had somehow not been in my orbit until introduced us last month—and I’m so glad she did. Eric also does interviews and I love his approach both to interviewing and, well, to life. He holds a gentle, earnest curiosity and a stalwart desire to help. No doubt because Eric was once in a vulnerable place himself. At twenty-four, he was on the streets, with a staggering heroin addiction, and facing prison. A combination of meditation, 12-step programs, deep-deep inner work, good music, tenacity, community, some good fortune, and time, landed him where he is today: clean and thriving with a burning interest in human transformation and resilience.

His award-winning podcast—The One You Feed—has more than 75 million downloads, and he’s a sought-after teacher, speaker, life coach, and author. His new book was just published: How a Little Become a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life.

I’m so happy Eric wrote this essay for Beyond, chockful of wisdom we could all do with at the moment. It’s a beautiful illustration of how a little and a little more becomes a lot. Enjoy!

xJane

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

I related very much to Jane’s recent essay about being a fighter. Just this morning I listened to one of my favorite songs from The Alarm called “Without a Fight” and it is a very vociferous declaration that I will not be giving up without said fight.

However, in that odd way that our best traits often become our worst traits, I’ve also had to realize that fighting is not the tool for every job. But when is fighting to change something versus accepting it the wiser move?

Back in my heavy 12-step days you would hear this in meetings a lot: “Four forty-nine, man, look at page four forty-nine,” or “You need to apply some four forty-nine to that.” People even had bumper stickers that said “449.” Now, 449 is not a cleaning solution like 409 or a lubricant like WD-40.

It’s a page in the AA Big Book. And what was on page 449?

This statement: “Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today.”

Rebellious young me heard that line and it drove me crazy more often than it brought me serenity. Because, of course, as I would point out to whatever well-meaning soul dared speak those words, acceptance isn’t the answer to all our problems. Nothing is an answer to all our problems.

But then again, as with any spiritual truism, there is wisdom at the core of page 449. Not all “problems” are things we can change today—or, sometimes, things we can change at all. They might not even be problems, strictly speaking.

Our biological hardwiring tells us that pain, discomfort, or loss of any kind are enemies to be fought. The fight-or-flight responses that helped us survive as animals on the savannah are still right there, ready to flood us with adrenaline. But as humans, we face the unique challenge and opportunity of rising above these automatic impulses. We can pause. We can reflect. We can recognize that sadness over the death of a loved one is a different kind of pain than a persistent backache, which is a different kind of pain than a sense of injustice, which is a different kind of pain than existential dread. (The downside to self-awareness as a species: lots of feelings.)

The starting point of acceptance is to do the simple, hard work of agreeing that whatever is happening to us is actually happening. My back hurts. My dog has passed. An injustice has occurred. The next step is to answer a simple, hard question: Can I do anything to change the source of this pain? Not “do I want to change it”; not “do I wish I could.” You already know the answers to those.

This is the confusion for which the Serenity Prayer seeks clarity.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.”
- Reinhold Niebuhr

And for centuries, thinkers have tried to make it easier than it actually is. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus framed the ability to know what is and isn’t within our control as the cornerstone of a life well lived. He drew a neat division: our judgments, choices, and attitudes on one side; our health, reputation, wealth, and the actions of others on the other.

As brilliant and timeless as that central insight is—that it’s worth focusing your time and energy where they will have the most impact—you may have some qualms with those lists. I do.

I can agree that we can’t control the fact of aging, for example, but I’d point out that we can make choices about our health today that give us a better chance of aging well. And yes, we can’t control the stock market, but we can make choices about how to save and invest.

The Serenity Prayer, Epictetus, and all sorts of other thinkers—they all want life to sort into two columns. Things you can change, things you can’t. But life rarely supplies obvious answers in the “wisdom to know the difference” department.

It asks us to balance conflicting truths and invites us to wonder whether to blame the world around us or our own perspective. Am I unhappy at work because my boss is actually a jerk, or because I’m being triggered and there’s something in me that needs attention? Is this business not working because it’s not a good idea, or do I need to hang on a little longer? Is my phone glitching because it’s truly outdated, or is the universe trying to teach me patience while I Google “how to fix slow phone”?

I dislike binary, simple answers. Our actions, judgments, and choices—which all these thinkers put in the “we can control” bucket—come from a complex stew of motivations, not all of which are even conscious. “Control” itself is a slippery concept as soon as you stick “self-” in front of it. And what even counts as a “choice”?

Is it a choice to drink, when you’re deep in the patterns of an alcoholic? Not exactly, I would argue, but at some point, there is some choice to say “no more.” So which column does that go in? The thing I can change, or the thing I can’t? I spent years living inside that question. The answer, when it finally came, wasn’t one or the other.

I think that’s closer to how most of life actually works. We often need to learn to both change and accept the very same thing. Which is harder than picking one. But I think it’s also more honest.

Deep gratitude to my paid subscribers whose support keeps my spirits buoyant and this newsletter afloat. ❤️

If you find yourself here a lot, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Not only do you help sustain my work, you help get heaps of (often quite ill!) doggies and kitties off the streets.

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If you enjoyed this essay, you might also enjoy these deeply moving paintings by , (pretty much my favorite living artist):

I can’t hear the Serenity Prayer without thinking about Sinéad O’Connor (though it might be clear to most of you by now, that it doesn’t take much to make me think of Sinéad.) She recites it at the beginning of Feel so Different, the first song on I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, my favorite album of all time.

Stunning live version of the song, but, alas, no Serenity Prayer.

Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!

Do you struggle with the change/accept binary? What, if anything, has helped you find the balance? How easily do you accept what is actually happening? What’s your relationship like with control? What are your thoughts on the Serenity Prayer?

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To the best of my (and Cathy’s!) recollection, Cathy Alter and I met somewhere in the wilds of Substack. She left such thoughtful comments, and soon a kinship formed. I knew Cathy had written mesmerizing essays and articles for everyone from O, The Oprah Magazine and The Cut to Oldster and The Washington Post, amongst many others. I asked if she might be game to write something for Beyond. To my delight, she said yes!

“How about bullies?” Cathy asked.

“Yes, yes!” I said.

I’ve been wanting to write about bullies for a while now. I have one in my life whom, for various reasons, I’m not able to discuss. But it’s such a vital and necessary and widespread topic—magnified by the abject bullying running our country at the moment. Cathy’s essay explores the often long-term toll bullying takes, the way it undermines your self-worth and makes you feel that you must be the cause of your own abuse—and how, in Cathy’s case, facing her experiences with honesty and openheartedness allowed her to land somewhere unexpected.

In addition to writing gorgeous essays, Cathy is the author of VIRGIN TERRITORY: Stories From the Road to Womanhood, the memoir, UP FOR RENEWAL: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over, and CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush.

She lives in Washington, DC, with her husband Karl and their son, Leo.

Enjoy!! Let me know what you think in the comments!

xJane

There’s Something in You

I was in the middle of taking off my coat when a woman strode up to me with great purpose, holding up a book—my book, in fact—like the raised torch of the Statue of Liberty.

“Is this really you?” she asked, staring hard. I had just arrived at my friend Charlotte’s house in Alexandria, Virginia, about to meet the ladies in her neighborhood for my first book club event since the launch of my memoir, Up for Renewal. Obama had just won the presidency and all of DC was ecstatic, hugging strangers and wearing shit-eating grins.

Figuring this woman was questioning the authenticity of my author photo (which is, ahem, a few years out of date), I assured her that, yes, it really was me.

“I know the photo is you,” she responded with impatience. “You look much more tired in person, though.”

There were 12 other women, already seated in a semi-circle, books on laps. Suddenly, all eyes were on me.

“What I want to know is,” she continued, “is this really you in the book?”

“It’s a memoir, “ I reminded her. “It’s really me.”

“Oh,” she sniffed. “I don’t like that character at all.”

In what has to have been my proudest moment of all time, I flung my coat on a chair, took a step closer, and replied coolly, “Well, maybe there is something in me that you don’t like in yourself.”

I’d like to take credit for that sick burn, but this particular bon mot originated with Dr. Phil. Yes, that Dr. Phil. There was a brief moment in time, after Jerry Springer but before Maury Povich, where I was a dedicated Phil watcher. Especially the shows where the bullies—passive aggressive mothers-in-law, controlling boyfriends, and cafeteria Queen Bees—all got their comeuppance, delivered in the southern parlance of ill-fitting britches and dogs that won’t hunt.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own bullies, past and present. Of the scars they’ve left behind on my psyche even though they have long ago forgotten about inflicting them. Was there something in me? I wondered. And if there was a vulnerability, how was it so detectable to everyone else but me?

“You always looked like something bad was about to happen to you,” said one of my high school tormentors, a football player, when I asked him what he remembered about me from back in the day.

“Because something always did,” I told him, shocked that he didn’t remember once placing a teammate on my back, piggyback style while everyone else laughed their heads off. The weight of that kid, a sleeping bag filled with sand, clung to my body in a way that was both unfamiliar and sickly intimate.

“I did that?!” he asked incredulously.

Of course, for me, it was like it happened yesterday. Back to those fraught years when I idolized my teachers, clipped a little koala bear to the strap of my overalls, and desperately tried to force my curly hair into a Farrah Faucet flip. I was nice, too, obeying substitute teachers and always standing up for the kids that had it worse off than me.

If you’ve ever been bullied, you know how easily it is to wormhole back in time. A grim backslide even when it happens to me now. After all, those mean girls grew up to be mean women. And as victims in the past, we are so sensitized to this unpredictable aggression, that when it happens again—in the office, on I95 during rush hour, and, in my case, at a volunteer job where the manager held her bit of power over me until I cried—it’s not a new experience. We bullied ones go right back to that place of being young and scared and defenseless.

And if you’ve ever been the bully, you may have skipped beautifully along in life to become an oncology nurse in Boston, or a mother of 4 boys in Orlando with a big, fat diamond on your ring finger (I know, because I’ve tracked you both down like a bounty hunter), but you were also the source of my unhappiest days.

Being bullied robbed me of my confidence. And even though I was a good foot taller than most of my schoolmates, I bowed my head and rolled my shoulders, folding into myself like a piece of origami. I kept my good grades to myself and saved my sense of humor for the weekends. Unless I wanted a life of solitude, I had no choice but to forgive my best friend come Saturday. I understood her abandonment at school; we were all just trying to survive until we could (please, god) leave town and reinvent ourselves in college.

I realize now that the thing that these bullies saw in me that they didn’t like in themselves was weakness. They needed me to feel as insecure and fearful as they often felt, walking down our school’s hallways hoping that the right brand of clogs would secure them some momentary popularity, or pushing through the doors of the auditorium, desperately praying that one of their friends had remembered to save them a seat.

It’s the way of the world. The true binary of power dynamics. I had to be the pariah in order to spare my tormenters the mantle. It’s one of the many reasons why they continued their attacks, refocusing everyone’s attention on someone weaker so that their own deficiencies—in the form of second-rate clogs or failing grades—weren’t detected. We all carry our injuries, even if they’re not of the same making.

These days, my real power comes from writing. And lately, I’ve been on a bit of a rampage, chronicling my life, bully by bully. The process has allowed me to regain parts of myself, to resee parts of myself, that once made me a target. My mother always worried that I was too sensitive, too nice, too trusting. “I don’t know how else to be,” I remember telling her.

It’s those very traits that predicted what shape I would take as an adult. The same attributes that once made me a target for bullies—kind, tenderhearted, more observer than actor—that have now manifested as a nurturing and sensitive partner and mother. “You are the emotional center of our family,” my husband often tells me. “Without you, me and Leo would roam around like untended animals.”

But what of my bullies? I recently bumped into one, on the sidewalks of the small beach town where my father keeps a weekend house and where I was spending 3 weeks of my summer. I hadn’t seen her since elementary school and my instinct was to run away. We hugged instead and she invited me out for coffee.

“You used to be so mean to me,” I told her once we parked ourselves at a table.

Even though I can’t recall her words, I instead see a snapshot from those days. Her body language was all offensive line, physically blocking me from wherever I needed to go—the school bus, the lunch line, a bathroom stall. Wherever I was, she was there waiting for me.

“I don’t remember,” she said as if awakening from a dream. “But if I was, I am so sorry.” Then she burst into tears. As you all might have guessed, she was also suffering. Built like an Olympic swimmer, she was teased relentlessly for her broad, muscular back and hair tinted green by chlorine.

Hearing her talk about those days, punctured by a collection of cruel older brothers and “lost” invitations to birthday parties, made me want to forge a friendship from scratch. While our shared history remained fixed (Remember Mrs. Babic? What about Grand Central Disco?), we used the long stretches of our summer days to upend the archives.

We signed up for a string of yoga classes together, showing up daily for ourselves and for each other. While my son Leo was fishing for porgies at camp, she and I met for happy hour across the street, trading stories about our earlier divorces and ecstatic remarriages. We walked the historic streets, pointing out our favorite homes and peeking into windows so we could judge the decorating abilities of the inhabitants.

Spending those weeks with my friend was like taking a small smudge stick to a large part of my past. Did befriending my former bully make me want to rekindle relationships with the rest of them? Not one bit. I had been friendly to the few I saw at hometown bars, and they were still the same douchebags; their eyerolls letting me know that I would never be one of them. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, who’d want to be a member of their club anyway?

Marx may have made those words famous, but it was my mother who most often repeated them as I was growing up, perhaps managing her own disappointments rather than steeling me for mine. And even though she worried constantly about me becoming a doormat, I’d argue that I was actually a welcome mat, steadfast in my knowledge that, eventually, the right people would walk in.

Deep gratitude to my paid subscribers whose support keeps my spirits buoyant and this newsletter afloat. ❤️

If you find yourself here a lot, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Not only do you help sustain my work, you help get heaps of (often quite ill!) doggies and kitties off the streets.

Subscribe now

If you’d like to support my work without a subscription, here’s my link to Venmo and Paypal. ⭐️

If you enjoyed this essay, you might like this one by Amy B Scher:

Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!

Have you had any bullies in your life? How have these relationships changed you? What have you learned about yourself through them? Have any shifted into friendships? If so, how? Let us know in the comments!

Leave a comment

I first met when she filled in the Beyond Questionnaire. It was immediately apparent that she was brilliant and tender and a total badass. We also had a lot in common—for one thing, she talks to ants! After that, I was lucky enough to chat with her at her book party in New York City, and then we had the most glorious lunch in London’s Holland Park. We spoke for two and a half hours straight and only stopped because my sometimes glitchy brain went into overload. All of which confirmed that she’s brilliant and tender and a total badass. Also that she’s incredibly kind and funny and generous. And she’s quickly become of one my favorite writers. I adore her Substack and often start my morning by listening to her read one of her short daily posts. They’re transportive. She’s also written A Perfect Explanation and In Judgement of Others both of which are fantastic.

So, of course, I asked Eleanor if she’d write an essay for Beyond. And lucky us, she said, yes! “I’ve been thinking a lot about British Boarding School Syndrome and about how we’re increasingly cut off from nature and this severing is creating a distortion of reality and we need to connect with our imaginations and the divine and the material to find our way back,” she said, or words to that effect. “Does that sound interesting?” Um, yes. The result of which, the essay you’re about to read, knocked my proverbial socks off.

Enjoy! I so look forward to hearing your thoughts in the comments!

Reality Calling

I’ve been thinking about reality, what it is, what it means, how I sit at this table, and the trees can speak, and you are another myself. I’ve been thinking about a woman sitting on the shores of the Mediterranean, staring out to sea, her back to a sea of tents, her family gone, her possessions blown up, and what does she have left? And I’ve been thinking about the British Empire; the schools it built, the structures it designed, how the Silver Guillotine in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials ripped me to shreds, and what happens when humans are severed. Do you remember the scene? Children are put in a box and cut from their Daemons.

Earlier this year I visited the Giant’s Causeway, a Paleogenic wonder on the northern coast of Ireland; gargantuan in proportion and megalithic in display which geologists will explain with scientific exactitude, but I prefer to believe it was the giants. Why? Because it’s more fun. And also without infinite figments of our imagination what do we have left? A finite material world and a prescriptive god, and that doesn’t sound like living to me. It sounds dull.

I write this in my home in the south of France, a place singing with aesthetic beauty, thin veils and mystery. Here, a picture book existence makes me wonder at my luck, a door audibly bangs to another world, and angels appear. Time spent here is to know fully that reality is part material, part imaginary, part divine, that this physical aspect which allows me to type is but a fraction of the whole. As I wrote that sentence, a box fell off the shelf behind me containing a 3d puzzle of Stubb’s painting of Whistlejacket. I’ve been here a week with no one moving anything. That painting has been my go-to love of the wild unseen since I was a child. This is what I’m talking about. Things happen here. I once dreamt I came down to the kitchen in the middle of the night to find a whole set of other beings leaning at the island stove, people that weren’t humans at all, who could see me but were uninterested, who inhabited a much higher plain. No doubt one of them thought it would be funny to push the puzzle off the shelf, or apposite. Maybe they just wanted a mention. Either way, whichever way you slice it, there’s invisible life in this house that witnesses me as I witness the characters in a book. I am the three dimensions to their fourth. I know it and they know it and that dream, and the puzzle falling from the shelf, are two occurrences of many.

I also write this as a survivor of early childhood sexual abuse, a kind of severing of reality from which I have fought my way back. What god would allow this? There must be no god. How do I survive? I will leave my body. And my imagination swelled, grew unbalanced, and became infected by fantasy in a world dictating that only the material is real. I write this in recovery of true reality. These things happened and I am here and I am not singularly flesh or non-existent or all mighty but in equal parts all three.

So let’s get to the point. A world dictating that only the material is real. Let’s zero in on that. At the dawn of the Age of Reason when Science challenged God the English invented schools; specifically Public Schools, so called, not because they were for the public, (they were fee-paying and only the rich could afford them), but so as to pay no tax. Public Schools were (up until this year) by default, registered charities with a scholarship quota. That’s the “Public” bit. The British were empire building, and in order to get away with the genocide necessary to turn up uninvited in someone else’s country and take it over, they needed foot soldiers cut off from the neck down. They needed all head and no heart and certainly not the imagination which might have imagined what they were doing was wrong. Boys as young as eight were sent away with their little trunks of possessions, not to see their parents again until Christmas. They were beaten and sexually violated, cordoned off from anything approaching art, and in all ways severed from what made them human. They were made “men” of; meaning male humans who could watch another die and not be shattered by it unless that other human looked and spoke and behaved exactly like them. Imagination was allowed for very small children but only if they understood it wasn’t real. The divine was allowed as long as you met Him in church and on your knees.

Midway through this great enlightenment the Industrial Revolution marched in to carry thousands of not at all rich from country to city, slaying their quotidian engagement with nature. The British Empire grew, outstripping Genghis Kahn and Ivan the Terrible, controlling at its height over 400 million people, (not counting the souls of those foot soldiers), and wiping out, over four bloody centuries, immeasurable knowledge, uncountable cultures and the very soul of magic. It was no wonder, then, that the birth of The British Empire and the Age of Reason coincided, and that the British Empire took one look at the condemning of The Unseen and the severing from Nature and used these twin forces as their twin weapons of choice. Feathers in their hair! Savages. No shoes on their feet! Uncivilised. Before you could say, “dunking stool”, we were shaming dreamers and ridiculing shamans and science had become another battle ground. You’re either with us or against us but you can’t have both.

Then along came the Victorians and their do-gooding attitude to the poor, followed swiftly by socialism and the call for a state school system that actually was for the public. The British Empire, not nearly ashamed enough, rebranded itself as The Commonwealth, but instead of acknowledging that multiple generations had been laid waste by a system devoid of the basic understanding of what makes us tick, the British Government copied the old system to the letter, albeit with fewer beatings, and sexual exploitation limited by dint of the pupils going home at night. Creative play was for primary school, at eleven we put those dreams away, and if you didn’t, it was made clear that you were not half as valuable as a scientist or mathematician, philosopher or doctor. Lawyers were, and still are, better than sculptors. In short, if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, and if it doesn’t exist it’s no use.

This sensibility persists. If you creep out on the ledge of make believe there’s a good chance you’ll be laughed back inside. If you dare to propose that the Aztecs were onto something, or Atlantis exists or what about alien spaceships you’ll be sent to the back of the class. And don’t, for the love of god, admit to hearing voices.

Cue a multitude fixated on material solutions to this problem called life, a conviction of absolute explanation and finite power, and the emergence lately, as men born in the 60’s reach mid-life in an era of therapy, of Boarding School Syndrome, a condition so acute and widespread they had to name it. A person suffering this condition will present, among other things, a fear of intimacy, emotional suppression, low self-esteem, avoidance of vulnerability, distrust of others, a persistent fear of abandonment, problems with anger, depression, anxiety – need I go on? It sounds like the last six Prime Ministers of Britain and all of the leaders of the free, and not so free world today. If I am only my body, and the visible world is all there is, if I am, in short, alone, then what’s the point? If your gain is my loss then why would I not fight you for it? Sometimes I wonder if all those with their finger on the trigger, dropping bombs and starting wars, if on their deathbed when reality comes crashing at their shore they’ll think, Oh shit. What a colossal waste to have brutalised millions only to discover that the demon they were running from was in their head. Or that they never got over that other severance, the original, necessary one when their umbilical was cut and by mistake they took it personally. What a shame. Better luck next time.

