ainsleyandherproblems

[ainsleyandherproblems]

[ainsleyandherproblems]

displace

The last time I was at my grandma’s house wasn’t for her funeral, or for Christmas a month later. It was on New Year’s Eve, when I went with my mom and sister and two aunts to try and tackle the onerous task of cleaning the place up. Not that it was dirty, but there was just....stuff. Every drawer contained things, and most of it was trash (lightbulbs and candles and batteries and socket covers) or typical household things (Tupperware that I, personally, took, because I don’t have any). When you think about inheritance, you think about the legacy items: Who gets the wedding ring and engagement ring, the earrings, the tennis bracelet, the silk scarf, the ink painting, the objects d’art we’ve always seen and never really cared about.

(My grandfather’s novelty watch with a pinup on it that said “time to fuck,” that we obviously didn’t throw out because it’s fucking hilarious)

We pulled all of her clothes out of the closet, these meticulous lovely fancy items, and all of us just shook our heads. None of us would fit, but even if we could, where would we ever wear a thing like that? Cardigans all the colors of the rainbow in cashmere and cotton that wouldn’t fit and were put quietly in the “donate” pile. I opened a random set of drawers in the bedroom, praying they’d be empty because I was getting really bored and melancholy sorting through all the things my grandparents collected over the course of their lives. What I found was decades worth of cards from my grandfather to my grandmother, for anniversaries and birthdays and Valentine’s Day and even Christmas, each with its own unique declaration of a love that lasted over five decades.

I brought them out in a box. We read some, and didn’t know what to do. If we’d found them before my grandmother’s burial we would have put them in with her body, but we hadn’t. We couldn’t throw them away, but it seemed wrong to read them, and none of us wanted to keep them. 

A few nights later, my mom sparked up the fire pit in our backyard and we made s’mores and burned the letters, which seemed the most loving and respectful choice. Thank you for once more keeping us warm. 

My grandmother’s house is now on the market, so naturally I checked the Zillow listing. It is so utterly bizarre to see that home cleaned of most of the personal things (though portraits of my cousins and sister and I remain on one wall; apparently, no one caught it). That’s the living room where we would all sit as a family, taking up every available sitting surface! The kitchen where we used to all make our coffee and lean against the island and chat! That’s my mom’s old room, and my aunt’s old room, and my other aunt’s old room, and I’ve explored all of them (one of them had a closet full only of blankets and board games). That’s my grandparents’ sitting room—it’s where my grandma was, the last time I saw her alive. The basement, where as kids we’d explore the crawlspace, play manhunt, and where I learned to play pool. I have so many memories there, and now someone else will buy it. Someone else will make memories there, and the last time I was there I just wanted to go.

I think, like many things, I never knew it was the end until it was over.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

grown-up food

There are seven days in a week. I know this. Yet somehow I spend ten days a week standing in the aisles of the supermarket near me, terrified and rapt. I’m openly a sucker for packaging as I walk down the aisle that is suffused with tea—considering the colors, the flavors they promise, caffeine and rest and zen—and despite loving tea I put nothing in the basket. Ditto coffee, which to be fair I love less and cannot buy to save my life (all I know is that drinking the organic hazelnut grounds I bought feels like a soapy punishment). 

In the bakery section I consider what might make me want to eat. Raspberries and chocolate and orange and apple cider donuts and pumpkin muffins, and then maybe I will consider if I’m running low on bread and throw the most recent sourdough loaf in the basket. 

Freezer section, and I’m freezing alongside microwave breakfasts I can’t eat for all of them containing meat. None of the frozen pizzas seem appetizing, or the right size for one person, or both. Frozen mac and cheese feels stupid. Into the basket goes froze edamame (shelled) and frozen broccoli. The dairy section overwhelms me and, once again, I get a pint of Greek yogurt and some shredded cheese. I pick based on the lowest prices. I need a dozen eggs. I cannot fathom what to do with a dozen eggs. 

Consider tempeh. Decline.

I pick up crackers. Detour to the produce section to wander around. A single avocado. A greenhouse-ripe tomato. Five pounds of apples, by mathematical accident.

Tap my card at the checkout, and shove the food into my backpack. Get home starving and realize, once again, that it’s crackers and yogurt for dinner. Shockingly (not!), I’ve lost five and a half pounds without trying. What I’m trying to do, in fact, is learn how to grocery shop. Trying to become a person who eats two balanced meals a day (I believe in breakfast for dinner and no food before noon, a time where my body can only handle a hot beverage). I can cook. But I can’t shop for food. Now that I am in perfect, proper control of what goes into me, I can’t actually take the reins.

I unpack the food. Bread, apples, a single avocado, a single tomato. A bag of shredded cheese. Greek yogurt. Frozen vegetables. Crackers. 

Maybe, I thought, if I go to Trader Joe’s I’ll have better luck. I walked an hour round-trip and left with a box of wine, a bag of trail mix, and a bag of a grain and vegetable medley I don’t even like. It sat covered in the fridge in the only bowl I own for a week, which was how long it took me to remember to eat 16 ounces of food.

I can cook. I just don’t seem to remember how to eat.

---

In college I spent six months subsisting primarily on Soylent. Almost everywhere I had a bottle in-hand of chai flavored meal replacement. Each bottle contains 400 calories and roughly 30 percent of daily necessary vitamins and minerals. I just never told anyone that, all day, it was the same bottle, carted around like an eccentric prop. I would go to dining halls with friends and get food—grain bowls, mozzarella sticks, fries and wraps and omelets and pizza—and then pick at it, chattering away while pushing the fork across the Melmac plate. I’d make hummus and pita chips and raw carrots a meal—my only meal. I got very sick. When I tell my law professors now that I took some time off after graduating to work on my health, this is what I was afraid of.

I went to the 7-11 on the corner recently to see if they carried Soylent (they did not, or were out). I ate a salad instead.

When sharing fries with a friend in the dining hall between civil procedure and legal practice in the middle of a shitty day I continuously pushed them further and further away from me, sliding them across the table like I was gifting them. I bought Tupperware, thinking I would be a good little grown-up and meal prep and bring food with me to save money and be a responsible adult. Well, a kid can dream.

I dip a sliced apple in yogurt. I forget what it’s like to have ever enjoyed the concept of “food.” The only thing I can fathom wanting to eat is an egg sandwich, the comforting food of high school mornings and chilly lines at the cart on 120th with Sara before classes on Thursday mornings, bundled in a scarf with steam rolling off the top of the blue paper coffee cup.

I used to weigh 102 pounds. 98 pounds. A year ago I weighed 88 pounds and my uncle said at Christmas that I looked like skin and bones. At the time, I still wanted to lose weight.

None of my pants fit anymore. 

When I told my mother I think I weigh around 90 or 95 pounds now, she said, “That’s not possible. Your sister weighs 110.” 

It’s possible, I say. You just didn’t see it happen, I don’t say.

Somehow, every painful, harmful, agonizing choice I have ever made, and they missed the disappearing act, the way my sister’s hand-me-down jeans (and I’m the older sister, for fuck’s sake!) now swim around my hips and ankles. She was always the skinny sister. I will never, I see now, be the skinny sister. My mother assigned us those roles whether she knew it or not; it is part of how she knows us. What she can’t believe, she doesn’t see. 

