When I left my ex, I briefly converted to Catholicism. I was looking for meaning and purpose in my life. So often when I was younger, I’d found that in God. I’d been raised Protestant, and had only ever been to Catholic Mass once before. When the man I was interested in suggested I go to the local cathedral, and promised me there were lots of babies there, it didn’t take any convincing. I went.

Having visited a variety of Protestant churches through the years, I was shocked and pleased by how many people went to Mass. (Now I understand that Catholic doctrine says that missing Mass any given week is a sin, but I didn’t know that then.) There were, in fact, lots of babies, and I got to make funny faces at every single one. There were also lots of other people my age. The attendees weren’t 90% white-haired, as I’d grown accustomed to in Protestant churches. The demographics here weren’t so skewed, and I relaxed. I fit in.

I wrote before that I’d joined a cult. It was at that Mass that I met the leader. Alone in a sea of people, I started to file out after we were dismissed. But a woman about my age was standing at the door, looking ready to talk to those who would pass her. My introverted impulse of “don’t look at me” briefly warred with my need for community, and the stronger of the two won. I stopped to talk with her.

Did I want to join a Catholic book club with a group of other people she’d assembled? Why yes, yes I did.

At first, doing Catholicism was great. I had two social commitments per week with Mass and book club. The guy I liked was delighted I’d gone to Mass. We started to go to Mass together, and we started dating. I felt grounded in a place of love.

But then, I found out that according to the Catholic doctrine, I shouldn’t date until I’d had an annulment. On the one hand, I liked the idea of annulments. Liked that the Church would confirm publicly what I already knew–that God had not blessed my union to a rapist. On the other hand, I couldn’t get an annulment until my divorce was final, and my divorce was dragging on longer than I’d ever feared thanks to Covid.

The guy I liked was a good Catholic boy, so he dumped me.

I was still committed at this point. Planned to get my annulment, no matter how long it took, get back with the good Catholic boy, and live happily ever after. I’d drunk the Kool-Aid of the “so you want to be a Catholic” classes, studying the story of Mother Mary and writing what I’d taken from the reading. “Trust in God and be obedient,” I wrote, “because while it may be scary at first, what He has planned is better than you ever could have hoped.” This was a message I desperately wanted to believe in, given the dumpster fire of my divorce. My kids’ dad had turned them against me, and I was trying to believe in any way possible that everything would be okay in the end. It had to be. God was watching out for me.

But then there was a sermon that dulled my sense of devotion to the faith. The priest of the week stood up in front of the congregation and presented a straw (wo)man hypothetical. In this scenario, a woman talking to her friend says her husband was a good man, she just needed to live her truth, so she was leaving him. The priest went on for a while about how this scenario had grown all too common in recent years and…honestly, I don’t know what else. I was so caught up in anger and internal rebuttals I didn’t much hear where he went with this, but I doubt I missed much.

As if most of the time, women casually throw away a good marriage to a good man on a whim? Uh, no sir! I had spent months agonizing about whether I really wanted to end things with my emotionally and sexually abusive husband, who’d admitted (to me) that he’d raped me only to later deny it again. Divorce represents an enormous emotional and financial labor. You have to restructure your entire goddamn life. No one is like, “Meh, marriage isn’t for me, I guess,” and blows their whole world apart. You know what does happen? Women get advised, by lawyers and common sense, not to talk too much about exactly what the problems were in public. Doing so can cause further backlash from the community and the courts than the divorce alone. I personally have put the majority of the gory details of my failed marriage behind a paywall, so it’s not exactly public.

What a slap in the face, to dismiss the turmoil suffered by the one who walks away. And framing it as a shameful thing women do? Oh, I was boiling.

But this was just one priest’s bad take. I’d never seen him before, and the other sermons had been so great. Hopefully he wouldn’t come up too often in rotation. I still went through with my Confirmation, officially becoming Catholic. My new boyfriend, not a good Catholic boy, got me a Mary Magdalene medallion, recognizing that I identified much more with her than with Mother Mary.

Then I took my boyfriend to my Catholic book club. I introduced him as my friend. I wasn’t allowed to be dating, but there’s no harm in having male friends, right? He read the book we were reading (What to Do When Jesus Is Hungry) and came prepared with thoughts about it. I liked his points, and appreciated the critical thinking he’d put in. But his opinion didn’t line up exactly with the leader’s opinion, so she did not like his points.

I’ve always valued an honest debate. No one is right 100% of the time, so it’s healthy to be open to considering differing viewpoints. This was not the spirit of how she argued, though. Every time he expressed his thoughts, she frowned and contradicted him in sharp ways meant to shut him down. I knew that pattern well. I’d seen it for years in the way my ex had spoken to me. My boyfriend was not conditioned to shut up and kowtow, though. He stuck up for himself long after when I would have fallen silent.

The whole episode made me feel deeply uncomfortable.

I was already thinking my boyfriend should not come to another book club meeting. Then, as we were leaving, he touched my back as we made our way out. Somehow, this small gesture was correctly interpreted to mean we were sleeping together. The leader’s husband sent me a string of texts about how I was in a sacramental marriage, and so it was sinful to sleep with someone else. That was adultery.

My ex and his dad were also sending me messages about how adulterous it was for me to date again after leaving my husband. They came at it from a more Protestant stance, where there’s no unified theory on the rules, but lots of different things to pick from if you want to quote scripture. Never mind that the divorce had been ongoing for most of a year, or that my ex had also dated in this time. He hadn’t chosen to leave, so he wasn’t at fault.

This brings up something I’d never realized about divorce until I was in the middle of it. There’s this assumption that the person who leaves has wronged the other, and that the divorce is their fault. But the person who leaves is the one who noticed there was something irretrievably broken in the marriage–that there’s some rot so repugnant they can no longer stand it anymore. Unless we’re assuming, like the priest with the bad take, that the person leaving is often doing so on a wild hare (which I do not), then logically it follows that the person leaving is the one who has been wronged. That the other person is at fault, for creating an environment so abysmal that the one leaving has declared it can’t be fixed, and they’re willing to demolish their whole life to get out.

I was in a sacramental marriage. Or, more accurately, a marriage that was assumed by the Catholic Church to be sacramental. We had followed the Protestant form of marriage and gotten married in a church that matched our faith, so the Catholic Church would assume that God had ordained and blessed the union until such time as an annulment tribunal judged otherwise. This is when the annulment process started looking like garbage to me. When my mindset shifted from “I get the opportunity to have it publicly recognized that God didn’t bless my union with this rapist” to “I’m supposed to pretend God blessed my union with this rapist until a panel of men from the Church determine He did not.” I’d gotten out of one controlling relationship just to get into another, with the Catholic Church.

There was another sermon about “cherry-picking Catholics” that extolled the dangers of following some church doctrines but not others. “Don’t be a cherry-picking Catholic,” the priest said, “I get enough of those at Easter and Christmas.” Moodily, I thought, I’ll be a cherry-picking Catholic, or I won’t be a Catholic. But the true breaking point came when the sermons took on a political bent.

Churches are not allowed to “participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office” if they want to retain their non-taxable status. We supposedly have a separation of church and state in this country. But it was now late 2020, and Trump promised Christians he’d stack the Supreme Court with judges who hated Roe v. Wade if they backed him, so despite all the morally corrupt behavior he’d exhibited, he became The Chosen One. The Spokane bishop didn’t name him, of course, that would be too blatantly violating tax law. The bishop did say, however, that Catholics ought to consider only one issue when filling out their ballots: abortion. That’s making a statement about an issue, not a candidate. But there’s still only one interpretation of what it meant. “Vote Republican, for God’s sake.”

After this sermon, I knew I couldn’t be Catholic. I wasn’t even pro-choice back then (as I am now). But I was not, even then, someone who would ignore the big picture (how Republicans more often legislate morality, increase military spending, and defund invaluable social safety nets) in order to address one small facet of the political landscape. There were irreconcilable differences in values between myself and the Catholic Church.

I didn’t fit in.

Then the leader of the book club texted me, reiterating the point of the sermon. Getting explicit that we all had to vote Republican, to fight for those unborn babies.

I took a deep breath. I could do what I was accustomed to, and be quiet in the face of a stronger personality. But despite the growing sense that she acted a lot like my ex, I wanted to give her the chance to be different. So I responded, saying politely that I didn’t agree. I said Democrats were more likely to help those who had already been born, supporting those who were hungry and in need like we’d been taught to do. That What to Do When Jesus Is Hungry was full of stories of lifting up those in poverty, which I valued more highly than forcing women to bring children into a world with defunded safety nets.

