The kicker in all of this is I can’t even complain. The gorgeous stone alcove contains two mineral pools of substantial capacity (one of which is a 30-person jacuzzi), and I can use them whenever I please. Because I don’t just manage this labyrinthine, 18-acre estate; I get to live here too. My work is near constant, but so is the privilege.

The question unfortunately remains — is the number of dead animals I scoop from its waters equal or greater than my enjoyment of soaking in them? Add to that equation: the fact my late dog Scout loved the water. Subtract again the stress of trying to fix rodent-chewed wires at 11 pm so it can be ready for guest check-in the next morning. Mix it all together and you get the kind of job you can’t, in good conscience, complain about. At least, that’s how it feels.

Most rich folk with estates like these have employees like me to handle the unflattering bits. However most people like me don’t have employers generous enough to grant them equal access to their amenities in addition to running them. Because I live here, I am in charge of the following (in no particular order): the tours, the events, the laundry, the maintenance coordination, and the estate itself, which is fifty years old and constantly breaking and shifting somewhere under its many brick-laden paths, crumbling arches, and aggressive ivy. When a guest books their weekend wedding here, they have an expectation of order and beauty. Boiled down: I’m on the hunt for anything that could shatter that illusion; unfortunately in doing so I am repeatedly shattering it for myself. I am noting the dangers, the cracked glass, the loose shingles, the splitting tree branches. It’s my job to look for the broken bits, not the fairytale.

Critters are really the least of it (though break my heart the most). For a full rundown, please note: the hummingbirds who get trapped on the wrong side of the glass, the squirrels making beds in my vehicle, acres of spider web that spring back within hours, coyote mafias leaving poop right outside my door, rattlesnakes who sunbathe on the flagstone, the whole lot of them falling in our pools and being unable to climb out, and the MICE, the goddamned mice. I have spent more time than I care to mention cleaning up mouse droppings from various sheds and outbuildings, all the while worrying I might get hantavirus. (No symptoms yet.)

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Where the manor will really knock you off balance though, is in the Wonderlandian way she steals from you. Time, items, sense of place. If you set something down you may spend hours searching and still never find it again. If you need to get from the wine cave to the top of the manor’s tower, you will have no choice but to wind your way through pathways that loop you back to where you started instead of where you were headed. Acres of rose bushes try to snag you and stop you. It’s an ever-shifting landscape, an estate built for the sure-footed, an estate that, over time, grew a mind and heart of her own. Bricks emerge from nowhere – roots pushing them up when you’re approaching and sand shifting them back once you’ve passed. Really, the whole place is a trip hazard dressed as a daydream. It is the childhood fantasy you always had in your periphery, a land of opportunity, a template for anyone with a big enough imagination and a penchant for climbing stairs. This place, she could be dressed in fine silks and flowing fabrics or left to her own accord. Either way, she demands intention and attention and rewards you tenfold.

Which brings me to my next complaint-that-can’t-be-logged-as-an-actual-complaint. I have dreams for this place. But building while also repairing is never a good strategy. The two work differently, are logged in different parts of your brain, and asking it to switch between the modes wears down the internal battery faster than any dedicated day of solid, single-minded work. Her very nature (with all her spaces, events, and projects) is to yank me by the hair, to stop me before I can ever build momentum in one direction. It is why I become the accidental, last-minute wedding planner or event coordinator when the ones our guests hire often fall short. I am the catch-all, the last line of defense. Sometimes I can tame her, but it is rare. This place, she will swallow you up and spit you back into the thorns. She will laugh at you for trying to eat from single-use flatware and whip them off your tables with a gust of wind so precise it shatters the plastic. You will think you know where you’re going, you will think you’ve got it handled by yourself, and then the sheer size of her, the mighty heart of her, will turn everything you thought before coming here upside down.

I’d like to think we have a very good working relationship now. We may never be the best of friends, but we respect each other. I rush in when careless guests try to move statues, climb into our fountains, and otherwise mistreat our ancient stone and antique furniture; she slows her winds by sunsets and bathes us in early morning fog. When a guest complains about something being overgrown, I first consult our gardener — the most under-appreciated and mystical of us all, Jaime — because if pruning at the wrong time jeopardizes the health of the plant, then that guest can kindly fuck off. No one is making you be here, and no one cares about your singular opinion on the ivy growing in through the windows.

You can understand the difficulty of holding a vision in Chaos and trying to enact any daydreams, but daydream I do. How we need café seating and a built-in coffee/pastry bar in our two-story gazebo. And to organize a property-sprawling, murder mystery game with a grand showdown in our hedge maze. And to host writing retreats that utilize our ballroom as a massive, Hogwarts-style classroom. And enjoy wine tastings and poetry readings in our hill-hewn stone cave. And, and, and…

And then another forest fire catches nearby and we watch with bated breath. Or a vendor goes rogue on our service road and hits a mainline pipe. Or my dog dies, I break down and run away to Utah, because I can’t fucking handle being here without her, where hundreds of people will walk by my front doors laughing and drinking and making a ruckus and asking me for things and trying to talk to me at all.

My employer once joked it was the best job and the worst job. But it’s not even that, it’s chaos and then it’s quiet, it’s weddings and then it’s memorials. It’s a place that vanishes the rest of the world, where big and tiny things happen, and you can’t control any one of them.

Then finally … a breather. I roam the gardens with coffee or tea or what-have-you, in hand. The morning is quiet, the fog is still slinking through. In the stillness, my mind leaves my body and floats to whatever craft I am working on. I watch our nearest but still distant neighbor roll by on her horse-drawn carriage. I remember how the beautiful and the wretched are not opposites here, they’re the same thing, experienced simultaneously.

I retreat to my deck, listening to Sylvia Plath read me her poems. I come across nine rows of church pews on Facebook Marketplace for free and get the go-ahead to bring them back to the manor and repurpose them into ceremony seating. I sleep outside sometimes, under 30-foot-tall billowing drapes and a chandelier braided in flowers. I ceaselessly find the joy. It is with my boyfriend Dylan, when I see him fixing bricks and painting breaker boxes in deep ivy green just for the creative hell of it. It is with endless free bouquets and the way Jaime calls sprinklers “sprinkles.” It is all our lanterns turned on at night, with the crickets going. It is when I check the secret floatie I have hidden next to the pool filter, to find two frogs clambering atop it, waiting to be carried to safety.

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This essay is my cabinet. Consider these the books, art, practices, people and palimpsests that I have traced over to build my creative life. They are the resources I recommend most often, return to most frequently, and trust to rekindle my curiosity whenever it begins to dim.

THE LIBRARY - A PARTIAL ACCOUNT OF THE WRITERS WHO HAVE BEEN FLAGRANTLY REARRANGING MY BRAIN FOR YEARS

My Sacred Text: Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

A collection of letters written between 1903 and 1908 after a young military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus asked Rilke for guidance on becoming a writer. More than a book about writing, it is a book about how to build a life around art. I have returned to it yearly for over a decade.

“Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come.”

My Writing Instructor: Natalie Goldberg, particularly in her novel Writing Down the Bones

The best book on craft I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot. Actionable and accessible exercises.

Essay I Wish I’d Written: On Keeping a Notebook — Joan Didion

A reminder that the act of noticing is never wasted.

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”

Adaptation I Love Most: Wild

Made into one of the most beautiful movies ever by French film director Jean-Marc Vallée and starring Reese Witherspoon (screenplay by Nick Hornby). This was originally written by the one and only Cheryl Strayed, about her journey hiking the PCT in the 90s.

Memoir That Defies Its Genre: Why Fish Don’t Exist — Lulu Miller

Part biography, part memoir, part philosophical inquiry. A beautiful example of how seemingly unrelated narratives can be woven together into something larger and stranger.

“With each new fish, each new catch, each new name placed on a formerly unknown piece of the universe, came that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order. What a salve, a name.”

Favorite Lecture: A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf

Nearly a century old and still startlingly relevant. Woolf’s argument for creative independence, solitude, and privacy feels heartbreakingly significant in a society that increasingly relies on and rewards immediacy, visibility, and external validation.

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

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THE SALON - CONTAINING SEVERAL PEOPLE I CONSULT WITH REGULARLY DESPITE THE FACT I MOST CERTAINLY WILL NEVER MEET THEM

Substack I Admire: Field Notes from Nowhere Girl

Dakota Warren likes to live very romantically, dare I say theatrically. I love her distinct style. I love her website. (Have you ever noticed how many author websites are so boring? JHC I might write a whole essay on this.)

Patron Saint of Podcasters: Anna from Wild Geese

I love this woman. She hosts thoughtful, reflective conversations and is the person who introduced me to digital gardening. (Which can be defined as: “…hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.”

The Industry Decoders: The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

Two literary agents breaking down real query letters and first five pages in real time. Equal parts illuminating as it is honest. Must listen for anyone pursuing publication.

Interview I Recommend to Every Writer: Ocean Vuong: How to Write Supremely Well

Vuong reminding us to take more risks and write with more idiosyncrasy. He says, “We are asked to be too awestruck by the canonical," and I can’t stop thinking about that.

