Search Results for: The Stranger

We’ve Always Hated Girls Online: A Wayback Machine Investigation

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Julianne Aguilar | Longreads | February 2018 | 14 minutes (2,894 words)

Once upon a time, in 1999, when the internet was small, when it came through your phone and not just on your phone, when the first browser war had not yet been won, when you had to teach yourself a few lines of code if you wanted to exist online, when the idea of broadcasting your real name for anyone to see was unthinkable — in those early days, before Twitter revolutions, before Facebook Live homicides, when the internet was small and most people didn’t understand it, and only the nerds hung out there even then, it was already happening.

Even then, people hated girls on the internet.

* * *

Eighteen years went by before I thought about Sara again.

I’d just finished a project in which I had tracked down a fanfiction author I’d loved in the early 2000s. Jami had been relatively easy to find: It turns out that if you’d had a sprawling internet presence as a child, you probably have one now, under new names, on new websites. Not only had I found Jami, but I learned that she is now a successful, Hugo-nominated author. I was deliriously happy. She’d made it — this girl who’d written fanfiction had achieved the wildest dream and turned that talent into an actual writing career. I wanted the same for Sara, a tangible success that followed minor internet celebrity.

In 1999 Sara had a website hosted on Expage, and so did I. I didn’t know her: I was attracted to Sara’s website because it was incredibly well-designed for 1999, and because Sara, like me, was a middle school girl who loved the internet. Her “About Me” page listed her age as 12, same as me. I don’t remember how I found her site but I do remember that it’s what initially sparked my interest in web design and the internet in general.

Between 1999 and now, I would occasionally think of Sara. I’d been addicted to her website. In the design anarchy of Web 1.0, Sara had an eye. She had a sense. Her website looked like few others at the time, in that it looked good, like something you couldn’t make yourself. She knew how to hold an audience: she updated frequently, changing her layouts often and offered the code for free. Because of this, her website was hugely popular. Many years later I’d see her name mentioned in a discussion about early internet celebrities. I was there, I thought. I was one of her biggest fans.

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What Happened Onboard the ‘Nautilus’?

The premises of Peter Madsen, who is accused of killing Swedish journalist Kim Wall. (Ole Jensen/Corbis/Getty Images)

For journalist May Jeong, Kim Wall was more than a colleague, she was a friend, a compatriot; she was on the frontlines of the great battle for stories, for freelance assignments, for respect as a reporter. “I only have questions” Wall texted Jeong, “about agency as a woman…and if we will ever be free, no matter what we do.”

At Wired, Jeong traces the final voyage of the Nautilus, the private submarine built by Peter Masden, the subject of a story Wall was working on. When Wall didn’t come home after visiting onboard with Masden, the police began a search that would eventually lead to the discovery of her violent murder.

Jeong travels to Copenhagen to find out what happened to Wall, and through her reporting she also finds a way to move through the grief of her friend’s death.

In the days after she disappeared, I heard people ask questions that betrayed a misunderstanding about reporting—couldn’t she have done the interview over the phone?—and casual sexism—why was she there alone so late? On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I would end up on internet chat rooms where the comments sections filled me with rage: “She is a woman—how could she go alone with a man she does not know?” And: “She had skirt and pantyhose—how could she egg on a poor uncle in that way.”

In Afghanistan, where I worked mostly with men, I never wanted to show any sign of weakness or fear. In reporting this story, my editor made me promise that I wouldn’t put myself in harm’s way. But much of reporting is just that—routinely putting yourself in uncomfortable positions. In the four months I spent on this story, I did things that in other circumstances might have seemed foolish. I went on long drives at night with sources. I met strangers on their doorsteps and entered their homes. In stepping onto that submarine, Kim was doing what any reporter onto a good story would have done.

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Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Crutches from Shutterstock

Britney Wilson | Longreads | February 2018 | 25 minutes (6,304 words)

 

“You good?” you asked, pulling a gray wool blanket up tighter around your shoulders, yawning, and stretching your legs out on the worn blue couch in the corner of my apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me and attempting to do my version of tiptoeing back over to my bed, hoping the slight clanking of my crutches wouldn’t wake anyone.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me. I was in law school. I’d spent the hours before your arrival cursing the fact that I had been born in the middle of February, and praying for your safe journey as I watched the snowstorm that was beginning outside my window.

The night before, on the phone, I had been worried. The news had been forecasting that the accumulation might be pretty significant, and as sad as the thought had made me, I’d suggested that maybe you shouldn’t come after all. You’d promised it would be fine and that you would all be there. I was genuinely concerned, but equally relieved by your determination.

A lawyer friend of mine had perfectly summed up what my transition from college to law school had been like. She said undergrad was alma mater (as in “dear mother”) and graduate school was the stepmom. You initially hate her because she’s not your mother, and you resent the way she seems to be encroaching on your life. Eventually, as you each come to appreciate the other’s unique role, you develop your own separate relationship and become friends. I liked the analogy, but I was two years in, and still hadn’t gotten to the friendly part. I desperately needed that reunion.

The only guy in the bunch, you had offered to sleep on the floor and give someone else the couch, but they’d insisted you take it. They had put you through enough on the drive up. You deserved your rest.