For a woman who jokes that “in life, as in all things, I do whatever the New York Times style section tells me,” I really took People Magazine circa 2005′s advice and decided to replace food with water. In the shower, my palms turned blue.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

time is a flat circle, and you should still see a therapist

My senior winter, I had to go to school jail. “School jail” is the name I invented for when the then-dean of studies made me sit in an empty office to write my final papers because I admitted that I “was not stressed” because I “was not actually doing any work” and would “probably get to it eventually” but kept “distracting myself and those around me in the library by generally messing around.” Said messing around include some incredibly hilarious and artistic Snapchats, teaching myself several Italian arias, texting my friends jokes, taking “long lunches” as “well-earned breaks from hitting the books (I was not hitting the books),” and watching Netflix while sitting in a windowsill (it was the only room in the inn, and also I wasn’t working anyway).

As you can see, I was having a great time! No stress, because I wasn’t working on anything that would contribute to me getting a single grade in a single class! To be fair, I was also “applying to graduate school,” which was work, but also like, not the kind of work that I could be graded on. Just cheerful nihilism all the way down. Stressless procrastination. The best feeling on earth for forestalling the impending doom of due dates.

The dean’s secretary brought me a space heater, and I sat at a stately desk watching “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” while banging out an essay on (cracks knuckles) “how the media’s reportage of sexual violence constitutes misogynistic propaganda.” I watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” while banging out an essay on “can the First Amendment accommodate limitations to speech to curtail hate speech.” It was very productive three days, because all I had to do was stare at blank Pages docs and fill them with as many as 2,000 words, which is not impossible when you picked essay topics about which you have Opinions™ and are prepared to Illuminate the Masses™.

I was desperately fucking unprepared for what would happen when I got to finals in law school, where I don’t get to “pick a topic to expound upon elegantly” or even have a single idea what’s going on most of the time. I didn’t know how to study because guess what philosophy majors can’t do? Math and studying. All we know is how to write essays in under 2,000 words and maybe how to issue a scathing takedown of someone’s intellectual position, and on a good day the difference between “a priori” and “a posteriori” knowledge. 

“Rule 4(a-e)???” “Consideration????” “Negligence per se as a matter of common law?????” You have actually got to be kidding me. What the hell. That’s not Greek, for starters, so I don’t understand.

I left my first final, bought a bottle of wine, drank half of it, watercolored a gallery of cartoon beagles in various sundries, and passed out at 6:30pm. It’s reassuring to know I will literally never be able to think about torts, because all of that post-finals knowledge of tort law disappeared into the ether of very cheap white wine. 

One down.

That December that I was in school jail, I was feted at many parties. I would leave school jail at 5pm, slick on makeup, and be handed shots of peppermint schnapps or vodka or tequila to celebrate the Triumph of the Young Journalist, the Triumph of the Young Soprano, the Triumph of the Person who Guessed How the Bachelor Would End. I was very depressed, but very beautiful and, with the right balance of tough love and support, managed to write the essays while also getting blitzed five out of seven nights a week. That was also the start, not at all by coincidence, of a period of time spanning a semester plus a reading week where I was in therapy twice a week. More, if you count all the times Natalie stuck her head in the door to make sure I wasn’t fucking around when I was supposed to be writing philosophy, or emailed me to say “it’s okay.”

Because that semester I was also catastrophically depressed. I spent many hours considering how to jump out my 14th-story window, which only opened about eight inches specifically to prevent jumpers.

It’s funny, and also not funny, that the last time I remember being as goddamn stressed and depressed as I am right now I required what amounted to round-the-clock care so I would just do the work and not open an arterial spray in my dorm room. 

I left my second final, bought another extremely cheap bottle of pinot grigio, and laid on my couch while unpacking a care package from the very dean who made me go to school jail in the first place. I gave myself a paper cut mindlessly shuffling papers around and stared at the ceiling while listening to Handel’s Messiah, eating cheese and apples and drinking wine. I started to have feelings, like “I can’t believe I could be singing this professionally instead of learning what a promissory condition is.”

Two down.

I had gentle nihilism then. Quiet gentle hilarious nihilism. I’m not sure, but I don’t think it’s quite so funny now, when I ask professors exactly how badly I can do to still squeak out a B in class, and they give me this look that sort of says “Jesus, try to step over the bar, not trip on it,” and I say, “There has been a lot of information this semester and also for six weeks I had a traumatic brain injury, which happened to also be my intellectual peak.”

In any time of great personal upheaval (moving, quitting your job, starting graduate school, meeting new people, becoming totally independent, having a whole ass traumatic brain injury) there must be space for reflection. I didn’t have that all semester, and so now that there is greater fluidity to my schedule, my brain has decided now would be a good time to unpack it. “We don’t have time for this level of reflection. Get the fuck back in Pandora’s box.”

Draw arrows. Learn rules. I am used to a discreteness in my courses—you take epistemology to satisfy the major and then, if you don’t want to, you never think about it again. It never comes up again. The idea that I will study, as hard as I can, and then I will still forget things but in two and a half years’ time I will know them, because they will be practiced skills, is alien to me. 

I’m also not used to having to get through this in isolation. Finals was also, weirdly, social time in undergrad. We’d pack our coffees and our blankies and our laptops/phones/chargers, our folders and books and pens/highlighters/pencils and granola bars and Advil and occasionally wine in travel mugs or an entire fifth of Fireball, and we’d commit to the grim but hilarious reality that we would be attempting to learn “all of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Right” or “circuits” or “the politics of post-war Germany” in about 18 hours. Sometimes we’d sit in the hallway and talk on the phone or do Christmas shopping online or go to the bathroom to vape or cry or both, but we were always a social group. This unit of stalwart support, to which I would return after mandatory therapy to dispense my newfound wisdom on the masses while we looked out the windows and wished we were allowed to enjoy sunlight and fresh air.

I left my third final, ripped a shot of wine out of a flask with lilies etched on to one side, and realized that I was capable of feeling wonder and ease for the first time in months. I vowed to get drunk with my section and look at Christmas lights. I vowed to look at dogs and Christmas trees and buildings and breathe deeply the fresh air and literally not ever think about a promissory condition again in my entire fucking life.

Three down.

I learned a lot, and suddenly all the feelings, presumably bonked to the bottom of my being by all the rules of law ad also a concussion, have returned. Tomorrow, it’s slated to snow.

I am done. It’s time to feel awe again.

But also, no human person could understand the relationship between Rule 12(g) and Rule 12(h)(3). That was dreamt up by someone blitzed on peppermint schnapps or maybe tequila. All I can say, staring down the barrel of my second semester, is that I know it wasn’t me.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

the immortal life of the woman in news

The old addy is that anything you post on the internet (hi!) is there forever. Doubly-triply true with journalism, because that’s not even your property by the time it’s published. So it can always be found. And even years later, you can get feedback on it. For example, I apparently have a Muckrake profile that I did not make (I didn’t even know the site existed) that has collated my work over the years for, I don’t know, posterity’s sake?

The other old addy is that satisfied customers don’t leave reviews. Same is true of people who read the news. 

When I was 19 I got my first vile threat over an article. The article wasn’t even controversial, or about something dramatic or that tends to tick people off. It was about bartenders being pissed that the school was changing the rules on job postings for them without notice. Basic college journalism bread-and-butter milquetoast reportage. 

“Someone needs to give you something to be upset about.” - “rick141″

I deleted the email. Then I retrieved it from the trash. Then I created a folder for hate mail, and put it there. 

Later, when I was looped into covering the 2016 election on campus because we had a woman contender for president (in case you forgot) who lost (in case you forgot) and I went to a women’s college (in case you didn’t know), I got some even more gross emails and feedback in comments sections, all from pseudonymous people I assume are probably men in their 50s who look back on their time at the blue and white as the best in their lives and are trying to relive it by bulling me. I was still 19.

“So you voted with your pussy?”

“It’s locker room talk, you’re all too sensitive."

