Search Results for: The Awl

Down the Rabbit Hole: A Psychedelic Reading List

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“On psychedelics,” Dr. John Halpern, head of the Laboratory for Integrative Psychiatry at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts, told The New York Times Magazine, “you have an experience in which you feel there is something you are a part of, something else is out there that’s bigger than you, that there is a dazzling unity you belong to, that love is possible and all these realizations are imbued with deep meaning. I’m telling you that you’re not going to forget that six months from now.” That rings true to me.

For the record, I’m not encouraging anyone to take psychedelics. Powerful substances such as LSD, D.M.T., and psilocybin are not for everyone, and they are illegal. That said, these substances behave in the body very different than opioids, alcohol, and cocaine, and they offer what many people view as the possibility for enlightenment, for constructive personal revelations, and insight into the cosmos. The stories collected here offer insight into this idea.

Not long ago, residents of affluent Western countries began traveling to the jungles of South America to have profound psychedelic experiences with the hallucinogen ayahuasca. And workers in Silicon Valley started taking small doses of psilocybin and LSD, called microdoses, to enhance their work and creativity in tech. Tripping got trendy. It also received more scientific attention. As Lauren Slater wrote in her New York Times piece, a new generation of researchers are studying the therapeutic effects of psychedelic substances and their potential for treating everything from depression, alcoholism, and PTSD, to confronting our own mortality. These researchers have differentiated themselves from the questionable, Timothy Leary-style drug studies of the ’60s. It’s exciting to live in a time when scientists are taking a serious, objective look at the way psychedelics work on not only the human body, but the human experience. After the legalization of cannabis in many US states, activists are now working to legalize psilocybin mushrooms. Like all outlawed psychoactive substances, psychedelics come with a lot of cultural baggage. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan stated that “anyone that would engage or indulge in [LSD] is just a plain fool.”

For those who haven’t tripped and want to understand the experience, or those who want to relive past trips without having to fit new six-to-ten-hour journeys into their adult work and parenting schedules, this reading list is for you. For those who prefer to never to ingest psychedelic substances, these stories will take that trip so you don’t have to. It’s nice to travel into another dimension from the comfort of your own couch, especially now that COVID-19 keeps most of us indoors at home. Anyway, shelter-in-place isn’t the best time to trip. Psychedelics are better suited to nature, if not a camping trip then at least a city park. Apartments are too small. They smother the cosmic consciousness we’re trying to expand. Also, things get weird in familiar environments, especially familiar environments where family portraits hang above piles of dirty laundry that need washing. (Hi Mom, my face is melting!) Maybe the best trip now is one others have already taken. Either way, safe travels my friends. See you on the other side.

* * *

The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale” (Ariel Levy, The New Yorker, September 5, 2016)

The ancient South American hallucinogen ayahuasca has become America’s psychedelic drug du jour, with everyone from Baby Boomers and Millennials to the Silicon Valley set seeking its potent revelations about harmony and interspecies unity. To hear the plants speak, all you need is money and some strength of mind.

One at a time, we went into the front room to be smudged with sage on the wrestling mats by a woman in her sixties with the silver hair and beatific smile of a Latina Mrs. Claus. When she finished waving her smoking sage at me and said, “I hope you have a beautiful journey,” I was so moved by her radiant good will that I nearly burst into tears.

Once we were all smudged and back in our circle, Little Owl dimmed the lights. “You are the real shaman,” she said. “I am just your servant.”

When it was my turn to drink the little Dixie cup of muck she presented, I was stunned that divine consciousness—or really anything—could smell quite so foul: as if it had already been vomited up, by someone who’d been on a steady dieta of tar, bile, and fermented wood pulp. But I forced it down, and I was stoked. I was going to visit the swampland of my soul, make peace with death, and become one with the universe.

