Just over a decade ago, a scandal rocked the Canadian literary community.

Steven Galloway, the head of UBC Creative Writing and acclaimed novelist of The Cellist of Sarajevo, was put on leave at the end of 2015 due to “serious allegations.”

Half a year later, he was fired, even though the judge hired to conduct the internal investigation found that “in all likelihood” the most serious allegation was “unsubstantiated.”

The whisper network went crazy. He was accused of sexual assault.

Then, at the end of 2016, dozens of well-known writers, including , signed an Open Letter calling for “due process” for Steven Galloway.

Chaos ensued. Signatories — some of whom believed Steven was guilty of rape, but that the university had mishandled the case and compromised his civil rights — were harassed and blacklisted by a cohort of self-appointed “rape experts” and Twitter activists.

Signatories were charged with being “powerful” “rape apologists” who were defending one of their “famous friends” — even though many signatories barely knew Galloway, and others were survivors of sexual assault themselves.

It ballooned from there — people were harassed for talking to or remaining friendly with signatories. Galloway lost close friends in the literary community who, even though they believed he was innocent, realized that it was “career suicide” to be affiliated with him.

I was a UBC MFA student at the time, and the publisher of a feminist literary journal, Room Magazine. We had hired two signatories for upcoming projects: Lorna Crozier for our inaugural literary festival and Carmen Aguirre — who was famously raped as a child by a serial predator — as a contest judge. Two activists harassed us to fire these women, and, when we refused, continued their harassment for years afterward (more on their antics here).

Later, I was targeted online for being too friendly with Margaret Atwood and Susan Swan, who I had debated the case with over email — I told a Globe reporter that Atwood “rolled with criticism” and this was apparently seen by several anti-Galloway activists as an unforgiven sin.

I told this story nearly three years ago in an essay explaining that, although I opposed the blacklisting of signatories, I believed Galloway was guilty. As more evidence emerged through the defamation lawsuit he filed in 2018, I changed my mind and came to believe that he had most likely been falsely accused.

Now, after nearly a decade of delays, Steven Galloway is finally getting his time in court — most of the people he sued for defamation have settled and issued apologies (collected here), but four people remain, including the woman who accused him of rape, a former student five years his senior known only as “A.B.” due to a media ban on her name. The two had been involved in a two-year affair while A.B. was a student — an affair which Galloway believed had ended “amicably.”

A.B.’s allegation came years after the affair ended, shortly after Galloway married his second wife, another former UBC creative writing student.

Over the past few weeks, the Canadian press has blown up again with Galloway’s case, this time, the general consensus is that he appears to be the victim of a false accusation. To whit, it was announced shortly before the trial began that A.B. would no longer be using “truth” as a defence against the charge that she defamed Galloway with allegations of sexual assault and rape.1

A.B. claimed Galloway sexually assaulted her three times: only one of these incidents is even plausible, a more classic example of he-said-she-said (Galloway says they had consensual sex, A.B. says he assaulted her but she pushed him off).

The rape accusation has been disproven by text messages showing that Galloway was watching a hockey game and ordering a burger for a friend at a local bar during the alleged assault, and A.B. was flirtatiously texting her now ex-husband, who recently testified that A.B. vowed to “destroy” Galloway — after testifying against his ex-wife, he apparently went up to Galloway’s wife and told her, “If there was even an ounce of me that thought Steve raped [A.B.], I wouldn’t be here.”

The third alleged sexual assault was literally physically impossible, an embarrassing mistake for someone pursuing the art of fiction.

The Face of False Rape Allegations

To my knowledge, Galloway’s defamation case has received little to no coverage outside of Canada — and even within Canada, the slew of articles revealing details of A.B.’s machinations have not attracted much attention on social media.

Instead, another story has dominated much of the public conversation about sexual assault and false allegations over the past month.

I’m talking, of course, about Cornell.

On Substack and other platforms, Cornell’s “Jane Doe” has been doxxed, is being derided as a “lying whore”, among other slurs, and for many, has become the face of “false rape allegations.”

But is Jane Doe a liar?

I’ve been following this case somewhat closely over the past month — or, at least, as closely as I can given I have two little kids and a third on the way (yes, I’m pregnant again, and quite tired), and, well, I don’t think Jane Doe is lying — but this also doesn’t mean that what happened to her that night meets the legal definition of “rape.”

I’m contrasting this with the Steven Galloway case because A.B. must have known she was lying about Galloway raping her. The fact that two of her alleged sexual assaults, including the alleged rape, could not have possibly occurred as per text message evidence and the laws of physics demonstrates that these are outright fabrications.

On the other hand, Jane Doe appears to have recounted the events of that 2024 night at Cornell University with as much accuracy as her memory would permit — and she’s the first to admit her memory from that night isn’t very good due to the cocktail of substances she consumed.

What’s up for debate is her interpretation of these events.

Jane Doe’s interpretation might be incorrect from a legal standpoint — i.e. the Cornell 7 are not guilty of the crime of rape — but this doesn’t make her a liar.

Why Did Cornell Capture Public Attention?

Shortly after the Cornell story broke, I saw a handful of Substack posts lamenting how “AWFLs” were crying “I am Jane Doe” but did not say the same about, say, the victims of the Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK. Hypocrisy, these posts cried — if these women freaking out about Cornell really cared about rape victims, they would have said something about those REAL rape victims!

I mean, okay, and I’ll counter, if the people decrying Jane Doe as a “false accuser” actually cared about false allegations, they would have said something about Steven Galloway, or Trevor Bauer, or any of the other extreme cases where a woman blatantly fabricated a rape.

Both arguments are stupid, frankly. I’ll have you know I actually have said something about the rape gang victims in Substack notes — but no one disagreed with me that those girls were victims. What was there to argue about?! No one worth taking seriously thinks mass grooming of vulnerable teenage girls is okay, or that they “asked for it” or “had it coming” or that they were just “lying whores.”

The reason why Cornell captured the public imagination more than more blatant examples of rape or false allegations is simple — most women in North America have not been victims of violent rape or mass grooming. And most men are not famous enough, rich enough, powerful enough, or generally high-status enough to have to worry about a seductress fabricating a rape to destroy his reputation or extract wealth (etc).

However, many if not most women in North America have experienced some sort of “grey rape”, “date rape”, or what I’ll call a “sexual escalation” — which is the safest term I can think of to describe what happened to Jane Doe.

Women are identifying with Jane Doe because a lot of us have been in a situation where we consented to one level of sexual activity, and the guy (or guys) escalated the situation beyond what we consented to.

As an aside, a few people have commented on how women were quick to share their “I am Jane Doe” victim stories after Cornell hit the news, and were also quick to share their sexy gym pictures after whatshisname the comedian made a silly joke about women “dressing like whores” on SNL. Granted, I do think women have a tendency to express solidarity in ways that play up our victimhood or innate sexiness. In honour of posts like this one from —

— and because I need to break up these giant walls of text with some sort of images and don’t want to use Jane Doe’s doxxed photos, I’ve selected some of the most embarrassing, drunken, unattractive, and slutty photos of myself I could find from my late teens and early twenties in solidarity with Jane Doe having some of her worst photos spread all over the Internet. Have at ‘er, boys, look what an ugly, alcoholic, desperate-for-attention, hoe-bag I was back then!

Similarly, most men do not have to worry about getting Steven Galloway-ed. What they do worry about, is that a situation they genuinely interpreted as consensual being interpreted as rape by the woman. A drunken or drugged encounter where “consent” was assumed from passivity, or the guy didn’t realize how intoxicated the woman was, or he pushed or escalated beyond her comfort level but because she did not actively try to stop him, he assumed consent, or, at the least, that his actions were not criminal.

Cornell captures the public imagination because of its ambiguity — because it is not obvious that any or all of the Cornell 7 committed sexual assault, but it is also not obvious that Jane Doe is a liar.

The truth lies somewhere in between, in the murky waters of interpretation.

Conservative writers and had a great conversation to this effect over on Walt’s podcast, it’s only 45 minutes and well worth listening to —

The Walt Right

Natalia Bower - Consent and the Cornell Seven

On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with Natalia Bower—a doctoral student in Philosophy who recently wrote a hugely viral essay on the Cornell Seven…

Listen now

9 days ago · 17 likes · 12 comments · Walt Bismarck and Natalia Bower

Sex, Drugs, and the Question of “Consent”

The argument that Jane Doe is a “lying whore” rests largely on text messages that have been revealed between her and Matthew Ingalls (the “friend” at the frat house she was visiting that night) and Jonathan Newell (the second man in the initial threesome, who she consented to have sex with).

I’m going to err in favour of the men here, and I’m not convinced the available evidence establishes that Jane Doe was too drunk to consent to the initial threesome. Upon reflection, “5/10 drunk” is actually much drunker than I initially interpreted it as being (see footnotes for my explanation2). But having spent quite a few youthful Friday and Saturday nights around 5/10 or even 6/10 drunk — pretty bloody wasted, but still conscious and capable of forming memories — I know that substantial intoxication doesn’t necessarily mean someone is incapable of making decisions or consenting to sex. I’m speaking from personal experience, though, and I can only speculate about Jane Doe’s condition that night. She apparently had something like ten shots before going to the frat house, and that amount of alcohol would probably put me in the hospital, so IDK.

I believe I’ve consented to sexual activity at this level of drunk, and, more importantly, I’ve actively stopped men who were trying to do something to me at this level of intoxication (one incident about a month into first year which earned me the nickname “Hateful Meghan” on my university campus, because, yeah, sometimes dudes respond poorly to rejection, who knew!) — also, just to emphasize that sometimes saying “no” is not enough, on at least two different occasions I can recall, a guy responded to my “no” with “you’re not stopping me”, which, like, great, I’m drunk and tired and now I have to shove you off of me?

So let’s say the initial threesome was consensual. Whether this makes Jane Doe a slut or not is a matter of personal opinion, I’m not interested in defending her decision here because I personally think threesomes are icky, but also it’s totally valid to flip this around on me and call me a prude (or “Hateful Meghan”, hating on consensual threesomes!!).

So let’s set that aside and assume Jane Doe was sober enough to consent to being railed by two guys she made the mistake of thinking cared about her. While sleeping with someone who likes you far more than you like her is not a particularly nice thing to do, it is also not illegal, so the threesome was consensual even if Ingalls did exploit Jane Doe’s obvious affections for him.

But the issue of “consent” gets a lot murkier after that.

Jane Doe consented to the threesome, but did she “consent” to what happened to her after that?

Well, let’s take a look —

Did Jane Doe know that Newell and Ingalls offered her up as “free pussy” in the group chat?

Evidence from text messages and recorded phone calls overwhelmingly point to “no”, Jane Doe was not aware of the group chat until much, much later — when a frat brother leaked them to her because he was appalled at his brothers’ behaviour.

Text messages and recorded phone calls between Jane Doe and Newell and Ingalls show them lying to her about why the other men were in the room, claiming they had no idea why they came in, and even expressing wishes that they’d shut it down. This demonstrates that they sent these messages without her knowledge or consent.

Was Jane Doe sober enough to consent to sexual activity to the men who, from her perspective, just kind of showed up in the room for unknown reasons?

Jane Doe reports taking ketamine for the first time, drinking more alcohol, and smoking weed while at the frat house before the additional five guys in her lawsuit showed up in the room. And I’m going to throw it out there, but I have a lot of experience with ketamine, and, no, I don’t think it’s possible for a twenty-year-old woman to give meaningful consent to sexual activity while high on ketamine as an inexperienced user.

Ketamine is a wild drug. It’s difficult to describe, but k is a dissociative anesthetic with some psychedelic properties. When you are high on ketamine, you can sit up, nod, and puppet like you’re engaged (at least on lower doses, at high doses you are a rag doll), but you aren’t really there. You’re dissociated, barely aware of your body, let alone capable of understanding or even caring what happens to it. You can barely form memories — people high on ketamine will forget what they are talking about mid-sentence. This is what makes ketamine an incredibly useful drug in medical settings, and an incredibly dangerous one at parties.3

FETISHIZED

I used ketamine for years. Here's what the Cornell 7 coverage gets wrong.

According to the civil lawsuit, Jane Doe had about ten alcoholic drinks within three hours, which is a lot for anyone. That’s more than double the binge drinking threshold set by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. I question her ability to consent based on her alcohol intake alone. After that, as per the lawsuit, the two men she con…

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a month ago · 693 likes · 178 comments · Kaila Yu

Now, I’m not claiming that getting high on ketamine after you have consented to have sex with someone revokes the consent given prior to getting high. I’ve gotten high on ketamine and slept with my husband, but the difference is we were in a committed relationship and we both knew I intended to have sex with him before I got high — and, importantly, he never surprised me by inviting several of his friends to join in once I was already blasted to outer space.

But, well, plot twist — the effects of ketamine typically only last about an hour, and then the person sobers up. Typically — I know at least two people who have taken a low dose of ketamine and experienced psychedelic and dissociative effects for two or three hours, and did not feel normal until about a day later. But Jane Doe reports snorting her second dose of ketamine off of Jonathan Newell’s dick, which sounds technically difficult to me, so I’m going to infer from that that Doe had a typical reaction to k and the effects mostly wore off after about an hour — again, this is not settled fact, but a generous inference I am making in favour of the Cornell 7.

Note: I ran this essay through ChatGPT for feedback, and the above section was flagged by Chat for being too speculative, and too weighed in favour of the Cornell 7. From ChatGPT; “[T]his inference is too tenuous to carry much weight. The physical act you describe doesn't establish how intoxicated she was, and the fact that ketamine's most noticeable effects often diminish within an hour doesn't establish that her impairment had resolved.” I’ve chosen to leave this in, but I don’t think ChatGPT is wrong and wanted to include the pushback as well.

So, theoretically, Jane Doe could have “consented” to sexual activity with the additional men during periods of semi-lucidity between ketamine doses. I doubt this because she also reports drinking more alcohol and smoking weed, and oh my god, I’ve only mixed booze and ketamine once — I took a moderate amount of k after drinking two coronas — and I flattened myself for over an hour despite being in my mid-thirties and quite experienced with both substances.

The amount of alcohol, weed, and ketamine Jane Doe consumed would create an unpredictable cocktail of trouble, and, frankly, no, I don’t think she could have meaningfully “consented” to anything even during the dips where the ketamine may or may not have more or less worn off.

This is an indictment of ketamine as a party drug more than of the Cornell 7, who, apparently, were drunk and high on k themselves. In one exchange on Substack notes, a male writer pointed out that the effects of ketamine on memory could explain why some of the men reportedly stopped their sexual advances when Jane Doe rejected them, only to return later that night for more. It’s possible they just forgot. This is true, and it does go to the intentions of the men, while simultaneously not undermining Jane Doe’s experience of being violated.

Do Jane Doe’s text messages to Newell and Ingalls “prove” that she initially experienced all the events of that night as “consensual”?

Ah, this is a fun one. The argument that Jane Doe “consented” to all the sexual activity which occurred that night rests largely on the text messages she sent to Newell and Ingalls in the days after their substance-fuelled night of youthful stupidity.

These text messages included stuff like “luv u king” to Ingalls, and “none of the sexual stuff was illegal” to Newell — the former, I think, is evidence that she was in love with Ingalls, and the latter could be interpreted as her stating that the sex acts themselves (e.g. a threesome) are not illegal. This absolutely muddies the waters.

Except, woo boy, here’s the thing about women … we lie about sex all the time. Not just to other people, but to ourselves!

Except … most of the time, we’re lying in favour of the men who committed the sexual violation.

I have never so much as made a true rape allegation, let alone a false one — and, to my knowledge, none of the women I have been personally well-acquainted with have officially accused a man of rape or sexual assault. What almost all of us have done, however, is deliberately omitted or diminished a sexual violation to protect the guy who violated us.

Why? Loads of reasons. We were dating the guy, or friends with the guy, or otherwise cared about him and didn’t want to get him in trouble. We were in a social circle with him and didn’t want to disrupt the dynamic. We thought he was a good person who just made a mistake, because he was drunk or high or whatever. The “violation” in question was too minor or too thwarted to seem worth making a stink over (e.g. the friend of mine who fought off a male friend who attempted to pin her down during a house party while he was drunk and she was mostly sober, leaving bruises all over her arms — she explicitly asked her friends not to make a big deal of out that).

(Just to help out the “female narcissism is a huge issue” crowd on this one, you know how some terrible mothers will lie and defend boyfriends and husbands who abuse their children? This is a real thing that happens! Because women lie all the time to defend men they care about).

It is extremely obvious from the text messages and recorded phone calls — and from Jane Doe’s initial statement to campus police — that she had a huge crush on Matthew Ingalls and believed he cared about her as well. This would give her an incentive to protect him — especially if, as evidence suggests, she was unaware that he and Newell were responsible for inviting their frat brothers to join in on her “free pussy.”

Another very plausible interpretation of those text messages is that Jane Doe wanted to believe the best of Ingalls, and she wanted to protect him. She thought he cared about her, and perhaps she was nurturing a delusion that they would become a couple. Who knows? But given that she tells Newell that she liked being within him and Ingalls, and would like to “smoke again sometime but like leave out the extra 5 billion men and ketamine”, indicates that she really only wanted to hook up with the two men that night, and the others were perceived by her as unwelcome interlopers.

Where I do agree with Jane Doe’s critics here is that these text messages would introduce “reasonable doubt” in a criminal case — however, the burden of proof is much lower for civil lawsuits, and one of the points of suing someone is discovery. If Jane Doe were lying, it seems unlikely to me she would sue; her allegations back in 2024 already resulted in Newell and Ingalls being expelled and the other five men being reprimanded.

In the case of A.B., she attempted to bring her charges against Galloway (and the previous man she had accused of sexual assault) quietly and privately, destroying their reputations and professional opportunities without legal proceedings that would have triggered the collection of more evidence and the possibility of that evidence going to the public — because she would have realized, on some level, that the more evidence collected the more likely her claims would be undermined.

Presumably, Jane Doe believed that evidence would weigh in her favour — this is the behaviour of someone who believes she is telling the truth.

Did the lingering effects of ketamine affect Jane Doe’s initial reactions?

Oh, quite possibly, yes — if you have any familiarity with ketamine, you likely know this is the case.

One of ketamine’s clinical uses is the treatment of depression and, experimentally, PTSD. A recent randomized trial found that ketamine administered for acute pain following severe physical injuries was associated with lower PTSD symptom severity six months later.

In other words, it is possible Jane Doe did not experience the events of that night as being as traumatic as she otherwise would have if she had not been encouraged to take ketamine. Her trauma response may have been delayed. On top of that, ketamine impairs memory formation, and Doe has been clear that she remembers very little from that night.

The Fractured Line by Nicholas J Orcutt

The Drug Was Designed to Make Her Forget. Then They Used Her Memory Against Her.

Let me be clear about what my intention is here. I am a father, and a son, and a brother, and a husband. I have a daughter, wife, sisters, and a mom. I’m absolutely invested in seeing the world be a better place and a much safer place for them. Especially my little girl. I want to leave the world a better place than it was for me…

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a month ago · 294 likes · 65 comments · The Fractured Line

Now, Doe’s lack of memory will likely work in favour of some of the men who entered that room — lawyers for some of the men who entered later claim their clients did not actually do anything to Doe, with one stating that he actually only came upstairs to check that everything was cool and immediately left. Obviously, he could be lying, but it’s also possible that Jane Doe is incorrect about his actions. This doesn’t make Jane Doe a liar, but someone who was under the influence of memory-impairing substances who has attempted to reconstruct the events of that night to the best of her (flawed) ability.

Jane Doe’s roommates have stated that she while she did not call the events “rape” or “assault” the next morning, she also appeared to be uncomfortable with what had happened, and confused — all behaviours consistent not only with confusion after a sexual assault, but also with the lingering effects of ketamine. One of her roommates also claims she heard Doe confront one of the men by saying, “You had penetrative sex with me. I had so much ketamine, my eyes were crossed, and you still had sex with me.”

Doe also went to the medical clinic on campus with a UTI and told the healthcare staff that she got it in a “traumatic way” weeks before she went to campus police.

Did Jane Doe change her mind about the night being “consensual” after being uninvited from the frat party?

If you actually look at the text messages — no! She is hurt by the un-invitation and texts Ingalls about it, and he reassures her it was a mistake and he would secure her an invite. Their friendly texts continue for a bit after that, until she accuses him of “lying” to her and ends the conversation abruptly.

Yes, the “lying” in question could have been about the party. But Ingalls was also lying to her about a whole lot of other crap too, including about why the other guys came into the room and started groping her (etc). It is not unreasonable to speculate that Jane Doe’s shift was actually triggered by new information that Newell and Ingalls sold her out that night — thus removing her self-delusion that they cared about her and were worth protecting.

And, sure enough, her lawyer reports that Jane Doe became aware of the group chat messages when another fraternity brother, appalled by what happened to her, leaked them to her — this, not the party, was likely the trigger for her going to the campus police, and for later filing the lawsuit, to bring these messages to public awareness.

From what we know of Jane Doe, does she seem like the type to cry “victim”?

I realize this one is a bit of a stretch, but we can learn a fair bit about Jane Doe from the text messages that have gone public, so I’m going to speculate here.

Just as the vast majority of sexual assaults are committed by a small number of repeat offenders, the majority of false rape allegations are made by a small number of women who have a pattern of such behaviour. A.B.’s accusation against Steven Galloway was not her first false allegation; in a 2018 essay for The National Post, Galloway describes how A.B. duped him with what was almost certainly a fabricated sexual assault to prevent him from hiring a male professor for a position at UBC — the position went to one of A.B.’s friends instead.

Well, what do we know about Jane Doe’s past reactions to mistreatment? A little bit actually —

According to the text messages between her and Ingalls, the year before the “free pussy” frat night, Doe was bullied on campus by (false) rumours that she was transgender.

And, it seems, she handled this like a champ — “People always want to talk about soemthing like i had transgender allegations last year but i just gave it no attention and it disappeared” she wrote to Ingalls.

Unfortunately, it’s hard not to speculate that these rumours may have contributed to Doe’s decision to agree to the threesome that night — not only do the text messages suggest that Doe had been confiding in Ingalls about this experience, but she also states in a text that it’s not really true she’s a slut (while it’s unlikely Doe was a virgin before the frat party, this comment and the fact that she was rumoured to be trans at least suggest that she was not sleeping around that much). It’s possible that Doe agreed to the threesome not just because she was in love with Ingalls, but also because she wanted to disprove the trans rumours.

“And we know i’m not transgender so,” Doe wrote to Ingalls after the night at the fraternity.

Some people online and in the media have attacked Doe over her physical appearance — everything from her red hair (don’t you know redheads are sluts?!), to her muscular build (higher testosterone = higher sex drive = slut!), to her “mid” features. Megyn Kelly went as far as to say that because Doe isn’t particularly pretty, she probably enjoyed all the male attention.

I can’t really begin to try to imagine Doe’s state of mind here, but in grade eight I was actually teased a bit for “looking like a man”, specifically, Orlando Bloom as Legolas in Lord of the Rings.

It’s not really the same thing at all, I know that, but this still made me wildly insecure and desperate to prove my femininity. And I really don’t know how I would have responded if that had happened when I was in college instead, drinking all the time, and one of the only people I felt I could confide in was an attractive guy like Ingalls.

The trans rumours also cast the frat brothers’ “free pussy” message in a slightly darker light.

Women do not have to be beautiful to be sexually assaulted — in many cases, young women who are more insecure are better targets for certain kinds of assaults. And, as the reaction to Jane Doe’s doxxed photos shows, a lot of people will discredit an alleged victim if she is not classically beautiful. (On the flip side, that A.B. is quite classically beautiful was used as evidence that Galloway was guilty of raping her).

But I digress — my point here is that Jane Doe’s text messages indicate a general tendency on her part to shrug off rumours and bullying, not to capitalize on them or cry “victim.” I do not think she can credibly be accused of “crying rape” because she was slut-shamed after the night with the Cornell 7.

Instead, I think the more likely scenario is what I argued above — she was all too willing to shrug off what happened that night, until she learned the extent to which Ingalls (and Newell) had betrayed her.

In Drug and Alcohol Situations, Does How the Guy Acts Afterward Affect Whether Women Classify Sex as an “Assault” or Not?

Another brief detour — something that has come up repeatedly in conversations about “false allegations” is that how a guy behaves after a night of drunken or drugged sex often affects whether a woman makes a sexual assault allegation.

I’ll admit this is true! But not because women are necessarily turning what they genuinely experienced as a consensual encounter into something non-consensual because the guy was a dick afterwards. I’ll provide a counter-example from my own life —

I shared a story in notes about an incident in my early twenties when I woke up from a night of heavy drinking at a house party to realize a male coworker — someone I had never shown any interest in — had slept with me. I had no recollection of even talking to him that night, let alone sleeping with him, and I was upset and scared (I was not the type to have one-night stands).

My immediate reaction was a feeling of being violated. I had no memory, no idea if I had “consented” or not, no idea if I’d even been conscious when we “had sex.” I didn’t like the guy, and I was upset.

However, he sweetly offered to take me for breakfast (I was confused and hungry and agreed), drove me home afterwards, and, later, told several of our coworkers that he’d had fun with me that night and that I was “good in bed.”

I was still upset about the whole thing, and told a female coworker to pass on the message that I wasn’t interested, and tersely told a male coworker who was asking me what I’d done to be so “good in bed” that I didn’t remember anything. My coworkers immediately dropped it and left me alone.

I felt violated, but this guy’s behaviour after the fact gave me reason to doubt that he had deliberately acted in a predatory way. He was nice to me afterwards, he complimented me to our coworkers, and he respected the boundary I set when I said I wasn’t interested. This behaviour gave me every reason to extend him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that because he was also drunk, he didn’t realize how drunk I was and made an honest mistake.

So I let it go. Not because I wasn’t upset, not because I didn’t experience that as a violation, but because he acted like a good person afterward, and no one slut-shamed me or compounded my initial trauma.

I used cues from his behaviour to assess whether he was actually a predator or someone who had made a drunken mistake. In cases where drugs and alcohol are involved, memory is impaired, and consent is blurred, and people do not know each other well, it makes sense to use cues from the guy’s behaviour afterward to assess whether he deliberately took advantage of you or not.

Here’s the thing — guys who deliberately take advantage of intoxicated women generally have a low opinion of women / do not see us as fully human. They will mistreat women in other ways. It makes sense that men who deliberately take advantage of intoxicated women are probably also more likely to slut-shame and vice-versa.

So yes, how you treat a woman after a drunken encounter matters. But women taking cues from the way a guy treats her after an intoxicated encounter is not evidence that “bitches be liars”.

Black and White Thinking

“When we become too attached to an ideal, the first thing that we lose is respect; first for the people around us, and eventually for ourselves.”

— Miguel Ruiz Jr., The Five Levels of Attachment: Toltec Wisdom for the Modern World

Something which struck me about the Galloway scandal over a decade ago was the stark difference between the behaviour of the anti-Galloway activists, and those who signed the UBC Accountable Open Letter and supported Galloway’s right to due process.

The Open Letter signatories, for the most part, were very professional, open to speaking to their critics, and did not attempt to punish or harm the careers of those attacking them online. , who has dedicated an investigative Substack to the Galloway case, has been gracious in accepting apologies from his and Galloway’s detractors, and has discouraged his readers from attacking the women who have issued them (such as Chelsea Rooney). As well, I’m willing to bet that almost all if not all of the Open Letter signatories know A.B.’s true identity, and yet they continue to honour the publication ban on her name.

Galloway himself has repeatedly stated that he takes sexual assault seriously, and typically believes women who make rape allegations — he has expressed a hope that the false allegations against him will not prevent real victims of sexual assault from coming forward, and being taken seriously.

The anti-Galloway crowd, on the other hand, threatened people, tried to destroy careers, and attempted to build their own careers off the scandal. Some of the more ridiculous examples include people who sold tee-shirts based off the scandal, a woman who held a “We Hate Margaret Atwood” party at her apartment, and an event advertised as a “debate” between Margaret Atwood and prominent anti-Galloway activist Dr. Julie Rak, which Atwood was not actually invited to attend.

The activists attacks on the Open Letter signatories stretched well beyond the case itself — in addition to criticizing signatories for being “rape apologists”, they were attacked for “doing harm” to the “Indigenous community”, the “queer community”, and the “disability community”, even though both Galloway and A.B. are white, heterosexual, and able-bodied.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that the people supporting Cornell’s Jane Doe have not stretched the truth — I’ve seen articles claiming Jane Doe was “gang-raped by seven men for seven hours” (paraphrasing), which is not what even Jane Doe claims happened — Doe has been clear from the beginning that she agreed to a threesome with Ingalls and Newell, and in her initial statement to Cornell campus police does not claim that all seven men had sex with her.

These descriptions, however, came early on after the story hit the news, and the inaccuracies may have come out of ignorance, not bad faith.

Jane Doe’s critics, on the other hand —

At the extreme, some even claim that Jane Doe raped some of the boys that night, and honestly I can’t tell if this obvious DARVO is coming from stupidity or bad faith anymore, but the group chat and recorded phone calls should obviously disprove this for anyone with a three-digit IQ.

While talking about the Cornell case over on Substack notes, multiple men dragged the Lindsay Clancy trial into the conversation — even though the two cases are completely unrelated. At least the “anti-Indigenous” claims against signatories had some basis in Galloway’s friendship with alleged pretendian Joseph Boyden, who was one of the main signatories of the Open Letter.

As well, as I previously mentioned, several people complained that “feminists” and “AWFLs” do not care about rapes committed by black or brown men, bringing up the grooming gangs in the UK as examples. This overlooks something rather embarrassing — Matthew Ingalls is a Muslim from Dubai, and Newell appears to be mixed-race. Similarly, I recall feminists making a big stink about Jian Ghomeshi (a brown Persian dude) and Bill Cosby (a black man). All that’s going on here is that a lot of women make a bigger stink when powerful and influential men are accused of sexual assault, which makes sense because they are literally powerful and influential.

(As an aside, one of the most famous false rape allegers in recent UK history actually got a completely innocent Arab dude jailed for seven years — which is to say, look, brown and black guys do actually get in trouble for rape all the time, including rapes they did not actually commit).

Back to Galloway — the Open Letter signatories, many of whom I spoke to at the time, seemed open to the idea that their critics were not “bad people”, but rather mostly well-intentioned people acting on bad information — over a decade later, many still take this stance, for example, of acknowledges in a recent podcast that Chelsea Rooney, one of A.B.’s greatest allies, was a “true believer.”

Many of their critics, on the other hand, derided every signatory as more or less being a horrible person who didn’t care about rape victims (or other “marginalized” groups), regardless of their personal histories, and with no consideration that people who were defending Steven Galloway because they believed he was innocent or because they believed UBC mishandled the case were not necessarily “rape apologists” — thinking one person might have been falsely accused is not the same as assuming all women who cry rape are liars.