“Irresponsible to say he might have raped someone when her emails say.... Shilling for a woman....”

“You should be ashamed for reacting this way.”

“You wouldn’t know a good time if it hit you.”

It was sort of like talking to my conservative and very loud and opinionated uncle, but with more implicit threats that a good hard nonconsensual fuck would sort me out. What I remember most from that time was that the lightbulb in my room had burned out and my roommate and I weren’t sure we could get high enough to change it, and that my life was a constant melange of bad news and worse emails. Sure, some of these emails were tasks I had to do, which made them bad, but some of them were telling me I sucked. Implying the world would be better off without me, or if someone cut my tongue out like Philomela. If someone put me back in my place.

I also remember being confused, because none of what I published was, actually, what I felt. That was reserved for my adoring audience of Twitter followers. A lot of being a journalist is getting into this very particular mindset where you can be clinical, can parse through things without letting your feelings get in the way. Even when I was being petty to the provost, I didn’t think she was a bad person, I was just annoyed with her stonewalling me and then complaining about the coverage. I was a journalist, but I was also a person with thoughts and feelings that had whole ass no business being in my work. They formed the lens through which I do it, not the final product.

When I published my senior column, where I was effusively and incandescent joyful and also honest about how hard things had been, so glad to have the last word on my college experience, so sad to let it go, I got a few more parting shots:

“Stop complaining. You should be grateful.”

Stop complaining. 

That’s always the underlying feature of the feedback: I should be so grateful, so humble, so quiet and good, that I ignore things that are wrong. I ignored the emails instead. And never mind the fact that, for all but one of my bylines, I was reporting on the feelings and experiences of other people, not me. The senior column was the exception to the rule. But I am a whole entire person with desires and hopes and dreams and feelings and appetites who deserves the barest shred of dignity, i.e. not opening her inbox at 9am to see an email from “bostonlion” telling me to get fucked (roughly, non-consensually, ideally by someone who hates me personally and specifically). 

I kept the emails. I also never forgot them, this particular chill that went down my back at realizing how fucking hated I was for doing my job. That was when I learned, actually, that I could not be a journalist forever. I couldn’t cope with the threats you get in this our green and pleasant land for doing a job everyone takes for granted, i.e. keeping you the public informed. 

Facts, and I literally cannot emphasize this enough, do not care about your feelings. They also do not care about mine. The world is this way within the reach of my arm and there’s not a ton I can do about it except tell the truth.

And, as that third old addy goes, please don’t shoot (or threaten to shoot, rape, maim, or otherwise harm) the messenger.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

goodbye

The last time I talked to my grandmother, she was in a nursing home bed, and I was wearing a Halloween costume. She said I looked adorable, and dunked on my aunt for assuming that she didn’t know that I was in a costume, or why. I assured that I’d see her for Thanksgiving, and that I couldn’t wait to see her.

The Sunday before Thanksgiving I called my mom, who told me that it was likely my grandma would be dead within the week after getting sprung from the nursing home. She told me not to change my plans about when to come home, and assured me my grandma loved me. I kept thinking that it was time. An hour after that, my sister called, to let me know that Omi had died. I thought, It’s finally over. I thought, I can’t believe I still have to submit this stupid fucking project. And I thought, I will never see my grandma again. 

When I was two and a half I broke my leg jumping off of something at the park right after my mom explicitly told me not to. Shortly thereafter, my parents went to Vienna and dropped my sister and I off with my grandparents and cousins. We hung out in the basement, playing with a giant stuffed mouse and on the computer (a Mac, before Macs were so ubiquitous), and hiding in the crawlspaces. Every so often Michaela and our cousins and I would run back up to their sitting room to tell them our stories, and even as I dragged my dumb little cast around with me, I remember feeling so very loved. It’s one of my earliest memories, coming up from the basement following my family in my red plaid nightgown with my pink and purple cast.

That house has always felt like home. The hammock, the crab apple tree in the backyard, the wash line we turned into a badminton net. Exploring our parents’ old rooms upstairs, or Omi’s closet, or the makeup in the bathroom. Playing pool in the basement, and drinking wine on Christmas while playing board games. It has always felt like home.

Today, we buried my grandmother. During the service the priest mispronounced my sister’s name, so amidst the tears my cousins and I ended up hysterically laughing. My grandma also always, always mispronounced Michaela’s name, calling her Michaeler because of her accent. We stood in the freezing November air to drop roses on her casket, at which point it sunk in that I will never see her again.

It sunk in that I will never go to that house just to go there. That I will never get a kiss on the cheek from her. That I will never again hear her say my name or tell me she’s proud of me, or loves me. 

I found a picture from the time of the broken leg. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m sitting on the living room floor with Omi, Candyland between us, and my little face is scrunched in concentration while I seemingly attempt to explain the ins and outs of the game to her. Omi wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type because she didn’t know how to be, yet there she was, on the floor with her toddler granddaughter on Christmas Eve. 

The day after she died, I called my mom. I skipped torts to work on that memo, and with a pumpkin cake in the oven I called home. “Even at the end you were the one she prayed for. She just wanted you to be happy, and she was so worried you weren’t. Never doubt how much she loved you.”

Hearing my mom say that made me burst into tears: That my grandma knew, saw, and understood. That she wanted me to be happy. That she loved me so much.

Omi, I have always loved you. Even when you bought me training bras and mortified me, even when you would blast Fox News in the sitting room, even though your cooking sucked. I have always loved you.

And I hope you know that. I hope you know how much we loved you. You were the heart of the family and we are less without you.

I love you, I love you, I love you. And I hope if I say it enough times, you’ll still hear it, and you’ll still know.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

twiqbal, plausibility, and lying to your psychiatrist

The Twombly/Iqbal standard sucks, and you can tell the Supreme Court I said that. It requires “plausibility,” a word somewhere between “possibility” and “probability” (except not in the dictionary, where it comes first—see, confusing!), and it is defined exactly not at all in either opinion. All it is is Justice Blackmun’s classic “I know it when I see it” obscenity opinion, applied how open the courthouse doors should be.

So what do you do? According to my professor, you include a bunch of facts to support your legal contentions. Throw in everything you possibly can to make your case, which is your job, after all, you nascent little lawyer, you! 

I decided I should practice this the only way I know how to: Lying to my psychiatrist about “how I am doing” during a telehealth appointment in my law school’s cafeteria.

First, a disclaimer: I only have these appointments every six months to extract money from my wallet and keep me ever so slightly doped on escitalopram, an antidepressant that works well in keeping me from, say, opening my wrists in a warm bath or jumping to an early graduation. It’s not a touchy-feely relationship like the kind I famously had with my therapist, Marisa, culminating in me getting out of line waiting to process in to my own college graduation so I could give her a big hug and thank her for making sure I got to that point. It’s not the relationship I had with my dean/advisor/mentor/confidante Natalie, who continues her duty of care for me as a friend even though she is no longer in charge of me and technically, according to tort law, doesn’t owe me anything.

The point is, a psychiatry appointment is medicine, not therapy. It’s maintenance, not betterment. And I don’t like it very much.

“Are you compliant with the medication?”

“Yup.”

“How are things?”

“Fine! Settling in well! It’s a little stressful and overwhelming but I’m meeting a lot of great people and really regulating myself well and taking care of myself and I love my classes and it’s all good!”

“Where should I sent the prescription?”

If you’ve known me for the past eight weeks, you’d look at that and notice that while it’s certainly possible, something about it feels....off. You, as judge, would throw the complaint back and say it’s implausible given claims of “I don’t think I remember how to take care of myself?” and “This is Soylent, it will keep me from starving to death,” and “I haven’t had fun and I’m sad and it’s always so fucking cold here?” How can you be fine, but also not fine?