Tourists of Consciousness” (Jeff Warren, Maisonneuve, April 29, 2011)

Before The New Yorker spotted ayahuasca as a subject, the Canadian quarterly Maisonneuve covered the increasing popularity of hallucinogen tourisism. Jeff Warren’s reporting makes a fascinating companion to Ariel Levy’s above.

As if on cue, the Estonian psychologist, Alar, vomited into his bucket, setting off a domino effect of throaty purges around the room. Susan began humping the air. The Mountie groaned and raised his arm, as if to ward off an assailant. Someone else started barking. The Finnish professor—also in his sixties—came spinning in from the sidelines, hair shocked upwards in an Elvis-style pompadour, and pranced around Susan’s undulating body.

It was all too much. I struggled to my feet, teetered, and fell sideways over a chair. On my hands and knees I managed to crawl to the bathroom, where I was noisily ill. I spent the next two hours slumped next to the toilet, disappointed by my lack of visions, but also giggling at the whole bizarre circus. Behavioural reality, at least, was beginning to shift.

How Psychedelic Drugs Can Help Patients Face Death” (Lauren Slater, The New York Times Magazine, April 20, 2012)

Researchers are exploring whether certain drugs can help patients cope with fear of death. Pam Sakuda, who was given six to 14 months to live, was administered psilocybin — an active component of magic mushrooms.

Norbert Litzingerremembers picking up his wife from the medical center after her first session and seeing that this deeply distressed woman was now “glowing from the inside out.” Before Pam Sakuda died, she described her psilocybin experience on video: “I felt this lump of emotions welling up . . . almost like an entity,” Sakuda said, as she spoke straight into the camera. “I started to cry. . . . Everything was concentrated and came welling up and then . . . it started to dissipate, and I started to look at it differently. . . . I began to realize that all of this negative fear and guilt was such a hindrance . . . to making the most of and enjoying the healthy time that I’m having.” Sakuda went on to explain that, under the influence of the psilocybin, she came to a very visceral understanding that there was a present, a now, and that it was hers to have.

Turn On, Tune In, Drop by the Office” (Emma Hogan, 1843, August 31, 2017)

Emma Hogan reports that in Silicon Valley, microdosing LSD is the new “body-hacking” tool everyone from engineers to CEOs are using to boost productivity and creativity. Interestingly, while apparently everyone is doing it, users are reluctant to have their real names appear in print.

San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.” Few billionaires are as open about their usage as Ferriss suggests. Steve Jobs was an exception: he spoke frequently about how “taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life”. In Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography, the Apple CEO is quoted as joking that Microsoft would be a more original company if Bill Gates, its founder, had experienced psychedelics.

As Silicon Valley is a place full of people whose most fervent desire is to be Steve Jobs, individuals are gradually opening up about their usage – or talking about trying LSD for the first time. According to Chris Kantrowitz, the CEO of Gobbler, a cloud-storage company, and the head of a new fund investing in psychedelic research, people were refusing to talk about psychedelics as recently as three years ago. “It was very hush hush, even if they did it.” Now, in some circles, it seems hard to find someone who has never tried it.

The Trip Treatment” (Michael Pollan, The New Yorker, February 2, 2015)

Research into psychedelics has been demonized and shut down for decades. But recent psilocybin trials from Johns Hopkins and New York University are helping researchers reconsider the therapeutic potential of the drugs.

The Trippy Science of Psychedelic Studies” (Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, Elemental, August 22, 2019)

Psychedelic substances show great promise treating everything from cancer to depression, anxiety to alcoholism. To help understand this burgeoning field of inquiry, one writer participates in a study. Tripping taught her as much about the promises as the dangers of medical psychedelics.

The brain on psychedelics is not only susceptible to cues, but it also exaggerates their meanings. And here’s the problem with that: We can debate what’s real and what is an illusion, but we can’t ignore the power of the drugs, or the power of the people who administer them to us, and we can’t ignore our own vulnerability to both. This is what chills me.