But let’s be kinder. What if they tried really hard to remain whole, to keep rotating in their childish systems the holy trinity of realms that every newborn knows. What if they began believing in The Little People and talking to Giants, playing with Fairies at the bottom of the garden only to be told they were wrong? What if the monsters under the beds were real? What if, like me, they left their body, their imagination became infected by fantasy, and god was put in a box? I didn’t start a war, but I could have done.

In Iceland, in order to build a new road, planners must take account of the homes of the Huldefólk; the Hidden People. Still. Now. In 2025. So there is hope. And educators in the UK are waking up to the devastating effects on the psyche of children denied creative play. Yet we still say, “Perhaps I imagined it” to debase something we suspect yet daren’t admit. And by no coincidence at all, “Perhaps I imagined it” is the defence of all survivors who are not yet resourced to go there.

Part of my recovery has been working with a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and in our sessions we work in the realms of material (the body) and imagination (what I see when I close my eyes.) The imaginary realm has served as a conduit to both the divine and the material, a central meeting place where anything is possible, including the healing of ancient wounds. We literally meet in the liminal, I see it as a white space, no up, no down, no judgement, and work with whatever joins us there. It has proved vital, magic and holy. It has been intense. It’s been real. I know this because of the very real material difference I experienced during the recent death of my mother; a difference from those around me who haven’t been lucky enough to do this work. My mother was hardly the stuff of Mary Poppins; she was absent, tough and uncaring, and there was much to be angry about, but when she died I watched her body be carried away not as a daughter lacking in love or a child neglected, but as a human. A flow within me had been reestablished; it kept me grounded through her demise and widened my ability to connect with her in a place of our shared reality. She died and I will die, too. It was less about forgiveness than a complete absence of rancour. I’ve also been microdosing – no surprise there – and again, those conscious magic mushrooms who work between many more dimensions than the three I’ve been focusing on, have wrought actual, materially measurable changes to my life experience. I am kinder. I laugh more. I let be more easily. Without those three working in cohort the very spine of our existence is crippled. They are the discs which keep us moving. The Giant’s Causeway had a point.

I’ve been trying very hard not to end this with unsolicited advice or any sort of call to action. Yes, we’re severed from reality. Millions live by their phones and die under the impression they’re alone, many millions more believe their worth can be measured in numbers. And the woman still looks out to sea, her back to a sea of tents, her children gone, everything lost, and the bombs still drop, and I sit in my beautiful house in the south of France and think who am I to tell you how to live? Who am I to tell her? But, you guessed it. I just can’t resist. So here it is.

In the overwhelm of a world maddened by confusion, the discs which soften our movement ruptured or enlarged beyond reason, when beauty feels like a privilege and grace is all we have, for those of you not with your backs to a sea of tents because surely she knows already, I encourage you to live knowing the three realms we have access to; the material, imaginary and divine, are real. The sum of their parts is reality; everything you see around you was born in someone’s imagination, including you, and time engaged with all three, and with fair shared belief, is time well spent. When we are born we are severed from our mothers, and some of us are relieved (me) and others are devastated, and all of us during our lifetimes must find our way back to the divine by asking the question, Who am I? and imagining the answer. This is the human experience, the collective endeavour that requires all three realms to get there. Let them bring you together. Reality is calling.

Deep gratitude to my paid subscribers whose support keeps my spirits buoyant and this newsletter afloat. ❤️

If you enjoy my writing, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Not only do you help sustain my work, you help get heaps of (often quite ill!) doggies and kitties off the streets.

Subscribe now

If you enjoyed this essay, you might like this one by Gayle Brandeis:

Thank you for reading! I love hearing your thoughts!

What’s your definition of reality? What’s your relationship with the material, the imaginary, and the divine? Let me know in the comments!

Leave a comment

This essay by Lauren Aliza Green went straight to my heart. I’m guessing it will go straight to your heart, as well. When Lauren said she wanted to write about intergenerational friendship, I was delighted. It’s a meaningful topic to me as so many of friends are decades younger, so I was imagining the same would be true for her. But I was blissfully wrong (which makes sense, since I’m on the older end of the spectrum and Lauren on the younger)! What an exquisite, tender tribute to friendship. I want to hang out with Walter, Shirley, Bobby, and Lauren on Sunday afternoons!

Lauren wrote another gorgeous essay for Beyond last year, when her debut novel The World After Alice was published. It’s a beautiful book; as with all of Lauren’s writing, smart, thoughtful, insightful, with loads of intrigue.

⭐️ The paperback is out this month and to celebrate, Lauren is generously gifting five readers an autographed copy of The World After Alice! If you’d like to be one of the lucky recipients, please add “Alice” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, July 14th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. (Shipping is limited to the United States)

I’m especially excited to share this essay with you—Lauren made a beautiful recording. The world needs this sort of care and devotion right now. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! ❤️

All the Sundays

I ring the doorbell and wait, imagining Walter on the other side, making his labored descent. He greets me with a hug, guiding me past the stair lift and the canes propped against the wall. Every Sunday the sight is the same: dappled sunlight coming through the windows, two pianos, the Sunday crossword already completed on the couch. We gather here to make music: Walter, our friend Bobby, and I. Shirley, Walter’s wife of more than sixty years, is our sole audience member. They were all born in the 1930s, children of the Great Depression; I am twenty-nine.

Walter and Bobby take their seats at their respective pianos. Bobby, as usual, has prepared a list of jazz standards to play. I sing the vocal line on “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “Blue and Sentimental.” Sometimes, in advance of our meeting, Shirley will email me a song to learn. One week it was “I’ve Got a Crush on You” by Gershwin; another, “Like Someone in Love” by Van Heusen and Burke. I keep a running list on my phone of our repertoire.

I first met Shirley and Walter in an Italian conversation class. We discovered, serendipitously, that we lived around the corner from each other. Shirley is a retired academic; Walter, a researcher. We soon became friends, bonding on the ride home through discussions of theater, restaurants, and travel. Shirley is the more excitable of the two, with wavy gray hair and green eyes that are quick to light. Walter, by contrast, radiates stoic intensity. His mind seems often to be elsewhere, as if scanning the patterns beneath things. For this and his frazzled appearance, our Italian teacher called him “Einstein.”

At some point, Shirley and Walter learned that I was a singer and invited me to join their Sunday concerts. They introduced me to Bobby, a former speechwriter and musical savant. “Name a key,” he told me the first day, his hands already dancing around a melody. What seemed at first a parlor trick soon revealed a greater talent: he could play any song I named, by heart, in any key. His knowledge on other subjects is equally encyclopedic; he is just as likely to quote Yeats in conversation as he is to mention Kennedy’s press secretary. He’s hilarious and big-hearted, with a spirit of boyish delight. He dresses formally, in collared shirts and slacks. His frame is slight, even ascetic. He often walks me home, and I’ll turn at the last second to see him amble back down the block. There lies beneath his joy an undercurrent of sadness; his wife died many years ago.

Our performances last around an hour. Afterward Walter goes to get the drinks tray. No matter how many times I’ve offered to help, he refuses. Then we talk: politics, poetry, the past. Shirley tells me about seeing a play at Judson Church for two dollars a ticket. Bobby laments the fact that all the “gents” in the men’s room at Carnegie Hall text on their phones. They reminisce: the Vietnam protests, the summer they weren’t allowed to play at the public pool because their parents feared they’d catch polio. As a novelist, I’m used to listening. The gift here is being invited to listen to people with such rich stories to tell.

Last year, Shirley and Walter attended the launch of my debut novel. They sat in the front row so that Walter could hear. (He wears hearing aids, though those can be finicky.) A pang of emotion struck me: nostalgia for the moment while it was still unfolding. Having friends six decades my senior sharpens my sense of time’s preciousness. I couldn’t help but wonder if this was the last time they’d be able to celebrate a book launch with me; if it was the last time all the people in that room would be able to celebrate in just that configuration.

For nonagenarians, Shirley and Walter get around. They drive to visit their son out of state; they fly abroad. When they leave, I take care of their plants and gather their mail. They bring me back tokens from their time away: a beautiful scarf made overseas, a whimsical pair of art-themed socks. I, too, am a traveler. When I went to Tokyo last winter, Walter asked me how I planned to communicate. “Have you heard of Google Translate?” I asked, pulling up the app to show them. Shirley looked wistful: once, misunderstanding—and the spontaneous memories that arise from it—was a necessary part of life. She doesn’t even own a cell phone. There is beauty in inconvenience, she reminds me.

*

One day a few months ago, an email arrived in my inbox from Shirley: there would be no concert that weekend; Bobby was not well. Doctors had found something. They were running tests. He was scared; they all were. I asked questions, determined to mobilize into action. I was, after all, the heartiest among us; I could easily run errands. Shirley said she’d keep me posted and that, in the meantime, Walter was teaching Bobby how to use his microwave.

We resumed our concerts the following week, under the shadow of Bobby’s looming treatments. We sang, we played, we drank. Shirley wondered if every language toasted to life and health. She rattled off a few: za zdorov’ye in Russian, na zdraví in Czech, skål! in Swedish. They all meant the same thing.

With time, our post-music conversations deepened. Our talks about Cole Porter evolved into discussions about what it meant to be a patient. “Patient” was apt, Bobby said, because withstanding the infusions, dizziness, and nausea did require immense patience. I told him about websites listing clinical trials. We discussed the healing properties of Greek yogurt. His appetite was all but gone. “Escoffier could be the chef, and it still wouldn’t matter,” he said. (I mentally filed away the name to look up later.)

What is friendship? What special powers does it have to enrich our days? I recall, as a college student, reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and being struck by this line: “Without friends, no one would choose to live.” Aristotle goes on to say that friendship benefits both the young and old—the young, because it keeps them from erring; the old, because it supplements the activities they can no longer perform. I would add to this that friendships which span the human continuum remind us that even when we feel alone or stranded in time, we’re all trucking down the same path. What comfort there is in such knowledge.

This past Sunday, I told Walter, Shirley, and Bobby about this piece, sparking a discussion on the rewards of multigenerational friendships. I said that the elderly offer a sense of perspective. The anxieties associated with youth (career uncertainty, self-doubt, comparison to others) are, to an older friend, mere trivialities. Been there, done that. They assured me such perspective ran both ways: there is immense joy in seeing life through less wizened eyes. Bobby shared a story about two friends who recently entered assisted living, and how they missed being surrounded by young people. “It’s like being in God’s waiting room,” he said.

Our time together is shaded by the knowledge of its finitude. This is okay. If anything, I wonder if more relationships would be better off being bound by this knowledge. Certainly, we seize every opportunity we have for joy. After I finish singing, Bobby beams and says, “Fantastic! Just fantastic.” This willingness to appreciate the moment—to fully, without embarrassment, embrace it—is the rare quality of someone who knows better than to take tomorrow for granted.

Last night Bobby and I walked together to the door. He wore a sweater despite the 90-degree heat. He gripped the railing. The following day, he was going for a CT scan. I wished him luck. This time, it was I who offered to walk him home. He declined, assuring me he would be fine. After we said goodbye, I strolled along the river, hoping to catch the sunset. “Blue Skies” played through my earbuds: Blue days…All of them gone…Nothing but blue skies…From now on. The music kept me company all the way home.

*Names have been changed for privacy.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like this one by :

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is one of my favorite writers. No matter what she writes, no matter the topic or the length, it reads like a poem plucked fresh from her heart. Her insight and wisdom and tenderness and wildness bowl me over. Where did this glorious soul spring from?

I’m lucky that Mary is also a dear friend. She is as loyal, kind, fierce, passionate, funny, and tender as her writing. Mary, her husband, two young sons, two dogs, and a bearded lizard lived through Hurricane Helene and the aftermath. In fact, they were right in the center of it: Swannanoa, North Carolina. The part that appeared in much of the news coverage. For three terrifying days, I didn’t know if she was alive! She was! And she’s now written this gorgeous essay that is in part about her experiences to stay alive, in part about disaster utopias, in part the exhausting drone of politics, in part collective liberation, and in part about cicadas. And wholly about tending to one another, the planet, and all her beings.

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Washington Post, among others.

Mary also honored Beyond by being our first Guest Contributor! So if you enjoy this essay perhaps check that one out, too. It’s about grief: short but so so potent.

Mary has recently started her own newsletter called . Of course, it’s fantastic. She and her family continue to live in Swannanoa where they’re healing alongside the land and the community.

Prepare to have your heart and mind blown open! Let me know what you think in the comments.

xJane

Ten Imperfect Cicada Metaphors for the Apocalypse

I love the sound of cicadas. Their percussive trill takes me back to Southern Summers of my childhood: lazy sweet watermelon dripping down your chin, chlorined lycra and jasmine blooming into the humidity, star-spangled infinite warm nights, books in hammocks and plumped tomatoes on the vine. 

What is happening now is something different than this. 

Collectively, the prolific 17-year brood of red-eyed, black bugs scream all day in our small town in Western North Carolina like an incessant car alarm. Over the mountain we live on, their calls meld together into a noise that rises like an eerie, alien electrical substation. I’ve never in my life heard anything like it.

The noise finds me all hours of the day, inside the house, in the woods, in the school pick up line. 

It reminds me of the news. Even when you avoid it, its horrors still hum in your background. 

It reminds me too of living here in Swannanoa after disaster came last September with the arrival of Hurricane Helene.

It’s everywhere, omnipresent and inescapable. It’s out our windows. It’s in our broken land. The broken buildings that line the river. And in so many who are still caught in the undertow of the aftermath. 

It’s woven in the fabric of our days, like the cicada screams.

Cicada Fact #1: The ones screaming are the males.

Of course they are. 

Sometimes it helps me to reframe the noise as “the screams of a dying patriarchy.” Sometimes it helps me to reframe politics this way too. 

The disaster, however, won’t square up. IMHO, this was nature screaming for us to turn this all around. 

Same goes for the atrocities in Gaza. For the fact that many traumatized flood victims are still going round and round with FEMA and insurance companies to little avail. For ICE raids tearing apart families.

After the disaster, I have no patience, no chill, for the injustices of this world that just make no damn sense.

Cicada Fact #2: You can’t escape the noise.

Sometimes the sun is too bright and the cicada screams are too loud and my noise canceling headphones do not, as they say, cancel the noise. And one cannot take to the woods for soothing, because that is where the cicadas are too. 

It’s kind of like when Trump came to Swannanoa post-Helene to stand on a red carpet placed over flood mud, the historic and improbably flooded Beacon Village a backdrop as he tore apart FEMA, who was in fact here helping, albeit imperfectly. 

We hadn’t had potable water for weeks at that point, and I needed to take my plastic buckets to the shuttered Ingles’ parking lot to fill them from the giant steel tanker truck brought in by the military. 

He blocked the then-singular route in and out of my community, limited by stream-and-river broken roads and bridges. I huddled in my room waiting for him to leave, curtains drawn, trying to pretend he wasn’t just a few blocks away. 

But I couldn’t shake his presence.

The cicadas’ omnipresent screaming also reminds me of when the woods were the only safe place during the pandemic, so I roamed the trails. 

But what was inescapable then, what came into harsh focus, were the skeletons of dying Hemlocks. The invasive Vinca and English Ivy and Multiflora Rose and the trees of heaven. Evidence of industrial colonization that crowds out native species. 

The pandemic gave me the time and lens to notice these things. 

The disaster itself forces you to notice it, no matter your time or focus. The landslide around our home, the broken banks of our rivers still littered with detritus, the businesses missing the backs of their buildings, the homes that once stood where there’s now bare land, the people living in campers and sheds and vehicles who still don’t have access to clean water, the fallen oaks scattered like matchsticks on the forest floor.

Wherever you go, there you are. 

 Cicada Fact #3: You can eat them. 

Sauteed, they taste like popcorn. Or beans. 

I don’t actually know what they taste like, but you can ask my little dog. She’s taken to wandering our property and gorging herself on the swarms of the demon-looking bugs.

The thing is, as much as I’m not a fan of their raucous cacophony, I don’t want to kill them. I’m emphatic about this to others whenever they wish away a fascist problem with a quick fix of death. 

This is simply wrong. It perpetuates the very systemic violence we’re trying to solve here.

And, if you kill one cicada, there are plenty more where that one came from. If we yell at them and call them idiots or try to ignore them, it doesn’t change anything about their pitch, their volume, or their lifespan. They remind me a little of all the fear-based headlines screaming for our attention, hijacking our nervous systems.

Best I can do, I think, is try to tolerate their noise until they crawl back underground to gestate for another seventeen years. 

This advice does not, however, apply to current politics.

Cicada Fact #4: They survived landslide mud. 

Like us, like my family. At around 9:30 in the morning that Fateful Friday in September, mid-Helene relentlessly thrashing and pouring, our soils reached a saturation point.

All around the county, land turned liquid, unleashing countless debris flow landslides charging furiously down mountains, bringing with them rushing torrents of trees and boulders and sometimes homes.

It was unprecedented, this geopolitical event. Warnings were dire but still too few and far between, and most people, including many local officials, didn’t grasp the enormity of what was coming until it was too late. 

Those of us that were able to metabolize the warnings ahead of time, like myself, were often dismissed. I don’t think many people can easily conceptualize disaster. Normalcy bias is strong, particularly when our behavior is trained by algorithms and advertisements, exhausted by capitalism, poverty, and/or calibrated to privilege, and divorced from ancestral earth wisdoms and bodily knowings.

What I didn’t yet know, but discovered that morning: when you’re standing on your front porch watching the land dissolve around you, come rushing at you, the ground thunders like earthquake. It feels like watching a high-def disaster movie in slow motion, on the biggest of screens. You realize you might die. The noise imprints on your nervous system though your conscious memory blots it out. 

You freeze, rather than fight or fly. Or I did anyway.

Until our 10-year old led the charge with our rescue German Shepherd, both of them taking turns leading our family up a treacherous climb mid-tropical storm, the soil giving way underneath our hands and trees falling around us as we clawed our way up a steep mountainside and appeared at our neighbors’ home as traumatized, transformed mud creatures.

A small copse of trees saved our house, split the flow around us.

The land-slid, debris-littered terrain surrounding our home, where we used to roam and play in the woods is now rutted far too deep beneath the previous topsoil for the cicadas to have survived. 

But on the periphery, where the mud flowed over existing land several feet deep, the surface is punctuated with hundreds upon hundreds of cicada holes, from this brood of periodic cicadas who had been biding their time below our feet.

Cicada Fact #5: Their time here is finite.

Here’s where the metaphors diverge a little. We know this ephemeral brood will retreat soon, giving way to the more gentle, harmonic annual cicadas that emerge every year. That’s part of what makes it somewhat tolerable.

The disaster is enduring. 

For the people most impacted, like this survivor, the trauma continues every single day. Families who lost homes, loved ones, and businesses, are now left to manage the ruins of their lives without simple, straightforward solutions, and many are still living in temporary, inadequate housing without access to basic needs. Many are still unemployed, or underemployed. Our only local grocery store remains shuttered, an inconvenience for some, but an incredible barrier to food security for others with disabilities, mobility challenges, and/or limited access to transportation.

I hope their experience eventually serves as a harbinger of broken systems, and their stories, from their own mouths and shared with agency and permission and only if it feels right to them, can inform how we fix them together.

For the incredible grassroots organizations formed in the wake of the storm that have been working together with the most impacted, like Swannanoa Communities Together and Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, this is a marathon. 

I hope that their mutual aid, where resources flow with little red tape, judgement, or prerequisite, to community members from all backgrounds, their fierce advocacy for housing, and their commitment to sharing power and wisdom can serve as a blueprint for building back more sustainably and equitably.

For artists like this photographer who continues to give of herself and her work to serve community in the wake of the storm, I hope her haunting poetry and photography signal to others the urgency of this ecological crisis.

These absurd politics, on the other hand? May they be finite. May they burn themselves out like a poorly built fire and give way to something better. 

After the disaster, I wrote a post that said: 

“If billions of individual raindrops can collectively re-make a landscape, then can billions of individuals bind together in localized action to re-make a world, an ecosystem?”

I dream of collective liberation. I am wildly, illogically hopeful. Because I emerged from the landslide and the news cycle changed, and ready to scream about it.

May we be powerful like water.

Cicada Fact #6: Sometimes I like to pretend the noise is an emergence of something better.

This metaphor doesn’t really make sense, because it’s only the males screaming and because they are screaming for sex and because the noise is honestly gawdawful. 