Because I’d known it would take me the longest, I’d let everyone else get ready for bed before me. So, I was the last person to get in the bathroom after our personal updates and in-house karaoke sessions wound down in the early hours of the morning, after you all arrived. By the time I came out, everyone was asleep, except you. I could tell you’d been fighting it.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me.

I stepped around Mia and Monique, who were lying across the floor old-school slumber party style on a pile of extra sheets. Bending down when I got to my bed, I gingerly placed my crutches on the floor next to it and moved an extra pillow to the head of my bed where Lisa was lying at its foot.

You leaned forward from the couch, craning your neck slightly to watch me climb onto the bed. When you were sure I was all set, you leaned back against the arm of the couch and yawned again.

“Alright, good night. I love you,” you said.

“Good night. I love you too.”

As I closed my eyes that morning, flanked by my friends on all sides, feeling supported and at ease for the first time in months, with your voice as the last one I heard before I fell asleep, I wondered where it had come from — the love.

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The Great Stink

CSA Images/Mod Art Collection

Laurie Penny | Longreads | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4270 words)

My heart goes out to men right now. Actually, my heart goes out to all sorts of unsavory places these days, no matter how much I warn it. My heart goes out to men most nights, wearing precarious outfits, no doubt getting exactly what it deserves. It brings back stories.

In the past weeks and months I’ve spent a lot of time sitting across tables from men who have been accused of sexual assault and rape — men who are angry, and afraid, and have no idea what to do now. Men for whom the fast-changing code of sexual and romantic conduct is not the most immediate problem: theirs is that they have been called out, condemned, and are wondering what the next months and years of their lives are going to look like. And in their bitterness I can hear a backlash coming down the tracks.

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Vanishing As a Way to Reclaim Your Life

(Sankai / Getty Images)

Laura Smith | The Art of Vanishing | Viking | February 2018 | 22 minutes (5,980 words)

I have long been in the habit of passing by houses and wondering about the people who live inside. I grew up in a residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C., the kind where the homes are close together and neighbors often wind up knowing more than they might like to. Before dinner, I would escape my house to walk our little white lapdog. The predictability of the ritual — setting the table, filling water glasses, the sight of my parents’ briefcases in the hall — filled me with dread. A day had ended exactly as it had the day before, and it would end the exact same way the next day and possibly forever.

This wasn’t how I wanted my life to be. I imagined that when I grew up, I would live all over the world. I would be an explorer of the wilderness, an observer of animals, a connoisseur of cultures, a collector of the unfamiliar. I envisioned hastily packed suitcases, maps, binoculars, huts in the mountains, spare hotel rooms in dusty cities, Jeeps tearing down muddy roads into the jungle.

As I wandered the streets of my neighborhood, I was shopping for other possibilities, other lives lived in other houses. But those lives appeared to be exactly the same as mine. In well-lit dining rooms and kitchens I saw other families setting the table, calling the children downstairs, washing their dishes in the sinks. Television screens illuminated family rooms where exhausted parents slumped on couches after a long day in the office. Children did their homework by the glow of Pottery Barn desk lamps. I imagined that after their parents went to sleep, when the loneliness of those quiet hours became too much to bear, they whispered to each other beneath their sheets.

During the day they roamed the perimeters of their neighborhoods on bicycles and were driven to soccer and piano practice. They learned about faraway places in textbooks and on the news, but it seemed as if there had never been anything but this, no other place than here. Thirty years on they would come back to houses like these and do the same things all over again.

I wasn’t sure what my mother did for a living, though I had memorized her job title because it sounded important and I was proud that it might be. “She’s a health policy analyst,” I told a friend. “What does that mean?” the friend asked. “It means she saves lives,” I said, feeling fairly confident that this wasn’t true, except perhaps in an abstract sense. But I wanted it to be true. I wanted the stakes of daily life to be more exciting than desks, screens, and fluorescent lights.

I passed by house after house, each one a nighttime domestic diorama: Homo sapiens suburbae. These people had nothing to do with the world of mystery, dark deeds, and wilderness that I was sure was out there somewhere. My house — if I had a house — would be different. It would be in the mountains, or the jungle, or maybe in the middle of a city. My children and I would eat ice cream before dinner and play freeze tag at night by the light of fireflies. We would have a menagerie of animals. If you stood outside our house at night, you would hear peals of laughter. You would see tickle wars and pillow fights in warm, glowing rooms. But then another thought struck me: what if the reason all these people lived the same lives was that this was the only way?

As I grew older, the fantasy began to erode. Where would the money come from? Would I have a partner, someone to help me? Where would the Jeep in the jungle take me and for what purpose? Where would my children go to school? Would I even have children?

When I was in my mid-20s, I heard a story about a young woman who had also dreamed of leading a life of adventure, and I could not get it out of my head. Her name was Barbara Newhall Follett. She was a child prodigy and had published an acclaimed novel at the age of 12. People called her a genius. A photograph was taken as she corrected her proofs with a quill, smiling proudly at someone to the left of the photographer. When she was 13, she left her parents and traveled the high seas with a hardened crew. Later that year she published a memoir about the experience. She was deeply knowledgeable about botany, butterflies, and much of the natural world. She was an accomplished violinist and a talented poet, but above all she was a writer. She had been writing short stories since the age of five.