Well, first of all, you can be. I’m not going to paint with the splatter of my feelings to a professor (unless you’re really unlucky, in which case, sorry!), but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like garbage fire all the time. But I didn’t want my doctor to worry. I didn’t want my doctor to change anything. I didn’t want to rehash the concussion again, or get into the fact that I will never be mentally healthy the way other people are, or talk about the fact that for the last two years everything, and I mean everything, has been slowly falling apart around me.

After my appointment I was walking to the T, and it occurred to me that I will never be better than I am. Which does not mean I am great, or good. Just that, realistically, this is the best I can hope to be. The best I can hope is that I have enough space between feeling and action to keep me safe, that my powers of rationality continue forcing me to do boring life maintenance work even when I do it wrong or skip parts of it or really half-ass it. And if this is the best I can hope for—what’s there to talk about, really? It’s the same as always. I agonize. I make myself suffer. I feel too much of everything or not enough of anything. A tentative equilibrium is eventually reached again, and while it lasts I enjoy feeling stable. When I feel unstable I throw my cries for help like bottles in the ocean. Help often manages to come, even if it’s just a friend to say “pull yourself together!”

That’s plausible. “Plausible” is that I have an eating disorder (only I’m not very good at having an eating disorder) because it’s something I can control in a world of things so totally beyond my control, watching everything just fall apart. “Plausible” is that I can do the work or I can take care of myself but I can’t do both. “Plausible” is that I will continue muddling through anyway because it’s the only thing I know how to do.

It’s plausible that I will, at some point soon, drag myself somewhere on campus and break down. It’s plausible that I will study for my finals and get too drunk at the Halloween party and finally buy legal weed, and it’s plausible that I’ll stop eating for a few days until my stomach aches in a way that is body-wracking. It’s plausible I’ll keep making jokes. These are all plausible facts which support my contention: I don’t know if I’m okay. I don’t know if I’ve ever been okay. I know that I usually have to scare myself before I realize how bad things are. I haven’t scared myself, yet, somehow.

There will be counter-facts, telling me I’m well-made-up and incandescent and sharp and funny and seem to know what’s going on. The presence of the facts I have doesn’t make those less true, it just adds color, and anyway this isn’t a fucking case. We can both be right. 

Sometimes I’m scared people won’t believe me. That it’s only possible, not plausible, that I can feel like this, and then the doors are shut on something I cannot name but think I need.

I’m okay. I’m not okay. I can do this. I can’t do this.

I just want someone to rule it, order it, make it so: Yes you are. Yes you can. 

[ainsleyandherproblems]

after the fall

I fell down a flight of stairs six weeks ago. I remember feeling my feet fall out from under me as I fainted, grabbing for the bannister and realizing I’d missed it, and then I was out cold on the floor but also still on the stairs, head against linoleum. I could hear my family running, panicking to figure out what had happened, as I blinked open my eyes to see if I could still see. I remember being in pain. I remember my mom trying to get me up. I don’t remember anything after that, until my mom lifted my shirt to apply Neosporin and gauze to my back, which had three bleeding divots on my ribs from the impact. At that point, somehow, I’d made it to the couch, and was handed Advil PM, and put to bed like an infant.

I passed out. I woke up, and I moved to Boston. Two days later, I started law school, still in unbelievable physical pain but trying not to show it. For fun I also ate shit on campus my first day and skinned my knee and got to walk home with blood running down my calf :)

It turned out that I had bruises up the right side of my back and hip, three gouges carved into the flesh corresponding to three of my ribs that had taken a lot of the impact, a deep bone bruise on my left heel, and a ding on my right elbow that I always managed to catch. It also turned out I had a bump on the back of my head, just to the right.

By the end of my third week I knew that something wasn’t right. I’d had all the classic concussion symptoms the morning after—headaches, nausea, crying for no fucking reason except also I was moving to a whole new city to do a whole new thing, being unbearably sleepy. Those had gone away and I thought, like an absolute idiot, fuck yeah, brain healed, let’s get learning! But I couldn’t...focus. Maintain a train of thought. My ideas felt gauzy, somehow ungraspable. I struggled to articulate myself. When I embarrassed the hell out of myself in class, at one point explaining OUT LOUD that I’d gotten the basic facts confused and saying, “I don’t think I’m doing a very good job, am I?” on a question I VOLUNTARILY ANSWERED, I panicked. Christ on a cross trainer, I was prone to leaps of logic that sometimes didn’t land but I was also a journalist by training. My job was literally to pick up on minute facts and not fucking lose sight of them!

So I did what any reasonable, normal, 24-year-old woman would do: I went to office hours to apologize. I had a concussion, I explained, and I thought it was getting better but maybe it wasn’t and ANYWAY that was why I could not focus on the basic fact pattern and I promise I’m doing the reading and paying attention and I actually really like this class! My professor looked at me, with that look that only moms can give to idiots, and said, I think you should see a doctor.

I did. And I was diagnosed with a “severe concussion with ocular dysfunction:” My eyes weren’t tracking visual stimulus, which is of course all of my stimulus, correctly, and my brain was overcompensating as a result. I wish it could have overcompensated in literally any other aspect of my life, but them’s the breaks. That’s the ocular part. The concussion part was obviously that I slammed my head against the floor and had suffered a brain injury as a result.

As a result, I spent six weeks on a strict no-fun regiment but able to do exactly 100% of my schoolwork (in case anyone’s curious, it’s why I’m three weeks ahead in the reading for all of my classes). I had to flicker my eyes back and forth quickly between targets (post-it notes with swear words on them) stuck to my wall so that I could retrain my eyes to track each other. I did all of that, of course, because I am a natural-born rule-follower, and got an A+ in concussion recovery.

Still, sometimes I worry if my brain is permanently broken. Will I ever be who I was, or is this, as a friend suggested, a real Sliding Doors situation. I worry that somewhere deep in my brain something got bonked and changed who I am. And it’s hard to figure out what’s the brain injury, and what’s just...me. Am I like this because I’m like this, unfortunately, or is it because I suffered a traumatic brain injury? In a time of great personal upheaval (moving, going back to school, quitting my job, paying rent, commuting, etc and so on) it’s impossible to know. The only thing I could tell was that for a year I was a superlative reader of judicial opinions at my job that paid me to read them, and then suddenly I couldn’t look at a screen and keep track of fundamental fact patterns and I didn’t feel like myself—things I knew I had once liked were foreign to me, even trivial things, and everything was so much more effort. 

I joked about it (because it was kind of hilarious if you really think about it) but it was also, fundamentally, terrifying. It’s terrifying to think that my self is made up of electrical impulses fired by neurons that can just call it quits if they get hit too hard. It’s terrifying to think about what could have happened, but didn’t. How life is made of stupid accidents and sometimes those accidents are just us getting remarkably fucking lucky. 

Arthur Miller wrote my favorite play, which happens to be titled “After the Fall,” an experience I have recently lived through. Obviously he was writing allegorically about the fall from grace and I was living through falling down the stairs, but let me have my extended metaphors, please. The play ends with Maggie dying, after Maggie asks Quentin how she is supposed to go on. “You have the will,” he replies. She asks what happens if she doesn’t. “You have faith.” But if you don’t have faith? You find the will. Real snake-eating-its-tail, for sure, but I read it and never forgot it. Unlike Maggie, my plan is not to take a fatal overdose of barbiturates. It’s actually to muster the faith and willpower to....trust that I am still me. That I am still capable of the things I used to be capable of. That I didn’t break in some unseen, irreparable way. Because if it turns out I’m not, I don’t know what I’ll do. Possibly the aforementioned overdose.