I’d like to think collective liberation would be a perfectly tuned and resonant orchestra, all of us playing our parts in harmony, right on time, in perfect pitch. 

So maybe this discordance is simply the prelude? 

I can’t shake the night of the election last November when I went to a late evening yoga class, one of my favorites, where we all move together to music like dancing. I felt power flood my body, my hands, my belly, from the depths of the earth below my feet. 

Moving collectively, we emanated that power, through our roots and into our bodies and out our palms. We created palpable energy in that hot room. 

We were going to have a Black woman helm our country for the first time ever. I was unshakable in that conviction. This was divine feminine rising, hope transcending the disaster.

My intuition is rarely wrong. Two days before the landslide, I told my husband I was concerned about landslides on our mountain. In early January 2020, I told my husband a pandemic was headed to our shores. 

Oftentimes, my intuition is a simple but pervasive bodily knowing, informed by lots of reading, information seeking and synthesizing, and excellent pattern recognition. 

This bodily knowing is an element of the divine feminine. And our society is sorely lacking in it. The way we live, our allegiance to the almighty dollar and a falsehood of perpetual economic growth despite limited resources and dogma delivered by other’s mouths that often keeps us from it.

Later that night, as I watched the swing states light up red on the map as Musk lit up with glee, I felt a darkness fall over my flickering hope like a heavy black cloak.

Cicada Fact #7: They can play Canon in D. 

Apparently, scientists with electrodes hijacked the poor things and turned them into musicians. 

This is the kind of solution I wouldn’t shy away from, I don’t think, if somehow, of their own volition, the cicadas would suddenly just break into song on the mountain. 

Cicada Fact #8: They feel a little like a cosmic joke.

The cicada memes and musings here locally have been lit on social media these past few weeks. Loud horny male bugs are a ripe subject for ridicule.

Last year’s emergence was apparently supposed to be louder and more prolific, and yet here we are, entrenched in what feels like never-ending unprecedented times, our broken landscape covered in swarms of screaming insects and an apocalyptic echo rising over the valley.

One really really good thing about a disaster is the camaraderie that comes with it. We share PTSD, sure (local social media is also now lit with lament and support with the arrival of heavy rains or wind), and recovery is decidedly inequitable and messy in ways that are really hard to understand or metabolize, but we also share an experience that binds us together, and sometimes dissolves into a hilarity that only those who were collectively traumatized are privy to.

It’s why when, a few weeks ago, my husband and I were woken from Sunday morning slumber at seven am by a phone call from the debris removal contractors saying they would be here in ten minutes, with no other warning, and then they removed a singular tree instead of the landslide’s worth that they’d promised, all I could do was laugh. 

Ha, universe, I see you. 

Another example: a few weeks ago our region was rocked by an actual earthquake, a 4.1 on the Richter scale. For a moment, I was certain the landslide was back as our house shook.

But to my delight, it ended quickly, and immediately the internet sparked with delicious End of the World as We Know it Lyrics and Taylor Swift Shake it Off memes.

Lenny Bruce is not scared of a little shimmy.

Cicada Fact #9: With a British accent, it’s pronounced ci-CAH-dah.

I know this because my current listen is Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible. The British narrator says it this way when she’s describing the ci-CAH-dah trill on the island of Ibiza, where the protagonist acquires mystic intuitive powers from the sea. 

Here in Swannanoa, we say ci-CAY-duh with our Appalachian lilt. 

Our local waters are the Swannanoa River, which is now muddied and chock full of E. Coli when it rains. I know this because my son and I traverse her broken banks to take water samples each week on the broken land the Cherokee once traveled by foot. 

Last September 2024, the Swannanoa River flooded to utterly unprecedented levels. She smashed through all of her previous records, after a front stalled over the Swannanoa Valley and flooded our waterways and saturating our soils a mere two days before Helene arrived from the Gulf of Whatever You Want to Call It (either way it’s too hot), and she turned our mountainsides into white water and debris flows, our streams into life-taking maws of flood, and our rivers into powerful, sprawling, rushing monsters of unfathomable, roaring destruction, that took with them structures and people located bafflingly far away from the banks that normally contain them.

Cicada Fact #10: When I want to escape our problems, the cicadas remind me to stay present.

Honestly, if I had a magic wand and could fix it all right away I would. But unfortunately an easy fix like this isn’t possible. And as much as I want to hide from the cacophony, I literally can’t. I’ve tried.

So I’ve taken them as a lesson: the omnipresent screams help me to remember that though escapism is widely available to us humans in the form of screen-dopamine, shopping, drinking, and various other means, I no longer want to pretend like things are okay here on our planet. 

But that doesn’t mean that I think we need to all work like dogs to fix it. In fact, I think the opposite might be true. I think, because I learned from the incredible advocates that came before me, that we need to work softly, with ample naps and snacks.

We are all ecosystems. Our bodies, our schools, our businesses, our communities. And if we’ve learned anything from disability activism and indigenous wisdom and Black Brilliance and trans visibility and the opioid epidemic and mental health & climate & current political crises, it’s that those systems need a hefty recalibration. That resistance and resilience and health and community are found in joy and care and showing up for each other, with regulated nervous systems supported by gentle environments that aren’t extractive of our beauty, of the earth’s beauty.

It lies in rest. It lies in regenerated soils and healed rivers with clean waters and nourishing foods grown sustainably, in restorative ritual and faith and creativity and art and meaningful work. 

It lies in listening to one another as individuals, even when it’s hard and we don’t agree. In offering bold and brave feedback and hard truths. It lies in breaking bread with our neighbors. In approaching what’s different or unfamiliar with curiosity instead of judgement.

I don’t want to turn away from this noise. I want to lean into it, to transmute it. To use it as impetus to build something different from this, something in right relationship with the earth and with each other, and whatever form of God you do or don’t believe in. To break up abusive systems of power into ecosystems that remember that power is only dangerous when it forgets it’s shared.

So that collectively, all our brilliances can rise together in a gorgeous crescendo of joy-orgasm like the warming of a precisely tuned orchestra, like a sunrise. Like how big-hearted Trump supporters appeared with machines to dig us out of the mud and hugged us, despite the solar panels gleaming from our roof. Like how the Eastern Band of the Cherokee showed up to liberate neighbors that were trapped. How the Amish built small homes for the unhoused. Like the shared meals and shared resources that arrived in droves in the wake of the storm. 

Like how when the storm came, we all got busy saving one another, and for a few days politics and identity fell away like a veil, and we were all of us just humans worthy of life, of care, of love.

Rebecca Solnit writes of the utopias that form in the wake of disaster, and how they often don’t last. I think this is, in part, because our economy demands a return to extractive, profit-driven, individual labor for individual survival, locked down by 40-plus-hour workweeks and social media algorithms and dogma that keeps us from each other and from our inner knowings.

But as I learned from the incredible women at Swannanoa Communities Together, when mutual aid networks begin weaving stronger and more far-reaching webs of care and regeneration like mycelium, maybe, just maybe, people of all stripes can eventually start tentatively exiting those extractive systems as some of that labor begins to be shouldered by new technologies, and we can spend time working hard together on the most real and human problems that plague us instead. Food security. Housing. Misinformation. Belonging. Disaster. War. Climate. Industrial agriculture. 

Tending to this beautiful world and all of her beautiful living things.

But in a way that allows us all to rise, no matter our race, religion, gender, sexuality, background, in accordance with the earth, all our wisdoms and intuitions collapsing together in one Big Beautiful Flood.

And then maybe, just maybe, then we’d have an idealistic chance in hell of turning this all around.

Cicada screams be damned.

If you enjoyed this essay, you might also like this one by Grace Yoder:

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Back in the day, before Substack existed, Facebook offered a thriving writer’s community. And that’s where I met Andrea Jarrell. I instantly fell in love with her writing. Crisp, tender, and compellingly honest, I was moved by Andrea’s take on the world.

I was also bowled over by the photos Andrea posted of the magnificent yoga poses she managed to finagle herself into. It was clear how deeply meaningful yoga was to her life, how it was shaping her. And it was inspiring to watch Andrea’s progress as a practitioner. Her crow pose is a thing of wonder!

Andrea’s gorgeous memoir, I’m the One Who Got Away, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2017. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Literary Hub, Harper’s Bazaar, The Rumpus, the Washington Post, amongst others.

I’m delighted to share this essay that explores the intersection of writing and yoga — and the power of practice.

Enjoy!

xJane

Embracing the Days of Small Beginnings

Throughout my recent yoga teacher training, I kept thinking back to graduate school when I was earning an MFA in creative writing. That raw newbie feeling — wanting to be good, afraid of not being.

On the first weekend of the New Year, teacher training began with an icebreaker. One by one, ten of us stood before the group telling our stories. Gently, our mentors coached us on stance, voice, eye contact, gestures — beginning the process of drawing out the teachers we might become.

When it was my turn, I said I wasn’t really there to teach. I told the group that as a communications consultant working with nonprofits, I thought the leadership and coaching skills I would gain would make me a better partner to my clients. I also said the two things I spent most of my time doing — writing and yoga — were connected.

As I spoke, one of my co-trainers who’s been my yoga teacher for well over a decade said, “Try skipping around the room while you speak.”

With my knees high in big galloping motions, I skipped, weaving across the sunlit studio. Yes, he wanted me to loosen my upright, shoulders back posture. But it was more than that. He asked, “Can you bring that skipping quality into your voice?”

Could I? I’m not sure either one of us knew that he’d landed on the actual reason I wanted to do the training.

My best yoga teachers exude sparkling encouragement. The kind of encouragement that keeps you coming back to your mat to surprise yourself with your strength, your discipline, a forgotten playfulness. No matter what I’m doing or where I am, I carry with me the exhilaration of flying back from crow, my hard-won headstand, and the physical resilience that has transformed my sense of self.

Could I embody unguarded energy and joy that would invite others to find their own? And how much would it hurt if it turned out I couldn’t be a teacher like that?

When I first earned my MFA, I sent stories out like bottled messages into so many seas. They always came floating back. Discouraged, I stopped. Yoga is actually what brought me back to writing, inspiring in me the discipline and persistence I needed to return again and again to the page. Both writing and yoga take practice — both are a practice. “Practice” takes the pressure off, tells the ego to stand down, no need to worry about being perfect. This is just a practice. If you don’t get it right today, you’ll have another chance tomorrow. It was only after I started practicing yoga every day that I began to publish stories, essays and finally a memoir.

Inherent in the word “practice” is a belief that with practice one improves. Which brings me back to teaching yoga. As my weeks of training went by, each time I stood to lead the group through a sequence or a meditation, I felt like I was trying to cross a threshold from presentation to genuine connection. In the moments when I forgot myself, no longer reciting poses but was actually teaching to what I was seeing — feet planting, hands sparking, chests shining all to the flow of breath — it felt like a good writing day. I couldn’t quite explain it, but I knew it had something to do with shared connection, the human spirit revealing itself.

Yes, I was there like everyone else because I wanted to teach. I couldn’t protect myself by denying it. The style of yoga I practice and teach is a power vinyasa inspired by Baron Baptiste. In his book, Journey into Power, Baptiste describes two kinds of beginning practitioners. The ones who leave their expectations of perfection at the door and the ones who never come back because they can’t do every pose the way they want to from day one. He cautions against “despising small beginnings” because it’s only by going through these beginnings and moving on that we become truly skilled.

A week after graduating from teacher training, I co-taught my first class to a full house of seasoned practitioners. People I’d practiced side by side with for years. Afterward, when my mentor asked if I felt I’d hit any aspect of the class out of the park, I couldn’t say yes. I’d done fine. I wanted to do better. I spent the next few days trying not to despise my small beginnings.

I was reminded of what Ira Glass has called the creative taste-talent gap. He says, when you’re first “making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. But your taste is killer. . . the thing I would say to you is, everybody goes through that. [Put yourself] in a situation where you have to churn out the work, because it’s only by actually going through a volume of work that you actually then catch up and close that gap, and the work that you’re making will be as good as our ambitions.”

In other words, practice.

Any kind of apprenticeship program – whether you’re developing your craft as a writer or a yoga teacher – is like a cocoon. If you’re lucky that cocoon will nurture you. Your mentors and fellows will cheer you on as they witness where you started and how far you’ve come. They will see your progress as real success, and it is. But the standard outside of the cocoon is higher and the only way to close the taste-talent gap is to do the work. Because that’s the other thing about practice. No one can do it for you.

I’ve practiced yoga for 20 years with truly inspiring teachers. In the words of Ira Glass, I’ve got killer taste. If I want to be a great teacher, my ability needs to catch up to my aspiration. And the only way it will is if I practice. I’m teaching weekly now, constantly trying to cross that threshold for genuine connection. When I graduated from my MFA program, my mentors said, “Just keep doing what you’re doing.” But I quit, despising my small beginnings. This time, I’m embracing them.

If you enjoyed this essay by Andrea, you might like this one by :

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I first heard of when included one of Lucy’s magical bibliotherapy sessions on her holiday gift list. I was intrigued. More and more these days, you hear about how healing bibliotherapy can be for everything from a broken heart to loneliness to mounting stress about the world. I wanted to know more!

So I’m delighted Lucy wrote this lovely essay for all of us about how she stumbled into bibliotherapy, how it helped her find renewed happiness and hope, and how it can help us, too!

Lucy has read her way through the BBC's Top 100 Books and is now tackling the NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. She works with clients around the world, offering bespoke book prescriptions to help people enhance and improve their reading lives. In 2023, she launched Libraries Curated by Lucy, a service that helps homes, hotels, and wellness retreats source and style beautiful libraries. She writes .

Lucy lives in Bondi, Australia and is never happier than when she has a book in one hand and an ice-cold glass of prosecco in the other.

⭐️Lucy is generously gifting one reader one of her wonderful bibliotherapy sessions, The Constant Reader! If you’d like to be the lucky winner, please add “READER” after your comment. The winner will be chosen at random on Monday, April 7th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! ⭐️

A Life Shaped by Stories

I’ve always been a reader, though not because of one life-changing book or a particularly influential teacher—though I did have two, one in high school and one in college. My love for books wasn’t passed down through my family (my three sisters barely read), but somewhere along the way, stories became a part of me. Some, like Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, have shaped the reader I am today, but the habit itself has always just been there—a steady presence, entirely my own.

My love for books is as innate as breathing—I’m never without one in hand, and I’m forever blathering on about books to anyone who will listen. And while I only came across the idea of bibliotherapy a few years ago—using books as a therapeutic tool—in a way it feels like something I’ve been doing my whole life.

I turn to books when I’m stressed, heartbroken, or in need of creative inspiration. When I want to escape (hello, pandemic!) or when I want to cozy up at home and shut out the chaos of what’s going on around me (current state of the world, anyone?). And while I used to think books were just a way to slip into another world when my own felt too complicated, too uncertain, bibliotherapy—reading with intention, and seeking books as a means of healing—changed that. It didn’t just distract me from life; it helped me live it better.

The first time I truly understood the power of books as a remedy for the soul, I had moved across the world for Ozzie, a man I had a six-day fling with one hot summer in Sydney. It didn’t work out; of course it didn’t. When he picked me up on the day I arrived, it became very clear I had made a mistake. Our dwindling contact in the months I was back in London—something I had chalked up to distance and work commitments—was, of course, a sign of his fading interest. My hopes that life would be a continuation of the six days we spent together were naive at best, reckless at worst.

Suddenly, I was alone in a country a million miles from home. Shame was my constant companion. It was white hot, a furnace. It followed me everywhere. His rejection of me sat heavy on my chest; like an uncomfortable, too-tight bra.

Not long after I arrived in Australia, he told me he was leaving for Vietnam—he wanted to travel, to see more of the world. I cried all afternoon, leaving my bed only to throw up until the bile of my stomach bubbled in the bottom of the toilet. The humiliation was total, it was concrete, I thought I might drown in it.

My instinct was to turn inward, to isolate. But there’s only so much self-pitying I could stomach. Instead, I turned to books—I wanted to see heartbreak and anguish laid bare in black and white. I craved the comfort of shared experience. I picked up The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, and for the first time, I felt like someone understood the shapeless, surreal nature of grief. Her words mirrored my own disorientation, my inability to make sense of what had happened. The way she examined grief with such precision, acknowledging its unpredictability, helped me feel less lost. Her book became a companion, one that made me realise—however trite it sounds—that I could survive the agony of a broken heart.

Then came Outrageous Openness by Tosha Silver, which helped me sit with discomfort and embrace impermanence, and to surrender instead of clinging to what wasn’t meant for me. My immediate reaction had been to leave Australia after things ended with Ozzie, but reading these books gave me pause. There's an often-quoted saying, "everywhere you go, there you are," and these books reminded me that the heartache would be with me, whether I stayed in Australia or not. Instead of going home—as tempting as it was—I began to sit with the discomfort, finding solace in the stories of others who had navigated similar pain. Books gave me a lifeline that made me realize healing wasn’t about erasing the past; it was about learning to carry it more lightly.

But it wasn’t until several years later—in the heavy days of lockdown—that I first came across the idea of bibliotherapy. The word comes from the Greek for ‘book’ (biblio) and ‘healing’ (therapeia), and the practice itself is an ancient one, where the therapeutic nature of books has been recognised for centuries. The ancient Greeks even carved ‘healing place of the soul’ above their libraries. But you needn’t be a Greek scholar to understand the restorative power of books.

I’ve always been quick with a book recommendation, but during lockdown, my DMs went into overdrive. Not because I was particularly zen about the whole thing—far from it—but because, like many people, I was permanently online, and begun to share books that had helped me make sense of the world. Some people suddenly had endless time on their hands, while others were climbing the walls with restlessness, fear, or grief. Either way, I was happy to oblige.

I recommended Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed to a friend who felt like life had been put on hold—her collection of letters, filled with wit and wisdom was a reminder that even in limbo, there’s still beauty to be found. Wintering by Katherine May was my go-to for those struggling with the heaviness of it all. For some, I’d recommend they read a book they loved as a teen (for me that was Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, and Francine Pascal), and there was the oft-recommended The Shell Seekers for anyone in need of the literary equivalent of a long summer holiday.

Each time I recommended a book, it felt like a reminder that even when the world felt small, stories could still take us somewhere.

This, for me, is the heart of bibliotherapy: connection. Books can make us feel less isolated, less lost. They reflect our struggles back at us and, in doing so, help us navigate them. I don’t just read for pleasure anymore; I read to understand, to grow, to steady myself when everything else feels uncertain.

I could map my life through the books that have shaped me—the university bedroom where I stayed up into the early hours of the morning finishing Beloved, the library I visited every weekend as a child, where I devoured The Babysitters Club, Sweet Valley High, and everything Judy Blume ever wrote. The theatre corner where I wailed my way through A Little Life, the café in Bali where The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari finally made sense. The street where I ate watermelon while Elizabeth Gilbert signed my copy of Big Magic.

Over time, my bookshelves have become more than just a collection. They’re a record of where I’ve been, what I’ve needed, and the stories that have kept me company along the way.

These days, I help people find guidance, comfort, and inspiration through books. Some come to me in a reading slump, others want to tackle classics but don’t know where to start. Bibliotherapy is more than just recommending books—it’s about understanding each person’s story, and their relationship with reading.

But books aren’t just a source of emotional support—they’re full of practical wisdom too. I often recommend On Writing by Stephen King, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and The Writer Before the Page by Toni Morrison to fellow creatives. Memoirs, philosophy, and poetry (which I once dismissed as pretentious until Langston Hughes—and a particularly handsome author who insisted I read him—changed my mind) can offer unexpected moments of clarity and peace.

My bibliotherapy practice starts with a conversation—about reading habits, life circumstances, and what someone is looking for, whether it’s comfort, motivation, or a fresh perspective. From there, I create a personalized reading prescription, drawing from fiction, nonfiction, essays, even children’s books if they fit. Some of the most rewarding moments come when a book truly lands. I once recommended Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg to someone struggling to focus on reading—and she devoured it in a single sitting. Another client, grieving a parent, found solace in Poorna Bell’s In Search of Silence.

Not every book will land at every stage of life. Some of my favourites took multiple attempts before they finally clicked. Just as a book that felt transformative in your twenties might seem irrelevant in your forties, or one that didn’t move you last year might suddenly feel profound. Such is the magic of reading.

And you need not be a bibliotherapist nor an avid reader to experience the benefits of books. Reading with intention—whether once a week, or once a year, and choosing books that align with your emotional or mental state—can be powerful. Keeping a reading journal helps. Revisiting old favourites can offer new insights. Exploring different genres and authors will broaden perspective, while joining a book club or attending a reading retreat (shameless plug—I’m hosting three this year!) will deepen your connection to books.

Bibliotherapy has reshaped both my reading habits and my approach to life. And sometimes, the wisdom we’re searching for isn’t found in grand gestures or big decisions—but in the quiet, unassuming pages of a book.