“She’s your kind of person,” my friend Robert said when he pointed me to an article about her. I had led an ordinary childhood and no one has ever accused me of being a genius, but Barbara and I shared a love of literature and the outdoors. There was something else too: a certain temperamental similarity — a restlessness. Later I began to wonder about Robert’s true motivation for telling me about her. When she was almost exactly my age, she vanished without a trace. He knew I would want to find her.

***

It happened on December 7, 1939. The residents of Brookline, Massachusetts, were busily preparing for Christmas. Miss Ayers’s shop on Beacon Street was selling Christmas wrapping paper, ribbons, and stationery. Hendries’s offered ice cream sculpted in the shape of Santa Claus. The Village Flower Shop was stocked full of poinsettias, and all around town people were placing orders for turkeys at 19 cents a pound. As night set in, the temperature hovered around freezing and the gas lamps flickered in the darkness. Families prepared for dinner in their clapboard houses on Walnut Street and their Victorian houses with trellised porches on Cyprus Street.

For some, the looming holidays brought a twinge of pain, their sadness cast in sharp relief against the holiday cheer. A 15-year-old boy ran away from school that day. A middle-aged woman didn’t come home that night. Four people reported their dogs missing, and a 22-year-old girl slit her wrists and then disappeared.

On Kent Street, Barbara’s marriage was coming to an end. The young couple’s apartment was comfortable but modest, with a fireplace and a rounded row of windows overlooking the quiet street below. She was 25, fine-featured, and tomboyish, with a long auburn bob. She hadn’t planned on this kind of life. She hadn’t planned on bickering about who would hang the curtains or what music to play at a dinner party. She had never intended to sit in an office all day, a large round clock ticking the minutes away. She hadn’t  planned on having a husband or a house.

The Boston and Albany Railroad had a depot around the corner and Black Falcon station, with its enormous ships fastened in the harbors, was just five miles away. There were ways to escape from Brookline, to get out of a marriage, to alter the patterns of a life. Barbara gathered her notebook and $30. She walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night. She was never seen or heard from again.

***

The apartment was exactly as I had envisioned it: in a low-rise building with rounded turrets and a plain façade in a quiet neighborhood of small apartments and clapboard houses, with a few shops and restaurants. A few houses down, an old man in a neatly pressed button-down shirt was mowing his lawn. Brookline is a town that seems to belong to another time, giving it a Halloween feel regardless of the season. There was a whiff of mystery, a sense that something more was going on behind those well-kempt exteriors. Or maybe I was reading into it because I knew something had happened in that building 75 years before.

I was lurking in front of Barbara’s building when a middle-aged Australian woman came out to put her trash in the dumpster. We started talking. I explained that this was the last place Barbara had been seen. “Would you like to come inside?” she asked.

Barbara walked out of the apartment, down the engraved wooden staircase, through the front door, and disappeared into the night.

A few moments later, I stood in front of the large, curved living-room windows, wondering if this very apartment had been Barbara’s. Below the window, I could hear the man mowing his lawn. I wondered how many Saturdays, for how many years, he had done exactly that. The mechanical hum of the mower was oddly comforting. The woman’s boxer, Harry, butted his snout against my legs while I answered her questions. I was looking for Barbara, I said. I doubted I would find her, but I hoped to gather clues and learn more. I had reason to believe that she was the vanishing type, capable of erasing one life and creating another. But there were other, more sinister possibilities to consider as well. I was just a year older than Barbara when she vanished, and this fact seemed significant to me. I had a sense that the decisions I was making then would determine the rest of my life. Like with a rocket ship, the trajectory set on the ground was critical; a fraction of a degree in the wrong direction could send me to a wildly different place.

Somewhere along the line, in ways barely perceptible at first, things went wrong for Barbara. From my vantage point, her life was both an inspiration and a warning. But I couldn’t think of how to explain this to the Australian woman, so I thanked her and left.

***

Life with P.J. was easy. We usually wanted to do the same things, which came as a huge relief. My previous relationship had been a constant battle over how to spend our time. My ex-boyfriend had mostly wanted to listen to lethargic jam bands stoned out of his mind. I wanted to hike, read, write, or go out with friends. A simple trip to the grocery store could cause an epic fight because we couldn’t agree on how we would get there, when we would go, or even what we would buy. But moving through the day with P.J. was effortless.

Four years later, on the roof of our apartment in Washington, D.C., P.J. asked me to marry him. He was nervous and had turned around to face me too suddenly, which startled me. Yes, I said. Obviously yes.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery. I told myself I would never do that. But when people asked me why I had chosen to get married, I had no answer. I don’t know, I said. Because sometimes people fall in love and want to announce to themselves and the world that they plan to stay together forever. Love was the factor I hadn’t considered.

I didn’t do a cost and benefit analysis. In fact, I hadn’t thought much about marriage at all because marrying P.J. hadn’t felt like a choice. He was a fact of life now. Questioning his place in it seemed as worthwhile as pondering whether I should keep my arms and legs. But I was squeamish about the wedding and skeptical of its meticulous choreography.

In Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, there is a section on “bad faith” — behaving without sincerity, lying to oneself. Sartre describes a café scene in which a waiter is serving his customers: “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly…he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” The waiter, as Sartre describes him, is imprisoned in his performance, relegating himself to the singular role that society allows him, rather than allowing himself the freedom of a more honest manner of being. What troubled me most about the concept of bad faith was not that we might lie to others, but that we might lie to ourselves. Self-deception is degrading. You wish you could have just a smidge more integrity. Your falseness lingers in the air and follows you through the day.

It was other people who floated through their lives without scrutiny. They were the ones who made a series of uninspired compromises that led them to lives of drudgery.

In the carefully scripted wedding rituals, I detected bad faith. I felt less like a bride and more like a person pretending to be a bride, the way a little girl might process through her living room with a pillowcase draped over her head toward some imaginary groom. I refused to take engagement photos because who would ever believe that we were spontaneously bounding through a field at sunset holding hands? Or making out in front of a brick wall? Who was this photo for? It couldn’t be for us because anytime we looked at it we would know all the work that went into it: a long afternoon spent smiling to the point of jaw exhaustion.

I sidestepped this icky feeling by outsourcing the wedding planning to my mother. I announced to everyone that I could not be bothered to care about napkin colors or floral arrangements. The only things P.J. and I would deign to opine on were the things that truly mattered: the beer selection, the music, and the wedding cake, which would not be wedding cake because wedding cake tastes bad. We would eat pie. We also cared about the wedding ceremony, which we designed ourselves. These things — the food, the drinks, the music, the ceremony — turned out to be most of the details of the wedding.

The problem was that I both wanted to avoid dealing with the particulars of the wedding and that I came to see each choice as symbolic of the kind of life we would live together. As my mother went about happily making her plans, if they veered toward the traditional or the frilly I would swiftly intervene, outraged.

One night, P.J. and I went to my parents’ house for dinner. We arrived with a pizza box in hand. I had decided that I wanted the wedding to be a pizza party (never mind that my father is gluten intolerant) held at the neighborhood bar, which was also a Ping-Pong hall. P.J. and my father sat silently at their ends of the table, looking wan, while my mother and I shouted viciously at each other. It was the kind of shouting that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call to see if everything is all right. My mother informed me in no uncertain terms that the family from Arkansas would not be coming all the way to D.C. for a pizza party at a Ping-Pong bar. She would have been more likely to agree to a wedding conducted on the moon in the nude. I informed her that, in that case, the family in Arkansas could attend a wedding at which the bride would not be present.

A few weeks later, my sister, my mother, P.J.’s mother, sister, and sister-in-law, and three of my friends gathered in a boutique for what was to be a long day of wedding dress shopping. The attention made me uncomfortable. I worried that they didn’t really want to be there. Why would anyone want to follow someone around all day while they shopped for a dress? I tried on the first dress and announced, “This is it. I want to buy this one.”

“What?” said the confused saleswoman. My friends and family (three of whom had traveled more than a hundred miles to be there) gaped. It would be the quickest wedding dress purchase in the history of wedding dresses, a staggering 15 seconds.

“Maybe you should try on another one, just to be sure,” my mom suggested.

“No,” I said. “I want this one.” I thought it was reasonably priced and didn’t want to drag the process out.

My mother suggested we move on to the bridesmaid dresses, but this too was contentious because I wanted the bridesmaids to wear whatever they wanted.

“Why must everyone match?” I asked.

“Why are you such a pain in the ass?” my sister shot back. “No, really, tell me why.” What she meant was, Why must everything be a statement?

But to me, the statement was the whole point. My wedding was becoming a demonstration of all the things P.J. and I were not. The dresses, the napkins, the seating charts seemed an initiation into a domestic life that frightened me, one I had observed as a child and had sworn never to take part in. The wedding was an opportunity to declare, most of all to myself, that I could live according to whatever rules I wanted.

So when a Cuisinart was delivered to our apartment, my stomach dropped. It wasn’t going to be that kind of marriage. My uncle had given us matching camping backpacks, and I had found that gift extremely gratifying. It aligned with the person I wanted to be: someone on the move, ready to jet off to some exciting adventure at barely a moment’s notice, someone unencumbered.

Yet if I truly hadn’t wanted the Cuisinart, I would have given it away. Instead, I left it in its box above the kitchen cabinets, where I eyed it with suspicion and, occasionally, longing. Domestic objects had a mysterious power over me. I was both attracted to them and repulsed by them. The Cuisinart was sort of beautiful, with its sleek metal base. It promised homemade salsas and soft serve made of bananas and Nutella. How bad can life be when you are making your own soft serve?

I purged my life of household items with fervor. In limiting my exposure to them, I was hoping to cauterize the desire at its source. The longing for a beautiful teacup would never be satisfied by buying just one teacup. Once I had it, I would want some other beautiful thing, setting off a chain of longing and acquisition that would drag down my whole life. Even a single day spent around the house made me nearly frantic. I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all. No beautiful teacups ever.

Other kinds of household items — the ones you need in order to live — filled me with joy. I enjoyed seeing my toothbrush beside P.J.’s, his shoes mixed in with mine. I enjoyed grocery shopping with him, knowing that he liked the grainy mustard more than the smooth kind, the hard cheeses more than Brie. I felt the seductive appeal of controlling my surroundings, of nesting among picturesque things.

