Search Results for: Fortune

The Billionaire Philanthropist

Photo: AP Images

Jacob Silverman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,268 words)

 

 

During the political chaos of the last year, one American institution has emerged stronger than ever. As its revenues soared, Amazon’s stock price has steadily ascended, cresting $1,500 and beyond. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO, has experienced what The New York Times described as “what could be the most rapid personal-wealth surge in history.” His net worth hovers somewhere around $130 billion. His 400,000 acres in land holdings — much of it in west Texas, where Blue Origin, his space company, is based — makes him the 28th largest landowner in the country, according to the magazine The Land Report. By any standard, Bezos is one of the richest people to have ever lived, while Amazon exerts an impossible-to-overstate influence on a range of fields, from retail to publishing to cloud computing. As part of the highly touted HQ2 contest, twenty North American cities — finalists winnowed from a list of hundreds of applicants — are falling over themselves to offer tax breaks and other inducements so that Amazon will choose their municipality for its next headquarters. The power of Bezos, and Amazon, seems unbridled.

Reckoning with Bezos’s influence means approaching Amazon and its “notoriously confrontational” culture, as Brad Stone described it in The Everything Store, with a critical eye. Paging through Stone’s 2013 book on the ecommerce giant and its founder, and watching the many Bezos interviews available on YouTube, yields a picture of a smart, cunning, singularly driven executive with total confidence in his vision. Amazon is run on lean budgets, almost like a startup, in an atmosphere of high expectations and continual performance assessments that cause some employees to “live in perpetual fear.” Stone explains that if you’re seeking the source of this tense, high-achieving environment, you should look to the founder: “All of this comes from Bezos himself. Amazon’s values are his business principles, molded through two decades of surviving in the thin atmosphere of low profit margins and fierce skepticism from the outside world.” Read more…

Grief is a Jumble Word

Ken Otterbourg | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,710 words)

 

I woke up sad today. I was sad when I got out of bed, and I was sad when I went downstairs to get the tiny can of wet cat food for the four cats. I was sad when I nearly stumbled on the bottom step of the first landing in the basement. I was sad as I thought about what would happen if I fell and lay in the basement for several hours with a broken leg or a concussion while the cats ate the cat food and licked my face and the dog wondered where I was after he had heard the pop top on the cat food can that signaled it was soon to be his turn. But I did not fall. So, I was sad when I let Bailey out of his crate and watched him scratch his face against the carpet while I got his leash.

I was sad when we walked outside as the sun was coming up in the east and I could still make out Venus in a morning sky that was the color of hope flecked with a few clouds off in the distance. Venus helped but not enough. I was sad when we walked down Fourth Street. I was sad crossing Broad Street and watching the morning traffic build and all the people on their cell phones even this early. I was sad after Bailey took his shit in the monkey grass even though it was a good shit that indicated the virus that nearly killed him two weeks ago and caused him to shit blood that was the color of raspberry juice was gone and that the $550 I had spent during four hours at the emergency vet between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. was definitely money well spent and necessary.

After we got home, I was sad scooping out his dog food into the bowl and giving him the remains of the cat food that stuck to the tiny can. The dog was happy and wagged his tail and swirled in delight. I emptied the dishwasher, and that didn’t make me happy or cause me to swirl in delight. It never does. I was sad drinking my coffee, which usually made me happy because it made me think of how much JoAnne loved coffee and how when I met her she used to drink a whole pot of it every day, so much that I wondered how she got any work done because she must have kept having to pee. But now things like that make me sad, and I would stop drinking coffee myself but I don’t think it would matter. I was sad eating my English muffin and banana and reading the newspaper and doing the Jumble and wondering if there is a list somewhere of all the five- and six-letter words that can only be arranged in one correct way and are therefore Jumble suitable. Those are the sorts of things that I think about, and many times a little nerdish insight or aha moment of that type is enough to make me smile. But they can also make me sad because there is nobody to share that insight with except the dog and the four cats and they don’t care, and it’s not the type of thing that you can save until later when you speak to an actual person because you would have to figure out how to slip it into a conversation so that it sounded natural and it never does. It’s the sort of utterance best delivered with no preamble across a kitchen table to the woman who loves you in spite of these tendencies and maybe even a little because of them.

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A Tale of Two Vegases

View of the strip in Las Vegas. (Kobby Dagan/VWPics via AP Images)

Gayle Brandeis | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (3,027 words)

 

The Best of Times — March, 2007

The night before I was slated to fly to Atlanta to attend the biggest writing conference of the year, I was sideswiped by one of my vomiting episodes. These hit every few months — hours of intense abdominal pain that came and went like labor, followed by hours of vomiting that often led to a trip to the emergency room; this had been going on for the past 12 years, with no diagnosis. I didn’t want to miss the trip, but I was writhing around on the floor, and heaving into a large mixing bowl, and attempting to keep the anti-nausea suppositories up my ass long enough for them to kick in. I was chanting, “Help me, help me, help me” — words that always burbled from my mouth during these episodes. I wasn’t sure who this chant was aimed at — not my husband, who tended to shy away whenever the vomiting began — but my mom seemed to hear me in Oceanside, 100 miles from my home in Riverside, California. She called and was alarmed when I told her I still hoped to get on the plane the next morning.

“I’m coming with you,” she announced. Before I had the sense to stop her, she purchased a last-minute ticket for my flight. She picked me up in her red Intrepid shortly after sunrise, and I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. I pretended to sleep most of the flight.

My mom and I ended up having a surprisingly good time in Atlanta — we danced together, attended illuminating panels, had a blast with her cousin who lived in the area, ate copious amounts of boiled peanuts; she even made meaningful eye contact with Walter Mosley, who she was certain would one day become my stepfather. When our flight was delayed, she was miraculously relaxed and chatty, and I didn’t feel the need to pretend to sleep on the plane to avoid her. I was plenty sleepy by the time we arrived at the Las Vegas airport, though — it was 1 a.m., and we had missed our connecting flight. The airline gave us the option of staying in the airport and flying home in a few hours, or taking a hotel room and flying home late the next day.

I was so tired, I needed to rest my head on the ticket counter, but I looked up at her and said “Why don’t we stay? Maybe we could see a show or something.” It was the first time I could remember voluntarily extending a visit with her. Our relationship had always been complicated, but when she started to show signs of a delusional disorder 14 years earlier, our connection became all the more fraught.

“Let’s do it,” she said, and soon we were giggling in a free cab on our way to a free hotel room just off the strip. Our luggage was still on the plane, so we slipped into the plush white robes hanging in the closet and crashed for a few hours. We put our rumpled travel clothes back on after our showers, then ordered egg white and asparagus omelets with our free breakfast vouchers and set out to see how much Vegas we could pack into a day.

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Is This the Most Crowded Island in the World? (And Why That Question Matters)

(Alex MacGregor)

Alex MacGregor | Longreads | February 2018 | 19 minutes (5,053 words)

Geographers have an affinity for superlatives. Among the millions of named features on Earth, if something can claim to be the biggest, tallest, deepest, longest, or otherwise most extreme, it gets a lot of attention.

Asserting any superlative involves a degree of hubris. Our world has been picked over for superlatives, but how sure can we really be about any one claim? Any elementary school class will recite in unison that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain in the world — that is, unless the class happens to contain an Ecuadorian student. Ecuadorians correctly learn that the highest mountain in the world could be measured by distance from the center of the earth, rather than from mean sea level. By this measure, Ecuador’s Chimborazo is taller than Everest. An asterisk is warranted for even this basic claim.

Of much less prominence on the globe, but also a tricky superlative to nail down, is the most densely populated island in the world. A handful of the perhaps 100,000 islands on Earth have stratospheric population densities: Ultra-crowded islands exist in places as disparate as Kenya, Hong Kong, France, and the Maldives, but it’s regularly cited that, by the numbers, the densest of all is Santa Cruz del Islote, a 3-acre islet of about 1,200 people off the coast of Colombia. This claim has been repeated in numerous publications, most recently by The New York Times, and it’s even the subject of a short documentary. Journalists usually emphasize the bonds of family and community in a place so radically removed from western consumerism.