The leader of the book club did not prove herself different from my ex. She sent me a long rant about exactly why I was wrong, questioned my moral character, and guilt-tripped me for letting her sponsor my conversion when I was so faithless.

I felt embarrassed, but not because I let her guilt-trips land. I was embarrassed to realize that while leaving the cult of one, my marriage, I’d immediately fallen in with another cult. I prayed I could avoid doing so again in the future.

Looking back, I didn’t need to feel embarrassed. I was suffering from extreme loneliness both times I fell in under cult leaders. Thankfully, I’ve never been so vulnerable since. I’ve gained confidence in standing up for my own values. I’ve grown a community around me of friends and family that support me even if they don’t always agree with me. I don’t have to do Catholicism, or any other organized religion, to feel connected. I can just be myself.

If reading this list caused a certain amount of panic to grip your throat, you too may be experiencing an excessive amount of business in your life.

I’ve heard this analogy: You wake up with a certain number of spoons each morning, and you have to decide how to allocate them. What to give your spoons to. Why spoons? I don’t know. But it constantly feels like I have too few spoons, given everything I’d like to get done.

The line that stuck with me the most from the book Complex PTSD is “I’m a human being, not a human doing.” I feel like, with all I’ve been trying to do of late, I’ve been a human doing. I’ve written out a list of all I want to accomplish for the day, then gone about my day checking items off until the day was over, gone to bed, and done that over again the next day. It’s exhausting. It makes me wonder what the point of it all is.

The publishing schedule I set up for myself on Substack started out as a helpful pressure. It got me to write more consistently than I was in the habit of doing, because I needed to get something down for the next post. I am glad that I set it up for myself; I’ve produced a not-insignificant amount of writing here.

But the pressure is no longer helpful. Things can change, and now whenever I think about my publishing schedule I get grumpy. I’ve recently written to The End on a few different projects, and now I mainly want to be editing and polishing those. I’ve also started writing a graphic novel, which isn’t yet in a format to be shared. Making sure to write posts for this Substack on top of the main writing I actually want to get done is too much. I have too few spoons for that.

The decision to get rid of my publishing schedule here instantly filled me with relief. I’m giving myself a break. Maybe at some point I’ll want to pick back up again, when I have something else that feels right to share consistently. But for now, I’ll only post as the muse hits me. I’m going to try to do less, and simply be.

“Why are your eyelashes so small?”

“I don’t have my makeup on.”

“Yeah, but…they’re smaller than mine.”

She told me that mascara bleaches eyelashes. Breaks them down. Makes them smaller and paler than they would be naturally. I listened in horror. I loved my naturally dark, long, curly eyelashes. I knew they were beautiful. I couldn’t imagine treating them in a way that would damage them. I decided, then and there, to never wear mascara.

I still did, once, trying it on as a teenager. My manual dexterity wasn’t great (my manual dexterity will never be great). The mascara ended up clumped and terrible looking. I immediately took it off. That was the only time I’d ever worn mascara, for thirty-four years.

Now I’m close to the age my mom was, when I asked that fateful question about her eyelashes. And guess what? Over the past few years, slowly, my eyelashes have been thinning. Flattening. Lightening. Basically, all I ever feared for my eyelashes had come true, even though I’d never worn mascara.

What the heck, Mom?

Turns out, eyelash thinning is a natural part of getting older. As hormones fluctuate, so too do collagen levels. Collagen is a key player in naturally beautiful eyelashes. My eyelashes were always going to end up here—there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. All my care to avoid mascara was for naught.

As a kid, I’d never realized how often people supply uninformed answers to questions asked of them. I was so keenly intent on honesty, I’d assumed that if someone didn’t know something, they’d say so. If they had an idea, but weren’t sure, I would have thought they could preface it with, “If I were to hazard a guess…”

I took my mom’s unmitigated answer as gospel truth. Built a whole plan around it. Now, thinking back, that was pretty ridiculous.

I didn’t wear mascara to my wedding. That’s how strictly I followed my personal ban.

Well, no longer. I don’t like my thinned-out eyelashes, so I bought a tube of mascara. It’s not an everyday wear, like it was for my mom. But when I’m feeling a little fancy, I put some on. A light layer—I don’t want it clumped. I can’t believe I waited until I was in my 30’s to do this.

What a silly thing.

Because of the timing, a few people made the comment, “I guess we’ll see who wins the election, huh?” It truly wasn’t about that, though. I was thinking about moving in about four years, not immediately. I’d make the change when some unknown future candidate from whichever side won the election. It was about something much longer-lasting than an individual term. It was about the entire baked-in culture, one that I couldn’t see changing in the next decade or two.

Circumstances in my life have changed since I spoke about trying to move, and now it looks like that will probably never happen. Right around the time the horrifying election results came in, that possibility for my future closed.

The next time “Best Year Yet” came up in my playlist, I skipped past it. For the first time in the past three years I’d been in love with this song, I felt as though I couldn’t will it to be true. The year ahead promised to be dark and full of monsters. My grief over the direction our country is headed made the idea—that the next year would be the best one yet—feel like a sick joke.

I’ve been feeling a lot of existential dread, lately. A lot of concern over things that affect so many people, even if they don’t directly impact me all that much. I live in Washington State, a lifeboat of liberalism in this red tsunami. Certain rights, which will be tread all over elsewhere, will remain guaranteed here. Still, everyone is going to get wet on this ride.

I always feel this existential dread, though, whenever I focus too much of my attention on politics. So many systems are so broken, and fail to serve the people. It’s not limited to the other side, either. Corporatism has infected the whole thing, and most every politician is bought in one way or another. Now more than ever, I need to stop letting my existential dread cripple me with despair. I need to focus on my own sphere of influence. Get my own house in order.

Here are my resolutions for the coming year:

• I will continue reading books about healthy parenting, coping, and relationships.

• I will increase the number of times I go to the gym from three times a week to four times a week. (Never skipping more than one day in a row is helpful for developing ingrained habits!)

• I will install new rules for myself for online shopping, such as only buying things I can’t find at an in-person store. (Online shopping feeds the corporatism monster, and I want no part in it.)

• I will continue attempting to live a more balanced life, with real rest, taking on healthy stress, and setting intentions.

• I will keep remind myself that while not every day has enough time to contain everything I want to do, life is long, and there are seasons for what can be accomplished. I will try to fully explore each season, without worrying about what’s not in season.

There is nothing I can do about the world being set to get smashed around me. What I can do is focus inward. I can grow my inner peace by continuing to treat myself right. I can keep working to be a healthier version of myself.

The fruit that is in season right now is my home life. I will focus my efforts there, instead of wasting energy worrying about what else is going wrong. In that way, this next year can still be the best year yet.

Wishing each and every one of you the same.

I’ve heard for some time that Sweden has a relatively fair and equitable society. Their social supports are better, for one. But even as a traveler there, I found Stockholm to be welcoming and accessible.

I wanted to eat real Swedish crepes, in Sweden. I found a breakfast place that specialized in them, and went. The cafe had a sign, saying in Swedish something along the lines of: “Did you know about Allemänsratten? You can camp and pick fruit on any public land. Sweden’s specialty is lingonberries, which you can eat for free!”

Most of the land in the US is privately owned, and those without homes are driven from place to place as undesirables. Many places are food deserts, or food swamps, where it’s hard to get basic, nutritious whole foods. Thanks to Allemänsratten, there’s a pressure-release in Sweden. Everyone has the right to camp on any public land (which is plentiful), and take part in the bounty of nature.

The tunnelbanan is a great equalizer. Most people in the US can’t get around unless they own a car. It can be a barrier to getting a job or going to school. Not so in Stockholm. The tunnelbanan connects the city like a great web. Anywhere the tunnelbanan doesn’t reach, the busses probably do. I hopped on and off the public transit system many times during my stay. It was a pleasure to experience such a well-oiled machine, with most of the waits for the next vehicle being 5-10 minutes.

While we were touring the palace, a kid there with his mother was acting up, crying and refusing to move forward. My ex leaned and muttered in my ear that it’s a real shame that spanking isn’t allowed in Sweden. That parents could go to jail for hitting their child. What was the woman supposed to do to discipline her child? Her hands were tied.

Why does a child in tears prompt the idea in some that that child needs to be hit and made to feel pain?

This is one of the biggest differences between his values and mine. There are three basic schools of parenting: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Authoritarian parents rely on fear and force to control their children, as he was bemoaning this woman’s inability to do. Permissive parents provide very little structure, letting their kids do what they will. Authoritative parents tell their kids what they expect of them, and why. Reasonable loss of privileges is typically used rather than threat of violence.