If you enjoyed this essay by Lucy, you might also like this one by :

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Nicole Graev Lipson first came into my orbit through our very own who writes the brilliant monthly column for Beyond. We started chatting and it turned out Nicole had a memoir in essays coming out in March with the compelling title, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Kirkus Reviews gave it the rare and coveted star and it landed on The Millions list of Most Anticipated Books of Winter 2025 and Zibby Owens’ list of Most Anticipated Books of 2025, amongst others.

The book explores what it takes to escape the plotlines mapped onto us. Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Nicole untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters.

I’m so delighted Nicole agreed to write an essay for all of us. So often the stories of memoirs tearing apart families or friendships make the news. But Nicole delves into what happens when the opposite it true: when a memoir draws loved ones closer together. This essay brought me great joy! I think you’ll feel the same!

Originally from New York City, Nicole lives outside of Boston with her husband and three children.

⭐️ Nicole is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of My Mother and Other Fictional Characters! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “MOTHER” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, March 17th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

The Tenderness of Truth

As my debut memoir Mothers and Other Fictional Characters neared its recent publication, I did what I always do when I’m nervous: made lists. One of these was a list of questions bookstore audiences might ask me during Q&A sessions. These were harder than I anticipated to predict, but there was one question I was absolutely certain I’d be asked, because it’s the question every memoirist gets asked: How do your loved ones feel about being in the book?

Readers aren’t the only ones who love this question. Wherever we nonfiction writers gather—in workshops, or by the bar during writing conference happy hours—we, too, eventually get to the topic of writing about the people in our lives. Comparing our approaches and philosophies is a form of “shop talk.” I’m sure there are memoirists out there who forge boldly ahead in the work of writing about real people, consequences be damned: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better,” Anne Lamott has famously said. But personally, I’ve never met one. The memoirists I know have all, like me, spent untold hours groping their way to the ethical parameters that feel right to them, and they all long to write about others with sensitivity and care.

I’ve always been fascinated by the complexities of relationships and the dramas below the surface of daily life. And so, unsurprisingly, there are many loved ones in my book, including my husband, my three children, my parents, and my dearest friends. One rule of thumb I’ve followed when depicting these loved ones is to write, always, from my own perspective and embodied experience. I cannot know what my children or my husband see and feel and think as they move through the world, and their stories aren’t mine to claim. I can only know what I see and feel and think: the lived sensations that comprise the tale that is mine.

There’s another principle that guides what I write about loved ones—one that I have my daughter’s second grade teacher to thank for. She encouraged her students to ask themselves four questions before speaking, summarized by the acronym THiNK: Is what I’m saying True? Is it Helpful? Is it Necessary? And is it Kind? Reading my daughter’s handout about this framework was a revelation. It captured so beautifully what communication can be at its most honest and humane. It wasn’t just a surface politeness Ms. Smith was encouraging, but a mode of empathy. What a gentler, safer place the world would be, I thought to myself, if not just seven-year-olds but all of us—parents and spouses and co-workers and politicians—put our words to this test before uttering them out loud.

The THiNK test has become a part of our family’s lexicon: all three of my kids know exactly what I mean when I remind them, mid-sentence, to use it. And it has become central to my writing and revising process: there isn’t a paragraph in Mothers and Other Fictional Characters that I haven’t weighed against its standards. To me, writing with the THiNK test in mind isn’t the same as being diplomatic. It doesn’t mean flattering my subjects, or sugar-coating what is painful, or tidying what is messy, or glossing over what is hard. But it does mean sharing only those details of my life with my family that are vital to a story’s telling and helpful, in a broad sense, to the reader. And it does mean writing with a regard for the dignity and humanity of the flesh-and-blood people who live in my words.

I’ve spent so many hours pondering the ethics of writing about loved ones—and developing an approach that sits comfortably with my conscience—that I could write a whole craft book on the topic. And yet…and yet. When I imagine someone asking, “How do your loved ones feel about being in the book?” I still feel dread. Perhaps this is because embedded in this question, however gently it’s asked, is the assumption that one is doing something unsavory when she writes about her loved ones—violating their privacy, betraying their trust, exploiting their lives for material. It doesn’t feel good to be accused of wrongdoing, however subtly. And personally—likely due to my female-conditioned longing for approval—when I’m accused of doing something wrong, I strangely feel like I’ve done something wrong, as if the suggestion itself has made me culpable.

Are there memoirists who have crossed a bright red line, violating their family’s privacy out of revenge or spite. There are. But over the past few years, I’ve come to question the knee-jerk assumption that writing about our family and children is inherently negative. The museums of this world are filled with portraits of wives and lovers and children by celebrated artists. When we gaze upon Monet’s Portrait of Michel in a Pompom Hat, or Matisse’s Portrait de Marguerite, or Rembrandt’s Titus, the Artist’s Son, we don’t wring our hands and tsk tsk at the ethics of these masters. We soak in their work, lingering on every detail: the pale gray hue of the eyes, the flecks of light in the hair, the shadowed folds of the clothes. We inhabit, for a moment, the artist’s loving eye, recognizing in every brushstroke his regard for his subject. The poet Mary Oliver said that “attention is the beginning of devotion,” and portraits like these encapsulate this truth. They insist that the human before us is important, their spirit and being worthy of contemplation.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these morally blameless artists were all male, and the morally suspect genre of memoir is often tagged as female. One day, I will write an essay about artistic judgment and gender. But for now, I will stick to the personal and say only that writing a book about the people I love most did not ignite tensions or drive a wedge between us. In fact, it had the opposite effect. Talking with my husband, children, and parents in real time about what I was writing, and sharing with them the passages in which they appear, cracked open the door to some of the most honest and loving conversations I’ve had in my life. Because of my memoir, my son now knows how desperately I long to protect him from male expectations. Because of my memoir, my mother and I have bonded over our shared maternal shames and struggles. Because of my memoir, my husband and I understand each other’s desires like never before. What people long for most, these conversations have made me realize, isn't to be seen as perfect, but to be seen and understood in all their murky complexities and loved nonetheless. I know of nothing that can get at the “both/and-ness” of loving like literature. As a writer—and human—my words are my attentive brushstrokes, my sentences the winding pathways of my devotion.

How do your loved ones feel about being in the book? When I am asked this, I think what will say is that I cannot speak for my loved ones. Only they know what it is they feel inside. My job, and my only job, is to tell my side of the story—truthfully, helpfully, selectively, and kindly— allowing them space for their vast, unfathomable depths.

If you enjoyed this essay by Nicole, you might also like this one by :

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’s beautiful Substack was one of the first Substacks I fell in love with. I’d already fallen in love with her exquisite memoir Motherland: A memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing which gently yet firmly explored her relationship with her fragile, demanding, narcissistic mother. Her newsletter continues that investigation alongside delicious recipes (it won a James Beard Award!), stories of the various animals who live with her and her wife, nature, health, self-care, and ponderings on how to be a human in these difficult times. Her prose is so elegant, precise, tender, and wicked smart, I look forward to every post.

So I was delighted to learn, Elissa has a new memoir: Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create. (pub date: March 11th. Preorders really help the writer!) It’s a mix of master class and memoir; a narrative, practical meditation meant to inspire, shepherd, support, and lead creatives in every arena through the emotional hazards and pitfalls of art-making; an antidote to shame, it provides a roadmap to telling the stories you want to tell but have been told you “shouldn’t.” Sounds like exactly the sort of book we could all benefit from!

I interviewed Elissa two years ago, and can still feel her warmth and dazzling intellect. And she played guitar! Born and raised in New York City, she currently lives in Connecticut with her family. She also teaches the most incredible memoir workshops. If you’re interested in learning more about Elissa, I’ve lifted the paywall on her interview for the next week.

In celebration of Elissa’s new book, I’m so happy to share an essay Elissa wrote about family, love, loss, grief, and, well, learning to breathe. It went right smack into the middle of my heart. I think you’ll feel the same. Enjoy!

xJane

⭐️ Elissa is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Permission! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “PERMISSION” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, February 17th and notified by Substack Direct Chat. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

Permission to Breathe

2015.

It is two o’clock in the morning, and the city rumbles twenty stories below my mother’s guest room window. My wife is sound asleep next to me; she’s quiet, and gently snoring. I can hear, coming from my mother’s bedroom, the sound of a Perry Mason rerun. I am propped up like an emphysemic on three threadbare pillows dating back to 1986, to the days of my living at home after college. Every breath I take in whistles like a tea kettle; every breath I exhale rattles like a snake.

I am a former competitive squash player, a tennis player, a swimmer; despite my parents and three of my grandparents being heavy smokers, I have always hated cigarettes, and rarely used weed. I’ve gone years without a cold. But on this breathless night in 2015, for the fourth time in as many weeks, my chest aches; a spot between my shoulder blades burns. I think of Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story – a healthy Cambridge rower, sober for years – succumbing to Stage IV lung cancer at age forty-two, seven weeks after she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. This is familiar territory: my grandfather died of pulmonary sarcoma when I was six. My fevers are worsening with every lung infection and in six hours, I will be nebulized for the second time in three months. For now, I lean back against the headboard and weave in and out of sleep, or maybe consciousness; I am as hypoxic as I was when we hiked in Colorado, my older cousin, her family, and I, ten thousand feet up on a warm July afternoon in the mid-nineties, back before my first memoir was published, back when the idea that writing a single paragraph about our beloved grandmother – the elfin one; the concert pianist; the card shark with the salty sense of humor; the one who left my father and aunt when they were small children a century ago and returned three years later – would be enough to excise me from their lives.

*

I loved you she says, her lip curling like a wave. She adds: -ED, -ED. LovED, yelling over the music.

She bends down so that we are face to face.

My back is pressed up against a tan-painted cinderblock wall outside the ladies’ room at a small family wedding in Minnesota.

My cousin emphasizes the d --- loved --- in all its determined finality, so that there is no possible chance of my misunderstanding her intention, or being left unsure: our relationship, and my place in the family are, she has decided, over.

We don’t love you anymore, she says.

She speaks for them --- my aunt, and my other cousins who are inside dancing, unaware of what is happening a few feet away. She is the repository for all familial approval; she gives it and she takes it, and nobody dares cross her.

We’ve decided that we’re better off without you, she says.

My knees buckle as though I’ve been struck. The wind is knocked out of me.

It is 2013. My first memoir has been out for three months. Embedded in it towards the end is a short backstory, a century old family myth; it had been dinnertime conversation during my childhood, but it was, unbeknownst to me, kept a secret in my cousin’s house when she was growing up. Our grandmother had walked out on my father and aunt in the 1920s; she came back after a few years. No one ever thought to ask why – was she living with spousal abuse? had she fallen in love with someone else? did she have postpartum depression like almost every other woman in our family? -- and she was made a pariah, as women who leave their children usually are. It was a story of abandonment and childhood trauma concealed in plain sight, encased in shame like a chrysalis; my father told and retold it until it and a visceral fear of abandonment became part of my history, my DNA, and as familiar to me as the color of my eyes. My aunt hid the story to shield her children from the terrors of life, and to fashion around them a protective veneer of perfection and safety. In her home, no one knew.

At this wedding, this moment of joy, my cousin is enraged. No one dares tell secrets in our family, intentionally or inadvertently.

You don’t love me anymore because I told the story of something that happened a hundred years ago? I say. The muscles in my throat contract; I can’t breathe.

That’s not the only reason, she says.

What else? I ask.

You know, she says, tapping her finger hard into my chest.

I don’t know, I say.

I lovED you. LovED you, she says.

She straightens up and saunters back to the party.

After the wedding, we return home, my wife and I, to Connecticut, where her ninety-four-year-old mother is dying of congestive heart failure. I’m distracted, dazed, inattentive when the woman I love needs me most. Instead of holding her hand while she is slowly losing her mother, I become obsessed with making my family love me again. It becomes hysterical; a compulsion. I write letters; some raging, some pleading. They go unanswered. I make phone calls; they go unreturned. I spend weeks looking at piles of old family photographs, dating back years: on vacation together in Turkey, in Aspen, in Florida. At Thanksgiving in 1968 – I was five; my cousin, twenty-one. On tennis courts and golf courses. At another family gathering in 2002, right after my father died. I have endless dreams of my cousin and awaken into the inky sliver of morning that fools my sleeping brain into forgetting, just for a few moments, that I am dead to her.

She cuts the cord at a wedding so that I can grasp the magnitude of exactly who and what I have lost. I will now be excluded from every family function and holiday. I will never see my cousin’s granddaughter --- my godchild --- again. Her little brother will never know me. We weave in and around each other on Facebook; we follow each other as if we’re lurking behind hedgerows. I watch my goddaughter and her little brother grow up on a computer screen, like television characters.

*

It is the Chinese who believe that grief is held in the lungs, that left unresolved, it festers and burbles like a stew until the life-breath of the sorrowful is spirited away, little by little, into a sea of self-loathing and despair and ultimately, death. A month after the wedding, I awake in our bedroom in Connecticut, gasping for air, sucking it in like a fish out of water, in small, hot sips. My health collapses: I erupt in spontaneous fevers that spike to 104. I’m given medicine for patients exposed to Bubonic plague. I abuse my puffers and gain ten pounds on steroids. I travel to London for work, and a Chelsea physician threatens to put me on a medical no-fly list. I cough poison and blood; I rasp and wheeze and one night I faint in my wife’s arms in our hallway. I hack until my hands shake, pass out in a Mill Valley gift shop while holding a pale blue silk scarf, and hate myself for being the wretch that my cousin assures me and the rest of our family that I am.

Standing alone in my kitchen one sunny afternoon --- Susan is at work in New York --- I reach for a small, delicious paring knife hanging on the magnetic strip next to my stove. It is one of my favorites, bought at Dehillerin in Paris: French, wooden-handled, ideal for slicing a radish or a bean. I want to hold its polished ebony grip in the palm of my hand, to nick myself just so that I can feel the pain and see myself bleed, just so that I can know, somehow, that despite being dead to this person who had once been like a sister to me, I am still alive and sensate and real. I stop; I put the knife back.

I engage an astrologer. A friend reads my Tarot cards. I meditate holding a 108-bead rose quartz mala, which is supposed to heal my heart. Every morning and night, I pray for the call where my cousin will say she loves me again, that they love me again, that it was all just a mistake, a blip, and that I am still part of a tribe; I pray for the moment when I can feel oxygen fill my body and mend it.

*

A small, personal Holocaust, is what a therapist-friend calls it. “You went to bed one night and they were there, and you woke up the next day and your tribe was gone.”

I crave silence and peace and stillness to quiet the ongoing war in my lungs; my arms and neck ache from straining for breath until my back spasms and I can’t work. On a bitter February morning two years after the book and the wedding, the excision and the chronic illness that followed, a bodyworker I find in an arbitrary search touches my shoulders and I gasp as though I’ve been branded with a hot iron; I turn over, drop my face into the cradle, cough, and taste a bitter, alien funk roll into my mouth from my lungs that makes me gag: it is the poison of fury and shame. It is grief.

Breathe, she whispers.

My chest bangs and whistles. The room spins.

Breathe.

A week later, I lie on a cheap blue latex mat with thirty strangers in a cavernous, brick-walled yoga studio down the hall from the bodyworker’s office. I stare out the window near the ceiling and watch clouds float by; I cough and fold myself forward into child’s pose – balasana -- my chest pressed flat to the floor, my arms wrapped protectively around my head like a fighter. It’s familiar to me, and easy; muscle memory. My body knows it. I used to sleep this way as a baby.

You don’t have to move, the teacher says to the class. Just breathe.

My body stops fighting and thrashing and begging for air; it’s exhausted. My lungs crackle like wrapping paper, and finally, after two years of relentless sorrow, they let go.

I’ve lost my tribe, our customs, the family of my history because in my first book, a love story, I wrote a short paragraph about something that happened to my father and aunt almost a century earlier, the tentacles of which touched me directly and made me who I am; I never asked permission to write it because I didn’t believe I needed to, since I never knew it was a secret. Two years after my excision, there’s finally a pulsing, nugget of life inside me, and intuitively, suddenly, my body knows what it needs to feed itself: the comfort of ritual, community, breath, and the promise of renewal.

It took me a decade to understand that we are the storytelling species; it is what we do to make sense of our world, to metabolize it, to fathom it. It is the way we claim our place at the human table. Amidst the muck of our imperfectly beautiful lives – the fragile egos and the mess beneath the deadly armor of perfection that we craft out of fear --- we instinctively hew to survival. The stories we tell are messages for the generations that follow, like the ancient pictographic cave hands representative of a distant ancestor who only wished to be known by his truth of having once been here, too.

Learning to breathe again after a decade aerated and watered me, like a parched lawn. It gave me back to me again. It reminded me to live, and to keep writing.

If you enjoyed this essay by Elissa, you might also like this one by Oritte Bendory;

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is a dear friend, one of my favorite writers, and a master of lists. She’s also deeply wise and intuitive, and can distill complex and layered subject matter, subject matter that philosophers spend decades puzzling over, into thoughtful, brilliant essays. Her previous piece for Beyond on writing personal essays inspired countless writers (I know because of the amount of emails I received!), still gleans comments, and routinely makes the rounds in Notes.

Caroline’s subject this time is grief and loss. Something Caroline knows a great deal about. And something the world is immersed in these days. How like Caroline to take her hurt and transform it into something useful for us.

Caroline’s writing is always hard and clear. And it always nurtures my heart, soothes my soul, and inspires my spirit. I trust you’ll find the same is true for you.

You can find more of her work (and get a weekly tarot reading) on her gorgeous newsletter .

Writing Is an Act of Hope

8 thoughts on grief and writing — and writing about grief

Hemingway famously said, “Write hard and clear about what hurts.”

Which is about as hard and clear a charge as they come.

It echoes a sentiment shared with me many times over the years, by well-meaning teachers, therapists, and friends. Whatever setback or hardship I encountered was met with an impassioned, “Why not write about it?” To me, the answer was implicit. Because it hurts.

As anyone who’s ever written can attest, the act of distilling one’s internal landscape into words can be murky enough. Why add shame or pain or grief, then electively dwell there? I’d left that sort of masochism behind, along with notebooks full of angsty teen poetry. I wanted my prose to be light, humorous, inspiring, imaginative — anything except laden with hurt.

Then exactly one year ago, I entered a season of loss, including the deaths of my mother, my dog, and a couple dear friends, all within a few months’ time. To say I was devastated is an understatement. The last thing I wanted was to write about it.

At first, I did what I’d done so many times before: turned to books for solace. I assembled what I’ve come to think of as The Little Grief Library, volumes about death and growth and survival. I read memoirs about loss — Crying in H Mart, The Year of Magical Thinking, Slow Motion, Here After. I read about the history of how humans conceive of Heaven and on looking for signs from the other side. I read a psychologist’s perspective on confronting our fear of death. And I devoured countless essays and articles on grief in its many forms.

To a degree, reading offered both context and comfort. Yet despite sentences I savored and sentiments that made me cry, nothing spoke directly to my pain, or mirrored my feelings the way I’d hoped. It wasn’t until I gave myself permission to write through the grief — some shared with others, some just for me — that I discovered what I couldn’t have predicted: my words were the ones I needed.

And so, I spread the gospel of writing hard and clear about what hurts. Not because it produces resonant work. Nor because vulnerable writing garners shares and high open rates. (Though this may be true.) But because it is an act of love and hope and bravery and healing. And because you owe it to yourself, whether or not you identify as a writer.

To that end, here is what I’ve learned this year, about grief and writing — and writing about grief.

1. Grief is everywhere.

Grief is universal, and not exclusively tied to loss. There is grief in everything — the choice not made, the path not taken, the unforeseen and the unavoidable. There is grief on the other side of change, including those we hoped for. There is grief in our ties to our fellow man and throughout the world at large. Though we may feel alone in our particular shape of mourning, it helps to remember that it touches us all. (And recording and sharing our experiences creates space for others to do the same.)

2. Grief is a time for grace.

If ever there was a time for self-kindness, this is it. It may mean soft blankets and warm foods, favorite movies and trusted company. It can also mean telling the internal self-editor to f*ck off until further notice.

Because let’s be honest. Writing “hard and clear” looks great on a mug or a magnet, but it’s easier said than done. If everything came out hard and clear, there would be no shitty first drafts, no editors, and far less procrastination. When you’re going through something, clarity isn’t always in the cards. And that’s fine. Write soft and messy. Write nonsensically. Write for no one other than you. Give yourself the space to produce as much or as little as you wish. Grief is a time for grace. And writing through grief is no different.

3. …and also a time for courage.

The most surprising part of grief, for me, is the unexpected silver linings. A renewed reverence for life. Fearlessness. Lucidity around what matters. Grief can be a catalyst for growth, epiphanies, and examining the way we live — and how we’d like to in the future.

When you write through hard things, you can use the turbulence as a magnifying glass, a catapult, a launchpad. Experiment. Take risks. Push boundaries. Get vulnerable. Employ that paywall. Let your feelings embolden you.