Also -

John Green: We’re not Merely a Catastrophe

I will never get over the Green brothers. Hank interviewed John for his new podcast “Humans,” and sent me trotting off into a maze off topics I’d like to explore further. Like when Hank says of humanity: “We’re either the hero or the villain.” And John says he thinks Hank is giving us too much credit. That, “After we’re gone, earth is going to be fine. Earth is going to retain complex life... But there will be nobody left to listen to Billie Holiday records, and that’s a bummer to me.” He goes on to say, “I get a little frustrated with the relentless doomerism that claims humanity is merely bad news… Of course we’re catastrophic, we’ve always been catastrophic. But we’re not merely a catastrophe.”

THE WORKSHOP - OR, THE SYSTEMS I HAVE BUILT TO COUNTERACT MY NATURAL INSTINCT TO STARE AIMLESSLY OUT WINDOWS

Favorite Writing Practice: Café hopping with a pen and paper

There’s something very invigorating about the aimless wandering in between sitting on random park benches, or in oak-carved cathedrals, or at cafe’s hidden in between brick alleyways (I’m looking at you).

Favorite Reading Practice: Reading with a pen and/or sticky notes

I’m begging you to write down your favorite quotes and a summary of each book after you read it. Helps with memory retention and refining the gold. The only downside is I can’t listen to substantive podcasts while I’m doing chores anymore because of how religiously I now write these quotes down. Here is a quick list of three quotes still burning a hole in my pocket. And to think I might never have found them again if I weren’t writing them down:

1. “She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings.” - Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

2. “Kafka’s night-writings, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness, James Baldwin’s exiled clarity – none of these emerged from comfort or compliance. They were forged in the crucible of longing.” -Erotic Decisions by Tamara

3. “...he had this idea of double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how this applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to look through the eyes of the folks who hate them.” Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

How I Get Unstuck: Boredom

The major benefit to the aforementioned podcast neutering is I have let my mind wander more often on its own. I have left my phone behind. On this, I journaled: And in the silence my mind comes rushing back to me. The part that wants to wear clown make up and organize a circus show for my friends, the part that wants to call my mom and talk about the wildflowers she’s planting, the part that wants to write about everything and trick people into reading it.

North Star of Creative Rituals: Choosing my field notes over my phone (which I write about here)

This practice turns mundane moments like waiting for a bus, grocery store lines, sitting in the front seat of a car while your gas is pumping, etc., into something full of potential.

THE ROAD - IN WHICH I ATTEMPT TO DEFEND THE IDEA THAT A CREATIVE LIFE IS BUILT MOSTLY AWAY FROM THE WORK

Non-Creative Creative Habit: Actually doing the Thing

Returning to old saved articles, bookmarked tutorials, abandoned sewing project, and unread recommendations and finally enacting their advice instead of just collecting them. Then. Deciding you want more of it, or deciding you are done with it.

Creative Risk I’m Most Grateful For: Living in a van for three years

Living in a van taught me a hard lesson in pairing down my non-essentials. It also taught me how to trust my own company and as Rilke put it, “Enjoy the great silence.” Skills I use the most in my writing practice today.

Creative Lesson Learned the Hard Way: To stop rereading my work so damn much

I used to spend hours doing this and it subsequently took me years to finish drafts. Someone (I can’t find the person to credit but I believe it was Stephen King) said something about how rereading your work makes it feel inevitable. It becomes too hard to tell what sounds off or unnecessary, because everything sounds familiar. Just finish the first draft then go touch some grass. Then reread. It’s game changing.

THE LONG TABLE - CONCERNING THE PEOPLE I WOULD MOST LIKE TO FEED, QUESTION, AND OCCASIONALLY DISAGREE WITH

Dream Dinner Guests: (To be determined.)

This section is intentionally unfinished. The best cabinets always leave room for future discoveries.

Trigger Warning: Pet Death

Before:

We decide running away is a very Human thing to do. We decide this somewhere between LA and Los Padres National Forest, after we begin categorizing the world. Going eighty miles an hour on the highway Dylan starts it by declaring driving as Not Human (with the way we are all inches away from collision in our two-ton hunks of steel but pretend otherwise). Scout climbs onto his lap and sticks her head out the window, her ears flapping in the wind.

“That’s Human,” he says. Then joins her.

We’d packed up the dogs and a weeks worth of food, too many cameras, and a vase of tulips. The goal was to drive until we didn’t recognize the roads and the air smelt different. Until Scout and Jack were scratching at the windows to be let out cause they could see the wide open spaces and how much room there was to run. Stay until our nails were black with dirt.

We work at refining our list as we settle into a campsite somewhere on Tecuya Ridge. Our location blinks and loads and we are Uncharted — the town at our base called Frazer Park, with building names like Mountain Air Veterinary hospital. I know where all the veterinary hospitals are. Anyway, we’re 7,100 feet up, the van’s front wheels propped up on two rocks, bacon cooking.

“Letting little immigrant children pick your produce is Not Human either,” Dylan says, examining a badly bruised banana. “Eating with your hands is though.” He takes a bite and I add it to our growing list.

NOT HUMAN

- Online shopping

- Pre-cut fruit

- Six lanes of highway

- GPS voices telling you what to do

- Single-use anything

- LED candles

- Power tools

- Self-checkout kiosks (we fought over this one)

- Read receipts

- Storage units

- Same-day shipping

- Terms and Conditions

- Parade of Homes

HUMAN

- Campfires

- Hand tools (shovels, saws, axes, hammer)

- Drinking from a bowl

- Braiding hair

- Free-peeing

- Getting sunburnt

- Skipping rocks

- Binoculars

- Not using utensils

- Choosing the scenic route

- Pulling over just because the dogs want to sniff something

- Crying in the car

Night three I am texting Kailee about when she should meet us in Utah, which will be the final destination in our escapade. The projector is on, playing some sappy rom-com. For the first time since Scout’s diagnosis, I text the word euthanasia. I start crying. Dylan hugs me.

“I can’t— I’m planning this “thing” and she doesn’t even know it.” I nod down at her sleeping head curled in my armpit. “That’s Not Human.”

“I know.” Dylan strokes my hair and holds us. “But if everything were Human, she’d never have made it out from under the bed.”

Animals often instinctually hide when they are dying. I keep having nightmares where I didn’t wake up. “Not Human means she’s here now,” I say, rubbing her petal-soft ears.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, he agrees, kissing me.

The next day we head toward the beach because Scout loves being chased, by humans, dogs, and waves, she’s not picky. We roll down the mountain road until we reach the seaside. Her head on my lap.

I think about how driving is technologically mediated movement but grief is not. Grief has frozen me in time. I wake up and think cancer. I go to sleep and think cancer. Someone asks me how I am and I think hemangiosarcoma is a very aggressive form of cancer.

NOT HUMAN

- Fluorescent lights

- Faux plants

- Pugs and French Bulldogs

- Insurance forms

- Metal tables

- 24/7 access to streaming services

- “Skip intro”

HUMAN

- Winking

- Peek-a-boo

- Building sandcastles

- Showing off

- Aging

- Riding horses

- Walking sticks

- Leaving a voicemail

- Sitting on the ground or floor

- Treasure maps

- Poetry

- Finding shapes in clouds and rock formations

- Digging a grave

After:

When she’s been gone two weeks, we drive to a sacred Pine grove Dylan does not want shared on the Internet. My first camp without her. Dylan drags me away from the fire to collect more wood and watch the sunset. We follow the deer trail and I point to a boulder to climb. It hovers over us some 10 - 15 feet tall and Dylan says it looks like the imprint of a giant wiener, balls and all, and maybe it belongs to god. I crawl into the imprints, which are actually just pockets of white limestone carved by thousands of years of wind erosion - nothing mystical about it. I still feel reverent, as one does after a loss, praying for whatever exists of the afterlife to treat her well, please. We stay there awhile, sitting on gods left nut, drinking Caymen Jacks (blood orange being our favorite) while my heart tries and fails to untwist itself, to fathom her non-existence.

Every morning I wake without her I crash and break into a new reality. One where I have to rely on a failing memory and an aging brain, to know the truth of her — oh how very human she was! Maybe more human than me. With the lilt of her prance and how long she would spend searching for the perfect place to pee. The way she stepped in between Dylan and Jack when Jack was getting berated a little too long for misbehaving. The alternating colors of her nails. How she rolled down the van windows when we got off the highway so she could stick her head out, breeze facing, heart open, claws flexed around the armrest.

gonzo journalist hunter s thompson was blown from a cannon. environmentalist and author edward abbey was illegally buried by his friends in the arizona desert somewhere. my boyfriend dylan would like to be entombed with all his favorite ‘items’. there is only one similarity in these unique and individual requests -- they were made in advance to someone else. they were made by the person before it was too late to do so.

since i just turned the ripe old age of thirty i thought it was about time i prepared for my death. consider this my burial directive, which is hopefully a living document, one i can edit many times to fit a changing life before the version becomes final. if not, and i’ve died sooner than ideal, all the steps are laid out below.

step one: call the closest funeral home (or the police, i suppose, if it looks like a murder) and have my body taken to the mortuary. someone needs to confirm my heart no longer beats. you’ll need to refrigerate me fast, because I do NOT want to be embalmed. don’t resuscitate me either for that matter. donate my organs, if they’re in reasonable condition.

step two: transport me back to utah.

just bury me immediately with the friends and family who can get there. no open casket or anything, this is just the burial party. if you want to do a memorial later, do that however you want. probably you can gather in the forest to grieve, maybe arrange yourselves in a circle around a fire. yes there better be crying, i just died jesus, let it out! and tell at least one embarrassing story.