I told myself that it didn’t matter if I was ambivalent about the wedding because I wasn’t ambivalent about P.J. And though I didn’t want to admit it, I craved the security of marriage. A handsome, kind man had agreed to tie his life to mine, to mix his shoes in with mine, to grocery shop with me, to list my name on his emergency contact forms forever. It was a vote of confidence in me and in my vision of how to live. The comfort that this knowledge provided released me from the pressure to find other forms of stability. I started taking on more ambitious writing projects because if they didn’t work out I would still have P.J. I could live anywhere in the world because P.J. would be there. We had very little money, but being broke with someone else is far preferable to being broke alone. Surely between the two of us we would figure out how to make enough money to scrape by. I did not view my impending marriage as a constraint. I told myself that it was a means of escape from the constraints of the rest of the world.

***

A year before our wedding, P.J. and I decided we needed to get out of D.C. Leaving would mean saying goodbye to nearly everyone we knew, which was, at least to me, exactly the point. Wanting to flee, if only for a time, is a fairly common fantasy. Anyone who has felt it will recognize that this feeling manages to coexist with the fact that you may love your friends and family very much. I love you. Please go away.

Many of our friends from our respective high schools, our college friends, our parents, and P.J.’s siblings and their combined five children lived within a five-mile radius of our home. There was an endless string of birthdays, happy hours, going-away or coming-home parties, soccer games, holiday and engagement parties. I often felt that rather than trying to actually spend time together in a meaningful way, we were crossing things — or people — off our to-do lists.

The total lack of spontaneity was making me fidgety. In college, I hadn’t done extracurricular activities, even ones I would have enjoyed, because I didn’t like the idea that I would have to agree to weekly meetings. As a result, I spent a lot of nights doing nothing when I could have been doing something constructive; but knowing I was free to do as I pleased was what I cared about most. Now I knew ahead of time what I would be doing every weekend for the next five months. I dreamed of saying to family and friends, “I don’t want to see you today because I need to be alone, or I need to write, or wander around without a plan, and that’s not a reflection of how I feel about you.”

I worried that I could, without realizing it, build a domestic life and become mired in it. So I renounced it all.

I might have enjoyed the merry-go-round of social events more had I not been working so much. I was running my family’s coffee shop, waking up at five in the morning to open the store in the dark, do inventory, organize and restock the line, brew coffee, order more, create the next week’s schedule, and serve food and drinks all day. Often I had to cover shifts for employees who had overslept or were sick. On the rare occasion when I wasn’t in the shop, my cell phone would ring incessantly with questions from the staff. “The sink is clogged and overflowing.” “There’s a crazy man shouting at himself in the bathroom.” “We’re out of peanut butter.” “There’s a weird smell coming from the basement.” Each time my phone rang, it reminded me that  I wasn’t a good manager. I had created an environment where people were helpless in my absence.

At night I came home with my jeans stained with coffee grounds, worrying about two employees who were fighting or a tense interaction with a customer. I was physically exhausted, but when I got in bed, instead of going to sleep, I cycled through the next day’s to-do list. We’re out of whole milk, I reminded myself. And don’t forget to order more bowls for the catering job next week. The new employee is coming in at 11; print her paperwork first thing.

I was beginning to see that when your days are all the same, your weeks, months, and years blend together. The alumni association of my high school asked for an update for the school magazine and I didn’t have one. “Nothing has changed,” I imagined writing. “Laura Smith, Class of 2004, is exactly the same.” I imagined that my classmates were climbing the Annapurna circuit, kayaking the length of the Nile, and rescuing earthquake victims in China. I longed to see other places. Even looking at a map was painful because it reminded me of how mired I was in my life. A National Geographic special about the pyramids came on, and I thought, I really might never get to Egypt. My world was small.

“When are you coming over?” my mother and P.J.’s would ask in rapid succession. “Let’s get a date on the calendar for something this week.”

“You’re smothering me,” I said to my mother. “That sounds nice,” I said to P.J.’s mother.

One night I looked into the bathroom mirror, feeling suddenly daunted by the task of flossing my teeth. How could I possibly bring myself to do one more thing I didn’t want to do? I slept fitfully that night and had a dream that I had fallen asleep at a dinner party and was surrounded by an endless cacophony of cocktail chatter and clinking glasses. I had never spent less time reading or writing in my life, probably since I had learned to read and write, and the lack of it made my life feel lusterless. “My brain is dying,” I told P.J. I was an automaton outputting work and taking in food and drink.

P.J. sometimes came in to help on the weekends, working behind the counter so I wouldn’t have to. He was teaching at a nearby high school and was often up grading papers until the early hours of the morning, but he never complained about the extra work. He memorized the smoothie recipes and sometimes made them wrong. I didn’t care because I was so grateful not to be the one making them.

His desire to please others was great when it worked in my favor. But when he wanted to please others at my expense I would grow irritated. “Of course we’ll be there!” I heard him say into the phone. I shot him a death stare, signaling that I was going to strangle him. He shrugged helplessly, whispering, “If we leave the dinner at nine we can be at the birthday party just half an hour after it starts.”