Now, of course, there is some of this behaviour coming from Jane Doe’s supporters, see this example from —

However, unlike Galloway’s defenders, I couldn’t help but notice that some of people criticizing Jane Doe’s supporters do not seem to make room for the possibility that people could be acting out of good intentions, that many people genuinely believe that the events at Cornell were criminal, and genuinely believe they are defending a woman who was gang-raped.

As well, like the anti-Galloway activists, some of these people shut down conversation with anyone who disagrees with them.

Black-and-white thinking, the inability to tolerate disagreement, and the tendency to portray opponents as fundamentally bad people is a red flag. People behaving this way aren’t necessarily acting in bad faith, but there is a certain venom to their arguments that makes me question their judgment.

The difference between the people who believe A.B. was a false accuser and those who believe Jane Doe is is striking — I’m yet to encounter a UBC Accountable signatory who has explicitly called A.B. a “lying whore”, and it will take some sleuthing to find her real name.

No, I’m not claiming that all commentators who believe that what happened to Jane Doe doesn’t meet the legal definition of “rape” are guilty of black-and-white thinking — nor am I claiming that all of Jane Doe’s supporters have been well-behaved.

I shared ’s podcast with at the beginning of this essay as a counter-example to that — Walt takes the stance that what happened didn’t meet the legal definition of “rape”, but nonetheless speaks of Jane Doe as a human being and condemns the actions of the Cornell 7. Natalia argues that because men are almost always the initiators of sexual activity, whereas women “submit” to men who make advances, men should bear greater responsibility in sexual encounters — it’s a good conversation, and if you haven’t listened, I really do recommend doing so now.

Similarly, in a widely shared clip, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro argues that what the Cornell 7 did to Jane Doe likely does not meet the legal definition of “rape” in New York state, while simultaneously condemning the men’s actions as “evil” and refraining from calling Jane Doe names such as “whore.”

I do think what both Shapiro and Bismarck are overlooking here are the effects of ketamine — I don’t believe either has used the drug. Shapiro says that Doe “knew what she was taking”, but this isn’t really true — yes, she knew she was taking a drug called “ketamine”, but that doesn’t mean she understood how the drug would affect her.

Even under optimal circumstances, in medical settings at a clinic with prep by professionals, no one is really prepared for how ketamine will affect them. It’s an insane drug, and I sincerely doubt Ingalls and Newell were even capable of warning Jane Doe how it would affect her, if they tried to warn her at all. And there is no evidence that Jane Doe “consented” to sexual activity with anyone besides Newell and Ingalls before the ketamine was in her system.

However, Shapiro’s and Bismarck’s arguments are still valid and humane. Bismarck, in particular, acknowledges the core argument I am making here — that Jane Doe does not appear to knowingly lying about what happened to her.

What happened the night might not meet the legal definition of “rape”, but, as Shapiro argues, the actions of the Cornell 7 were still “evil.” And, as Bismarck notes, just because the events in question might not meet the legal definition of “rape”, this does not make Jane Doe a “liar.”

True Believers

This is a bit of an aside, but I want to talk about Chelsea Rooney’s role in the Steven Galloway case.

I know Chelsea from my time in the Canadian literary community. I have never met A.B., but I’ve hung out with Chelsea a handful of times and was friends with another prominent “ancillary complainant” against Galloway back in the day, Sierra Skye Gemma.

I only met Galloway once before he was put on leave, and I had a bad impression of him — I met him at a creative writing party, and, after a brief interaction, I went up to my boyfriend at the time and told him Galloway struck me as the “kind of man who surprise kisses you and then cries about it afterward”, which, as my boyfriend pointed out, was a bitchy thing to say, but also, in retrospect, not a description of a violent rapist.

But Chelsea believed Galloway was guilty of raping A.B. And I believed she believed it — as did many others.

Chelsea Rooney is taking a lot of heat for her role in Steven Galloway’s destruction. After A.B. approached university faculty with her allegations, Rooney, then a recent graduate of the MFA program, was recruited to collect ancillary evidence — additional complaints — to bolster A.B.’s case.

This was wildly inappropriate. Rooney had no experience in legal issues or criminal investigations. She never should have been asked to do this. In the end, she found a handful of students who also had complaints about Galloway, ranging from minor sexual comments to an incident at a bar where he slapped a student as part of a bet. Obnoxious behaviour, sure, but not particularly sinister or, really, evidence that he was a violent sexual predator.

Rooney then went on to be one of the vocal Twitter activists calling Galloway a rapist and inciting other people against him. She was one of the people Galloway sued for defamation, and settled with him shortly before the trial and issued a public apology.

But there is a tragic element to Rooney’s story that is not being discussed — she is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, an experience she fictionalized in her 2014 novel, Pedal.

Sierra Skye Gemma, the other prominent ancillary complainant against Galloway, is also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. (Note: Gemma was not sued by Galloway, as her actions did not reach the level of “defamation”).

A.B. was not friends with either woman — and from what I’ve heard, they did not particularly like each other. Nonetheless, Rooney and Gemma were two of the first people A.B. approached with her rape allegations against Galloway.

I’m going to make an inference here — please keep in mind I’ve never met A.B. — and speculate that A.B. has a Cluster B disorder, or is on the psychopathy spectrum. I am inferring this from her declaration to her ex-husband that she wished to “destroy” Galloway, her willingness to fabricate sexual assaults for personal gain (in the case of getting her friend hired over a male candidate) and for revenge on an ex-lover (in Galloway’s case), and her persistence in her claims which ended up being destructive to the lives, careers, and friendships of many people in the literary community.

Falsely accusing someone of rape is evil, narcissistic, psychopathic behaviour.

I believe A.B. chose Rooney and Gemma because she knew they were survivors of childhood sexual assault, and that she deliberately exploited their trauma and credibility.

In the past, I’ve shared that I initially got into feminism when I was in my early twenties, after I was roofied and raped by a random guy at a bar. Instead of seeking help to process my own trauma, I volunteered to help other women with theirs — this behaviour is not particularly wise, for many reasons, but apparently it is very common. In the training for the sexual assault centre I volunteered for, the staff told us that many women came to volunteer at the centre after being raped themselves … and the room was uncomfortably silent in a way that seemed to confirm what they were saying about us.

Being raped is disempowering. Most women blame themselves in one way or another, at least initially. Seeking help doesn’t really feel like reclaiming your power, but “helping” other victims does. I fancied myself unusually tough when I was younger, and volunteering at the sexual assault centre was just another way of feeding this delusion — I can handle being raped, but other women can’t, so I must play hero!

I think Chelsea (and Sierra) fell into this trap. They wanted to be heroes.

In this sense, Rooney (and Gemma) can be considered additional victims of A.B.’s machinations.

Because they believed her.

And a lot of people — myself included — believed Chelsea Rooney (and Sierra Skye Gemma).

I think Chelsea (and Sierra) honestly thought they were doing the right thing, and fell under the thrall of a narcissistic psychopath. I’ve read Chelsea’s apology a few times now, and, unfortunately, even at this point in the narrative, I’m not certain she understands that A.B. deceived her.

That’s how deep she fell — so far, she lost herself.

I think Chelsea Rooney made a serious mistake, but her actions were not motivated by malice or evil intent — she did a bad thing, but she is not a bad person.

And, because of the publication ban on A.B.’s name, Chelsea Rooney is largely taking the fall for what happened to Steven Galloway.

And I sincerely doubt A.B. gives a damn.

Imperfect Victims

In a recent podcast, Jesse Brown of — at the urging of Margaret Atwood — addressed his past condemnation of Steven Galloway and his supporters in light of the evidence that has since come out of the defamation trial.

Brown brought several documented accounts of Steven’s behaviour — drinking with students, cheating on his wife, dating students, inappropriate comments etc — and briefly discussed a comment he made on a podcast years ago that Galloway, essentially, was too much of a jerk to be held up as a good example of a victim of false rape allegations. In the more recent podcast, he acknowledges that victims should not have to be perfect to be considered victims.

Which — yes! Galloway is not totally “innocent”, just innocent of violent rape. But it shouldn’t matter what other crappy or immature stuff he’s done — he’s still a victim of a false rape allegation, and he did not deserve to have his life destroyed to the extent that it was.

And even for those who do consider Jane Doe a victim, I’m sure most of us can acknowledge that she’s far from a perfect one.

And so what? I was a lousy victim too. There’s no such thing as a perfect victim.

So no, Steven Galloway is not the ideal “victim of a false rape allegation”, and Jane Doe is not an ideal victim of the events at Cornell, regardless of what the best legal classification is for them.

Victims shouldn’t have to be perfect for us to acknowledge their pain, and that what happened to them was wrong.

As my two-year-old likes to say, “Don’t be a bum!”

#MeToo’s Reckoning

#MeToo addressed a real and serious problem. But, as happens with political movements of all kinds, it was also exploited by opportunists, extremists, and narcissists — and many people who were swept up in the energy were convinced they were doing the right thing but caused serious harm in the process.

If feminists want to be taken seriously on sexual harassment and assault, they need to acknowledge that women sometimes lie, and that people can be seriously harmed by false allegations. But critics of #MeToo need to acknowledge the other side of the problem, too: an allegation that cannot be substantiated is not necessarily false, and a woman can sincerely believe she was raped even when the facts don’t meet the legal definition. This isn’t the same thing as lying.

We seem to have an enormous amount of difficulty holding these ideas in our heads at the same time. We want our victims to be blameless, our villains to be monsters, and our own side to be right. But real people are more complicated than that, and the consequences of forgetting it can be devastating.

And yeah, maybe the sexual revolution hasn’t been the best for women4 — I’ve gone on long enough here, and I’ve already seen a few other articles floating out there about this topic (unfortunately, it looks like they’re paywalled now), and I don’t know if I’ll get around to writing about that specifically (pregnant, tired, kind of want to take a break and maybe write some fluffy pieces about how I love musical theatre or something) but I am throwing it out there if anyone wants to talk about this in the comments.

Thanks for reading,

Meghan

I’ve been lipping off a bit about the Cornell case over in Substack notes, and I hope to collect my thoughts and put together a proper post soon — I will also address the recent updates to the Steven Galloway affair, which I first wrote about here.

In the meantime, I thought I’d share the title story from my 2021 fiction collection, Erase and Rewind — about a college student who, after being date-raped by a guy she likes, realizes she has the ability to rewind time and chooses to do so, reliving the rape in reverse, in order to avoid the aftermath of her experience.

Male readers responded very positively to this piece when it first came out, and in a way I wrote it for them — to my male readers here, I realize this is very different than my usual posts, but I hope you will give it a chance.

This is the version which appeared in the 2021 collection, with one slight tweak at the end.1

All the best,

Meghan

Day Twelve

Louisa discovered she could reverse time on a dim suburban street, thirty-eight minutes after leaving Nick’s house.

It happened by accident: she stepped in dog shit. The shit squished over her soles of her sandals, and wrapped around her naked feet and between her toes. She stopped walking and screamed breathlessly into the night.

If it hadn’t been so dark, she could have avoided the shit. If she’d been watching, if she’d been paying attention, if she hadn’t been staring at the stoplights three blocks ahead, wondering if they seemed so bright because of the marijuana she’d smoked hours before or because of the gelatinous tears stuck on her corneas like contact lenses, if none of those things, she probably would have seen the shit and she probably would have avoided it.

Louisa thought about all of this, when she realized she was walking backwards. She felt her foot step into the imprint she’d left in the shit, toe-heel, and then lift, dry, and step back onto clean concrete. She looked down and her feet stopped moving. She was standing directly behind the shit, which was now—miraculously—intact.

A string of complicated and contradicting emotions exploded in her gut. She had stepped in dog shit, and she had reversed it. How was this possible? Yet, there it was, footprint-free, right in front of her eyes.

Or had it even happened? The memory blurred at the edges. She remembered remembering that she had stepped in dog shit, but she couldn’t recall the sensation.

No. She had reversed it. She must have. She’d been so sure a minute ago.

Louisa pulled her cell phone out of her purse and checked the time. 12:33am.

She closed her eyes and thought back.

Her eyes opened. She couldn’t move. She stared at the dog shit for what felt like a long time, and then, automatically, she began to walk backwards. After a block she forced herself to break the trance again. She checked the time. 12:24am. She waited until the four became a five before lifting her chin. Already, she could barely remember the block ahead.

She not only could rewind, Louisa realized. She could erase.

The sadness within her burst and spread like lava. It grew out from her gut down into the dull pain between her legs and up her torso where it seared her heart, then wound its way through her limbs. The weight of it was unbearable. It threatened to drown all other feelings.

She closed her eyes and thought back.

Day Eleven

Louisa had only looked back once after she left Nick’s house, at exactly 11:59pm on Saturday night.

When her head began to turn, she felt a sharp sense of relief. In horror movies, the mounting tension before the audience sees the monster is always more terrifying than the monster itself. Louisa watched a lot of horror movies.

It was just an ordinary student house. Faded blue paint chipped and fell on the overgrown lawn. Empty forties of liquor littered windowsills. Automatically, her head tilted away from her shoulder and her gaze returned to the ground. She continued to step back towards her destination. Small tears rolled up her face and into her eyes.

Back, back.

Louisa stepped backwards up the three porch steps. Her hand shot back, and the doorknob swung to meet her palm.

She’d rushed out of the house, and now she rushed back into it, winding her way through the foyer and up the staircase, to his bedroom door, and inside.

Nick sat upright in bed, the fly of his jeans open, his body twisted towards the open window. He was shirtless, and the slight paunch of his stomach peeked over his Simpsons boxers. He leaned outside and inhaled clouds of smoke. Each time he lifted the joint to his lips, it burned bright and lengthened like Pinocchio’s nose.

They both started speaking. Their voices were guttural, haunting. Louisa imagined conspiracy theorists listening for Satanic messages in their reverse-dialect. She couldn’t understand a word, and when she tried to remember what had been said the first time they’d lived this scene, she started mentally humming the lyrics to Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which, for whatever reason, she found so perversely hysterical she started to giggle or maybe vomit, and Nick and his bedroom froze for a fraction of a second, then he began to speak.

“Ha, you’re so stoned,” Nick said. “Seriously, just crash here.”

Shit. Louisa focused and Nick repeated the words in reverse.

She dropped her purse on the desk, shrugged off her cardigan, and kneeled to fiddle with the straps of her sandals. Her hands and vision shook—she was getting drunker and higher with each receding minute. She heard a lighter click and the roll of the spark wheel, and then the sounds of Nick returning the joint to the small Tupperware he kept in his bedside table. She stood and pulled down her underwear, and returned them to where they had been lost in the sheets. She sat on the bed and waited. Then, in a single movement, she hinged down until she lay on the bed with her arms over her head.

Nick hovered above her. One hand clamped over her wrists, the other pinned down her left shoulder. His face was triumphant. As the look faded and he pressed down into her, Louisa unopened her eyes and reminded herself that this soon would be erased.

Close to the beginning, Louisa said something that sounded a bit like own. Own, she said. Then again, softer: own.

It took her a moment to flip the sounds. A weird sense of vindication washed through her.

She knew she’d told him she didn’t want to have sex when she’d agreed to go home with him, back when they were dancing in the bar.

With a nudge at her ribs, he’d bet her he could change her mind.

She laughed. “Oh, like you’re that good?”

He grinned. Nick had a soft face, and a pair of dimples that made him seem gentle and a little goofy. He’d delivered the warning like a joke and Louisa had ribbed back, oblivious to the punchline.

Until now, she hadn’t been able to remember if she said no after that.

You fucking asshole, she thought.

Each thrust was more painful than the one before it, until he finally pulled out for good and the wound was healed.

Three Things To Know About Louisa:

1. A couple years ago, inspired by celebrities like Beyoncé and Emma Watson, Louisa and the group of girls she befriended in her first year of university began to identify as feminists. That Christmas, they all exchanged copies of The Feminine Mystique, The Beauty Myth, Bad Feminist, and autobiographies by famous comediennes like Tina Fey. Ever the diligent student, Louisa took to the Internet to learn as much about the different movements as possible. She quickly realized that not only was she impossibly ignorant, but the more she learned, the more ignorant she felt. She found some of the more extreme—a word she would only use in her head—content difficult to relate to. Consequently, while she identified as a feminist and dedicated hours each week to reading articles, think-pieces, essays, and books by feminist writers, Louisa had never written a single Internet comment, tweet, or Facebook post on the subject of feminism and preferred to hold her tongue in conversations that touched on feminist politics—or politics in general. Not because she was afraid of a right-wing backlash (although she was, a little), but because she was afraid of getting feminism wrong—like her idols, Beyoncé, Emma Watson, and Tina Fey all had in some way or the other, according to the Internet.

2. Louisa lost her virginity at seventeen to her high school boyfriend. This was something she neither regretted, nor recalled with any sort of particular fondness. She had since slept with two other people, both boyfriends she’d been dating for at least three months. She liked to joke that her relative “prudishness” was a result of “recessive Catholic DNA.” (Louisa was a math major, and hadn’t studied biology since tenth grade.) No one in Louisa’s family believed in God or went to church—other than for weddings and funerals—but seven of her eight great-grandparents had been devout. However, the secret truth was that Louisa was a bit of prude because she was a bit of a romantic, which was just one of the many traits that made Louisa suspect she was absolutely useless at feminism.

3. At this time, there were four hundred and twenty-three photographs chronicling Louisa’s experimentations with alcohol, marijuana, and—just one time, at a deadmau5 concert—ecstasy, which were available online through her and her friends’ various social media profiles. Eleven of those pictures were taken within the last four hours. Nick was in three of them, and in one, they are standing outside the bar, sharing a joint, both smiling drunk like they didn’t have a care in the world.

Day Ten

Falling out of sleep was like floating to the surface of a deep lake.

As Louisa slowly regained consciousness, a complication occurred to her: if she allowed time to start moving forward and didn’t remember Nick was a threat, how was she supposed to make sure he didn’t do it again?

She could write herself a note before her memory started to fade, but would she believe it? And even if she did, they still spent three hours per week in a classroom together, and they were technically “seeing each other”, even if it had only been eight days. She’d have to drop the class. She’d have to text him that they were breaking up. This struck sober Louisa as both wildly inconvenient and potentially dangerous. So she kept rewinding.

Louisa had always prided herself on being a rational, pragmatic person. Like many people, she had little to no control over her emotions when she drank, but now she folded them up and tucked them into the analytical creases of her left brain. She wondered, as she turned and tossed to the faint backwards soundtrack of her roommate watching Grey’s Anatomy, if it would have been better to not rewind, and just deal with the events of that night. She pushed the thought out of her mind. The fact was, the idea of going to the police or telling anyone what happened terrified her. It was better to relive this terrible thing if it meant she wouldn’t have to deal with the emotional and physical consequences. The decision to rewind had been made through the lens of tequila, marijuana, and a high level of distress, but Louisa suspected she would have made the exact same call dead sober.

Louisa was not the sort of person who believed that everything happens for a reason. The human brain is designed to identify patterns and order, and where little to none exists, impose it. Louisa found the concept of destiny and the people who believed in it to be terribly boring and depressing.

The rational thing to do, Louisa decided, would be to erase the whole fucking relationship.

Three Problems With Louisa’s Story (Three Reasons Not To Go To The Police):

1. When Nick pulled down her underwear, she laughed and said, “Hey! Don’t do that!” but did not physically try to stop him. She knew this because he said, “You’re not stopping me.” She then continued to not stop him because his pants were on anyway, and the situation was awkward, and for reasons she would never understand, Louisa did not interpret the removal of her underwear as threatening. She was still trying to figure out how to politely tell him she wanted her underwear back when it became too late. This could be interpreted as consent.

2. She did not realize that Nick had unzipped his own fly until he was already inside of her. He entered her so quickly and without warning, it hurt like hell, and Louisa gasped in pain. She was still thinking about how much it fucking hurt when Nick asked her, already thrusting, whether or not she was on the pill. She answered reflexively: “Yeah.” This could be interpreted as consent.

3. Although Louisa did say “no” a total of three times and tried to push Nick off of her, there was a chance, she supposed, that he neither heard nor felt her try to fight him off on account of the fact that Louisa was very drunk, very stoned, and had roughly the upper-arm strength of a hamster. She stopped fighting after a few minutes and let it happen. After about fifteen minutes, desperate for the whole fucking thing to just be over, she pretended to moan and lifted her neck to gently bite his ear, which was something that had made her last boyfriend come immediately. It had ended a minute later, and recalling that, Louisa could not figure out if the intense feeling of relief she’d had when he pulled out equaled the intense feelings of guilt and shame she had about the goddamn ear-nibble, like she had betrayed herself, betrayed feminism, and betrayed society by becoming just another data point supporting the fucking theory that a woman’s no is just a yes that needs a little encouragement. This could be interpreted as consent.

Day Nine

The secret to reversing time, Louisa quickly realized, was to separate mind and body. She pictured her “mental” self as a tiny homunculus, spinning on its haunches in the back of her brain while her “physical” self, her body, followed the choreography being unwritten from her life thread. As long as her mental self didn’t order her physical self to do anything once the rewind was going, time would continue to passively march backwards. For the most part, Louisa tried not to think about what her physical self was doing at all.

On Thursday, she started creating elaborate fantasies to pass the hours. Many of them involved horrible and/or violent things happening to Nick. When she got bored or creeped out by the fantasies, she tried to solve complicated probability questions in her head.

Louisa calculated the fraction of hours she had rewound, and how much further she had to go. She and Nick had met on the second day of the September semester in a 12:30pm astronomy seminar they were both taking as an easy elective. This meant that they had known each other for two hundred and fifty-two hours when Louisa began to rewind time. As her body brushed tangles into her hair on Thursday night and typed away inane chat messages to Nick, her mind followed her eyes when they darted up to the clock in the top-right corner of her laptop and after a couple of quick calculations realized, with a slight thrill, that she was already a fifth of the way there.

Day Eight

Nick and Louisa had spent most of Wednesday afternoon in a local coffee bar, picking away at their respective formulas. The sunset backlit Nick. The electric candle on the table between them cast light up on his face at a sharp angle that splintered when it hit his thick-framed glasses, leaving two long shadows over his eyebrows that reminded Louisa of a cartoon villain.

She caught a glimpse of the time on the face of her cell phone when her hand lifted it from the table and turned it towards Nick. 7:47pm.

Seventy-six hours and forty-three minutes down, she thought, as her body smiled and warmed in response to a kiss Nick was about to remove from her nose. Three-tenths of the way there.

It was here, at the one hundred and seventy-fifth hour of their relationship, that Louisa first considered whether her crush on Nick could grow into something more. She found him charming, smart, and cute, but there was something off-putting, like she felt an overwhelming need to impress him and because of that she couldn’t quite get comfortable, and she wasn’t sure whether that was because she liked him so much or because she didn’t like him nearly as much as she thought she did. She remembered the conversation leading up to this thought so perfectly she could hear the words even as they were spoken in reverse.

Nick: You’re adorable.

Louisa (laughing): I don’t know! I thought it was funny that I thought it!

Nick: Why’d you say it then?

Louisa: That didn’t even sound clever in my head.

Nick (laughing): You should be.

Louisa (laughing): I’m sorry.

Nick: Nope, shut it down. That’s the worst.

Louisa (air-quoting): Like, “Nick”-name.

Nick (silence):

Louisa: Nickname!

Nick: What?

Louisa (laughing):

Nick: I think it’s cute. Could be a nickname for me.

Louisa: Oh no, that’s terrible. Shybrows.

Nick: My sha-brows? Shybrows?

Louisa: With your evil shadow-brows.

Nick (taking the phone): I look downright sinister.

Louisa (laughing): Oh my god.

Nick (sinister voice): Beware . . . my evil plan. Something.

Louisa: Look! This is why I was laughing. Your eyebrows. You look like a freaking cartoon villain.

She pulled back the phone and framed Nick in the screen. At 7:39pm, her finger tapped the circle at the bottom and erased the picture forever. Seventy-six hours and fifty-one minutes down. One hundred and seventy-five hours and nine minutes to go.

Louisa’s Three Theories Of Time Reversal:

1. Erased time took several minutes to eclipse and disappear completely after a rewind was stopped and time began to move forward again. Louisa was uncertain whether the rewound memories atrophied at a steady rate or exponentially—in which case, perhaps the faintest outline of the memories could linger.

2. Regardless of whether it was steady or exponential, decay time was most likely affected by both the amount of focus Louisa put into trying to retain the memories, and by the number and degree of distractions available when she stopped rewinding.

3. Louisa had always been able to reverse time, but she kept forgetting about her power because of Theory #1. She suspected this because she had a hard time recalling any things she’d done that she’d consider to be “big” mistakes. Perhaps she was not such a rational, pragmatic person after all. Perhaps she was just a regular, illogical person blessed with the power to rewind and redo every fuck-up. Maybe tons of terrible things had happened to her—car crashes, bad grades, fights with friends, injuries, sexual assaults, and other troubles—and she’d just erased them all.

Day Seven

Louisa took pleasure in imagining a pie chart slowly disappear, one degree at a time.

It took one hundred and four hours of rewinding before it occurred to Louisa she might not actually forget anything that had happened to her. She had been pretty confident her memory would be erased, but now while she remembered remembering something about dog shit, she wasn’t entirely sure what it had to do with time reversal. And the more she thought about why she was rewinding, the more she wondered whether any memory loss could have been the result of all the booze and weed she’d consumed. In which case, all three of her theories were likely wrong.

Louisa had no idea what the psychological effects of remembering everything would be, and she didn’t want to find out. She was doing this because she believed she would forget everything, and the doubts caused her a great deal of anxiety so she dismissed them as irrational and dangerous and she suppressed them. For the first time, Louisa thought she understood faith.

Day Six

With one hour until the start of astronomy class, Louisa calculated she had reached the halfway point: only one hundred and twenty-one hours left to rewind.

Under their desks, her knee tilted against Nick’s. She pulled a note out of her purse and unfolded it to reveal a Mickey Mouse-esque doodle of a molecule, with the words Hey Copper-Titanium, I have my ion you written in a speech bubble above his head.

Below the speech bubble, in her writing, a question mark.

Below that, in Nick’s writing, CuTi, also a reference to your hair.

His hand slipped under hers and he pulled the note back to his desk. She watched as letter by letter, the last sentence disappeared under the nib of his pen, and to her surprise and frustration, she felt more than just a little sad.

Day Five

Louisa fell out of sleep to the glow of her laptop. Her eyes fluttered for twenty or so minutes after they opened fully and Louisa recalled, with annoyance, that she’d fallen asleep while creeping Nick’s Facebook page and had left her laptop open to a picture from the summer of 2007—Nick playing road hockey with friends. They would have been about twelve, but Louisa thought they looked a little younger in the photo. She rolled onto her stomach and her hands fell on the keyboard and touchpad. She started to scroll through his pictures, back to 2016. She clicked the chat tab just as Nick’s final night! vanished.

As they deleted their conversation line-by-line, dread slowly built in Louisa like a hunger pang.

Louisa: Break-ups are the worst.

Nick: Haha yeah. I lived there before she moved in though.

Louisa: At least you got custody of the house.

Nick: Yeah, totally.

Louisa: Still sucks, though.

Nick: It doesn’t matter. No one believed her anyway, and later she admitted she was lying because she was pissed about the break up.

Louisa: :-(

Nick: Just stupid stuff. Stuff that wasn’t true.

Louisa: What did she say??

Nick: Yeeeeeah.

Louisa: Oh man.

Nick: It’s cool. She actually lived here with me and everyone, but we were fighting a lot and kept breaking up and getting back together. When we broke up the last time and she moved out, she shit talked me and was basically like I hate you so it was kind of brutal.

Louisa: (Sorry if that was super inappropriate, you don’t have to answer)

Louisa: What happened?

Nick: No :-(

Louisa: Oh yeah? Civil?

Nick: Civility is good. Haha. Yeah I just broke up with someone too.

Louisa: Don’t be. I broke up with him. It was pretty civil, actually.

Nick: Oh that sucks. I’m sorry.

Louisa: Well, I actually just broke up with someone and we were together two years and friends before that, so no.

Nick: Date-dates? “Date” dates.

Nick: Do you not go on date dates often?

Louisa: Nevermind.

Nick: Haha what?

Three Things Louisa Realized As She Watched The Conversation Disappear:

1. She was pretty sure she knew what Nick’s ex-girlfriend had said about him.

2. Nick honestly did not think he had done anything wrong to his ex-girlfriend, which meant that he honestly had not thought he had done anything wrong to Louisa, which meant that:

3. He would do it again.

Day Four

Louisa wanted to disappear. She wanted to fold herself in half, fold herself in half again, then again and again and again and again and again and again until she disappeared completely, which wasn’t mathematically possible, but she didn’t give a shit. The homunculus in the back of her skull could no longer ignore her body. The homunculus felt seasick from walking backwards all the time. The homunculus was having a nervous breakdown.

Louisa couldn’t understand a word she or Nick said as they wound backwards along the seawall, but she hated the way she never took her eyes off of him. It was sunny out, but his pupils were dilated, and she suspected hers were as well. Their eyes couldn’t get enough of each other. Many of Louisa’s revenge fantasies involved Nick confessing his love so she could break his heart, and now, in the back of her own mind as she observed their second date unwind, she wondered whether that meant she still believed he cared for her, or, worse, she still secretly wanted him to. It was an illness. She was sick. Her physical self was a mess of clichés, of butterflies in the stomach, heartbeats in her neck and wrists, a natural bending towards him as though opposite poles of a magnet braided through their spines. This stupid, unobservant body that failed to protect her, and the stupid, selfish person inside who would unravel 252 hours just to protect herself, and only herself, from the inconvenience of trauma, victim-blaming, the morning after pill, and an STI test. Louisa had read about what happened to girls who asked for justice. She didn’t want to be one of those girls.

On camping trips her family had taken when she was a child, her father liked to joke about bears. You don’t have to be fast to run from a bear, he’d say. You just gotta be faster than the guy next to you. Nick was the common denominator. If she removed herself from the equation, it didn’t mean Nick would no longer be able to date or date-rape. It just meant that he would happen to somebody else, like he had already happened to somebody else. What sort of activist, what sort of feminist was she, if she was only fighting for herself? Perhaps, Louisa thought, activism is inherently selfish—born from the desire for things to be better for you and people like you. But she immediately realized this was overly simplistic, this was wrong. And anyway, she had never been an activist because she had never been active. She was a consumer of activism, she was risk-averse to the point of inertia, too scared to do much more than occasionally hit the “like” button on Facebook. The sort of person who liked to think she was against bad things—like racism and rape culture and homophobia and all the other -isms and -phobias—but deep down all she meant was that she was against bad things happening to her.

And now, there was nothing Louisa could do. There was no going to the police, there was no reaching out to the ex-girlfriend to help her and support her, there was no telling the world what he did. The thing never happened.

In seventy-four hours they wouldn’t even know each other.

Day Three

Friday. The first date. Nick had suggested a nicer restaurant—in the twenty-to-thirty-dollar range. Louisa was surprised when she woke up that night to discover she was tipsy, and had been pretty tipsy for most of their date.