carbon-neutral funeral services

at first i thought i’d want a mushroom casket, but upon further inquiry, have found they’re still very expensive. and the mushroom biodegrades in 45 days, which makes it a little pointless to begin with. it will take years for my body to turn skeletal unless i am 1. buried in warm soil, 2. well watered, and 3. turned regularly. so while yes mushroom caskets are good for the soil, you could just sprinkle some fertilizer over me damn. i think some of these sites are using the same guilt trip but towards the eco-friendly folk. i appreciate the option and i get the desire to have something nice for our bodies to be paraded around in, but there are less expensive ways to do this. ultimately i would like to build my own box, but if i don’t get around to it before i die, just wrap me in a shroud like this and bury me casketless.

step three: someone has to dig the hole. (3.5 feet deep, to allow for best chance of rapid aerobic decay) bury me in the forest where some hungry little earthworms can have their way with me. pine valley probably. plant a willow tree over top, and some wildflowers too.

step four: in tomestone arizona there is a grave that reads: Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44. No Les. No more. and an 1800’s grave in my hometown of salt lake city for ‘lilly gray’ just says: Victim of the Beast 666, and no one knows why. possibly my favorite epitaph, bette davis, reads: She did it the hard way. as for my own, I go to seek a great perhaps, might just be the most beautiful phrase for that unknowable possibility of what comes next. they are famous last words attributed to 16th-century french writer françois rabelais and popularized by john green in his novel Looking for Alaska and i am just as obsessed with them now as i was when i read them at 16. or maybe i’ll quote annie dillard in her book The Writing Life, when she reminds us: how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

No Embalming Directive

To make it official for the government folk:

I direct that my body not be embalmed under any circumstances.

If temporary preservation is required due to timing or logistical needs, I request refrigeration only. I do not consent to chemical preservation, cosmetic embalming, or any invasive postmortem procedures.

It is my preference that close friends and family arrange for my burial as soon as reasonably possible after my death. If circumstances allow, I would like to be buried promptly.

This directive reflects both my environmental values and my personal wishes. I ask that those responsible for my final arrangements honor this request.

in conclusion

allocation of my animals, my assets, and my money will be discussed at length in a letter i’ve hidden between the pages of my favorite book. if you know you know. some kind of communal library out of all my books would be cool though. everyone could have fun overanalyzing all the words i’ve underlined in various books.

as for my journals and manuscripts and rough drafts: RELEASE THEM ALL. no i think bestie should probably read them first and decide what i’d be okay with sharing. proceed with caution.

“A place like this makes you want to live forever,” one of our guests once told me.

All manner of mischief happens here; people chase each other through our hedge maze and over our giant chess board. I was cheated on here, fell in love again here, and a short time ago, as legend has it, I officially aged out of the system and turned thirty.

I handled it well despite society’s unfounded obsession with early bloomers. Take for example, Forbes 30 under 30, which is I think, meant to show us peasant folk what the bright young elite of today are doing and induce awe at the riches they’ve accumulated so far. “In fact, 46 Under 30 honorees have gone on to become Forbes billionaires!” They brag unashamedly. “And now, in the midst of an AI revolution, they’re leading the charge. The new class is using machine learning to do everything…” The article goes on to say. Inspiring, I guess?

I’m being bratty. Some of the Thirty do genuinely excite me and deserve to have their work spotlighted, like Daria Balatsky, co-founder of Alga Biosciences, a company making “safe, scalable, cost-effective dietary supplements that reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making cows burp less.” Delightful! And former elementary school teacher Yasmin Barkett, who co-founded ROYO (Read On Your Own) in 2024, a website that “empowers teachers to personalize books in real time, letting students see themselves as avatars in stories.” I love it.

But then one of the Thirty was praised for raising $255 million to “sell AI agents that can handle customer service tasks for consumer companies…” So there can be even less shitty jobs for the rest of us in the 99% to fight over. I was also surprised to find a celebrity section (I guess I forgot I live in America). The subtitle: “Turning fame into a force for change.” Sounded exciting, but most of the celebrities were just praised for their heavy acting workload and/or abundance of lucrative brand partnerships.

“No matter what you do, you must also be a content creator,” 22-year-old Anna Cathcart says. “You're putting up a mini billboard any time you post something-- that's immediate marketing.”

I want to cry for Anna, thinking of myself at 22, and what it would’ve meant for me to perform an identity before forming one. (And don’t worry, they don’t give two farts about our concern or criticism because, in case you forgot, they’re future billionaires).

Success has become less about achievement and more about timing. Narratively, we are obsessed with prodigies and child stars and our framing of them makes success feel magical, which obscures other factors like privilege or pressure. We call it talent and ambition, but often, it is compliance shaped into something marketable. We already know many prodigies are highly trained from extremely young ages or are under intense familial or institutional pressure.

But it’s easy for critics to point out bad parents, generational wealth and predatory industries. The deeper, unfortunate truth is: entire systems are built to extract value from our youth. And it has only gotten more intense with social media, with children streaming and commodifying their entire adolescences. The younger they are when this happens, the more devastating the consequences and more likely it is they will fall into the same horrifying pattern: they rise to fame early, are punished for not knowing where to go next, disappear, and return to our awareness with some kind of paparazzi-fueled public unraveling.

We crown them with attention, virality and money. And then we watch them crack.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are hitting milestones much later in life than our parents did, according to a now famous 2021 Pew Research Study. Some of these milestones (like having children) may be better approached with time and intention, and their delay isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. (Of course we are still chastised by conservatives on the right, who warn of a declining birth rate while largely refusing to engage with the reasons behind it.) The study, overall, indicates an increasing instability and reminds us: culture spotlights the exception, not the norm. Yet we still expect people to peak early in a system where adulthood itself is delayed. The timeline is broken, but the expectations have stayed the same.

I personally have failed almost every writing dream I’ve ever dreamt for myself (finish a non-embarassing book by twenty-five, find an agent by twenty-eight and be published by thirty, ha). I am far too Alice-like to have found success so young, (i.e., wandering away to live in a van for three years, falling down the rabbit hole of trying to renovate a house alone, etc.) I needed those years of movement and unrest, of bathing in rivers and dozing off at laundromats. Because as I have aged, unwatched by a society at large (who would cheer on my failures and question my successes) my understanding of my self has strengthened, matured, and resolved. A natural productivity, unforced and unbidden, has emerged.

It is ironic how much better we get at prioritizing what’s important, focusing our energies, and managing our time, while (and maybe because) we increasingly having less of it.

Refuse the Clock: A Last Bit of Wisdom From Wonderland

It has become clear to me we are not afraid of failure — we are afraid of being late. At least I was. But success does not live in one singular achievement or one moment in time; it lives alongside it. In relationship with time. So let us resist the limiting (and very capitalistic) belief that we must grab at success while young (!) and instead embrace the wisdom gained from aging.

I am here to build a life (not just a career) around my art, so I will draw inspiration from the spinsters and the crones. And I mean those words with the most generous definition: Women who do not soften, but distill, their wisdom. Women who have outlived the need to be agreed with and fawned over. I am in awe of writers like la Genberg and Samantha Harvey, who live quiet lives perfecting their craft over decades. Their bio’s are short, their public appearances few, but their art — nothing short of transcendental.

When Alice first falls into Wonderland, Lewis Carroll writes her new reality with horrifying relatability. She stumbles through the disorienting landscape in the same dreamlike way we do when we’re on our phones… i.e., Scroll for ten minutes and somehow an hour is lost. We look up and rub our eyes and think, How did I get here? What did I gain? Usually the answer is ‘nothing’ or in the case of the hyper-productive who like A.I., ‘a capitalistic efficiency of the process which might entirely rob the artistic joy from said process.’

I turned thirty and I have fallen in love with time. In some cases this means I worry too much about losing it. It is why I run from Tiktoks, shorts, reels. And I think I can officially say short form content has not yet been fast enough to catch me. I love big ideas, long ideas, and I am traveling more competently through them. In the last year I have also turned off many of the podcasts or audiobooks I once had playing in the background, preferring to let my mind wander. I am better than I ever have been at sitting in stillness. Early in the morning, or after a day spent checking off work and household tasks, I walk in the yard with the dogs. I leave my phone behind. In the quiet my whole self comes rushing back at me. The part that wants to wear clown make up and organize a circus show for my friends, the part that wants to call my mom and talk about the wildflowers she’s planting, the part that wants to write about everything and trick people into reading it. The part that understands creating gets better with aging.

‘But Carly!’ you might cry. ‘Not everyone gets to live in Wonderland.’ Well, I say, I still have to work in Wonderland and working where you live can produce a strange sort of overstimulation. Thousands of guests pass through in a year. There is a constant whiplash between my desire to enjoy the gardens and live up to their beauty. It is both a place of escape and a place that needs constant tending. I often miss when I lived in my van, making $14 an hour tutoring English and sleeping along random Forest roads. I lived a life of simplicity before I knew what to do with it. At least I couldn’t afford to scroll (literally, couldn’t afford unlimited data). I think it is in our poorest situations when we should resist it the most.

I do consider myself lucky now but I am still proud.