“Do you actually want to go?” I would ask him. Sometimes the answer was yes, sometimes it was no. When he would commit to things I didn’t want to do, I wouldn’t allow myself to blame him. It was the other person’s fault. I didn’t want to think about the fact that sometimes I felt trapped by him.

I wrote during any free moment I could get. After work, late at night, I would write in the darkness of our studio apartment while P.J. slept in the bed nearby. In between placing orders, I wrote in the coffee shop’s cavernous unfinished basement, which smelled like damp concrete. Sometimes I typed notes on my cell phone between shifts. But the moments snatched here and there were never enough. I could never really gather the intense concentration needed because I was constantly interrupted.

“I can’t live without writing,” a journalist friend told me. I rolled my eyes because the truth is that you can live without writing. In fact, often we must live without it.

If I wasn’t writing, I was simmering with frustration about how I should be. At a bar with friends, even if I was having a good time, I would silently berate myself for again being lured away from my work. I wanted to write more than I wanted to be near the people I loved. Sometimes I worried that this made me small-hearted or selfish, but it seemed constitutional and therefore unlikely to change.

I began writing about a woman who disappears. Not Barbara, but a fictional woman. She was a botanist who had vanished, perhaps deliberately, in the Burmese jungle in search of a rare, psychedelic mushroom. I wrote about her because, of course, I wanted to disappear. Often those who write about women who have vanished are men with an impulse to eviscerate women, or women with an impulse to eviscerate themselves. I was interested in a different kind of vanishing: the kind where you disentangle yourself from your life and start fresh. People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life. You hadn’t abandoned them. You were just gone. Mysterious rather than rejecting. Vanishing was a way to reclaim your life.

“Let’s leave the country,” P.J. said one night after work over burritos at a Mexican chain restaurant. We had been talking casually about moving abroad for a while, but the idea was tantalizing and somehow more urgent now that we were deep in the weeds of wedding planning. Moving away was another way to say no without having to say it. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” I imagined myself saying. “We can’t go to dinner because we’ll be in Asia.” We had talked about traveling, but never in a way that felt like more than daydreaming. But a few months earlier a local restaurant owner had offered to buy our coffee shop, at a loss of course, and my dad and I jumped at the opportunity to be rid of what had once been a dream. Without the coffee shop, P.J. and I could shed everything that had burdened us in D.C.

“Can we please?” I said.

“We can do whatever we want,” P.J. said.

* * *

Two days after the wedding, P.J. and I were in his sister’s basement frantically packing. A book I wanted was nowhere to be found, a friend was dropping by with a last-minute wedding present, and we were trying to figure out what to do with $130 in coins another friend had given us as a generous gag gift. We had a plane to catch, I had a stress rash on my face, and somehow in the post-wedding rush I had strained my neck, making it painful to turn my head to the right. We were moving to Southeast Asia for a year, mostly because it was the farthest away we could get on the planet before coming back around again. The weather, the people, the sounds and smells would all be new to us. Days would be remarkable again.

We had saved some money and had a few freelance writing and research contracts that could be done remotely. That money would cover our expenses, which would be minimal: we had picked Southeast Asia because it was cheap.

People would miss you. You could miss them. You could live at a peaceful distance, loving them in a way that is simpler than the way you love someone you have to deal with in everyday life.

I ran upstairs, tore the cushions off the couch, didn’t find the book, then ran downstairs to my backpack and started ripping out the clothing I had neatly rolled inside. Our backpacks contained everything we would need for the next year, which it turned out wasn’t much. We’d each packed five shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of pants, and a couple of pairs of shoes. There were also our computers, books, and two notebooks. Other than knowing what I would wear for the next year, I had no real plan. Suddenly, I didn’t care about the book. We were leaving, and how little our old lives would overlap with our new one was thrilling.

We drove to Dulles International Airport with our respective parents because both sets wanted to take us. P.J.’s sister and her children followed behind in their minivan. This vast crowd stood in a knot at the international departures area to watch us check in. At the check-in counter, something appeared to be wrong.

“You don’t have return tickets?” the ticket taker asked.

“That’s correct,” P.J. said.

“What is your plan for exiting Thailand?”

“We’ll be leaving by bus.”

I turned around and looked at our families standing behind us. Their faces were hopeful. Had we botched the trip? Would we have to stay home forever?

A few months earlier, my mother-in-law had sat us down on her porch and said, “Maybe you should consider going away for a few months instead of a year.” I felt something constrict in my chest. She seemed to be asking us not to change, or to get onto some kind of track. To her, this was a trip. We would come back to our apartment in D.C., back to her house for dinner on Sundays, to “regular” (i.e., office) jobs and daily routines. The coffee shop had been a nice little digression, but that hadn’t turned out so well. Teaching — that was fine in your 20s, as long as it was a stepping-stone to something more prestigious. And now this “trip.” It was time to grow up and get serious. This line of thinking made me want to run screaming in the opposite direction. I couldn’t describe the life I wanted, but this was not it.