All of which makes for an uplifting read about a fascinating place. But what if the premise is wrong? I can’t comment on the experience of life on the island. But we’ve already learned to be wary of superlative claims, especially when westerners are the ones keeping score; what about this one? What if this is merely a very crowded island, and not the most crowded island?
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A Finder, No Longer a Keeper

Jenny Klion | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,134 words)

 

Twenty years ago, in the parking lot of a Cirque du Soleil show at Santa Monica Beach, I saw in the dust an antique diamond engagement ring. Of course I picked it up, all tiny diamond and huge ring size, but the mystery took hold of me: who was its owner, what was her story, and did she mean to throw away her marital promise ring?

“Look at this!” I said to my new husband James. We’d only recently found each other, were instantly simpatico, and had married at nearly first sight.

“Are you sure you want to mess with that?” he asked. “That’s somebody’s magic, you know, sitting in the dirt.” He was always talking about somebody’s magic, and messing with it.

“I do!” I gleaned, and pocketed the sweet thing.

Six months later, back in New York City, I was lying on the floor in a group hippie singing class, engaged in a visualization exercise about some inner artistic journey. Our instructions were to invent a guide-type helper for ourselves, and at the end, give that guide a gift. So in my mind’s eye, because it was all I could think of, I offered up the antique diamond engagement ring I’d found in the Cirque du Soleil parking lot. I felt very good about myself, filled with generosity and hope.

But when I checked in on the ring proper, which I’d stashed away for safekeeping — there it wasn’t. Well, the ring was in its place, but the diamond was gone. It had disappeared. I had no idea what happened to it.

“Did that imaginary guide-type helper actually take the diamond?” I wondered aloud. Was that possible?

“No,” James scoffed, laughing, pulling me onto his lap. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Hey, you are messing with my magic,” I said, a bit stung, and moved away from him.

It’s what I wanted to believe, anyway. Because since then, I find jewelry, nearly everywhere I go.

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Hierarchy of Needs

(Severin Matusek / EyeEm)

Angela Palm | Creative Nonfiction | Winter 2017 | 10 minutes (2,732 words)

“You never laugh anymore,” my seven-year-old said from the backseat of the car while I was driving. It was early November.

“What did you say?” I asked, though I had heard him clearly.

* * *

I had been thinking about what it meant that Donald Trump had not yet stopped running for president. About the errands we still had to do that night. About the balance of my credit card, and about our new mortgage and all the furniture I couldn’t afford to fill the new house. About the cost of my kids’ college. About the most recent school shooting and the new statistic I’d read that said Americans in 21 states are more likely to die a gun-related death than as a result of a car accident. About heroin overdoses and prescription pill addictions that were hitting closer and closer to home. Food insecurity. Black lives and deaths in America. Overpopulation. Prison overcrowding. The Syrian refugee crisis. Global warming. Dying oceans. My aging parents, and my own mortality. E-mail that had gone unanswered for months because I was simply tired of typing. The state of my marriage. The quality of my teaching. The exercise I wasn’t getting.

If my brain were a computer, its internal fan would make that loud, warm, whirring sound that means it’s working too hard. It probably isn’t a coincidence that adult coloring books topped Amazon’s bestseller lists last year.

* * *

I wash my body each day with liquid soap I squeeze from a bottle that reads “happiness.” I buy this product again and again to no noticeable effect and keep quiet faith in the power of the subliminal.

If that power exists, then it follows that I am also subconsciously affected by the sponsored ads on Facebook. Should I buy that period underwear? I find myself wondering several times in a single day. No, no.

* * *

The most basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are physiological ones: air, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, and excretion of waste. Eating, fucking, snoozing, shitting. Happiness is not listed among any of the hierarchy’s tiered descriptions, but I imagine it floats somewhere above the uppermost point of the two-dimensional pyramid or surrounds the diagram’s boundaries like a cloud. Perhaps it appears intermittently as each level of the hierarchy clicks into place, and flickers out of focus again when the pyramid fluctuates. Or maybe it is measured differently altogether.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula.

Our independence, says the Declaration of Independence, guarantees a right to pursue happiness and bypasses the needs in Maslow’s hierarchy entirely. Though the document assures life and liberty in imprecise, yet enthusiastic terms, it cites no explicit guarantee of basic needs such as drinkable water or fresh air. Those are assumed here. For now.

I have everything in Maslow’s ground-floor level of needs, some things in the upper levels of needs, and many things that aren’t needs at all. But this assumes happiness relies on having as opposed to being.

* * *

Echoing Tolstoy’s assertion about happy families in Anna Karenina, a therapist wrote that unhappy people have vastly different reasons for being unhappy, but happy people all have one thing in common: They are grateful for what they have rather than being obsessed with what they want.

Through product messaging, I’ve come to believe soap might have the power to make me happy. A pill might make me happy. Stylish clothes might make me happy. Make-up. Skiing. Validation from the strangers of the Internet. Alcohol. Weight loss. Botox. Period underwear.

As a culture, we’re obsessed with the search for happiness, desperate for a definition of its formula. An Amazon search turns up over 92,000 books that focus on the subject. In 2008, a woman named Robyn Okrant embarked on a mission to live for a year according to Oprah Winfrey’s advice on happiness. Okrant changed her sex, her food, her clothing, her makeup, her philanthropic methods, and more. In a Forbes Magazine interview she says of the experience: “It was incredibly draining, and it made me really sad. It made me sad to think of how many hours I’ve lost — even when I wasn’t doing the project — to blindly following advice and listening to what other people tell me I should be doing to create my own happiness.”

* * *

Do you know how easy it is to mask unhappiness? Add exclamation points. That is how I text my mother: I’m great! Can’t wait for the holidays!

* * *

This past fall, Thanksgiving came and went quickly. Before my brother and his girlfriend flew back home, we spent a small fortune on lunch together at a trendy brick oven pizzeria and brewery. While we waited for our food to arrive, I heard a man at the table to my right tell another man about a gay bathhouse he recently visited. “The floor is covered in semen,” he said as he ate his salad. The other man nodded, his expression neutral and joyless. I imagined a place where men empty themselves into and around each other, and I mentally classified it as a combination of a fulfilled basic need and the freedom to pursue happiness.

To my left, beyond my brother, a large flat screen television broadcasted a continuous live video feed of a Ugandan village’s water pump, which the pizzeria had funded. I was the only person in the restaurant who watched it for longer than a few seconds. Between bites of thin crust pizza topped with speck and Brussels sprouts, I saw a young boy in red t-shirt carry a plastic jug to the pump and fill it. I saw a barefoot girl toddle across the screen, then bend over to rake her hands across the ground, her face placid and oblivious to the camera. A man crossed the screen somberly and approached the pump, filling his two jugs. Then a woman filled her jugs.

Beyond the pump was a row of homes. A telephone pole rose above them, presumably delivering electricity to the village from an unseen source beyond the camera’s lens. The area in view was free from debris, free from conflict, and nothing I could see in this tiny slice of rural Uganda echoed the violence of a twenty-year civil war. I was unsure whether to take this a sign of recovery, as I only saw what I saw, and nothing more. But whatever the context, this village remained. It moved me, though I could not articulate exactly why.

For a moment, I coveted the simplicity the live feed seemed to depict. I don’t really want to live in a world where lunch for four costs $100 and restaurant staff refills my glass more often than I need, where emotions are advertised as bath soap and adult coloring books are offered as tools for unburdening our saturated minds, but here I am.

During the 43 minutes or so that I witnessed their lives from the comparable extravagance of my own, none of the Ugandans that passed before the camera laughed, but none cried either. They drew their water from the well, and then they returned to their homes, aligned on either side of a narrow road, to clean and cook and live. I wondered whether they knew they were being watched by relatively well off and overwhelmingly white people in Vermont, day after day, and whether the cost of that water was their exploitation and subjection to an American pizzeria’s marketing plan during the restaurant’s business hours. Altruism doesn’t need a camera. Neither do the thirsty.

Carl Sagan said that there are no dumb questions, but I read an article that went one step farther. It said that happy people all ask dumb questions. Here’s one: who is the camera for, then?

* * *

Over Thanksgiving break, I graded my creative writing class’ personal essays and memoirs. Their nonfiction writing revealed wide-ranging pursuits of happiness and setbacks along the way. I never said, “Write about how you struggle,” but they did. Three women battled eating disorders. One of those three was also a cutter whose words about blood sloshing from her wrists read like intimate correspondence with a lover.