Wonderland is full of time-obsessed characters, but time never behaves. Clocks exist, but they fail to organize experience. The White Rabbit is always rushing. For what exactly is never clear, but Alice sets her sights on him and chases him anyway. He can symbolize youth (something you will never catch since we only ever get older); he can symbolize what motivates us (money, success, the One Thing That Will Bring Us Happiness); he can symbolize anything you like really, particularly the things we chase. I like to think of him and all his impatience as a fallacy of the whole damn story, because success, and more importantly happiness, is one thing you can’t age out of catching.

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When Dr. Godwin Baxter fishes a deceased woman’s body from the depths of the river Thames, he decides not to resurrect her unborn infant child but use its brain to bring the woman herself back to life. Thus Bella Baxter is born. Described so aptly in the book as “the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman” (p 36). After learning walking, speech, and masturbation, curious Bella impulsively decides to elope with Baxters lawyer (Duncan Wedderburn), while still only possessing the mental acuity of a child.

“I need more past,” Bella says before she runs away. “On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past, O how I envied her” (p 61). She also unashamedly details her sexual exploits with the rakish Wedderburn.

Few experiences are as universal—and as narratively uncomfortable—as the first time someone realizes their body can give them pleasure. Perhaps the film’s greatest advantage over its source text, is its ability to visually portray a childlike discovery of sexuality without sexualizing children. This aspect may explain why the film resonated strongly with many female viewers. Being young and unable to voice sexual curiosities is a unique horror of childhood; many children lack the language when they need it and/or a safe environment in which to question their experiences.

The central tension of the film begins here but ends somewhere else. Bella is portrayed as a character without social memory — approaching sexuality like a scientist approaching an experiment. Yet the world she inhabits is structured by power, experience, and knowledge that she does not yet possess. While the books final twist changes the frame of the story entirely, the film takes a different direction. Unfortunately, it stops short of developing any coinciding vulnerability of a curiosity it seeks to explore, particularly how curiosity without language or social knowledge can invite exploitation.

Bella without Social Memory

Bella begins her second life without the accumulated knowledge that most people inherit through childhood and socialization. She does not yet understand shame, reputation, social expectations, gender norms, or the cultural scripts surrounding sexuality. Because of this, Bella interacts with the world through pure curiosity, and Godwin Baxter encourages this. Before she elopes with Wedderburn, the film shows her discovering masturbation, and script writer Tony McNamara writes it comedically.

Many children encounter sexuality long before they possess the language to articulate their questions, and attempt often precedes understanding. Bella’s condition literalizes this developmental gap. She enters adulthood without the cultural understanding that helps shape sexual behavior. On her travels, Bella encounters a world that operates under confusing societal norms. The people around her understand power, manipulation, and consequence in ways she cannot yet grasp. In short, Bella lacks social memory, but the world does not.

This allows the film to stage a fascinating experiment: What happens when desire appears before instruction?

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Bella as the Scientist of Her Own Desires

People often start experimenting during adolescence (and Bella is very much cognitively still in adolescence), ideally in a safe environment and/or with peers their own age or with a similar experience level. When we experiment, we rarely arrive at definitive answers. Instead, we receive feedback. These feedbacks typically accumulate slowly throughout life, into a tentative hypotheses about what we want and who we are, which must eventually be translated into language. However, after ditching Wedderburn, Bella’s sexuality is explored at an exponential speed when she is employed as a sex worker in Paris.

While Bella embodies this process of discovery, experimentation alone does not produce liberation and sexual freedom is not simply the ability to impulsively act. Agency requires language, reflection, and the ability to contextualize experience. The purpose of experimentation is twofold: to discover what one enjoys or does not enjoy and to strengthen the ability to communicate those preferences.

Curiosity Without Language (The Real Vulnerability)

Bella’s curiosity is celebrated throughout the film, but curiosity without knowledge is a vulnerable state to inhabit for long. In real life, children initially lack the language to articulate their questions, the knowledge to recognize exploitation, and the power to refuse unwanted situations. They learn by accumulating small misreadings of the world—moments when they trusted the wrong person, laughed when they should have objected, later realized a touch was not quite right, experienced a sinking feeling of realizing too late that a joke was not meant kindly, etc. These are not failures so much as the rough drafts of self-knowledge, with takes a certain amount of bravery and time to safely explore. These qualities coexist uneasily: curiosity and fear, bravado and confusion. Childhood is not pure innocence nor fearless discovery, but a volatile mixture of both.

The film hints at this vulnerability but rarely confronts it directly. Instead, Bella is portrayed as remarkably resilient, confident, and unconcerned throughout her experiences. She is never ashamed. She is never afraid. She is never uncertain. After a while, the absence begins to expose a missing emotional reality, one that makes the portrayal feel psychologically incomplete. Children’s experiences—whether loving or violent—can shape them profoundly for the rest of their lives. Yet Bella appears largely untouched by the emotional consequences of her encounters.

The film suggests these negative emotions, particularly shame, are largely cultural construct. But it is not only cultural. Negative emotions serve important psychological functions. They allow people to reflect on their decisions, reassess their behavior, and exercise agency in future choices. Yet these moments rarely appear in the film. Even when violence erupts—such as when Wedderburn attempts to kill Bella’s friend Martha by throwing her overboard — Bella responds with laughter. Martha herself appears strangely unconcerned.

The effect is unsettling. Violence becomes something to laugh at rather than something capable of producing any damage. This emotional invincibility creates a fantasy version of curiosity that downplays the real risks faced by people navigating sexuality without guidance.

Real-World Parallel: Sue Lyon and the Ethics of Sexual Representation

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, a story of child sexual abuse is told from the perspective of the predator himself: the thirty-seven year old stepfather, Humbert Humbert. The carefully constructed narrative exposes the warped thinking of an abusive adult without requiring an actual child to embody that exploitation.

“In literature, no one gets hurt, because literature is not real,” Tom Bissel says in an essay collection on Nabokov’s work. “Yet film and television sort of are real when you’re talking about children being tasked with roles whose impact on their lives they are in no position to understand.”

When Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel into a 1962 film, fourteen-year-old actress Sue Lyon was cast as Lolita. The film aged the character up and presented her as a seductive “nymphet,” effectively transforming a story about abuse into a narrative that sexualized the young actress playing the role. Producer James B. Harris said in an interview, “…Lolita—who, we made sure when we cast her that she was a definite sex object, not something that could be interpreted as being perverted.”

Ultimately, Nabokov did not agree with the portrayal of his character Dolores (twelve years old in the book). “Not only is the portrayal of this poor child grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications,” he says. “Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

Writer Final Girl Digital argues in her Youtube essay that you can’t ethically or morally portray Lolita into a film: “When translating this warped gaze onto screen using real people and most importantly using a real little girl,” she says, “the fetishized, fantastical image of Lolita the nymphet becomes real, thus perpetuating what it sought to criticize.”

It is no wonder Sue Lyon’s film career only lasted until 1980. Lyon stepped out of the spotlight completely, and little is known about her personal life since then. Rumors of a sexual relationship between her and Harris on set of Lolita circulated but were never proven (like Humbert Humbert, Harris was also a married man in his thirties, meanwhile she was not even old enough to watch Lolita in theaters when it came out). She married and divorced five times, had one child who she would later become estranged from, struggled with her mental health, and only made one brief public comment in 1996. She said:

The Novel’s Final Twist and The Films Simplification

At the end of both stories, Bella inherits Baxter’s wealth and lives comfortably. However the novel and film diverge from each other through their narrative framing. The novel reveals that Bella’s narrative was constructed through her husbands perspective, radically altering the meaning of the events described. Bella addresses readers in a letter at the end of the novel and disputes the entire Frankenstinian nature of the story. She suggests that her husband constructed the bizarre scientific backstory as a way of explaining—or containing—her independence and sexuality. Her eccentricities become easier to explain if she is imagined as possessing a “child brain.”

Bella dedicates herself to social reform and political activism. She spreads the inherited wealth through volunteer work and advocating for women’s rights, birth control, and sexual safety. She becomes a thoughtful and hardworking woman, and this transformation has a clear and logical path from her earlier experiences. She reclaims her story from that of her husbands (and ultimately my only gripe with the novel was that we didn’t get to see more from her perspective.)

At the end of the film however, she is drinking gin and enjoying her independence. (Strangely, Felicity, a reincarnated Bella 2.0, acts as their new servant.) The film retains Bella’s narrative centrality but transforms her into a kind of lavish “girl boss.” This shift weakens the earlier thematic groundwork. Bella’s curiosity never really leads to reflection or transformation beyond the unradical choice to reject most of the obviously toxic men around her (except, somehow Max — the student of and co-conspirator to the mad doctor who reanimated her.)

Bella marries Max in the book too but she explains she married Max out of convenience, thus making sense of why someone as independent and intelligent as her could end up with someone who was complicit in her entrapment. The novel thus was able to successfully explore how male narratives shape women’s stories. When the film removed this framing device, it shifted the thematic terrain: By focusing on Bella’s interiority and rapid development, it became uniquely suited to explore the effects this experiment had on her psyche. But Bella’s liberation resembles a version of empowerment defined by adopting traditionally masculine behaviors without questioning the structures behind them.

This imitation problem is echoed in an observation made by Rainer Maria Rilke in his 1904 letter to a young Franz Kappus. Rilke is speaking on the necessary and inevitable breakdown of rigid gender roles when he says:

“The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex.”