It was around this time that I read a passage in a novel about two old ladies, a mother and a daughter who lived alone together in some isolated place eating only potatoes. When a stranger came across them, he was struck by how the pair seemed to have withered mentally without outside stimulus. Having only each other to talk to, they were nearly mute. Without other minds, other sights, other experiences, they had grown dull. The passage had sent a jolt of fear through me. I was surrounded by people who loved me, people whom I loved, and yet I was wilting. I thought about Wilson Follett and the urgency he felt to end his “poisonous” marriage. Maybe Helen wasn’t poisonous, but something about family life was. I didn’t like the idea that I might be anything like Wilson, who was, in many ways, the villain of Barbara’s story.

You must be vigilant, Wilson argued, because even the best-intentioned love can strangle. You cannot protect the things you love by sealing them in airtight containers. When you pin a butterfly and put it behind glass, you kill it. Barbara put her butterflies in a sieve, studied them, and then released them back into the wild. Go outside, she seemed to be saying. Be fearless, life will be over soon.

Barbara once signed a letter to her father, “With love and love and love and love and LOVE and LOVE,” each inky love becoming larger and larger. When her father wasn’t there, she wrote, “I am longing to see you” and “I miss you terribly.” Where is the dividing line in a love like this? At some point, love crosses over from being the buoy that lifts you up to the tide that drags you under. My chest was pounding as I sat on the porch and P.J.’s mother asked us to stay, and it was pounding just as loudly in the airport as we tried to leave. Perhaps Wilson was just being who he was when he left his family. Maybe I was too. It wasn’t a question of wrong or right or ingratitude. It was a compulsion.

Standing at the check-in counter, I imagined failing to get our boarding passes and piling back into the family cars. I could picture our mothers’ looks of contented relief as we all drove home together. Put us on that fucking airplane, I thought.

“Listen,” P.J. said to the agent, “if when we land in Thailand they want us to turn back around, we’ll do that.”

The woman shrugged and processed our tickets.

We were running away not just from home but from a certain idea of what married life should be. Marriage is in many ways freedom’s opposite, the binding of one life to another—in theory at least—forever. So as I tied myself to P.J. with one hand, I untethered myself from the rest of my life—family, friends, my job, my apartment—with the other.

As the plane lifted off the tarmac, I felt I had escaped. But leaving the country for a year isn’t that unusual. People quit their jobs and move all the time. They travel. It’s an indulgence, but nothing truly revolutionary. Yet suspended in the night sky, surrounded by strangers reading, talking, and sleeping, I knew leaving meant much more than that. If you had asked me then what I would have been willing to risk to find freedom, I would have said everything — except P.J.

* * *

From The Art of Vanishing: A Memoir of Wanderlust by Laura Smith. Published by Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Laura Smith.

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.

 

Recovering My Fifth Sense

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Kavita Das | Longreads | January 2018 | 18 minutes (4,512 words)

Just two weeks before my birth in November 1974, my parents moved into their first house, a split-level ranch in Bayside, Queens. They had been in America for less than a year, having first emigrated to England from their homeland of India so that my father, a gastroenterologist, could pursue his Ph.D., and my mother, an obstetrician-gynecologist, could receive additional medical training.

While my mother was giving birth to me my father was home raking leaves, because it was fall and leaves need raking, and because fathers were not considered crucial to child birthing in Indian culture. I came into the world around midday, a glowing, healthy, baby of six pounds, seven ounces.

In the hospital, after the nurses had brought me to my mother’s bedside, she began to give me my first feeding. As soon as I started to hungrily suck on the bottle, milky formula began trickling out of my nose. She wiped it away and began again, but the formula, once again, leaked from my nostril. That’s when she suspected that, although I had been spared the perceivable deformity of a cleft lip, nestled between my plump cheeks and hidden behind my rosebud lips, was a cleft palate.

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The Handgun and the Haunted Range

Justin Quarry | Longreads | January 2018 | 22 minutes (5,444 words)

 

When my father died in the winter of 2000, back when I was newly 19, the single thing he left me was a nine-millimeter pistol. The day after his funeral, my grandfather simply told me my father wanted me to have it, handing it to me in its ragged original packaging — spare bullets, along with the pistol, spilling from the Styrofoam encasement as I opened the discolored box.

This inheritance both surprised and confused me. For one thing, though I’d spent my early childhood with rifles and shotguns racked against the walls of our home and the rear window of my father’s Jeep, with countless taxidermied deer heads gazing down at me apathetically, I’d never known my father to own a handgun. For another, unlike all the other men in my family, I’d never spent a second in a tree stand, didn’t even recall playing with toy guns; rather than pretending to shoot deer or Iraqi soldiers, for instance, one Christmas I requested and received a custom-made deer costume for my Cabbage Patch doll, Casey.

The pistol also puzzled me because I hadn’t necessarily expected to inherit anything at all from my father. Over the prior 10 years, my mother had to fight for nearly all the child support she’d received, and it was an open secret that, when my mother had divorced him, he’d spent the $20,000 my great-grandmother had given him to split between my older brother and me, once we were of age, on a revenge Grand Prix. My mother had pined for a Grand Prix in the months before she left him, and so he bought one for himself, kept it immaculate, and always left it in the furthest reaches of parking lots, where it was least likely to get dinged.

Two weeks before I’d gotten the gun, and hardly a month into my second semester at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, my father’s family called me back home to Northeast Arkansas to visit him for the last time I would see him conscious. Only a week after that, they called me home again to see him, then in a coma, die.