The Plot to Turn On the World: The Leary/Ginsberg Acid Conspiracy” (Steve Silberman, PLoS/Maps.org, April 21, 2011)

As the public faces of the psychedelic revolution, Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg made a dynamic duo. The charming, boyish, Irish Harvard professor and the ecstatic, boldly gay, bearded Jersey bard became the de facto gurus of the movement they’d helped create — father figures for a generation of lysergic pilgrims who temporarily jettisoned their own fathers in their quest for renewable revelation. (Note that this piece, originally published at PLoS, is no longer available there. Some digging discovered it online at maps.org.)

A Psychedelic Murder Story” (John Paul Rathbone, Financial Times, June 19, 2015)

Ayahuasca tea has long played a religious role in Brazil, but did it also contribute to the brutal death of a celebrated Brazilian artist? A dark twist on the question for enlightenment.

There have been many other reports of mental and physical healing following ayahuasca ceremonies, as well as occasional stories of delusion, cultism and worse. Early last year, Henry Miller, a 19-year-old Briton, died after apparently taking part in a shamanic ayahuasca ritual in Colombia — a terrible accident which played in the British press as a cautionary tale of a gap-year adventure that went horribly wrong. And then there is Glauco’s story, largely unreported outside Brazil, although it is one of the most curious cases of them all.

Riding the Highs and Lows with My Mom” (Valentina Valentini, Longreads, August 21, 2019)

Valentina Valentini’s life-long role-reversal with her mother gets up-ended one psychedelic night in the Hollywood Hills, giving her the chance to become the daughter, once again.

She handed me the pipe. I politely refused. We went back to listening to the girl croon.

Not many minutes later I began to feel lightheaded. And warm. I knew it would get hot in that tiny room. My first thought was that I might be inhaling some second-hand smoke, therefore creating a bit of a contact high. I wasn’t altogether opposed to that, so I sat still a little while longer. Then my eyes started to feel heavy. Very heavy. I whispered to my mother that I was going to take a step outside and get some air. She seemed concerned, but only mildly. I assured her I’d be fine, snuck through the haphazard chairs with swaying wannabe hippies in them, and stepped out the shop door.

The Trip of a Lifetime” (Laura Miller, Slate, May 14, 2018)

In the context of some reads on psychedelic drugs, Laura Miller looks at Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. In it, Pollan says that drugs such as psilocybin and LSD got a bad rap after some flawed scientific experimentation and images of burned-out, ’60s counter-culture hippies soured Americans on exploring the medical benefits these drugs might offer, suggesting that their mind-altering abilities might help free us from cognitive patterns that are holding us back.

If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.” He felt that the experience made him more emotionally open and appreciative of his relationships. Both Waldman and Lin report similar effects, even though Waldman never actually tripped. The promise of hyperlight travel, revolution, and spiritual transcendence be damned: If psychedelics can help cure the midlife crises of disaffected baby boomers and Gen Xers, then it’s only a matter of time until we’ll be able to pick them up with a prescription at our local pharmacy.

Tea, Biscuits, and Empire: The Long Con of Britishness

CSA Images / Getty / Illustration by Longreads

Laurie Penny | Longreads | June 2020 | 21 minutes (5,360 words)

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.”
— Winston Churchill, unpublished memorandum

“Will Mockney for food.”
— Alan Moore, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, vol. III

This is a story about a border war. Specifically, a border war between two nations that happen, at least in theory, to be precisely the same place. One of them is Britain, a small, soggy island whose power on the world stage is declining, where poverty, inequality, and disaster nationalism are rising, where the government has mangled its response to a global pandemic so badly that it’s making some of us nostalgic for the days when all we did was panic about Brexit. The other is “Britain!” — a magical land of round tables and boy wizards and enchanted swords and moral decency, where the sun never sets on an Empire run by gentlemen, where witty people wear frocks and top hats and decide the fate of nations over tea and biscuits.