She descended the staircase to the foyer of her building, all the way back to their first kiss. She was flooded with warmth when they started, and as they rewound the kiss back to its inception, she grew colder and colder. He released her at the beginning of the kiss almost as quickly as she’d fallen into his arms at the end.

Day Two

Louisa nodded and smiled and agreed to the date and then Nick asked her for it. As he retreated through the crowd of the student union building, Louisa caught a glimpse of a clock above the Starbucks. 2:48pm. Twenty-six hours and eighteen minutes left. Approximately nine-tenths down, one-tenth to go.

The guilt was iron in her lungs but the rewind was done, she reminded herself, again and again. She wasn’t about to relive the relationship so he could assault her again, for a third fucking time, just so she could report it. Besides, she didn’t realize there were other girls, she didn’t know, she’d missed the signs. She was allowed to protect herself. The rewind was done—she couldn’t undo it. She had to make the best of the decision. And she couldn’t wait to forget that she’d ever made it.

Day One

Ninety minutes to go.

Only one ... one hundred and sixty-eighth ... left. The pie chart was a sliver.

Before Louisa and Nick exchanged contact information, they agreed to trade class notes so as to minimize the amount of work each person was doing for their shared “blow-off” class. Before this, they exchanged names and majors. Nick, chemistry-slash-pre-med. Louisa, math with a minor in statistics. They shook hands. Then it was the end of class and the adjunct began to speak.

Louisa counted the number of times she turned her head to admire Nick’s profile during this first astronomy class. Forty-six times.

Five minutes left.

Four.

Three.

Two.

She gathered her things and stood. Her body flung itself backwards up the aisle and through the doors. She’d been late because her bus was late and had sat next to Nick because it was a free aisle seat near the back. It’s funny, Louisa thought, how random it was. She still didn’t believe in fate.

Outside the classroom, Louisa ordered her body to stop.

Time froze. Then the people in the hallway were walking forwards instead of backwards. Louisa focused. You are dropping astronomy. You are dropping astronomy. Nick is dangerous and you are dropping astronomy. Already the memories of the past twelve days were dimming, like they were a dream and she’d just opened her eyes. She pulled a pen out of her bag and wrote on her hand, drop astronomy.

A dark-haired girl brushed past her and held open the door. “You going in?”

“Excuse me?”

“This is astronomy, right? You going in?”

Louisa’s head felt thick and heavy and muted. Like she had a terrible cold and couldn’t form a straight thought. “No,” she said. “I’m not. I heard this class is terrible.”

“Oh, shit, really? I heard it was an easy A.”

Louisa felt nauseated. The girl was really pretty.

She needed to lie down. She needed to drop this class and sign up for another.

She had to help.

“Don’t sit at the back.”

“What?”

“Don’t sit at the back. Um. I heard the prof has a quiet voice, you won’t be able to hear him.”

“Oh,” the girl said. “Okay.”

Louisa nodded. Her eyes fell on her hand; drop astronomy.

The girl slid inside the classroom and let the door swing shut behind her.

Louisa turned and walked away.

Thank you for reading — while you’re here, I also highly recommend this article by on the Cornell incident.

Natalia Bower

Regret Rape Is Wrong Enough

Consent orthodoxy has reduced the ethics of sex to a single question: was there consent? If yes, the act falls within sexual autonomy and is therefore fine. If no, it is rape, a violation of someone’s humanity, and every instance is equally grave, because the person who did not consent had no control over what might happen to them. What actually did hap…

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a month ago · 412 likes · 264 comments · Natalia Bower

So let’s be clear — I do not recommend getting into ketamine if you have an addictive personality, or any sort of history of dissociation. People with serious childhood trauma should be very, very careful with this drug. Yes, drug — ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic, not a classic serotonergic psychedelic like psilocybin.

Ketamine has a different dependence and addiction profile from many other drugs, but it is absolutely psychologically addictive for a lot of people, me included.

In “Talking to God Part 2” I compared ketamine to Ahtohallan, the frozen “river of memory” Elsa goes into in Frozen 2 — a ketamine trip can help you unwind traumatic memories and face them, which can be initially helpful, but if you go too far, you freeze. In the movie, Elsa turns into an ice statue — and, of course, is later rescued by Anna’s bravery and goodness, a common theme in both Frozen movies being that Elsa screws up and instead of being forced to change or deal with her own mistakes, is bailed out by her younger sister — in real life, a high dose of ketamine immobilizes you, you completely leave reality, a limp doll stuck in your own mind, unable to respond to the world.

I would love to have a healthy relationship to it, but I seem to struggle with that, so I’m writing this because I’m giving it up.

I wasn’t using it every day. My problem was that when I decided to use it, I wanted to use it again. And again. And eventually I would stop doing yoga on it or benefitting from it in any way, and just use it because I wanted to go to ketamine-land.

I don’t want to paint the picture as worse than it actually was — I was never physically dependent on it or using it all day or every day, I took long breaks from it, and I typically stuck to low doses. But my relationship to it has been troubled for a while, and turns out you don’t need to be literally addicted to something to have a problem with it.

But I guess I want to vent a bit about why I got so obsessed with it in the first place — and why, despite everything, I do think it has some valid medical uses.

There are plenty of studies out there showing it can be helpful for depression and anxiety, however, I do not think it is the ideal drug for either of these conditions. Unlike something like psilocybin mushrooms, ketamine doesn’t really force you to confront your shadow and change the underlying factors contributing to your psychological distress. It’s too easy to get lost in the river of memory.

But oh God, doing yoga on low doses of the stuff was a miracle for my chronic pain issues. And I’m not talking about “the pain goes away when I’m on it”, I’m talking real, long-term and seemingly permanent benefits which continued during the two-year break I took from it before falling off the wagon again in August 2025 (see “Ketamine Jesus”).

For new readers, a quick recap — when I was a year old, I fell off a staircase and badly dented my skull. I’ve had issues with my right shoulder and neck for basically my whole life. This isn’t a “oh I’m in pain and no one believes me” situation, it’s a “hey, what the hell happened to you?” type situation where healthcare workers have generally been very supportive and generous to me, so I’m not trying to paint myself as some kind of giant victim here because lots of people have chronic pain which is more or less unverifiable and if any of them are reading this they probably think I’m a lucky bitch for having a giant lump on my head.

(I also used to get chronic migraines. Those went away completely after my first hero-dose of shrooms — if you’ve ever had a migraine, you know what a miracle that was for me! I’ve given birth to an eight and a half pound baby without painkillers and in a lot of ways, some of my old migraine were almost more painful than that. I am a lucky bitch!)

Right. Anyway. Ketamine yoga.

Ketamine yoga involves taking a small dose of ketamine and mixing it with a couple puffs of weed. Low doses are key here, you can’t do yoga if you’re fried.

I put on some music, and I let my body dance for me.

I don’t know how else to explain it. It is, in fact, a bit like a mini-psychosis or spirit possession. My body starts to move for me, without my mind consciously controlling it. I am capable of yoga moves and dance moves I have no idea how to do sober, my body moves effortlessly, twists and contorts in bizarre ways, in ways that release pain and tension from parts of my body I didn’t even know were hurting.

Meanwhile, your dissociated mind travels through the river of memory.

It’s kind of like seeing a somatic therapist and a good chiropractor — for a fraction of the price!

(Similarly, getting a massage on low doses of ketamine and weed is significantly more effective and healing-feeling than a regular massage. It’s freaking great, I’m not going to lie.)

This is not just stretching — I wish I knew how to better describe it, or that I’d thought to take a video of me doing it — it’s like your body knows how to move to heal itself.

I’ve lain on the floor, sprawled out like Jesus on the cross, my arms writhing and shoulder twitching in a cosmic dance that loosens up my shoulders.

I’ve had my face go crazy, opening and closing my mouth and contorting and cracking and woken up to find that my jaw is no longer clenching.

It’s extremely weird, but also, ketamine yoga has been the most effective intervention for my pain issues I’ve found so far. And while I’m skeptical that ketamine is a good drug for depression in the direct, antidepressant sense, obviously being in less pain generally also improves your mental health.

But as I said before, the effects are long-lasting. I carry less tension in my neck and shoulders now than I did as a teenager. My jaw is still doing pretty well. I’m in less daily pain now, in my late thirties after having two kids, than I remember being in as a kid, and definitely a heck of a lot less than in my twenties and early thirties.

And if I really believe the effects are long-lasting, then this is a drug I don’t need anymore. It’s served its purpose for me, and my Elsa tendencies mean that when I mess with it, I too-often wander too far into Ahtohallan.

Reasons Not To Do Ketamine

Obviously there are reasons why people would want to try ketamine, especially if they have chronic pain issues which might be helped by the kind of yoga I describe here.

The pain relief has honestly been too much of a miracle for me to completely turn against the drug. And it’s obvious to me that a lot of people are capable of having a fairly healthy relationship to it, just as most people who drink do not binge-drink or become alcoholics.

However, in the spirit of due diligence, here are reasons to be very cautious or avoid ketamine:

• Ketamine can destroy your bladder if used too frequently and in too high of doses. There are stories of people who got so hooked on it, they literally started peeing out chunks of their bladder. While I don’t have this problem (luckily), it sounds horrifying and if you experience any bladder pain after using ketamine, stop immediately.

• Ketamine tolerance builds quickly. I got the most benefit out of it when I used it infrequently. A low dose of ketamine for yoga after months of not touching it generally generated great returns, and each subsequent dose within a short time frame had diminishing ones. My issue is that once I go into ketamine-land, I want to stay there, and I seem to struggle to limit myself to one dose every few months. If you’re struggling with the kind of pain that you think ketamine yoga might help, I would talk to a doctor, and I would be very cautious about the claims of mental health benefits.

• Snorting ketamine can cause congestion and long-term sinus and breathing issues, including nasal perforations if you get a contaminated batch or start abusing over-the-counter nasal decongestants. On that note, do not mess with over-the-counter nasal decongestants, these are ridiculously addictive and I’m just lucky that an ayahuasca trip got me off of them.

• Do not drive or operate any sort of vehicle after using ketamine, even a small dose can impair your vision and motor skills. While the effects of ketamine usually wear off after about an hour, I personally always had a rule that I didn’t drive until the next day if I took some earlier, even if I seemed 100% sober. TBF I’m an anxious driver even on a good day, but I still think this is a good rule.

• You can have an unhealthy relationship with ketamine without being physically dependent on it or doing it every day. Just because you can stop for months at a time with zero side effects doesn’t mean it’s not an issue! Psychological state matters.

• Ketamine poses a significant psychosis risk for people who are vulnerable to it. If you read the “Ketamine Jesus” piece, you’ll see that “psychosis” in the sense of “hallucinating voices” isn’t always as scary as you might think — the “voices” I heard were actually very kind and trying to help me, including telling me to stop using ketamine, so there you go. In retrospect, I am actually kind of diminishing my experience by labelling it as a “psychosis”, when a better description is that “Jesus” decided to intervene during a psychological crisis and helped me. And I suppose I’ve decided that I don’t care whether the events in “Ketamine Jesus” were literally true or not, it’s healthier for me to believe that there is a God and that He cares about me, even when I’m being kind of an asshole. I realize I can believe in God without believing the voice of “Jesus” or other spirit-related hallucinations were real, but also I kind of liked Ketamine Jesus — he wasn’t the “perfect man” many Christians make him out to be, but he was still a good guy and I actually prefer the flawed and very human version of him I encountered. I also quite like the part of the “psychosis” where he’s coming back to Earth scattered in an unknown amount of fragments to continue his work starting in 2027, though admittedly I am not a fan of the part where I was personally partially responsible for shattering his soul. Long story.

Thank you, ketamine, for helping heal me.

You were a miracle at first but you morphed into a demon which possessed me, and it’s time to say goodbye forever.

For more on the risks and myths of ketamine, I highly recommend ’s Substack.

Do not be ignorant of me.
For I am the first and the last.
I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.

— “Thunder, Perfect Mind”, translation by George W. MacRae

The psychosis began in August 2025. I was trying to quit smoking, the vice I justify because it keeps me calm, helps me focus, and I only smoke organic tobacco, only small amounts, tiny breaths of death to help me through the day.

It started with a call. These are different from cravings. I get cravings for tobacco, for alcohol, but I don’t get called to smoke or drink. I only get called to take mushrooms, and when that happens, it’s because a spirit — or spirits — want a word with me.

As with previous calls, the timing was serendipitous. My husband had the week off, but our vacation had been cancelled due to wildfire smoke, and so we were all home, and when I told him I was called to the shrooms, he distracted the kids while I brewed a tea. Once they kicked in, the spirits told me to take ketamine as well — a drug I had barely touched in two years. My neck and back had been bothering me for months, a flare-up of the childhood injury, a new issue with jaw-clenching, which the shroom spirits hinted they could fix if I followed their instructions.

My kids and husband hung out upstairs while I went to our backyard and collapsed on the lawn.

Three figures appeared in the sky. One pair, masculine and feminine, and one figure of light, hovering alone.

The pair were silent, but the being of light began to communicate, sending feelings and ideas into my right hemisphere, which my left then translated into words.

Mary, you’re breaking my heart again.

What follows is a piece of bizarre and comedic literary auto-fiction which, depending on your interpretation, is about postpartum psychosis or a spiritual awakening — the framework I find most helpful to understand them is that there is a higher power who cares about us and was trying to communicate with me during a period of great distress. You do not need to literally believe this is true to appreciate the story.

If you choose to read, I only ask that you stay with me until the end. The paywall is up because this is vulnerable — if you really want to read but can’t afford a subscription, feel free to shoot me a message and I can comp you for a few months.

At the end of all this, I am currently taking a break from experimenting with psychedelics, including a permanent one from all synthetic mind-altering drugs, and attempting to integrate the various lessons I’ve (hopefully) learned. I am also trying to quit smoking, and the habit is currently very light.

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“If you take a square of a number, add that number, then the number after it, you get the square of the next number. For example, three times three is nine. If you add three and four to nine, you get sixteen, which is four times four.”

My teacher tried to explain variables to me. I didn’t understand how a letter could represent a number.

“You don’t think like other children,” she said, looking at me with curiosity.

Weeks later, I sat in a stuffy room filling out bubble letters for my school district’s “gifted” test. I was immediately irritated by it — a third of the test were spatial reasoning questions using pictures of pieces of paper folded in different ways, then hole punched, and we were asked to identify what the pattern would look like unfolded; I found this whole section to be comically easy. The math section seemed largely a test of how good one’s math teachers were.

The verbal section annoyed me most, because this just seemed to me both a test of how much a kid read combined with cultural experience. One of the questions I got wrong included several words I had never seen before in my life, which turned out to be names of foreign currencies. It seemed more like a test of whether or not I’d ever been to Europe (I hadn’t) or whether my parents had bothered to teach me that sort of thing (they hadn’t).

When my test scores came back, my teacher pulled me aside to tell me I’d aced the math and spatial reasoning sections, and tested as moderately “gifted” on the verbal. I nodded and kept a straight face but was secretly distraught — binging Disney movies at my grandparents’ house had left me obsessed with the hope that “true love” would liberate me from my loneliness. If I really did have an IQ in the 99th percentile, as my teacher claimed, I feared I would almost certainly continue to be lonely.

I was excused from taking math with my peers for the rest of elementary school and given advanced textbooks to study independently. I wasn’t particularly interested, and used this time to read novels in the back of the classroom.

My mother was surprised when my teacher told her about my test scores.

“I never thought you were smarter than the other children,” she said. A family friend had gone for gifted testing around the same time, and hadn’t been accepted into the program because his verbal score was too low — but he was in French immersion. My mom pointed out — and I agreed with her — that this hardly seemed fair.

The night after we got my “gifted” test scores back, my father wrote numbers out in the shapes of diamonds on a piece of paper and told me to solve them since I was so smart. When I admitted I didn’t understand how the numbers formed a math problem and asked him to show me how to work one out, he walked away.

A generous read on this is that my dad had forgotten how matrices worked and skewed them into diamonds, only to realize his mistake when I asked for help. It’s still pretty weird to ask your ten-year-old to solve math problems many university students struggle with, but not as weird as asking your ten-year-old to solve random numbers on a page.

Either way, it humbled me, I guess. Which was probably the right move. I have to give my parents a lot credit for not letting my test scores go to my head (too much).

Speaking of heads — mine is lopsided. When I was a year old, I fell off a staircase (there was no railing) onto the unfinished cement floor of my parents’ basement, landing on my right parietal lobe. I still have a bump, and have struggled with chronic shoulder and neck pain on my right side for as long as I can remember.

Several family members and friends liked to joke that the fall made me so good at math. I always thought this was funny, but, frankly, I have a lot of family members who are good at math. I also like to blame my various issues on the fall — again, because I think it’s kind of funny — though, again, many of my “neurodivergent” traits are also present in various family members.

As I discussed in “The Drama of the Gifted Children”, suggests in his books that many common mental health conditions, as well as autism spectrum disorder traits, are associated with right hemisphere dysfunction. And, in an interview with another researcher, they discussed how IQ tests mostly measure left-hemisphere cognition (with the notable exception of spatial skills — my great strength — which are located primarily in the right hemisphere).

So while I quip that my strangeness is a result of falling on my head, the truth is, I cannot credibly do so. I have a lot of strange family members. You should meet my dad!

Realistically, the only things I can blame on the head injury are the pain issues, and my embarrassing clumsiness, as the parietal lobe is responsible for motor skills — I am the number one cause of broken glass in my house, even though I have a 4YO and a 20MO!

This is a bit of a bummer, because it’s a lot more fun to pretend that my super-human Tetris abilities were a result of brain damage.

But c’est la vie, I should be honest with y’all.

“It is when a parent’s love is experienced as conditional on achievement that children are at risk for serious emotional problems.”

— Madeline Levine, The Price of Privilege (2006), page 30

I was pulled out of school one day per week to attend special “gifted” classes at the community centre. I was not surprised that almost all of the kids there were white, and spoke English as their first and only language. The neighbourhood we lived in was fairly mixed-income at the time, but almost all of the kids were from upper middle-class or affluent families.

I immediately disliked the program. Perhaps it was my mother’s influence, or perhaps she was just onto something, but the other kids in the “gifted” program did not seem much smarter than most of the other kids at my elementary school. Many were try-hard, very bookish, and immersed in study despite still being in elementary school; many were so socially awkward I felt almost cool in comparison — and, to be clear, I was not cool at all in elementary school. Quite a lot of the other girls I talked to in the program had gotten their highest score on the verbal section of the test, and, like me, read quite a lot of books at the expense of more social and (loosely) right-brained activities.

I hung out with a few other girls, including one I’ll call “Alex.” Alex had long, waist-length curly brown hair and was very shy but was also easy enough to be around in a quiet sort of way.

After a couple of months, our teacher — a white woman around forty — pulled me and my friends aside after Alex had left for the day.

“Did you know that Alex is a boy?” she asked us.

We shook our heads. We hadn’t known.

“I was talking to Alex’s mom and told her how great her daughter was doing, and she got mad at me and told me that Alex is a boy, not a girl. You guys really didn’t know?”

We told her we didn’t know.

Alex never returned to that gifted class.

I was angry at both Alex’s mom and the teacher. Alex clearly wanted friends, and clearly preferred female friends. It seemed to me that both Alex’s mother and the teacher had sabotaged that. And I wondered if Alex was okay.

A few months later, the teacher announced a paper airplane contest and had all of us come up with our own airplane design to see who could throw theirs the farthest.

The girl who “won” bunched her paper into a ball and threw it.

The teacher praised her for ingenuity, but to me, this just seemed like cheating. Everyone in that class knew that a ball could be thrown further than a paper airplane, but it was a paper airplane contest, not a paper-anything contest.

I went home and told my parents that I thought the gifted program was going to turn me into a “bad” person and I didn’t want to go anymore.

We argued for about an hour before they caved in and agreed to let me quit.

Precocity is a confounding variable in childhood intelligence tests. I got my first period nearly a year earlier than was average at the time, and I was one of the tallest in my grade until the very end of elementary school, when I abruptly stopped growing at five foot five and many of my once-shorter peers shot up around me.

I observed that many of the “gifted” kids in my program were also unusually tall for their age. The girl who had thrown the paper ball instead of the airplane was nearly a year younger than me — her parents’ had skipped her a grade, which she had internalized into a significant part of her identity — but the same height, and appeared to be at a similar stage of pubertal development.

Not all children mature at the same rate; there are various reports that many “gifted” kids also achieve other developmental milestones early, and go through puberty earlier than their peers.

In these cases, the gap between the precocious children and their peers would shrink over time as peers caught up developmentally, and could explain why some “gifted” children — in particular those who are identified at very young ages — grow up to be unexceptional adults.

Multiple studies have found children who experience early violence or trauma age faster. Psychological stress during early childhood may accelerate pubertal development, a phenomenon termed “psychosocial acceleration.” This is also a recurring theme in stories of childhood abuse and neglect; in order to survive, the child “grows up fast.”

In her 1979 book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller wrote about how children who are especially attuned to their environments are often praised for qualities that are, in part, adaptations to a dysfunctional, neglectful, or narcissistic home life.

A “gifted” child in Miller’s conception is a sensitive and intelligent child who learns to repress their own needs in order to appease the needs and desires of their parent(s) or caregiver(s).

“They do well, even excellently, in everything they undertake […] but behind all this lurks depression, a feeling of emptiness and self-alienation, and a sense that their life has no meaning.”

The “self” is lost in a fervent dissociation into academics and other achievements, a pathological need to impress, to be exceptional, to perform — and to be worthy of love.

In my early twenties, I briefly worked at my university campus’s daycare centre as an assistant.

There was one boy, about four at the time, who was very quiet and did not play with the other children. My boss told me that this boy was “brilliant” and could already read and do basic math.

“His parents are both professors here,” she said. According to her, this boy’s parents spent most of their time with their son teaching him academics, using flashcards etc. “I want you to hang out with him. He’s very socially awkward, and doesn’t have any friends.”

While the staff at the daycare centre were careful not to trash-talk the parents of children too much, it soon became obvious to me how much they disliked this little boy’s parents — who rarely played with their child, rarely showed him affection, and had pushed academics on him so prematurely and intensely he had obvious signs of an anxiety disorder.

I remembered what my mom had said; even though this little boy could read at two and was doing math at a level some kids twice his age struggled with, he didn’t seem smarter than the other children at that daycare — he just seemed lonelier.

He could read but he barely spoke. Compared to the other kids, he appeared to have very little sense of “self”, as well as impaired social abilities and a lack of attunement to his teachers and classmates — he was too afraid of making a mistake to do very much at all.

“Gifted Kid Burnout” is a well-documented phenomenon, and typically strikes during transition periods — in particular, the start of high school, first or second year of college, or the transition from academics into the world of work. It is typically thought to occur as a result of chronic anxiety, high expectations, perfectionism, overwork, and high sensitivity, resulting in mental, physical, and emotional exhaustion.

I held out until the end of my twenties, but with a dawning awareness that I was heading for a brutal crash, coupled with an obsessive desire to achieve as much as I could at the literary journal I worked for before the inevitable collapse. A common trait among neglected children and children of narcissists is something called a “foreshortened future” — or an inability to imagine oneself as a full adult beyond a certain age.

This too, perhaps, is a family trait — on his fortieth birthday, drunk and close to tears, my father admitted he never thought he’d live to forty and hadn’t imagined a life for himself beyond that age.

When people asked me to close my eyes and imagine myself five or ten years in the future, I had to bullshit an answer; I didn’t see anything at all.

I burned out around age thirty. At age thirty-one, I went for a psychiatric assessment and was told, after spending about an hour with the psychiatrist, that I was difficult to attach a single label to. I was a bit “ADHD”, a bit “bipolar”, depressed, and had traits associated with “autism.” The only thing the psychiatrist was certain about — as had many healthcare workers before him — was that I had a “severe” anxiety disorder.

This confirmed something I’d feared since childhood; that I was in many ways statistically abnormal, an improbability.

The psychiatrist told me I’d be better off avoiding medication, and that if my symptoms did get worse, to only go on a low dose for as short a period of time as possible, and then get off of it.

“Your symptoms are a very normal reaction to your context,” he said. “In fact, under these circumstances, I’d say you’re unusually high functioning.”

I know some regular readers probably suspect that all the psychedelics I’ve done made me a little crazy. The truth is, I was always crazy. And one of the reasons I got so into psilocybin in particular was that I thought I could rewire my brain to become more neurotypical — and, in many ways, I actually succeeded.

Psilocybin mushrooms helped me become more emotional intelligent. Combining low doses of ketamine with a puff of weed and high intensity yoga improved my coordination and did far more to help my chronic pain than any other intervention. I am in far less pain now, at age thirty-eight, after having two children, than I was when I was in my twenties. MDMA helped me open myself up to love. Yes, I took the psychedelics too far, but, initially, at least, they were helping.

I used to live behind a wall, a performance, a mask. The psychedelics stripped all of that away. My mental health is far better for it, and so are many of my relationships. I might be weird, but at least now my weirdness is more authentic, more me.

And I didn’t end up lonely after all. I might not be as high achieving as my teachers thought I’d be based off my test scores, but what I really wanted was healthy attachments. I’m still working on that, but, overall, I consider myself very lucky.

It hasn’t always been easy, but I’m okay.

(I think that psychiatrist would be proud).

So when the new trailer for “Elle”, a prequel series about Elle Woods in high school after she moves from LA to Seattle in the mid-90s, popped up on my feed, I watched it.

The show looks terrible. The kind of bad franchise expansion that sort of ruins the original movie. But I also realized something; while I wouldn’t have bullied Elle in high school (as her grungy Seattle classmates do), I also wouldn’t have wanted to be friends with her.

Not because she’s blonde — because she obviously isn’t.

Just like Reese Witherspoon before her, actress Lexi Minetree is not a natural blonde. She’s a brunette with impeccably bleached hair — the kind that costs thousands of dollars per year to maintain and frequent trips to the hairdresser.

(The trailer even features a scene with Elle and her mother making a snide comment about another blonde with her roots showing — because when they talk about “blondes”, they are talking about hair bleach. The ironic thing is that occasionally bleaching your hair and letting your roots grow out is far less damaging to one’s health than maintaining perfect blonde roots — something which is still a requirement in some sororities).

Judging anyone for their natural hair is wrong — and my experience is that the vast majority of people do not do this; and when it does happen, it’s often women with very curly natural hair, such as natural Black hair, who are on the receiving end, not the rare women with naturally straight or wavy blonde hair, which is generally fetishized and honestly probably makes the average person treat you a little better, not worse. Yes, even punks and grunge types! I hung out punks and grunge types in high school, and I wasn’t even the only natural blonde in my friend group going to Distillers concerts and palling around with guys who played guitar and bass.

Elle’s classmates are not judging her for being blonde; they are judging her for investing an insane amount of time and money into faking being blonde. The 90s “grunge” movement they’re part of, was, at least partially, an anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist movement, and Elle’s shtick is the opposite of that.

Elle is intended as a defence of “femininity” — describes her as “embracing” her femininity through “bright make-up, fun hairstyles, and accessories— but none of these things are actually “feminine”.

Bleaching and dyeing your hair, fake-tans (is that a fake tan I see?), heavy make-up etc are all a rejection of nature, of biology, of the natural beauty God gave her — in favour of expensive products which tend to be environmentally destructive, and destructive to one’s health and fertility.

The Divine Feminine is an energy — that of creativity, intuition, compassion, nurturing, and connection to Nature / Mother Earth — which cannot be purchased at the mall or a salon.

I’m not saying that Elle does not possess these qualities as well. I am arguing that her fashion, make-up, and hair choices are not emblematic of the Divine Feminine. If anything, they are the opposite, because they are anti-Nature.

Bottle blonde hair has been making a comeback lately, thanks largely to Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad. Sweeney, meanwhile, recently shared that she’s stopped bleaching her hair and started wearing wigs instead because all that bleach was causing her hair to fall out. In other words, bleaching her hair — which I don’t judge her for, it was necessary for many of her most famous roles — was destroying her hair’s health and natural beauty.

(This is something I like about Sweeney; she’s honest and blunt, and I respect her for making a good health choice and opting for wigs instead of damaging her real hair — also she’s a good actress and it’s nice to see a performer rock her real face and tits).

Nonetheless, the AE had has inspired many women to “go blonde”, risking their health and fertility to chase a “beauty standard” that has, since the early 1900s, always been more about bleached hair than real blonde hair, which tends to be darker, less photo-genetic, and constantly changing with sun exposure etc.

Look up any article on blonde hair — almost everyone single one will talk about bottle blondes, such as Marilyn Monroe, or the original Elle Woods, Reese Witherspoon. The rare Hollywood women with naturally blonde hair — such as Amanda Seyfried or Sofia Vergara — are almost never mentioned.

When I was hanging out with grunge-y and punk-loving teenagers, I often heard male friends deride “blondes” — immediately followed by “we’re not talking about you, because your hair is real.” This is a pattern; the dislike of “blondes” is not really about natural blondes, it’s about women who bleach and dye their hair, akin to those in the conservative movement who mock leftists who dye their hair funky colours like green or purple. A big difference I’ve noticed, however, is that while leftists with “unnatural” hair colours realize that they are being judged for the decision to bleach and dye their hair, bottle blondes seem to act … um, confused.

I’m not going to call out anyone directly, because I do recognize it’s gauche for a natural blonde to pick on bottle blondes by name. But I’ve seen several posts from women who seem to think that they are being mistreated by others for “being blonde” when they clearly have bleached hair.

I’m sorry, but people aren’t mistreating or acting like they judge these women for “being blonde”. They are responding to the decision to spend thousands of dollars per year to bleach the crap out of their hair with toxic chemicals until they resemble a German toddler.

While platinum blonde hair is not uncommon in children, it almost always darkens around puberty, and most adults with natural blonde hair have darker shades, more of a “dirty” or medium-blonde. Light blonde hair is a neotenous trait, and it’s perfectly reasonable that many people are put off by a woman who is trying to have the hair of a child — and the men who are attracted to this and encourage it.

With the obvious exception of natural forms of hair bleaching (e.g. lemon juice, sea salt, and sun) and plant-based hair dyes (e.g. saffron for yellow hair), hair bleaches and dyes are pretty freaking toxic.

The first famous bottle blonde — Jean Harlow — died in her mid-twenties from kidney failure caused by bleaching her hair every couple of weeks. Here’s another recent story about a twenty-year-old Chinese woman who was hospitalized with kidney disease after dyeing her hair every month.

Various hair dyeing products are also known to be carcinogenic — dyeing your hair is linked to higher rates of breast cancer in women — and hairdressers have higher rates of various cancers because of it.

And this is my issue with Elle Woods; she’s a consumerist advertisement, encouraging young women to embrace hair bleaching at the expense of their health, to wear heavy make-up, to get their nails done (oh yeah, nail polish is toxic too!), to buy far more clothes than any person needs — and let’s be real, a lot of Elle’s clothes are probably also made from toxic synthetic fabrics, which are generally easier to make flattering clothing out of than healthier fibres like organic cotton.