It’s a lottery, which type of house a child will grow up in. They never chose which style of parenting their parents would ascribe to. And if it’s authoritative, they are doomed to live in fear, failing to make healthy attachments to their parents, which will go on to affect other relationships for the rest of their lives. Outlawing spanking is like saying, “You’ve made the wrong choice of parenting styles; try again.” It is encouraging a more fair and just life for the children in Sweden.

Allemänsratten, a good public transit system, and an outlaw on spanking are three things I believe any society could benefit from having.

to be able to say

I didn't need anyone else

to be whole.

An island unto myself.

And while it's true

that I could be okay

without any one particular

person in my life,

still,

we are social creatures

aren't we?

Having you back

has restored something in me

that was missing.

I was okay.

Now, I'm great.

For the uninitiated: NaNoWriMo is the abbreviation for National Novel Writing Month. In the month of November, writers from around the world unite (online and at local in-person chapters) in their personal attempts to write 50k words of a new novel in 30 days.*

*Unless they’re a NaNo rebel, and aren’t following these rules exactly. Writing something other than a novel, writing a second draft, etc.

It’s a giddy cocktail of elation, anxiety, and burnout. There’s one big thing to be said for NaNoWriMo. It’s a kick in the pants to get writers to actually do it; sit down and write. But as much as this is a noble goal, there’s a lot to be said for the drawbacks of it as well.

If you are not used to making a good habit of writing (as is the assumption, the very purpose for the event), then writing 1,667 words a day is really hard. Personally, I’ve learned that I don’t do well with a word count goal. I’m much more prolific with a word count limit. 😅 That goal haunts me. With every writing sprint, I check how many words I’ve written, then calculate how much further I have to go. Each time I get disappointed with how little I’ve actually written compared to how much I feel as though I’ve written, and this discouragement begins to strangle my creativity over time.

On top of this sheer mental barrier, a lot of writer’s block is a product of poor outlining leading to hitting a plot hole. You know what makes that more likely? Rushing to write as fast as possible, with no time set aside to chew on an idea. Like during NaNoWriMo. So then (as I struggle to dig my way out of the plot hole), I get stressed about meeting the daily quota, which prompts me to rush more, which leads to me getting even more blocked up… It’s a vicious cycle.

It especially doesn’t make sense to me that NaNoWriMo overlaps with Thanksgiving, one of the most family-oriented holidays. It’s a time where you’re supposed to reflect on what you’re thankful for, and spend time with your blood or chosen family. During this time, participants of NaNoWriMo are either ignoring their loved ones to cram their words in, or spending time with these loved ones but sporting a thousand-yard-stare, imagining how very behind they’re getting.

NaNoWriMo buys into and preys upon our culture’s fixation with productivity, in a way that isn’t all that effective at boosting it. The fact that I’ve failed at the goal of NaNoWriMo most of the times I’ve participated has done a lot to weigh on my confidence as a writer. It’s done a lot to contribute to the many things that cause me to doubt myself.

Truly, there’s many reasons to say, “You know what? I’m not going to do this anymore.” But it’s October, and the fall weather is making me think I should start something new. I should get ready for NaNoWriMo.

But earlier this year, the NaNoWriMo leadership put out a statement saying that those against the use of generative AI are ableist and gatekeepers to creativity.

Let’s put a pause on thoughts about the ethicality of using generative AI at all. Given the context, my very first thought when I read this statement was specifically about using generative AI to participate in NaNoWriMo. To me, this feels a bit like putting your FitBit on your dog; the steps aren’t yours, and now the numbers are meaningless. I don’t know if it’s good for us to be counting the numbers to begin with, but if we are… Counting the number of words your prompt got a computer to write for you? Really?

If we get into the ethics of generative AI, I am against it. I see training generative AI off the work of those who haven’t consented to this use (which is almost all the work they’re trained off of) as a breach of copyright law. I know the government doesn’t seem to see it that way. They follow the money, and there’s a lot of money to be made ripping off the work of others.

Some sites, like Substack, let you toggle whether it’s easy for AI trainers to use your stuff (whether it’s easy, not whether it’s possible; and saying you don’t want this makes your discoverability plummet because the algorithm HATES people who want basic rights to their own work). But many giants, like Google Docs and Adobe, simply write it into their use agreement that by using their product you agree they get to use your work to train AI. Good thing they at least paid for one copy of your writing. Lol, jk, they didn’t.

Almost makes me want to put “train your generative AI off someone else’s writing” every third line in my posts.

In response to the NaNoWriMo stance, that being against generative AI is ableist: being for generative AI is an exploitative, capitalist machine stance. There’s big money in generative AI, as long as those who train them don’t have to pay artists for their work while doing so.

It should be no shock to anyone that NaNoWriMo is funded by a company which profits from generative AI. If their statement were a research paper, they’d be obligated to disclose that bias. If they were a lawyer, they’d have to recuse themselves due to a conflict of interests.

Maybe this will be the push I need to say goodbye to NaNoWriMo once and for all. There are so many better ways to prompt me to sit down and write. Shut Up and Write, for one. There’s no word count goal, but a time period within which you’re supposed to do nothing but write. Posting on Substack has helped to keep me regular(ish), as I attempt to keep up with my publishing schedule. Having some non-word-count goal, like writing at least a sentence a day, or scheduling writing time at specific times on specific days. If none of these get me to 50k words in 30 days, that’s fine. Productivity can be measured in other ways. And also? NaNoWriMo didn’t get me there, either.

Part one about Helsinki, Finland can be found here. Part two can be found here.

For seven years in a row, Finland has ranked as the happiest country in the world. While a lot of people have speculated on why that is (and a lot of haters say it’s not really true), here’s what I have to say after visiting.

Existing as a person with a body can feel unsafe in many places in the world. In Finland, I was struck by how safe I felt.

Any woman in America knows that it’s dangerous to walk alone late at night. Any woman who’s done it anyway knows the gnawing sense of dread that haunts you, provoking you to take useless precautions like holding your keys like a dagger inside your pocket. I would never walk alone late at night and drunk, in the US. I know some do, but I know my paranoia would eat me alive.

I did walk alone late at night and drunk in Helsinki, though. And it felt completely safe to do so. At one point, a guy passed me going the other way, but my hackles never went up. He said “Hej,” I said “Hej,” and everything was fine. The lack of tension was shocking.

My favorite restaurant in Helsinki was on the corner of a redlight district. I sat eating kabob (the likes of which I’ve never found before or since), looking down the street toward the XXX video stores and the Chinese massage parlors, etc. I imagine this sort of street in the US would be mainly deserted, with some sketchy-looking people casting furtive glances around. But here? I saw multiple women pushing their prams along the street, looking completely unconcerned.

What I would give, to feel so safe in a big city in the US.

And while safety and happiness don’t necessarily grow at a 1:1 ratio, they’re very highly linked. Just think about it: how happy can you be when you feel threatened? If you’re worried about getting assaulted, how chipper can you be? And if you’re struggling to make ends meet, or concerned that a major life event could cause you to struggle, doesn’t that impact your life satisfaction?

Finland has so many social safety nets in place to catch people when they fall. Their citizens aren’t worried about upset at every turn. Thus, even if it’s cold and dark and their lack of vitamin D can make them cranky, they rate themselves happier than the average American by quite a bit. They can have faith that their lives aren’t so fragile.

People talk about how stoic Finns seem in casual conversation. They can come across as cold. Maybe I wasn’t overly aware of this, being myself an awkward person. To me, the Finns I met seemed perfectly pleasant and helpful. They didn’t engage in a lot of small talk, but that’s honestly a relief to me, as I don’t care much for small talk myself. I don’t really consider that to be an indicator of unhappiness.

Of all the people I met in Helsinki, only one of them seemed to be in a truly foul mood: an American tending a bar downtown. I couldn’t understand why he was so upset. Clearly he was living in a beautiful country, in the safest city I’d ever experienced, but he was busy complaining about the sweet drink they had on tap.

My Finnish friend Elisa and I both ordered the sweet drink, and once we were out of earshot, laughed off the bartender’s funk. Some people wear their bitterness like a badge of honor.

I fell in love with Finland during my stay. Personally, I totally understand their high happiness ranking.

Transition sound is Clumble.aif by snikpohneb -- https://freesound.org/s/216751/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

Forgive me, for this post is much longer than I typically write. The thing is, I don’t want to cut a single word.

I also don’t normally discuss politics. I hate how divisive they are. I don’t want to put my foot in my mouth. Also, politics depress me. I care about my mental wellbeing, so I tend to think about politics as little as possible, which comes out to about an hour each time I fill out my ballot. But as the US gears up for the next presidential election, it’s gotten harder and harder to stop thinking about it. Recently, the following essay spilled out of me, fully formed.