Five days into law school, laying on an air mattress alone in a new city doing 100 pages of contracts reading, I was convinced I was dying. I was convinced my brain was bleeding, because for 18 hours it had pulsed with pain that no amount of Advil could solve. Eventually I fell asleep. Eventually the pulsing stopped, and that was yet another night in a very long 24 years that I have successfully lived through.

(I later told my legal writing professor I didn’t go to the hospital that night partly because I thought it would be weird to cold email my professors that I’d be missing class due to being in the ER, to which he replied, “that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”)

Which feels like a real cadit quaestio ipso facto deal. I am still me, still doing fundamental me things. And after making the world’s worst first impression with a professor by announcing I had a brain injury, I went to office hours to celebrate no longer being concussed and my abiding love of the First Amendment. I am slowly re-learning the things that crack me up, and finding them funny. The frets on my ukulele make sense again. I am coming back to myself, to my own head.

The next challenge will be, of course, getting my feet under me so I never fall down the stairs again.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

the conflict of unequal war

My earliest memories of news are as follows: I’m fairly sure that on September 11th, 2001, my sister stapled her finger by accident while playing with the stapler, so as a result we were in a rush to get to preschool at 8 o’clock or whenever it started, and upon telling that story I was invited to say the Pledge of Allegiance. Lessons in French and colors and numbers and letters and the singing of “You’re A Grand Old Flag” were aborted shortly thereafter. My parents mostly didn’t let us watch on television, but by evening it was this engrossing, unavoidable thing: Planes crashing into buildings, smoke and screaming, the specter of ash-covered people stunned on sidewalks, the desperate fear and anguish of those falling from skyscrapers, anguish from the people who said the news on CBS. I asked my mom what happened.

“Some bad men knocked some buildings down,” she said, but when we drove over the Throggs Neck Bridge a few months later and the skyline had an unhealed wound, I know it hurt them. 

It wasn’t until years later that I was finally able to find, for myself, the pictures of that day, the headlines, the reportage, to be transported back to being a confused and scared four-and-a-half year old who watched the world change but didn’t understand. My knowledge of Manhattan for many years included a gaping wound right in its heart.

The next two fall out of order: I remember watching the execution of Saddam Hussein, when it was aired on the evening news the day it happened. I was maybe seven or eight, and I remember vividly the graininess of the footage, the yellow cast to it, how I watched a man die—a horrible man, a dictator, for sure even if there never were WMDs—and didn’t really understand. And I remember the stupid goddamn fucking “Mission Accomplished” banner on the back of a warship, which my parents used to reassure me that, yes, the mission had been accomplished.

Having lived through this 20-year forever war in Afghanistan, I can’t tell you I remember most of it because, well, it stopped feeling like news. It was always, relentlessly, happening, and because it was the “War on Terror,” there wasn’t a front line per se, but incendiary weapons and mines and snipers and drones, and people died. But there weren’t battles, not the same as the ones I learned about in school, and so for 20 years it was the background noise to another ordinary life, another perhaps ordinary time, where other things happened like a market crash, a series of presidential elections, climate change and COVID and Brexit and the Greek bond crisis, famine in Yemen and ciivl war in Syria, the near collapse of the American experiment, a revolution in Egypt, all things I paid attention to because they were discrete events. The war in Afghanistan, all those “forever wars on Terror,” were not discrete events.

Until we decided they were. Until we left. 

Today, the Afghan government fell, and the state will soon be re-designated as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan under Taliban rule. As it was, 20 years ago, before coups and wars changed the political landscape and ushered in instability, yes, but also hope. We offered change and hope to a nation without the promise or possibility of its longevity once we left, without putting the necessary social and political infrastructure in place to preserve it, or the goddamn basic rooting out of a terrorist group (which, correct me if I’m wrong, but I think was the point of the “War on Terror?”), and then we left. As if to atone for my 20-year sin of not caring (though to be fair, I couldn’t really have been expected to for the first half of those two decades), I am now diving into this. Journalists under threat, civilians who worked for us, with us, in agony trying to get out on the promise of visas that the State Department, in unbelievably typical fashion (I think USCSIS exists to rubber-stamp applications before throwing them in an industrial shredder, for all the good it seems to do), has failed to prepare or plan for.

And me? Sitting here, with no fear of terrorism coming through my city gates and undoing a fragile hope and progress, me who remembers the decision to go to war in the Middle East but took longer to learn that Iraq and Afghanistan were ostensibly separate geopolitical concerns because, to my mind, they happened at the same time because of 9/11? Me, a kid who remembers the gaping, gashing wound of the skyline, who visited the memorial and found the name of the family friend who died and was never buried, on a freezing December day while construction was ongoing?

I’m so, so fucking angry.

I’m so fucking angry that for years I was fed lines and lies about terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction, and Muslims, and now I am watching these human people, with lives and hopes and jobs and aspirations, who want the same things for their lives I do, and the same things for their children my parents want, watching that disappear in a regime change (which follows other regime changes, of course) they didn’t ask for and couldn’t stop. I’m so fucking angry about the money my government spent on this war, the senseless bloodshed, how no one wanted to say “this will end like Vietnam, which is to say, badly for all,” how we then sanitized George W. Bush and turned him into a puppy-painting grandpa living in Texas when he signed off on all of this under an expansive bill that gave an absolute fucking chucklehead way too much power and allowed him, and by extension us as a nation, to become war criminals.

You hear about the last planes out of Saigon at the end of another disastrous war, Vietnam. People clinging to choppers like desperate lifelines. You maybe watch the Hey Arnold episode (if you’re me, and a child of the late 90s) where Mr. Huang at last meets his daughter after putting her on the last flight out of Vietnam and staying behind. You see the pictures, the archival newsreels. 

And today you look at any news station and see, amidst the normal news of COVID and climate change and Carli Lloyd announcing her retirement from professional soccer, in Clarissa Ward’s measured, steady voice, that there are people clinging to the wheels of U.S. Air Force planes, clinging to the fuselage, and falling when the plane tips sharply up and skywards. Ahmed Ali tweeted this: “Please understand, no one latches themselves to a plane knowing they will fall to their deaths unless the sky is safer than the land.”

I think of women and girls, reporters, U.S. allies, the people who helped us fight a war that didn’t end until we decided to pull the plug and call it quits, hiding, clinging to airplanes, desperate to get out.

When I was 17, I wanted more than anything to be a war correspondent. It was the flavor of journalism where I believed I could do the most good, have the most impact—and even in the year 2015, it didn’t seem there was a particular shortage of war and conflict. There was, after all, the endless roiling turmoil of the Middle East that, after a couple of years and a “Mission Accomplished,” we all but forgot about until ISIS—then ISIL, then the Islamic State, then Daesh—came back on the scene. But then other scenes of women driving for the first time, girls enrolling in universities—these are people, lives, stories, the mundanity of life amidst the backdrop of unending war.

Those were stories I really thought I should tell. The only ones that seemed to matter. 

I am not cut out for that sort of reporting, of course, in the same way I never could have been cut out for covering Vietnam. For a journalist, I am remarkably conflict-averse, and yet even within my own land I have seen far too much of it lately. The Capitol insurrection we all swore could never happen here. Sometimes I read appellate opinions on child abuse and pornography, denials of asylum applications, rape and Title IX, and I have to parse through all the legal writing to remind myself that behind every case is a person. That, when all you read is the formatted document, it’s hard to remember that these are real human lives.