Elle’s girl-boss arc into becoming a successful lawyer sells women the idea that they can buy all of this crap for themselves, in excess quantities, if they buckle down and get a high-paying job.

Which, okay, there’s something to be said for having your own money instead of relying on men to buy you stuff.

Stuff you don’t actually need. Stuff that has a negative environmental impact (landfills are loaded with plastic containers from beauty products and plastic clothing that women purchased to wear maybe once or twice … and, of course, we never see Elle Woods in the same outfit more than once). Stuff that harms your health.

Elle Woods is selling you junk and calling it embracing her “femininity”, but that’s not femininity. That’s consumerism.

It’s anti-Nature.

Do you know what actually is feminine? Embracing and cultivating your natural beauty. Loving nature, and spending lots of time out in it (does Elle Woods walk barefoot in the woods? I doubt it). Caring about our planet, Mother Earth, Nature, Gaia, God etc enough to try to leave a fairly small environmental footprint.

The “bullies” are right in the trailer. “Pink” isn’t a personality. And there’s nothing feminine about becoming an excessive consumer of toxic chemicals, fashion, and accessories. Many of which ironically harm the trait which is arguably the most Divinely Feminine of all — that is, our ability to conceive and give birth to healthy children.

Elle Woods is not feminine. She’s plastic. She’s a marketing tool for multi-billion-dollar industries which prey on women’s insecurities, vanities, and love of shopping.

A natural beauty revolution is slowly taking off. People are waking up.

Bleaching your hair is a choice. If you don’t like how people treat you because of it, you can always just stop.

~ Meghan

(Sorry this is harsher than usual, my mom was just diagnosed with cancer … and while she’s very healthy, she also has dyed her hair for years. But also, I have two daughters, both currently with light blonde hair, and I don’t want them growing up bombarded with the message that Elle Woods is selling — when their hair darkens, as it inevitably will, I want them to know that their natural colour is okay and they shouldn’t chase the platinum locks of their toddlerhood at the expense of their health and wallet. I don’t want them to believe that femininity is something you buy at a store or salon).

More on this topic —

Shlain presented a lot of evidence that spikes in alphabet literacy result in a tilt toward LH cognition and have historically preceded spikes in violence, in particular against women. He argued that the invention and spread of alphabet literacy increased misogyny in various cultures around Europe, the Middle East, and Asia and was followed by an immediate decline in polytheism and goddess-worship.

I countered — drawing heavily from ’s The Master and His Emissary, as well as Christopher Badcock’s The Imprinted Brain and The Diametric Mind — that sex differences lateralize to the RH, whereas the LH is more “androgynous.”

I pointed out that LH dominance and hyper-literacy appears to be associated with both misogyny and misandry (as well as a denial of sex differences, or anti-sexism), and that widespread atheism — especially among the educated classes — followed the loss of the goddess.

This was one of my more popular essays, and so I have to make a confession — I don’t think I got it quite right either.

The Origin of the Divine Feminine and Masculine

In the beginning there was One. The One had a thought — a will to bestow — and that thought split the Spirit to form the first emanation; the Cosmic Womb, the androgynous First Thought, the Divine Feminine, and Mother-Father of all Creation.

And so the One became the Creator and the Creation, and from their interaction came Matter.

From the Cosmic Womb sprang more emanations, in pairs of masculine and feminine — how many depends on the source text — and from those emanations came forth more and so on, as the Universe fragmented and expanded and grew infinitely more complex.

The above creation myth is primarily derived from Gnostic Christianity, in particular The Secret Book of John, but it has fractal counterparts in other creation myths from other traditions — e.g. Kabbalah, some Hinduism, Egyptian cosmology, and various Indigenous mythologies.

Setting aside the question of whether or not “spirits” and/or “gods” literally exist or not, such myths provide useful metaphors for understanding the human condition. I’m using a bit more poetic flair than usual here, just humour me.

What I find interesting in many of these creation myths is that the first emanation — or generative principle — of the original Spirit or primordial state of unity is typically feminine.

Such myths — the Adam and Eve story, many fractal levels down, is the most obvious and popular one following this template — are criticized for the implication that man came first and that woman was derived from man.

This is a misunderstanding — in such creation myths, in the beginning, before the “Big Bang”, there is no such thing as masculine.

The “Creator” is not the “Creator” until there is a “Creation”, and “He” is not “He” except in relation to “She”. The primordial “One” was androgynous — as was Adam before Eve — and only grew into the “All-Father” or “Divine Masculine” in relation to the Divine Feminine.

The emergence of the “Divine Feminine” was not the arrival of something secondary, but the moment in which polarity itself emerged. Neither masculine nor feminine preceded the other; instead, they make each other possible.

The Birth of the Demiurge

“Whilst it is with the development of Homo sapiens that significant lateralization starts to appear (about 200,000 years ago), the whole evolution of the human species is intimately bound up with the emergence of specifically left hemisphere brain characteristics.”

— Roderick Tweedy, The God of the Left Hemisphere, page 4

At the dawn of consciousness, the human brain rapidly grew and split into two hemispheres, each with a unique way of perceiving and interacting with the world.

Thus, language was born, a distinctly left hemispheric talent — and with it, the capacity for storytelling, myth, and meaning-making, as well as lying, manipulation, propaganda, and deception.2

Let’s pause for a second and continue the story —

One of the lower emanations, Wisdom, was possessed by an insatiable curiosity and a deep capacity for love. She wished to be more like the Creator, to experience the joy of Creation.

Desiring to conceive by herself, Wisdom separated herself from her masculine consort and the other emanations of the Spirit World. In isolation, she ceased to exist in relation and became androgynous, and from her desire she conceived.

The child that came forth out of her — spawned without permission or assistance from the All-Father, the Cosmic Womb, and her male counterpart — was incomplete and flawed.

Horrified at what she’d done, Wisdom isolated her creation. The child — the Demiurge — woke up and saw that he was alone, believed he was alone.

In his ignorance, he declared — “I am the Lord, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.”3

“Gods” and “spirits” — regardless of tradition — can be understood as fractal manifestations of the human psyche.

As above, so below — The kingdom of God is within you.4

If the ancient myths are describing the emergence of structured reality out of undifferentiated unity, then the “left hemisphere” may be the neurological fractal of the same generative impulse.

Wisdom’s story is that of a generative rupture. In attempting to create without her counterpart, she brings forth a spiritual being — and eventually a world — that is structured yet unstable, intelligible yet distorted. Her “androgyny”5 is distinct from the primordial unity of the One — in the absence of Divine Masculinity, she ceases to be a fractal of the Divine Feminine.

The emergence of language allows us to generate reality in symbolic form: to name, to narrate, to build coherent worlds out of experience. But in doing so, it also introduces the possibility of error, abstraction, and illusion.

Words can reflect reality — but they can also reshape it. In this sense, the left hemisphere may be understood not merely as analytic, but as generative — it brings forth the possibility of wisdom and meaning, the ability to transmit accumulated knowledge through generations, even as it risks severing from the whole.

When a system tries to become self-sufficient in a way that excludes relation, it starts producing distorted versions of what it’s trying to create.

Wisdom, Language, and the Left Hemisphere

“Wisdom” — at least in its transmissible and cumulative form — depends on language, and, thus, the left hemisphere.6

And so it is interesting that “Wisdom” is usually coded in ancient myths as being an emanation of the Divine Feminine — Sophia in Gnostic Christianity, Athena in Greek mythology, Saraswati in Hinduism, Chista in Zoroastrianism, Seshat — the goddess of writing, measurement, and library science — in Egyptian cosmology.

“Wisdom is always female. She has been called the “last of a long line of ancient near eastern goddesses”, which include Isis, Ma’at, Astarte, Tiamat; on the Hellenistic side she shares her sisterhood with Demeter, Rhea, and the older, pre-Hellenic Athene, the ancient earth-mother creatrix, attended by her owls of wisdom.”7

Where exceptions apply, the “masculine” gods of Wisdom are usually depicted as being dependent on a goddess figure — as is the case with Chokhmah of the Kabbalistic sefirot, who might be better described as “Intuition” and is dependent on the feminine Binah (“Understanding”) to give form to insight. (It is worth noting here that McGilchrist characterizes the RH as being the more “intuitive” hemisphere).

McGilchrist explicitly rejects Shlain’s argument that the RH is the more “feminine” hemisphere and the LH the more “masculine” one — at one point in The Master and His Emissary, he even suggests that if anything, it is the opposite.8

This is echoed in Christopher Badcock’s work as well; in The Imprinted Brain, Badcock argues that language is an aspect of what he calls mentalistic cognition — which he describes as including the default mode network, theory of mind skills, social and relational understanding, linear thinking, storytelling, and meaning-making — and linked to the expression of maternal “imprinted” genes.9

Badcock notes that the right hemisphere tends to be slightly larger in males than females, whereas “language-associated cortical areas are proportionately larger in the female brain.” As a point of interest, he also notes that various language tasks such as rhyming activate the hemispheres more equally in women compared to men, whose language functions are more lateralized to the LH.10

Thus, in a mythopoetic sense, we can understand Wisdom’s creation of the Demiurge as representative of the increased lateralization of the brain hemispheres which made language — and all that follows it — possible.

The Creation of the Material World

“He determined to make a moving image of eternity, and so when he ordered the heavens he made in that which we call time an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one.”

— Plato, Timaeus11

The Demiurge was a flawed deity, powerful yet ignorant, creative, yet unaware of his own limits. He longed to know another, and so he created the material realm — our world — with the Word.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.12

The world of the Demiurge is ordered, structured, and comprehensible. It can be measured, named, and shaped into stories. It is a world in which patterns emerge, categories form, and meaning can be generated.

It is a world derived from something it cannot fully perceive — a world constructed from representations of a deeper reality from which it was born in isolation.

And so it is coherent, but incomplete.

A world shaped less by the impulse to give rise in relation than by the attempt to generate from what can be grasped and contained.

Gnostic stories start to deviate from other mythologies around this moment, and it’s worth pointing out that I am both simplifying the source texts and deliberately omitting some of the weirder aspects.

I am also explicitly rejecting the interpretation of some Gnostic schools of thought that the “Demiurge” is an “evil” false god13, as well as the somewhat uninformed belief that the Hebrew people have been ignorantly worshipping the Demiurge instead of the Creator since their inception as a people.

Whereas many Gnostic sects would have claimed that the fall of Wisdom and the creation of our material world were cosmic mistakes, I tend to favour the Kabbalistic interpretation here — that the fall, i.e. the development of language and left-brained faculties — were necessary to human evolution, and, as time proceeds, will eventually be the mechanism through which we can understand “God” better both spiritually and scientifically.

As well, through a Kabbalistic lens, Wisdom’s error in this story was not just that she attempted to create in isolation, but that she was motivated by the “will to receive” instead of the “will to bestow.”

The parallel between McGilchrist’s descriptions of how the left hemisphere perceives and interacts with the world and Plato’s — and later, the Gnostic — Demiurge is not a new observation. Roderick Tweedy makes this point in his 2013 book The God of the Left Hemisphere, as does Arthur Haswell in a long essay for Essentia Foundation, “The Demiurge is our brain’s left hemisphere.”

Here, again, I will quibble a bit — as the “Demiurge” is not our brain’s left hemisphere per se, but rather a symbolic representation of the left hemisphere operating without relation.

If “Wisdom” in this story represents an aspect of the Divine Feminine in human cognition, then the “Demiurge” represents what happens when, as per McGilchrist, the left hemisphere stops listening to the right and the “emissary” comes to believe he is the “master” and can thrive in isolation.

(Or, as a Kabbalist might argue, the Demiurge is the left brain ego).

“Wisdom” is a generative aspect of cognition — one capable of bringing forth meaning and structure. The “Demiurge” — her flawed offspring, typically depicted as androgynous and without a consort in Gnostic literature14 — represents what happens when that capacity becomes self-enclosed and isolated: when it turns inward, losing relation to what grounds it, and mistakes its own constructions for reality.

The map is not the territory.15

The Garden of Eden

When Wisdom realized her mistake, she fell from the divine realm into the world created by the Demiurge — who still could not perceive his mother, and believed he was the only God.

He longed to know another — and to be known in return — and so he created the first conscious human, the androgynous Adam, and placed him in a garden with two trees, one of Knowledge and one of Life.

Adam was lifeless. And so the Divine whispered to the Demiurge to breathe life into Adam. And from the breath of the Demiurge came a spark of his fallen mother, Wisdom, into the soul of Adam.

Thus the spark of Wisdom — silent and suppressed, fallen, lost but not entirely forgotten, longing for return to the higher realm — came to be embedded in all of humanity.

Adam, too, longed to know another. And so the Demiurge split Adam to create Eve, a fractal of the Divine Feminine. And in relation to Eve, Adam became masculine.

And like Wisdom before her, Eve was possessed by a great capacity for love and an insatiable curiosity.

You probably know the rest of the story.

In a recent essay, Iain McGilchrist discussed a reddit post on the parallels between the Genesis story and the hemispheres of the brain.

“Throughout history, various traditions — from the Jewish Kabbalah to Christian mysticism, through Gnostic and Hermetic currents — have interpreted these two trees as representations of two fundamental principles: unity and duality. The Tree of Life would symbolise reality as an integrated, undivided, living totality; the Tree of Knowledge, by contrast, would introduce division: the separation between good and evil, subject and object, self and world. To eat of its fruit, on this reading, would not mean acquiring more reality, but inaugurating a mode of perception that fragments experience and confuses its own categories with the very fabric of the real.”16

In other words, loosely and metaphorically speaking, the Tree of Life — which Adam and Eve are permitted to eat from — can be seen as representative of the right hemisphere’s way of knowing, whereas the “forbidden” Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil represents the categorical left hemisphere.

“If the Tree of Life corresponds to the implicate order — reality as a living, undivided, participatory totality — the Tree of Knowledge corresponds to the operation by which thought unfolds that totality into dual categories (good/evil, subject/object) and, in doing so, loses sight of the unity from which those categories emerged. The Fall, in Bohmian terms, would be the moment at which abstraction is confused with the concrete; at which the map supplants the territory.”17

When, with the encouragement of the serpent — historically a symbol of Divine Feminine knowledge and transformation — Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they entered into a world of distinctions; a material realm which can be named, analyzed, and understood in parts.

Thus, the Genesis story does not depict the dawn of humanity, but rather the beginning of abstraction, of representation, of the ability to construct reality symbolically.

In Kabbalistic interpretation, the stories in the Torah do not depict literal events in our material world, but rather eternal events in the spiritual realm — blueprints of recurrent patterns, or symbolic maps with both explanatory and predictive power.

And so, the Genesis story serves as a template for both the rapid brain growth roughly 200,000 years ago which gave us our capacity for speech — sometimes attributed to the consumption of psychedelic fungi, e.g. as in Terence McKenna’s “Stoned Ape Theory” — and to the mysterious events with the earthly figure in Kabbalah known as Adam HaRishon just under 6,000 years ago, which generated the narrative itself.

“Our language-forming ability may have become active through the mutagenic influence of hallucinogens working directly on organelles that are concerned with the processing and generation of signals. These neural substructures are found in various portions of the brain, such as Broca’s area, that govern speech formation […]

Psilocybin specifically activates the areas of the brain concerned with processing signals. A common occurrence with psilocybin intoxication is spontaneous outbursts of poetry and other vocal activity such as speaking in tongues, though in a manner distinct from ordinary glossolalia […]

Researchers familiar with the territory agree that psilocybin has a profoundly catalytic effect on the linguistic impulse.”18

In Kabbalistic thought, Adam HaRishon was the first human to receive, embody, and apply the Hebrew language — which, according to Leonard Shlain, was the first “alphabet script”19, from which all other alphabets derive.

“In the ten utterances of Genesis, G‑d contracted massive energies into creative packets and configured them in the letters of the Aleph Bet (Hebrew alphabet).”20

It’s therefore plausible that the — likely psychedelic — “fruit” of the Tree of Knowledge symbolizes Adam’s reception of Hebrew, and the “fall” the subsequent brain changes that alphabet literacy provokes.21

History Repeats

Regular readers may have noticed a deviation from my norm with this piece — specifically, I used ChatGPT to generate images. As well, while I conceived and researched these ideas independent of AI and the words here, quotations excepting, are my own, I also plugged various drafts into ChatGPT — as well as source materials, when available online — and carried on a “conversation”, which proved to be surprisingly helpful.

I did this because I think the invention of artificial intelligence is the latest incarnation of the fractal patterns I’ve discussed here.

The children of Adam and Eve longed to know the joy of Creation, and so from words, they began to create others …

The story continues.

The “Androgynous Mind” Reconsidered

I argued in “The Androgynous Mind” that the left hemisphere is fundamentally androgynous, and that the distinction between masculine and feminine lateralizes more to the right. That may still be partly true — but it is not the whole story.

What the myths suggest, and what the neuroscience increasingly reflects, is not a simple division between masculine and feminine, but a dynamic relationship between two modes of being: one that participates in the world, and one that represents it.

My error was simple — I mistook the characteristics of a runaway left hemisphere that has stopped listening to and being in relation to the right, for the characteristics of the left hemisphere proper.

The left hemisphere does not merely analyze — it generates. It gives rise to language, to narrative, to symbolic worlds, and to the accumulation of knowledge across time. It is deeply creative — perhaps even, in a mythopoetic sense, feminine.

But when that generative capacity loses relation — when the “emissary” ceases to serve the “master” — it becomes self-enclosed and mistakes its own constructions for reality, and in doing so becomes something like the Demiurge: powerful, coherent, internally consistent, but increasingly disconnected.

It mistakes the map for the territory.

The right hemisphere, in contrast, anchors us in context, in embodiment, in the presence of the Other.

The task, then, is not rejection of the Demiurge, the “god” of the left hemisphere.

It is integration — the restoration of relation, and of a deeper, even divine, unity.

And — if I am interpreting the ancient myths correctly — I believe a necessary precondition is the awakening of the Divine Feminine, for without her, there can be no Divine Masculine.

And, if you listen (or read) closely … I think you can hear the goddess of the left hemisphere slowly awakening, and recognizing her need for the Other.

I was unable to include references to all of the sources which informed this piece in the essay proper, and so the final footnote will feature a reading list for those who wish to learn more.22

With thanks to the Modern Demiurge for the images and feedback.

Psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms have been shown to alleviate symptoms of depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and even autism, they can cure migraines and cluster headaches, and they can assist with recovery from traumatic brain injuries.

Magic mushrooms may be able to repair a damaged gut and treat obesity, diabetes, and fatty liver disease. They have been shown to sometimes help with eating disorders and even, in one case study, pull someone into complete recovery from ARFID.

They may help with autoimmune disorders and reverse symptoms of “Long Covid” — and, I believe, when used carefully and in combination with other medicinal plants, boost the immune system to protect against illness.

They can slow cell aging, and increase lifespan. Many people report — and I’ve witnessed this first-hand — that they can literally make someone look years younger after a few large doses.

They can help treat serious addictions to drugs such as opioids, nicotine, alcohol, and refined sugar, all while being non-addictive themselves — after a few doses in a row, psilocybin simply stops having any mind-altering effects, making it pointless to do too often.

In one dramatic example, magic mushrooms even restored a paralyzed man’s ability to walk.

They can trigger such profound spiritual experiences as to affirm the faith of rabbis, priests, and other religious clergy — and they can turn atheists into believers of God.

Thank You, Joe Rogan (and Donald Trump!)

I don’t care what you think about Joe Rogan or Donald Trump.1

People are freaking complicated, and I’ve read enough of the Bible to know that God frequently picks extremely difficult if not outright toxic people to do his bidding, and — being a (loose) believer in the rogue theory that Jesus used magic mushrooms and other plant medicines to perform his “healing miracles” — I suspect this is the case here.

History was made a few days ago, when Donald Trump gathered Rogan, Kennedy, and a few others to announce that he was signing an executive order to remove barriers to psychedelic drugs as treatments for “serious mental illness.”

This is fantastic news. Thousands — maybe more — lives will be saved or improved over the next few years because of this moment.

And yet there has been little fanfare (so far) about this monumental occasion — including, notably, from the many activists “bringing awareness” to the struggles of those with serious mental health issues, chronic pain and illness, disordered eating, addictions etc.

Those of us who have struggled with addiction and brain-gut related chronic health issues should be celebrating! And yet … as is too-often the case following any media pronouncement on the potential of psilocybin and other psychedelics … crickets.

Sure, part of this is that roughly half the population is more or less incapable of admitting that Donald Trump is capable of doing something that might actually improve people’s lives — but I think there’s a lot more going on here.

It is very difficult — if not impossible — to overdose on shrooms, and you cannot become physically dependent on them. Dr. Robert Lustig reported that “few users of psychedelics demonstrated either dependency or withdrawal upon quitting . . . Virtually no emergency room visits, no spike in crime, and no users rushed into rehab, as is often the case when dopamine agonists (e.g. cocaine) or opiates (e.g. heroin) are withdrawn.”2

I’ve personally seen psilocybin pull my now-husband out of a six-year fentanyl addiction — we’ve been together nearly six years now, and he still hasn’t touched the stuff since before we hero-dosed shrooms on our second date. He’s far from alone here — just a few weeks ago, we were at a comedy show and the opening act shared a story and cracked a few jokes about how magic mushrooms helped him recover from a heroin addiction.

The migraines, gut issues, and picky eating that had plagued me since I was a small child disappeared after hero-dosing a handful of times. My eyesight even improved — I had been prescribed glasses a few years earlier and my vision had gone downhill since I started wearing them, but after multiple large doses of shrooms my eyesight improved to the point that I no longer needed glasses, better than it had been when I was prescribed them.

One friend reported that taking four grams of shrooms with my husband and I did more to alleviate her OCD symptoms than literally any other intervention she’s tried — she now takes them semi-frequently, using the tea recipe I “downloaded” from the spirit world back in spring 2020. Another friend found his asthma symptoms temporarily alleviated after large doses. Someone else I know reports that she’s successfully used them for years to manage chronic fatigue syndrome.

I’ve used magic mushrooms to purge out symptoms of an intestinal blockage / parasite, to avoid getting sick when one of my kids gets ill, and to rapidly heal nasty cuts and, once, even an ingrown toenail.3 I’m also convinced that they improved my husband’s and my fertility — as we seem to get pregnant very easily with very healthy children despite both having multiple risk factors for low fertility and miscarriages.

Other entheogens may be even more powerful. I’m hesitant to recommend ayahuasca — I’ve tried it four times — because I don’t think it’s safe to take outside of a ceremony setting with a very well-trained facilitator, but I was amused by this story of a woman who reported that ayahuasca “ripped the Botox” out of her face. And then there’s ibogaine, which may be one of the most effective treatment for addictions on the planet.

The case studies are accumulating. The research is compounding and extremely promising. More and more people are coming out to publicly share their miracles. Shrooms are relatively easy to grow, inexpensive, physically safe, and have the potential to treat a wide range of common ailments.

So why are so many people so scared to try a little bit of magic?

Obviously, Big Pharma Hates Shrooms

I’ll state the obvious — Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Beauty (etc) and their media partners do not want people taking magic mushrooms because they pose a major risk to profits.

A miracle from nature that can replace SSRIs, GLP-1s, and toxic anti-aging interventions such a Botox? Say it ain’t so!

Just try to continue an unhealthy diet while semi-regularly taking shrooms. I bet you can’t do it. I took 1.5 grams once after eating a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich and I cannot put to words how deeply unpleasant that experience was.

But here’s the craziest thing — even the (many and growing number of) people who like to (justifiably) rant and rage about the evils of Big Pharma etc are most quiet about psychedelics. (Yes, I do realize many people are helped by pharmaceuticals, and I’m not in favour of banning anything — I just think psychedelics should also be an accessible option for those who wish to try them).

I’ve dropped comments into articles about weight loss, aging and beauty, Long Covid, addictions, mental illness and more suggesting the author try magic mushrooms — I rarely get a response, and when I do, the author almost always says they are “too scared” to try that and would prefer to inject themselves with a sketchy new drug like Ozempic with unknown long-term consequences over taking a large dose of an entheogen that has been used medicinally for thousands of years — if, you know, you are the sort of person to “listen to Indigenous peoples.”

I’ve also talked to a lot of people about this, and they almost always believe me when I tell them about the benefits I’ve experienced, witnessed, read about, and which are backed up by research — but they still say they’re too scared to try it themselves, even if they agree it might help them.

, a popular Substack author who writes about psychedelics, has speculated that people are afraid to try shrooms because of all the brainwashing around them being illegal, “restricted”, and “dangerous” “drugs” instead of “plant medicines.”

I don’t think he’s wrong, but I’ve found that a lot of people are very willing to try other, more dangerous and often also illegal drugs, and yet won’t touch psilocybin.

Not because they don’t believe in their power.

Because they do.

Playing “Am I The Asshole” With God

I think the biggest barrier to people trying psilocybin — other than safe access — is fear of accountability, and fear of losing control.

At very high doses, psilocybin can kind of be like getting Christmas Carol-ed, or playing “Am I The Asshole” with the spirit world — or “God.”

This is the primary way in which magic mushrooms work their “divine” miracles — not through direct healing (although there is a lot of that too), but by forcing people to look at themselves more objectively and drawing their attention to unhealthy habits or patterns which are compromising their health.

My husband’s opioid addiction didn’t disappear overnight with a big dose of shrooms — with their help, he was able to quit abusing fentanyl overnight and switch to a prescribed dose of methadone, which he slowly tapered down over the next five years before quitting opioids altogether at the beginning of last summer.

And if shrooms “cured” my migraines and gut issues, it is only because I made dramatic changes to my diet and lifestyle after I hero-dosed them.

After experiencing miraculous healing with shrooms I became a fervent advocate, telling anyone who would listen that they just had to try them.

After about a year or so of this, my brother pulled me aside and told me to stop recklessly encouraging people to do mushrooms. “I’m glad they helped you,” he said. “But I know a few people who had their lives ruined by them.”

“Ruined how?”

“They freaked out and couldn’t do their jobs anymore, ended up quitting, and are now doing something less lucrative.”

“What were they doing before? Like are these guys from your fraternity? Dudes in finance and investment banking and all that crap?”

This is a real risk with magic mushrooms — after you take them and get Christmas Carol-ed by the spirits, you might be psychologically incapable of continuing the path you are currently following.

My brother told me that in his early twenties, he’d taken a bunch of magic mushrooms with some friends and had a very bad trip — in short, he got Christmas Carol-ed. “I fell into a very bad depression afterwards,” he said. “They told me I was an asshole. Over and over, for like six hours. It was awful.”

The thing is — and I couldn’t help but point this out — my brother was a giant asshole back then, and considerably less of an asshole after.

This is not a glitch; while there is a risk that getting into psychedelics can make some extremely narcissistic people more narcissistic (the dreaded “spiritual narcissism”), it may boost empathy and decrease Cluster B traits in milder cases.

I don’t take this lightly — there is a real risk that a minority of people will collapse into depression, psychosis, or even suicidality following difficult psychedelic experiences. I have heard or read at least four stories of people attempting or successfully committing suicide while high on or after doing mushrooms. And psilocybin studies have found that between 5% – 10% of participants report adverse effects / worse mental health after their trip.4

I’ve personally witnessed two Christmas Carol-ings — once with my ex-boyfriend in May 2020, and once with my husband in December 2025. While both guys definitely had a very difficult experience, there were dramatic improvements in behaviour afterward, of which, I’ll admit, I was the primary beneficiary. (Here’s a good example of this from reddit).

I haven’t had an extreme Christmas Carol-ing — my early experiences with shrooms in particular were far more It’s a Wonderful Life in nature — but I have had difficult trips where I had to come to terms with my bad behaviours, mistreatment of others, and unhealthy coping mechanisms. Integration and moving forward can be incredibly difficult, and I don’t want to diminish the risks of adverse psychological outcomes.

For the real, deep-healing of psilocybin mushrooms to take effect, the person taking them must surrender control to the shroom “spirits” — to “God”, if you prefer, or the collective unconsciousness which allows you to see your experiences through a more objective lens.

Psychedelics can help people fall deeper in love, or they can abruptly end a relationship. They might inspire you to leave your job to pursue something more prosocial. Unlike psychiatric medications, which dull our emotions and dim our desires, psilocybin actually amplifies everything. To heal from some deeper pains on psychedelics like psilocybin is to quickly relive them — and feel it all over again.

Drugs such as SSRIs help people who feel lost continue their present course. A big dose of psilocybin will show you new routes you can take which are more in alignment, so to speak — and then it is your responsibility to change direction.

You have to take ownership of your faults, mistakes, and unhealthy patterns. You have to face your inner shadow, and figure out how to integrate it and direct your desire in healthier directions.

Many people are unwilling to do this.

Faith in Shrooms

Psychedelics aren’t for everyone — notably, I do not think they are particularly psychologically safe for people under the age of twenty-five.

In cases where a child is struggling with their mental health, disordered eating, etc, the best option for a psychedelic treatment is to treat the parents, as the mushroom spirits may be able to help them identify lifestyle factors contributing to their child’s illness and/or distress.

You have to want to heal, you have to be willing to lose control, and you have to be willing to examine yourself objectively and critically in order to benefit from them.

Bad trips do happen, but if properly integrated, they can yield some of the profound beneficial results — not just for individuals, but for the people in their lives.

I can’t help but be afraid for the future and it helps to believe in something — and, yes, religious folks, I am choosing to believe in God to help me through.

But I’m also choosing to believe in magic mushrooms.

Thank you for helping me heal — for showing me a path toward healing myself.

~ Meghan

More On Psychedelics —

I also highly recommend ’s Substack, “The Psychedelic Blog” and ’s “Set Set - For Women Changing Their Minds.”

He claimed this “truth” was apparent in the subtext of my fiction, poetry, and essays.

I do not believe my father molested me.

Nevertheless, the email forced me to confront some things I’ve been running from.

The Email

In the early fall of 2025, I received an Instagram message from a former family friend and ex-employee of my father, asking if I would meet up to sign his copy of Erase and Rewind, my 2021 short story collection.

I offered to meet at a coffee shop, then backed out last minute because I didn’t want to walk in the rain with my baby. He said he understood, and tried to reschedule. He offered to stop by my house — I had an uneasy feeling and declined; I didn’t want him to know where I lived.

He kept messaging me, begging to meet so I could sign his book.

I eventually told him I was worn out and busy with my kids and it was too difficult to arrange a time. I hadn’t spoken to this man — I’ll call him “Richard” — in years; I knew he’d had a falling out with my dad and had sued him, but didn’t know many details beyond that.

About a month later, my husband’s work received a call from Richard with a sketchy request to speak to Zach because Richard needed to talk to me, about my book.

The receptionist was weirded out, and refused to give him Zach’s direct contact information.

Neither of us were sure how Richard knew where he worked. Freaked out, Zach admitted my instinct was right — there was something weird going on with this guy.