4. Knowledge happens as you go.

In any personal writing, I approach it not from a place of what I want to say, but rather what I want to know. What I wish someone would’ve told me. What I’m trying to find out. What I struggle to make sense of. What I am longing to hear. Oftentimes, an answer reveals itself as I go.

Never is this truer than when contemplating the kind of ideas — eternity, anyone? — that threaten to break my brain. You needn’t be an expert, on grief or any subject, to explore your views on it. You needn’t have all the answers to sit down and write. Sometimes, it’s best if you don’t.

5. Write because someone may benefit. (It might be you.)

One of the more altruistic arguments for sharing personal writing is that it may help someone else — to feel seen or understood, to educate and inspire. While I fully subscribe to this, there is another truth at play: the act of writing may also help you. Sure, it may not feel very helpful when you first sit down, or as you’re wading through whatever comes out. But a piece of personal writing is a conversation between who you are at the beginning and who you are by the end. And the person I am after having written is always grateful I took the leap.

6. Through writing, we capture — and celebrate — life.

How human it is to learn something a little too late. How human it is to forget. How human it is to want to stop time, freeze the moment, return to another stage of life. While none of this is possible, we can preserve and record our memories, our thoughts, the beauty we wish to hold. We can pay homage and keep spirits alive. We can create a container for what we do not wish to carry. To write about grief (or loss, or death, or fear, or heartbreak) is to write about life.

7. Writing is an act of connection, in more ways than one.

Though I often write alone, it always feels like I’m in community — with my inner voice, my higher self, the spirit world, an imaginary reader... When I write, I am never alone, because I actively become my own friend. Whatever you believe, writing can be an act of connection, and of uncovering mysteries, even if only within your own mind.  

I have a friend who loathes writing but speaks their complicated feelings out loud when they’re alone in their car. They’ll speak to deceased loved ones. They’ll talk through their pain. They’ll talk to themself, saying the words they most need to hear. In their own way, they write hard and clear about what hurts. This absolutely counts.

8. Writing is an act of hope.

When my mom got sick, she developed a new hobby: entering book giveaways. She entered seemingly all of them. “I won a new book!” became a regular refrain. They formed piles on the dining table, spanning every imaginable genre and category — memoirs and business books and romance novels with covers that made me blush. I suspect the books provided something in short supply: They made her feel lucky.

I once read that buying and collecting books is actually about mortality. When we bring a book into our possession, it’s not merely about the words and worlds contained therein, but about the time it will take to read them — time we assume we have. The article insinuated that amassing books was an exercise in avoidance.

Put another way, it is an act of hope.

Over the last year, I’ve come to see both reading and writing as an act of hope. Of connection. Of reaching across time and space, to touch whoever may read it.

The act of writing alone may not provide instant healing, for ourselves or another. But whenever we write, we may hope our words will find their way to someone who needs them (including ourselves). And in those moments when hope is in short supply, it helps to think that our words — hard, clear, or otherwise — can actually help create it.

If you enjoyed this essay by Caroline, you might also like this one by Amy Scher:

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Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one.

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What first drew me to was her deep love of animals and the land and her social activism of their behalf. She so beautifully weaves together holistic herbalism and therapeutic arts and passionately advocates for wolves and so-called weeds who cannot speak for themselves. She reminds us that we are nature — not something separate from it. She’s written two gorgeous books: her memoir, Awakening Artemis, which tracks her journey of healing through the lens of twenty-four medicinal plants. And the recently published Earthly Bodies: Embracing Animal Nature which explores inner and outer landscapes through the lens of wild animals. She also writes the Substack which encourages us to trust our intuition in order to deepen our connection to the wild and to ourselves. As you all know, these topics are near and dear to my heart!

So it was an extra delight to discover that Vanessa is also a boxer. Boxing has played such a vibrant and pivotal role in my life. I began over two decades ago when I was nine months into debilitating, nonstop head pain from head and brain injury. The root of the pain, my jammed occiput, was so severe doctors told me these were nicknamed “suicide headaches.” It may sound odd that I decided to box in such staggering pain but many doctors were telling me I would always be in this level of pain and although I believed I could get well, I needed an outlet for all the fear and anxiety that was coursing through my body. Plus, my intuition was guiding me there. I couldn’t spar, of course, but I could hit the bag and pads — and I luckily ended up with two highly skilled coaches, one of whom told me if I weren’t in my thirties with a head injury, he’d be training me for the Golden Gloves. I was good and I loved it. And within three months, the pain was gone. I was doing many other things for the pain, so it’s impossible to know what role the boxing played but I believe it helped tremendously. In varying ways, boxing is still in my life.

Vanessa has written the most captivating essay about her journey with boxing and how it has impacted, well, everything (it also helped with her healing!) including her nature advocacy. I loved reading this. I was so inspired! I think you will be, too!

If you want to learn more about Vanessa and her beautiful work, she filled in the Beyond Questionnaire earlier this year!

⭐️ Vanessa is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of Earthly Bodies! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “EARTHLY” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, October 7th and notified by email. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

Rewilding Through Boxing

I didn't realize how much I’d missed boxing until I started coaching again at the local YMCA this summer. I've often omitted the decade and a half I spent in the sport from my public persona, as it seems to create a cognitive dissonance with my primary focus on writing, land stewardship, and nature advocacy. People tend to assume that as an herbalist, instead of hitting a heavy bag, I should just be skipping through flower beds (which I also do, of course). We compartmentalize ourselves in this strange world of "branding," but the reality is, we are all multifaceted. 

Rewilding, a term often applied to ecological restoration, is equally relevant to the human experience. A discipline that demands a profound connection to one's body, an acute awareness of space, and an unwavering focus, boxing has been essential in reclaiming my body and in my process of rewilding. Women all too often have been told to tone down, be nice, be pretty, and smile. In the ring, stripped of these societal constraints, I accessed primal instincts that reside within us all. This awakening of my physicality became the foundation upon which I would build a deeper relationship with the natural world. Boxing is entirely connected to my land-based activism. It awakened my animal nature. We humans are animals, whether we admit it or not.

Rewilding

I remember riding the subway from Tribeca to Brooklyn with an ice pack on my face in 1998 after my first sparring session. I was twenty-five and nursing a bloody nose with a serious shiner on its way, I noticed people staring at me with horrified expressions. I wasn’t as skilled as I thought I was. My face and my ego bruised in the aftermath, I hid in my apartment as much as I could. It took a few weeks to take care of my physical wounds and, though my confidence was shaky, I eventually got back in the gym, laced up my gloves, opened wide for my mouth guard, and stepped into the ring again. I was possessed by a need to become strong, a skilled fighter, and yearned to trust myself in the ring; a place where my opponent trained to expose and exploit my weaknesses. In a world where women are considered the “weaker” sex, conditioned to shrink, and told beauty is our currency, boxing was my little rebellion. I wanted to know the part of myself that was predator instead of prey.

Until I began boxing at age twenty-three, I had an incredibly fraught relationship with my body. In one of my long-standing inner narratives, I had the starring role as the asthmatic girl sitting on the sidelines, incapable of participating in gym class. Growing up, I felt like there was a spotlight on me showing everyone I was incapable. When my elementary school gym teacher insisted I run around the perimeter of our elementary school for the annual fitness test like everyone else, I had an asthma attack that landed me in the hospital. It was absolutely humiliating.

As a teenager, I was forced to have sex without consent and left my body behind. I dissociated, played dead, and don’t remember putting up much of a fight. Afterward, memories of earlier abuse started to emerge. I felt out of control of my body and hated what she seemed to attract, so I began to rein her in by fighting hunger. My incredible restraint, denial of food—a biological imperative and pleasure I once loved so much — helped me hold disturbing memories at bay, numbed my emotions, and made me feel strong. If I could move beyond hunger, I reasoned, I had total control of my body, and that was power.

Then, at sixteen, a car accident changed the course of my life. My back and neck shattered, and I was trapped inside my bedroom and body for months. Enclosed in a fiberglass brace, I moved slowly, and tenderly. Dependent on others for my most basic needs, I had no choice but to eat. I could no longer hide my eating disorder and survival became my full time job. I dropped out of high school to heal. As I began an excruciatingly slow process of recovery — healing my body through physical therapy, and processing mental and emotional trauma through writing, visual art and psychotherapy, I began to land back in a body I’d been trying to transcend.  We can describe how we feel in the most vivid detail, but in the end, we must traverse our inner landscapes alone.

In Waking the Tiger, trauma therapist Dr. Peter Levine talks about moving as an essential way to release embodied trauma. We literally have to get it out of our system. When threatened or injured, all animals draw from instinctive reactions to protect and defend oneself such as freezing, stiffening, bracing, fleeing, collapsing, or fighting. In the wild, animals recover from trauma by shaking spasms of their body core, along with flailing limbs to complete the fight-flight they were in before they froze. But our human-mind often interrupts this natural reset after a traumatic experience. Whether we’re fearful of the impulse to shake our bodies or the flood of our normal animal-aggressions, we often ‘hold it together’ and keep our composure. This, according to Dr. Levine, is why humans hold onto trauma and wild animals (those not in captivity) usually don’t.

When I think about the way I dealt with sexual assault when I was young—freezing, leaving my body, and playing dead—it makes sense that I had to move in such an intense and extreme way to get it out later. “The restoration of healthy aggression,” Levine writes, “is an essential part in the recovery from trauma.”

It would take over a year of rehabilitation before I could move in the unbridled way my body yearned to. The moment my bones were ready, I began strength and cardiovascular training at the local fitness club. Though my respiratory system was still a challenge, I was learning to manage it. I had initial wheezing, but if I took my inhaler or even took a few minutes to relax my breathing after the onset of asthma, it would subside. And when it passed, I discovered incredible endurance. Eager to push further, I found books on sports psychology where I was introduced to meditation and visualization. When I felt like I was hitting a wall, I visualized a golden light illuminating and animating my body, giving me newfound energy. I practiced visualization outside of training and imagined myself running further and faster each day in as much sensory detail as possible: I felt the earth beneath my feet, the air and wind against my body, heard my sneakers touch the ground, and imagined my breath unobstructed and deep. The young me sitting on the sidelines, finally came down off those humiliating bleachers.

The Urban Wild

I moved to New York City on a whim in the mid-nineties. I was twenty-two years old and had an opportunity to assist a well-known photographer. I figured I should experience the city and make connections while I was young, then pursue my dreams of living in the wild and working for National Geographic. Scrambling to make ends meet. I was always on the hunt for something financially sustainable so soon I became a personal trainer. It made sense, I’d learned a lot from the car accident rehabilitation, had become strong and worked hard to dismantle my stories of the physically deficient asthmatic-kid and the woman who needed to shrink.

One day at the gym, I met a professional boxer and was captivated by the beauty and power of shadowboxing. Growing up in a family of artists and physicians, boxing was never on my radar, but the fluidity and grace of the movements immediately drew me in. That summer, that same fighter offered a boxing-fitness certification for trainers. The idea that you can learn such a complex skill, or even learn to hold focus mitts (small, padded targets used to improve hand-eye coordination, reflexes, and punching accuracy) in a short course is total bullshit, but the prospect of boxing excited me. When he guided us through drills and taught us how to throw a real punch, I felt a strange and deep sense of relief. It was as if my body had been waiting for this moment, desperate to unleash her power. I knew I was just scratching the surface and needed to explore more.

I convinced the boxer to train me. Although he trained me only once or twice a week, I practiced regularly on my own and began a daily ritual of reclaiming my body. I pounded the heavy bags until my knuckles were raw, spent endless meditative hours on the speedbag, and after tripping over my feet for months, became proficient on the speed rope. Each day of training, I was soaked in the bittersweet sweat of anger, grief, and fear that I hadn't even known was lodged inside. It was as though I had just swum, fully clothed in the ocean, and every time I peeled those sopping clothes off and carried my heavy, waterlogged bag home on the subway, I felt a little more free. Ravenous afterward, I stopped counting calories and learned to heed my hunger.

After training for about six months, a fighter and his coach came in for sparring, which was a rare event at my training location. Although the gym had a ring, it was primarily used for boxing fitness, not fighting. I’d been in the ring to practice footwork and focus mitts with my coach, but never for sparring. When the fighter's sparring partner didn't show up and I was hitting the bags nearby, they asked if I wanted to get in the ring and throw punches at him. They assured me it would be a one-way fight; he just needed to work on his defense. I was nervous but agreed, eager to test my skills against a real opponent.

As I stepped into the ring wearing a pair of heavy 16-ounce sparring gloves, a surge of adrenaline coursed through me. When the bell rang, my heart pounded and I attacked with everything I had. Unleashing a flurry of punches, it was a side of myself I'd never met before. My opponent, a seasoned fighter, looked a little shocked, although he dodged and countered most of my attacks. I kept pressing forward, determined to prove myself.

After several rounds, I could no longer keep my hands up, my legs were on fire, and my breath was reduced to ragged gasps. When I had nothing left after five rounds, they nodded respectfully, helped me unlace my gloves and told me I should consider training to fight. I knew they were right. It was time to go to a real boxing gym and get a more consistent, committed coach.

Months of intense and sometimes demoralizing tours of potential coaches and boxing gyms in New York City, like the one in Tribeca whose tests of my ability and heart resulted in black eyes and bloody noses, eventually led me to Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, which became my home away from home. I remember the first day I walked up the stairs and into the famous, grimy boxing gym in 2000. No music, just the sound of boxers hitting heavy bags, speed ropes hitting the floor, trainers yelling at their fighters, and the intense, overwhelming smell of sweat. Everyone trained, sparred and shadowboxed to the same three-minute bell, resting during the same one-minute period. That ebb and flow of energy became a living, breathing organism all its own, and it was impossible not to get caught up in the intensity. One of my favorite things about boxing gyms like Gleason’s is that a beginner might train alongside a world champion any day she walks in. When boxers were preparing for fights at Madison Square Garden, they came in for sparring. Several world champions would train alongside me daily. 

But on my first day training at Gleason’s, I walked up the stairs to the ring and climbed between the ropes with what felt like all eyes on me. My coach told me to climb up into the ring and shadowbox. I was on stage and I felt like a fool. The asthmatic girl who had never had a fight in her life and whose defense mechanism under threat was to freeze was fighting an invisible opponent in one of the most famous boxing gyms on earth. The first few rounds were exhausting. I was trying way too hard. But after a while, people lost interest in me and I forgot that I was performing. I burned off my nervous energy and entered my own world. I was in a groove, in sync with my body.

In sparring or in a fight, there's no time to second-guess your decisions or dwell on past mistakes. This was a great teaching for me as an overthinker and over-analyzer. There were countless times in the past when my instinct told me to act, speak up, speak out, but I didn't or couldn't. Through boxing, I learned to trust my instinct and act, and eventually, inspired others to do the same. When I developed enough skill, I turned pro, coached boxing, and taught other women how to fight.

Animal Nature

I would support myself by coaching boxing and facilitating nature-connection in the urban wild for over a decade. The same wildness I found in boxing is essential for ethical wildcrafting. The skill requires reverence for nature, and like reading an opponent in the ring, the ability to read the land and her inhabitants. I often said that herbalism felt like a bone-deep remembering. It's like rediscovering a forgotten language, a genetic memory that connects me to my multi-species family. Something I already knew, that needed to be awakened.

Similarly, within each of us, there is a natural framework for fighting; it's something we were all born to be able to do. And the more I've cultivated internal strength through training, the more I've been able to embrace my vulnerability, allowing me to let down my guard and feel more, not steel myself against the heartbreak of Earth. As someone who is intensely porous and loves the earth, my local ecosystems, and misunderstood and mistreated wild relatives like wolves, coyotes, dandelions, and bats so deeply that it's sometimes unbearable, this inner strength is essential. As I grow stronger on the inside, I need less of an outer shell.

"From the ground up," my coach always said, "All your power comes from the ground up." Like weeds that burst through the cracks in the sidewalk, it's the roots, the life-force energy of Earth that push the plant through boundaries to break free.

I find it helpful to remember that beneath all the layers of domestication, we carry the wild within.

If you enjoyed this essay by Vanessa, you might also like this one by Gayle Brandeis:

⭐️ Beyond is a reader-supported publication with the goal of bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you value my work and would like to support it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

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I first learned of Lauren Aliza Green through my good friend and fellow Substacker . Caroline has pretty much impeccable taste and I figured anyone Caroline thought was a lovely person who wrote beautifully probably was. I figured right.

Lauren’s beautiful new novel, The World After Alice, was published earlier this month and it carries shining blurbs from both Ann Napolitano and Elizabeth McCracken! The story takes place in the wake of tragedy: the death of sixteen-year-old Alice Weil. Now, twelve years later, Alice's brother Benji and former best friend Morgan surprise their families with a wedding invitation to Maine. As the estranged families come together for the first time since Alice's funeral, old flames are rekindled and buried secrets abound.

Lauren has also written A Great Dark House, winner of the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Lit Hub, American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. She was named as one of Forbes’s 2024 30 Under 30 in Media. She lives in New York City with her husband and bunny rabbit.

I hung on every word of this essay contemplating not only how I crafted my stories, but also my life! I think you’ll have the same reaction! As always, I’m keen to read your thoughts in the comments!

⭐️ Lauren is generously gifting three readers an autographed copy of The World After Alice! If you’d like to be one of the recipients, please add “Alice” after your comment. The winners will be chosen at random on Monday, July 22nd and notified by email. I’m excited for all of you! (Shipping is limited to the United States) ⭐️

On Plots: Marriage, Adultery, Grief

While promoting my debut novel, The World After Alice, I’ve frequently encountered the dreaded question: “What is your book about?” The simple tagline—a dysfunctional family reunites in Maine for the first time in twelve years to celebrate an unexpected wedding—omits that this is largely a book about grief.

Part of my descriptive challenge lies in the fact that the book weaves together three distinct storylines: marriage, adultery, and grief. Such plots have been around forever and, I suspect, will continue to endure. Every few years, however, the question of whether the marriage plot is dated, defunct, or otherwise dead hits the literary discourse. Take this recent book review from the New York Times, where the writer asks, “Why bother with the centuries-old marriage plot in a no-stakes, no-strings-attached world of total freedom to change one’s mind without consequence?”

While it’s true that matrimony no longer serves the same social function it once did, it is equally true that the marriage plot itself has never been about marriage but rather about something far greater: the protagonists’ internal struggles. I am not the first to say this. Adelle Waldman, writing for The New Yorker in 2013, argues, “If we look closely, we find that much of the [marriage plot’s] strength derives from the internal and the timeless—from conflicts rooted in the perversity of human nature and the persistent difficulties of social life.”

The marriage plot is, above all, a teleological one. There is no mystery at its heart. Readers expect the characters to join together by the novel’s end. The enjoyment of these books, their gratification, derives from seeing the protagonists grow and change as individuals before they say “I do.”

Consider Jane Eyre. By the time Jane and Rochester wed in chapter 38 (famously, “Reader, I married him”), Jane has gained financial independence, a family of her own, and a sense of autonomy. Rochester, for his part, has lost his eyesight and thus been humbled. Had he and Jane married during their first engagement, before the reveal of Bertha Mason, Jane’s strength might have remained unrecognized. However, with the developments in the last third of the novel, Jane comes to retain her individualist spirit so that she is not subordinate to her husband but established as his equal. The fulfillment of their union, and the reader’s satisfaction, depends on her growth outside of matrimony.

While the traditional courtship plot culminates in an exchange of rings, the narratives of grief and infidelity track less linear routes. In the grief plot, the protagonist spins around in circles, orbiting the absent object of his or her love. Nowhere is this better depicted than in Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, which imagines a conversation between a mourning mother and her deceased son. Quoting Alice in Wonderland, the son says, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Oh, yes—what better definition of grief than this?

The grief narrative folds back on itself, mimicking the cyclical way the sufferer cedes their every thought and feeling to what is now gone. In my novel, I found that this cyclicality provided a nice foil to the goal-oriented plot of courtship mentioned earlier, which unfolds not in the aftermath of an event but in the before-times, when it is still possible for the protagonists to contemplate whether the hoped-for will come to pass.

If we were to graph it, the marriage plot might look something like this:

While the grief plot, that most elliptical of narratives, might look like this:

In between these two falls the adultery plot. The adultery plot—that of Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary—typically sees its protagonists meet a tragic end, as illustrated below:

All three plot structures—each of which weighed heavily on my mind as I pieced together The World After Alice—rely on the “I” being forced to redefine its identity in relation to another. In the marriage plot, the “I” must learn how and who to be with the “you”; in the adultery plot, the “I” severs themselves from the “you”; and finally, in the grief plot, the “I” must continue to live without the “you.”

These plots force us to redefine what we know of ourselves. What does it mean to join with someone in marriage, or to separate from them through adultery, divorce, or death? How do we reconcile our Western notion of the “I,” which values autonomy above all else, with a desire to transcend that “I” and connect with another? In an 1864 diary entry, Dostoevsky wrote, “To love a person as oneself according to Christ’s commandment is impossible. The law of the self is binding on earth. The I stands in the way.”