Bella’s journey sometimes felt trapped within this transitional stage. Rather than developing a fully articulated identity, she simply inherits the habits and goals traditionally reserved for generationally wealthy men. Drinking, sex, and accumulating wealth.

Bella’s story offered a fascinating opportunity to explore sexual curiosity and the cultural frameworks that normally shape and contort it. The films narrative shift makes it uniquely capable of exploring the vulnerability, and in some cases, privilege of taking risks. Yet the film ultimately chooses shallow, fast-tracked celebration over deeper examination: Fear, shame, and vulnerability largely disappear. What remains is a fantasy of liberation that sidesteps the deeper emotional realities of learning sexuality in a world structured by power.

The girl: a random tagalong to my twenty-eighth birthday party.

The book: ethically questionable and laughably unrealistic.

The result of our brief encounter: an end to my year-long experiment with polyamory.

I call it an experiment because that’s exactly what it was. I fell into it accidentally, but not in the way often portrayed in literature and cinema.

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Misconception #1 : The affair-to-polyamory pipeline

In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, the protagonist leaves her husband and child to embark on a cross-country work trip, but ends up staying in a nearby motel instead. Over the course of the novel, she lies about her whereabouts, develops an obsession with a random rental car associate, and drops thousands of dollars renovating the motel room. Eventually, she cheats on her husband with an older woman, which results in the protagonist and her husband entering into a vaguely open relationship. After a year or two, the couple divorces but remain friends.

Stories framed as being about polyamory often seem to center around bored, upper-class couples and their very privileged mid-life crisis. I understand why affair stories have an audience, and that some couples have a misplaced desire to attempt an open relationship after infidelity. But successful polyamorous relationships rely on trust and honesty as much as, if not more than, a monogamous one.

In a monogamous relationship, there are often certain avoided topics. For example, you may not be allowed to admit you find your sister-in-law attractive. Or your partner is uncomfortable with you bringing up past sexual encounters or framing them too positively. Or maybe the topic of masturbation is avoided altogether. In polyamorous communities, dishonesty around these subjects is laughable.

I thought All Fours was a decent book. But the affair-to-polyamory pipeline is a tired cliché, and I didn’t find it personally relatable. Cheating is not polyamory. Throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what can save a failing marriage is not polyamory.

Here’s how it happened for me

Jameson was my opposite in almost every way. Tall, energetic, social. Most of all he was surprising, and falling in love with him was no less shocking. He was married at twenty and divorced at thirty. He was thirty-four when I met him on my first day of work: Charming but earnest. Promiscuous and unashamed. He was also an ex-Jehovah’s Witness and had been shunned by many of his friends and family, per the religious guidelines.

I flirted immediately.

“I’ve never worked in a bar before so,” I gave him a lazy smile. “Feel free to boss me around.”

He laughed, asked me questions. As a nomad who was usually on the move, I’d learned to boil myself down to an elevator pitch: I’m a born and raised Utahn, yep, it’s just me and my dog Scout. Nope, not married, not even close.

He asked me out on our second day working together.

“I’m not sure I’ll ever marry again,” he warned me at dinner that night. “Or be monogamous.”

I was unfazed. He reminded me of my best friend, Alina. She was a teen mom turned adult film actress living in a deep red state. She and Jameson were both people who, in some way or another, lived so radically it became far easier to embrace honesty and all the hate that came with it, rather than juggle multiple versions of themselves based on who was in the room.

I was in no rush to commit either, since I had just settled down in Salt Lake again after three years on the road, so Jameson and I were on the same page. But he still took our relationship seriously. He wasn’t flaky or unresponsive, coy or misleading. We talked about the other women he was dating, and I could tell he genuinely cared about each of them. I told him about the ex-boyfriends I was still friends with, like Noah, the one who regularly hung out at my house so our dogs could reunite.

“In fact, he’s at my house right now, probably passed out on my couch,” I said.

“Your couch?” Jameson asked, as he garnished a martini glass with an olive.

“We’re not sleeping together,” I said.

“You don’t gotta lie,” he sipped his new concoction.

“Why would I lie?” I said, and gave him a whip with my towel. “Don’t get me wrong, I do still sleep with my ex occasionally, just not that one.”

He spewed his drink out, laughing. Then he wiped his mouth, slung his arm around my neck, and said, “You’re alright, you know that?”

We played a lot of pickleball and bananagrams. We flirted at work, and I regularly overheard him telling coworkers and friends how much he liked me. He was quick to point out observations and give compliments. “Do you know what I love?” He would start, then proceed to list something specific and lovely. Like after I met his shy roommate from Colombia and he said: “You were so nice to Karen today. I really appreciate how you took the time to get to know her.”

After two months of consistently hanging out, he sat me on my kitchen counter and backed up just to look at me. “I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. A little hiccup of crazy to come out.”

“Uh oh,” I asked. “Am I too healthy for you?”

“No! After a decade of an unhealthy marriage, absolutely not. What can I do to prove how much I like you? Want me to use condoms with everyone else? I’ll do it, I swear.”

“Raw dog exclusive?” I asked and he laughed and laughed. Our first tiff came a week later, when we were kneeling in my bed, struggling to angle the projector just right at the wall. He brought up the topic of condoms again.

“Did we decide for sure that’s what we’re doing?” He asked.

I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t know, didn’t we?”

“Well, hmm, I’m sorry. Full disclosure, I didn’t use one the other night with Billy-Anne.”

I pondered this for a moment. Tears poked at my eyes. I felt for the first time, the ramifications of messing up in our situation. How correspondingly larger the hurt.

“Fuck,” he said, “Did I upset you? I’m so sorry,” he scooted closer and hugged me into him. “I’ll wear condoms with everyone else. Carly? Tell me what you want?”

I wanted to say Yes, idiot, that’s obviously what I want. But I took a deep breath, said the truer, more difficult thing. “I don’t want you to make any promises you can’t keep.”

“I can keep this promise,” he said. “I want to. I hate that I just hurt you, I’m sorry.”

I smiled, nodded, let it all go. “Thank you for being honest.”

There were other slip-ups he admitted to quickly. Each new discussion sometimes brought discomfort, but more often than not, brought a sense of closeness, even awe that we could be so candid with each other. There were no ignored phone calls, no tipping away of his phone screen, no hiding of his password. People at work would try to catch him in a lie for me. “Oh yeah, I ran into Jameson at the bar with so and so the other night…” I was happy when I could smile and say, “Oh yeah, she’s visiting from Texas.”

The “I love you’s” started slipping out between us, and we did not bother to reign them in. This love was friendship love, that dipped into romantic love, but did not pigeon hole itself there.

After safe-sex talks, we made other agreements. Some were obvious, like not sleeping with anyone if they had a partner who wasn’t on board with the arrangement. Eventually, when he asked me to be his girlfriend, we agreed to talk about potential sexual encounters before they happened.

Agreements we made easily. Definitions were harder.

Misconception #2 : definitions are the same for everyone

In Sally Rooney’s Normal People, main characters Connell and Marianne are best friends and sometimes lovers. They are clearly in love, but spend much of the novel dating other people or separated by long distances. Their story, which spans years, is full of emotional conflict mostly centering around miscommunication. Rooney often employs a time-jump technique to explore these misunderstandings. One chapter will end with the characters happily together, and in the next chapter we find several months have passed and the dynamic has shifted. In one pivotal scene directly after a time jump, Marianne reveals to the reader that Connell said he wanted to date other people. Later we find out Connell remembers this conversation differently and had no desire to date other people. They disagree with each other on exactly what was said, leaving the reader to attribute the misunderstanding to the characters insecurity.

We aren’t shown verbatim what was said, reminding readers that a narrators framing is unreliable. It is cleverly done and truthful to the characters experience. However, I found the most common misunderstandings between me and Jameson were due to our own assumptions of a words definition, rather than a misremembering that is only revisited months after the conversation happened. The “terms” of the relationship between the characters in Normal People are never really discussed at all, and by the end of the book, the characters are still (mis)communicating in the same way.

Ultimately, Rooney wrote the miscommunication she wanted to portray, and wrote it well. But challenging a characters connotation of a word is an alternately juicy opportunity that may frustrate readers less because the ambiguity of unreliable memory is not needed. Every relationship has unique agreements. Conflict arises when we assume our partners expectations match our own, instead of talking about them beforehand.

“Fooling around” meant something different to me than it did for Jameson. In my view, “a lot” of sexual encounters meant more than a couple per month. In his view, anything under ten didn’t seem like much at all. We only discovered how differently we viewed these phrases after living the reality of them. I saw just how complicated things could get after we implemented a rule of No Sleepovers with other people.

“I like this. I like reserving some things to be just for us,” he said. “The intimacy of falling asleep with you is so special.”

I went to bed a few nights later knowing he was going out with one of his other partners. He promised to text me when he made it home safely, but when I jolted awake at 4 a.m., I checked my phone and saw nothing.

I called him a few times and he didn’t answer, and no matter how I tried to convince myself he might’ve just forgotten, I began to spiral on the realization that he might’ve been careless or drunk enough to break the rule. Or worse, I wouldn’t believe him if he told me he’d been home the whole time.

Finally, at 5 a.m., he called me back. I could tell he was in the car.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m just leaving.”