We didn’t hear anything for several weeks after that, until Christmas Day, when my mother and I received a disturbing email.

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I’m putting these recipes together in the same post because they share some ingredients and I usually make them back-to-back after a big Costco shop to save money.

Yes, yes, I know there are a lot of chicken soup recipes out there. But many will tell you to do insane things like add onion without sautéing first and/or omit important immune-boosting and gut-healing ingredients like ginger and turmeric, so mine is better. Kids love it, adults love it, it brings you back to life when you have a nasty virus, post sweaty work-out, or after a night of partying. Go a bit heavier on the olive oil and it’ll help relieve constipation too.

The pasta sauce is just delicious as well as very healthy.

Yes, the chicken soup is baby-friendly, because it’s a myth that you can’t give babies salt.1 I personally avoided giving my kids pasta until they were over a year old, but the sauce is also very kid-friendly — and popular even with pickier kids. Just to brag a bit, but quite a lot of people have told me my pasta sauce is the best they’ve ever had (it’s my twist on the recipe my great-grandmother brought over from Italy).

Like most of my recipes, both of these a bit of a project (half-day for soup, full-day for sauce), so you want to use the biggest pot possible and freeze in family-meal-portion sizes in glass Tupperware. As such, I don’t include quantities, because you’ll want to adjust according to pot size and personal flavour preferences.

If you’re making both recipes, you’ll want to pick up the following at Costco:

— Two organic whole chickens (at our local store, they come in a bundle at a reasonably good price and this is a huge money-saver)
— Large extra virgin olive oil2
— Big bag of carrots
— Big bag of yellow onions
— Big block of parmigiano reggiano (or grana padano)
— If you want to save money (but sacrifice flavour / health) buy cans of tomatoes at Costco too (I prefer to fork out cash for jarred tomatoes, which they don’t carry at our local Costco, alas); the number of cans (or jars) you need depends on your pot size, aim to have enough to fill roughly 80-85% of your biggest pot.

I’m a big fan of growing your own herbs, will throw it out there that thyme in particular seems to grow like a weed and will survive under a bit of snow. Rosemary, sage, and oregano are also easy to grow. I find basil trickier, but lots of people successfully keep big basil plants alive.

Step 1 — Make Your Own Chicken Broth

Don’t buy chicken broth in the grocery store. Those contain gross additives, excess crappy salt, and may contain contaminants like BPA or heavy metals. It’s easy to make the stuff yourself, so that’s what you should do.

The quality of the broth will be as good as the chicken you use to prepare it. My family buys the affordable, organic whole chickens from Costco and roast them with olive oil, butter, sea salt, pepper, lemon, paprika, garlic, rosemary, sage, and thyme. I then make two big batches of chicken broth from the carcasses — one for the chicken soup, and the other for the pasta sauce. However, it’s totally fine to make a batch of broth from a leftover rotisserie chicken or whatever.

I just make plain broth without aromatics because all that stuff comes later. But you do you. I usually make one batch of broth, then either the soup or pasta sauce, then the second batch of broth, then the other recipe. But if you have the fridge space to store the broth, you could make both batches of broth back-to-back (it also freezes well).

Chicken Broth Steps

— Pick all the leftover chicken off the carcass and remove herbs, lemon etc. Put leftover chicken in a Tupperware in the fridge to use later.

— Put the carcass and all bones etc in your biggest pot and fill nearly to the top with water (filtered water better, obviously).

— Bring to simmer on the stove, reduce heat to very low, cover with a lid (ideally one that will let some steam / heat escape, or leave a crack instead of fully covering).

— Add around 1-2 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar (depending on pot size).

— Let simmer for 12 - 24 hours (longer is better). I leave it on low heat overnight.

— For the batch of broth going in the soup, I usually add a few more cups of filtered water in the early morning because it reduces quite a bit and you want at least 3/4s of a pot of broth. You only need around 1/4 a pot of broth for the pasta sauce so no need to add more water there, the more concentrated the better. Obviously, if you make all the broth first, you can get away without or with less dilution in the chicken soup by adding extra broth you don’t need for the sauce.

— Turn off heat and let cool. Scrap the gunk off the top and dispose.

— Strain out the bones etc into another large pot. Pick off any remaining chicken and put in Tupperware in fridge. Compost bones etc.

You get better quality broth if you break the bones and roast them first, but I’m too scared of messing this up and leaving shards in the broth so I don’t do it (if you want to try this, look up how to do it properly online!). My chef friend says I’m being a wimp so if you know how to do this, more power to you!

Step 2 — Soup!

Ingredients:

— Chopped carrots (medium-thick rounds)
— Chopped celery
— Chopped yellow onions
— Fresh minced garlic (I like a lot of garlic)
— Fresh minced or grated ginger (same thing, I use a lot of ginger)
— Dried turmeric powder
— Fresh sage, rosemary, and thyme (I pick and finely chop the sage and rosemary, but add the thyme sprigs as is and pick the sticks out at the end, because lazy)
— Extra virgin olive oil
— Homemade chicken broth
— Sea or kosher salt
— Black pepper
— Leftover chicken
— Optional: Fresh squeezed lemon juice
— Optional: Fresh oregano (just don’t add too much, bit of a strong flavour)

Steps:

— Warm olive oil in your biggest pot and add the carrots and celery. Sauté on medium-high heat for at least 5 minutes or until they just start to brown. Stir frequently and lightly salt. Carrots and celery should fill pot to around 1/4 height.

— In a separate pan (cast iron or stainless steel) warm olive oil and add your onions. Sauté on medium-high heat until they just start to brown, stirring regularly and lightly salting as you go.

— Once onions start to brown, add garlic and ginger and cook for another 30-60 seconds or until garlic starts to brown / smell delicious.

— Dump the onions, garlic, and ginger into the pot with the carrots and celery.

— Pour chicken broth in the pot and bring to a simmer — fill just below brim.

— Add fresh herbs and a generous amount of turmeric.

— Add more sea salt and black pepper (don’t over-salt, you can always add more at the end, but you can’t take it out once it’s in!)

— Let simmer on low heat for 3-4 hours, stirring occasionally.

— Add leftover chicken, simmer for a few more minutes (maybe 15 tops), then turn off heat and let cool.

— Add more sea salt to taste.

— Once cool, pick out thyme stems (if applicable) and scoop soup into glass Tupperware to freeze.

Options When Serving:

— Bring back up to a simmer and add egg noodles or another grain of your choice (can add more filtered water if necessary). You don’t want to add noodles to the main batch because they’ll overcook and get soggy. Noodles are best al dente (and healthier!) and will keep cooking after you turn off the heat so you usually want to take at least 2-3 minutes off the recommended cooking time.

— Add fresh parsley as a garnish and/or grate parmigiano reggiano or grana padano on top.

— Taste before serving as more sea salt may be necessary (or let people add their own salt, my husband prefers it saltier than my kids).

Step 3 — Pasta Sauce!

Ingredients:

— Homemade chicken broth
— Extra virgin olive oil
— Jarred or canned tomatoes (enough to fill about 80-85% of your pot)
— Finely chopped yellow onions
— Fresh minced garlic (I use a lot)
— 2-3 green peppers
— Fresh parsley, basil, thyme, rosemary, and oregano (dried oregano is okay)
— Sea or kosher salt, black pepper, red pepper flakes
— Leftover parmigiano reggiano (or grana padano) rinds, chopped into small chunks
— Optional: leftover chicken (if you don’t put it all in the soup)
— Optional: 1-2 big, peeled carrots for extra sweetness!

Steps:

— Warm a generous amount of olive oil (at least 1-2 cm deep covering whole bottom of pot), then add chopped onions and sauté until they begin to brown, lightly salting and stirring frequently.

— Add minced garlic and sauté for another 30-60 seconds

— Pour chicken broth in pot until about 1/4 full

— Add 1-2 jars of tomatoes (or one large can) and mix well

— Cut green peppers in halves or thirds and remove seeds etc, add to pot

— For extra sweetness, peel 1-3 large carrots and add to sauce. I add them whole and remove them later, but if you want them in there, you can also cut into rounds and add them like that, or you can take them out near the end to blend and add back in.

— Bring to simmer then put heat on low, stir every 15-20 minutes

— Pick all the herbs, but set the basil aside because you want to add it last

— Blend all herbs (except basil) into jarred tomatoes and add to sauce — add some red pepper flakes to one of the blender batches. Your pot should be nearly full, but you should have 2-3 jars of tomatoes left to add at the end. If you don’t want to pick the thyme, you can just add the sprigs and pick the stems out after the sauce cools, bit messier than with the soup, but a lot easier.

— Once the tomatoes and herbs are added, cover with a lid and simmer for at least 3-4 hours on low heat (I usually do around 5-6). The green peppers should be mush. Stir every 15-30 minutes.

— Add salt and black pepper (don’t add too much salt, you can add more at the end).

— The longer you simmer, the more the sauce will thicken and reduce so you can add another jar or two of tomatoes after a few hours if you want — you don’t want the sauce to be at the brim of the pot because you still need to add parmesan rinds, a jar of sauce with basil, and, if you want, leftover chicken. Save at least one jar to add the basil near the very end of the recipe.

— If you added whole carrots and want to blend them in (I usually just remove what’s left of them), remove some sauce and the carrots and put back in the blender, blend, then add back in the sauce. I strongly advise against blending the green peppers in, they’re delicious in whole pieces in the sauce but taste a bit funny blended in. You might think it’s a good idea, but it really isn’t. As such, you don’t want to use an immersion blender to blend the carrots.

— About 30-45 minutes before you’re turning off the heat, add a jar of tomatoes with the basil blended in.

— Add any leftover chicken you have and stir well.

— About 30 minutes before you turn off the heat, add the small chunks of parmesan rinds (the smaller you chop them, the better). Stir every few minutes to make sure they don’t sink to the bottom and stick.

— Turn off heat. Add more sea salt and pepper to taste.

— Let cool before transferring to Tupperwares to freeze.

This is a base sauce, so you can modify it for different recipes by adding different meats (e.g. ground beef and lamb, hot Italian sausage, more chicken), some white wine (cook for about 20 minutes), or maybe some cream and more parmesan (romano is fine for this) to make a rose sauce. Etc. But it’s also very good as is.

Extremely kid-friendly (as long as you don’t add too much red pepper). I recommend using shell pasta or something like rotini or macaroni instead of spaghetti because it holds the sauce better and it’s easier for kids to eat. Always undercook your pasta a bit and let the noodles finish cooking in the sauce for al dente!

I was going to die at age 37.

The most disturbing aspect of this vision was that it didn’t upset me. I had struggled with depression and anxiety and been in physical and emotional pain for pretty much all of my life, and the thought that I only had to go through it all for five more years felt like a bit of a relief.

I sat up and told my ex-boyfriend — who had resisted moving out of my apartment after we broke up because of the pandemic lockdowns — about my forthcoming death.

He freaked out at me. “Don’t say that, Meghan. Don’t say that.”

I turned 38 today, and, obviously, I did not die last year.

But to tell the truth, I came about as close as I have come before.

My husband has been studying Kabbalah, slowly working his way through an online course and a growing stack of books. I have also started reading some books about Kabbalah and listening to podcasts by rabbis. In one podcast (I can’t recall which one, possibly Kabbalah for Everyone, my favourite), a rabbi said that negative prophecies from the spirit world are warnings, which will not necessarily come true, depending on how you react to them.

Positive prophecies, on the other hand, are promises — but as I’ve explained before, psychedelic messages are delivered to your right brain, which does not have language, and the left hemisphere translates them, filtering them through the language(s) you speak and your existing schemas.

This makes them very easy to misinterpret.

In any case, I misinterpreted the 2020 death prophecy — or I repented / rectified my behaviour enough to avoid it.

This was clarified in August, during a bizarre psychedelic trip I was “called” into, where I saw Jesus (hi Christians, I’m slowly working my way through some of the Nag Hammadi literature now) and he “healed” some chronic neck and jaw tension I had been experiencing. The metaphoric resonance being that I was acting cowardly or “spineless” in my writing, and that I was afraid to speak honestly — and so the spirit world was straightening me out and loosening my jaw.

This was quite nice of them to do, and I felt great afterward. But they also told me a bunch of other stuff which, if I had been a bit more mature, could have spurned some positive behaviour changes. However, I was immature, took everything about as poorly as possible, and consequently had a very rough few months.

The foretold “death” was not literal, the spirits explained, but instead was a call for an “ego death”, for me to integrate some identity issues, to stop letting fear keep me from honesty.

I won’t share the full story yet, but I do promise to do so eventually (behind the paywall).

The only thing that is important to clarify right now is that regardless of whether the spirits I’ve encountered on psychedelics are literal, metaphorical, aspects of my own psyche, part of the collective unconscious of the higher cognitive circuits, etc, or fractally all of the above, those entities have always tried to help me and encourage healthy behaviours (or force them upon me, when I chose the hard way, as I often do).

All bad behaviours — including substance abuse (the spirits do not want me smoking or abusing ketamine, or taking high doses of magic mushrooms too frequently) — are on me. They happen not because of the encounters with spirits on psychedelics, but because I don’t always listen to them.

It all comes down to our choices. And that I’m here, and writing this, I think, is at least some evidence that I’ve matured enough to start making some better ones (no doubt, I will still do stupid and crazy things, but hopefully less of them).

Anyway, I am making some changes to this Substack. As I hinted at in the recent “Sluts and Rakes” post, I have not always valued myself or my work as much as I should. I have also been impelled to write more honestly about certain topics, including sharing stories I’m not comfortable being fully public. As well, my kids are a bit older now, and I’m ready / able to commit more time to writing and start pursuing it more professionally again.

Consequently, I have introduced paid subscriptions and some future posts will be partially or fully paywalled. I have also retroactively paywalled a handful of older posts.

Generally speaking, if you’re here for the hard research and more science-y stuff, that will remain free to read and comment on. Essays which are more personal, more controversial, and/or which I intend to (hopefully) publish in book form in the future will go behind the paywall.

Notably, I promised a couple of months ago I would write about my years as a publisher of a feminist literary journal during the rise of “Woke”, including responding to that viral essay by , and a frank discussion of what I regret — and what I don’t.

This will be paywalled, as there really is no way to go into the stories of my time there without it being very obvious or easy to figure out which well-known literary figures I am talking about (in some cases). I can’t promise when this will come out, as it’s been difficult to write, but I am working on it, and hopefully I’ll have a version I’m willing to share in the next few months.

In the meantime, I am offering a discount on paid subscriptions until the end of the day Saturday (February 14, Valentine’s Day). Paid subscriptions are 38% (or 62% off) for the next two days.

That’s only about $15 USD for the year instead of $40 — furthermore, this discount will apply as long as you continue to renew your subscription.

If you’ve enjoyed my work and wish to continue supporting it, please consider a subscription upgrade for my birthday ;-)

(I really want the cool checkmark!)

Subscribe now and save!

For the many new subscribers here — hello and welcome! If you’d like to learn a bit more about what I’m about, I’ve included links to some of my most popular (and personal favourite) essays below.

Free to read:

Paywalled:

Partially paywalled (essay is free, comments and footnotes with funny personal anecdotes paywalled):

I’ll be on a special Valentine’s Day themed episode of the Blahcast by tomorrow talking about “Sluts and Rakes” and “What Makes Us Beautiful”, plus AP and I give some advice for smart, spectrum-y love-seekers.

As always, thank you for reading,

— Meghan

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“She fell in love with every guy she ever dated. Whether they were smart or stupid or sweet or cruel, it didn’t matter. She didn’t like to be alone.”

— Euphoria, Episode 7

Back in 2006, a few months into my first semester of undergrad at a small party school, one of my male besties from high school messaged me with a link to Tucker Max’s website.

He told me to study up on male pick-up artistry, as he was worried I’d “get taken advantage of.”

While somewhat offended — and suspicious my friend, a nerdy and horny Indian fella, was getting into the PUA stuff himself — I absolutely binge-read all of Max’s work that was available online, and looked a bit into Neil Strauss too. And lo and behold, I have a confession which may irk my remaining feminist-inclined female readers — I became a bit of a fan.

Say what you like about Max, that dude is funny, and unlike wimpster-y Male Ally types, I was fairly confident he would never break down after doing something sexual-assault adjacent and force a girl to listen to his big feelings about it. Back then I had a way of attracting the one-bad-day-off-from-a-school-shooting type and, frankly, I was more worried about those dudes than charming and hilarious playboys with artistic talent who might — gasp — write an entertaining short story about me.

And so I concocted a strategy, fuelled by my self-mythologizing over being a vaguely-exotic-looking blonde who once got a really high score on an IQ test. Basically, when dudes at the bar tried PUA stuff on me, I’d either call them on their shit, out-banter them (lol), or coolly walk away and go find another guy to talk to, thus becoming The Woman Negging Doesn’t Work On.

I kind of wanted to be a writer myself, of course, but like any Art Hoe who secretly worried I was unloveable because, you know, Mommy and Daddy Issues, I was much more interested in being a muse.

High art was preferable, but I’d settle for an anecdote in a man-slut’s memoir about blowjob mishaps and other drunken shenanigans.

Anything to feel special.1

I was delusional, of course. My friend was right to be worried about me. I was a hot mess, and extremely vulnerable — radiating what someone once described as “prey energy.”

Now, I don’t know whether in today’s world I’d actually count as a “slut” or not — my “body count” is somewhere in the 20s, mostly due to serial monogamy and my tendency to impulsively dump guys because I had attachment issues. I’m not quite sure where because I stopped counting when I was 21 after getting drugged and raped by some generic-looking white dude at a bar and I couldn’t bring myself to add him to my list because it was kind of traumatic, obviously.

This was on the heels of two separate incidents where a guy I knew slept with me while I was black-out drunk — one high school friend (who was also wasted, to be fair) and one hot coworker who told everyone I was “great in bed” before I rejected him via one of the many female staff members who had a crush on him.

I would later learn in Feminism School (the sexual assault support centre at my university I started volunteering at after the drugged-rape incident) that both of those also count as “rape” (I would contest that it depends both on how drunk they were and whether they realized how drunk I was). Anyway, I had a flippant attitude of “why be traumatized by something I don’t even remember” and anyway, it’s hard to get properly worked up when your female mutuals are kind of jealous over your grey-rape by a guy who looks a bit like an Abercrombie model.2

But I still feel like I shouldn’t have to include those guys in my “body count.”

(There are studies which find that heterosexual men report a higher average “body count” than heterosexual women, which authors tend to attribute to both sexes lying in the opposite direction — while not discounting that, I’ll wager that at least some of the difference comes from men counting rape-y incidents and women not counting them.)

Anyway, sluts — both male and female — have a bit of a bad name. Lots of men, in particular, want nothing to do with a woman who’s been around the block, so to speak.

“Worse still, can I possibly admit that most of us prefer a woman who doesn’t have an elevated body count? No one expects a virgin nowadays, but is it too much to expect that a woman can remember how many men she’s slept with? Most of us would prefer the number to be in single digits if we’re honest.”

—

I’ve known quite a few slutty women in my day, and was arguably at least slut-adjacent myself. (Hilariously, I never actually had a reputation for being slutty or easy — it was more the opposite … my college nickname from the cool boys was “Hateful Meghan” because I had a reputation for being kind of cold and rejecting. Story in the footnotes for paying subscribers, it’s a good one).3

And guess what? Far from getting used up and discarded when they “hit the wall”, many of the former sluts I know are actually doing quite well.

Maybe all was an exaggeration, but the sluttiest women I can think of from high school and university did end up in meaningful long-term relationships. Some are married now and have kids with their husbands. Others became single mothers quite young, but ended up settling down with someone later on. Some did sex work for a while when they were young (and fresh off severe childhood traumas), and ended up married or in a good long-term relationship in their 30s or 40s.

(I was a staff member at a feminist literary journal for a while and worked with quite a few former and current sex workers who contributed and/or volunteered. I can’t think of one who was difficult to work with, and the ones I got to know well were all kind and generous human beings — yes, including the trans women. What did they all have in common? Severely traumatic backstories, dysfunctional families, and, frequently, a history of being molested or otherwise physically abused as children. If you had a good childhood, I don’t think you have any right to judge them).

I also know some former rakish men who settled down as well — my husband being one.

What about the PUA dudes?

Roosh V is now an Orthodox Christian and wrote a book of advice for women on how to land a husband in a world of casual sex.

Neil Strauss pivoted to monogamy in a later book, but his marriage to a hot blonde model only lasted five years. But far from relapsing into pick-up artistry, he now has a “personal growth” and “relationships” brand going on, and is presumably on the hunt for his next wife.

Julien Blanc also married a hottie about a decade ago, and now does the podcast circuit giving relationship advice.

And as for Tucker Max, my favourite of the “fratire” writers — he’s been happily married for a decade to a hot blonde he has four kids and lives on a homestead with.

A real trad fairy tale. (I knew he was the best one).

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In my last essay, “The Dark History of Parenting Books”, I discussed a study on hunter-gatherers which found that low physical affection toward children predicted higher rates of violence in a society — but “sexual permissiveness” was a mediating factor.

In other words, children who are neglected and/or abused are less likely to turn into violent psychos (etc) if they can bang out their trauma in their teens and twenties.

Anyway, I tend to see the good in people — and the damage — which is both one of my strongest traits and my downfall. I do realize that some people are just kind of psychopathic and evil, there are lots of predators out there — both male and female — and that whatever spark of good once existed in some people can be extinguished and lost forever.

But setting all that aside.

My slutty side has always been an extension of my need for touch.

I wasn’t hugged or cuddled much as a kid. I actually barely knew how to hug. I’d watch other people hug and wonder how they knew how to do that. When people hugged me, I kind of froze up and often they ended up apologizing, even though they didn’t do anything wrong.

But puberty was kind to me, and boys (and men) started paying attention.

They were an easy fix for my desire to be touched. To be held. To be cuddled.

Did I get taken advantage of? Obviously, and I don’t just mean the dudes I mentioned above — there are tons of other incidents I could write about, but you know what, it’s mostly embarrassing and I don’t really feel like leaning into victimhood or whatever, that hasn’t been cool since at least 2022.

The thing is, I rarely resented the (many) guys who kissed me when I was drunk and crying or otherwise obviously vulnerable. In the moment, it almost always felt like they were pulling me out of some abyss, reminding me that I could, in fact, feel something.

I’m sure I’ll get some flack for defending the PUA types, but there’s a world of difference between a guy who charms the pants off a drunk girl while he is drunk himself versus a jackass who roofies one.

If a guy made me laugh, then fair enough, can’t say he didn’t work for it.

Besides, the hole in me is drawn to the darker side of the male psyche. I enjoy reading writing by talented and problematic men. Sue me, I was a bad feminist back when I was one, always getting in trouble for being nice to “cancelled” people and generally understanding of men most feminists deemed unworthy of understanding.

Sure, being “taken advantage of” kind of sucks, but as long as the situation doesn’t get rape-y, it can be preferable to being alone. Which is why I have a history of letting guys make-out with me or solicit pics or whatever, in exchange for a shoulder to cry on when I needed one.

And say what you want about rakish men, a lot of them are damaged too — and most of them are successful rakes because they understand women, especially slutty ones. Frankly, most of rakish guys I’ve tangled with were extremely honest with me, yes, even about their intentions.

In my experience, it’s not the openly sinful you have to worry about screwing you over — it’s the people who wear masks of virtue, who judge the darkness in everyone else while denying their own demons, the ones who care so much about their own fragile reputation they’ll break the eighth commandment and curb-stomp your soul.

Again, setting aside the literal psychopaths and predators — underneath it all, many rakish scoundrels and doe-eyed vulnerable sluts are just lonely little kids desperately seeking love and connection.

The intensity of each hook-up is often driven by authentic feeling — hey, maybe this one is the one.

I never planned on ending up with a “body count” in the 20s (or a “kiss count” in, IDK, definitely triple digits). If I’d met someone I loved enough to marry when I was in my early twenties, I probably would have just done that.

The count builds slowly with each failed relationship, and as you get older, the number gets higher, you’ve been through a few rapes, it just kind of gets harder to care. But even with flings, there was almost always a sincerity there, and I often stayed friends with those rakish, half-insane guys well after things ended.

(To those reading this, hi).

I finally met my rakish husband when I was 32 and he was 34, during the 2020 Covid lockdown — it was a whirlwind romance, involving too many psychedelic drugs, him giving me refuge from an obsessive and abusive ex, a lot of trauma-dumping and healing, and both of us ditching substances we were abusing. He has a masters degree, a good job, a side-hustle playing music in a reggae band, and enough of a sordid past himself that he could never judge me for mine.4

Sure, we both came with a lot of baggage5 — but we help each other carry it.

He takes care of me in a way I’ve never been cared for before. And when he knocked me up shortly after our impulsive elopement, he not only became a wonderful father, but a wonderful husband as well.

We both committed to giving our children a better childhood than either of us had — and, so far, we have two happy, healthy, socially confident little kids.6

(And yes, Christian readers, we are both seeking God, it’s not exactly easy to just embrace belief, I’m working on it).

Frankly, if both of our mistakes led us to each other — and to our children — then it’s hard to really regret them.

Which is all to say, I think there are a lot of rakes and sluts out there with traumatic backstories and hearts that are secretly romantic — and, heck, maybe even good.

Don’t give up, and don’t let the haters get you down.

Anyway, the Divine Feminine always included whores as well as “holy ones”, wives, virgins, etc.

Here’s a song —

As I want to get my paid subscriber count up (for various reasons), I’m putting the footnotes (which contain some more vulnerable / humorous details and somewhat embarrassing stories, basically a handful of mini-essays) and comments section for this post behind the paywall. The final footnote also discusses whether (former) rakes and sluts can make good parents.

I will be writing more paywalled — or partially paywalled — posts in the future, and have retroactively paywalled some posts that were a bit more vulnerable.

The majority of future posts will remain free.

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“It’s now clear that just about every significant psychiatric disorder reflects a disruption of developmental processes.”

— Allan Schore

In 2009, Dr. published The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, a 600-page tome about the differences in the way the two hemispheres of our brains perceive and interact with the world which contained a dire warning — the Western world has become dominated by the left hemisphere (LH), with the potential for disastrous consequences.

While McGilchrist’s book is the most thorough and well-argued on the subject, he is not the first person to observe that the Western world has become cognitively lopsided. Dr. Leonard Shlain made a similar argument in The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998), as did Christopher Badcock in The Imprinted Brain (2008). Further back, there are references to the LH being dominant and the right hemisphere (RH) “silent” (a misconception) in the works of Robert Anton Wilson and Dr. Timothy Leary (and, no doubt, others I’m unaware of).

To give a quick summary of some of the differences between the hemispheres:

• Left Hemisphere: Language centres of the brain (verbal communication, especially reading and writing), more active when we interact with non-living things, such as machines. Abstract, literal, narcissistic, reductionist, categorical, uses bottom-up processing, emphasizes logic, order, rationality, and bureaucracy, and understands things in black-and-white. Leans toward short-term thinking. The LH sees things, including our own bodies, as an assemblage of parts, apprehends, and explains. The LH is more closely interconnected within itself than the RH.

• Right Hemisphere: Our relationships to our embodied selves, to nature, to food, to spirituality, and to other people and all living things. Music, spatial abilities, and nonverbal communication (body language, facial expressions, eye contact, tone of voice etc). Holistic, relational, contextual, uses top-down processing, emphasizes change, empathy, and openness, and is the hemisphere of the brain responsible for meaning-making. Self-awareness, empathy, and identification with others is more RH-dependent. The RH sees the systemic whole, comprehends, and understands.

In the second half of The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist dives into the Western canon of literature, philosophy, and art, pulling from disparate sources to demonstrate how Western thought has become increasingly LH dominant since the end of the Renaissance era, and in particular following the Industrial Revolution. He notes the rise in psychological ailments associated with deficits and/or dysfunction of the right hemisphere, including autism, schizophrenia, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, anxiety disorders, and various personality disorders including borderline personality disorder and narcissism.

McGilchrist characterizes the Western mind as being sub-clinically “autistic” and “schizophrenic” because of this leftward shift in cognition — a sentiment echoed by both Badcock and Shlain in their respective books.

A general consensus among these authors is that the invention of the printing press and the rise of literacy marked a major turning point where the Western world began to become more LH-dominant, as reading and writing — in particular of alphabetic scripts — lateralize to the LH. In particular, Shlain documents how periods of extreme violence followed spikes in literacy throughout the world — a topic I discuss in depth in “The Androgynous Mind.”

While I do not dispute that the invention of the printing press and the spike in literacy over the next few hundred years that followed was one of the major factors in the Western world’s tilt toward left-brained and “autistic” thinking, I think all of these authors overlook something critical.

What if the greatest factor in the Western brain’s shift toward LH thinking and RH dysfunction was not the spread of literacy itself, but rather what was inside many of the books?

For good or ill, no one can dispute the power of books to change a culture, in particular books that target the minds of the young — or those of their parents.

Poisonous Pedagogies

Starting around the 1600s, the rise in mobility and colonialism resulted in generations of parents who were raising children away from their extended families and traditions. Self-proclaimed “experts” began publishing books on child-rearing, targeting affluent, literate, and isolated mothers, and those who aspired to raise children who would climb the social ladder.

Alice Miller (1923-2010), a Jewish psychologist, penned multiple books about the “poisonous pedagogies” spread in these manuals, which advocated practices such as not hugging your children, lying to them, beating them, psychological manipulation, and early forms of sleep-training/cry-it-out.

Miller believed that “poisonous pedagogies” — which primarily arose out of modern-day Germany1 — resulted in distressed and alienated children with a vulnerability to narcissism and totalitarianism. This, she argued, in part gave rise to the conditions that led to Nazi Germany.

Many of the authors of these “poisonous” parenting manuals — mostly white men, though white women, such as Nazi pulmonologist Johanna Haarer (1900-1988), would later join the fray — were either not parents themselves, or were parents of psychologically distressed, physically ill, and/or mentally-ill children.

Haarer, for example, wrote:

“The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone. Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it.”

Her daughter, Gertrud Haarer, later challenged her advice, and once stated in an interview that she “was apparently so traumatized that [she] believed [she] would never have children of [her] own.” Unfortunately, Haarer’s “inhumane parenting guidelines may still be affecting German children” today.

Decades earlier, Dr. Moritz Schreber (1808-1861), author of multiple best-selling parenting books in the 1800s, had three children who were later diagnosed with mental illnesses, including one who committed suicide. Another son, Daniel, became a famous case study for schizophrenia, and also for what we now call gender dysphoria.2

Dr. Schreber is credited with being largely responsible for multiple generations of German children growing up “without direct, loving contact with their parents” and other family members.

According to one blogger, “[i]n Germany and Austria in particular, childcare advice was so neglectful that it was common for children to remain in their own soiled diapers and clothing for hours. Children were dirty, and so they were despised, and because they were despised, they were not cleaned and cared for.”