(Recently, I read a suicide prevention handbill that said the term committed suicide was offensive. Died by suicide is the preferred term. I made a mental note to remember that. But what is the appropriate term for a person who enjoys hurting themselves? Who obsesses over the color of blood and loves the pain associated with extracting it from her own veins? Who, for reasons I will never comprehend, cuts herself in pursuit of happiness?)

There were two other women whose mothers had died too young. Another student’s chronic illness forced her to withdraw from school. One young woman wrote mainly about other people’s heroin use, others’ sexual abuse, as though she was recasting a truth she couldn’t quite admit as her own. All semester, I cheered silently for her.

A young man with autism recently came out of the closet and didn’t want to be called brave for that. Another young man with ADHD was allowed, by the grace of a formal accommodation, to leave the room and use his phone whenever he felt like it. He employed this choice only when he became frustrated with the less talented writers in the class. At times, I wanted to walk out with him.

A young woman wrote a chronicle of her meaningless tattoos, detailing how being able to get inked up for no reason makes her happy. She ended her essay with the line, “This skull, if you have to believe it stands for something, means I’m dead inside.”

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them.

One young man couldn’t be bothered to do the classwork I assigned. He assumed I’d let it slide without consequence. “I’m just really into dance right now,” he said when I asked why he wasn’t doing the work — not any of it. “Are you sure my grade is right?” he asked after grades were posted.

I need an extension, they said. I need you to repeat the assignment requirements, they said. I need an electronic reminder for homework or it won’t get done, they said. I’m overwhelmed, they said. They cried when printers jammed and when they were late to class. They cried when they were given an earned poor grade. They would write me to tell me their weekend was “just too much” and they wouldn’t be able to haul themselves into the classroom.

They would stare at me like guppies, open-mouthed, waiting to be fed, and I would often have the wrong kind of nourishment. I’d read articles about trigger warnings and about millennial attitudes and about millennial parents and millennial fear of failure and low tolerance for stress, and I still couldn’t completely formulate a way to educate them effectively.

They were happiest when I brought food to class.

* * *

Though some basic needs are assumed in the United States, safety is not necessarily one of them. During the prior semester alone, there had been seven shootings on American college campuses. Just after the Thanksgiving break, the following headlines populated my Facebook feed:

“Your Opinion on Gun Control Doesn’t Matter” (Daily Kos)

“‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” (The Onion)

“On Guns, We’re Not Even Trying” (The New York Times)

Toward the end of the semester, I had been stumbling about my house, talking nonsensically to myself instead of writing or grading. “Refrigerator. Frigerator. Fridge,” I said while walking through the kitchen. Then, as I entered my office, fragments from Horace’s Ars poetica: in medias res. Ab ovo. Which mean, respectively, “into the middle of things” and “from the beginning.” The poet never implied that endings exist. Only that poetry is somehow perpetually on its way from one understanding to another, altered understanding. It is in pursuit.

* * *

Recently, I tried for the hundredth time to explain the concept of infinity to my five-year-old. “No. It has to end,” he sobbed angrily, and then stomped away.

How do we begin receding from too much? As individuals, as a generation, as a nation?

The first sign taught in baby sign language is “more.” There is no sign for “less.”

Once, the average person only had words for a handful of colors. In 1903, Crayola crayons were red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet, and black. By 1949, there were 48 colors available; 64 by 1958; 72 by 1972; 120 by 1998. We learned more names for colors than we ever dreamed: magenta, fuchsia, copper, periwinkle, cornflower, ochre, onyx, royal blue, sienna, peach, beige. A box of eight crayons becomes 16 becomes 24 becomes 48 becomes 64 becomes 72 becomes 120. A child who has had a box of 48 crayons is never again satisfied with only 8. Or maybe they don’t know how to ask for less in a society of more.

Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

In 2003, Crayola officially added the colors inch worm, jazzberry jam, mango tango, and wild blue yonder and they retired the colors blizzard blue, magic mint, mulberry, and teal blue.

By that same year, it is estimated up to 20,000 children had been abducted and forced to enroll as soldiers in the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army.

* * *

I admit I have an adult coloring book. I limit myself to five colors for each picture to keep the process simple, but it takes forever to choose five from my kids’ 64 pack. I’m stressed before I even begin the supposedly meditative activity.

In the phenomenon referred to as Russian blues, we discriminate between colors faster when linguistic organization presorts them.

There must be more colors to discover than we have named. There must be a Crayola 286-pack in our future, containing the shades between fuchsia and magenta, cornflower and periwinkle. Or the purple that bees see in the space between yellow and ultraviolet light.

Can we want things that we do not know about?

* * *

After the semester ended, I attended a grant-funded writing residency in Massachusetts. The Cape in winter is nearly deserted. Many of the good restaurants close for the season, and a majority of the homes sit empty. I welcomed the stillness, the solitude. For a week, there was less of everything: less motion around me, fewer people with whom to interact, less to accomplish, less to buy. There was less noise, less mess without two children. Fewer distractions without Facebook and Amazon and political headlines. I had most of what I needed — food, water, shelter — and not much more. Not having more was a relief, a reprieve I hadn’t experienced for years.

I took daily, silent walks to the vacant shore, meditatively listing to myself the places and things around me named for shells. Shellpoint Apartments, Shellhouse, Shell Inn, Shell Street. Repeat. I knelt in the cold sand and looked out across the bay. I examined the lifeless things that had washed ashore, raking my hands across the ground like that Ugandan child and gathering what the sea had discarded. A peace swept over me whenever I was near to the ground. I caught myself smiling for no reason.

At the Cape, I passed hours sitting quietly, needing nothing, wanting nothing. Pursing nothing but a few more words on a page. On the final night, four friends stopped by, including a couple with their new baby. The baby laughed and I laughed and soon we were all laughing together. All the fine dining restaurants were closed, so we ate at a Ninety Nine chain restaurant and did not make polite apologies to one another for it. We squeezed into a booth for four that was too small to accommodate our group of six. A hockey game played on the television in the bar, but we didn’t watch it. We had wine, but not water. We talked of punk music, but not war. Of banned books, but not guns. A comment about the unusually warm winter, but no mention of global warming.

I returned home the next morning, restored by fractions and of somewhat sounder body and mind. I threw away the happiness body wash. I deleted Facebook from my phone, deleted task managing apps, deleted emails, deleted unnecessary streams of information from wherever they made contact with me. I made a point to laugh in front of and with my children, and hoped it was not too late to unlearn all that I didn’t need to know.

* * *

This essay first appeared in the “Joy” issue of Creative Nonfiction, the print quarterly founded by nonfiction writer Lee Gutkind in 1993. Our thanks to Angela Palm and the staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

 

Politics as a Defense Against Heartbreak

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | February 2018 | 12 minutes (2,955 words)

One week into the new year, my friends assembled in the cellar lounge of an upscale restaurant to celebrate my 33rd birthday. On that frigid January night, we drank fancy cocktails made with bourbon, made with bitters, made with things that don’t seem like they go together but do. Music meant to be forgotten even as you’re listening to it played in the background beneath our chatter. I leapt from my seat, tugged down my short dress and flung my arms around each friend as they arrived. My friends kept my drinks coming all night and properly admired the way my 33-year-old cleavage still defied gravity in the most spectacular way. The group who turned out that night represented nearly every phase of my life from childhood to high school to college to career to the other cities I’ve lived in, but in that amateur episode of “This is Your Life” the romantic partner I longed for had yet to make an appearance. Many of my friends in the small city I call home paired off years ago. I’m always the one without a date to every party, even my own.

A girl I’ve known since we rode the bus together in elementary school offered to give me a tarot reading. She settled on the couch across from me and I cut and shuffled the deck as instructed. She flipped each card over and carefully placed it down on the small round table between us — 10 in all. First was the Wheel of Fortune, perhaps commentary on the success I’d seen over the past year as a writer, and last was the Queen of Wands, maybe insight into my passion for nurturing community and my ambitions for the upcoming year. But it was the middle card that interested me most. When my friend turned over the sixth card, the card that predicts what lies ahead, it was an older white man with a long white beard seated on a throne, The Emperor. “Oh, interesting,” she said.