The day after I wrote it, I got news that gave me more hope in America than I’ve ever had before.

There’s a lot to be disappointed in, in the USA. Politics are an obvious one. Health issues are less obvious. Still more subtle, there are systems that only some of the population see, which are broken. When these systems fail to serve, the way they misfunction causes an untold amount of grief in the lives of those affected, which goes unknown to those who never interact with these systems. Something is rotten in these “united” states.

Politics. Even the word on its own spikes my anxiety. The electoral college votes all one way or the other in 48 states, and there’s no runoff voting. This causes an unbreakable two-party system. All the citizens hate it, but no politician ever does anything to fix it because it serves whichever of the two respective parties they’ve sworn fealty to. Each party has roughly 50% of the power. Even though they each have less at one time or another, roughly 50% is still better than roughly 33%, roughly 25%, or less. Why would they ever bring about the reduction of their own power? They wouldn’t. So US citizens are trapped on this nightmare seesaw with no way off.

My understanding is that politics cause a lot of anxiety for a lot of US citizens. They certainly do me. Whenever I spend much time thinking about how broken our system is, how little I can do about it, I fall into a spiral of despair. This is unhealthy. This creates a mindset of unmet want. A poverty mindset. The easiest way to fill the feeling of want, at least momentarily, is to buy something. I want, I buy, so I get something, and I feel better, right? Only temporarily. I have to reup my feeling-better many times a month to keep it going. Amazon profits from us being trapped in a two-party system, and lost in a spiral of despair. This multi-billion-per-year-earning company can spend unfathomable amounts of money on ads and bribes to keep us in this two-party system, even if the politicians were predisposed to do something about it. Which, as established above, they’re not.

I feel want because of my lack of control. There are other, less-obvious ways to fill my want of control. I could develop a codependent relationship with my partner, as I try to control them. I could even go so far as to be manipulative. Abusive. I could be really authoritarian over my children. I could become a neat freak, and get really particular about every granular detail of how my home is cleaned. I could go the other direction, and want to hold on to every little thing, “just in case,” to avoid feeling as though I’m unprepared for the next of life’s upsets, leaving me in a hoarder house. Either way, this mindset could spill back over into my behavior with my partner and/or children. Or maybe they see less of me because I become a workaholic, trying to grind my way up the advancement track as a different way to earn some solace from the expense of living.

These are just the examples where I’ve been either the recipient or the actor. I’m sure there’s more. I hope it’s clear how disordered these behaviors are. But they’re basically impossible to reduce when you feel trapped and helpless, which is the feeling prompted by our two ruling parties being so incredibly divisive. So contentious. Every election, every Supreme Court decision, could be the end of the world, or could be our salvation. I have no control over which it is.

If you want to go to therapy for your dysfunction, you’d better hope you lucked into a good health insurance plan. They’re really hard to decipher, and you probably got no assistance doing so. Unlike people, health insurance plans are not created equal. Some health insurance plans are little better than paying out-of-pocket costs, like a plan where you pay 100% of costs until you meet your deductible (meanwhile paying hundreds of dollars a month for the privilege of being on the insurance plan), at which point you still pay 40% of costs. But you figure that’s a better deal than paying three to four times as much per month, and only having copays to worry about, as long as you don’t go to too many different appointments. If your provider even takes your insurance.

In therapy, this is a big if. If your insurance changes to one your therapist doesn’t take, you have to choose between ditching the therapist you already clicked with for a discount one who makes you uncomfortable, or shoveling hundreds of dollars a month at your problem (constantly reevaluating if your therapist is that worth it, or if you should just accept where you’re at). Looking for a new therapist is one of the worst ordeals in life, because you’re adding stress when you’re already thinking dysfunctionally, and ideally you’re looking for a therapist who:

A.      Is competent at handling your particular issue

B.      Is even accepting new patients

C.      Takes your insurance

But getting A, B, & C all in one package feels like putting on a blindfold and trying to find a unicorn in a herd of mules wearing faux horns. If not completely impossible, then at least nigh impossible (and embarrassing besides).

With strictly physical maladies, it’s more common to find doctors who take your insurance. But A & B from above can still be tricky, and knowing what’s covered vs what’s going to rack you up hundreds or thousands in medical debt can be hard to discern. On top of this, medical debt is one of the hardest kinds of debt to get out of. It would be great if medical insurance were actually sufficient to cover costs. At least I can hope my medical problems are a result of a car accident, because medical coverage under car insurance is way more comprehensive.

As a quick comparison with another flawed medical system, let’s look at Canada. Their health costs are covered. Medical debt anxiety doesn’t exist for them; this is mind-boggling to me. The two common complaints I’ve heard from Canadians about their medical system is: it takes years to get a family doctor, and even when you do, they’re super rushed and you may not like them. It used to be in the US that it was relatively quick to get a family doctor. I’ve experienced getting a new one after a wait of only a few weeks. No more. Now, every place I call, I get laughed at for asking if a highly rated doctor is taking new patients, and the others are booked out for multiple months. Maybe you happen upon a clinic that just hired a newly-minted doctor, and you can get in within two months. If the stars align and your schedule can accommodate the one opening they have in that time.

I understand months is still better than years, but we are trending longer as time goes on. And the second Canadian complaint is identical in the US. Family doctors are always rushed. They get 15 minutes per appointment, no more. They’re overworked and understaffed. If Canadians think our paying out the eyeballs for our health insurance means we feel genuinely seen or heard about the misgivings we have about our bodies—like we feel we have time to ask the questions we have about our health—they’re wrong. We’re paying out the eyeballs for the same quick and dirty session they get on the cheap.

Despite the Canadian medical system’s flaws, they don’t share one of the US’s major medical problems: life expectancy. The US has a six-year shorter lifespan than most other industrialized nations. In Canada, most European countries, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea (okay, we don’t have all day for the full list), the life expectancy is 82 years or higher. In the US, it’s 76. To put that into perspective, that’s nine years after the new retirement age. So US citizens who spend roughly fifty years in some combination of higher education and work, building a life for themselves, get to relax for about nine years before they croak, while basically everyone else gets fifteen. WTF.

While our medical system is part of the problem (people fear to go to the hospital to get sometimes life-saving medicine because they think “what if it’s not as big a deal as I think it is? I’ll be saddled with an unknown amount of medical debt I can’t afford”), the shorter life expectancy can’t be laid 100% at their door. There’s a sneaky, behind-the-scenes contributor here. Life expectancy was almost three years higher in the US in 2021 than it is now. What in very recent history has changed? What is killing us?

I’m not talking about Covid here. Other industrialized nations saw a temporary dip in life expectancy which has overall righted itself. I’m talking about something with a lot less news coverage, and something much harder for an individual to take preventative measures against in their personal choices. Something that is only going to get worse and worse.

I would like to shine a spotlight on the Food and Drug Administration. And no, I’m not talking about the opioid epidemic, either. Other people know a lot more about drugs than I do. I’m talking about food. Since 2017, the FDA has allowed food companies to self-regulate safety testing before adding novel chemicals to our food. And companies trying to turn a profit don’t self-regulate to their own financial disadvantage. They’re going to (and have) say it’s safe, and put new chemicals in our food. There was a small outcry about this when it happened, people complaining about chemicals being added to our food, but strategic marketing covered it up. You’re probably familiar with some variation on the idea that “all food is made of chemicals; it’s scientifically backward to freak out about chemicals being in our food.” That’s the one I was fed, and I ate it right up. I thought the people freaking out about chemicals in our food were akin to anti-vaxxers. That’s what the food companies wanted me to think. That’s the angle they promoted.

More so in the US than in any of the countries with a better, longer lifespan, we are getting novel substances dumped into our food. Chemical byproducts from other, more primary production processes (often non-food producing processes) are being mixed into almost every bite we eat to make food cheaper, and make it more addictive, so we’ll buy more at a better profit margin. Eating disorders are becoming more prevalent, weight is getting harder to manage, and many aspects of our health are in decline. Cancer is more common, people are developing new allergies, and they’re developing strange, unexplained symptoms that don’t line up with our medical knowledge. The FDA, charged with keeping the food we eat safe for consumption, completely opted out of this duty seven years ago, and since then our health outcomes have gotten worse and worse. We are eating chemical waste. We are getting sick. We are dying.

Okay, that’s a lot of big-picture stuff. The backdrop of the lives of all of us. Some people don’t know about it, but it’s affecting us all. But each of us have our own personal lives, that interact with smaller systems specifically set up for our particular circumstances. Surely those are better tuned towards our needs, right? I’ll take an example from my personal experience. Family court.