As I watch the news, read about the blame game over whose fault the pullout in Afghanistan is, I find myself trying to step back from policy and remember: These are people in pain, people who are scared, who are wondering where the help will come from. It’s the same blinding sense of empathy and pain I get when I see pictures from 9/11 and its aftermath, people covered in ash, sobbing, helping, running, falling. Fear and desperation, the sense that things have broken in ways we do not know, right now, how to fix.

So what will we do? Who will we be, now that we have no choice but to fix the problem we have created or let it become another in a string of great moral stains?

In the Time Magazine piece published just after September 11, 2001, it asks the question: “Do we now panic, or will we be brave?” It reminds us of the scene: “Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror, and fear. The first plane is just to get our attention. Then, once we are transfixed, the second plane comes and repeats the theme until the blinding coda of smoke and debris crumbles on top of the rescue workers who have gone in to try to save anyone who survived the opening movements. And we watch, speechless, as the sirens, like some awful choir, hour after hour let you know that it is not over yet, wait, there’s more.”

Now, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of that day, having watched the construction of the Freedom Tower and run my fingers over Thomas Farrelly’s name on the memorial pools at Ground Zero, the man from church who was ready with hugs for my sister and I, whose wife helped teach me Catholicism, who always asked if we wanted to bring up the bread and wine during mass, I find myself asking the same questions oriented for the very people I was told we needed to destroy. I find myself wondering who we will be, and who we will help them, these people and lives in a foreign land, become, after a 20-year failure.

I remember my eyes affixed from a doorway, holding my Blanky, watching the terrible repetition of planes crashing into buildings, desperate to see and unable to understand. The planes were used as weapons on that beautiful cloudless day when the world changed. Now they are lifelines, and unfulfilled promises.

Who gets to get on the planes?

Clarissa Ward is, right now, in a hijab and abaya walking up to members of the Taliban to ask about women’s rights in the new-old Afghanistan. She has more courage than I can fathom; this is a regime that would not necessarily hesitate to execute a foreign journalist live on her own program for the shock and awe. But also brave are the women and girls walking to school, to work, today, and the men who continue to encourage progress in lieu of regression. Brave is everyone who worked against the Taliban in the hope of obliterating terrorism. The failure is surely not theirs. 

Now, do we panic? Or will we be brave? Will we be willing to change who we are, to welcome those who we displaced, relied on, whose lives we helped make maybe a bit better? Or do we panic? Do we look at the planes and feel stuck? Or do we see potential: This is what we can do now.

I was four and a half years old on 9/11, the day the world changed and my sister stuck her finger in a stapler before preschool. I have grown up with this war, this forever fact. Maybe it means my childhood is ending, because the war is “ending,” too.

And now I, as we, must decide who we will be. 

I hope we take the refugees. I hope we give them hope, and lives, and never forget that all we did was make sure Raytheon made bank off the backs of American soldiers and the lives of ordinary Afghans, off the memory of ordinary people who lost their lives on a day that changed the world, off the memory of people who rose to the occasion at home and abroad to become heroes. Because at the end of the day, I am confident we all want the same things: To wake up every day healthy and safe, and go about our business of work and cooking and cleaning and learning, of laughing and talking and storytelling, and go back to sleep healthy and safe. To have lives full of possibility and hope. 

Ultimately I know that there is so much I do not know, about geopolitics, about terrorism, about this war that was the background for so much of my life or any war at all. But I know that we must make this better, as much as we can, clean up the mess we failed to stop and certainly helped cause. That is the point of us, after all, this nation of liberty and lamps lifted beside golden doors and hope and fragile progress. What we could not impose and could not force in their lands, we owe to them within our own.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

soccer strokes

My grandmother—my Omi, the German familiar for the term—has never told a story where, upon hearing it, any of the listeners thought it was 100% true. 

Oh, she and her cousin (who was braver and more curious, good detail and world-building) found an injured American parachuter in rural Germany during the Second World War and surreptitiously brought him food, until one day he was just gone? Possible, but also sounds suspiciously like a film plot! 

Or, more banally, stories about my mom and her two older sisters growing up, where they would look over her shoulder and go “that’s not true,” even when the corrected detail didn’t make them look better to us kids. Things like, “When your mommy was little, she used to absolutely love this doll called Chatty Cathy,” and then my mom over the shoulder, “I never liked dolls,” no sound, all big exaggerated mouth movements. 

Indeed, the only story, as far as I know, that my Omi has told correctly consistently and unerringly is about me—specifically, a soccer game she went to when I was in the peewee leagues, running my little heart out.....to score a goal.....in my team’s goal.....after the whistle had blown to end the quarter. Clearly, my prowess on the pitch? Natural and unmatchable. 

The thing about Omi’s stories is that they’re entertaining, or at least riveting, when they aren’t about the tumors of someone I’ve never met: How her village in Germany, where she was born in 1935, was about 40 kilometers away from a facility which manufactured bombs for the Nazis, so during the war she would hear Allied forces bombing at night. How her father, a chemist, was told to flee to a farm to avoid the Soviets after the war, because his work was used for the manufacture of bombs (including an ill-devised idea for saltwater bombs), and they would be coming for him as complicit. How she came to America to learn English and stayed with relatives who happened to be friends with Opi’s family, and how the fell in love and to marry without him ever meeting her family because she knew that if she went home to Uslar, they would never let her go back to the States.

I find fascinating a woman who once—according to her own stories, anyway—was forced to eat her pet chicken during the war, when times were tough, but who now has a shoe collection my uncle jibed recently during a clean-out of random spaces around her very large and well-appointed home would rival that of Imelda Marcos. She voted for Trump once, but when you listen to her speak about her past, there is this profound yet veiled rage against Hitler and Nazism, not necessarily on moral grounds but simply because of how much her family suffered because of him and his ideas, despite being Lutherans with the whole blonde-hair-blue-eyes deal that I inherited (minus the religion). 

From her stories, I get this glimpse of a woman who lived her life without necessarily seeing the interiority of it, maybe because as a child she lacked the luxury, what with the bombs and threats of the gulag, and because for ten years she was an only child perceived by all. Who needs to see themselves, when everyone who matters sees you, and only you? As an adult woman, one gets the sense that she understands her own lacking: When Opi was hospitalized, she refused to act on what to do about future treatment until my dad gave her his thoughts, because he’s an engineer and would know these things. He didn’t, but her wariness about her instincts and intelligence in these areas is something I have seen. Which is not, of course, to say she is incapable—as a housewife in the golden age of “men make the money and women manage the home,” she helped turn her husband’s auto repair store into a very successful enterprise for them.

Did I bury the lede? I come from “new” money on one side and blue-collar farmers and handymen and waitress-veterans on the other. I also come from people with fucky blood and a propensity for cancer. 

Once, my grandparents paid for us to go to Disney for three days—because they were at their condo in Florida and wanted an excuse to see us. I still have loans, my family still has to look at the budget to figure out if certain things are attainable, and according to the government my “estimated family contribution” for law school, including me as an income-earner, is exactly zero dollars. I don’t understand the finer things, is my point: I wear the same pairs of jeans until I literally wear them out, and the perfume I wear is the one I smelled in Paris and discovered was very botanical and also not expensive. She offers me half-gone bottles of Chanel, too-big cashmere I just know I’d spill coffee on by accident, and I accept these things because they are things she realized over lunch at her home I needed to have, and then they sit and collect dust and moth holes in my room.

For a long time, my grandma didn’t understand me, and I didn’t understand her.

But now, I think I do. At least, better than I used to. 