She foresaw a man coming into my life. He would not be a young man. He would be a good influence. Maybe business, maybe love. I wondered, would he be the man I’ve been waiting for? Like many women, I’d thought by 30 I’d have found The One. Had there been a candle to blow out, my birthday wish would have been for the perfect man for me: an educated, financially stable, liberal feminist. A man who was a manifestation of my politics, of all the things I believed in.
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The Stock Market Doesn’t Matter

peaceful lake
Time to go outside. (Photo: Getty Images)

You’d have to be hiding deep under a rock, with the president of the United States’ Twitter account on mute, not to know that the stock market had some good days at the end of last year and beginning of this one.

“Stock Market just hit another record high! Jobs looking very good,” he tweeted in October. “Stock Market hits new Record High. Confidence and enthusiasm abound,” he gushed in November. “Things are going really well for our economy,” he enthused in December. “Stock Market hit another RECORD HIGH, unemployment is now at a 17 year low and companies are coming back to the USA. Really good news, and much more to come!”

“All signs are that business is looking really good for next year,” he predicted the day before Christmas. “Will be a great year for Companies and JOBS! Stock Market is poised for another year of SUCCESS!”

At first, it seemed his market forecast was right — and as it soared in the first month of 2018, so did his tweets. “Yesterday was a big day for the stock market,” Trump tweeted in mid-January. “American business is hot again!” He took credit for the stock market at least 25 times last month. Read more…

The Thing about Women from the River Is That Our Currents Are Endless

Counterpoint Press

Terese Marie Mailhot | Heart Berries | Counterpoint | February 2018 | 11 minutes (3,098 words)

Terese Marie Mailhot’s powerful, lyrical memoir is about a member of the Salish tribe reckoning with her past and mapping her future. 

***

Indian Condition

My story was maltreated. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. He marked it as solicitation. The man took me shopping with his pity. I was silenced by charity — like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

Women asked me what my endgame was. I hadn’t thought about it. I considered marrying one of the men and sitting with my winnings, but I was too smart to sit. I took their money and went to school. I was hungry and took more. When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much.

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. We sometimes outrun ourselves. I stopped answering men’s questions or their calls.

Women asked me for my story.

My grandmother told me about Jesus. We knelt to pray. She told me to close my eyes. It was the only thing she asked me to do properly. She had conviction, but she also taught me to be mindless. We started recipes and lost track. We forgot ingredients. Our cakes never rose. We started an applehead doll — the shrunken, carved head sat on a bookshelf years after she left.

When she died nobody noticed me. Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

My mother brought healers to our home, and I thought she was trying to exorcise me — a little ghost. Psychics came. Our house was still ruptured. I started to craft ideas. I wrapped myself in a Pendleton blanket and picked blueberries. I pretended I was ancient. A healer looked at me. He was tall and his jeans were dirty.

He knelt down. I thought I was in trouble, so I told him that I had been good. He said, “You don’t need to be nice.”

My mother said that was when I became trouble.

That’s when my nightmares came. A spinning wheel, a white porcelain tooth, a snarling mouth, and lightning haunted me. My mother told me they were visions.

“Turn your shirt backward to confuse the ghosts,” she said, and sent me to bed.

My mother insisted that I embrace my power. On my first day of school I bound myself a small book. The teacher complimented my vocabulary, and my mother told me school was a choice.

She fed me traditional food. I went to bed early every night, but I never slept well.

I fell ill with tuberculosis. Mother brought back the healers. I told them my grandmother was speaking to me.

Zohar, a white mystic, a tarot reader, told me she spoke to spirits, too. “Your grandmother says she misses you,” she said.

“We could never make a cake,” I said.

“She was just telling me that. What ingredient did you usually forget?” Zohar asked.

I knew this was a test, but a strange one, because she didn’t speak to my grandmother either. I remember my mother was watching us, holding her breath.

“Eggs,” I said.

My spiritual fraud distanced my grandmother’s spirit from me. It became harder to stomach myself, and harder to eat.

“Does that happen to you,” I said.

“What?” Zohar asked.

“Did you ever want to stop eating?”

“No,” she said.

Zohar asked my mother if she could sleep next to my bed, on the floor. She listened to me all night. Storytelling. What potential there was in being awful. My mindlessness became a gift. I didn’t feel compelled to tell any moral tales or ancient ones. I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies.

My story was maltreated. I was a teenager when I got married. I wanted a safe home. Despair isn’t a conduit for love. We ruined each other, and then my mother died. I had to leave the reservation. I had to get my GED. I left my home because welfare made me choose between necessities. I used a check and some cash I saved for a ticket away — and knew I would arrive with a deficit. That’s when I started to illustrate my story and exactly when it became a means of survival. The ugly truth is that I lost my son Isadore in court. The Hague Convention. The ugly of that truth is that I gave birth to my second son as I was losing my first. My court date and my delivery aligned. In the hospital, they told me that my first son would go with his father.

“What about this boy,” I said, with Isaiah in my arms.

“They don’t seem interested yet,” my lawyer said.

I brought Isaiah home from the hospital, and then packed Isadore’s bag. My ex-husband Vito took him, along with police escorts. Before they left, I asked Vito if he wanted to hold his new baby. I don’t know why I offered, but he didn’t kiss our baby or tell him goodbye. He didn’t say he was sorry, or that it was unfortunate. Who wants one boy and not another?

It’s too ugly — to speak this story. It sounds like a beggar. How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?

I learned how to make a honey reduction of the ugly sentences. Still, my voice cracks.

I packed my baby and left my reservation. I came from the mountains to an infinite and flat brown to bury my grief. I left because I was hungry.

In my first writing classes, my professor told me that the human condition was misery. I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless.

The Indian condition is my grandmother. She was a nursery teacher. There are stories that she brought children to our kitchen, gave them laxatives, and then put newspaper on the ground. She squatted before them and made faces to illustrate how hard they should push. She dewormed children this way, and she learned that in residential school — where parasites and nuns and priests contaminated generations of our people. Indians froze trying to run away, and many starved. Nuns and priests ran out of places to put bones, so they built us into the walls of new boarding schools.

I can see Grandmother’s face in front of those children. Her hands felt like rose petals, and her eyes were soft and round like buttons. She liked carnations and canned milk. She had a big heart for us kids. She transcended resilience and actualized what Indians weren’t taught to know: We are unmovable. Time seems measured by grief and anticipatory grief, but I don’t think she even measured time.

Indian Sick

They moved my release, and they want me to stay the full seven days, which means I’ll miss Christmas Eve with my son. I wish I could exchange my time with Laurie. She’s being released today. She told me that if she had insurance they would have kept her in the hospital, and that they’re keeping me longer because I have good insurance. I can’t say she’s wrong because an insurance representative works with my psychiatrist concerning my release and my progress.

I’m upset to stay here longer than I expected. But I think I like these walls. It feels artificial but good. The psychiatrist likes to speak to me more than she does the other women. She calls me in, and sometimes our discussions become more general and conversational. She wants to know whether I’ve considered contacting you after this. I told her that I don’t believe you’re a hindrance, and that I am not prideful in love.

“He isn’t telling me to leave him alone,” I said.

“You’re an intelligent and attractive woman. I doubt that this is easy for either of you,” she said.

“I think I could leave him alone.”

She gives me the full report of my conditions. I have post-traumatic stress disorder, and an eating disorder, and I have bipolar II.

“When you get out I hope you have a good Christmas,” she said.

The girl with the tight braids, Jackie, keeps looking at me and saying that something isn’t right. I ask her if I have crazy eyes, and she says no. She talks to me all day and French braids my hair. She likes to drink, and she doesn’t know why I can’t just find another man. “I guess it is that easy,” I say. “If I wasn’t sentimental.” She only dates thugs, she says. She runs down the ways she meets men, and it sounds exhausting.

Jackie encourages me to eat, and the things I’ve eaten today were reasonable. There was rice pilaf and broccoli, and I still drank the prune juice the cafeteria workers put aside for me.

I weigh a hundred and twenty-six pounds now. It is progress that I know my weight is not the issue. Still, I’ve obsessively weighed myself, and it’s inconvenient for the nurses because they have to escort me to and from the gym before meals.

On Christmas, I wake up at four in the morning. The nurses let me sit by a window, and I look out at the highway and imagine that the people driving to work are good. I feel like I could master containment that way.

Josue came from behind me and tapped me with an envelope.

“You’re getting out today,” he said.

“Santa,” I said.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked.