Someone on the outside of this system would hope, and might assume, that family court would be a fair system that gets the best outcome for the kids, whatever that is. They might make judgements about someone that didn’t get a favorable outcome in court, thinking that person must deserve it, because the system is fair. But unlike criminal court, you have no right to a lawyer. If you are a struggling single mom and your emotionally abusive ex has family that’s willing to pay lawyers indefinitely until you’re drowning in debt and literally can’t afford to keep fighting, you will not get the result that’s best for your kids. Especially if you didn’t want to accuse him of criminal behavior while you were navigating the confusing thoughts of leaving his coercive control. You idiot. The judge will not understand this, or find you credible if you bring that up now. You will get a result that is more favorable toward your abuser than is best for your kids. Then, he will use his generous portion of time working to turn them against you.

Things will get more and more adversarial between you and your kids as time goes on. Unless you get lucky and his part in this is provable, the courts will not help you. Besides, you’d have to put up thousands of dollars to even try to get them to help. But if your ex is smart enough not to do anything too blatant, they wouldn’t do anything anyway. He can keep putting pressure on the wedge he installed between you and your kids until they don’t even want to see you. They don’t come to your house during your court-allotted time. And again, it would be thousands of dollars to even attempt to punish him for this, and that attempt would probably end in failure. No matter what you do, you’ve lost your kids. You didn’t have untold thousands of dollars to spend, so you never had a chance.

In criminal court, you have a right to a lawyer. By this alone, criminal court is more humane than family court.

I feel betrayed by the US on every level. My vote means nothing, corporations profit off my mental and physical suffering, and seeking medical care is a crapshoot. The systems specific to my situation completely failed me. I didn’t even talk about how going back to school to escape a soul-sucking minimum-wage job saddled me with a crushing amount of student debt. That phenomenon is so well-covered, it feels passe to even bother.

Someone made of different stuff may choose to defy all this with hope. To dive into some project or other in the attempt to “be the change you want to see.” But me? I want to chase the American Dream. To move somewhere that would afford my descendants a life full of opportunities I never had. A better life. And maybe, I’ll get an extra six years of retirement in the process.

I want to leave the US.

I talked this essay over with my husband, who comforted me and said he doesn’t want me to stew in anger at my country until the point at which we may have an opportunity to leave it. I told him I thought the amount he’d been keeping me in the loop about the election cycle may be contributing to my stress. He assured me he wouldn’t bring up politics again—that if he wanted to talk about that stuff, he’d do so with someone else.

The next day, he messaged me, “Okay, this is the last bit of politics I’ll share, but your fav governor that you saw speaking, he’s the VP pick! Tim Walz, the geography guy!”

For context, I am a geographer, a GIS professional, and I had recently gone to the ESRI User Conference, where Tim Walz was one of the speakers in the big opening session. In case you want to watch the speech he gave there, here’s the link. Basically, he talks about how the policies and circumstances of a place have a big impact on the people who live there. He has used his geographical knowledge and his power as governor to implement real change in Minnesota.

I was crying before he finished speaking. I got to my feet amongst thousands of my fellow geography nerds in a standing ovation—the only one we gave. For the rest of the week we all raved to each other about him. Any time I met an attendee from Minnesota, I asked them if they loved their governor as much as I did. I said we should make 49 clones of him and elect them to be the governor of each of the other states. I messaged my husband saying I wanted to marry the governor of Minnesota.

I know vice presidents don’t have as much power as presidents do, but they are much more in the spotlight than the governor of a state with a middling population. Having Tim Walz as the VP pick means having Tim Walz be a central voice in the Democratic Party as a whole. I’m sure he’ll do his best with what power he has (and maps!) to implement real change.

Maybe, for the first time in my life at age 34, I can think about politics and hold a little bit of hope.

Here’s the first post about the lighter side of my trip to Helsinki.

One of the first things my then-husband and I did in Helsinki was go visit Suomenlinna. He was really into history—particularly military history—so what interested him most were the ships and the cannons. I was less interested in those things, and more interested in admiring the angles of the star fort with the beautiful greenery that had sprouted atop it, as well as the story about the defaced church.

Suomenlinna had had three masters. First, the Swedish built the star fort on it. Then the Russians took it over when they conquered Finland. The Russians built a beautiful Orthodox church in a green space on the island. After Finland won their independence in 1917, they’d had enough of being ruled over. For some reason they left many Russian-looking buildings in downtown Helsinki, while that church on Suomenlinna bore the brunt of their wrath. Without Russia to enforce Orthodoxy, austere Protestantism dominated. They wrecked the visage of the ostentatious church with its onion domes, tearing down the towers and transforming the building into a plain, slight thing. I was fascinated by this story. My then-husband was fascinated by the dry dock. To each their own.

The next day, WorldCon 2017 began. By far, the best part of WorldCon was hanging out with nerds from around the world after the main events were over. My then-husband and I sat in a circle of 20-40 people each night, playing Werewolf late into the evening.

It’s here that I developed the idea that Americans are more sensitive to the way others pronounce things than British people are. This opinion was formed based on exactly one experience, and so I am willing to be wrong on this point. But here’s my anecdote.

Two of the people playing were a Norwegian man named Jan and a British man. Jan had introduced himself to the group, pronouncing his name the way I might say the word “yawn.” The British man kept pronouncing his name like the first syllable of the word “January.” At one point, someone pointedly asked Jan, “You’re name’s pronounced yawn, right?” Jan confirmed this, but the British man continued mispronouncing his name the whole night.

I also developed the sense that Finns knew their English was better than they claimed it was. One of the people playing was a Finnish woman named Elisa. I noticed that whenever she drew an innocent villager card, she was very vocal in trying to help theorize who the werewolves were. Whenever she drew a werewolf card, she grew silent. Once I’d figured out the pattern, I accused her of being a werewolf in a game where she was being quiet. She protested that her English wasn’t very good, and it was self-consciousness which kept her from speaking up more. I called her bluff, and urged the group to vote to hang her. She was blushing like Finns do so easily, and looked like she might be about to cry. I thought that either I was very clever, or very cruel. Then she revealed her card. Werewolf.

Thankfully, Elisa didn’t hold my cleverness against me. She hung out with me after the majority of the group had dispersed each night.

It was while hanging out with her, and a handful of other folks from different places, that two older people approached us.

“We’re going to filk in the sauna,” they announced. “No clothes allowed, only bring your singing voice!”

Of course I’d read that enjoying the sauna, even naked and co-ed, was a regular occurrence in Finland. That didn’t mean I wanted to do it. And the two inviting us were definitely old enough to be the parents of anyone in our group.

As one, we all angled ourselves slightly toward Elisa. We looked to our native Finn for guidance. Though Elisa did seem to be more extraverted than most Finns, still she wasn’t so outspoken as to assume group leadership. There was an awkward moment before she realized we were waiting for her to make the decision for us. She thanked the people for the invitation, but politely declined. The tension present in the group as a whole released. I think to a one we were thinking some variation on “thank God!”

After we were out of earshot of the two, many in our group giggled in nervous relief. Elisa let us know that, while naked co-ed sauna attendance did happen, it wasn’t super common cross-generationally. Additionally, clothed sauna-ing was also popular—they didn’t all sauna naked. Lastly, no one need feel pressure to sauna in a situation where they felt uncomfortable. Any of us could have said no.

I detected that she’d thought it unfair to make her have to answer for the group. But you’re our native Finn! I’d thought. I had not yet fully integrated the idea that it was insensitive to single out one person to speak for a people.

When Elisa found out that my then-husband and I were planning to travel to Stockholm a few days after the convention ended, and that I hadn’t decided how we were getting there yet, she was the one who suggested taking the “all-night party boat.” There was a ferry that went from Helsinki to Stockholm every night, and there were multiple bars scattered around the ship where people drank and danced into the wee hours. She told me that all the college students in Helsinki went on the all-night party boat at some point or other during summer break. I got online and booked two last-minute tickets, glad I’d had such a laissez-faire attitude about figuring out the connective tissue of our travel plans.

I wrote more privately about the troubles I had with my then-husband during this trip, but now I’d like to turn to the happy part of my journey to Helsinki.

The fun started at the JFK airport. I’m genuinely not being facetious. The man behind us in line to check in for our flight was a Finn. Now that I’ve been to Finland, this should have been glaringly obvious before I heard him speak—his complexion reminded me of porcelain, and he blushed just from me glancing back at him. We struck up a conversation with him, and the first few minutes consisted of him apologizing about how bad his English was, despite his seeming completely fluent.