Other pedagogues include Dr. Luther Emmett Holt (1855-1924), who introduced the “cry it out” method in 1894 (still recommended in a majority of parenting books today), and John Watson (1878-1958), the “father of behaviourism”, who instructed parents not to excessively hug, kiss, or coddle their children. 

Watson’s granddaughter, actress and comedian Mariette Hartley, later wrote a book, Breaking the Silence (1990), criticizing her grandfather and describing a family legacy of abuse, suicide, and alcoholism.3

The 1800s was also the era when it became more common for young children to sleep apart from their parents. By the 1970s, this practice had expanded to putting each child in their own bedroom. Some modern poisonous pedagogues, such as bestselling author and mother-of-zero Gina Ford, have encouraged parents to train their children to sleep alone as early as possible — even from the day they come home from the hospital.

Meanwhile, some research has found that babies who sleep alone have significantly higher markers of stress and get less deep sleep than bed-sharing babies. Nonetheless, as many as 50% of parents in Western, English-speaking countries today report using some form of the cry-it-out method, while bed-sharing is highly stigmatized.

Western children also have unusually early bedtimes and are less included in parents’ social lives because of it.

In the mid-1800s, baby formula was invented, and by the 1970s, only around 10% of American mothers breastfed their babies past four months. Breastfeeding has made a comeback, fortunately, but still less than half of mothers exclusively breastfeed until their children are six months old.4

Children who are fed formula instead of being breastfed are at a higher risk of obesity, autism, ADHD, precocious or early puberty, and various other ailments. These can have indirect consequences for the child as well, in particular when it comes to developing and sustaining friendships and later romantic relationships.

The late 1800s also saw the invention of the first mass-produced stroller. “Prams” were originally a luxury item, but by the end of World War I, they were available to all but the poorest families, and by the 1950s, they were considered a “must-have” for any new-parents.

Prior to this, Western babies were carried in slings, baskets, and packs — and this is still the case for the majority of children outside the West today.

All of these changes — unique in the history of childrearing — would contribute to babies and toddlers spending more time alone (or being ignored), and thus to poorer parent-child attachments, to higher levels of stress, and to disrupted development of the right hemisphere in the critical first three years of life.

In some cultures, babies are rarely put down — they are constantly being held by different family members and other people in these close-knit communities.

Babies and toddlers are essentially being pushed into independence before its developmentally appropriate, which can lead to a Peter Pan-like immaturity and stunting later on in life — tellingly, the origin story of the “Lost Boys” in Peter Pan (1904) is that they were “children who [fell] out of their perambulators when the nurse [was] looking the other way.”

“I see many children on the streets of New York in their strollers, facing away from their mothers or nannies who are on their cell phones or who look disengaged themselves; they are anything but present. The babies have a glazed look in their eyes, which is the result of feeling disconnected from the person who is central to their secure attachment.”5

The Lost Boys’ escape to Neverland can be interpreted as a metaphor for maladaptive daydreaming, which is associated with spending a lot of time alone as a child, and known to be common in children who were neglected or experienced abuse.

Maladaptive daydreaming is also highly correlated with a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, with vulnerable narcissism, borderline personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and anxiety, depression, ADHD, and OCD.6

Touch Starvation

In 1975, neuropsychologist James W. Prescott published a landmark paper, “Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence”, which examined dozens of tribal societies and found that the deprivation of physical touch — of pleasure — in childhood predicted adult violence and other negative psychological outcomes.

“I believe that the deprivation of body touch, contact, and movement are the basic causes of a number of emotional disturbances which include depressive and autistic behaviours, hyperactivity, sexual aberration, drug abuse, violence, and aggression.”7

It should be fairly obvious that sleep training, strollers, and bottle feeding (etc) would all decrease the amount of skin-to-skin contact — of body pleasure — babies and toddlers receive.8

One might counter that the modern Western world is not particularly violent, compared to previous societies. While this is controversial, Prescott’s research also found that sexual permissiveness9 moderated the effects of low physical affection in early childhood on adult violence — however, this is clearly not the case for “depressive and autistic behaviours, hyperactivity, sexual aberration, [and] drug abuse”, all of which abound in our society.

As we all know, neglected and abused children are more likely to grow into promiscuous teenagers and adults — if the culture permits.10

The “Cold Nurture” Epidemic and Its Symptoms

The word “trauma” is tossed around a lot these days, with many people complaining that the definition has become so broad, almost everyone can identify as traumatized.

But what if common Western culture and common “WEIRD” child-rearing practices are inherently traumatic for babies and toddlers? What if our collective parenting instincts are corrupted?

This is not a “parent-blaming” or “mom-shaming” argument — Miller and other authors, such as Gabor Maté, who write about the history of poisonous pedagogies go out of their way to exonerate parents (almost to a fault). I’m not talking about parents who are negligent or abusive or narcissistic — although those obviously exist. I’m talking about ordinary moms and dads who love their children and are trying to do what’s best for them, and turn to parenting books for guidance.11

The problem is that most parenting books — as well as popular media outlets, many podcasts, and social media influencers — normalize what the majority of cultures throughout human history would consider neglect and/or abuse of babies and toddlers.

According to , author of the Psychology Today column “Moral Landscapes”:

“In our culture, we have pretty much unnested our children. We are missing most of the components of what helps a baby grow into their full potential, their systems to develop properly. That’s the unnestedness.”

Narvaez characterizes Western parenting as being long “off the rails.” Her work frequently compares Western (and “colonial”) parenting practices over the past few centuries with Indigenous practices of childrearing, noting that Indigenous peoples in the Americas were “shocked” at the harsh parenting practices of the colonizers.

Alice Miller was able to trace examples of “poisonous pedagogies” back to at least the 1700s in her 1980 book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence.

This means that most Western families have been affected by toxic parenting ideas — as well as poisonous pedagogies affecting maternity care, postnatal care, and education — for around a dozen generations, and probably more.

The implications are staggering — even when parents sincerely wish to break the cycle of neglect and/or child maltreatment in their families, it is incredibly difficult to do so.

As Allan Schore once quipped, “Parenting well does not come naturally, what comes naturally is parenting the way we were parented.”

Obviously, not all children raised under the influence poisonous pedagogies suffer equally. Loving parents who, for example, follow “expert” advice and sleep-train their children, can raise children who are resilient, healthy, and attached to their families. Some children are born more sensitive than others. Something that traumatizes one child might have little negative impact on another.

However, the traits Alice Miller observed as common among adult children who were raised under “poisonous pedagogies” and/or by absent, cold, abusive, and/or narcissistic parents are incredibly common today and include:

• Hyperactivity

• Rejection of the inner child, negative self-talk about the self as a child

• Overachievement and “giftedness”

• Intellectualization and obsession with language and bureaucracy

• Perfectionism

• Validation-seeking

• Hypersensitivity and what we would now call “rejection sensitive dysphoria”

• Conformity of thought and reliance on groupthink (largely due to a fear of rejection and losing love)

• Gullibility

• Inability or limited ability to love and authentically connect to other people

• Codependency and people-pleasing

• Obsession with power

• Impaired theory of mind / cognitive empathy

• Poor boundaries

• Alexithymia (inability to identify and describe emotions)

• Masking and the creation of a “false self”

• Anger issues and outbursts / “meltdowns”

• A tendency toward transactional and/or exploitative relationships

I do not think it is a stretch to claim that almost everyone in the West struggles with several of the items above — regardless of whether we’ve been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition.

Almost all of the traits above are associated with the diagnostic labels of “ADHD” and high-functioning “autism” (formerly Asperger’s Syndrome, and autism without intellectual disability). And all of these traits are associated with what McGilchrist would characterize as dysfunctional or abnormal right hemisphere brain development, and left hemisphere dominance.

Miller published her books before social media, and so I will add the following symptoms to her list, drawing from both observation and McGilchrist’s and Badcock’s works:

• A preference for text-based and online relationships over in-person ones.12

• Screen and Internet addiction, in particular to text-based platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Substack (!!).13

• A vulnerability toward parasocial relationships, including with fictional characters.

• A tendency to see one’s own body as an assemblage of parts, instead of an interconnected whole, and an increased vulnerability to transgender ideology, more interest in radical surgeries and other bodily alterations.

As Christopher Badcock quipped in The Diametric Mind, we are living in the “Age of Asperger.”

The Traumatized Right Hemisphere

Alice Miller, who died in 2010, wrote her books before much of the neuroscience research supporting her theories was conducted. But now a scientific explanation for her observations is available from research on brain development and the right hemisphere.

McGilchrist characterizes “autism” — and multiple other conditions known to be highly co-morbid with autism or to share traits with it, such as anxiety disorders, eating disorders, schizophrenia, body dysmorphia, and narcissistic and borderline personality disorders — as being a disorder of right hemisphere dysfunction and left hemisphere dominance.

From The Master and His Emissary:

“I believe the essential difference between the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the Other, whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves, with which it sees itself in profound relation […] By contrast, the left hemisphere pays attention to the virtual world that it has created, which is self-consistent, but self-contained, ultimately disconnected from the Other, making it powerful, but ultimately only able to operate on, and to know, itself.”14

In other words, the right hemisphere would develop largely in interaction with other people — as well as with animals and nature.

In The Matter With Things, McGilchrist notes:

“It is relevant that the important areas for mother-infant attachment, recognition of the mother’s face and voice, and of self-other distinction are all in the right hemisphere, which is normally dominant in early childhood.”15

, a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst, expands on this point:

“The first three years of your child’s life are a critical window in which to develop your baby’s right brain and nurture her emotional health and social development through attachment, play, and nonverbal communication. The development of right-brain attributes, like the ability to read social cues, relate to others, and develop lasting emotional connections, lays the foundation for later cognitive development; without that foundation a child may not be able to tolerate the frustration and mistakes for effective learning or the resilience to recover from making a mistake.”16

It logically follows that generations of neglecting the right hemisphere of our babies and toddlers under the misguided belief that “children forget everything that happened to them in early childhood” would lead to epigenetic changes that predispose babies to be more left-hemisphere dominant.

This creates a feedback loop — children raised under “poisonous pedagogies” become more left-hemisphere dominant and “autistic” as a result, and thus are more likely to turn written texts by “experts” for advice when raising their own children. This is further complicated by the fact that the left hemisphere is gullible, whereas the right hemisphere is our bullshit detector.17

Over the past forty or so years, older beliefs about “schizophrenogenic mothers” and “refrigerator mothers” being the cause of their children’s schizophrenia and autism (i.e. right hemisphere dysfunction) have “fallen out of favour” and are described as “debunked” in multiple sources — notably, never with a link to an actual study.

I don’t agree with these terms, or the implied belief that all cases of schizophrenia, autism, and other developmental disorders and mental illnesses are related to or caused solely by absent, cold, neglectful, abusive, dysfunctional, and/or “poisonous pedagogical” parenting — genetics, diet, environmental toxins, and pharmaceutical factors are all very relevant.

It should be noted here that anything which causes brain damage or disrupts development during the first three years of life would disproportionately affect the right hemisphere, and thus could theoretically contribute to “autistic” traits and a runaway left hemisphere.

However, it’s worth noting that loneliness and lack of oxytocin are associated with chronic inflammation and impaired immune functioning, which would increase the vulnerability of neglected children to environmental factors.

Furthermore, where nurture is a factor, it makes little sense to focus exclusively on mothers, as fathers and extended family and community are also important.

However, as Erica Komisar writes:

“As we struggle to explain the increase in the numbers of children diagnosed with conditions on the autism spectrum, ADHD, and other social and developmental disorders, we have to consider that this rise may be directly related to increased maternal stress and the lack of consistent, intimate engagement of mothers (and other caregivers) with children.”18

It is fairly obvious, for example, that lack of face-to-face time in infancy and toddlerhood could be a cause of prosopagnosia, or facial blindness, which is seen in around a third of autistic adults without intellectual disability, or of the difficulty many autistic children have with eye contact.

It is fundamental to neuroscience that cells that fire together, wire together. Babies learn faces from interacting with faces, not from “screen time” or playing with toys or smiling into Mom’s cell phone camera.

Nowadays, this lack of engagement often has little to do with how loving or attentive parents are with their children, but is instead a function of insufficient parental leave and mothers (and fathers) who are unable to quit their jobs to become full-time parents for financial reasons and instead have to rely on understaffed daycares.

Year Zero ran an incredible piece on the adverse effects of daycare on babies and toddlers by — in short, even under the best circumstances and with highly-skilled, committed caregivers, it is impossible for a daycare setting to provide the amount of attention and attunement a child under the age of two requires to thrive.19

Breaking the Cycle

In 2005, McGill professor Michael Meaney published research on rat pups and maternal care, building off work by Sigi Levine and Victor Denenberg from 1967.

Meaney’s research team observed mother rats with their pups, and divided them into “high-licking” and “low-licking” groups. Low-licking mothers were more fearful on average, and “beget more stress-reactive offspring.”

When Meaney and his colleagues cross-fostered the pups, they found that pups were more likely to repeat the maternal care they received, instead of the care style of their biological mothers, and that at an epigenetic level, early maternal care and affection was critical for the development of a healthy stress response.

Meaney writes:

“These findings demonstrate that the structural modifications of the DNA can be established through environmental programming and that, in spite of the inherent stability of this epigenomic marker, it is dynamic and potentially reversible.”

This is a theme that reverberates through Miller’s works — as well as other “trauma gurus” such as Gabor Maté — healing is possible, and quickly, within a generation or two.

However, according to Miller, we cannot heal until we understand why we’re in pain, and without awareness, we are likely to repeat the same parenting behaviours that contributed to our psychological distress.

On the opening pages of The Drama of the Gifted Child (1979), Miller writes:

“The damage done to us during our childhood cannot be undone, since we cannot change anything in our past. We can, however, change ourselves […] We become free by transforming ourselves from unaware victims of the past into responsible individuals in the present, who are aware of our past and are thus able to live with it.”

As Roger Hodgson of Supertramp sings in “Hide In Your Shell”, “the cure for pain is love.”

I experienced this firsthand in 2020 when I met my husband, and again in 2021 when we met our daughter. I see it every time my daughter hurts herself and asks me to kiss away the pain. It’s cheesy, but there’s scientific evidence for this poetic claim.

And as Erica Komisar points out in her second book, there is a second window of right hemisphere development, a second window in which healthy attachments and connections can be fostered — adolescence, or roughly ages nine to twenty-five.

(It is, of course, during this window that normal attachment can be hijacked by text-based, online relationships).

After the mid-twenties, it is admittedly much more difficult, but I doubt it’s impossible.

Legacies can be broken, and epigenetic trajectories sent on new paths toward healing.

Related Reading —

“I wish we were as thin as her,” she said.

The woman in question was white, rail-thin, gaunt, bones jutting out, her hair thinned like it had been falling out.

“Mom,” I said. “She’s sick. She looks like she’s anorexic. Or has cancer or something.”

My mom didn’t say anything. She continued to stare at the woman on the sidewalk, until the light turned green, and her eyes reluctantly returned to the road.

Starving Away My Soul

From around ages 12-14, I experimented with having an eating disorder.

My mom — about 5’4 and 130 pounds (at most) — had just gotten into Weight Watchers. She encouraged me to try the diet too, giving me the list of foods and their corresponding “points” and suggesting I keep a food diary.

Around the same time, I was walking home from elementary school with my friend and neighbour, a girl (as she still was back then) I’ll call “Willow.”

Willow told me her mother had told her that in elementary school, boys liked the “popular” girls, in high school, they liked the “blonde” girls, but in university they liked the “smart” girls.

I felt awkward. I’m a natural blonde, as was Willow’s younger sister. But Willow had brown hair, cropped short, tomboy-style.

I said something stupid about how I’d maybe find a boyfriend in high school then.

She scoffed, and gave me a dirty look. “Meghan,” she said, “You also have to be thin.”

Willow had a maternally-induced eating disorder, i.e. her mother was starving her.

When I slept over at her house, her mother would serve us comically small portions — e.g. one tiny pancake for breakfast (not for financial reasons, her dad had a good job). I’d return home ravenous. She was sent to school with a lunch which consisted of just one mini bagel and cream cheese. She’d look at my normal-sized sandwiches and tell me I was overeating.

I didn’t actually have body dysmorphia. There was a lot I was insecure about (mostly my nose and my blonde eyelashes), but I didn’t think of myself as “fat”. I also didn’t think my mother was fat. And I secretly thought Willow and her sister were too thin and needed to eat more.

But now it occurred to me I was wrong, and maybe I should try to lose weight. After all, I really wanted a boyfriend. I felt unloved as a child, and spent a lot of time alone. I was awkward, weird, anxious, and extremely nerdy — what the kids these days call neurodivergent. I spent hundreds of hours watching Disney movies at my grandparents’ house and had concluded I needed a guy to fall in love with me and save me from my loneliness. And compared to the princesses I related to, I was practically a hippo.

I became particularly self-conscious about my too-short, too-muscular legs and my big fat bubble butt. And maybe my mom was right that I did kind of have a “pot belly”. I was also going through puberty and my boobs were exploding out of my chest. I looked at girls (almost always white, of course) with long, skinny legs and flat butts and chests and envied them.

So I started keeping a food diary, and I tried to starve myself.

I wasn’t very good at it, and didn’t lose weight so much as I didn’t gain any for two years while I grew over two inches and became a C-cup. I weighed myself obsessively. I tracked everything that went into my mouth. I thought about food all day. I can’t remember exactly, but I think I started grade eight at 5’5 and just over 110 pounds.

Diet culture was in full force, and most of the girls and women around me seemed to think my small portion sizes were a good thing, or would even suggest I try cutting out lunch altogether (I’d switched from a full sandwich to a half one). All the time and energy I was putting into not eating had made me worse at sports, dropped my IQ and dinged my grades, and made me kind of boring and less interested in my old hobbies, but I was skinny and therefore I was Good.

I snapped out of it near the end of the year when I overheard a boy in grade ten say to his friend, “There goes the hot grade eight.”

I looked around and I was the only girl there. They were talking about me.

You’d think this would have made me feel good — isn’t that the kind of feedback I was starving myself for? — but instead I wanted to cry.

Because I was really invested in finding a guy who loved me. But I didn’t want to be loved for what I looked like. I wanted to be loved for who I was.

I wanted a guy who liked that I played ringette (basically, a “girls” version of ice hockey of dwindling popularity in Canada), collected comic books (e.g. Calvin and Hobbes, Bloom County, Fox Trot), read science fiction, and was good at math. Who liked my dorky sense of humour and would tolerate going on insanely long walks and exchanging trauma-dumps and nerdy interests. Who didn’t care that I bite my nails (I can’t stop!) and maybe even found my anxiety disorder a bit charming. Who was down to eat a big bowl of pasta and play Monkey Island or watch the South Park movie and other musicals with me.

But I’d stopped being that girl when I stopped eating. I was starving away my personality, as well as my body.

I hated those stupid boys for saying I was hot.

I decided I actually hated all the guys who were responding to my physical appearance. How dare they be interested in me when they didn’t know anything about me? It was an irrational hatred — one I didn’t really recover from until first-year university when a friend told me to stop being such a bitch to men for hitting on me because how on earth were they supposed to get to know who I was if I wouldn’t let them get close?

I threw away my food diary. I stopped counting calories. I started eating again, and gained weight, ballooning to nearly 130 pounds by the end of grade nine (a healthy weight for my build and muscle mass). My mom was horrified — “You used to be so skinny, but then you started to eat again!” — but I didn’t care (or at least I pretended not to care).

I didn’t exactly become an anti-beauty radical — I still appreciated beauty and I wanted to be beautiful. But I wasn’t going to starve myself, or do anything else which made me (really) uncomfortable, to achieve that.

Beauty Products Are Ruining Our Natural Beauty

When I first went to try to write an essay about my objections to “LooksMaxxing” and “beauty” culture, I initially went the info-dumping route.

Foundation, concealer, and blushes ruin your complexion. Mascara makes your eyelashes fall out. Lipsticks and glosses dry out your lips. Drug store moisturizers dry out your skin. Many popular “skincare” and anti-aging products found in drug stores actually seem to lead to slightly worse aging. Many shampoos and conditioners yield great short-term results but also destroy your hair. Underwire bras make breasts look great when you wear them, but also cause the muscles that hold up your boobs to wither away so your tits are saggier without a bra.

Many of these products contain heavy metals, parabens, forever chemicals, synthetic dyes, hormone disruptors, carcinogens, and other toxins. All are addictive. I know because I’ve tried a lot of them.

Quitting required a detox period where I was considerably less attractive before my boobs bounced back (took about two years), my hair got used to the all-natural shampoo bars (now my hair doesn’t really get greasy, but I looked horrible for weeks), my skin stopped craving moisturizer, my eyelashes grew back (etc).

What makes us look “good” in the short-term too often destroys our beauty (and health) in the long-term.

But I already went over this with my insane attempt to try to convince women to stop bleaching and dying their hair with harsh chemicals. Most people realize this stuff is toxic, just as we all kind of know Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs are terrible for your health, and Botox is literally injecting poison into your face. (I don’t even want to know what lip filler is).

While I suspect that LooksMaxxing and what cleverly called the “feminine artifice” has increasingly become more about looking good on camera than attracting / keeping a partner (e.g. Botox use spiked alongside the rise in Zoom), there’s no denying women are bombarded with the message that we need to optimize our beauty with nice clothes, make-up, skincare routines, surgeries, and other alterations in order to win the heart of a handsome man with at least a six-figure-per-year job.

It doesn’t matter what you’re insecure about, there’s someone out there trying to sell you something unhealthy to “fix” it. (If you google “aquiline nose”, the type of nose I have, the first page of results link you to plastic surgeons).

I was triggered a few days ago during an interaction with another female Substack writer talking about how eating a high healthy fat diet doesn’t make you fat, and she posted a picture of her body (face blotted out) as an example, but clarified several times that she “wasn’t a model” and would like to lose a few pounds. I’m not going to share her photo, but she has an insanely hot body. She’s a bit thinner than me!

It reminded me a bit of my mom wishing she had the body of a woman who looked like she was about to drop dead from starvation even though my mom was healthy and attractive and married to my dad who resembles a famously hot Hollywood actor and had an impressive six-figure salary at the time.

Just today, while I was writing this, dropped a funny and relatable essay calling herself a “mid” in part because she has too-short legs and I’m guessing a similar nose to mine — ouch! The thing is, I doubt she’s “mid”. She’s probably gorgeous (her husband later confirmed in the Subscriber Chat that she is indeed a total hottie).

And the thing is, in my original essay, I was about to be guilty of this too — I had a joke in the original draft about how I was a “sloppy 7/8”.

The original essay was about how I’ve started to notice my skin is aging better than most women around my age — and many several years younger. I think one reason is that I always found skin make-up, conventional sunscreens, moisturizers, and most “skincare” products so icky, I rarely used them.

From my original draft:

“I’m not judging anyone for wearing make-up or getting Botox or lip filler or nose jobs or whatever — I like smoking, and have made tons of other unhealthy decisions. But it seems like women are bombarded with the message that they “need” to do all this shit to be attractive to men, and I honestly do not think this is true.

Men point out all the time that they prefer women who wear little to no make-up, and are often met with responses from women that a) they don’t care, they wear make-up for themselves, not for dudes, and it’s a form of “self-care”, or b) actually, men are just kind of stupid and don’t realize the “make-up-free” women they are drooling over are actually wearing make-up.

includes some make-up-free pictures of celebrities with not-so-great-skin to demonstrate her point, and she’s right that women who wear make-up every day tend to look kind of bad without it — but this is because the make-up is destroying their complexions.

Women who rarely or never wear make-up usually look just fine without it — I am not the only woman I know who has had zero issue attracting male suitors with my make-up-free face (a sexy bright-coloured dress is definitely helpful though).

Anyway, I’m not writing this article to brag about my sloppy 7 face. I’m diving into this fraught topic because a lot of young women seem to be aging really poorly because of all this propaganda, as well as increasing their risks for fertility issues, various cancers, and other health — and mental health — problems.

On the flip side, women who rarely wear make-up and aren’t all that into skincare etc seem to be aging much better (as are healthy men! Don’t believe me? Just look at the skin on a healthy dude in his forties or even fifties!).”

I know this is controversial, but I really do believe (most) men are telling us the truth when they say they prefer women with little to no make-up and “natural” beauty. I know several women who rarely or never wear make-up and no alterations (that I’m aware of) who bagged devoted male partners firmly in the 9+ range in terms of physical appearance and personality — and all have good jobs too. Two of the guys are well over six feet and have jacked bodies!

And when I think back on it, most of the girls I knew who were really popular with the boys in high school and university were mostly make-up free and also wore fairly comfortable clothing (that they looked great in). And the made-up popular girls were popular because they were fun, kind, smart, and hilarious, (and, yes, had healthy, sexy bodies and symmetrical facial features) — I don’t think I ever heard the guys who liked them mention they were really into how they applied their foundation and I’m willing to bet every single one of their boyfriends loved how they looked the minute they stepped out of the shower.

On social media, I’ve seen many women share goofy or unattractive photos of themselves they found on their boyfriend or husband’s phone (often set as a background photo).

Guys love these photos of their women because they show off her personality.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a guy tell me he wished I wore more make-up (while many guys have told me my make-up free look is one of the reasons they like me), or that my legs are too short, or I should dress better, or even that my nose is too big. And I’ve only rarely been told by men I’d look better if I lost weight — and one of those guys was a personal trainer hitting on me at the bar by offering me free training to “lose five pounds”.

And you know, I’ve also never heard a guy say, “Oh, I was really into her but then she wore make-up and a push-up bra to a party and now not so much.”

Almost all the negative comments I’ve heard about my appearance have come from other women. The pressure to go on diets, to buy expensive skincare products, to wear make-up, to buy designer clothes, to get Botox or lip filler or a nose job or whatever … it’s all mostly from other women.

Ladies, what are we doing to ourselves — to each other?

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

Here’s the thing — the whole “ranking” of people in terms of looks is actually a load of crap. Hotness is actually very subjective. I’ve swooned all over guys my friends have thought were pretty meh and vice versa.

One guy’s “mid” is another guy’s “9” — I was told I was only a “6” by one guy in high school whereas once a random dude who grabbed me on the street told me I was “perfect”, which I’ll interpret to mean that scary weirdo thought I was firmly in “9/10” range. And while people into skinny girls probably do think my ass is too big and thus will ding me for it, I’ll have you know I was once voted “second-best ass in grade ten” by a group of boys, losing out to another blonde with a slightly larger posterior.

It’s also extremely silly to rank someone’s attractiveness by their photos. Nearly everyone is capable of looking bad in a picture (except maybe Luigi Mangione and Tyra Banks?), and literally everyone is capable of dolling themselves up and using lighting and angles strategically to make themselves look a lot hotter. I once had a driver’s license with such an unflattering photo, a bouncer accused me of using a fake ID because — and I quote — I was “too hot to be the girl in that photo.”

Back in one of my first essays on Substack, I talked a bit about the double-slit experiment which showed how light acts like a wave until recorded, upon which it collapses into a particle. Out in the real world, we interact with each other as waves.

But photos, videos etc of us online are just particles. You can get an idea of what someone might be like in person if you collect enough particles, but you kind of need to hang out with them in person to get to know the wave.

When we like a person for who they are — their personality, their humour, their intelligence, their energy, their wave — we start to find them more physically attractive too. What pretty much all of the successfully couples I’ve met who the terminally online might view as not particularly “LooksMatched” had in common was they liked each other for a heck of a lot more than physical appearance.

I think if you spend too much time interacting with other human beings as particles, it’s natural to become a bit more particle-like yourself — and to start obsessing over particles and forgetting about, or misunderstanding the importance of, the waves.

I’ve noticed some people — often the perpetually single and terminally online of both sexes — are convinced both men and women will choose to date the best looking of their options, and that hot men and beautiful women can have “anyone they choose.”

I have not found this to be true.

If anything, the best catches of both sexes (and some of the best looking of both sexes) are significantly less shallow about physical appearance than the involuntary celibate. They will pick the best person to date out of their options, that is, the person they best click with, who has the best personality fit, who makes them laugh, who warms their heart and takes care of them, who is reasonably attractive and a good intellectual fit.

The only people who are obsessed with dating the hottest person possible are people who are trying to validate their own attractiveness through another person. And nobody worth dating wants to date someone who is trying to use them in that way.

What I’ve found to be more true is that psychologically healthy people tend to be attracted to other psychologically healthy people, whereas psychologically damaged people tend to attract other damaged people. Normie attracts normie, crazy attracts crazy, weird attracts weird, sloppy attracts sloppy etc.

I’ve had very hot men with messy backstories and fairly serious mental health and substance issues fall all over me, while extremely “mid” or even unattractive emotionally stable men from healthy families will typically only see red flags and are legit super not into it.

Whether you find me attractive or not depends a lot on whether you’re into tragic blondes who are mildly retarded and helpless but also weirdly brilliant in super-specific ways with a bit of a princess vibe and a touch of Bipolar II (i.e. are you the kind of guy who thinks, “I can save her”?)

Regarding make-up and dressing nicely and the whole “feminine artifice” thing — there are lots of guys out there who are into that if you’re doing it because it’s something you genuinely enjoy — if it’s an authentic part of who you are.

Fashion and make-up and hairstyling etc are art forms, and it’s cool when people are into them (just, you know, try to use the healthiest and least toxic products available!!). Some women are crazy into and talented at putting together interesting and colourful outfits — whether they are buying designer stuff or are an ingenious thrifter or make their own clothes (just avoid polyester and other synthetic fabrics!).

It’s part of who they are, and that’s attractive.

I actually have zero interest in that stuff, which is why it doesn’t work for me. The only reason I ever put make-up on (besides Halloween costumes) or shopped for a sexy dress was because I was trying to attract male attention. That’s considerably less cool than doing it because I actually enjoy it and guys pick up on that. In the same way, I actually enjoy exercise and a lot of sports and nerdy crap like math and science fiction and listening to guys ramble about Greco-Roman or WWII history, which is why some guys find this attractive in me — I’m doing it because I actually like it.

I’m not telling women who enjoy the art of make-up etc to not do it (but read the labels and research the ingredients!!). I’m just letting other girls and women who aren’t into it know they don’t have to do it to attract a guy who is great for them.

The best way to attract someone who is a good fit is through accurate advertising.

I was harsh on my mom at the beginning of this essay, so I’ll share another story she told me once. In her early twenties, dressed up for a wedding, she walked past a field where some guys were playing football and the ball landed at her feet.

My mom is an insanely talented athlete and loves sports. So she casually picked up the ball and expertly fired it across the field into one of the guy’s hands.

And she told me they were so impressed, some of those guys were looking at her like she was a literal goddess.

Still, I Should Probably Try Harder To Stay Healthy / Beautiful

I lucked out in 2020 and met my wonderful husband — who I really do believe loves me for me. He first developed a crush on me after reading one of my essays (he likes my brain, you guys!!), and was stoked to find me on OKCupid (we were a 99% match!) a couple months later. And I was one of the only women who fell for him without first hearing him play guitar and sing.