“Okay,” I said and waited for the explanation.

He went on to tell me about the concert they saw, how they made it back to her apartment around 1 a.m., how he was ‘pretty tired’.

“Okay, and?” I asked.

“And?”

“It’s 5 a.m. Did you fall asleep or something?”

“I didn’t mean to,” he said.

“You didn’t feel yourself start to get tired?”

“Well, I slept through my alarm,” he finally said.

“What do you mean, your alarm?” I asked.

“I was just going to take a quick nap and sober up. I had an alarm set for 3 a.m. I didn’t mean to sleep through it.”

“A quick nap?” I sputtered. “That’s what Uber is for.”

He realized how hurt I was and apologized. I accepted his apology and thanked him for his honesty. But the dispute called into question the feasibility of imposing certain rules and how we would enforce them. What counted as a sleepover? Were naps off-limits too or just naps past midnight? Would we have to initiate a curfew or could you technically stay out until 6 a.m. as long as you didn’t fall asleep?

It felt uncomfortable and silly. And after awhile, it also became exhausting.

Misconception #3 : Equality

When I think about the double standards or sexual inequity reflected in our culture, I think of two things: the horny husband who’s obsessed with not getting enough sex, like in the 2011 movie Hall Pass, when two wives give their husbands a “week off of marriage” to do whatever they want. Or I think of what I would see most commonly among real life couples around me: the heterosexual, got-married-to-young ex-mormons who want to spice things up in their marriage. They go searching for a third person to bring home, but these are, of course, stories where only threesomes with other women are allowed. Woman on woman intimacy is eroticized and “safe” for heterosexual masculinity while male/female intimacy destabilizes masculinity and is therefore excluded. Polyamory is only okay for the women to engage in if A. it is with another woman, and B. he can join in.

Jameson and I had different goals out of polyamory. Ultimately, as an ex-Jehovah Witness, he was looking to rebuild a life within a community full of lovers and friends. He loved meeting new people and attraction was easy for him. I understood why this aspect appealed to him — in polyamory, people often default to exercising their sexual freedom because sexuality is still very restricted in many cultures. It can also be fun and exciting.

Jameson would average one or two dates or hangouts per week, which often resulted in one or both of them turning sexual. On the other hand, I only had sex with one girl and one ex-boyfriend (one time) throughout the entirety of our year-long relationship. We acknowledged our differences, mainly: I didn’t want to go on that many dates and rarely found myself attracted to other people. Not to mention I was far too busy. Some polyamorous couples find the “imbalance” uncomfortable. They feel the need to force a certain kind of equality, i.e, they both can go on one date a week, and even if one partner didn’t feel like going on that date, they did anyway, just to avoid being alone at home. I stubbornly and quietly rebelled against this idea. To me, fairness wouldn’t mean forcing Jameson or myself to “match” each others sexual habits.

In my opinion, polyamory’s true philosophy is about much more than sex - it’s about autonomy in all forms. This includes sexually, but more importantly for me, this meant more freedom with my time, finances, and non-traditional friendships. I was renovating my house and had no intention to add a man’s name to the title. I liked to be alone for days at a time and didn’t like asking for permission. I was exploring my sexuality and attraction to other women. I was helping an ex-boyfriend (and very dear friend) through an emotional crisis, and once, that included help financially. There aren’t many husbands who would ‘let’ their wives do that.

When Jameson found out, he said: “That’s really fucking cool. He’s lucky to have you.”

Our differences were usually what made things exciting, especially at first, even if they did produce a kind of whiplash. I’d spend all day reading, crafting, building something, and he’d be out with friends, long after I’d put myself to bed. One morning, the day before I was showing my house to a potential renter, he called me and sleepily told me about his night - drunken city wandering with co-workers, searching bars and workplaces for a sober friend to take their drunken group home.

“Are you still coming over to weed?” I asked, since he’d promised to the night before.

“Mmhmm,” he mumbled. “Maybe I’ll just sleep a bit longer though.”

I find myself sometimes wanting to pull back (because I think it’s “good for me.”) I journaled that morning after we hung up. Other times, I want to recklessly experience him. Maybe because I know I’m strong enough now to handle the consequences. And isn’t that what strength is good for? I tapped my pen in my notebook a lot those days, trying to understand every confusing stab of disappointment or discomfort.

There was a knock at my front door. When I answered it, I was surprised to find Jameson standing there, with gardening gloves and a bouquet of flowers. He scooped me up, kissed me, and we weeded for six hours.

I felt guilty for ever doubting him.

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It was like this a lot. I ping-ponged between certainties - there’s no way this could work out, we’re too different, this doesn’t have the legs for longevity. Then the pendulum would swing to the opposite side of the spectrum - this is so great, he genuinely supports everything I do, he is my biggest cheerleader.

We’d been together for six months when I accepted a job in California. I had one month to pack my bags, and figure out how to handle a relationship with this man who had elbowed his way into my life and found a space there.

“I have to go,” I said. “This is too good of an opportunity.”

He nodded. “I agree.”

“What do we do?” I fretted.

“I’m coming with you,” he said, “obviously.”

We said we’d try long distance for a few months, and if things were going well, he could move out to the estate I was managing. We were going to roll the dice, as I kept calling it in my head. He bought me a promise ring, though not for marriage.

“I promise to meet you in California.” He said as he slipped it on my finger.

Misconception #4 : Time

In a New York Times article called “The Trouble with Wanting Men,” Jean Garnett chronicles her attempts to re-enter the dating world as a woman in her mid-forties. She spends much of the article expressing dissatisfaction about her resigned fate as a heterosexual. After an open marriage that ended in divorce, her cynicism towards love is understandable. But when she meets an educated polyamorous man, a “sex nerd” who is overly communicative, she’s still unimpressed. She’s met this type before. The type who has “read all the literature and knows all the proper terms.” Someone who treats polyamory like a second job or a passion project.

Ultimately, I don’t know why Garnett passed on Sex Nerd, or if she was even interested in having an open relationship again. But her disdain towards the knowledgeable and thoughtful aspects of this man confused me. Since when is Sex Nerd an insult? Especially in the context of Garnett living as a divorcé post failed open-marriage.

Going by her definition, Jameson and I were definitely Sex Nerds. He was an incessant ruminator, like me. He knew what it meant to wonder and wonder until you’d exhausted yourself, and keep wondering still. He caught my trains of thought before I could send them too far away into the land of hypotheticals. He was proactive in addressing concern, initiated conversation on uncomfortable topics, and handled the topics carefully and thoughtfully. At first this was incredibly refreshing, but eventually I found myself wanting to avoid the conversations altogether.

There was an uncomfortable truth developing quietly under the surface of our relationship: For polyamory to really work, you basically have to treat it like a second job. To respect each partner, to prioritize having all the discussions needed, sorting through the unique baggage new partners bring to the table, especially when they’re unfamiliar with the ins and outs of open relationships — it all takes an incredible amount of time. I started calling it “mental math,” when referencing the variables and changing equations I felt I was constantly juggling. Unless Jameson and I agreed to only having random hookups with people we’d never meet again, I was struggling to see a world where I had the time and mental capacity to be in a long-term open relationship.

“We don’t always have to do this, you know,” he said to me one night.

“Hmm?” I asked, looking up from my book.

“We can just be monogamous sometimes. If we’re busy or stressed out. Or like… for a bit after we move in together.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “Like give ourself a break.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Just explore California, enjoy the estate.”

“Agreed,” I said, smiling.

Through research and my own experience, I found non-monogamous couples were regularly shifting through versions of polyamory that felt most authentic and manageable to them. In open relationships, communication errors forced out fresh understanding. Jealousy was bargained with and became mundane. New relationship rules were formed, revised, and often dropped. And couples sometimes found the need to simplify their outside commitments and became more monogamous during busier periods (like when raising young children). They could then return to the open lifestyle when they had the space to do so. Alternatively, couples with robust and established polyamorous communities might embrace or rely the support of their other partners during these same periods.

I moved away in January of 2024, and after several months of visiting back and forth, he moved in with me in April of the same year. I told him I wanted this to be the season of picnics in the gardens, camping in the gazebo, listening to owls and coyotes together, of nights spent reading, lit only by candle light. He said he wanted that too.

So I was wide open and soft in the palm of his hand when he cheated on me.

Misconception # 5 : There’s no such thing as infidelity in an open relationship

He’d gotten a haircut the same day he decided to fuck her. They cut off too much of his mustache. We’d been living together for only two months.

When I found out from someone else two days later, I did not feel contained anymore. I felt myself spilling over my edges, losing bits of myself alarmingly fast – optimism, surety, safety, they splashed out into parched desert soil and dissolved before I could even identify the lost parts. The first thing I said was, “We’re breaking up, you know that right?” Then I yelled at him how men are pigs. They’re all pigs. I buried myself into my bed covers, not finding it comfortable, moved to the couch, too stiff, then the armchair, but everything felt wrong. And I was too sober for this, way too sober for this, too fucking sober for this. I rolled a joint with shaking hands. I lit the joint and sucked and kept sucking. What the fuck. I was so utterly confused. I was furious. I put so much work into understanding polyamory, in bettering my responses to it, in working on regulating my emotions and taking accountability for my feelings. And the second he had to do one hard thing, he immediately caved. Sex had some kind of power over him I had not fully realized until that moment. He ruined such a good thing, and we were just getting started, what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck. “You couldn’t have waited a little longer? You couldn’t have fucking waited?” I asked. Crazy thoughts came, like, maybe he has a tumor in his brain. It was like he went and got his hair cut and came back a different person. A clone took his place. If a fully mustached version of him walked into my apartment and said he’d just been abducted by aliens and he’d only just escaped, for just a second, I might have believed him.