He’d been touring NYC, and was returning home. He could not comprehend why two Americans were bound for Finland any more than I could comprehend the appeal of exploring NYC. I had lived in New York State and in Connecticut for a while, and never ventured to The City. It was too loud and too crowded to hold any interest for me. I knew from walking around downtown Chicago that neon lights and mind-bogglingly tall buildings made me distinctly uncomfortable.

He seemed less perplexed after we told him about the event—WorldCon 2017—that drew us to journey to his homeland. I felt a need to defend Finland against him. If I were to travel to a place without a particular event to go to, Finland seemed as fair a choice as any. It certainly wouldn’t be the bottom of the list. The man made comments about how there was nothing there, that the people were strange, that the weather was gloomy. I wondered what ideal he was comparing it to, in his mind. New York City?

He asked how we were getting to our Airbnb once we landed, and I said we’d planned to figure out the public transportation system once there—it had looked, from online, like a much better system of transportation than what I was used to. He offered to drive us there, and after much asking if he was sure on my part, we accepted. His kindness was touching. It was so strange to be offered such kindness, that a part of me wondered if he intended to rob or betray us. But there were two of us and one of him, so I discounted that as a serious possibility.

In the parking garage, I exclaimed over the cars. “They’re all the same!” Almost every one was a mini-SUV in gray or black. The outliers with color were almost universally muted in tone.

“Yeah,” he said, his demeanor saying this proved his point about how boring Finland was. “No one wants to stand out.” His own car was a black mini-SUV.

He drove us to our Airbnb, and said wearily that he hoped the weather got nicer for us. There were clouds in the sky, but the air was a perfectly comfortable room temperature, and it wasn’t windy. “It seems good to me!” I said. He met my enthusiasm with disbelief. I think that as he drove off, he was just as puzzled about our trip as he’d been when we first met.

Continue reading about my trip to Helsinki here.

I didn’t want anyone to wish me “Happy Mother’s Day,” but I didn’t tell anyone that, so they did.

I am the mother of two wonderful kids, who are both officially teenagers, and well on their way to becoming their own people. So it makes sense to wish me a happy Mother’s Day, right? But the story’s not that simple.

Leaving their dad caused a rift between me and my kids. I pulled him aside right after dinner, and the conversation went on late into the night, into the wee hours of the morning. Once I made it clear that I was serious about getting a divorce—that there was no more talking me out of it—he demanded that everything be decided right then. I knew I was too tired to think straight, too tired from having weathered the arguments so far, but I didn’t stop it. Didn’t say, “No, we need to put this down for tonight and come back to it tomorrow.” It was in this weakened state that I caved and agreed he could take the kids with him to his parent’s house across the country, as he healed from the dissolution of our marriage.

He assured me he’d let them call if they wanted to, and I believed him. I didn’t know that, while he may have told them they could call if they wanted, he was definitely telling them that I’d never wanted them, and that I was the one sending them away. That I’d cheated on him. That I was a bad mother, and they were lucky to be rid of me. Of course they never wanted to call me. And with all the angry texts he was sending me, I didn’t feel like I could call them. There was no straight line to them. I’d have to call him, and hope he would hand the phone over.

So I suffered in silence. I felt like there was a sucking wound in my chest. I found myself frozen in awkward positions, with my hands held in a rictus that turned them into claws.

That was, until the judge ordered him to bring them back. Thank goodness, I thought, things can get back to normal between us.

Oh how wrong I was. Having spent two months being told by their dad and his parents what a horrible mother I was, they were in no mood to reconnect, the way I was. I read extensively on what to do when your kids have been taught to hate you, and tried my hardest to enact all the advice. “Be impeccable,” as Carl Knickerbocker likes to say on “Unapologetic Parenting.”

But I’m only human. I could not enact the advice perfectly. I made mistakes. And 50% of the time, my kids were with their dad, who maintained his stories that I was a rotten person who was trying to hurt him, and that I would use them to do so.

Hypocrite.

For so long, I tried so hard to dispel this notion. Tried to prove to my kids how much I loved them. That I just wanted to be part of their lives, and get to be a family together. But it wasn’t enough. I could tell things were deteriorating still. Three years in, I convinced their dad to let me take them to family therapy. I thought this was a miracle in itself. And I thought, Finally, things can change between me and my kids. That is, until we went.

After the initial consult, the first therapist said there was more hostility there than she was accustomed to, and recommended we see someone more highly specialized. She was out of her depth.

At the second therapist, my kids told him that I had pushed my daughter out in front of moving traffic on her bike. He informed them that he was required to file a CPS report about this, because what they’d described was abuse. I felt completely defeated. Clearly, all my effort had been in vain. My kids believed the worst of me. They were beyond the scope of even what family therapy could heal.

Then we left the office, and my kids played with one another. Pretending I didn’t exist, they darted forward and backward on the way to the car, chipper as could be.

The therapist had been very clear with them, that this had been seriously damaging for me, and I may face real consequences. I was openly crying. And they were happy about it.

It was shortly after this failed attempt at therapy that my kids stopped coming to my house during my allotted parenting time.

I’ve wanted more children for years. Since my kids left, I’ve had a miscarriage. I haven’t spoken face-to-face with my daughter for two months. It’s been more like seven months, for my son.

That’s why I didn’t want anyone to wish me a happy mother’s day. I was a childless mother, this year. The day only served to remind me of all I’ve lost.

I commented wryly to a few people: If I’d been pregnant, at least the day would have been bittersweet, instead of just bitter.

It’s okay that Mother’s Day hurts. Pain is an opportunity to grow. Repressing emotions can be so damaging, and that’s what I’ve been doing. Losing my kids was too big. I haven’t known how to think about it and be okay. But I do need to think about it. Do need to get lost in the depths of the sorrow that thinking about it causes. Avoiding pain doesn’t diminish it, it only puts it off. It’s only by leaning into the sorrow that I will ever be able to get through it.

It’ll be okay. I love myself, and I’ll be okay.

At some point while we were living in our second rental in Spokane, my then-husband came home one day and told me he’d gotten a massive speeding ticket. Not to worry, though, he’d have it dropped. The cop who’d pulled him over had done so in an unmarked vehicle, which is illegal in Washington State. All the evidence against my then-husband had been done so improperly, therefore, he was off the hook.

There was one problem. In order to get a case against you dropped, you have to show up to your court date. My then-husband neglected to do so.

The amount he owed went up, as court fees added on to the original fine, and I started stressing. We couldn’t afford to drop hundreds of dollars out of the blue. I needn’t have worried. My then-husband also neglected to pay his fines. The penalty for failing to pay the fines that come from a traffic violation? His license was revoked.

This didn’t affect the way we operated much, because I was the driver whenever we were together, and often would chauffer him places when he was going somewhere and I wasn’t. He didn’t feel particularly motivated to go through the steps to get his license back, and so he didn’t. For the rest of the time we were together—for years—he went without a license.

Even though I did the vast majority of the driving, he still drove sometimes. This stressed me out, and I hoped he would at least slow down. He did it assuming he’d never get caught. He was right.

The whole time, I felt embarrassed. No one else had this problem. No one else had to take their passports with them for when they got carded, to hide the fact they weren’t allowed to drive. No one else let their problems compound and compound until they became what should have been debilitating (should have been, but wasn’t, with me there). Most people, most adults at least, took care of their own obligations and functioned within the bounds of society. My then-husband’s lack of…ability? or interest?…in doing so was a burden to me. I had to carry myself, our kids, and him. He couldn’t function without me, and eventually, I began to resent him for it.

I’d wager most travelers from the US visit Mexico or Canada first, depending on which border they’re closer to. Living in Washington State, I visited Vancouver BC, Canada.

Driving north across the border is very chill. It took a minute to get used to the speed limits being posted in kmph. I panicked for a moment, thinking my car didn’t have that readout, before realizing it did. There’s a whole second set of numbers to look at, that for the ten years prior I’d trained myself to ignore.

The greater area around Vancouver feels very similar to the greater areas around Seattle and Portland. There’s lots of vineyards, and lots of roads on crazy inclines which are not the norm in Spokane, WA. In Vancouver proper, the street names are confusing. In my experience, cities in the US use numbers for street names along one axis, and letters for street names along the other. In Vancouver, they used numbers along both axes, so that 3rd St crossed 3rd St, and finding my way wasn’t as straightforward as I’d have liked.

I visited an English garden. Having never been to England (I’ve since spent one mind-numbingly long layover in Heathrow, which still doesn’t count), this was a treat. The detail with which the flowers were laid out in different patterns, the meticulous order, was mesmerizing. It reminded me of English desserts. And there was one plant, a Gunnera Manicata, which had such broad leaves I had to stretch my arms to their full reach to touch either edge of one. If a Venus flytrap were that big, it could have swallowed me whole.