Dostoevsky further explores this notion in Notes from the Underground, where he introduces readers to the underground man: a self-conscious figure whose obsession with the laws of mechanical science paralyzes him. If human beings are subject to the laws of science, the underground man wonders, then what agency does any of us have? To underscore this point, he refers to man as a “piano-key” or “the stop of an organ”—pressed against, acted upon.

His view only changes when he meets Liza, a prostitute who glimpses beyond his cynical exterior to the soul underneath. When he flies off into a spiteful rage against Liza, she doesn’t run away as he expects but instead rushes toward him and throws her arms around him. It is a startling moment in the story. For a brief instant, readers see the “I” do the impossible, at least by mechanistic laws: it joins with another to become a “we.”

I contemplated this moment a lot while working on The World After Alice. There are certain times in life—heightened moments of grief or love—when the emotion is so powerful and overwhelming, language itself breaks down. And yet compassion is still possible in these moments, available through other means. Here’s a snippet from my book illustrating this in real time between the groom and his mother:

“With a movement unexpected to them both, Benji reached out and pulled his mother into an embrace, amazed at how defenseless she felt in his arms. It occurred to him how few times he’d initiated such a gesture. How many wasted opportunities, when such a touch might have conquered the space that twelve years had set in their way.”

In moments such as these, the veil of reality is momentarily lifted. Something tender and true breaks through. The self is made both clearer and more obscure, stripped of the identities they’ve long clung to. “It was the year of my disintegration,” the unnamed narrator of Where Reasons End says, “and I could find few delusions to live for.”

In the absence of delusions, what remains? This was the question I set out to answer in The World After Alice. It is a question of existence, one that shatters the binaries between self and other, life and death. While I may shudder at describing my book as a simple “wedding novel,” I remind myself that the stories of our relationships form the essence of our lives. Nothing could be more important than that.

If you enjoyed this essay by Lauren, you might also like this one by Mary Pembleton:

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I no longer recall when or how I first met but I do know I can’t remember the writing community without her. Entering the land of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in the days when my health was still extremely challenged wasn’t easy — but I was living in isolation (having just moved to a new state months before completely collapsing) and I knew writers were gathering there. I admired Lilly’s gorgeous prose, fierce intelligence, and fast wit. And she welcomed me with kindness and guidance.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Lilly three times: first for her incendiary anthology Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger. And then for her breathtakingly gorgeous (and one of my favorite ever) memoir Negative Space about getting to know her deceased father through his journals, letters, artwork, and interviews with friends. Finally, Lilly was one of the six anchor interviews that launched Beyond; Lilly is a master of craft, and the insight she shares in this beautiful essay is remarkable.

Lilly’s writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, Off Assignment, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She teaches creative nonfiction in MFA programs at Columbia University and Randolph College.

And, lucky for us, Lilly is now on Substack with . And luckier still, Lilly has a new book out, First Love: Essays on Friendship, a tender, thoughtful exploration of the intimacies, challenges, and foreverness of female friendships. She lives in New York City with her husband, two beloved kitties, and her new desk.

I was enchanted by this piece. I think you will be, too. Let me know what you think in the comments. You know I love to hear from you!

xJane

A New Desk: On Claiming Space for Writing

During the eleven years I spent writing my first book, I lived in five different apartments, with a roommate and then by myself and then with my now-husband. Through all of that time and all of those moves, I had the same small-but-sturdy wooden desk. Smaller than most desks for adults—I think it might actually have been made for children—this desk had just enough space for my laptop, a cup of coffee, and a notebook. But it was enough. The desk, with its scuffed reddish-brown varnish, fit under my loft bed, in the corridor off the kitchen, and in a cramped corner of the living room, like my writing fit into my busy life.

The reason it took over a decade to write that book was because I could only carve out little corners of time to write. I was bartending full time and trying to build a writing career one freelance article at a time. I was meeting and falling for and moving in with the person I would marry. I was going out with friends on my nights off. Some weeks I didn’t write at all. But the little red desk was always there, tucked in some corner, waiting for me to come back to it when I could. It became a symbol of my determination to make it work; to finish my book despite all the other demands on my time.

That book was published, finally, during the part of the pandemic when people interacted with each other almost exclusively on the internet, so not only did I write the whole book sitting at that desk, I also did my whole book tour—on Zoom—at that desk. At each event, I sat alone, reading aloud to my computer screen, the culmination of my hard work feeling eerily, unsatisfyingly similar to the long process that led up to it.

Six months later, I had a signed contract for a second book, and my husband and I were moving to a new apartment. When the movers placed that same tiny, now quite-weathered desk under the window in the second bedroom that was to be my new office, it looked strangely out of place. Even though the room was not very big, the desk looked shrunken, disproportionately small under the new office’s wide window. I’d gotten so used to it I almost forgot how small it was, but now it looked like a toy. I noticed this just for a brief moment, and then went back to indicating where the couch, the bed, the dressers should go.

As I started to unpack over the following days, placing books and nick-nacks on shelves in my new office, and considering which art to hang on the walls, I realized why the desk looked odd in this space: This new office was coming together just in time to start writing a new book—a book for which I had an advance, which meant I could build my routine around writing, rather than squeezing it into the gaps between other work. The little red desk was a vestige of an era that I was leaving behind; an era of scraping and straining and taking whatever little scraps I could get. With this a book advance and a finally-stabilized schedule, I could afford to spread out a little bit.

It was time, finally, to get a new desk.

Not wanting to just put this trusty friend on the curb, I posted online that I had a desk to give away to a writer who would use it well. A social media acquaintance came by a few days later to pick up the little red desk, and told me while we maneuvered it onto a dolly that she loved my book—that she was excited to own the desk where it was written. I was surprised and touched that a souvenir of my writing life would be meaningful to anyone but me, and felt like I was sending the desk off to where it needed to be. I waved goodbye as the acquaintance and the desk went out the door.

I used a chunk of my book advance—way more than I would ordinarily spend on a single piece of furniture—on a beautiful mid-century Danish teak desk that’s nearly twice as wide as my old one, with space for multiple beverages and notebooks and piles of books and papers on either side of my computer. When it arrived and I scooted it into place under the new office’s wide window—where it fits perfectly—it felt like a door opening. It felt like a beginning, like a promise to myself. A literal expansion of the space in my life that writing could claim.

The rest of the office took shape around the new desk: A new small bookshelf just for books related to my current project, where I can glance at them throughout the day and easily reach over to leaf through them. A new lamp for when I work late into the evening and the overhead light isn’t enough for my tired eyes. Stick-on dry erase sheets on the wall for to-do lists and ideas. The art on the walls began to coalesce around the theme of my new book, female friendship: art postcards featuring pairs or groups of women; a print I bought years ago from a photographer friend of three women in a bath house; a new print from another photographer friend, of five teenage girls lounging in a field. As I hung each new piece, it felt less like decorating a room and more like building a nest, or casting a spell.

After a few weeks of settling into the new apartment, it was time to get to work. The first day I sat down at my new desk, looking around at all of the depictions of female friendship on the walls, the favorite essay collections and research material on the shelf right beside me, potted plants on every surface, I could hardly believe how far I’d come from the days of writing scenes for my first book on restaurant order pads during brief lulls during the dinner shift, typing them up at my tiny desk tucked under my loft bed while my roommate bustled around in the next room. I sat for several moments—just looking around the room, touching the original brass drawer pulls on my beautiful new desk, and feeling lucky—before I rolled my shoulders back and opened a new document.

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Alison Swan and I met way back in the day. We somehow ended up in the same writer’s workshop during the year I moved back to Michigan after my divorce and Alison had just graduated from the University of Michigan’s MFA Writing Program and was working at Ann Arbor’s legendary Shaman Drum Bookshop. We got on instantly and have stayed loosely in each other’s lives ever since.

One of the things I love and admire about Alison is how much Alison loves and admires our planet. She advocates for it both through her writing and lived action. She has written or edited several eco-themed books including A Fine Canopy which was shortlisted for an IPPY Poetry Medal from Independent Publisher, listed as one of the eleven most anticipated poetry books of fall 2020 by LitHub, and highly recommended by Orion magazine where she has a new poem forthcoming. She also leads the Eco Book Club at Literati Bookstore and taught eco-literature at Western Michigan University for many years. And she’s been active in efforts to protect and preserve the Saugatuck Dunes on the southeastern shore of Lake Michigan since 2001.

On top of all that, her poetry is simply glorious! Lucky for us, Alison agreed to read the four poems included in this week’s newsletter. When Alison reads her work, I feel it in my bones! I think you will, too!

Alison shared of her work: “When I wrote No. 1—on the first full moon after the election of 2016—I thought I might be writing them at a rapid rate, which hasn't happened. In fact, these days I'm making peace with the incredibly slow rate at which I work, very slow and very steady. On my best days, this feels like resistance.”

Antivenin No. 1					A Fine Canopy (Detroit: Wayne State U P, 2020)

I can stare the moon full in the face
all night long if I want to
Maybe I will

 

Antivenin No.2					North American Review

Nimbly, deer part the dark and slow
traffic.
              Night interrupts the long
view, wilderness I consider
carrying inside
	                      then leave to the does,
those heroic mothers.
	                                     One way to
survive our story is to take a page
from theirs.
                      Cover less ground,
I mean.
                 Let every single picket have
its moment,
	                    meander the flowerbed
weed to weed, read as many stems
as you can.
	              Nose the mushrooms.
Leap to the other side.



Antivenin No. 3						Split  Rock Review

She is not the first to say: Tunnel
of Trees, place without sun
or with little, where trees meet gravity
with something akin to surrender.
Call it bowing though you know
it’s not. Call it commonplace as
soil once was and is no longer.
Call it commonplace as heedlessness.
Don’t bring up sex, religion, politics,
nor weather either anymore. That’s just
the way it goes. Imagine that, she
used to say, her hair a perfectly
flattering cut and color, and why
not? It saved her from criticism
in her own home. Women do
what we must to deflect his gaze,
to be free to cast our own
upon snow or not-snow, soil or
not-soil. Compost I write and think
compose. Compose I write and think
compute, measure all the microbes left
at the base of this tree where snow
piles up then melts, piles up then
melts, all winter long: muddy days
and icy nights and rarely the
clean bright purchase of fresh snow.
Birds still sing. They sing out of sight,
but they still sing: dozens
congregate in one bare tree.
I count six species before they begin
to notice me and hide—not fly,
hide, for old maple is a host of
baffles and human is grounded,
bowing down you might say.



Antivenin No.4
After Roman Loranc’s photograph “Canal, Hedgerow Farm, Yolo County, 1999” 						

A canal’s been cut into fields
turned to meadows where some trees
have grown up into a felted sky.

The clouds recall a stretch of logged
central Michigan, circa 1975,
year of my last piano lesson.

But it’s Yolo County, California, in the year
of the birth of my daughter. The water’s
surface is blank as brand new skin

become silver triangle pointed
at a live oak teeming with little lives,
the ones that inhabit bark crevices,

the undersides of leaves, and water.
A fish or something has lined the surface.
A man with a camera has waited

and as he waited, felt the ripening
seeds of bountiful herbs and grasses.
You can feel such a thing for decades

without knowing that you’re feeling it.
And then the book gets opened
and placed upon the piano

which I had better begin to play again.

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one.

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I first met in the comments section here on Beyond. We began exchanging emails and instantly felt like we’d known each other forever. Evelyn has a generous sensitivity to both the beauty and hardship of life that feels comfortable to me. And she’s funny, kind, and smart.

Evelyn is also a gifted writer and New York Times bestselling author of many books, including The Hundred Loves of Juliet (which you’ll learn more about in her essay!) and One Year Ago in Spain (out this summer). She writes for children, teens, and adults. Recently, Evelyn collaborated with Netflix on their groundbreaking literary/filmmaking project, Damsel, which stars Millie Bobby Brown, Angela Bassett, and Robin Wright. On top of all that, Evelyn writes , a behind the scenes look at writing as a career.

Evelyn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

I think you’ll really enjoy this essay! I’m excited to hear your thoughts in the comments!

xJane

How to Find Joy in Writing through Hard Times

In 2019, my husband Tom was diagnosed with a rare, incurable disease. At only 39, he had idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, caused by a genetic mutation that has been identified in only three other people in the world. His lungs were turning into something like stone, the cells unable to process oxygen. Breathing felt increasingly like suffocating, a little more each day.

We had only been married for eight months. I was on book tour when he received the horrible news that he was probably going to die. But Tom didn’t tell me until I came home from tour, because—true to his endlessly generous way of loving me—he wanted me to enjoy the fruits of my hard work.

Around the same time, his brother Ryan was diagnosed with Stage 4 liver cancer. He was only 36, and he dreamed of being a novelist some day.

I don’t need to tell you we cried ourselves an ocean of our own sorrow.

But this is not an essay about sadness. It’s actually about joy. About how writing my feelings into fictional characters took some of the heavy weight of reality off me and passed it onto imaginary friends who could help carry the burden.

In a recent study published in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology researchers discovered that the people who continue doing things that are meaningful to them come out of periods of trauma better off. In fact, by making space in hard times for themselves—even if just tiny snippets of time—those participants actually experienced post-traumatic growth. This study was done during the Covid pandemic, but the results can be applied to any of us going through hard times.

The study found that what mattered was doing something that held meaning for that specific person. For some, it was knitting blankets for their grandchildren. For others, it was gardening. And for creatives, it meant engaging in their art, be it writing, painting, taking ten minutes each day to sketch a landscape… anything. As long as it mattered to them.

I didn’t realize this was what I was doing as I carved out time in hospital rooms to work on a new novel. The story was about a man who creates magic wherever he goes, who manages to take ordinary life and blow it up into a jaw-dropping, Cirque du Soleil-type version of itself.

It was inspired by Tom, who had always lived life curiously, as if every moment contained a wonder to discover. When I met him, do you know what the storage unit of his apartment contained? A ukulele because he heard someone else playing and thought, I would love to fill my life with that kind of happy melody. A badminton set, a huge mesh bag full of volleyballs, and a frisbee (from his ultimate frisbee days fifteen years prior at Stanford), because who knew when someone might want to play a game? There was a radio-controlled car he was taking apart because he wanted to see how it worked. Parts for a robot he was building. And don’t get me started on his giant size-12 shoebox full of free sunglasses of all colors, which he had collected over the years at music festivals. You never knew when you’d need a set of purple shades with a plastic mustache attached.

All this, I poured into the novel I wrote at his bedside when Tom moved into the hospital to wait for his lungs to further degenerate, to hope for an organ donor match.

Of course, when it was just Tom and me and the rhythmic beeping of all the hospital machines, we would talk, because by then he was confined to his bed and there wasn't much else he could do. We would dream up plans for a future we weren't sure he would have--a trip to Hawaii! A safari! We would joke about how crappy the current situation was (he ordered a poop emoji-shaped hat from Amazon). My job was to be there and love him, and so I did. Fiercely. Immensely.

But there were also times when they had to take him away for tests, or when I'd have to leave the room so they could do a procedure there. And in those moments, I wrote.

I wrote snippets between doctors checking in, respiratory therapists fiddling with the high-flow oxygen, nurses administering too many medicines.

I wrote at two in the morning while he was in surgery for ECMO, a machine that took all the blood out of his body and re-oxygenated it before pumping it back into him, because by then his lungs had completely stopped working.

I wrote when we received word of a donor match, and I wrote after the doctors gave us the devastating news that the donor lungs were too boggy, that they didn’t qualify for a transplant.

The chapters I wrote were not good (although, at the time, I thought they were). But what mattered was the doing. Writing not only helped me escape reality for fifteen or thirty minutes at a time, but it also kept me connected to something I loved, an activity that was meaningful for me.

It’s easy to feel guilty for taking time for yourself in the middle of hardship. It’s difficult to believe that you deserve even brief sparks of joy when others are suffering. But the truth is, those small moments rejuvenate your soul, and then your heart is more able to give love and care when the people you love need it.

Sadly, we lost Tom’s brother to the cancer. But Ryan knew I was writing the whole time he was sick, and he wouldn’t have wanted me to do anything else. I was writing in part for him, because he couldn’t. And I was writing in part for me, because I needed it.

Tom did receive another organ match and had his double lung transplant in September of 2019, just three days before his birthday. We celebrated his fortieth in the ICU, with apple juice and chocolate pudding and a pirate hat, because, well, it was Tom, and he wasn’t going to let a day of his second chance at life go by without a swing at some joy.

And just like the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology study showed, I came out of our darkest period, stronger, with a new perspective on what it means to live and to love. Life may not be a fairy tale, but you can learn to find the moments of joy in them that are uniquely yours—and even to create more.

I did have to set aside that manuscript I wrote because honestly, it was terrible. But there were some really beautiful and insightful emotional nuggets in there, which I mined for a new book idea.

That book was about Juliet, reincarnated, and Romeo, who is lost in time. Across centuries, he finds her over and over again, but always has to watch her die. Fast-forward to present day, when he meets a version of Juliet who teaches him how to stop focusing on the fears of the past… and how to live with hope and to find happily-ever-after in even the smallest slivers of time.

That novel is The Hundred Loves of Juliet, which was published last year. This is the dedication I wrote:

To Tom—

This book is my love letter to you.

To us.

When we read the story together, we cried an ocean of tears. But this time, Tom was healthy, so our tears were not of sorrow, but of love and hope.

⭐️ Beyond is a reader-supported publication with the goal of bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you value my work and would like to support it, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!

Subscribe now

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one.

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The moment I stumbled across ’s newsletter I was smitten. With the exception of one year, from the day I was born I have lived with cats. And I’ve studied Tibetan Buddhism for decades. So I instantly appreciated David’s insightful, practical, and sometimes whimsical approach to sharing Buddhist teachings alongside his adoration of cats!

As it turns out, David is devoted to all animals. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, David lived in London for ten years, before settling in Perth, Australia. Starting in 2015, he returned to Africa with groups on Mindful Safaris, which combine his love of animals and meditation with the extraordinary natural vistas of his homeland. He also donates a large chunk his subscription funds to support endangered African wildlife centers including orphaned elephants. Another large chunk supports Buddhist nuns in the Himalaya regions.

On top of all this, David is a gifted writer. In fact, he’s written fifteen books. The Dalai Lama’s Cat bestseller series which has been translated into thirty-five languages, The Magician of Lhasa series, Hurry Up and Meditate, Buddhism for Busy People, and more! His novel Instant Karma is in development for a television series.

I’m so happy David agreed to write this essay for Beyond. It’s tender, wise, funny, and bursting with hope. So much in life goes “wrong.” But what if we looked at these derailments as blessing that we just didn’t yet understand?

Enjoy!

xJane

When an Obstacle is Really a Blessing

Readers who have come across my books usually know me as the author of Buddhist fiction (such as The Dalai Lama’s Cat series and The Magician of Lhasa) and non-fiction (including Buddhism for Busy People and Hurry Up and Meditate). But this wasn’t what I planned for my life as a young man. It only worked out this way because of a massive derailment. Or so it felt at the time.

Like many writers, I was a compulsive scribbler from a young age. My kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Ames, with whom I was secretly in love, was so taken by a poem I wrote aged seven that she had me stand on a chair and read it out to the massed ranks of kids. They were then required to applaud. Was that dizzying acclaim what started it all off, I sometimes wonder?

Poems and short stories in my teen years were followed by my first novel when I was eighteen. By the time I was thirty, I had written ten full length novels, most of which were roundly rejected by every agent and publisher I sent them to. And I queried many. I did receive a few crumbs of comfort – an ‘almost made it’ rejection letter here or doomed agency representation there.

Did this trouble me? Of course! Despite Herculean efforts I was failing to make any headway in my chosen vocation. I never doubted that I was ‘meant’ to be a writer. And not just any writer. A ‘major international best-selling novelist’ was my chosen affirmation. Coming of age in the 1980’s, I bought into the promises of Tony Robbins and Madonna, of Flashdance and the Power of Myth that you could be whoever you wanted to be. I’d even moved from the cultural backwater of Zimbabwe, where I’d been brought up, to London, to usher in this glamorous new reality.

And then finally it happened - or seemed to. I got my first book deal for an expose about spin-doctoring, my day job being in public relations. That non-fiction deal paved the way to me securing the support of Ed Victor, the literary agent more famous than many of his authors, who cruised around London in a Rolls Royce and, whenever I went to see him, seemed to have just got off the phone from ‘Freddie,’ author of The Day of the Jackal. Sitting on the sofa of his capacious office, listening to his wildly entertaining anecdotes about editors on both sides of the pond, for the first time it felt to me like things were about to happen.