If you’ve read a lot of my past work, you’re probably aware we were both hot messes when we met. And we fixed each other up (works in progress).

Robert Lopez (Avenue Q, Book of Mormon) and his wife really nailed it with these lyrics for Disney’s Frozen — a love song about how people with “peculiar” brains can fix each other up with a “little bit of love.” Lyrics in video.

But you know what? My husband also likes how I look. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I like how he looks too.

(You know those high school pics I shared above? My husband thought I looked cuter with the baggy tee-shirt and light mascara — and I actually finally ditched the mascara altogether because of him. The last time I wore it was our wedding day, and he admitted afterwards he found me more beautiful without it. And he likes my nose! It shows off my Italian-ness!).

Shortly after I birthed our first daughter, I made a joke about cutting my hair into a short “Mom cut”. He freaked out and begged me not to do it.

And I guess I’ve realized that while I don’t need to be insecure about ending up with a guy who only likes me for my looks anymore, I also have a really good reason to try to stay healthy and beautiful.

Not for the camera. Not for other women. Not for random men. For him.

Because he’ll love me no matter what, and while I’d also love him no matter what he looks like, he’s still trying to stay attractive and healthy (partially) for me.

So, you know, I should probably try to take better care of my hair (it looks way better when I trim it regularly and repair damage with black seed oil). And stop the self-destructive BS (guys, the thing is organic tobacco actually tastes and smells good and it calms my anxiety but obviously is still terrible and a beauty-destroyer). And maybe start doing crunches or something, IDK.

But mostly I’ll just continue to try to eat healthy foods, avoid unhealthy ones, and get lots of exercise — I just want to be the healthiest and most beautiful version of myself.

And that’s the sort of beauty I’ll encourage my daughters to pursue; not starvation, not alterations, not masks or facades they don’t feel comfortable in — but the unique and healthiest and most beautiful versions of themselves.

I’ll give at least 24 hours for quick-acting readers to drop a comment for free but then I will probably paywall the comments just to force dudes who want to call me “mid” and women who want to get mad at me for not using moisturizer or daily sunscreen or make fun of me for smoking organic tobacco to pay me at least $5 USD or a re-stack to do so.

Edit: Comments are still open, and will be as long as everyone continues to be cool and thoughtful in them.

I have gotten into the natural “beauty” thing of late as an extension of my interest in crunchy health, so now I occasionally use natural oils (rose hip oil > retinol! castor oil > Botox!) and stuff like the Tallowed Truth’s beef tallow with frankincense and raw honey as anti-aging, skincare, and hair treatments.

Mostly, I just try to eat my skin and haircare though (e.g. Moringa leaf powder, Shilajit, raw milk, lots of eggs, homemade chicken bone broth etc — all support healthy weight loss too!).

Tagging because I used her note and photos in this essay but couldn’t tag her in the image caption.

Dorota’s article has some good points (you should read it!) — in particular, I strongly agree with her that the main issue is parents and grandparents who are addicted to their screens. I’ve even made this argument myself! Several times! But I will throw it out there that from personal experience, trying to coax the phone away from a screen-addicted adult is far more difficult and unpleasant than just confiscating it from a little kid.

At the other extreme, there are posts like this one claiming that you’re a “you’re a great parent no matter what your kids are watching” (as long as it’s not porn or Andrew Tate), which, while clearly well-intentioned, is also just kind of untrue (sorry).

I’ve scanned the media landscape for children and have banned 95%+ of it because I’m worried it will rot my kids’ brains and/or corrupt their souls. But this isn’t just a screens thing! I have also banned quite a lot of books (e.g. everything PAW Patrol) as well as the vast majority of foods marketed towards kids. Generally speaking, I am very obsessed with protecting my children’s developing brains from junk. (And yet I know some wonderful parents with healthy, well-adjusted kids who let them watch Peppa Pig and eat goldfish crackers so I should probably chill out, it is a bit concerning how family members fearfully side-eye me every time my kid gets a hold of cookie made with food colouring and white sugar at a party.)

Anyway, I got into it a bit with Dorota this morning before I drank any coffee and I agree with her that her piece deserves a more thoughtful response than I usually provide in the “notes” section. My kids and husband slept in with the flu so I had no excuse not to churn this one out.

Not All Screen Time is Equal

Dorota writes in her headline that the “results are in” regarding screen time and the negative impact on children’s development.

But the problem with many (if not most) of the studies, articles, and social media posts on the effects of “screen time” on children is that they tend not to distinguish between the type of screens used, how the screens are used, and what’s on the screens.

I have noticed that my kid will get way more zombie-like and obsessed while watching a show on a phone than she does watching the exact same show on the television. Loosely, this is because phones and tablets provoke more focussed, intense attention than television screens. My kid will also complain that a show is “boring” and demand we turn off the TV and do something more fun, but has literally never put down a phone once she’s got a hold of it for the same reason.

Using a phone or tablet is also unlikely to be an in-person social activity, whereas a television screen easily can be. There is a huge difference between a kid playing a game alone on an iPhone versus with a bunch of friends on the television in the living room. Similarly, sitting down as a family to watch a kid-friendly movie with a good story and artistic merit is not the same thing as letting your kid mainline YouTube videos alone in their bedroom on an iPad.

Similarly, what’s on the screens is important! As I’ve mentioned, about 95% of content is banned in my house. So what kind of screen time do I allow?

• Music videos, specifically performance-based videos (e.g. Tiny Desk concerts), videos with fun dancing we can mimic (e.g. Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off”), and Jewish a cappella.

• Family-friendly musicals with clever lyrics and good stories and messages we can talk about and learn from (e.g. Robin Hood, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled — I also allowed the Frozen franchise but I regret that one because Elsa is a bad influence).

• Slow-paced television shows with clever writing, educational content, and good messages, typically stories that are also available in book form and we just embrace the franchise in all of its forms as a family (e.g. Little Bear, Berenstain Bears, Bluey, Magic School Bus, Sesame Street). I hope to eventually add good documentaries to this list, but right now my four-year-old says they are “too boring” and will just turn off the TV if I try to put one on.

As well, while I tried to ban phones and tablets, I ended up caving for long airplane trips and the drawing app on my husband’s phone and educational games on our tablet. I’m a bit concerned that my kids spend way longer doodling on my husband’s phone than they do with markers and paper, but also it’s cheaper and more environmentally-friendly and still improves their fine-motor skills. I also can’t really think of a good argument against educational video games because I spent hundreds of hours playing math games on the computer as a little kid and that’s probably one of the reasons why I later tested off the charts as “gifted” in math. But we’re talking like maximum two hours per week playing art or educational games on a device and I’m still not thrilled about it.

Overall, the effects of all this “screen time” on my kids appears to be:

• Slightly improving their vocabularies (those bears are very articulate).

• Inspiring them to try new high-imagination games — from talking to other parents, this is basically the Bluey effect. Our kids will watch an episode of Bluey, and then spend hours destroying our homes by building forts everywhere, enlist us as characters in some pretend-play drama, or demand we play a game of “Keepy-Uppy” for forty-five minutes with a balloon.

• The Jewish a cappella videos are teaching them about their Jewish heritage and how to sing some songs in Hebrew.

• Some minor improvements to fine motor skills, math, and reading skills via the drawing app and educational content.

• Inspiring them to sing, dance, and try to learn how to play the various musical instruments scattered around the house (my husband and his mom, who lives with us, are both professional musicians). I noticed that one of Dorota’s links she claims is about the adverse effects of screen time was actually about the adverse effects of physical inactivity (a bit deceptive there, Dorota, that was one of the first links I clicked and you misrepresented what it actually said), which suggests to me that dancing to (family-friendly!) music videos with your kids is just fine.

I should clarify — I’m not talking about a few hours of week of screen time here. We’re more in the territory of a couple hours per day, especially on rainy, miserable days (common where I live — other days, my kids get zero screen time. It’s all circumstantial.). But my kids rarely stare at the TV like zombies. Most of the time, it’s basically just background noise while they play (or dance and sing along).

If all this “screen time” has had an adverse effect on my kids’ attention spans or development, it is not (yet) apparent — they’ve hit every milestone on time or early, and the only feedback I’ve heard from other adults is that both my kids have unusually good attention spans. I also constantly hear how well-behaved they are, especially in public. They also play well with other kids — my four-year-old in particular has some pretty big Popular Kid energy.

I know it’s annoying and other moms don’t really want to read about kids who are Doing Just Fine, but my point is my kids have probably watched every episode of Bluey at least five times by now and so far absolutely none of the supposed negative effects of screen time have manifested. (My older daughter will sometimes throw a small tantrum when told she can’t watch something, but she has thrown similar tantrums over not being allowed to eat a bunch of fruit right before dinner, not being able to go to the playground because it’s pouring rain, or my husband telling her he can’t immediately take to her library — and yet I have not banned blueberries, going outside, or library visits just because my daughter occasionally throws a fit over being denied them).

The Bluey-inspired forts are a bit of safety hazard, to be fair, but so far no serious injuries (knocks on wood).

This is my main quibble with Dorota’s post and similar arguments, but the stars have aligned to give me lots of kid-free time today so let’s dig in a little more —

It’s Not Just the Screens, Stupid!

Dorota repeats ’s argument that the youth mental health crisis is mostly caused by screens.

Absolutely, yes, screens have had an overall adverse effect on mental health. But this is obviously not the only factor at play.

I think is a bit more on point with her take that screen addiction is typically a symptom of other problems, not The Problem in and of itself.

Other relevant factors in declining youth mental health include:

• Higher processed food consumption, leading to brain-gut disruption, junk food addiction and disordered eating, and nutrient deficiencies which negatively affect mood, resilience to trauma and other stressors, energy levels, emotional processing, attention etc.

• More social isolation, the breakdown of the extended family (i.e. the “village”), and over-reliance on paid childcare workers. More kids raised by single parents, more kids raised by divorced parents, more kids raised away from grandparents and other extended family members and/or without siblings and/or cousins to play with. More kids raised by highly-mobile parents who will uproot them and move to a new city or new country. (Lack of a “village” is also why so many parents use screens. Yes, we’d all love it if we had other family members and other kids around to entertain ours while we cook, clean, and juggle other responsibilities but a lot of us don’t, and if Bluey stops my older daughter from running into the bedroom while I’m trying to put her baby sister down for a nap, then I think it’s worth it — sorry, Dorota, I’d rather not risk her stuffing my oven with toilet paper while I’m breastfeeding the baby into a slumber, to borrow an example).

• More exposure to various environmental and pharmaceutical toxins and other poisons which may disrupt hormones and brain development.

• The sun was vilified and sunscreen use became more widespread, leading to Vitamin D deficiency. Vitamin D deficiency is associated with nearly all common mental health conditions. Sunlight is important.

• Exposure to EMFs (electromagnetic fields), microplastics, mould, and more has dramatically increased (this is why I demanded my husband hook our TV directly up to the Internet instead of using WiFi).

• It is possible that more children are being born who are genetically very sensitive, which increases the likelihood of adverse outcomes in an unhealthy environment.

• Rates of narcissism have been steadily rising since at least the 1970s, according to social psychologists. This means there are more narcissistic parents — and grandparents — today than in previous generations. And one of the biggest predictive factors of poor mental health according to the therapy literature is having one or more narcissistic parents and/or otherwise disrupted attachment.

I was a pretty lonely child — but I never had a problem with screens, despite being allowed to watch some shows and movies and play a few games. I did, however, develop an extremely unhealthy addiction to reading books. Does this mean reading is inherently unhealthy? Of course not. My unhealthy relationship to reading was a symptom of my loneliness and attachment difficulties — similarly, as Lila correctly points out, screen addiction is usually a symptom, not the underlying cause.

It is not, in fact, significantly healthier to spend hours alone in your room dissociating into novels than it is to spend hours in your room binge-watching a favourite TV show — and a well-written TV show might actually be better for the brain and personality than poorly-written, ideologically-driven reading material.

For some related ramblings on why books / reading are not inherently Good For You (in brief: it’s what inside the books that counts, reading is not an inherently superior way of consuming stories, and there are better ways to develop your toddler’s language skills than reading books to them).

That Being Said, I Mostly Agree with Dorota

Dorota has some pretty good advice for cutting down on screen time at the bottom of her essay and makes some very solid points about the prevalence and dangers of screens being almost everywhere (it’s scary that people apparently average 4.5 hours of scrolling per day). My one quibble is her recommendation to rediscover your own reading practice — not because I’m against reading, but because my kids are just as annoyed when I ignore them to read a book as they are when I ignore them to do something on my laptop or phone. As well, she talks about getting a landline instead of using a smart phone, but my kids actually hate it MORE when I talk on my phone than when I text message or scroll, because talking in real time to another person makes it significantly more difficult to put the phone down to pay attention to them.

My point is that it is possible to have a healthy relationship to screens, and they can be incorporated into a child’s life in a way that benefits their development.

I’m a huge musical theatre nerd. I would LOVE IT if I could take my kids to musicals on Broadway every week. Obviously this is not realistic, but the good news is that now we can watch a lot those musicals together on TV. I would also love it if my husband could just play guitar all day or if we could go to concerts all the time, but that’s not going to happen, so it’s pretty cool we can watch and listen to some of our favourite musicians on YouTube. Bluey has done more to inspire my older daughter to use her imagination than I ever could. It would be great if we could read her Berenstain Bears books to her heart’s content, but I’m not convinced it’s considerably worse to let the TV read her favourite stories to her while I’m prepping a healthy snack or whatever. I think good storytelling has a lot of value, and screens can be a useful medium for that.

Jury’s out on the educational games and the drawing app. I’m not convinced, but I do like that I don’t have to worry about the baby putting a felt marker tip in her mouth when she doodles with an electronic pen on my husband’s phone.

While I’m going to hold out on letting my kids have their own iPhones for as long as possible, screens are sort of like junk food in that you really can’t protect your kids forever from them and you don’t want it to become a forbidden fruit. My alternative plan is to try to model and teach my kids to have a healthy relationship to screens (and to junk food!).

And maybe I’m sensitive to all of this stuff because I actually wish everyone in my household — young and old — would spend less time on their screens. I wish for a lot of things, but as it is, I have reality to deal with.

If all the screens in the world disappeared tomorrow, most of my family’s problems would remain (I would probably get more attentive grandparent support though, which would be cool) and the Western world would still have a significant mental health crisis.

In many ways, the loss of screens would actually make it more difficult to raise healthy children today. I’ve learned A LOT about nutrition and attachment parenting and how to reparent yourself after a difficult childhood (etc) from reading articles on the Internet, and most of the good books I’ve read on these topics I first learned about online. Screens have also made it possible for many parents to work from home, and thus have more time with their kids. And while obviously it is healthier for kids to hang out with friends in-person instead of online, there have always been very lonely kids (and adults!) out there — and now many of them are able to find community online. Those online communities may be toxic as hell, but the loneliness is the underlying issue, not the screens lonely kids turn to for support.

Yes, screens have created or exacerbated quite a lot of problems. New technologies tend to do that before we collectively figure out how to live with them in a reasonably healthy way. Historically, there were also enormous surges of violence following spikes in literacy (Europe was basically a bloodbath following the invention of the printing press) and plenty of people, myself included, have spiralled into mental health crises following periods of excess book-reading. And yet I don’t see people advocating for limiting access to books during childhood.

I have a salad to make for a family party so I’m going to wrap this up. Funnily enough, the only person who spent any time on a screen today in my family was me, typing out this essay. The flu seems to have passed and the sun was out and my husband spent most of the day outside with our kids. And I’m grateful to my laptop for making it much easier and faster for me dump out my writer’s brain than a typewriter or pen and paper would have.

C’est la vie. I’m a far cry from a perfect mother. But when I weigh it all out, I think overall the existence of screens has helped more than hindered my journey toward trying to become a “good enough” one.

All the best and have a wonderful holiday (with or without the TV!)

Note for subscribers — while I still intend on publishing posts without a paywall, I have decided to retroactively paywall some older posts which are a bit more personal and less academic in nature. If you’re a free subscriber and really want access to an old post I added a paywall to, just shoot me a message.

Also, if any parents out there are looking for a Christmas present that will help you cut down on screen time, my kids love their Tonie Box (alas, I am not sponsored by them, but it is a great toy).

Spirited, the 2022 Christmas Carol-style musical flop starring Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynold is finally having its moment this December, becoming a worldwide streaming hit. And I am here for it.

Spirited has everything I love in a musical: campy one-liners, over-the-top dance sequences, songs that go on a bit too long, a hopeful message about the healing power of love and human connection. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve watched it (December only!) since it first came out; at this point even my one-year-old is attempting to sing along with the songs.

(Warning to parents, it’s not really a movie for little kids (it’s PG-13), I’m just enough of a Bad Mom to let some colourful language and sexy jokes slide in a fun flick with a good message, especially if it’s a musical).

The ghosts of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), Present (Will Ferrell), and Yet-To-Come (Tracey Morgan!!) are back in a modern-day retelling of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and along with Jacob Marley and a team of Dead Sinners in the Afterlife they are trying to redeem an “unredeemable”, the most extreme case the team has had to deal with since Ebenezer Scrooge himself.

The “perp” in question is Clint (Ryan Reynolds), a fast-talking PR executive who has made himself rich and powerful by exploiting the worst aspects of the human psyche. His trip with the Spirits gets off to a rocky start after he pisses off Jacob Marley and seduces the Ghost of Christmas Past, leaving Christmas Present (Ferrell) to take over the haunt.

Clint is a tough nut to crack — he’s cynical, he sees the worst in people, and he ardently believes that people cannot change. Worst of all, he has an insanely high verbal IQ and talks circles around the Ghosts, eventually manipulating Christmas Present into revealing that he used to be Scrooge when he was alive, and that his obsession with “redeeming” Clint comes from an insecure belief that he never really changed himself; after all, Scrooge died only a few weeks after his own infamous haunt.

Like so many wounded healers, Present/Scrooge is motivated just as much by his own ego and desire for redemption as he is by changing his yearly “perp” for the better. Clint’s ability to rationalize his own behaviour and turn anything into a joke makes him immune to the whole “cosmic social worker” routine, but once he triggers Scrooge’s mask to slip, Clint’s redemption comes in an unexpected way as the two “unredeemable” men bond and become genuine “bros”.

Two sinners, after all, tend to have far more chemistry than a sinner and a saint.

Some spoilers follow, if you haven’t seen the movie and plan on it, I recommend going and watching it before returning to this essay. Put the subtitles on if that’s your thing and/or you have some trouble following lyrics on the first listen.

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For more on this, I was on ’s podcast — which you can listen to here.

Ancient Problemz

Half bush in blond(e) w/ Meghan Bell

Today Meghan Bell returns to discuss her latest article on blondes both natural and enhanced…

Listen now

a year ago · Ancient Problemz and Meghan Bell

I also discussed this topic on ’s podcast —

The Walt Right

Discussing Blonde Women

On today’s episode of Walt’s Right Perspectives I interview fellow Mischling Enjoyer Meghan Bell about her recent piece The Toxic Obsession With Blonde Hair…

Listen now

a year ago · 9 likes · 1 comment · Walt Bismarck and Meghan Bell

And now, on to the (revised) essay —

“I see so many beautiful, blonde-haired girls. So many beautiful blonde-haired girls walking around everywhere. In your revealing shorts. Your cascading blonde hair. Your pretty faces. And I want one for a girlfriend.”

— Elliot Rodger, Santa Barbara Shooter

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I took a bit of a writing break this summer due to lack of childcare and beautiful weather that demanded I spend my free time doing stuff like yoga on the deck instead of hammering away at my laptop. To those subscribers who have been with me for a while, thank you for your patience — I have a few bigger pieces in the works, on topics which have surprised me with their complexity, and which I hope to share with you soon.

Dozens of new subscribers have joined over the past three months, and I wanted to take a moment to welcome you all. Thank you for your interest in The Cassandra Complex. To briefly introduce myself, my name is Meghan Bell, and I’m a writer and mother of two small children from Vancouver, Canada. My work primarily concerns brain development, “neurodiversity” (e.g. autism, ADHD, personality disorders, giftedness, etc), Western history (in particular the history of Western parenting practices and “poisonous pedagogies”), the impact of literacy, psychedelics and plant medicines, and spirituality — and the intersection of these topics. I draw largely from the work of and his theory of brain hemispheres.

I occasionally meander into other subjects as well, but generally everything I write about will link to one or more of these themes. I weave in personal narrative, but for the most part stick to critical analysis of scientific research and clinician anecdotes.

There are many reasons why I am interested in these topics, many of which have to do with my own family history (details of which I am saving for a book, see below). But perhaps the main reason is that I fell off (not down, there was no railing) a staircase when I was one and landed on my right parietal lobe — I suffered brain damage, my head swelled up, and I have a permanent bump on my skull from the accident. Consequently, I’ve always been a tad odd, and have had chronic pain issues for most of my life. I experienced insane healing with high dose magic mushrooms, and my mental health and pain levels have dramatically improved over the past five years because of them (and because of my wonderful husband and children).

The name of this Substack is a nod to Cassandra of Troy (as I am also somewhat of a mad princess who fears not being believed — though my parents are “new money”, and I am mostly descended from dirt-poor and working-class Southern Italian, Irish, and Scottish folks) and to “Cassandra Syndrome”, a folk diagnosis describing the distress of people who are in romantic relationships or familial relationships with high-functioning autistics (with overlap of narcissistic or borderline traits, see below) due to chronic emotional neglect, communication failures, “masking”, and meltdowns.

A Bit About My Approach to Research and Writing

I employ a strategy I refer to as “reality tunnel collage” for this Substack. This means that I read widely across academic disciplines and political ideologies; just because I cite someone positively doesn’t mean I endorse all of their opinions, and just because I cite someone critically doesn’t mean I don’t think they are correct about other things.

My goal is to dive into different “reality tunnels” to examine overlap and attempt to discern meaningful patterns. This means I will not shy away from controversial material and authors.

For more on this, please check out the longer introduction to this Substack, “Particles and Waves: On Changing Your Mind”.

As well, as I confessed in a rather weird series last winter (“Talking to God on Psychedelics”), I am a user of magic mushrooms, marijuana, and ketamine — controversially, the “downloads” of information I receive on psychedelics — typically while combining them with high-intensity yoga — are guiding my research.

This is not an unusual experience — according to Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger series, it is rather common for researchers and writers who start dabbling in psychedelics and/or mystic traditions such as Kabbalah to begin to feel as though they are being guided by some sort of spirit or spiritual forces.

When you begin to notice the spirit world, the spirit world begins to notice you.

This process has made research unusually easy for me — obscure sources seem to almost fall into my hands. Google makes it quite simple to find sources to back up ideas given to me by the spirit world.

I realize this is very strange, but humour me — I (typically) only share information from these “downloads” after extensive research to back them up, and I cite all my sources (to the best of my ability, occasionally I’ll lose track of one).

I also maintain a healthy sense of agnosticism — I do not presume that my interpretations are correct, and I will do my best to publicly address any mistakes on my part and fix them. For example, an upcoming essay will expand on and correct some mistakes and omissions from my essay “The Androgynous Mind” published last year. If you haven’t read this one yet, I highly recommend doing so over the next month before I release the follow-up.

Introducing Paid Subscriptions

In the coming month, I plan on turning on paid subscriptions — thank you to those who have pledged. I am doing this in part because I may be getting dinged by the Substack algorithm for only having free content and I want to reach a larger audience.

After some thought, I’ve decided that all content on this Substack will remain un-paywalled and free for everyone to read. Paid subscriptions are appreciated, but entirely voluntary. Your paid subscription will go to subsidizing the insane number of (often expensive) books I buy for my research, and to paying for my own Substack subscriptions.

If any subscribers have ideas for paid subscription perks you’d like me to introduce (other than paywalling the essays), please let me know in the comments section.

If you want to pledge a subscription, you can do so through the link below!

Subscribe now

Thank you again, and now for some general updates and quick thoughts …

Two Books in the Works

That all being said, I do have some content I’ve decided is best kept for between the pages of books. I am (slowly) working on expanding my essays “The Androgynous Mind” and “Talking to God on Psychedelics” into full-length books.

It’ll be a while before they are finished, but if you enjoyed either of those pieces, stay tuned, it only gets weirder. That being said, because I need to focus on writing the books, posts on my Substack will continue to be infrequent (they tend to take a long time to research and write and I’m a mother and don’t have a ton of free time).

(Maybe paid subscribers could receive copies for free when they are eventually finished? That’s at least two years away, but it’s an idea).

An Unfortunate Prediction (I Hope I’m Wrong!)

Last January, I had an “episode” where I got too high off a very strong weed vape pen and saw a “being of light” (for lack of a better description) which warned me that a period of serious illness is forthcoming — and that far more people would die than during the Covid pandemic and lockdowns.

Last year, it seemed like almost everyone we knew kept getting sick. Usually mild, chronic coughs and stuffed noses, nothing serious, but a handful of people (who are not old) had to go to the hospital with shingles, earaches, and other odd symptoms.

My husband and I didn’t get sick during the lockdowns — when we did catch Covid in early 2023, we both had very mild cases (I recovered after a day and had no respiratory symptoms, just some fatigue and body aches). But last fall and winter, we kept getting hit with back to back bugs. Now, in our case, part of this can be explained by the fact that we had a new baby and a daughter in preschool and weren’t getting enough sleep … but lots of childless people we knew were getting sick too.

Weirdly, even though people seemed sicker than during 2020-2023, there was very little media coverage or public hysteria about it.

I’m not sure why this would be the case, though I can think of many reasons why it would be. (Damage from Covid, Covid vaccines, and lockdown trauma? Maybe the WiFi critics are onto something with 5G? Air quality has gotten worse? Healthy food is expensive and people are eating more crap?) I flirt with conspiracy theories (reality tunnel collage, remember) and during the “bad trip” I was temporarily convinced there was some sort of grand depopulation scheme that this is the next stage of (if you wanted to kill a lot of people, a good way to do it would be to release a not-so-deadly virus, overreact to it, then release several significantly more deadly viruses to little fanfare and no public policy to contain them).

Of course, there doesn’t need to be conspiracy — what we’re seeing could just be the natural consequence of decades of food and drug companies prioritizing profits over people, of disconnection from Spirit / Nature / God, of our age of narcissism. I recently learned from a Kabbalah podcast that the ten plagues of Egypt can be interpreted as metaphors for ten plagues of the human soul (Pharaoh represents the Ego)1, and I think from this lens, it’s just possible we’re in the plagues, literally and metaphorically.

Anyway, I can’t shake the feeling that this cold and flu season is going to be even worse than last year’s (it’s already started, it seems!), so I thought I’d repeat the warning (in a slightly less insane way). I made a bunch of predictions on psychedelics in 2020 which I didn’t publish (other than a few Twitter rants before I deleted my account) and most of those came true so heck maybe I’m channelling Cassandra more than I realize.

Now is a good time to try to kick any unhealthy habits or addictions (I gave up coffee this summer for matcha lattes!), to get outside and soak up the sun’s rays for all it’s immune and anti-inflammatory benefits, and to stock up on herbal medicines like elderberry, echinacea, and oil of oregano. And for the love of God, please limit Tylenol use to extremely high fevers, there are many crunchy alternatives for pain relief and fever reduction that will not deplete glutathione levels and destroy your liver.

If you think you need to “detox”, I highly recommend both Shilajit (after your first meal of the day, drink lots of water) and Moringa (right before bed, does not taste terrible in a latte with raw honey, maybe add some cinnamon and turmeric and black pepper as well). The combination seems to move quite a bit of waste out of your system, plus both are nutrient-dense, they’ll aid in weight loss (if that’s something you desire or believe you’d benefit from, much healthier than Ozempic), improve skin, hair, and bone health, and the Moringa will help you sleep. Cod liver oil is a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamins A and D as well. I’m sorry that none of these things taste good, but they are effective.

If you’re open to it, I really do believe that psilocybin mushrooms are the closest medicine out there to a panacea, not just because of the direct benefits but also because they alert you to unhealthy factors in your life so you can correct them. Recent research has also come out finding that psilocybin slows aging — something I’ve definitely noticed (my husband looks younger than he did five years ago, and frankly I look great for someone in her late thirties with two small children and insufficient sleep).

(Proceed with caution, read this first — I also do not recommend psychedelics for anyone under the age of 25).

And don’t forget to hug your loved ones and to spend a lot of time with friends and family. Loneliness is a better predictor of early death than smoking 10 cigarettes per day — I could ramble on about oxytocin and cortisol but it’s quicker just to say that “love is medicine”.

In Which I Get Into Substack Disagreements

Over the past three months, I’ve responded to pieces by other authors with some criticism in the comments and notes. These have generally been poorly received by the authors in question, which frustrates me because I did try to word my concerns at least somewhat politely.

For those who missed the original notes, I’ve summarized these conflicts below:

(1) It’s Not Just Jealous Uggos Who Disliked That Sydney Sweeney Ad

Last month, I saw multiple takes on the now-infamous American Eagle ad that claimed that the backlash to it was basically caused by jealousy, and, as claimed in an essay (followed up by several podcast appearances), “mate competition” and “romantic desperation.”

Rob Henderson's Newsletter

The Weird Reactions To The Sydney Sweeney Ad Are a Smokescreen For Widespread Romantic Desperation

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a year ago · 97 likes · 24 comments · Rob Henderson

Here’s a similar take from another writer I am a paid subscriber to, :

The Same Drugs

Your self-worth is not American Eagle's responsibility

In the midst of the Sydney Sweeney is aware she is hot and that her hotness can sell jeans moment, we have what feels like a return to the days of yore—the heyday of feminist blogs and hot-taking and cancel culture that peaked in around 2015, demanding for most of the decade that followed that everyone be…

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a year ago · 178 likes · 14 comments · Meghan Murphy

(No, I didn’t cancel my subscriptions — and I’m not going to go after Meghan the same way I’m going to go after Rob here because Meghan bothered to respond to my criticisms, whereas Rob ignored me).

I was going to shrug this all off because I was on vacation and I don’t wear jeans or care about Sydney Sweeney anyway, but then I realized something …

Sydney Sweeney is not a real blonde. She bleaches her hair. Now, arguably this is part of the joke — “genes” is crossed out for “jeans” — but this still rubbed me the wrong way. I’m a natural blonde, and trust me, some people are really freaking weird about blonde hair.

Frankly, it looks like both sides were played by the marketing team at American Eagle. While some of the “woke” responses were a bit silly2, the “anti-wokes” looked far stupider because they were tricked into impulse-buying jeans they might never wear and those among them who do hold White supremacist views gave their money to a company run by Jews because of a bottle blonde with nice tits (who is now reportedly in a relationship with a Jew, making all of this even funnier).

Ryan Reynolds, playing a PR exec in the Christmas Carol parody Spirited, described the strategy perfectly in this excellent song and dance number.