One is a real place. The other is a fascinatingly dishonest, selective statement of fact, rather like describing how beautiful the countryside was in the antebellum American South. A truth so incomplete it’s worse than a lie.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die. The U.K. is unique among modern states in that we not only buy our own hype, we also sell it overseas at a markup. “Britain always felt like the land where all the stories came from,” an American writer friend told me when I asked why she so often sets her novels in Britain. Over and over, writers and readers of every background — but particularly Americans — tell me that the U.K. has a unique hold on their imaginations.

Every nation-state is ninety percent fictional; there’s always a gap between the imaginary countries united by cultural coherence and collective destinies where most of us believe we live, and the actual countries where we’re born and eat breakfast and file taxes and die.

That hold is highly profitable. Britain was kept out of recession last year by one industry: entertainment. Over the past four years, the motion picture, television, and music industries have grown by almost 50 percent — the service sector, only by 6.  So many shows are currently filmed in England that productions struggle to book studio space, and even the new soundstages announced by London Mayor Sadiq Khan in 2018 will be hard-pressed to keep up with demand. As historian Dan Snow pointed out, “[O]ur future prosperity is dependent on turning ourselves into a giant theme park of Queens, detectives, spies, castles, and young wizards.”

There is hope: the statues are coming down all over Britain, starting in Bristol on June 7, 2020. Black Lives Matter protesters pulled down a monument to slave trader Edward Colston, who is remembered for how he lavished his wealth on the port city and not for the murder of 19,000 men, women and children during the Middle Passage. In Oxford, students demanded the removal of monuments to Cecil Rhodes, the business magnate and “architect of apartheid” who stole vast tracts of Africa driven by his conviction in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxons. In Parliament Square, fences have been erected to protect Winston Churchill himself, the colonial administrator and war leader whose devoted acolytes include both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Young Britons are  demanding a reckoning with a history of colonial conquest, slave-trading, industrial savagery, and utter refusal to examine its own legacy.

Meanwhile, the economic disaster of a no-deal Brexit is still looming and Britain has the highest COVID-19 death toll in Europe, putting further pressure on an already-struggling National Health Service. Under Boris Johnson’s catastrophic leadership, or lack thereof, there are no signs of changing tactics on either. Fantasy Britain is having a boomtime. Real Britain is in deep, deep trouble. Read more…

Trading Spaces

Henryk Sadura / Getty, Ev MiIee / Unsplash, Photo illustration by Longreads

Cheryl Jarvis | Longreads | June 2020 | 15 minutes (3,812 words)

I’ve reread the letter so many times that coffee rings smudge the words. I’ve won a teaching position at the University of Southern California that will pay my way through graduate school. The year is 2004, and a longtime dream is finally a reality. The aftershocks of my shattered, decades-long marriage — the sleepless nights, the lost months — begin to recede as I fantasize about the life that awaits. Like millions of women before me I’ll go west, to exotic, sun-drenched California, to reinvent myself, start anew.

The ring of the phone jangles my daydreaming.

“Mom!”

My younger son, Brian, is calling from his home in Los Angeles. His deep voice oozes charm.

“How’s my Sweetie?” he asks.

When he wants something, he calls me “Sweetie.” In his youth he exploited his blue eyes and beguiling smile to get his way. At 26, with 1800 miles between us, he has to rely on more sophisticated techniques. My antennae heighten. He’s “psyched,” he says, that I’m coming to L.A., and he’s been thinking, what about living together?

No. No. God, no.

Images flash of size 13 sneakers sprawled across the floor, smelly workout clothes hanging in the bathroom and flung over chairs, grimy dishes congesting the sink, junk food crowding the pantry, the house teeming with testosterone, his friends invading with bulging duffel bags and monstrous appetites. I think of the grocery bills that I’ll end up paying, food devoured before I have a chance to shelve it. More memories of his high school days surface: the urgent calls from school to bring money/ homework/ permission slips, the last-minute requests for help with papers and projects, the late-night calls from the police for assorted misdemeanors. His college years — three schools and a marijuana arrest — ratcheted the strain. Finally, in the five years since he graduated, via long-distance mothering, we’ve evolved to a peaceful co-existence that I’ve not only grown accustomed to but have come to love. But living together?