And they did. Within months, my thriller Conflict of Interest was the subject of a bidding war between two rival publishers. I still remember being handed the fax saying that Little, Brown had  offered a six figure sum when my wife and I returned to the hotel in New York where we were visiting. And along with the tantalizing advance, the marketing section of the proposal contained the spookily precise promise to turn me into ‘a major international best-selling novelist.’ It was thrilling and vindicating all at once.

The wheels of the publishing industry grind slowly. It took eighteen months for Conflict to be published in hardback, and a further year for the paperback edition to come out, which is when mass market sales really kick in. In the meantime, I wrote two further thrillers in the same genre.

Having met and married my Australian wife while in London, after ten British winters we moved to my wife’s hometown of Perth, the warm climate more akin to the one I had grown up in. It was here that we were adopted by the most delightful Himalayan cat. With a lustrous cream coat, charcoal face and clear blue eyes, somewhat wonky on her pins, she belonged to a neighbor but increasingly spent time with us, away from their baying hellhound of a Chihuahua. When we moved house, the neighbor was only too happy to let us take her with us: little did we suspect what an extraordinary literary muse she was to become!

In that pre-digital age unless there was a retail stampede, it took time for sales data to come through. Eventually when they did, sales figures for Conflict were reported as solid but not spectacular. Regrettably, spectacular was needed to match the advance I had been paid.

So, another fax bookended my thriller-writing career. Little, Brown wouldn’t be buying another novel, it said. My editor wished me well. She looked forward to seeing my name rising on future best-seller charts. My writing career seemed over almost before it began. 

That fax was, without question, the most devastating of my life. It is one thing to be turned down as an unknown writer – stupid editors! Don’t they recognize potential when they see it? – but quite another to be dumped because of poor sales. The ‘major international best-selling novelist?’ Awakening the giant within? The years of honing my craft, relentlessly exploring all options and never giving up – what on earth was it all for?

I was blindsided and crushed in a way that I never had been. Everything that I’d struggled for had come to nothing. Far from being an up-and-coming novelist, I had been thrown on the trash heap of not-good-enoughs. Never had I felt so humbled, depressed or purposeless.

Two saving graces prevented me from dissolving into a complete pity party. The constant support of my loving wife. And Buddhist classes. I had begun meditating in London for stress management reasons and began going to Dharmas classes soon after getting to Perth. As an animal lover, I liked how Buddhism recognizes the sentience of all living beings.

Of more immediate relevance was the way that the Dharma gently but directly refuted many of my assumptions about the nature of happiness. Did material success really make people happy? Was fame and fortune truly a worthy aspiration? I knew from my time on Ed Victor’s sofa that his most miserable client was also a household name thriller writer.

Buddhism helped me cope with the freefall following that bombshell from London. And given its wealth of powerful and often counter-intuitive ideas and practices, it was the Dharma more than anything else I would talk to others about when socializing. Conversations which sometimes ended: “Is there an intro book to Buddhism you would recommend?”  

There wasn’t as it happened. Traditional Tibetan presentations often weren’t aligned to the Western world view. And Western writers who’d ventured into this space, with the best of intentions, weren’t always clear communicators. Which was when the thought struck me: perhaps I could have a go?

I wrote Buddhism for Busy People when I was still only a few years into Dharma practice. My motivation for writing was utterly different from previous books. I wanted, pure and simple, to share my enthusiasm for the life-changing insights I was learning. I had no financial expectations. Buddhism is a niche market – surprisingly few people are interested in exploring the nature of consciousness or of reality, or how one gives rise directly to the other.

I contacted an editor at Australian publisher Allen & Unwin who had published other Buddhist books. To my surprise, she made an offer. And to our mutual surprise, several months after it came out as a paperback original, it had sold in sufficient quantities to trigger a reprint. Months later, another reprint. These were followed by translation deals, a US deal – and a request for me to write a new book.

With a certain inevitability, the storyteller within began questioning if there wasn’t, perhaps, a way to communicate Buddhist themes using fiction? A lot of intelligent, curious people shun non-fiction for their leisure reading, having to deal with far too much of it at work. When I heard that the Dalai Lama once had a cat, it occurred to me that the goings-on in His Holiness’s office might be intriguingly explored through the eyes of a feline much like our own pampered Himalayan. And so began a new chapter in which I evolved into writing Dharma fiction and non-fiction, a sub-genre that a reader memorably described quite recently as ‘a gateway drug to the Dharma.’

What I really want to focus on here is the obstacle. That monumental setback. As I have come to learn from my lamas, the way any event is perceived depends entirely on the mind of the perceiver. And those perceptions are shaped by conditioning, or karma. My feelings at the time were that this was the worst thing that could have happened to me. My feelings, twenty years later, are only of relief.

How lucky was I to be dispatched from a career in which I would otherwise have spent years immersed in imagined worlds of corruption, duplicity and evil? Is it possible to do this for decades without it having some kind of effect on your mind? Ed’s household name thriller writer seems like a case in point.

Instead of that, I have spent the past 20 years discovering that external reality is more ephemeral and mind-dependent than I ever suspected. That we ourselves are not so much passive receivers of what’s ‘out there’ as active creators of it. So, if it’s happiness we’re after, the very best thing we can do is change the movie we’re projecting by taking control of where it’s coming from – our minds. What a rare privilege to have the opportunity to explore this! And in so doing I have had a sense of returning to a path followed in previous lifetimes, and to a broader perspective in which that the season of mainstream thriller writing was, in fact, a temporary aberration.

One of my precious lamas, Zasep Tulku Rinpoche, sometimes talks of ‘obstacle blessings’ which come in many guises. He cautions against being overly reactive when apparently bad things happen, and interpreting everything according to our present, narrow perspective. The Chinese folk tale of the lost horse is the classic example. An old man loses his horse to the wild and when his fellow villagers come around wailing he just says, ‘We’ll see.’ His horse returns along with a few horse friends he picked up along the way. The villagers are happy – if somewhat envious. He just says, ‘We’ll see.’ Attempting to ride one of the wild horses, his son is thrown off and breaks his leg. The villagers wring their hands, despondently. ‘We’ll see.’ The imperial army comes around recruiting able-bodied young men. His son is exempt. And so on.

All of us, especially us sensitive, creative flowers, are prone to seizing the significance of things, concretizing them, imputing patterns where they don’t necessarily exist and heading inexorably towards full-blown catastrophe. I pass on the ‘obstacle blessing’ concept as one of Buddha’s many opponent practices from which we can all benefit. A different way of looking at whatever may be troubling us and allowing for at least the possibility that it may turn out not to be such a bad thing – even if we can’t figure out why just yet.

These days I am able to fulfil my life’s mission which I see as transmission. I return annually to Africa, leading groups on Mindful Safaris. I no longer see Zimbabwe as a cultural backwater so much as a place of unique reconnection. It’s not only the extraordinary animals and people who inspire me. I have also stumbled on revelations of ancient symbols and spiritual practices with direct links to India that have never before been explored. It is one of the great joys of my creative life to share these discoveries with readers on Substack and, in time, a new book.

I am not a major international best-selling novelist. But I have come to see that as the goal of a frail, egotistical creature desperate for a form of validation of questionable worth. My current reality, on the other hand, is one of authenticity and fulfilment. And in the most intriguing of ways it seems to have brought me around the full circle.

That poem I composed for Mrs. Ames in kindergarten was about a witch, a cat and a transcendent state of enchantment. It seems I had to spend forty years traveling the world and getting side-tracked to find my way back to what was in my heart all along.

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I first met in the basement of World Gym in the East Village back in the eighties. She was teaching a yoga class that I had inexplicably (I did not like yoga) signed up for and always ended it with what I later learned was The Four Immeasurables.

May all beings have happiness and the causes of happiness.
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
May all beings never be parted from freedom's true joy.
May all beings dwell in equanimity, free from attachment and aversion.

I was so moved by these words, I cornered Cyndi in the locker room one day to ask her more about them. She invited me to hear Gehlek Rimpoche, her lama, speak at The Open Center. I went. And my life was forever changed.

Cyndi went on to open the legendary OM Yoga Center in New York City (students included Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey, Jr., Parker Posey and sooo many more) and quickly became one of the most influential yoga and meditation teachers in America. She’s written five books including The New York Times critically acclaimed May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga, and Changing My Mind and the classic yoga text: Yoga Body Buddha Mind.

In 2023, Cyndi was one of twenty presenters invited to give a dharma talk at the Dalai Lama Global Vision Summit. She’s lead meditation teacher trainings around the world and her work has been integrated into the NYPD, NYFD, and the NY DOE, as well as hospitals, parole work, and college counseling centers. She’s a regular columnist for Lion’s Roar, Real Simple, Yoga Journal and Yoga International. In 2018 she was ordained as a Buddhist Chaplain, under the guidance of Roshi Joan Halifax. On top of all that, she writes the beautiful newsletter . You can see why I asked Cyndi to write an essay about how her spiritual practice impacts her writing practice!

I’m forever grateful to Cyndi for bringing Gehlek Rimpoche into my life. If you’re interested in learning more about Rimpoche, you might enjoy this profile I wrote about him for Tricycle.

Cyndi currently lives in Santa Fe with her husband, Brad, and their dog, Bailey.

I think you’re going to love this essay! Enjoy!

xJane

Beautifully Ordinary

When Jane invited me to write an essay about how my spiritual practice influences my writing practice, I had to stop and think. The word practice was not one I had associated with my writing. As a decades-long Buddhist, I am programmed that practice refers to meditation and yoga. These are my sadanas, my training commitments that have become not just a part of my life, but the filter through which I interact with the world.

What makes something a practice? Meditation can be defined as a practice because it has structure, boundary, purpose and requires commitment. Without that, meditation is just sitting quietly and that’s nice, but you won’t get anywhere. Same with writing.

Four or five times a week, every week of the month, I open up my computer and write. Like all my other practices, it is about getting to know myself. In fact, the word for practice in Tibetan is Gom, which translates as “a process of familiarization.” In both meditation and writing, I am getting more in touch with myself, my hopes and fears, my habits, and my basic goodness.

Recently, one of my private meditation students asked me, “What do you feel like when you meditate?” Right away I said, “Ordinary. Beautifully ordinary.”

I don’t expect to have a peak experience or any special kind of high when I meditate. I don’t consider it a failed meditation if my mind is busy and dense and I don’t consider it a success if my mind is spacious. I just do the work, the practice. I sit down as I am and it is a relief to be ordinary and honest.

Maybe this is the first way that my spiritual practice has influenced my writing. The stability and clarity I’ve gained from meditation practice supports my writing practice. So does my habit of not expecting a certain result from sitting meditation. I usually start with an idea but I am also curious to see what comes out on the page. Not every day is going to be great or even interesting.

I don’t meditate at the same time every day but I always meditate in the same room on the same cushion. It’s nothing fancy but over time, that spot has become imbued with a certain welcoming energy and that makes it easier to sit down and begin. Meditation practice is like stepping back into a river of awareness that was there all the time, and writing feels like this, too.

Despite all this, another thing that is similar about my two practices is that I drag my feet getting to the cushion or computer.

Fortunately I studied for 35 years with Gelek Rimpoche, a high lama from Tibet, who lived in the US for decades and figured out how to impart the great teachings of the Buddhadharma in ways that related to our every day lives.

Here is some Buddhist wisdom that I learned from him - directions for how to practice dharma - that help me with my practice of writing.

1. Take your resistance by the hand and gently, but firmly, bring it onto the mat with you.

The swamis of Hindu yoga tradition wear saffron robes, the bright color symbolizing their burning passion for practice. When I was coming up as a young yogini, I was taught that a real yogi wakes up in the morning and runs to their mat, full of heat and ardor for their practice.

I used to feel like a bad yogi or maybe a fake yogi because when I wake up in the morning I crave coffee, not yoga. And as the day goes on, I have to give myself pep talks about how glad I will be that I did my yoga practice when what I really wanted to do was anything and everything else.

When I finally make it to the mat, usually around 5 pm, it is not with a heart full of joyful dedication, but a rather stolid sense of duty. That kind of heavy energy is called resistance and I know it well.

The dharma instruction to invite that feeling to come along with you is so brilliant. I can’t wait for the mood to hit. I bring my whole self with me onto the mat. I bring my boredom, sluggishness, bad mood - all of it.

This works for me because I know that after about five deep breaths, in and out, I will feel differently. The resistance will be forgotten. I will have arrived.

This approach works for me with writing, too. Instead of a yoga mat, I have a favorite coffee shop. Resistance is strongest when I am trying to start a new piece, so the first thing I do is write a title. In big font. Then I write the first things that come up. It doesn’t matter if it is good or bad. It’s a start and the momentum of that is stronger than the resistance.

2. Quit while you are still hungry.

Did you ever eat way too much of something and then you never ate it again for the rest of your life? When I was 12, my dad and I gorged on a whole box of maple bars and I haven’t had one since.

In a similar way, Rimpoche wanted to make sure that his students didn’t sabotage their practice by overindulging. So he cautioned against this by emphasizing the fact that enlightenment doesn’t happen overnight. Even burning enthusiasm needs to be doled out in bite-sized portions.

Meditation is like anything else that requires stamina. After growing my meditation sessions from 25 - 60 minutes, I began attending deep, silent retreats. Sitting on my cushion for 18 hours a day offered me many life-enhancing insights but it doesn’t work as a daily diet.

Now I know I have the capacity to meditate for long periods but on a regular basis it is more realistic to sit for 10-25 minute sessions. And I don’t even do that every day. As long as I practice often enough to maintain a connection to that river of awareness, it’s fine.

I decide on a period of time for meditating and, no matter what, I stop at that time. I can come back tomorrow. And if I quit while I am still hungry, I won’t feel as much resistance.

Quitting while you are still hungry does not mean you are putting yourself on a diet. Every day you get to decide what length of time or how much effort will make you feel over-stretched or nicely satisfied, eager to pick it up again tomorrow.

My years of mindfulness meditation help me figure this out. Mindfulness means “placing the mind” and mindfulness meditation means “consciously placing the mind.” When I am writing I am consciously placing my mind on the words and images that I am using to convey an idea or a story.

Just as in formal meditation practice, my mind will float away. But unlike formal meditation practice, when I realize that my mind has been floating I don’t bring my mind back to the feeling of my breath.

Instead I touch into what I was thinking about because it is usually moving the story forward. Then, just like pulling on a rope to haul a drifting dingy back to the dock, I pull my attention back to the words on the page.

A floating mind is part of meditation and, as all writers know, it is an essential part of the writing process, too.

But when I try to write for too long, my mind will float and not come back.

If I’m full, I will find that I am just rewriting the same sentence over and over. This kind of spinning can often trip over into negative self-talk and when I notice that, I know I need to take a break.

Weeks after I had turned in the manuscript for my first book, Yoga Body, Buddha Mind, my editor told me I needed to write one more last chapter. My heart sunk because, well, I didn’t have another chapter to write. I was written out. I had said what I had to say. But no matter, she said the book needed another chapter and she needed it in a week’s time.

I was already at the beach with a few friends. While I reluctantly sat down at my desk, they were sleeping in, bike riding to the beach during the day and lounging by the pool drinking Seabreezes in the evening. I remember staring into space trying to think of something to write, feeling like I was chained to my desk with a sweaty forehead.

This was before I had begun attending those 18-hour meditation retreats. Otherwise, I might have been able to manage better. In the 13th century, Zen master Dogen began organizing long retreats into alternating periods of sitting (25 minutes) and walking (10 minutes) meditation.

Now I know that if I am up against a deadline and I can’t just quit when I am still hungry, I do the same thing we do in deep retreats. I walk around the block and pay attention to what I see and feel. In this way, my mind gets ventilated, my stuck energy is released and my appetite for writing returns.

Pushing hard to finish my book felt like I was stretching my brain far beyond its capacity. Turns out it wasn’t and I got the book done on time. But just like overdoing it at the gym, I felt wrung out. Almost like straining your calves in spin class, I didn’t want to exercise my writing muscles for a time long afterwards.

3. Drip, drip, drip, the bucket fills.

This advice builds on the first two. Get yourself to the cushion no matter what. Don’t stay too long. Every little bit adds up.

Rimpoche frequently dispensed this pithy little morsel, which is now implanted in me. At different times it sounded like he was saying:

Don’t be aggressive

Don’t be greedy

Be patient

Be consistent

Never ever give up

But…if you do lapse, you can always take a fresh start.

Giving up has been tempting at times, but somehow Rimpoche installed in me a kind of faith in the practice; an assurance that if I stick with it something worthwhile will happen. It’s not so easy to say what that something is. We can go big and think about total liberation from suffering. Or we can go more immediate - being kinder to oneself and others. Less frazzled, more patient, less craving, more contentment.

At first I didn’t necessarily buy into these end results because I didn’t even recognize my dis-ease, impatience, underlying anxiety. I was painfully self-critical and unaware of that, too. But I trusted Rimpoche, and the people around him seemed kind and good. So I thought, “I’ll have what they’re having.”

The Sanskrit word for this is Saddha, which means faith, trust or confidence. Confidence starts with your teacher, then it grows as you experience results from your practice.

Over time, I began to recognize interactions where I was able to create a gap between stimuli and a response that I chose, rather than an unconscious reaction. That was my practice showing up in real life.

The sadhanas - the practices that help us develop saddha - have gently and gradually worked on me. Old habitual patterns of self-judgement, anger and wanting have been eroded, making way for new neural pathways of mindfulness, compassion, clarity.

This kind of patience is built on curiosity and that been so helpful for my writing practice, especially with my Substack.

I have been writing newsletters to my yoga and meditation students for many years. But I only did it when the mood struck or if I had a retreat to promote. Most of the time it was fun to write and if it wasn’t fun, I didn’t do it. But committing to a weekly Substack six months ago changed all that.

Fortunately, my work ethic supports this kind of commitment, but I still felt daunted by having to get a new idea every week and write about it in a way that connected to thousands of people who may or may not already be my loyal students.

One time a meditation student who felt pressured to meet her sadhana requirements, asked her guru, the great meditation master, Chogyam Trungpa, “How can I find the time to meditate?” With his Oxford accent he stated the obvious, “It’s all about scheduling, my dear.”

Over the last several months I have created a loose schedule for writing based on the notion of drip, drip, drip. I know that my current capacity for writing is no more than 2 hours and so I enter 3-4 sessions into my weekly calendar. Each writing sessions produces a drip and I don’t expect more.

This system works for me and I have come to trust it. Which really means that I trust myself, I have confidence that I will keep my commitment and that removes a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. Drip, drip, drip, the bucket fills and the Substack goes out.

Writing, like meditation, happens breath by breath, moment by moment, drip by drip. Jane, who also studied with Gelek Rimpoche, was right. I do have a writing practice, after all.

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments mean so much to me. I read each and every one.

Leave a comment

and I bonded over a deep love of cats. They pretty much rule our lives. We went on to discover we both also love doing interviews: Sarah did a near-record six interviews for The Paris Review, one of which you’ll read about below. We love big cities, great literature, and we’ve both struggled with chronic health issues: for me, the aftermath of head and brain injury, for Sarah manifestations of mental illness from which she’s now recovered.

Sarah guides us through her twenty-five years in the mental health system in her journalistic memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses. Described as “powerful, mesmerizing, and unputdownable” by memoirist Anthony Swofford, it calls for a new conversation about mental health diagnosis, one based on rigorous transparency. It was an Apple Best Books pick, hailed in The New York Times as a “fiery manifesto of a memoir,” and named by Parade Magazine as one of the sixteen best mental health memoirs to read. She serialized her follow up memoir, Cured, on Substack.

Sarah has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and The Paris Review, where she was an advisory editor, and is on the creative writing faculty at Northwestern University. She loves helping people succeed on Substack and channels all her wisdom and enthusiasm into the tremendously popular Substack Writers at Work.

Last summer, Sarah filled in the Beyond Questionnaire which you can read here.

Her essay on the link between notebooks, mental health, and the very human desire to reinvent ourselves really touched my heart. I think it will touch yours, as well.

Enjoy!

xJane

On Not Keeping a Notebook (and “Pathological Decluttering”)

There are two types of people in this world: those who keep a notebook (or diary or journal) and those who don’t. Those who feel the need to record their days and inner thoughts (or progress toward a goal or the world around them) and those who would just rather skip it. Those who keep Moleskine in business and those who think Leuchtturm1917 is a historical event. 

Then—at the edges—there’s a third group: those who keep notebooks and destroy them. 

Like many in group three, I spent years buying and filling notebooks of various sizes (A5, A4, B7), prices (expensive, cheap, ultra-cheap, ultra-expensive), brands (Field Notes, Clairefontaine, Apica), and page layouts (lined, unlined, dotted). Some were only partly filled before I didn’t like what I saw—who I saw—and destroyed them. 

Joan Didion, who wrote “On Keeping a Notebook,” explains why: “[O]ur notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable ‘I.’” 

I wanted escape my implacable “I,” become someone else, someone I wasn’t, someone (I love this term) mentally sound. 