In her I see a woman who, well, hopes. Who loves and doesn’t know how to show it except sometimes for checks or a $50 slipped quietly into your hand, which makes you say, Omi, you don’t have to pay me for coming to see you, I like spending time here! Which even now is true, because there’s a pool table in the basement and an assortment of cheese my mom won’t buy, so even when it’s boring, I have activities. If all else fails, I’ll pour myself a few cups of coffee so I can go pee every 45 minutes. Her home has such a specific smell, a melange of, I assume, perfume and home cleaners and laundry detergents and her, and it always smells safe. It smells like running around the basement playing hide-and-seek with my cousins and thinking nothing bad could happen, or playing board games in the breakfast nook and laughing when Michaela spilled chocolate milk on the rug. 

I will never understand my grandma as much as I wish—because even after my paternal grandma, my Grammy, a Navy WAVE and lifelong Catholic Democrat who used to make legendary Saturday dinners I was too young to appreciate, died when I was 11 and I spent time trying to think of what I wish I would want to know, I still don’t. What, Omi, would I want to know? 

You raised three addicts, all of whom got better and two of whom have kids—my cousins and I. You are from a tiny village in Germany, and love your sister, whom I have met, but don’t talk much to your brother, whom I haven’t. You can’t cook, but you put together a mean cheese platter. Your health has always been bad. These are things I know.

What, Omi, did you want to be when you were 10 years old? Why the gap between marriage at 22 and a first child at 25? What do you miss most about Germany? Did you study at college or the equivalent back in the day? What was your favorite subject? What do you most wish your children had done? What do you want me to do? What is the piece of advice, the wisdom, you would tell me, if you only had five minutes? 

Once, when I was two-ish, I cracked my shin jumping off of something in the park, mere seconds after my mom told me it was the last time. I was in a cast for a while, and in the interim was staying with Michaela and my cousins overnight at Omi and Opi’s. I remember being too big to be carried by Dani, the oldest, and so certainly by Zach or Tyler, but we kept running from the basement to their sitting room to exuberantly tell them things, show them things. The newspaper with a story about a giant hamster taking over the city that we were going to copy on Opi’s copier and freely distribute (so I may have gotten my journalism start earlier than we thought). I remember dragging my little cast behind me to catch up, on the parquet flooring and fancy oriental rugs. And I remember feeling so loved, so happy, so excited, that a big bulky pink-and-purple cast couldn’t stop me from telling Omi and Opi all my stories and facts.  

When I was 12, Omi had a massive stroke, which left her with aphasia—words no longer came. This was a woman who had always mixed up her kids and grandkids (you really do get used to responding to the wrong name, and figuring out if you are the intended subject or not, and answering accordingly), whose native language was not English, but who managed to mostly get the words back.

When I was 24—today, in fact—my grandma had a massive stroke. My aunt watched half of her face droop while on the phone with 911. Miraculously, she is still alive, and miraculously, she still has words.

There are so many stories—unbelievable, fantastical, not-even-true stories—I haven’t heard. 

A few weeks ago I stayed home from a visit to read a book and relax after a tough week of work. I could not tell you what book I read. But if I get to hear another of Omi’s stories, in her voice, sitting in her slightly-fussy house but being told I can get as chilled out as I want with my feet on the couch, with that ambient smell? 

I would never forget it.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

“you’ve always got something to say”

“No, thank you! Fuck off, thank you! Fuck off! Get me some ketamine, I want to separate my mind from my body!” 

…Is the kind of thing I would have tweeted in high school, a very memetic quote from The Thick of It where Nicola Murray MP is having the shittiest of shitty days. I recently had one of those, myself, and not only did I tweet the picture, I instagrammed it, because it’s also just so unimpeachably funny. In high school, I also had a lot of those days, and once tweeted a quote from Monsters Inc.:

“We could tunnel out, using mainly spoons.” I think I may have also tweeted about jumping off the catwalk, because I really didn’t want my last summer of infinite freedom to end, and was also clinically depressed. Actually, I remember that joke: “If you see ambulances, no worries, just threw myself off the catwalk to get out of this place.”

Which isn’t even about being suicidal! It’s about not wanting to go to school, a wildly different thing!

I didn’t get in trouble, per se, in the sense that I didn’t get “expelled” or “suspended,” but I did get in that far more insidious type of trouble: Meeting with school psychiatrists and guidance counselors, phone calls home, being forced to take print-outs of my “joke” (scare quotes theirs; I still think it was fucking funny!) to my actual therapist, the result of which was me feeling not so much “supported” as “shamed.” It may not have been an official demerit on my permanent record, a thing I think is actually a myth invented to frighten naughty teenagers into showing up to all their classes, but it certainly didn’t feel like someone was holding my hand through this difficult time called “the beginning of senior year.”

No, it actually just felt like everyone was exhausted and irritated with me, wished I would shut the fuck up, and somehow wanted me to apologize. Which I did, to shut them up, in true girlboss gatekeep gaslight style before that was a thing. 

But imagine feeling shame because you artlessly attempted to express the depth of how you feel, which was just endless miles of shit. Imagine a teacher just ignoring you for a month over something (“voglio mi uciso,” which roughly means “I would like to kill myself,” very fucking polite) you erased off a worksheet you didn’t know she’d be collecting. (I hear she’s an administrator at another school now, so, whatever).

Schools have an interest in regulating certain student speech. We know that, because that’s why you can protest the war but not advocate for taking fat rips off an apple bong in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ on the grounds of your public school. It’s why your Snapchat about bullying might get you suspended, but your Snapchat about how much you really just fucking hate trigonometry shouldn’t. But students also have an interest in free expression, testing out the muddy waters of who they are, what they believe, what they want to say—and for a public school to attempt to inhibit that is where madness lies. 

In college—and I want to private school, fancy, expensive, I look forward to paying off the piece of paper above my bed for the next 30 years—my censorship was self-imposed to maintain the guise of impartiality as a journalist. I didn’t tweet much about the school, other than milquetoast shit—forgetting my registration times, enthusing about a dining hall option (or lamenting when the online menus got it wrong and there was no action station stir fry to be had in this our green and pleasant land), excitement over professors. But I chose that, because I wanted to maintain a certain distance—I was worried about the reflection on my professionalism, not any punishment that could be meted out. 

It turns out that, when you’re not afraid of getting in trouble for your speech, you can really test it out. Test out how you express your malaise and pain, your righteous fury, your confusion, your politics and morals, your preferences on pop culture. Swear if you’d like, and learn to do it well. Sometimes you put things out there and, on feedback or reflection, think, Fuck me, I wish I had said that better, or not at all. You learn, and in learning, grow. 

I sent an email yesterday in which I’d been very upset about a rejection to something I really, really wanted, and said, “I feel like I should have done more during the pandemic but I was trying not to fall into an eating disorder or deep despair over the state of everything and get a job, I was very busy!” Should have been a real record-scratch, freeze-frame, parents-getting-called situation. But I’m 24, and I’m allowed to struggle and scrabble and tell people things just absolutely fucking suck sometimes for me, even amidst a miasma of much bigger, worse problems for other people.

That’s not a lesson I ever learned in high school, so it’s no wonder, of course, that it took all my courage and strength to beg for help from people freely offering it, why I don’t know how to communicate: I’m still scared I will get in trouble. 

So to the cheerleader: You got something better than a spot on the squad, because you got a Supreme Court win that just moved the needle for other students. The wisdom is that sounding off publicly sometimes isn’t a good move, but learning to manage your feelings, modulate before you speak, that’ll come. 

As Malcolm Tucker told Nicola Murray on his shittiest of shitty days, “Speak, I fucking ask you, speak, you’ve always got something to say! Open sesame!”