No. No.
Read more…

Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent

Photo courtesy of the author / UGA Press

Sejal Shah | UGA Press | excerpted from This Is One Way to Dance | June 2020 | 14 minutes (3,746 words)

 

“I think we’d like to make love now.” The words repeated: a murmur, a shimmer, a cat walking across covers. The woman saying these words had red hair and very pale skin. She wore sparkly eyeliner, purple. She lay next to a man beneath a brown sleeping bag. It seemed like a reasonable request. My eyes flickered open. I looked at their bare shoulders and collarbones. (Why were they saying this to me?) The night, absent of stars, wound itself around us. I lay curled near their blanket-covered legs. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

I opened my eyes. The night lifted, a navy-blue scrim rising. The white man had dreads. The white woman told me that she had been a sixth-grade teacher. “I was a teacher, too,” I said. The man grinned. He reminded me of a former student who often argued with me and liked to talk. A lot. My student was tall but hunched over, always wore an olive-colored jacket, and something about him seemed oddly animal-like, but not in an unpleasant way. I paused. Then: “What am I doing in your car?”

Read more…

So Much More Than Enough

Hulu

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,564 words)

Lynn Shelton was the kind of artist no one asked for, but the only one you really wanted. The kind of person who was so good — so empathetic, so altruistic, so honorable — her work couldn’t help but be good in all the same ways. But in the face of what film became — a monstrous inequitable monopoly — she played too kind, too female, too independent, too old. When Shelton died suddenly on May 15 at only 54, from a blood disorder no one knew she had, artists more famous than her surfaced one after the other to remember her flawless reputation and critic after critic emerged to fawn over her career. It was so familiar, all those people so quick to praise in private but almost never in public, until, you know, it kind of doesn’t matter anymore. The reality was that Shelton had made eight films, directed countless television series, and still had to audition for jobs even when she knew the people giving them. The reality was that she had to work in TV to pay for the work she really wanted to do. The reality was that people in the industry knew her name, but no one outside of it did. “The main reason women make inroads in independent film is that no one has to say, ‘I pick you,’” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “I’m not pounding on anybody’s door. I’m just making my own way.” 

As existence increasingly became exhibitionism, Shelton made being a private success — being a good person making good work — more valuable than being a public one. Which is why I loved her more than any other artist around. Because it wasn’t just about loving her films, it was about loving her as a filmmaker, as a woman. Because, somehow, over two decades, she was always pure independence — fervent, uncompromising, relentless and humble, humble, humble — despite the constant pressure to be otherwise. Because, to me, she was the only kind of artist to be.
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Queens of Infamy: Lucrezia Borgia

Lucrezia Borgia
Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2020 | 33 minutes (8,371 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

If you love Queens of Infamy, consider becoming a Longreads member.

* * *

Mention the Medieval period and people free-associate themselves right into visions of plague, violence, and shit-covered peasants. The term “Renaissance,” on the other hand, conjures up stuff like humanism, science, and paintings of people that actually look like people. But late 14th-, 15th-, and 16th-century Italy consisted of more than just painters with Ninja Turtle names wanking their way from one Tuscan villa to another; it was also full of intrigue, murder, and complex intergenerational family drama. If there was one family that featured heavily in some of the most violent and licentious stories of the period, it was the Borgias — even today their name is a by-word for depravity. And at the center of many of the wildest Borgia stories was the beautiful, wily, thrice-wed Lucrezia.

Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

People have called Lucrezia many things over the years: seductress, murderess, femme fatale of the Borgia cabal. The attributes assigned to her didn’t come out of nowhere; as we shall see — and as Lucrezia noted herself — many of the men around her came to unfortunate ends. In portrayals where she escapes the villainess role, she’s often made out to be another hapless aristocratic daughter traded off into various political marriages, someone with no agency or ambitions of her own. The reality, of course, is much more nuanced. While Lucrezia was indeed married off several times to further her family’s agenda, as an adult she proved herself to be a skilled ruler loved and respected by her subjects.

Read more…

Self Portrait With iPhone

Getty / Image courtesy of the author / Photo illustration by Longreads

Pam Mandel | Longreads | May 2020 | 10 minutes (2,453 words)

The first thing I notice are the car selfies. So many of the profiles I see include car selfies. I overthink as I try to determine what this tells me.

I consider the following options:

I have a car. See how I have a car?

No one knows I’m doing this. My car is the only place I can get privacy in which to take a dating profile selfie.

I have no friends, no one to take my picture.

On Reddit and Quora, I learn that others have noticed this too. I find multiple threads asking my exact question. “What’s the deal with all the car selfies?”

Consensus is that the light is good inside your car — it’s even and diffused. You might be on your way to or from an important event, one that requires you to clean up, whatever that means for you. You look in the mirror, check your teeth, and think, “Hey, I look good.” Your phone is right there, in the dash-mounted bracket, perfect for a selfie.

Snap.

I consider taking “car selfie” off my list of disqualifying factors for selecting a mate. I mean date. For selecting a date.
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O! Small-Bany! Part 4: Fall

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | April 2020 | 22 minutes (5,474 words)

The first time I get rear-ended is at a stoplight on the corner of Central and North Lake, around 4pm. One minute I’m on my way to school pickup, the next minute I’m disoriented and sobbing. The at-fault is a 19-year-old dude in a Jeep full of friends. He is nonplussed. He asks, without affect, whether I am okay.

“No!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

My car is badly damaged. I can’t stop sobbing. No airbags deployed. I am worried the dude will get back into his car and flee, so I photograph his license plate in haste, and call the cops. I cannot for the life of me stop crying. My rage and fear and shock and sadness are a tangle. The Jeep doesn’t have a scratch on it. It’s raining. The dude and his friends huddle under a shop awning, laughing.

The cop tells me to calm down: “It’s not that big a deal, ma’am.”

Later, when I call the cop oversight office to suggest that this particular cop go fuck himself, the oversight officer will watch the body cam footage and promise to speak to the cop in question about sensitivity in traumatic situations.

For some reason, I refuse an ambulance. (“Some reason”, ha: I am more terrified of institutional health care than I am of getting back into a smashed up car and driving away with whiplash and a concussion.)

I spend days in bed, in the dark, alternating heat and ice. A haze of phone calls from insurance agents, a hailstorm of Advil, rivers of CBD hot freeze.

You can get rear-ended anywhere. It wasn’t Albany’s fault, per se. But it’s so easy to blame Albany. Fucking Albany! This was God’s way of telling me I’ve done my time in this hopeless shithole of a city, right? Or maybe this was God’s way of punishing me for never utilizing public buses. Or maybe this was God’s way of shaming me for having my kid in private school. The thinks you think when you’re stuck in bed, in the dark, without distraction, for days on end! Meditation is a billion times harder than crossfit, and constructions about “God” are tough epigenetic habits to break.
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Grieving, but Calmed by a Different Kind of Storm

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Photo illustration by Longreads

Stephanie Land | Longreads | April 2020 | 12 minutes (3,059 words)

 
Almost a month into COVID isolation, I curled up on my bedroom floor under the window I’d opened to rid the room of my children’s lunch aromas — the ketchup and chicken nugget smells that relentlessly crawled up the stairs every day before noon. John Prine’s “Souvenirs” drifted out of my laptop’s speakers, drowning out the blaring screens full of TikToks and my youngest’s kindergarten Zoom meetings that were even more ridiculous to see in real time. On my own screen was the ever-faithful blank document, its cursor drumming, reminding me of my inability to produce, my failure to do my job that day. At least I showed up. Kind of.