He hugged me until the tension in my back relaxed. His Christmas card simply said that I had talent, and that part of what makes me a good person is that I can be struck by emotion. He also included the picture of me he took.

It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

I’ve been released, but I am not better. I can’t work, and I won’t leave the house. Outpatient treatment: Because I am not crazy enough to be sedated in a madhouse. They think I’m better. I am a cat in heat — something my mother would say. I am unraveling in the dark kitchen. I am scattering my wet eyes looking for signs or something significant. I am incorrigible when I’m like this. I wish I could do anything but stand alone in a dark kitchen without you.

Every Christmas after Grandmother died, my mother locked herself in her room to cry. We always stood on the other side of her door, looking at each other as if she might never stop crying. Some years she didn’t come out until the morning. Some years she came out with red eyes, and she could barely speak. She’d motion to get the presents from under the tree. We passed them around, and I can’t remember a single present I ever received.

I lock myself away as she does. Some things seem too perfectly awful.

I only have crude things to say to you. I won’t fuck you anymore so it can mean less. I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress. There is permanence in physical craft. Laura isn’t absorbed in any beds. She barely perspires. She requires twenty-four-hour protection from her own scent. She keeps her bra on. She wears practical clothes. Her fleeces and cargo pants and that smell of non-scented goat’s milk lotion for dry skin — that must do something for you.

My body left resonance that can’t be dismantled or erased. I don’t know if men think about what seduction is. It was reading the work you love, and buying clothes, and making polite conversation with your friends—convincing your mother that I could mother you like she does. It was laying warm towels across my legs before I shaved so that when you touched me, I was soft. It was withholding from you at the right times, and listening to you with my eyes and ears. I worked hard to assert intent on your bed and your body. I’ve soiled all beds for you with my wanting and preparation. I prepared myself for you as if I wasn’t working as a server, going to college, or raising Isaiah. The weight and the dust of me are in every thread of your mattress. Love is tactile learning, always, first and foremost.

When you loved me it was degrading. Using me for love degraded me worse. You should have just fucked me. It was degenerative. You inside me, outside, then I leave, then I come back, get fucked, you look down at me and say, “I love you. I love you.” I go home and degenerate alone. The distinctness of my bed and its corners are fucked by my fucking you. My agency is degraded. For comfort, I remember my hospital bed and the neutrality of the room I had. I was safe from myself and from you. I’m stupid, waiting for the phone to ring, thinking you might call. I’d drive to you and be no better for it.

I want my grandmother’s eyes on me. I thought unseeing would be a cruel game to play with myself. But now I am reading the dark and knowing how my feet drag on every inch — feeling monstrous and tired. I’d like to have familiarity back, but all I see now is my father’s body over my mother, whose body is boneless like a rabbit’s. I’ve descended into my earliest memory. It is too horrible to know, and no work of unseeing will remove him from me, or turn the lights on in the kitchen. How could someone like you ever be on the other side of the door—on the other side of this?

I Know I’ll Go

After my mother died, I went to find him. He lived in a town called Hope. He had a new family, and our van sat on his front lawn on bricks. When he answered the door, he told me he knew who I was. He had a thin, dirty white shirt on. He looked ill, and his face was gaunt. His hair was still black in some parts.

His wife, Winnie, was my older sister’s childhood friend. My father had met her when she was a girl, visiting my sister. After years with Ken, her front teeth were gone. She smiled at me and said my father had old videotapes of theater work I had done in the community. I had five new brothers, so young. They looked like the archetypes my own family had formed in the presence of my father. I found myself in the youngest child, who formed bonds too quickly and needed holding.

I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her.

My father and I sat across from each other in lawn chairs in his basement. I resisted the urge to sit poised like him. Instead, I held bad posture and slunk in my chair.

“You have my nose,” he said.

I said I missed him, feeling awful that it was true.

“The best thing I could do was leave.”

“I know,” I said.

“Your mother was a good woman. I told her I was an asshole, and she took me in — like a wounded bear.”

“I know,” I said.

A month after this, he showed up at my house with a white documentary filmmaker. I answered the door but could not let him in the house. My brother Ovila was still scared of him, still angry and confused.

“They’re doing a documentary about me,” he said. “About my art.”

I was anxious, standing there with him at my door.

“I know,” he said. “I’ll go.”

I hugged him in my driveway. I know that the whole rez was watching, even my sister, who knocked on my door after he left to look me in my eyes so I could see that I betrayed her. Even she, who was as tall as him, and bigger, had to come to my door with backup. Even she was scared of him. I didn’t know any better back then.

The National Film Board of Canada debuted the documentary as a piece with immediacy and no external narrative. I’m a woman wielding narrative now, weaving the parts of my father’s life with my own. I consider his work a testimony to his being. I have one of his paintings in my living room. “Man Emerging” is the depiction of a man riding a whale. The work is traditional and simplistic. Salish work calls for simplicity, because an animal or man should not be convoluted. My father was not a monster, although it was in his monstrous nature to leave my brother and I alone in his van while he drank at The Kent. Our breaths became visible in the cold. Ken came back to bring us fried mushrooms. We took to the bar fare like puppies to slop.

His smell was not monstrous, nor the crooks of his body. The invasive thought that he died alone in a hotel room is too much. It is dangerous to think about him, as it was dangerous to have him as my father, as it is dangerous to mourn someone I fear becoming.

I don’t write this to put him to rest but to resurrect him as a man, when public record portrays him as a drunk, a monster, and a transient.

I wish I could have known him as a child in his newness. I want to see him with the sheen of perfection, with skin unscathed by his mistakes or by his father’s. It’s in my nature to love him. And I can’t love who he was, but I can see him as a child.

Before my mother died I asked her if he had ever hurt me.

“I put you in double diapers,” she said. “There’s no way he hurt you. Did he ever hurt you?”

“No,” I said.

If rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this? There is a picture of my brother, Ovi, and me next to Dad’s van. My chin is turned up, and at the bottom of my irises there is brightness. My brother has his hand on his hip, and he looks protective standing over me. I know, without remembering clearly, that my father took this picture and that we loved each other. I don’t think I can forgive myself for my compassion.

***

From Heart Berries: A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot. Our thanks to Mailhot and Counterpoint for sharing it with the Longreads community. Published by Counterpoint. Copyright © 2017 by Terese Marie Mailhot. All rights reserved.

The Month of Giving Dangerously

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Elizabeth Greenwood | Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,900 words)

Another fit of insomnia. I reach for a book I’ve read before, in times both happy and sad: Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness. I open at random to a chapter toward the end, on the subject of generosity. “When a strong urge comes up in my mind to give something — even though the next fifty thoughts may be ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. I might need it!’— I give it,” Salzberg writes. “Even if fear or other considerations come up, my resolve is to honor that first impulse to give.” As I read these lines, my heart seizes. Something in this passage contained the remedy I’d been craving because everything in my life felt as if it was contracting.

My first book was hot off the presses. I’d heard about the cruel process from other authors: You expect your life to change dramatically. This will not happen. There will be a short-lived flurry of attention and things will go back to normal. I steeled myself, but a part of me thought maybe they are wrong. Maybe my life will change!

 Dear reader, I am here to tell you there was no such reversal of fortune. I’d spent the past six years researching people who had faked their deaths and I was back to the drawing board. Typically, I would have been teaching several writing classes, but due to the vicissitudes of the adjunct professor labor market I was underemployed, anxious, and blue.

I got a prescription for Klonopin and I started getting acupuncture, which left me weeping on the table for thirty minutes while the poker and her interns assured me this outsized reaction to tiny pinpricks was totally normal. I’d have loved to have indulged in some old-fashioned talk therapy, but my disaster health insurance didn’t cover it. I even tried equine therapy, which I wrote about for a travel magazine, and spent the afternoon corralling two miniature horses in order to learn to trust myself.

I was still questioning whether the choices I’d made over the past few years were worth it if all I had to show for it felt like a big nothing. The luxury of complaining about any of this — I’m a childless, educated woman in America — made it feel all the more shameful. So the cycle compounded. Something needed to change.

Then the election happened. In a confluence of a precipitous adrenalin crash, a gaping daily schedule, limited finances, and a political climate that had everyone adjusting their meds, I was crying almost every day at the pointlessness of it all. My sleepless nights stretched into twos and threes. I wanted to figure out the way I was going to help but had no clue as to how.