My big plan for visiting Vancouver was going to the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park. I’m afraid of heights, but I stubbornly don’t want to let that hold me back from having interesting experiences. So when I got there, and the very first bridge was the scariest one—barely two people wide and swaying back and forth over a river far below—I swallowed and stepped onto it. I held the railing with a death grip as I inched across. I couldn’t have done much more than inch anyway; it was incredibly crowded, unlike what any of the online photos had prepared me for. Several people (mainly teenaged and young-20s boys) intentionally jolted the bridge for a laugh. Finally I made it across. After walking across two more of the higher bridges to prove to myself I could, I stuck to the lower bridges to give my poor heart a break.

There were a lot of informational signs about the huge trees which served as the support structure for the network of bridges. It was from one of these signs that I learned about heartwood. The pillar of the tree, which will not decay or lose strength, and which is in many ways as strong as steel. Clearly the concept stuck with me, as years later I adopted “Heartwood” as the section title of my paid posts for this Substack, which deal with all I’ve experienced that turned me into a survivor.

One of the employees at Capilano held an owl on his gloved hand. He explained that owls only actually sleep for about four hours a day. They keep hiding the rest of the day as other predatory birds, which see better in daylight, would attack them if they left their tree hollows while the sun is up.

I picked up some ice wine while in Vancouver, despite not being a wine person. It’s a specialty in such northern climes. The grapes are left on the vine until the weather has gone so cold they’re frozen. The resulting wine is thick and sweet. The idea of taking home something special and local like that appealed to me.

You’d think that returning to one’s home country would be easier than entering a foreign one. This is not true for US citizens. When I presented my passport for inspection by the border guard, he grilled me. He noticed I lived in Spokane, WA, so he asked me why I was crossing the border so far west, between Seattle and Vancouver.

“I-90 is almost a straight shot, east-to-west. There’s no straight highway like it north of the border.”

“Yes there is,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

I had checked my route multiple times before leaving on this journey. I could still envision BC-3 W, the only highway he could have possibly been referring to, clearly in my mind. It was as if whoever planned it had been trying to draw an audio waveform. The border guard was dead wrong. But I’ve dealt with enough difficult people to know the futility of arguing the point. I shrugged.

“Well, that’s the way I’m going home. On I-90.”

Unable to find a reason to further hold me up, he begrudgingly let me through. I drove home on I-90, and got back to normal life.

I believe I’ve been to court more than the average person. I served on a jury once. I made multiple appearances to family court during my divorce. But I also went to court multiple times for the sake of my friend. Perhaps that’s why Body Swappers has a legal bent to it. It’s not only the magic system which is inspired by this series of events, but the setting is, too.

She asked me to go to her boyfriend’s arraignment. I asked, “Don’t you mean your ex?”

She laughed in the way she often did, as if she was afraid to laugh, but couldn’t help it. “We never officially broke up.”

“You tried to break up with him. You should just call him your ex.”

I didn’t know until I was there that arraignments are held all in a row, with many people having their freedom determined in rapid succession. The defense attorneys have little time for each client to make a case that they should not be locked up for weeks as they await trial. One of these short speeches inspired me to laugh inappropriately, and the whole court turned and stared at me in offense. But that’s a story for another time.

I know my friend got up and gave a speech, as victims are allowed to do during the offender’s arraignment, about how dangerous he was, and how afraid of him he was. Here’s where my grip on the sequence of events fails me. I don’t remember if this arraignment happened before or after the second incident.

You see, at some point in between his arrest that I witnessed and the trial later, she saw him again. Tried to make things work. Because she still considered him her boyfriend. I didn’t understand, couldn’t understand. Hadn’t he done enough for her to leave?

While his mom was in the living room and they were “hanging out” in his bedroom, he’d wrapped his hands around her throat and held her down on the bed. Again, she weighed under 100lbs, and he over 200lbs. In that moment, she was afraid she was going to die. But she didn’t. When she could leave, she went to the emergency room. They documented extensive bruising and injury. That got added to the evidence in the case.

I don’t remember how many times I went with my friend to court. Was there a second arraignment? I’m not sure. I do remember the trial, though.

I was a witness. I knew when she’d left my house to go talk to him, when the police had saved her, and what state she was in afterward. I spoke to how she’d texted me that she was afraid for her safety, but that when she came out of the apartment, her hair was freshly wet. That she’d been forced to shower with someone she was afraid of. That she was acting like she was in shock.

I’d never been a witness before. As someone with anxiety, I was incredibly nervous. The weight of import my testimony bore was palpable, and I’ve never been at my best in front of large groups of people. While I spoke, I wondered if my testimony was helping the case, or harming it. Perhaps it had been a mistake to trust myself to speak.

After I’d given my statement, I was allowed to watch the rest of the trial. I got to listen to his mother’s statement.

She said during that second incident, she hadn’t heard anything from his bedroom. That she’d been watching a movie, and they’d both come out and chatted with her a bit. That they’d seemed relaxed. That she’d never known her son to be violent. That she didn’t believe it had happened.

I realized then how little a mother’s testimony means.

He was found guilty on multiple counts, at least one of which was a felony. He’d been going to school in the hopes of becoming a nurse. I’d never known that once you get a felony, you can’t be a nurse, but I was relieved he’d never have a position of power over the weak and the ill. My friend, meanwhile, expressed that she felt bad about ruining his life.

I’m not proud to admit this, but by this point I was feeling a certain amount of disgust about my friend’s continuing empathy toward her abuser. How much would he have to do, for her to stop caring what happens to him? I didn’t understand that the dynamic between an abuser and their victim is similar to the dynamic between a cult leader and their followers. Didn’t understand just how twisted the victim’s thoughts could be, in favor of their abuser, even at the expense of themselves.

I never did understand it, until the point when I realized that my thoughts had the same exact bent to them. That I was just as self-sacrificing, to the point of self-destruction. That I had put the wellbeing of another so above my own wellbeing that I never stopped to consider how they were treating me. And that it was killing me.

At some point, my friend started to open up to me about her relationship. She started off by saying vague things like, he wasn’t always the nicest to her. Then she got into more specifics. One time he pinched her leg, and when she cried out and acted hurt, he said, “What? At least I didn’t smash your head in the car door.”

“That’s not okay,” I said, and, “For him to say at least he didn’t do that, means he was considering doing it.”

I begged her to break up with him. Begged her to do it over text. Said yes, under normal circumstances it was a shitty thing to do, but it was absolutely okay given that there was a danger to her safety with him. She kept saying she couldn’t break up with him. Kept saying that when they snuggled, she really liked being with him. I told her that was saying she liked him for having a warm body. I told her everyone has a warm body.

I started to Google things like “how to convince friend to leave abusive boyfriend.” The results were not as conclusive and helpful as I would have liked. One thing that was stressed a lot was to emphasize the importance of breaking up in a public space, if the friend couldn’t be convinced to do so remotely. When my friend said she was going to leave him, that she couldn’t stay with him any more, I told her again to just text him. When she said no, she had to do it in person, I told her to meet him at Starbucks. Begged her to only do it if it was in public.

She went to his apartment.

I should say she went to his mom’s apartment, which is where he lived. Looking back, my impression of his mom is that she is also a weak people-pleaser. A victim. That she didn’t know what to do about her son any more than my friend’s mom did about hers. My understanding is that, on this occasion, the mom was somewhere else. It was just my friend and her boyfriend there.

Hours after she left, I got a text from my friend saying she was trapped in the bathroom, and she didn’t know what to do.

I called her. What did she mean? She whispered that she didn’t know how long she had before he came back, but he’d been really angry with her for trying to break up with him and she was scared. I told her to lock the bathroom door, but she said she didn’t want to make him mad. I told her to text me where she was, and we hung up.

I called the police, and told them what she’d told me. Told them where she was. No, I didn’t know if he had a weapon. But yes, he was holding my friend against her will.

I drove to the address. I managed to get there around the same time as the police, as there was some confusion about the address. I watched from a distance as two officers approached the door and knocked.

The boyfriend only opened the door halfway. One of the officers spoke, and the boyfriend tried to slam the door shut. The officer stuck his foot out and caught the door, then the two of them shoved at once, and knocked it open. I heard a woman’s scream from within. My friend’s scream. My blood ran cold as I worried about possible misfires of weapons, and my friend getting caught in the altercation. But then an officer escorted her out of the apartment.

Her hair was wet through. It turned out that after I’d gotten off the phone with her, her boyfriend had decided they should shower together.