I fingered the carpet inches from my face, watching the dog hairs vibrate as I breathed in and out. It was the hair of our newest dog, the husky. Everything in our bedroom seemed coated with a layer of it. Last fall, my husband and I drove nine hours down to Salt Lake City to adopt her on the same morning the pregnancy test came back positive. The twins would have been somewhere around 24 weeks by now. As big as eggplants. Imagine that.

***

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore. It happened in that moment between turning off the car and opening the door when the panic attack occurred. This was only a few days after we’d returned from our honeymoon. I was on my way home from the therapist’s office. I’d made a frantic appointment after I woke up to a message from an acquaintance that began, “Thought you might want to know” and continued with the information that my abusive ex was in town. This was the man who’d strangled me and kept me imprisoned in his anxiety for a year after that — yeah, that one. Someone saw him in town the night before at a bar. “He was with a girl,” the messenger said. “They looked pretty cozy.”

I began 2020, the year of perfect vision, wondering if I’d ever be able to write again. The last time I’d written anything creatively was August, when I realized I wasn’t able to go to the grocery store alone anymore.

My panic attack wasn’t about that specifically, though in some way I guess it was. I’d ended the appointment with my therapist by admitting I was too embarrassed to go out in my small town because I’d gained 25 pounds in the past year. “I can’t look people in the eye,” I’d said, “because I just start telling myself what they must be thinking.” My ex’s snide attitude toward anything but his idea of a perfectly fit body was at the root of this. He had been my daily critic of what I wore, ate, and the progress I’d made, through exercise, to shrink my body to the smallest size possible. It was my ex’s words, but in other people’s imaginary voices.

For the six months before that, since people started referring to my first book as “critically acclaimed,” every time I saw myself on a television screen doing an interview with a morning show host, I saw my ex watching it just long enough to turn to the person next to him and say, with arms crossed, “Look at how fat she is.”


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For 15 minutes that August afternoon, I gasped for air with the windows still rolled up, hot tears falling on my bare thighs, before I felt safe enough to drive home. I’d offered to pick up a few things for dinner, and now I’d be forced to admit I hadn’t been able. That I’d had a panic attack in a grocery store parking lot because I couldn’t go inside alone, fearing I’d run into someone I knew, or didn’t know. A lot of people had approached me in that grocery store since my book came out. Some wanted to tell me their story, often with tears in their eyes, then ask, “Can I just give you a hug?” I felt pressured to say yes. Now I’d admitted out loud what I imagined them thinking, and that seemed to make it real.

After that, whenever I had to go somewhere in town, my husband always came with me. He was a good buffer for those situations — something to physically put between myself and the person who wanted to talk to me. Every person who made eye contact became a potential “fan” who’d ask for a hug, only now I saw it as a potential threat. An imaginary mockery of my appearance, an invasion of my private life, the one I kept close since the swarm of interviews started the year before.
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Little League, Revisited

Photo courtesy of the author / Getty / Little League World Series / Photo illustration by Longreads

Adam Kuhlmann | Longreads | April 2020 | 17 minutes (4,265 words)

It’s a cold, gray morning in late December, the week that sags like bunting hung between Christmas and New Year’s. I pull my mother’s Subaru alongside a large cinder block building identified only by a street address peeling from a rust-pocked and dented steel door. I see no functional windows, just a few square cavities that have been boarded up from the inside.

My wife, Mysha, eyes the grim façade from the passenger seat. “Is it strange,” she asks, “that Chase takes lessons inside a commercial slaughterhouse?”

Chase is my nephew, an 11-year-old with the eyelashes of a Hollywood starlet and a penchant for neon athletic wear. During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, he had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

“It gives him a leg up,” my sister had told me the previous night after Chase went to bed. Perhaps sensing my skepticism, she explained the nature of today’s competitive child-rearing: how all of a kid’s activities — from his first birthday party to his college admissions — must be coordinated and enhanced, for a fee, by biologically unrelated adults.