That’s when insomnia propelled me to open randomly to Salzberg’s lines about generosity. Something in this challenge to give blindly, to listen to the part of oneself that blithely seeks to contribute, instead of the cacophony of voices concerned with balancing the checkbook. Expanding beyond one’s postage-stamp reality seemed like it could be the antidote to the feelings of scarcity propelling my anxiety.

We all want to give, at least in theory. But when presented the opportunity, we come up with excuses as to why the time is not ripe. We imagine we’ll donate to charities when we are more financially secure. We consider getting up from our subway seat for the weary-looking woman, then demur. As if extending beyond ourselves even slightly will make our precarious balance of time, energy, and emotional resources come crashing down.

So I made a resolution — for the first month of 2017 I would give everything. The rules were simple: If I got the urge to be generous, I’d try to honor it. I would try to do this in every category of giving I could imagine — in time, in money, in undivided attention, in suspending judgment, in forgiveness, in giving people the benefit of a doubt. I’d volunteer, drop dollars in the most dubious panhandlers’ cups, I’d pick up the tab. I’d try to take generous interpretations of others’ baffling behavior, as I take most everything personally. I’d dispense unsolicited praise. For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely, and they could put my name on a registry if they wished. My great hope for this experiment was to plug back into my life and to brandish a big middle finger to a regime intent on making us feel separate from one another.

Then, just before Christmas, my dog decided to treat herself to a Ziploc of trail mix from my purse. The concoction contained raisins, which are lethal to canines. One $1500 vet bill later I was feeling exceptionally broke. This was the exact moment when excuses are made, when we chicken out. But I’d already committed to my experiment. With utter terror in my heart, I stepped off the ledge. It was time to give dangerously.

Day 1

I wake up in Oakland, having spent a few days with my best friend from college who is tremendously pregnant. Our daily routine consists of binge-watching shows, doing a light activity, and then returning home to rest. I’ve been giving Zoë shoulder rubs all week and paying for whatever she’ll let me — ice cream, gas, Mexican takeout.

What isn’t as easy is lunch with Krista, a longtime family friend, something of a cousin to me. We have a strained relationship and have little in common, but get together when I’m out west due to a misplaced sense of obligation. We were raised high WASP, and the conversation glides along the surface of things like a figure skater. Resentment? What resentment! Isn’t this cheese divine? We meet at a loud, overpriced restaurant in the Ferry Building. We discuss her kids, her “personal brand,” and Marin County real estate, all of which she has achieved. She takes a tone with the busboy when our food takes over half an hour to arrive. When the bill comes, I pick it up, much to her surprise and mine. The total comes to just over a hundred dollars because I tip extra.

I get back on BART in a disassociated state as I often do after spending any amount of time with Krista. Zoë picks me up, and we repair to an outdoor mall, my favorite California institution, and I spend over $200 dollars on various serums and unguents at Sephora. This doesn’t feel like self-care or generosity. This feels like mania.

Day 3

Back in New York I have ten dollars out for the cabbie on the way home from JFK and put two back in my wallet. Shameful. I go to a crowded resolutions-fresh yoga class. I typically set up in the front row, not because I am good at yoga but because I want as few toned yoga bodies in my line of sight as possible. A Lululemon doyenne with the triceps to show for it takes her place to my right, and I wedge into the front corner with the wall to my left. Perfect, I think. Just one other human in my peripheral vision, the rest of the class a jam-packed sweaty moving organism of good intentions. I will really kick this year off right.

Once the sun salutations begin, my neighbor flings her arms out to the side to Namaste the morning. She makes strong contact with me and gives not a nod of apology or acknowledgment. Oh well, I think. Round two, smacks me again! Every New Yorker knows well and good that in a crowded yoga studio you throw your arms up, not out. Round three, full on bopped this time! My heart starts pounding. She’s interrupting my flow with zero regard! After exchanging sweat with this precious soul several more times, and audibly sighing with each brush of her manicured hand, I decide: Fuck it.

I will extend generosity to her by allowing her to hit me. I will offer my body to her as a battering ram for full sun salutation. This requires much deep breathing on my part in lieu of biting her, but I am shifting my mind toward expansive acceptance rather than anger at a person oblivious to my moral outrage. I still want to bite her.

Day 4

I go to work on my laptop at a coffee shop near my house. I usually tip my beloved baristas $1 — and only about half the time, depending on my feelings of poverty that day. I will do this only if the coffee slinger sees me, in the sad hope that maybe she’ll give me an extra shot of espresso for free. But not today! I slip two dollars into the jar while the woman working the counter grabs my drink. She doesn’t even see me do it. I am basically Mother Teresa.

Day 5

The super in my building is a lanky fellow named Junior. He runs a small racket out of the recycling in the basement, distributing cans and bottles to neighborhood vagrants who line up around 10 a.m. every other day, for which I imagine Junior is taking a cut. Since I work from home and walk the dog around this time, I have a front row seat to the cottage industry. Junior will often stop me to kvetch about the weather for a while, then ask me “to hold ten dollars” so he can buy cigarettes. I rarely carry cash as part of an ill-advised ploy to spend less. I instead offer cigarettes from my own aging stash. He refuses, preferring Kools. Today we go through the same rigmarole, and in my wallet, I have a twenty, not a ten. “Here, take this,” I say, my hand quivering in giving over an Andrew Jackson. Junior is pumped and promises to get me back in the next few days. I never see the money again.

If I claimed this was an act of selfless generosity, I’d be lying. Junior lives in the apartment above me and often cares for his toddler granddaughter, whose bedtime is around 1 am. Junior seems to be prepping for his Riverdance audition both day and night. It is not infrequent that I will stomp upstairs after midnight in my housecoat asking in my white girl voice to “Please be mindful, as I am trying to get some sleep.” I’m hoping the crisp $20 will buy me some quiet. It does not.

Day 7

I’ve been meditating for a few years now, and not because I am virtuous. I have to meditate for 15 minutes each day in order to not get arrested. I bust out my meditation technique prior to nerve-wracking situations, like giving a talk. I’ll begin to summon the feeling I’d like to exude, sit on a few couch cushions, take some deep breaths and visualize myself fielding questions and criticisms with a smile and élan.

I’ve been trying the same strategy in the morning for the past week or so to psyche myself up to be generous. I close my eyes, picture an exhausted mother with bratty children entering the subway and see myself magnanimously, selflessly, standing up for her. Other passengers notice my benevolence, maybe even rousing inspiration. I see myself standing aside in line, letting some harried citizen to cut me. The bill comes after a big dinner with friends, and I quietly pick it up. The waitress even writes a small note on the receipt: If only there were more people like you.

But today it isn’t working. Seeing the slideshow of generous events only makes me feel stricken with anxiety, more aware of my limitations.

So I try something different. I instead conjure the feeling of having enough, visualizing what that would look like. I see myself engaged in each moment of my life — the tedious answering of emails, listening to my boyfriend instead of unloading on him, responding to prison letters for my new book project with the utmost care. My bank account doesn’t contain a certain target number, but I engage a feeling of peace toward it. I try to sit in the sensation of having enough, feeling generosity move through me. I am the conduit — the thing I am giving away was never mine in the first place. My chest begins to swell and my limbs experience a pleasant, groggy glow. I feel rooted to the ground in a way that doesn’t seem ponderous. I feel bolstered instead of weighed down.

Rather than picturing myself giving, I reverse engineer the feeling of abundance to make that the baseline for the day. I manage to:

  • Drop off my boyfriend’s bags of detritus that had been lingering in the hallway to Goodwill
  • Respond to all correspondences and queries, even ones I’ve been avoiding
  • Try to be extra nice to all customer service people I speak with, even the trifling representatives of New York Sports Club
  • Give a $20 tip (double the amount I normally would!) to the aesthetician who lasers my bikini line. She basically works with genitals all day and didn’t go to medical school for the privilege.
  • Let my dad lament my failure to procreate without rebuff
  • Drop $1 bills into four different panhandler’s cups

I felt a little surge, a little electrical current of belonging, each time. Belonging to what? I’m not quite sure, but it was something bigger than my own plight.

Day 8

There’s a homeless woman who sits in front of the falafel place near my boyfriend’s apartment. I can understand the words she says individually, but collectively they make no sense. She has a kindly way about her, so I call her Eunice.