But really. It was still him, the very same him. As optimistic as ever – his faith in what we could overcome woefully off course.

It made a sick sense in my gut: The way he looked up to my community of friends and ex-partners, my confidence and self-acceptance. Unmatchable when paired with his impulsivity. I forgave the little “harmless moments” because the honesty was so refreshing. Despite the embarrassment of making him move out after he just moved in, I knew it was over and done with. When he asked if there was a chance we could still work, I told him there was no way. If he stayed, there’s no way it wouldn’t eat me up; no way I didn’t lose sleep. If he stayed, he would consume my thoughts and my joys and my fears, he would be my anxiety and my validation and I wasn’t losing sleep for fucking anybody.

I didn’t think about the other woman much. I didn’t really care about her role in it, other than that she tried to be my friend and so I didn’t want to see her again. But 20 year olds were drawn to mistakes. As they should be, with their whole life ahead of them. He was not a twenty year old and he didn’t get to make twenty year old mistakes.

In fact, the alarming fifteen year age gap between them was another on the list of reasons the betrayal sickened me so much. Not to mention he broke all three of the very simple rules we had ever made. So I was mildly enraged when two separate people acted confused when I told them (begrudgingly) that he cheated on me.

“But weren’t you in an open relationship?” They asked.

I’ll say it simply, because I am still exhausted by the subject, even as I find myself wanting to write about it now, sitting next to my new (amazing) parter, almost two years later. Every couple has rules and agreements, has differences with what they consider ethical and unethical. Porn, masturbation, flirting, kissing, emotional entanglement. All of these have to be determined and agreed upon by the mutual parties. To agree to the rules of a game and then break them for your own personal gain is cheating. Simple as that.

We didn’t leave the apartment for three days straight while I dragged every answer out of him I could think of one day wanting. He asked me things he didn’t think to ask me before, back when we had years and years to talk. Who was my favorite writer? (Rainer Maria Rilke) Who would I have sex with first after him? (Probably my ex) Wouldn’t couples therapy be fun? (Yes, probably, but it’s not happening).

He asked if I think he has a mental disorder or a sex addiction.

“Jesus, I don’t know, go see a therapist,” I said, rolling another joint. “You clearly have self-esteem issues.”

I looked for the signs I should’ve known. Namely, his impulsivity. But he made me the benefactor to his life insurance policy. He wanted my location and to share his – I’ve never done that with a partner before. He bragged endlessly about me. I still believe he wanted to have an honest, healthy relationship, and he simply wasn’t capable of it. I wasn’t crazy to believe you, became my mantra, I wasn’t crazy I wasn’t crazy I wasn’t crazy.

He asked me at least once a day, in one way or another, if I would let him stay, if we could work on things together, if he could win me back, prove it to me. He said he would never do it again, he saw how horrible the situation is, how serious it all was. He tried other approaches. He said he was in denial, it couldn’t be over. Now he knew the extent of his issues, he could work on them. Can we talk in a month? Let’s meet up in September. Let’s meet up in one year. What if he just moved out but we kept dating? I can check his phone every night to make sure he’s being honest. He’ll do anything I want him too.

But I didn’t want to be his mom or his babysitter. I didn’t need another project. He wasn’t ready for a healthy relationship, polyamorous or not. So I gently told him no, kissed his hand. I had finally stopped crying after this part, by day 7.

Day 9 I was quiet all day. He told me he missed me.

“You miss a me that doesn’t exist anymore,” I said.

On day 16, he moved out.

Ultimately, for me, polyamory was about testing the edges of my comfort, questioning established relationship dynamics, and practicing a more autonomous style of love. Ironically, the times I have seen polyamory work best is the No Rules type, which only works if you trust your partners decision making 100%. Or there is the novelty type, the “monogam-ish” couple who may flirt here and there, engage in interesting opportunities when they present themselves, but don’t necessarily go looking for them. And ultimately, unless you are privileged and passionate enough to commit significant amounts of time to its establishment, an open relationship may just end up being a failed experiment (though admittedly, a very fascinating one).

In high school I was sporty, and at various times, quite handy. I hung every set of curtains in my best friend’s house (but there is also a half-built cat tower in her laundry room). I experienced a coming-of-age depression, bought a motorcycle, learned guitar (then later sold the motorcycle and left a note book full of unfinished song lyrics in my closet). Eventually I went to college, and began working in academia. I’ve read hundreds of books (and set down dozens of others). Mom and I both have dreams of living off-grid, so I got into canning and horticulture (now the scraps of a very large garden bed are rotting in my parents backyard).

I am most ashamed of this last one.

My blessing and my curse is I am an accomplished romanticizer. Consequently, I have quit a lot of hobbies I was initially obsessed with. There is a natural course-correction that takes place as we age, a revising and a sharpening. But in a culture that worships grit, I experienced several conflicting effects before I could name or appreciate them. I once wrote in my journal that I was doomed to live a bunch of little lives, and nothing represents this fear better than my graveyard of abandoned projects.

Exhibit A: Gardening

What pulled me in: Post break-up blues and a whole lot of extra time on my hands. Living in a city for one month too many. Jess’s garden from Roots and Refuge.

The fantasy: Tunnels of green, endless cherry tomatoes, dirty feet, dirty hands, unbrushed hair, milkmaid dresses, tangled flowers, open space.

The reality: I purchased an unrealistic number of seed packets and grew two pepper plants and two tomato plants on my deck. I made salsa all summer long. After accounting for soil and fertilizer, I probably spent about $30 dollars a jar.

Why it was abandoned: I moved into a van and had no porch or land to grow from. (+ I almost cut my finger off building aforementioned garden beds for mom. Mom kindly let me off the hook.)

What I’ll keep from it: All the seed packets, greenhouse plans and garden layouts. A disdain for grocery store produce. A resigned understanding this is a retirement vision, to be picked up if I can ever afford an acre or two of my own.

Exhibit B: Bouldering

What pulled me in: A big, red rock, stretched across forty feet of St. George’s Pioneer Parkway, and a welcoming community of fellow dirt-bags.

The fantasy: Traveling from town to town, exploring places through their boulders. My dog, Scout, in my passenger seat and endless road in my rearview mirror.

The reality: My obsession at its peak coincided with my time living in a van. I’d stop in Salt Lake when the weather was nice and pay for a temporary membership at a climbing gym called The Front. I worked during the day inside their cafe, climbed in the evening with friends, then used the gym shower and parked my van on the street outside to sleep. My maps even began to confuse The Front as “Home.” For a few months at a time, it was.

Why it was abandoned: Moved out of the van. No nearby gym. A shower at home. Trips to the desert take all day.

What I’ll keep from it: A pair of overly expensive, well-worn climbing shoes and a chalk bag. The grip strength of a young man. An unhealthy fondness of heights, and a proclivity toward mapping the climbable routes of any passing boulder, tree, or structure.

Exhibit C: Lyra & Silks

What pulled me in: Videos of a spinning acrobat queen named Aisling and an ungodly amount of spite after I dumped my ex-boyfriend for cheating.

The fantasy: I finally learn to do the splits and maybe join the circus. Feathers, beads, strange apparitions. I get wrapped up in a carnival, murder mystery.

The reality: I hate stretching but I have strength, and spinning is fun. I train obsessively for a few months, pull off a few cool moves, and injure my ribs in a reckless body roll. Don’t learn the splits. I now get on less frequently now, despite promising everyone a thirtieth birthday show.

Why it will likely be abandoned: I may no longer have access to twelve-foot, structurally sound, ceiling beams like I do now. I will let myself procrastinate almost any type of physical workout if the alternative is reading a book or journaling. Because these are “Good For My Brain.”

What I’ll keep from it: $250 bucks in paid performances and a birthday routine of unknown quality. A whole lot of sparkly outfits and three solid steel hoops. A new understanding of my own gracefulness.

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In Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, she likens overwhelm of choice to the plucking of a good fig. “I wanted each and every one of them,” the narrator, Esther, says, “but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” So she stands in front of the tree, “starving to death,” and watches each fig fall to her feet and dry up around her. I am not like Esther, but I am close. The fruit around me may be dried, but there is also be a bite or two taken from each one.

Quitting isn’t the problem – not starting at all is far worse. Esther was paralyzed at the thought of all the lives she could not lead, and my only solution to this cognitive gridlock has been to eat immediately, ravenously, and without loyalty. Quitting, so long as you don’t leave someone else holding the consequences, is one of the most under-rated creative practices.

Here’s why.

1. You See What’s Left

Not noted above is my winter fling with snowboarding (abandoned after two concussions due to fear of early onset dementia) and an undying fantasy of riding everywhere on horseback (another retirement dream). I get random bursts of obsession with film photography, DIY, and interior design, and about once a year I resolve to sew a whole new wardrobe using only second-hand materials. I get my ass handed to me in pickleball by my parents every holiday and pull out my half-inflated rugby ball when old teammates come around. There are several jars of frozen bugs in my freezer, waiting to be correctly preserved…

Through it all, some have remained constant.