At 39, with no plans to father a child myself, I am free to pass judgment on all manner of parental behavior without worrying that, one day, I’ll have to admit I was wrong. So, I reminded my sister about the 1990s, when the most we’d hoped for was piano lessons. As for getting into college, I told her about the Friday night before I took the SAT. I’d stayed up late, crowding around Betsy Newman’s backyard fire pit. I’d joined a boozy, a cappella rendition of Blind Melon’s “No Rain.” My test prep had consisted of just saying no to the nozzle of a can of Cool Whip, a triumph of restraint I’d managed without a glance of adult supervision.

My sister patiently absorbed my nostalgia. Then she added: “Chase wants this too. He loves baseball.”

I couldn’t argue with Chase’s results. Last summer he’d been selected for the all-star team of his neighborhood little league. My sister sent us photos of the boys celebrating at a local Mexican restaurant. In one close-up, Chase’s arm is draped over the shoulder of a boy with the same tousled hair spilling from the same star-spangled hat. With the other hand, he is slugging a yellow concoction from a goblet the size of a table lamp.

During our annual holiday visit to my Virginia hometown, my nephew, Chase, had invited us to watch him pitch and hit baseballs for an hour, under the tutelage of a private coach.

Looking down at her phone, Mysha confirms the address, so we slip into a small parking lot in the back of the building. Though it’s no more welcoming than the front, at least we find no sign of doomed Angus cattle.

Inside, the facility’s décor hews to jock brutalism. Forty feet above us, fluorescent lights hang from metal beams, filling the cavernous room with a stadium’s ice-blue brightness. The atmosphere is warmed only by the sound of classic rock rattling from speakers bolted to the walls. Black netting curtains off a pair of batting cages, where a few stocky teens hack at soft tosses. The floor is covered in green artificial turf studded with five-gallon buckets, around which cluster litters of scuffed baseballs.

I spot my brother-in-law, Clay, seated with two other men whose buzz cuts and taut expressions would fit in on the bridge of a naval destroyer. They lean forward from metal folding chairs, studying the ritualized movements of their boys. Nearby is a makeshift pitching mound, where I spot Chase moving into his windup: a fluid and compact gathering of 100 pounds of muscle and bone. His pitch sails high, pulling out of his catcher’s crouch a college-aged man in gray sweats. His bottom lip is swollen with tobacco, and he pauses to discharge a brown stream into a soda bottle before offering my nephew a blunt appraisal: “You’re overthrowing again. What happened to your release point?”

Chase cocks his head thoughtfully. “I forgot to reach out with it.”

“Right,” the coach says, demonstrating with his own right hand before returning a dart to Chase’s glove side. “Fix it.”

In his plush suburban home, Chase is a merry prankster. When he was 4, he stood on the carpeted mezzanine, reached his hand between two wooden balusters, and dropped an untidy sock onto the face of my sister, napping on the sofa below. Here, in this Spartan box, Chase’s aim is nearly as true — but he is all business.

We slide in, and the fathers stand to make room for us in the self-consciously gallant way of Southern men. And suddenly I recognize that I am easily the smallest person in the seating area. This includes my wife, who at 6-foot-1 dwarfs me in a way that attracts stares in public.

Out of the corner of my eye, I track a wide throw that tips off Chase’s glove and bounces once on its way toward our congregated shins. I bend and manage to spear it with my right hand.

One father draws out a whistle through his teeth.

“Once a second baseman, always a second baseman,” Clay says.

I toss the ball back to Chase, who registers the deed — and our presence — with a stoic little nod.

“College ball?” asks the other father.

Before I can laugh, say “no,” and explain that this catch had been the most graceful maneuver I’d accomplished in 20 years — indeed, I’d just tweaked my back and would require, this evening, a liberal application of Tiger Balm — Clay jumps in.

“This guy played in the Little League World Series!”

I wince.

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