Today I pack up a sack of food to give her on my way to the gym — clementines, granola bars, bananas, trail mix — a cornucopia of organic Brooklyn fare. I hand it to her, and she is gracious. I see her carefully stuff it into the innards of several bags nestled inside one another like skins. She smiles, I smile back. She thanks me, and I say “you’re welcome.” It’s all so easy. I could do this every day. I am a motherfucking saint.

On my way back to Scott’s building, I see his neighbor. She’s wheeling a little grocery cart, closes in on Eunice, and…she’s giving it to her! Goddamn her! Here’s something Eunice can actually use! I was supposed to be the good person today, and here she goes, showing me up.

Perhaps I still have a few dark and petty corners where the light of generosity could give a good scrub.

Day 11

I have volunteered to subject myself to something called MulchFest.

It’s Sunday. I’m hungover, it’s freezing, and Scott is sprawled out on the couch with coffee and The New York Times. I sit with him and debate the relative merits of submitting myself to the elements, and to the perky knowingness of the Park Slope canvas bag-toting crowd. Scott is from the Midwest and believes that life should be difficult. I put on two pairs of socks and my heaviest coat and head out.

I’m several hours late and somebody in a neon pinafore hands me a clicker counter to tick off the trees as they get mulched. I have the overwhelming urge to punch my thumb down, to feel the satisfying click click click but know this will irretrievably fuck up the count. So I stand at attention, desperately resisting the urge to pull out my phone and appear occupied. The point of MulchFest, I have decided, is to commune with my surroundings, my neighbors, to behold the circle of life as manifested by browning pine needles, the melancholy stench of decomposition signaling the promise of a new year. A fellow who looks to me like a human hacky sack sees me with my brow furrowed and waiting to count trees that never arrive. Everyone is still at lunch, he informs me. I return the clicker and he gently ushers me over to a little white tent and presents me with a new task: creating pine sachets from freshly mulched trees to distribute to park patrons.

For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely. They could put my name on a registry if they wished.

The rhythm of dipping a trowel into the needles and tying off the bag is lulling, relaxing. I merchandise my wares attractively on a card table. Park goers stop by and ask, “May I take one?” “Take TWO!” I implore, “and a snack!” chucking an apple and a granola bar at them. I am giving people something they want, for free, something crafted by these two hands. I’m loving this. An hour and a half passes and it feels like but a moment. I’m in love with Brooklyn, with humanity.

I once dated a journalist who never stopped giving — to strangers, to the less fortunate, to people he was writing about, mostly. Every Sunday morning, Rob would throw back the comforter and go to prepare lunch for homeless people in a church basement. He became close with one of the regulars, helping him advocate to get his VA benefits reinstated, putting his name on housing lottery lists, taking him to doctor’s appointments for his chronic pain. Rob was widely regarded as someone who would interrupt his life for the benefit of others, one of the most generous people anyone had ever known. But I could never get him to open up to me, not in any deepening intimacy. A frustrating part of our relationship was how his service made him somehow unimpeachable.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. For me, not so much. Looking back, I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close. Giving, for him, was, in part, a way to hide. This is an ungenerous interpretation, I realize — but on which side of the ledger does our giving fall? And who is keeping score?

Day 12

The worst words a New Yorker can hear on the subway: What time is it? SHOWTIME! Out-of-town visitors film the acrobatics with glee while I contract further into myself. I give a dollar to Showtime, which I loathe. But giving the dollar somehow makes me loathe them less.

Day 15

I am still meditating in my new style, conjuring a sense of abundance. The phrase that came to me today was “less afraid.” In that tiny moment in the morning, I certainly feel a wash of quiet confidence. Getting up off my meditation cushion, well, that’s a different story.

Day 18

I understand my little experiment is made possible by the fact of my privileges: I enjoy a degree of freedom and mobility unknown any time in previous human history. I am in charge of keeping alive no one but myself and a 15-pound dog. My career choices may not pay in money, but I am wealthy in time, flexibility, and multiple breakfasts. I’m healthy and able-bodied. Perhaps my generosity experiment is a foray into a kind of first-world problem, manufacturing a false sense of adversity. What would, say, a single mom think of my enterprise? I ask the best one I know: my own.

I give her a call and explain the project. “What would you have said to somebody embarking on such a journey back when my sister and I were younger?”

“Well, I can tell you what I would’ve thought,” she says laughing with the irreverence that is my genetic inheritance. “My whole life is about being generous to my children. I use up my finite supply of generosity in keeping the household together.” It’s true. I remember her falling asleep on the couch by 9 p.m. every night of my childhood.

“But generosity can also be about receiving, allowing others to be generous to you,” I counter.

“When I was raising you guys, I had to convince myself of my own strength. I had to get into the mindset that I was capable of doing this on my own. If the spark plug went out on the lawnmower, then I needed to know how to fix it myself.”

Then she tells me something I didn’t know: “I also felt so alone, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else. And then you start to build up walls, and even a martyr complex, like, ‘I’m the good responsible one, I have to be sensible.’”

“It does seem we expect more automatic generosity from women, and are then delightfully surprised when men go beyond themselves, huh?” I say.

“Hell, yes! Women are always putting other people first. All our energy goes into other people. Think about Grammy, her life was cut short because of it,” my mom says breathlessly. My grandmother had three kids, a paraplegic husband, a rural mail route as a postal worker, her elderly parents across the street, a dozen grandchildren, and innumerable wayward souls she cared for. She literally worked herself to death.

“If you could go back in time, what generosity would you have offered yourself?” I ask.

“I would’ve just allowed myself to take more time for me, I suppose. I could’ve hired a babysitter for the night, but that seemed unthinkable. Same too with little splurges, like a facial or a massage. Those lines just seemed so clear to me then, and I couldn’t cross them. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself.” she says. 

Day 20

One of the greatest generosities I’ve known is when strangers reach out to let me know they’ve enjoyed my book. This means more to me than any review or professional accolade; it buoys me during the rough times and makes my whole day. I think about how many books I’ve devoured and recommended to anyone who will listen — save the author. So today I send laudatory notes, thanking writers whose work has meant much to me.

When you truly love something, there is nothing easier or more natural in the world than to say so. I write my friend Amitava, letting him know I will teach his essay about performing Hindu burial rites for his mother, and how moving I found his recollection. I send an earnest letter of gratitude to a beloved actress thanking her for a recent personal essay she wrote about her relationship with reviews, and how it made me feel less alone. I write an Irish fellow about how much I enjoyed an excerpt of his book. Though it feels a bit awkward to telegraph admiration to total strangers, the feeling of lift far outweighs the embarrassment. It feels like an unburdening.

Day 21

Generosity, thus far, has proved illuminating when giving comes easily — giving compliments, sending texts to friends trying to brighten their day, in little gestures like getting up to offer a lady in nurse’s scrubs my subway seat.

But money is where I am stuck. Scarcity is the heart of my fear. Being in deep student loan debt and in precarious employment, my inner monologue is a stream of calculations, always trying to suss out how many more months I can exist in New York. Instead of getting a real handle on my finances, like by following a budget, I adhere to Coinstar, consigning clothes, cooking big batches of chili to eat throughout the week, and prayer.

So today I decide to give away money. I send $10 to a friend of a friend’s GoFundMe to help replace clothes and furniture lost in a fire. I then notice more calls for help which I skillfully tend to ignore — $10 to a friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s fundraiser to get a seeing-eye dog, $10 to my second cousin who wants to record a demo of songs. And because we live in end times I send $10 to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. Then I give a whopping $50 to WNYC because it’s pledge drive time and every little bit helps. That’s $110 in total. Turns out that donating via the internet is pretty much like any kind of online shopping: You end up spending far more than you would if the cold currency were to physically depart from your wallet.

By evening I receive an email from a former tutoring client about starting sessions with her younger son, and another query about subletting my room. Did parting with my funds send a rupture of wealth through the universe? Did I just manifest money by giving it away? Steeped in the culture of The Secret and living in late capitalism, it’s tough to imagine giving without getting anything back in return. Does this mean my project is sullied?

Day 24

I decide to take this line of inquiry to somebody who may know. I meet Richard Bascetta, a senior Buddhist teacher at the Shambhala Center of New York, for coffee. He’s a bit of a silver fox and wears cool square-framed glasses. I explain my project and my query — how can we give selflessly without expecting anything back? Since this giving thing has been feeling pretty good, is it okay to use generosity as a panacea to feeling bad?