In my thirty years, there have been hobbies that came and went, but more importantly were the ones that returned. Whether due to logistical reasons or emotional ones, I have always been pulled back to writing and community based activities.

Writing, and all its forms — researching, documenting, collecting, is the only way I know how to successfully combine all my fields of interest into one cohesive, creative practice. It is also accessible and flexible. Writing can be crammed into thirty minutes or it can be obsessively indulged in. Writing can be solitary or it can be communal. All I need is pen and paper and something to wonder about.

2. You Become More Human

ChatGPT can tell you that a bouldering route is called a Project, and it can tell you how to interpret the rating system to determine the difficulty. But it can’t tell you how half of “climbing” is actually just sitting on your crash pads with fellow dirt bags, laughing and drawing straws to see who has to make the two-hour car ride back with Jake’s sweaty, old climbing shoes. (We tied them to the roof-rack).

How else can we confidently say a gardener always knows the weather and dirt never leaves from under her fingernails? Only a human could tell you that working in an upscale, members-only club with very few patrons is ten thousand times less interesting than working in a dive bar kept busy by over-sharing drunks.

In conclusion

There are a number of reasons we might stay inside a life of expired curiosity: fear of change, others expectations of us, or even our own initial investment. Endurance is often praised as virtue, even when attention has already moved on.

But experience doesn’t need mastery to be useful. Not every departure needs a reason. And essays don’t have to be finished in order to

Hey! Look over here!

Never before has our attention been so fiercely fought-over, which unironically reveals its value. And nowhere do we give attention up more thoughtlessly than in the tiniest slices of our lives — in the waiting rooms and elevators, in grocery store lines and drive-throughs, when the urge to look away from the world and down to our phone screens is the strongest. There are many ways to combat this. In one famous anecdote, Kurt Vonnegut insists on walking to the store to buy an envelope instead of, as his wife suggests, ordering a thousand of them to be delivered to their house. He explains the rituals he does on this walk and the people he sees, ending with “…we’re here on Earth to fart around.” And, of course, the computers will do us out of that.

I regularly experience a similar, hard-to-pin-down feeling of losing something vital, so in mid-2024, I bought a tiny notebook titled FIELD NOTES and stuffed it into my purse. On the first page, I transcribed a quote from Annie Dillard: “How you spend your days is… how you spend your life.” I didn’t mean for this quote to forecast, over a year later, my 2026 New Years Resolution — to write down one observation a day, for the whole year.

Classes and Categories -

When I first got the notebook in 2024, I intended to pull it out when I was bored at social functions instead of scrolling on my phone. One of my first entries is a disorganized tangle of overwrought sentences I tried to force into some kind of poem.

The entries got a little more interesting after I took the notebook with me to a soccer match I had an obligation to attend. To combat my boredom, I watched the match yes, but I also watched the players, the families, the coaches. I wrote: There’s always that one player on the sidelines, yelling at his teammates as if they can see the game from his perspective. Is he benched so often he’s forgotten you can hear absolutely nothing but the refs whistle when the adrenaline is roaring in your ears? It was a simple (and sassy) observation, but it felt revolutionary. It was more than a description of the scene — it reframed the scene entirely. It is a skill I’m just beginning to recognize, but exists in great writing everywhere.

In an interview with NEWSNIGHT, Donna Tartt likened jotting observations down in her little traveling notebook as the writer’s version of an artist sketching in a sidewalk cafe. “If you need a character, all you have to do is look up,” she said. And Joan Didion wrote in her essay on keeping a notebook, “Some morning when the world seems drained of wonder … On that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon…”

Looking back at my entries, I’ve discovered the forms my observations fall into, and how each form has distinct benefits. Every entry sits under the umbrella of Might One Day End Up In A Novel. But below that, there are two classes, non-fiction and fiction, for whether the observation is drawn directly from real life, or simply inspired by it. In each class, there are five main categories; Dialogue, Humor, Description, Commentary, and Misc.

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Dialogue -

I tend to write down a lot of dialogue — it is what I’m most drawn to recording. One of my favorite lines came from a guest who was visiting the whimsical garden estate I work at. He remarked and I recorded: “A place like this makes you want to live forever.” A lot of my loved ones appear in this category. When Dylan forgets things, he says he didn’t forget, I wrote. He says, “They are just misplaced memories. I have a crack in my brain where they blow out.”

I, like many writers, have warned those around me that uncopyrighted phrases may be stolen and repurposed. But a lot of the dialogue I’ve written in my Field Notes has come unbidden into my mind while staring off into the middle-distance.“The world loves me right now,” one entry reads, and I can’t remember if it was supposed to be funny or poignant, or maybe both. Either way, noting the way real people speak and isolating the impactful lines sharpens my own ability to write compelling dialogue.

Humor -

I also tend to write down the things that make me laugh. Because of this, entire sections of my Field Notes essentially became a love letter to the people I admire most in my life. A wine-drunk night in a hot tub with my best friend postmarked our dark humor.

Lydia: What would we do if one of us was dating an actual psychopath?

Me: I don’t think we’d ever get that far apart in logic.

Lydia: You know what I’d do first?

Me: Poison him?

Lydia: No.

Me: Entrap him in infidelity?

Lydia: Well yes, but not with me, that’s too obvious.

Me: Go for it.

And Dylan (my partner) shows up on almost every page. On one of our many camping trips, I stumbled away from the campfire to scribble.

Description -

I am not great at writing compelling description in my novels. With my Field Notes in hand however, I started noticing the details of craftsmanship and the difference in textures as I searched for something to fill in the lines. White swan fence, I wrote on a walk through San Diego’s Mission Hills neighborhood. Arched, metal necks. And as I sat in a seaside café the next morning: No trace of the sun except for sandy ocean hillsides that glow from its reflections. I put myself in places I want to get better at describing. Blurry sunset, smudged across the sky. Mountains, brushed with light. I wrote during a drive through the desert with the dogs. Jack and Scout, running through the sagebrush and sand.

“They’re gonna get rattlesnook,” Dylan says.

Sometimes the descriptions are childishly simple, little details that could belong in any book. Character who has to crawl in through her trunk because both her cars front doors are broken, I wrote, after overhearing a friend fondly recalling her first vehicle. Some advice I heard once: Look for the stories people repeat.

Commentary -

In my opinion, commentary holds the most advanced form of observation because an added layer of analysis is written in. It takes more time. No surprise I have the least amount of entries in this category, as I am someone who tries not to form opinion too quickly. An example I like more than my grumpy critique of the soccer player is one I wrote during the New Jersey drone freak-out of late 2024. I titled it: My Hot Take on the Drones, and below it wrote: I am pro anything that gets us looking up into the night sky. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary, but it should say something other than what is tangibly happening. Besides behavior and news, commentary can be around cultural issues, moral dilemmas, the state of the world… etc.

At the dog park last summer, I wrote: Scout looks for me in the crowd after she runs in many circles. When she spots me, she is immediately overjoyed. It is a visceral relief, like at any moment she might be abandoned, and when I am still here, when I choose her again, as I do every time, it is no less a miracle. Sometimes the entries are quite personal. Last fall while sitting on the porch with Scout, my hair pulled up in a two-day bun, my reminder went off to write something down. I thought for awhile, then scribbled what felt most true in that moment. Thank god for the days I do not have to be observed.

Misc -

I am in no way saying these strings of thought are good writing (let alone grammatically correct). Only they capture a small brush stroke of reality and my space in the world at any given moment. They are mostly ordinary - attempts to romanticize the mundane. Sometimes all I can say about a day is I enjoyed the warm chai, I wrote last month. They may be random phrases. Black Market Wisdom Teeth removal. Or I will write down words I liked: Behooves, Consolation Prize, Ripe. And lots of memories. Don’t forget [Dylan] grumbling about the Christmas beer [he ordered] and how it wasn’t very festive. “Can I get a candy cane or something?” He said.

In conclusion -

Mary Oliver suggests in her poem Yes! No!, that paying attention is “— our endless and proper work.” This year, I am framing it as an intentional and nurturing practice to keep my radar tuned to the small and (extra)ordinary. I plan to re-read the entries often. (As a side benefit, I’d like to describe these aspects of my days vividly enough to bring me back to them, so I quit losing so many.) You never know what you’ll catch when you’re holding the net out. Today, while sitting in my office to write this essay, I jotted the note: Wind is pushing the trees around today. Shadows dart back and forth across the window pane.

Our brain snags on things every day. Writing them down cements their importance and increases the likelihood we’ll remember them. Phones can work in a pinch, but studies strongly suggest handwriting better aids in preserving memory. Whether by the act of lingering on the sentiment a second longer, or by being more connected to the shape of each letter, the exercise is undeniably effective. It sharpens the way we look at the world and increases our ability to call back on details during conversation or in creation.

Ultimately, I am just another person asking for everyone to put their phones down and look up. But I am asking for more than that too. Engage in socially acceptable snooping and watch strangers in line at the grocery store. Who looks happy? Who looks angry? What are they buying? Look for meaning in peoples actions the way you did with your first crush. Assign generous interpretations. Sift through the world as though it is hiding great treasure from you.

It probably is.

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