It was afterward that I heard the whole story. How she’d told him she didn’t want to be with him. How he’d held her down in the bathtub, looming over her, calling her all kinds of names and telling her what a POS she was. How he’d talked her around in circles until she’d agreed to stay with him. Only then had he left long enough for her to contact me.

The police took her statement. The whole time she expressed concern over what would happen to her boyfriend now. Worry that she shouldn’t have left him, and shouldn’t have gotten him in trouble. The officers got weird looks on their faces, which I would interpret as a mix of incredulity and “listen to me” earnestness. They told her that he absolutely, without a doubt, met the definition of an abuser. They told her that abusers tended to escalate. They told her that he seemed to have escalated quickly, and that at that pace, her life would have soon been in danger. They urged her to let this be an end to their relationship. They cautioned that if she got back together with him, it would lead to nothing but trouble.

I listened to their speeches and found them impressive. I couldn’t imagine how anyone would go against their counsel. But I did not at that time understand how hard it is for a victim to leave their abuser. I couldn’t comprehend how deep in denial a person could be about the nature of their partner. How much a person could lie to themselves.

I thought I had accomplished my goal. Thought I’d protected my friend, again, this time for good. I was a hero.

I met her in a class in college, and we were both amused by how similar we were. Detail-oriented hard workers, who had trouble in leadership positions because we were both such people-pleasers that it was hard for either of us to ask others to put in more effort, or to correct their mistakes. Between the two of us, we put in well over 50% of the work on a group project that involved six group members.

One day before class, I saw her kissing a man who was quite literally twice her size. She might be 100lb soaking wet, and he was over 200. Seeing him, I took a disliking to him. I tried to place the feeling. Perhaps because he has a man bun? I wondered. I shook it off. It’s none of my business.

(As an aside, I’ve had this flash of intuition on at least three other occasions, when meeting the significant others of people I knew. Every time I’ve had this sense of doom, the relationship has ended in a royal mess.)

At one point, my friend was wearing a turtleneck. But it failed to fully cover the bruise on her throat. I took her aside. “What happened?” I asked. She put her hand over the bruise. “It’s my brother,” she said after some hesitation. “He hurts me sometimes.”

We talked for a while, and she told me she lived with her mom and brother. Her mom was at least somewhat aware of what her brother was doing, but didn’t put a stop to it (I suspect she didn’t know what to do about it). My friend lived in fear of her brother, locking doors whenever possible, to give him fewer opportunities to torment her. She wanted to move out, but couldn’t afford to.

My then-husband and I had lived with roommates on multiple occasions, and we had an extra room at our place at the time. “You can move in with me,” I said. “You have to get away from him.”

She declined, clearly embarrassed, and I thought that was the end of that. But then, a few weeks later, she asked me if the offer was still on the table. I checked with my then-husband, and said yes.

The people who helped her move were myself and her boyfriend. She had a vintage vanity that she clearly cherished, but as they took the mirror off to move it, they’d discovered that the screw holes were stripped. As they brought it in to the room at my place, she told me she was worried the mirror would fall off and break if we tried to use the same holes. Having done some woodworking previously, I told her we could just start new holes. I got my set of drill bits and started comparing bits to the screws, to find one that was just a bit thinner.

Her boyfriend got impatient at this. “Just screw them in,” he said. “You don’t have to drill a hole first.”

After my friend had expressed such worry and care over the vanity, I was shocked at this. “The wood might crack and break,” I said. “It will take barely any more time to drill a hole first.”

He relented, but I felt justified in feeling prejudiced against him. He clearly didn’t care much about my friend’s feelings.

As I would soon discover, I had not saved her so fully from physical abuse as I’d thought. Her boyfriend also didn’t care much about causing her pain.

The story continues here.

You taught me to trust,

deeper than I’ve ever

felt before. Showed me

I don’t have to be

the only one who breaks

out in dance, and I

don’t have to be

embarrassed. You

encouraged me to

believe in myself.

To see myself as a

badass, independent woman

who don’t need no man.

I don’t need you;

that doesn’t scare you,

just prompts you to

keep trying. I never

imagined anyone could be

so consistently kind

and supportive as you.

Are you a dream?

Or were those who

came before, insubstantial,

only puffs of smoke

by comparison?

This is a new development. For most of my life, I was totally hoodwinked with the idea of seeing things through, being true to ones’ word, never giving up. I stayed in band all the way through high school because I’d decided to try it out as an eleven-year-old, so I’d made the commitment. Despite hating swimming practice, I kept doing it till a school counselor realized how depressing I found it and removed me from the class. I worked at Outback Steakhouse as a hostess for two years, plugging along under the promise that if I waited long enough, I’d be promoted to a server. In the meantime, I was the one they turned to when someone had clogged a toilet in the women’s room.

I believed divorce was a sin, and that I should do everything in my power to make my marriage work, including killing myself bending over backwards to please a man who is impossible to please. To do anything less was to be forsworn.

Our society has a vested interest in molding us to be the kind of people who stay in dead-end jobs, and who stay in dead-end marriages. Everything is more stable that way. Change, chaos, those things are expensive. If someone realizes their workplace is taking advantage of their labor and they could make more money elsewhere, and they leave their job, that creates hitches in productivity and revenue. If someone realizes their spouse is actually the worst and initiates a divorce, that adds another money- and time-consuming case to the family courts. Wouldn’t it be much more convenient if we were all steady little worker bees who stayed out after work to avoid our marital problems? And so this fear of being labeled a quitter makes sense as a means of keeping us that way—keeping us in order.

Having quit my marriage, what I’ve realized is this: keeping commitments that aren’t serving you is a way of putting yourself in chains. It is narrowing your present and future possibilities based on the ideals of the past. But what if your present self has different ideals? What if they see things more clearly than your past self? Honestly—how could your present self not see things more clearly than your past self? Everyone knows: hindsight is 20/20.

I would not have made the promise to be forever faithful to my ex had I known how he would treat me as time went on. Therefore, I don’t find that promise to be all that binding. I’m glad I quit. Had I kept slogging away under the promise I’d made when I was a doe-eyed 18-year-old, I would never have been able to be so in-tune with my present self as I am now.

I think it’s invaluable to be able to look at your situation and say, “Yes, I know I said I would do this, but I see now it’s not in my best interest to follow through.” Don’t be held back by the chains of your past. Dare to break free.

I did not do this. I did open my outline. However, the story had pulled a little bit away from the original plot, so the next scene was “some sort of connective tissue.” I let myself be scared off by the amount of work there was to be done, and played my game without having done any of it.

On Tuesday, I scolded myself, and opened up my notebook. The blank page stared back at me, and I shrank from it. Maybe a drink of water, then I’ll be ready. No such luck. Maybe if I think through the other character’s expectations and feelings? I jotted two lines down about what the other character thought and felt, then skipped down a few lines and wrote the first three lines of the scene. Then I kept staring at the page, wondering how to continue, until I gave up and took a nap.

On Wednesday during my lunch break, I decided I really needed to bang it out. Deadline day was tomorrow. I didn’t have my notebook with me, but I rewrote basically what I’d already written from memory. Then I stared at the screen.

What even is the point of this scene? I asked myself. How do I make it interesting? What purpose can it serve? Thinking back on this, that’s probably part of what constipated my writing efforts. Those questions can be left for the editing stage.

Today I have been weepy and lethargic all day. Every time I’ve turned my thoughts toward being productive in any way, including writing that next scene, I’ve thought “I don’t want to.” All I’ve wanted to do is play a game or watch a show. I just want to loaf. Knowing how I’ve been in the past, I know that if I indulged myself in only loafing, I may go on doing that for days. I have to at least write my post, I told myself. I can loaf after that, but I need to do at least that much.

So I stared at my notebook some more, and thought I don’t know how to write and I’m not good at this.

It’s not true. I know deep down it’s not true. I’ve hit a block right now, but that’s a temporary thing. I’ll get back in the swing of it. Also, this kind of stuff is why I’m grateful I gave myself a break and did not join NaNoWriMo. The pressure of writing 1,667 words a day? That’s not for me.

I still owed you all a post, so I wrote this. A glimpse into my writing life, when I’m at a low point. It’s only now as I write this that I’m remembering that I’ve developed tools to deal with writer’s block that I haven’t used yet. Tools like, if I’m having trouble describing the scene, sketch it first. Skip to the next scene that’s most exciting, and come back to this one after the juices are flowing. Try writing a scene of backstory from a different character’s perspective.

But the most important thing, which I clearly haven’t done the best with, is be kind to yourself. That lesson I need to relearn over and over again.

Have you ever faced writer’s block? Have you developed any tools to help deal with it?