That day, when we all knew his body was finally going to expire as we listened to its death rattle, none of the other men in my family, which is to say none of the people closest to him, could bear to be with him. My brother, who was six years older than me and had lived with my father after our parents divorced, was too afraid. My grandfather, who was also my father’s best friend, my father his namesake, was too emotionally unstable, sleepless for weeks, having had a dream in which my father was lost on a hunt at night, and as he called for my grandfather, no matter which way my grandfather pointed his light, no matter which way he stumbled in the woods, my grandfather couldn’t find his son. And so there I was at my father’s bedside with the women of the family — with the women, where I usually was. I thought that as one of his three closest living relations, even though he and I weren’t at all intimate, it was my place to be with him when he died.

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From One Friendship, Lessons on Life, Death, AIDS, and Childlessness

Left to right: Dan, the author, and Michael. (Photo courtesy of the author)

S. Kirk Walsh | Longreads | January 2018 | 27 minutes (6,711 words)

 

I first met Dan Cronin on an early spring evening in 1993. Michael, my new boyfriend, introduced us. We were standing on the southwest corner of 12th Street and Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A stream of cabs, city buses, and cars surged toward the illuminated marble arch of Washington Square. The changing twilight danced through the rustling, pale-green leaves of the trees that shaded the grounds of the nearby church. “I’ve heard a lot of great things about you,” Dan said to me. His smile was angelic and mischievous, his eyes, a striking slate blue. He lit a Newport cigarette, a wisp of smoke releasing from the corner of his mouth.

That night, we decided on dinner at a family-run Italian restaurant in the West Village. The three of us talked about books (J. M. Synge, E. L. Doctorow), Catholicism (the religion of our childhoods), Arthur Ashe’s recent death from AIDS, Dan and Michael’s strong allegiances to Upper West Side. It was a memorable night. As I said goodbye to them at the 14th Street subway stop, I felt a kind of certainty and contentment as if I already knew that Dan and Michael were going to be a part of my life for a long time.

Prior to that night, Michael had also told me a lot about Dan: He was a professional tenor, who had performed on Broadway and national tours around the country. He was a voracious reader of American history, passionate about all things Abraham Lincoln, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan. He was religious in his daily purchasing of lottery tickets. (He always played the same numbers; the street address of his childhood home.) He was employed as a waiter at the famed Russian Tea Room. (He was the shop steward of the union, and the powerful position allowed him to work only when he felt up to it.) Having recently visited his ancestral town in County Kerry, Ireland, he told a story of encountering a man who could recite passages of Ulysses in Gaelic.

Over the past year, Dan and Michael had become close friends. They had many lively discussions about sports and politics, but their true bond centered on their experiences with recovery, addiction, pain, and abuse. “He’s a remarkable man with many talents,” Michael said when he first told me about Dan. “It’s sad because he’s HIV positive.” Shortly after his diagnosis seven years earlier, Dan started taking high doses of AZT (zidovudine, the first antiretroviral drug approved by the FDA in 1987) as a part of his treatment protocol.

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You Are What You Hear

Illustration by Katie Kosma

Pauline Campos | Longreads | January 2018 | 14 minutes (3,469 words)

 

In the winter of 2011, in the dressing room at Target, I get caught up in an existential crisis. While trying on bathing suits, I find myself toggling between two drastically different views of myself: one is informed by the harsh words my mother verbalized so many years ago, probably without meaning to hurt me or realizing I was internalizing everything she said; the other by my young daughter’s unconditionally loving view of me.

In the midst of this crisis, I must perform a juggling act: I need to treat myself and my body kindly, not only for my benefit, but for my daughter’s too. I can’t pass on to her the body shame I alone somehow absorbed — the only one of my mother’s five daughters who’s wrestled with eating disorders.

***

“Mama, that one’s pretty!” my daughter shouts when I try on the blue one-piece.

I frown at my reflection in the unforgiving dressing room mirror. The lights are too bright. Beneath the glare, I see a too-fat woman with too-full hips and a too-round belly shoved into not-enough Lycra. There is fat where muscle had once been, cellulite hiding definition lost long before I got pregnant almost five years earlier. As my eyes follow the lines of my body from my head to my toes, I hear my mother’s voice and see what her words once described. My daughter, however, only sees her mama in a pretty blue bathing suit.

“I don’t like the way this one fits,” I say, evasively. “Let’s try that black one on and see how it looks.”

Innocent eyes blink up at me.

We are shopping because of a last minute birthday party invitation — a pool party, and it is tomorrow. At the time we are living in Arizona, and although I miss the changing of seasons, I can’t really complain about what I am missing while my daughter is thrilled about the chance to go swimming with her friends. She already has a bathing suit, thanks to regular swimming lessons. I do not. My husband hasn’t seen me in one since before we were married.

The black suit is…disappointing. Or rather, the body within it isn’t living up to the standards of beauty set so deeply within. It could work, except it is a bit too tight around the stomach and my boobs are spilling out of the top. I see lumps and bumps and cellulite. I keep hearing my mother’s voice. And seeing my daughter’s eyes. I keep my expression neutral and smile at her reflection.

“Let’s keep looking,” I say.

Trusting eyes blink back at me.

“Okay, mama,” my daughter says.

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