The need to destroy the notebooks I’d filled came in a blur, a rush. I never set fire to them—that would’ve been melodramatic—just threw them away, always with a new notebook at the ready.

Once, on a trip to Tokyo and after my return, this played out as clearly as it ever had. I was there to interview the Nobel Laureate Kenzaburō Ōe for The Paris Review—an opportunity I half experienced between panic attacks and crying spells. 

My mind was unhinged and unmanageable, much as it had been since the age of twelve when I received my first psychiatric diagnosis. That was why I traveled—for work, sure, but mostly impulsively, randomly, to escape the edginess, irritability, anxiety, crushing depression (which came every day at 4 PM), and manic-ish episodes that made up a large part of my life. (I moved apartments about every year for the same reason.) 

The potential was too delicious: In a different place, I might become a different person. 

Notebooks followed the same faulty logic: new notebook, new mind, new me. 

I wasn’t a natural-born diarist, not someone who kept my tender childhood thoughts under teeny lock and key. My first didn’t come until my twenties and only because that’s what writers did, and I wanted to be a writer. I’d been wooed by Sylvia Plath’s journals (ah, the melodrama, particularly during the Smith years) and Virginia Woolf’s notebooks and journals (oh, the brilliance). Important people wrote down their thoughts for posterity, and I wanted to be important in the superficial way we think of importance, i.e., known, famous, recognized, approved of by others. 

On that trip to Tokyo, I’d been keeping a small, soft-cover Moleskine that doubled as my wallet. It was faded blue and worn at the edges, the band stretched from opening and closing it so much. Inside, on the beige-yellowish paper, my handwriting filled the pages. 

It held the usual writerly scribblings: ideas for stories and poems, articles to write, descriptions of strangers and settings. Some pages had diary-ish entries—accounts of my days, progress toward some goal or other, musings that probably seemed profound at the time. 

Then there were the journal-ish entries, my uncensored thoughts on paper. In those, the words were jagged, revved-up, spikey, anxious—often breaking out of the narrow lines. Or they were languid and thick as if the letters themselves were heavy with depression.

I tried to replace it with a graceful, soft-cover Midori, larger and thinner than the Moleskine. (Japan’s brands are legendary: Maruman, Kokuyo, Yamamoto, Stalogy, Midori, Hobonichi. It seemed impossible to choose.) The cover was light yellow. Inside was soft, lightly dotted paper.

Graceful. Delicate. Soft. Light. Not at all the person I was. 

New notebook. New mind. New me. 

It didn’t work. It never worked.

When I returned to my tiny house in Iowa City, jittery and on edge from not sleeping, I left the new Midori on my dining room table. Tattered Moleskine in hand, I went up to my attic office. It was too hot and stuffy to write. (Central air was something I dreamed of.) Sweating, I sat on the floor. My hand shook as I pulled the silver trashcan toward me. 

It’s not that I thought someone would find my notebooks and use them against me, see all my patterns of thoughts, my obsessions, my melancholies, and give me yet another diagnosis. (I’d received five by that point—doctors aimlessly trying to label my mental and emotional pain.) Or posthumously diagnose me the way we do when we anachronistically say Einstein had ADHD and idiotically wonder what it would have been like if he’d taken Ritalin.1

Or maybe I did.

I held the Moleskine over the trashcan and let it fall. The jitteriness subsided, slightly. Then I took a cloth-covered storage cube from the bookshelf and threw away the two other notebooks that hadn’t yet met their demise. 

This was something I did: rid myself of myself. Notebooks weren’t the only victims: photos, notes on bits of paper, anything I’d saved. There are only a handful of photos of me from the ages of twenty through forty-five. 

All the evidence gone.

The irony was that throwing away my notebooks (and photos and scraps of paper) coupled with my immaculately clean, spartanly furnished home could have been categorized as a symptom of a psychiatric diagnosis. Symptom: compulsive decluttering. Diagnosis: obsessive-compulsive disorder. 

An even greater irony? That anyone in our materialistic, capitalist culture of too much could be seen as mentally unsound for throwing or giving away their possessions. Of course, Marie-Kondoing can tip over into toxic, distressing behavior, but to piggyback on ’s “The Way We Live in the United States Is Not Normal,” the way we pathologize ourselves and those around us is not normal. 

A decade or so later, when my agent went to sell my memoir Pathological: The True Story of Six Misdiagnoses, the Knopf editor interested asked what kind of documentation I had. Had I kept a notebook? Journals? Photographs? I don’t remember what I said, but I hedged, a pit forming in my stomach, worried they wouldn’t bid because I couldn’t account for those years beyond my memories of them. Why hadn’t I kept all those notebooks?

Just before Pathological came out, my publicist asked me for photos of myself for the B-roll so we could pitch the big morning shows: CBS This Morning, Good Morning America—those prime TV spots that seem to ensure a place on the bestseller list. The idea was that I should have (or was expected to) document my repeated descents into and rises out of madness. It simply never crossed my mind to ask someone to snap a photo of me during a suicidal episode in the emergency room. 

In her essay, Didion describes how, with a notebook, “it all comes back.” She admires how a notebook allows us to stay “on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise…[w]e forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget…forget who we were.”

Those are times I’m happy to forget. I wouldn’t wish them on anyone.

Now that I’m fully recovered from serious mental illness, I’m on nodding terms with who I used to be—often I appreciate her, sometimes want to hug her—but I wouldn’t want to spend time with her, which seems like an exceedingly mentally sound thing to feel. 

Today, I don’t “keep” a notebook, but I plan and outline and think and write on paper using a Rhodia A4, top spiral bound (I’m mystified by side spiral bound notebooks—you can’t write on both sides of the paper without crimping the side of your hand), dotted (never lined). 

When an anxiety attack or bout of depression descends (because recovery does not mean I never feel them—they are part of what it means to be human), I go through a process of writing down my thoughts. The woman who taught me this process calls it the 4 N’s: notice the thoughts (write them down), normalize them (see how they might be reasonable responses to a situation given that our minds are evolutionarily designed to look for the negative and overreact as if we’re in mortal danger at all times, even when answering email), neutralize them (get the facts), and consider the next best thought or action.2 Sometimes, all it takes is writing and rereading my troubling thoughts to see how extreme and unreasonable they often are.

Then I rip off the paper and throw it away. 

2

Credit to life coach Corrinne Crabtree for teaching me the 4 N’s. And I couldn’t publish this essay without mentioning and her beautiful Substack .

Beyond with Jane Ratcliffe is a reader-supported publication with the goal of bringing as much light as possible into this world of ours. If you enjoy the work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments mean so much to me. I read each and every one.

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I’m so delighted to share an excerpt from’s gorgeous memoir Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life which explores Maria’s difficult decision not to have children, so that she could follow her dreams of an adventurous life.

In 1973, when Maria was twenty-one and before she’d met her now husband Dag, Maria came close to drowning in Morocco attempting to help another swimmer. In the excerpt below, Maria is returning to the beach for the first time at age sixty-six.

Maria’s writing is so lovely: crisp and fresh and so precise; bursting with vibrant urgency—as well as wisdom and gratitude. She’s published thirteen books, which have won numerous awards. Their subjects range from her travels with Dag, to the emotional impacts of extreme adventure (her previous partner disappeared on Everest when she was thirty, another life changing event), and four of them are books for children. When not traveling, Maria and Dag split their time between British Columbia and Catalonia.  

I trust you will enjoy this wondrous snippet of her life as much as I do!

December 2018

The plane overshot the coast, then turned back for the approach to landing. As it banked steeply, I saw the sun begin to slide behind the horizon, where the Atlantic meets the sky.

I was flying into Morocco from Indonesia, where I’d been leading a trip for our adventure travel company. Dag had driven down from Catalonia; he had been in the country for a couple of weeks and was at the airport to meet me. We headed south from Agadir for over two hours on a highway winding through bare, rolling hills. Night had fallen by the time we stopped in Tiznit to buy fruit, tea, and milk. The vendor sat by a pile of oranges. He wore a long, striped djellaba, the hood pulled over his head against the evening chill. He was watching a video on his smartphone. A donkey tethered to a post nearby flicked its tail.

Forty kilometres on, we took a narrow road through the edge of a small town, past shuttered shops and dark houses.

“Does this look familiar?” asked Dag.

I shook my head.

“It was just a one-street village then. There was nothing beyond except dirt paths.”

Some months before, Dag had told me about a place in Morocco that was a mecca for paragliding, a sport he loved. He suggested he should go there while I was in Indonesia. Then I’d join him, and we’d explore the country together. I’d always talked about returning to Morocco to see the places I’d missed because of my long-ago accident. So this plan fitted together nicely.

“The town’s called Mirleft,” he had said, and I’d stared at him in astonishment.

“That’s where I drowned.”

# 

He had rented a small apartment on a beach. “I don’t think it’s the same beach,” he said on the way. “There’s a bigger one with a notorious rip current half an hour’s walk along the cliffs. We can go there tomorrow.”

We zigzagged down, the road becoming a gravel path ending at a small parking area. Stepping out of the car, I heard the pounding waves, inhaled sharp, salty air. A man darted from the darkness, took our bags, let us into the apartment. Framed by the bedroom window, the moon lit the breaking surf. My journey had seemed endless, through many time zones. I was blurred with tiredness. I longed to lie flat, to hold Dag, to sleep. I closed the shutter on the ocean. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow. 

#

I woke to a dull roar, the repetitive thump and hiss of waves hitting the beach. Dag brought me a cup of tea. He opened the shutters, and bright sunlight flooded the room. I sat up, blinking. Looked out. The ocean shimmered. Surf foamed over yellow sand.

Our apartment was in one of a few simple stone buildings straggling along the head of the beach where it met the bluff. We walked to a small cafe for breakfast. Two steps up from the sand led to a patio. Earth-hued cushions were scattered over stone benches, low plastic tables set before them. It was grimy yet cheerful. The owner emerged from the dark interior, greeting Dag like an old friend.

“Mohammed, this is my wife, Maria,” said Dag.

Skinny and tall, with stained teeth and a long blue scarf wrapped around his head, Mohammed bowed to me, folding his palms together at his chest.

“I have been waiting for you. Your husband has been with me here a lot. He has missed you.”

Mohammed served us eggs cooked in a brass pan with olives, tomatoes, onions, and lots of oil. We scooped up the mixture with pieces of flatbread. Then he brought us little glasses of sweet mint tea. When I finished mine, I excused myself. I wanted to walk on the beach alone. I headed to the jumble of black rocks marking its northern end. Scrambling onto the highest rock, I looked around. Dag was right. I had always described a larger beach, with higher bluffs. But this was the right shape, like a horseshoe. I jumped down and followed the tide line, walking barefoot on damp, hard sand to the far bluff, sheer like a cliff.

Just before I reached it, I stopped and stood very still.

The memory was visceral. Sprawled out on my stomach, one cheek pressed against the sand, opening my eyes, seeing the arm lying next to my face, realizing with a shock it was mine. That I was alive. A babble of voices, then hands lifting me, carrying me, the pain of that, the agony of every breath.

It was here. Right at this spot. I was sure, I could sense it with every cell in my body. I sat down. Hugged my knees to my chest. Stared at the waves. A dog trotted up, wagging his tail. Yellow-furred, long-legged, a jaunty red scarf around his neck. He curled up next to me. We stayed that way for some time.

I looked along the beach to the rocks. Squinted. There I was, with my friends Claire, Eileen, and Margaret. Twenty-one, slender as a reed, hair down my back, a long patchwork skirt and T-shirt over my bikini. We had just walked from the village. I threw my bag and clothes on the sand and ran into the shallows to play with some other young travellers. Carefree and laughing, jumping in the foam of the broken waves as they rolled to shore. After each jump, landing back on my feet, never out of my depth. Then the shout, someone was beyond the break, in trouble. People started forming a chain to reach him. I was a weak swimmer. I should have backed away. Instead, I made a split-second decision and reached out my hands. Suddenly, I was in the chain, moving out, standing on my tiptoes in chest-deep water. The people on either side of me held me fast when a wave rolled in and lifted me off my feet. But the next wave was much larger. As it curled up above us, I stared at its belly, smooth like blue glass, at its foaming, teetering head. Then the shocking crash, the tumbling over and over like a rag in a washing machine, no idea of up or down.

Surfacing: at first the relief of air, then the realization I couldn’t touch the bottom. I was being pulled away from the beach where my friends stood staring at me in bewilderment. Only later did I learn about the notorious rip current, too strong and fast for anyone to swim against. That I could have swum parallel to the shore to try to escape it, as the man we had been attempting to rescue had already successfully done. That eventually the rip would peter out in much deeper water, or curl back toward the beach, so I should relax and let it take me. Had I known this, I would have kept my head above water and waited for the current to release me, knowing I’d end up somewhere I hadn’t expected to be but that I’d be okay. Instead, I panicked. As another wave churned over me, I coughed violently, sucking in water. I saw it rolling toward the shore, rearing up as it reached the surf break. I was beyond that now, and my friends had become tiny figures.

#

The mind protects us from the unbearable. For most people, it is impossible to imagine the moment of death, the prospect of not existing. But I know what it’s like to die, at least by drowning. Waves slapping against my face, water filling my mouth, my nose. The choking, the sense of being suffocated. The desperate struggle, limbs flailing, hands clawing uselessly at the ocean. The mind slowing into lucid waves of sorrow, regret, and anguish. I imagined my body smashed against the rocks at one end of the beach, or drifting down into depths, rolling around on the ocean floor. I thought about my parents, how they would find out, their terrible sorrow. I remembered the spat I’d had with Claire that morning. I would never be able to apologize to her. I’d miss the rest of university, miss meeting my future husband, miss travelling the world. The beach was far away now. I kept fighting, choking, clawing. The loneliness, the desolation was profound. And soon so was the darkness.

A young German man had walked from the village a little while after us. From the top of the bluff, he saw people running around by the rocks. Wanting solitude, he took another path, down to the far end of the beach. As he reached the sand, he spotted a body washing about in the surf. He ran in, grabbed my hair, carried my limp body to this spot. My lips were blue. I wasn’t breathing.

#

I stood up and slowly walked back across sand, the yellow dog trotting along beside me. At the cafe, it flopped down at my feet.

“This is the beach, isn’t it?” said Dag. He was looking at me with concern.

I nodded.

“I found the spot where I was resuscitated.”

Mohammed set down another cup of mint tea. “Your husband told me of your accident, madam. I am sorry. The sea is very dangerous here. It has taken many people. You are lucky. Allah was with you. You were reborn.”

I breathed in deeply. Ocean air moving easily through my lungs.

Mohammed was right. I had been returned to life – but differently. The invincibility of youth had been stripped away. Underneath it was a raw understanding of the fragility of existence. It was a knowledge that would impel me to chase my dreams and inform the biggest choices I was to make in the years ahead. '

Thank you for being here, dear Beyonders! ❤️ Your comments (and hearts) mean so much to me. I read each and every one. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on Maria’s beautiful essay!

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I first met Jo Salas here on Beyond and was impressed by her thoughtful, tender comments, and by how she conveyed so much insight and emotion in so few words. So I wasn’t surprised when she managed to pack oceans of brilliance and precision and sweet, aching tenderness into this essay she wrote for Beyond and do so in such few words—but I was absolutely bowled over by it. I’m guessing you will be, too.

Jo takes us on a writer’s journey from childhood determination to later in life publication—and all the being-a-human stuff that arises in between; a journey in which many of us will find at least one piece of ourselves. I certainly did!

Jo is a New Zealand-born writer living in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley. Her second novel, Mrs. Lowe-Porter, which she writes about here, will be published in February 2024. Her first novel, Dancing with Diana, was published in 2015. Jo is also the cofounder of Playback Theatre and has authored four books and numerous articles about this original form of story-based improvisational theatre, including Improvising Real Life: Personal Story in Playback Theatre. 

Irrepressible Words

After I read Little Women, at eight years old, it dawned on me that I had a claim to be called Jo. Josephine was my middle name. And I was the second of four sisters, just like Jo March. So, I became Jo, and have been ever since.

My new name underlined the urge to write that was within me even then. In my teens I wrote passionately, fluently, sometimes with whimsy or wit. I thought I’d do this for the rest of my life.

Then, at the age of 17, I fell in love, and decided, under the weight of centuries of conditioning, that my new boyfriend was a better writer than me and therefore I should focus only on supporting him. He didn’t make that demand. He didn’t even know about my literary ambitions. Within four years we were living in a remote shepherd’s cottage in England, helping the farmer with his animals. My new husband wrote short stories while I looked after our baby and washed nappies in cold water.

Writing came back to me about seven years later, when I started chronicling the theatre work we had started together after we returned to the States, living by then in a small town in upstate New York. Again I felt that fluency and joy. I had readers: my impulse to write was met by the eagerness of others in the theatre world. I wrote my first book to support the growing number of people who practiced the theatre method we had created. It’s now in 10 translations, from Portuguese to Nepali.

I continued to write and publish nonfiction—but then fiction writing came knocking at my door until I finally opened it. My first published short story, “It begins to tell,” appeared in a local arts-and-entertainment magazine. I had the unusual experience, for a writer, of face-to-face comments from people who’d read it. “I’ve always wondered if writers really make it all up,” said a friend outside the grocery store. “And now I know they do!” She meant that I was (at that time) not an old woman like my protagonist, so the story must be invented.

It was. But, like most stories, it grew from a sliver of real life. Years before, a friend told me that her elderly mother had vetoed her husband joining her in the nursing home where she’d lived for several years. The poignance and mystery of it stayed with me. What could have led a decorous old lady at the end of her life to refuse her husband’s wishes? I had no idea, but my imagination built a narrative around her action—a young jazz pianist, a censorious husband, a lifetime of suppressed yearning.

I wrote story after story, usually prompted by a kernel of fact, like the first one.

And then, a novel. To entertain myself while I painted my kitchen, I listened to Tina Brown reading her book The Diana Chronicles. An anecdote stuck in my mind: Diana at 15, before she was a princess, revealing her extraordinary empathy in a school trip to visit disabled people.

My novel Dancing with Diana was published in 2015—about a boy in a wheelchair who dances with Diana for five minutes and can never forget her, interwoven with the story of Diana’s tragic last day. My small publisher made a beautiful book but did nothing to promote it. I tried, with little success.

I did not plan to write another novel, until, in my mid-sixties, I was drawn into it by the life of the translator Helen Lowe-Porter. Helen was a remarkable person: the translator of the Nobel Prize-winning German novelist Thomas Mann, a mother of three, and a gifted writer in her own right who strove all her life to fulfill her artistic vision. She was not helped by having a distinguished husband who outshone her and betrayed her. His mid-life affair with a very young family friend broke her heart and changed the direction of her life. Helen’s story, I felt, was a classic women’s predicament.

Helen was also my husband’s grandmother. I had access to personal reminiscences and many of her papers. I worked on the novel for years, reading Helen’s letters and essays, visiting the street in Oxford where she’d lived and her beloved cottage on a Maine island, talking to other family members. It wasn’t going to be a biography: I wanted the freedom to imagine and invent, while also honoring this extraordinary woman whom I’d never met. She became fully alive in my mind: brilliant, meticulous, witty, self-deprecating, loving.

When the dispiriting business of querying agents had not brought an offer, I attended a writers’ conference in New York where aspiring writers could meet agents seeking new submissions. The writers—recognizable with their anxious eyes and manuscript-laden bags hugged to their sides—far outnumbered the agents, younger, smartly dressed, relaxed, chatting with each other. I joined a small group where one agent read aloud the first page of a manuscript and three others would comment. I held my breath as a stranger read my words. One agent shrugged. “Competent. But I’m only interested in contemporary fiction.” Another said: “No one wants to read about writers, especially failed ones.”

Like my main character, I was by then getting old. I had no more patience for the agent game. But I wanted my novel to find publication. I wanted Helen Lowe-Porter to be known, after being in Mann’s shadow all her life. Even recently, in Colm Tóibín’s highly detailed biographical novel The Magician, Helen, whose 22 translations sealed Mann’s reputation in the English-speaking world, is not mentioned beyond a single disparaging line.

I met a “publishing Sherpa”—a generous, savvy woman who guides writers like me to find the right path to publication. She connected me to an independent literary press. The fiction editor wrote that she was thrilled I’d decided to accept their offer.

After years of “no thank you” or no response at all (the industry standard) I could hardly believe it. Helen’s grandson and I broke out the champagne.

And now my novel, Mrs. Lowe-Porter, is finished, ready for its readers, exactly one hundred years after her first Mann translation appeared. For me, it’s a significant milestone. Will there be more novels? I don’t know. But for now, I’ve kept faith with my name. 

Tell me…

What did you give up of yourself due to societal conditioning? What have you regained? Any dreams that have carried you from childhood to now? What has helped you keep your faith? What moved you about Jo’s beautiful story?

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