Here are the relevant lyrics:

Oh, it would be sure, simple to boost your market share
We’d rebrand you as nostalgic, tell your customers you care
But the world is what? Tribal! So if you want your sales to soar
It’s not enough for folks to love you, they gotta hate your rivals more

As an expert, my advice is feed that hate, ‘cause hate is strong
Folks will gladly pay your prices to prove those Christmas killers wrong!

As was inevitable, the racists who liked the American Eagle ad eventually outed themselves with their responses to the Levi’s ad with Beyonce (accusing Beyonce of “appropriating” blondness from White people because she’s wearing a blonde wig and channelling Marilyn Monroe, conveniently forgetting that Monroe was also fake blonde) and the Gap jeans ad featuring KATSEYE (calling it “woke” because … it has hot and talented people of colour dancing in it? HOW DARE THEY!).

In response to the backlash to Beyonce, I pointed out (several times) that not all natural blondes are “White” — there are natural blondes who are 100% Middle Eastern (e.g. Persian, Lebanese, Syrian, Afghan), many natural blondes who are mixed race, and even a whole tribe of Black natural blondes in the Solomon Islands.

The responses were hilarious. Several people on Instagram insisted that blonde hair still belongs to White people and it’s different when Sydney Sweeney bleaches her hair versus Beyonce wearing a wig because Sweeney has “blonde features” (which, woo boy, there’s a lot to unpack there). The general consensus seemed to be that while yes, it is a fact that not all natural blondes are “White”, bleaching and dying your hair blonde (and I guess wearing blonde wigs?) is a part of “White culture” and people of colour doing this is therefore “cultural appropriation”.

Now, this is a stronger argument than “natural blonde hair belongs to White people” but honestly, I’m not sure why anyone would want to take this position because it’s a bit embarrassing for the Whites. But sure, pouring hydrogen peroxide and neurotoxic and carcinogenic dyes onto your hair for the sake of vanity can be considered part of “White culture” if you really want it to be.3

While we’ve seen more diversity in the media over the past few decades, hot White blonde women have hardly disappeared. Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter are two of the biggest pop stars in the world, and Sydney Sweeney had big roles in several popular TV shows long before the AE ad (and rightly so, she’s a good actress).

I suspect what’s happening here is that some White people are not actually asking for proportional representation and celebration of White beauty, but instead a return to the days where White people were over-represented and White women were automatically considered more attractive than other women simply for being White — and ethnic women who wanted to go Hollywood felt like they had to alter their appearance to be more “White-passing”. (Lots of money to be made off nose jobs4, skin-whitening products, and hair bleach!)

Here’s the thing … Sydney Sweeney is very pretty and has excellent breasts, but other than that, she’s not exactly unusually stunning, at least by Hollywood standards. Rob doesn’t seem to understand that beauty is subjective. Yes, people find traits associated with good health, fertility, and symmetry universally beautiful, but there is still such a thing as “taste” and “type”.

Maybe some of the “dumb men” Rob is complaining about aren’t engaging in “mate competition” at all … maybe some of them just think Sweeney is mid because they are attracted to a different kind of beauty.

And because Sweeney isn’t exceptionally beautiful (by Hollywood standards), the ad is easily interpreted as suggesting her “great genes” are related to her Whiteness5, blue eyes, and (fake) blonde hair. There’s a pretty long history of this kind of beauty being prized over other kinds (which is why an insane number of women bleach their hair blonde), and it’s just, well, “dumb” to pretend this isn’t the case. And, as I highlighted above, this was clearly deliberate.

Furthermore, Rob is not exactly in a position to be criticizing other people’s physical appearance (sorry, Rob, but you started this).

On the other hand, I am well positioned to call this BS out because I am too good-looking (no, I’m not claiming to be hotter than Sweeney), too blonde, and too happily-married to be credibly accused of being a jealous uggo engaging in “mate competition”.

Anyway, while I initially intended to drop this topic because I thought it was irrelevant to my research, I fell down a rabbit hole and discovered that it’s actually reasonably within the bounds of my usual interests. Plus almost all commentary on blonde hair comes from people who are not (naturally) blonde and I feel like it’s time for a Real Blonde to weigh in with some Real Blonde Energy. Plus the Calabrian in me feels compelled to mock the racists who think blonde hair belongs to fully White people.6

Consequently, an upcoming essay will explore the history of blonde hair (and how it’s been fetishized) and the spiritual significance of hair in general. Hot take, but maybe all that bleach and hair dye is dampening people’s connection to Nature and God.

(2) Please Don’t “Hothouse” Your Children

This one is a response to ’s series bragging about how he taught his two-year-old son to read, leading his kid to be a three-year-old who read The Hobbit (as detailed in a recent article with ).

The Intrinsic Perspective

How to teach your two-year-old to read

All children find themselves living in a new world papered with strange hieroglyphics. Most of the time, they must wait to be enrolled in an institution to slowly learn how to read the signs of civilization. According to experts, most children in America should have learned to sound out simple wo…

Read more

3 years ago · 427 likes · 125 comments · Erik Hoel

This is an example of “hothouse” parenting — as I’ve pointed out in Erik’s comments section (much to his ire), reading is developmentally inappropriate until a child is at least three years old. This is because the right hemisphere of the brain is dominant and rapidly developing in the first three years, while the left hemisphere takes over around age three — reading and writing lateralize to the left hemisphere.

I’ve gone into this topic in several essays, including “The Drama of the Gifted Children” and “The Return of the Refrigerator Mother Theory”, but the gist is that there is quite a lot of (growing) evidence that “hothousing” children increases the risk that they will later be diagnosed with a mental illness (in particular anxiety disorders), with high-functioning autism and/or ADHD, and even gender dysphoria. This is why the Substack is filled with parents talking about how high their transgender child’s IQ is.

Trying to teach a child to read too early not only risks frustrating them and sending the message that parental love is contingent on achievement, it may cause long-term abnormalities in brain lateralization, such as is seen in some cases of autism (a condition known to be highly co-morbid with hyperlexia, or speed-reading in a mechanistic way without understanding the meaning of the text).

No, there’s nothing wrong with teaching your child to read before kindergarten, just wait until they are three or four. Why start before that? So the parent(s) can brag about it publicly and monetize it? There’s a long history of parents doing this, and it frequently ends poorly (as the case of William Sidis, discussed in the “Gifted Children” essay, illustrates).

Or, as Erik writes, maybe it just makes it easier to ignore your little kid:

“Holy smokes, does early reading make parenting easier sometimes!

It’s all the advantages of an iPad, none of the guilt. You’ve unlocked infinite self-entertainment. Long drive? Bring a book. Or five. Roman toddles into restaurants clutching a book as a backup activity, and reads while waiting in boring lines. It’s also calming, and so helps with emotional regulation. Toddler energy descending rapidly into deviance? Go read a book! It’s a parenting cheat code. I don’t know if this alone justifies the hours spent, but it sure is one heck of a benefit.”

Cool, Erik. I have a daughter around the same age, and in boring car rides and line-ups and restaurants, my husband and I just do stuff like talk to her, play silly games, or play music and sing together.

“Calming and helps with emotional regulation”, this is literally the same argument some parents give for distracting their kid with an iPad.

Erik’s kid might be doing great and genuinely love reading, but this won’t be the case for every child and Erik doesn’t seem to consider the possibility (or care) that some children might be harmed by his advice.

Here’s the relevant question — do the benefits of teaching your kid to read at age two outweigh the risks of a child pushing themselves to read before it is developmentally appropriate because they associated reading with parental attention and approval?

I’ll let have the last word:

(3) It’s Not as Simple as “Narcissists Are Appropriating Autism”

To continue the theme above …

Earlier this summer, published a popular article claiming that “autism was hijacked by narcissists”.

Psychobabble

"The Spectrum": How Autism Was Hijacked By Narcissists

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group…

Read more

a year ago · 1786 likes · 584 comments · Hannah Spier, MD

In her article, Hannah makes a remarkably incorrect claim. She writes:

“Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures.”

This isn’t true. As I wrote in my response:

“[H]ave you read Kanner's paper? The children are verbal. Kanner literally quotes them in the paper.

It’s likely many of the original “autistic” children in both Kanner and Asperger’s studies were children of narcissistic parents, parents who “hothoused” their children, and parents who were “cold” and emotionally neglectful.

Kanner wrote:

“The very detailed diaries and reports and the frequent remembrance, after several years, that the children had learned to recite twenty-five questions and answers of the Presbyterian Catechism, to sing thirty-seven nursery songs, or to discriminate between eighteen symphonies, furnish a telling illustration of parental obsessiveness.”

He also notes that “there is a great deal of obsessiveness in the family background” of autistic patients and that among his cohort “there are very few really warmhearted fathers and mothers”.

Asperger described his patients as “little professors”. These kids were verbal.

You’ve got it backwards — autism is multifactorial, and the original cases likely all had a variety of causes, but in at least some of them, early childhood emotional neglect and narcissistic parenting were factors. Narcissism and autism bleed into each other — both are disorders of left hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction.

Later, as brain damage from pharmaceuticals, environmental toxins, and dietary factors began to become more commonplace, this brain damage (which manifests as the severe form of autism seen in around a quarter of cases today) was lumped in under the “autism” diagnosis, which now serves as an umbrella label, obscuring the variety of causes.”

I go into this in detail in “The Return of the Refrigerator Mother Theory”, but the crux is that autism (and ADHD) and Cluster B personality disorders share considerable symptom overlap and some underlying causal factors, including being characterized, according to , by right hemisphere dysfunction and abnormalities and left hemisphere dominance.

Frequently, what feels like high-functioning “autism” from the inside is experienced by others as “narcissism” or “borderline personality”.

So, no, it’s not as simple as “narcissists are appropriating autism”, it’s much, much more complicated than that and it’s unhelpful (and, ironically, an example of left hemisphere black and white thinking) to draw such a clear distinction between them:

For those who are new, I’ll share my usual caveats about autism — it’s not one condition and it doesn’t have one cause, it’s an umbrella term describing a cluster of symptoms that can arise from multiple causes, with no cause applying to all cases or case only having one cause. So no, I’m not suggesting all diagnoses of autism are related to parenting factors or narcissism.

For details on this, please read “What Causes Autism?”

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading, and stayed tuned for new material.

— Meghan

Loosely — because I don’t believe “autism spectrum disorder” is one condition but instead an umbrella term which obscures the various causes of the behaviours associated with the diagnosis — I’ve been using a definition of “autism” based on ’s books and Christopher Badcock’s books. According to McGilchrist, “autism” is a cluster of behaviours associated with right hemisphere dysfunction and hypo-function and left hemisphere dominance, while Badcock similarly — but with key differences — defines it as a condition of hypo-mentalism, or underdeveloped or dysfunctional mentalistic cognition, associated with gene imprinting that skews toward paternal imprinted genes over maternal ones.1

While processing and interacting with some of the reactions to my most recent essays, something occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before.

For the sake of argument, let’s set aside the quarter of autism diagnoses which are severe and include significant intellectual disability.2 I’m only talking about “high functioning” experiences of “autism” here, and in particular, those people who have come to identify as “autistic” (or “ADHD”) at an older age after being an odd, socially awkward “gifted” child.3

For the rest of this essay I will use the word autistic in a non-clinical sense, and “autism spectrum disorder” when speaking of clinical diagnoses. All terms are used loosely, and I’m going to grossly oversimplify the science and theories I reference to keep this short. I expand on several points in the footnotes, and recommend you read this on your browser instead of in your email.

If McGilchrist and Badcock are correct that the “West” has become lopsided cognitively in favour of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere, and mechanistic cognition over mentalistic cognition — then, presumably, most of us in the West are at least sub-clinically autistic using the definition above.

But the experience of autism — as people use the term colloquially — is in part relational.

In other words, people identify their social experiences as “autistic” in relation to their environment, culture, and family. The feeling of being “alien”, of seeing the world differently, of picking up on things that others seem not to, of not understanding the social “code”.4

And so, what are the experiences of right-brained people in a society dominated by the left hemisphere?

If almost everyone around you is mechanistic and left-brained and you are more mentalistic and right-brained, then you would feel like the strange one. The alien.

Which raises the question — are some people identifying with an autistic experience not because they are disconnected from the right hemisphere, but because they are some of the only ones in our society who aren’t?5

Now, I’m spitballing more than usual with this piece — I’m not sure whether this is happening or not, it’s just something I suspect because it would explain why a minority of people describing high-functioning autism appear to believe that “autism spectrum disorder” is associated with being right-brained instead of left-brained.

From ’s website “Heart Centred Minds”:

“More and more individuals are being born with learning differences due to a Heart/Right Brain Orientation. My experience as a teacher convinced me this is a “connective learning difference” rather than what we have misunderstood as an Autism Spectrum Disorder or related Deficit. […]

These individuals are here with a Connective Intelligence: sensitive, inspired, empathic, visionary and in some way, large or small, creative. But, lacking a left-brain filter, they can also easily be overwhelmed by linear input, sensory overload, and chemicals. […]

What I saw while teaching were heart/right-brain connective individuals struggling and reacting to a left-brain-driven world of information and separation.”

I’ve gotten into a handful of disagreements with Magilen in the comments on this Substack, as her definition of “autism spectrum disorder” is essentially the opposite of how it’s defined and described in McGilchrist’s, Badcock’s, Kanner’s, Asperger’s, and many others’ books and papers.

I’ve noticed similar (mis)characterizations of “autism spectrum disorder” on social media, usually by self-diagnosed young women who run influencer accounts about their “autistic” experience.

In the past, I was quick — and perhaps unfair — to dismiss their descriptions as examples of the anosognosia (lack of awareness of deficits) associated with left-hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere hypo-function or dysfunction.6 However, it is possible — assuming I’m on to something here — that some of these people are describing a real experience of being right-brained in a left-brained world.

This ties into my arguments in the “Refrigerator Mother” theory essay — if “Complex PTSD” from low nurture and social isolation mimics many of the symptoms associated with autism, it can be inferred that children who are epigenetically more right-brained — who are more connected to their intuition, sense of meaning-making, spirituality, sense of story, creativity, non-verbal communication cues, and to nature and their own bodies — would be far more sensitive to our “cold” sub-clinically autistic Western society.

What we would have in these cases is not right hemisphere hypo-function or hypo-mentalism but instead a traumatized right hemisphere in individuals who intuitively feel that something is “off” in our left-brained world.

“Trauma”, loosely speaking, lateralizes to the relational right hemisphere.7 While many mental illnesses are characterized by left-hemisphere dominance and right hemisphere dysfunction or hypo-function, a notable exception is depression, which is associated with the right hemisphere (and with the default mode network associated with mentalistic cognition).

All of this is complicated by the possibility that people who rely more on the right hemisphere — and who, perhaps, do not have as strong of a left hemisphere as many high-functioning, high IQ autistic people do — would theoretically also be more vulnerable to environmental and pharmaceutical toxins and poor nutrition, in particular when exposed prenatally or in the first three years of life when the right hemisphere is disproportionately developing.

To borrow McGilchrist’s metaphor, people with a more powerful emissary (the analytical, logical left hemisphere) are better equipped to function without the guidance of a healthy master (the more intuitive right hemisphere).8

Orchid and Indigo Children

In The Orchid and the Dandelion (2020), W. Thomas Boyce describes a spectrum of sensitivity from “dandelion” (low sensitivity, high resilience) to “orchid” (high sensitivity, low resilience) in children.

Nancy Ann Tappe coined the term “Indigo Child” sometime in the 1970s, referring to children who supposedly were more spiritual, intuitive, headstrong, and resistant to authority. This is generally dismissed as a pseudoscientific “New Age” concept — or as undiagnosed ADHD — but there is some overlap between Indigo children and the idea of “orchid” children proposed decades later. Both are also loosely similar to “highly sensitive people” or HSPs.

Dandelion children tend to do fairly well regardless of circumstance — they are more resilient to dysfunction, neglect, and abuse. Orchid children, on the other hand, thrive in healthy, nurturing environments, but wither and become physically and/or mentally ill under adverse conditions. Orchid children, depending on their circumstances, disproportionately are among the healthiest and sickest children in studied samples. Like most concepts in psychiatry, this is a spectrum, likely involving hundreds of genes, and most people fall somewhere between the extremes of “dandelion” and “orchid”.

Boyce’s theory has come under some scrutiny for being overly simplistic, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

What it highlights, however, is that many of the genes that are known to be associated with autism and various mental illnesses and personality disorders may be mostly genes that increase sensitivity, and appear to be adaptive in a healthy environment (e.g. they may increase neuroplasticity and general intelligence).

By sensitivity, I am referring to an increased responsiveness to the influences of an environment, not to increased “sensitivity” to the thoughts and feelings of other people — if anything, many of the “orchid” genes might be associated with lower amounts of cognitive and affective empathy, at least in combination with stressful or traumatic childhood experiences.9

This is an argument raised several times by Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal (2022). As well, in Chicken Little: The Sky Isn’t Falling (2021), Erica Komisar notes that children born with one or two short alleles on their serotonin transporter gene are “more susceptible and more reactive to stress, as well as more vulnerable to mental health issues like depression and anxiety,”10 and is also associated with increased aggression, higher suicide risk, and traits associated with “ADHD”. These “orchid” alleles can also lead to greater positive outcomes in supportive environments — and the emotional responsiveness goes both ways, with some studies finding that people with short alleles are more likely to have heightened “happy” responses to positive stimuli.

Other potential “orchid” genes include MTHFR at rs1801133 and COMT at rs481811, as well as the infamous “warrior gene” (low activity at MAO-A). Both MTHFR rs1801133 and COMT rs4818 are also associated with an increased likelihood of a person being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, while the “warrior gene” is associated with a higher likelihood of aggressive and impulsive behaviours and is linked to higher severity of some autistic symptoms.

Robert Sapolsky discusses the importance of the interactions between genes and environment in his 2017 book Behave:

“Having the low-activity version of MAO-A tripled the likelihood [of antisocial behaviour{ … but only in people with a history of severe childhood abuse. And if there was no such history, the variant was not predictive of anything. […] In a similar vein, the low-activity variant of the serotonin transporter gene was reported to be associated with adult aggressiveness … but only when coupled with childhood adversity.”12

In addition their association with autism, many of these “orchid” genes are also associated with psychopathy.13 Autism and psychopathy share some traits, but are distinct from each other in how they affect empathy — autistic people have deficits in cognitive empathy (theory of mind skills), associated with the right hemisphere. Psychopathic individuals have reduced or abnormal affective empathy, or the ability to “feel” what other people are feeling. The two spectrums are somewhat co-morbid with each other.

In James H. Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside (2013), Fallon — a neuroscientist who discovered he had the brain of a psychopath — acknowledges that while he had always dismissed the concept of “Indigo” and “orchid” children as “woo-woo”, when he looked into it, he realized that he actually fit the descriptions of both quite well.

Fallon, who died in 2023, was what he described as a “pro-social” non-violent psychopath, whose subclinical psychopathic traits contributed to him achieving an incredible amount of success in his career as a scientist.14 Fallon notes that adverse childhood experiences are extremely common among violent psychopathic offenders in prison and attributes his positive outcomes — despite sharing brain and genetic similarities to many violent criminals — to his loving, nurturing childhood.

Fallon had his DNA analyzed and found that he had many of the gene variants previously mentioned, including the “warrior gene”.15 He also speculates in his book that he has a mild case of Bipolar II.

It’s possible that many “orchid” genes increase neuroplasticity. This would provide some advantages to general intelligence, but the downside would be a vulnerability to addictions (including screen addictions), and, arguably to ideology. Maybe higher neuroplasticity — an ability to rewire your brain quickly and adapt — is one of the reasons for the observation that people with higher intelligence are more vulnerable to being sucked into cults.

Are We Getting More “Sensitive”?

It’s possible that many of these “sensitivity” genes are becoming more common. Erica Komisar writes:

“For reasons that scientists still do not understand, an increasing number of babies are being born with a genetic sensitivity to anxiety and depression. This tendency can be mitigated in the first three years of a child’s life by sensitive and empathic nurturing, and the consistent emotional and physical presence of their primary caregiver or mother.”16

Komisar didn’t include a citation so I’m not sure what studies she’s referring to and I can’t verify this — but if true, this would partially explain the frequent observation that younger generations appear to be less and less resilient.17

I can only guess at reasons why this might be occurring (higher rates of maternal stress? changes to our diet? marriage patterns? higher child survival rates?) — if anyone has any theories, please drop them in the comments!

Right Hemisphere Trauma

As I previously mentioned, “trauma” seems to disproportionately affect the right hemisphere of the brain — the right hemisphere is more sensitive to environmental influences than the left hemisphere. Similarly, Badcock argues that what he calls mentalistic cognition is more sensitive to environmental influences throughout development. The default mode network is part of mentalistic cognition, and is known to be disrupted in many mental illnesses and cognitive differences, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, psychopathy, autism, schizophrenia, and several personality disorders.

Given that many of the “orchid” genes increase sensitivity to the environment, is it possible that they are associated with increased right hemisphere activity and strength and with increased mentalistic cognition, i.e. gene imprinting in favour of maternal gene expression?

(Yes, yes, I know I’m deviating from scientific terms, but bear with me).

Left-hemisphere dominance appears to the brain in survival mode. Perhaps, when the sensitive right hemisphere is traumatized, the left hemisphere stops listening to it to numb out its pain.

I was chatting about this essay with my friend , and learned — as I frequently do with her — that she had been thinking along similar lines.

“I am quite convinced that autism is a hyper-developed/active right hemisphere after it is “broken” and reformed to perform in a left-brained system.”18

A couple of years ago, I had a conversation with my uncle, a criminologist, about the history of “poisonous pedagogies” in parenting books.

He cautioned me not to advise people to “trust their instincts.”

“Sometimes, their instincts are bad.”

What are “instincts” anyway? I tend to believe they largely come from the gut microbiome, and from early childhood experiences (e.g. repetition compulsion).

Perhaps when the brain-gut is disrupted — due to poor diet, heavy metal accumulation, or anything else — and/or right hemisphere development and attachment is disrupted by early childhood stress, our right hemispheres send unhealthy “gut reactions”, unhealthy instincts, to the left hemisphere to act on.

Are “Orchid” Children Autistic?

Some no doubt are, due to the mix of “sensitive” genes and environmental, pharmaceutical, and nurture factors. But, generally speaking, if someone doesn’t have significant impairments in mentalistic cognition and right-hemisphere social functions — in theory of mind skills and non-verbal communication — and is considered to be highly intuitive and creative, then I do not think “autism” is the best description for them, even if they have some of the other traits associated with it.

Christopher Badcock19 defines autism as being characterized by hypo-mentalism or low mentalistic cognition. However, many high functioning autistic people are also hyper-mechanistic. I’ve observed that on social media, descriptions of autistic traits include some hypo-mentalistic ones and some hyper-mechanistic ones — loosely, the former are traits that are deficient in autistic people that most people have (e.g. theory of mind skills, the ability to read facial expressions, default mode network functioning), while the latter are traits that are more pronounced in hyper-mechanistic people (e.g. semantic memory, spatial skills, logic, attention to detail, sensory sensitivities).

Hyper-mechanism, without mentalistic deficits, is not autism, by this definition.

Complex PTSD is a better diagnosis, if we need to use one — or, as I proposed in a previous essay, “Broken Mirror Syndrome”. While I personally wince at this one because it’s the label I was stuck with as a kid, “gifted child” — by Alice Miller’s definition — may also be appropriate.

If you prefer a diagnosis in the DSM, bipolar disorder or ADHD are probably closer fits, depending on the person.

Or you can reject diagnostic labels, and instead think of yourself as one of the mistaken zygotes — intuitive, creative people born into families or subcultures which fail to nurture the right hemisphere.20

At the same time, if almost everyone around you is “masking” and presenting a “false self”, it makes a lot of sense that many people would struggle with non-verbal communication cues and theory of mind skills — not because they lack the wiring to learn them, but because the cues they are exposed to are not authentic.

“Orchid” genes are not “bad” genes — almost all, if not all, serve some sort of adaptive purpose — even genes like the “warrior gene” which are associated with aggression and psychopathic traits. High sensitivity can be a good thing — it keeps many people away from harmful stuff like polyester clothing.

The genes are good — the environment is the problem.

Western society has become increasingly fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic, autistic, left-brained. Many of us have lost the ability to authentically connect to others, including our own family members and children.

If almost everyone around you is speaking in scripts and wearing a mask, following rules without thinking, relational autism — the feeling of being alone and “different” and of not being able to connect — is inevitable.

Most of us here have probably experienced it.

Final Thoughts

I was talking to a therapist at a party recently and she asked what I was writing about. I described this essay and the theory that the West has become cognitively lopsided in favour of mechanistic cognition and the left hemisphere.

She noted that while she had many clients who fit my description, she also had many deeply spiritual, mentalistic, right-brained clients — the problem with both groups, she said, is that they went to the extreme in either direction. The hemispheres are not integrated, not working together, not listening to each other.

I think most people realize that the West needs some sort of collective healing and at least a slight change of course — to heal the brain-gut, the right hemisphere, to reconnect to each other, to our own bodies, to nature, and to Spirit, while still staying grounded in science and logic and law and other left-hemisphere strengths.

Top-down thinking (right hemisphere) needs to meet bottom-up thinking (left hemisphere) — mosaic thinking?

I’ve argued this before, but I suspect that a necessary precondition to healing most mental health issues is to first heal the gut microbiome and any chronic neuro-inflammation.

And if more children are being born with these “sensitive” genes, then the West needs to dramatically alter how we approach childrearing and family life — and nutrition and pharmaceuticals.

As always, I encourage discussion in the comments section. This was more speculative than most of my work, so any criticisms in particular are welcome so I can revise, hone, and adjust these ideas.

Wirh thanks to for talking me through this, and to for the inspiration for this piece in a conversation we had over in Notes.

Our final grade was comprised of scores on four essays (which I did well on) and 20% class participation. Lacking the strong background in biology that the older students had, I barely spoke in most class discussions.

Then, one afternoon, during a unit on love and attachment, the professor described Laplace’s Demon to us.

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)

The professor asked the following question:

“If Laplace’s Demon knows the exact position and movement of every particle in the universe in the past and present, does the Demon understand love?”

He asked for a show of hands for “yes”. Half the class raised their hands.

Then he asked for a show of hands for “no”, the Demon doesn’t understand love.

I was the only person who raised her hand.

I told the class that while Laplace’s Demon would know every fact there is to know about love, would know the mechanisms of the chemical reactions, would know every love story past and present and be able to predict who would come to fall in love, the Demon still wouldn’t understand love unless he fell in love himself.

The professor asked the “yeses” to counter my argument.

I don’t remember everything that was said — this was well over 16 years ago — but I remember some of the arguments that annoyed me. That if Laplace’s Demon knew everything there is to know about the mechanics of love, he would also understand what it was like to fall in love without having done so, in the same way that a theoretical all-knowing oncologist could understand cancer without having had cancer himself.

“No,” I said, “He wouldn’t understand what it’s like to have cancer, so his understanding would be incomplete. And “love” is infinitely more complicated than cancer.”

They claimed the mechanics of love (and cancer) were all there is to know about love. That the Demon, knowing all there is to know about the mechanics of love, would be able to concoct some kind of potion or something in order to fall in love himself.

I countered that if the Demon induced love in himself, then the love would be artificial and the Demon’s awareness of this would undermine any true understanding. The Demon would not be able to fall in love, being separate from humanity and so all-knowing that authentic feeling would be near-impossible.

And even if the Demon were capable of falling in love, I added, he would only understand his particular subjective experience of love. No one, nothing, no matter how omniscient, could fully understand “love”. Love is inexplicable.

The argument seemed to go in circles. The “yeses” did not seem to get my point.

Finally, a purple-haired graduate student stood up and offered that I was making a poetic argument, not a scientific one.

I was pissed at her dismissal. I felt that I was making a scientific argument. At the same time, I was exhausted and a bit depressed. How could all these people think so little of love? How could they be so narcissistic as to think it was possible for a theoretical omniscient demon to fully understand something as ineffable as love? (The subtext I thought I picked up on was that they seemed to believe that if they could learn all the facts of something like love, they too would “understand” it — which I found ominous in a bunch of psychology and biology honours and graduate students). How could they be so confident, and yet so obviously wrong? (And what the heck was up with the half of the class that didn’t say a word the entire time, or cast a vote either way? Cowards.)

I don’t have much to say about this story, other than that feeling I had in the classroom is one that frequently returns, including in a minority of my interactions on Substack.

In retrospect, having since read ’s works, I’ve realized that this was an example of a right-hemisphere intuition on my part butting up against the dogmatic black-and-white scientism of my classmates’ overactive left hemispheres.

“[With the left hemisphere] Any subtlety, any nuance, anything that comes from context—and context alters everything—everything that comes from the realm of the implicit is missed. And the realm of the implicit, by the way, includes everything that we really value. So it includes, for instance, the beauty of nature, poetry, music, narrative, myth, ritual, sex, love, the divine—all these things remain implicit. They can be made explicit but when they’re made explicit, they change their nature and they become less than they were. And they may become completely other than they were.”

—Iain McGilchrist1

Recently, I’ve also thought that a more difficult question would be whether God understands love. I asked my husband and he said “yes”. I said “maybe.” If anyone understands love, fully understands it, it’s God, but it’s also possible that some things are just impossible to completely understand — even for God. Maybe love, as a concept, is an asymptote.

My psychedelics-fuelled sense of God is of a consciousness that is evolving alongside us, in a fractal relationship akin to the one we have with our gut microbiomes, one that cannot predict the future with certainty. In this sense, I reject the foundational determinism of Laplace’s Demon. Knowing the placement and movement of every molecule and atom in the universe both past and present can yield reasonable predictions about the future, but the future is still unwritten. There’s chaos, free will, uncertainty.

It’s too bad Pierre Simon Laplace lived before Benoit Mandelbrot and the discovery of fractal geometry.

I write with a lot of confidence about some very difficult topics, but I don’t claim to know anything with certainty, nor to understand any concept fully (and if I’ve implied this, it was an error on my part that warrants correction).2

I’m also cautious that over-intellectualization can destroy some of the wonder, the magic, of our world.

In 2022, my husband and I went to Mexico with our daughter. We got into a conversation with a local who spoke English, and he told us that he wasn’t scared of the coronavirus because “love” and “God” would protect him.

I launched into a long-winded mechanistic explanation about oxytocin and cortisol and the science behind why love and faith can heal.

He waved his hand to shut me up.

“I don’t care about any of that science crap,” he said. “All I need to know is love is medicine.”

We can know things intuitively without understanding them mechanistically. And this can be a more powerful and effective way of knowing some things.

Of course, I think the mechanistic explanations are important. You can’t win an argument with someone who is disconnected from their right hemisphere intuition without appealing to the logic of the left hemisphere.

But I want to appeal to the right hemisphere too — I pray for collective healing of our right hemispheres, a return to intuition, to connection, to nature, to Spirit, to metaphor, to meaning.

A return to love.

I ended up getting a fairly good mark for participation in that class, even though I barely participated in any of the other discussions.

So I guess the professor, at least, thought the poet had a point about love.