Richard has lived in New York and practiced Buddhism here for decades, and realizes generosity’s challenges: “In this environment, we are fighting for space, for money, for status, for a fear of not having that money and status. People come here to accomplish. I’m sure you’re a good writer, but there are at least a hundred people here who are as good or better.” Damn, Richard.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close.

“Our inertia typically prevents us from acting for others,” he says, his eyes never wavering from my gaze. “We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, careers, chasing one love after another, our anger — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on like an itchy coat, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity. Generosity, in its most powerful form, is breaking through the inertia.”

Richard tells me that a few years back he started carrying a stack of ones in his front pocket. Each time he’d pass a panhandler or street musician whose tunes he admired, he’d drop a dollar in their cup. But lately, he’s been pulling his hand back. And he’s not sure why. “It’s been a pinching reminder that I’m compromising my original intention—to give regardless of my inner commentary about the person,” he says. But he doesn’t see this as all bad: “It’s given me the chance to reflect and see how my judgments get in the way and clog the flow of generosity.”

Richard assures me this is okay, because the benefit of generosity — beyond how good it feels, beyond helping someone else — is that it reveals to us where we are stuck. “We are working with that resistance. Where does that mistrust and worry reside in you? That’s the investigation.”

Buddhists believe that one moment of presence is a moment of enlightenment. And when I think back over the past month, I see I’ve built a repository of these moments: connecting with Eunice before I was shown up; becoming hypnotized by the rhythm of filling a cloth bag with pine needles; hearing about a time in my mom’s life that was a struggle. Enlightenment is a distant shore for me but these moments are undeniably fractals of a larger mosaic.

Day 27

On Inauguration Day I take a train to Philadelphia to rendezvous with my sister, mom, and aunt, where we will set out for the Women’s March before dawn the next day. I expect to have many opportunities to exercise generosity, what with thousands of strangers vying for catharsis and a bathroom. The last time I saw my sister was over Christmas, when she called me a sausage, referring to the growing weight differential between us. I close my eyes on the train and silently release that hardened gem of hurt. The release is more gestural than actual, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

Day 28

We are on the road and our excitement swells as we pass dozens of charter buses at rest stops and see pink floppy hats all around. But when we go to drop our bags at our hotel, it hits me. The inauguration crowd is still in town. Staying at our Marriott Courtyard just outside the Pentagon are not only protesters of the new regime but supporters as well. I see whole families decked out in matching red hats and commemorative t-shirts. My body seizes up. I actually feel terrified of these people, even though I think the fear is irrational. I’d been envisioning practicing my giving toward allies, my family, people as outraged as me. Now I have to dive deep into the wells of whatever reserves of compassion I’ve been cultivating over the month toward my perceived enemies. How can I engage those from the other side? What will be my part in making things better? I decide today will be about extending generosity to these folks, to people who took off work and spent their hard-earned money to bear witness and lend their enthusiasm to the installation of our new president.

The march itself is magical, and exhausting, and inspiring. I behold so much generosity around me: There are people passing around bags of trail mix and carrot sticks; people creating a human microphone to reunite a lost child with her mother; there are cops and medics rushing to help the fallen in the crush of humans. But what impresses me most about the day is the new reality we live in. I feel safe and secure in the sea of witty signs and like-minded representatives of the popular vote. But the second we break away and walk along the Mall we pass more Trump supporters. What would my generosity even look like to them? Would it register? Right now the most generous thing I can do is to not push them into traffic on Independence Avenue. But I think about a quote, supposedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.”

As we walk back across the bridge toward Arlington Cemetery, where my grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea is buried, I lag behind. The day is gray, thick, and unseasonably warm. We are all hungry and cranky, legs achy from standing for hours. In the distance, I see a pack of white boys in red caps walking toward us. My body responds before my brain, sensing a threat. They pass my mom and sister, who are still wearing their pink hats, ahead of me. I took mine off when we left the March because I am an actual pussy, fearful a Trump supporter would hurl an epithet or punch me in the face. When I catch up with them, my mom and sister seem shaken and tired, trying to be stoic.

“They called us ‘clits,’” my mom says, shaking her head.

Now my limbic system is just confused, outraged that these assholes would dare speak to anyone, let alone two women. But I’m doubly confused because “clit” is perhaps the most bizarre term they could have lobbed. “They wouldn’t know where to locate one on a human female!” I counter. I try to make light of it, but we are all on edge.

Back at the hotel, the air conditioning is blasting and we devour our burgers. More white people are milling around in stars-and-stripes gear. It occurs to me I have a choice. I can treat all of these people as a monolith of hatred and ignorance, or try to see them as individuals. The results are nothing stunning: I allow a Trump-supporting couple to enter the elevator ahead of me. I move my bag at breakfast the next morning so a teenage girl in a red cap can sit down. I leave a tip for the housekeeper, her political affiliations unknown. I let the same Trump-supporting couple board the airport courtesy van first. It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to the same place anyway.

***

The month ends. By my count I’ve given away 19 subway seats, picked up the check at dinner and drinks half a dozen times, sent 36 “I just called to say I love you” texts to friends, sent $320 dollars to different fundraisers and organizations, given $47 to the homeless, and spent 15 hours of my life volunteering. I’ve let Scott’s innocent yet potentially inflammatory comments slide more times than my ego is comfortable with. I bought coffee and a sandwich for my ex without sending a Venmo request for the privilege. I traveled to distant neighborhoods to meet friends for dinner closer to where they live. I’ve left notes in Scott’s pockets for him to discover during the day. I’ve bought bouquets of flowers to bestow upon unsuspecting pals. I’ve done nothing but listen on the phone, seated, taking it in, when usually doing household chores simultaneously. I’ve stayed past my office hours to meet a student who was freaking out about an assignment. I’ve sent e-books to a friend to use while nursing. I’ve been generous to myself by wearing the good underwear at the back of my drawer that I save for a special occasion that never comes. I’ve tried to do only one thing at a time.

We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, chasing one love after another — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity.

But the experiment doesn’t feel like it’s over — I didn’t do this perfectly. There were times when I grabbed a subway seat like manifest destiny. There was a time I decided to get offended by a friend’s offhanded remark. I spent an afternoon at the Brooklyn Food Bank silently cursing the project director, who I took to be an imperious asshole. I noticed I have the hardest time letting things slide from the people closest to me. Like Richard said, examining oneself through the lens of generosity can be illuminating. At the beginning of the month I was listing all my generous acts. But by the end of the month, I was listing opportunities to be generous that I didn’t take up. Those moments taught me more about myself. Instead of feeling defeated by my imperfection, I feel curious, inspired even.

You make yourself vulnerable by making an offering the other may or may not take. You extend yourself in giving praise, attention, patience. You let the other in. You see the sky does not fall. You do it again. Giving becomes easier. Defensiveness can soften because you’re not fighting to preserve what little you feel you have to protect. From the constant gnaw of scarcity, you realize there is enough.

I’m still grouchy as hell. But I’ve found giving to be the easiest, quickest, even cheapest way to feel good, better than therapy, equine or otherwise. If I want to reset the chemistry of my brain on a particularly down day, I’ll just try to listen to what someone is telling me. I’ll text friends telling them how much I adore them. I’ll buy coffee for the person behind me in line. And a little bit of the weight lifts.

When I think back to the first day of my experiment, when I endured and paid for a frustrating lunch with Krista, I see it differently now. The truest generosity I could’ve offered wouldn’t have been in picking up the tab, but in looking directly in her eyes and meeting her where she is, where we all are: imperfect, flawed, all-too-human, locked into our own stories of what is going on, the only story we understand to be true. For all I know, she had to do deep breathing just to be around me.

I haven’t mastered generosity and the fearlessness that comes with it. But I’ve touched it in moments. I want to experience more of those moments. And because life always gives us a heaping helping of stress and awkward lunches and unexpected vet bills, I know I will have more to do. Because I didn’t die this month, nor did I go into the poorhouse, nor did I feel overextended. Instead, I felt connected. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by how much further I have to go, I feel ready. Instead of feeling stretched thin, I feel full.

***

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, a nonfiction book about people who have faked their deaths.