We’ve all got something to say, after all, even when the challenge is finding the right words to say it. Even when we use the wrong words to say something true, or honest, or annoying, or painful, or even hurtful. 

So I guess my point is, my alma mater owes me an apology—Justice Breyer said so.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

“major in unafraid”

So the college I went to—have I mentioned it’s a historically women’s college affiliated with an Ivy League university in the City of New York?—has this tagline it uses in promotional materials. People there “major in unafraid,” which is in fact neither an academic discipline nor a thing I really managed to achieve, despite walking away from campus after four years with a major and a minor and a journalism award. 

Can’t blame the white and blue for that, because the problem is, the more you know, the easier it is to be afraid. For example, I spent part of my life afraid that no one would want to fuck me, but now I am afraid of not using two types of birth control to ward off unwanted medical conditions. I used to not be afraid of everyone and their opinions of me, but the internet has made me very aware that if I become a public figure I will never know a moment’s peace.

Courage, they say (and I am unclear on who “they” are) is being afraid of something and doing it anyway. Never in my life have I actually done this; I do things I don’t want to do, sure, but those are always low-level, begrudging things. I envy the fucking hell out of people who are legitimately courageous, who stare down their fears. If I’m afraid of something, my preference is to lock it somewhere very far away from me, so I don’t have to deal with it. As you might imagine, this proclivity of mine will someday be untenable, and will someday make a therapist a lot of money. 

My mom is often the person who pushes me to do things I don’t want to do but which end up being good for me. In fact, my entire journalism career is, in a roundabout way, her fault: When I was starting sixth grade, she told me about newspaper club, a thing helmed by two teachers who became mentors and, I think fondly, fast friends, who taught me the value of a punchy hed and would periodically critique the songs on my iPod. I like to think that now they’d be stoked about my latest heds (”Mich. Law Inoculates Bizzes Against COVID Claims” being one such stellar line) and proud of my evolution, because while I wrote a lot of email write-ups I did do some mud-digging investigating. They pushed me fall in love with journalism when I was young and dumb and didn’t know that “checking your sources” was, for example, a thing.

My first piece was about the fact that the district was doing away with German because the teacher was retiring, and if I was writing that now it would read “NPT Axes German Classes Without Warning After Retirement,” but at the time I wrote some dumb hed and used a third-party quote and got my ass roundly chewed for it, which was fair, since I’d done shoddy journalism. I pulled something similar again (we wanted an ex-journalist to run the school paper, and I don’t think that was wrong, but the teacher in charge of the club disagreed), but mostly learned my lesson.

Along the way, I was doing something that terrified me—interrogating the truth! digging up the facts!—without thinking about it. I just did the work because it was fun, and important, and I liked showing up every Wednesday and being told “hey, write your story, Scoop Inkblot!” which was one of the pen names I had to use if I had too many stories in one issue. It was fun! And I loved it!

The problem is, as is always the case, the reality is not a correct approximation of your childhood. For example, play cars for children and dress-up clothes slap way more than putting actual gas in an actual car (after agonizing about how to sidle up to the pump) and putting on slacks and a blouse for work. I wish I could wear a tiara and use my feet to make the car go, but unfortunately I have grown up, and among many things that I have accrued in that time period—tits, a sense of shame, journalistic integrity, knowledge about three legal topics, a college degree—came fear and shame. 

I was always a perfectionist, sure—but before I knew that my grades mattered,  I was a perfectionist for me. I think back on my years as a soccer player, a sport in which I participated because as a native Long Islander it is my birthright to do so, and at which I was always mediocre with a couple of flash-in-the-pan moments of athletic prowess thrown in to keep it interesting. I was bad at soccer—I can count on one hand the goals I scored over nine years, but not so on the shots scored on me as goalkeeper. But I kept going back, kept showing up to practices and getting a little faster and a little more agile every year, knowing I would do a shit job but still doing it because—why? I was expected to? I kind of like it?

As an avid fan of the U.S. Women’s National Team now, I love it because I understand it and because there was a time where I would have wished I was on the squad, teeing up Megan Rapinoe’s astonishing set pieces for the World Cup-winning goal.

But the point is twofold: I understand offsides rules, okay, and more importantly, there was a time in my life where I did things even if I failed or wasn’t great or was just mediocre. And I had flashes of fun in the trying (and would have had more, had I liked being athletic more). And there’s value in that, which I know because now I will restart games of solitaire if it doesn’t look like I can win, which is a waste of time and sanity. When did I become so averse to losing? How does it intersect with fear of failure, with the shame that comes from doing a bad job? 

Unlike Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, the first concept I learned wasn’t shame. I don’t know what it was, maybe sharing or something, but it definitely wasn’t shame. So where did that come from? Is it a natural part of growing, that fear of failure, that sense of shame from which abounds, or does it come from others? In school, after all, I was in the “gifted and talented program,” which I have spent my teenage years and young adult life actively disproving my qualifications for, but that’s only because when I was five I could solve logic puzzles. In college, not so much, unfortunately, since that was a necessary part of a major course.

Anyway, my point is that I showed up to college excited and rapidly became terrified. I’d been terrified of failure in high school, but that was failure to achieve a goal: Getting into the goddamn school. Failure was the referendum on my ability to succeed there, and realizing I’d clinched a 98 instead of a 100 in Italian was the nail in the coffin of my blithe confidence. Everything was a fight, with me, not to top myself over a missed question on a problem set. Once there, at The School, I was still terrified of failure, but I had no real goal I was working towards, vacillating between thinking I would be an effective journalist, professor, and lawyer (only one of which panned out). What’s the point of Latin honors, anyway? I have a set, but I don’t know if it means anything, because I can measure it against fear and failure and fear of failure and think, God, if I’d never known of this I could have been a happier person.

This is, of course, my parents’ blind spot: What I recognize as terror and shame, they see as strength, this invisible force pushing me to do well, to strive, to achieve. Which, of course, it has, but there have been massive costs along the way, like social lives and scars.

And in fact, I’d accepted that I wouldn’t get those honors despite scrabbling for them like they held the keys to all my dreams, and was stunned to pick up my diploma and see that, wait a minute, that jazz class I didn’t pass-fail pushed me into laudable territory.

On reflection, literally right this second, I only cracked the fear and loathing in my own brain when I sang in college. I didn’t study music, had stopped the training—ear training and sight reading and do-re-mi—but I wanted to do it for the sheer love of letting my voice do those things it does. Mostly, I got the notes right, and clinched a couple of solos (a stratospheric soprano bit in a Mozart piece, and the whole entire Laudamus Te in Bach’s B Minor Mass), but I did it because I wanted to. It made me breathe differently, apply a different part of my brain, and because I loved being there so much, being a part of a big group of voices doing sounds one voice alone can’t make, I didn’t care about being good. I was, but my friends nabbed the stellar solos (the Laudate Dominum from Mozart’s Great Mass in C, or a bit from Judas Maccabeus by Handel) and I was there to sing the supporting stuff.

I told someone once that it made me incandescently happy. Fourth of July fireworks overjoyed.

One of the greatest nights of my life, I looked unimpeachably beautiful and it snowed, and the lights were on in the Broadway median strip and College Walk, and I was singing Judas Macc, with a baby solo. My parents and I had dinner where I was allowed to have wine and espresso, my best friends came, and it didn’t matter how I, independently, did. Because I was so incandescently joyful, so delighted—I’d forgotten I could feel that way. And I owe it all to the love of good friends, beautiful music, well-placed snow, and some exquisite ravioli. 

Maybe the point is this, and clearly I’d be either a stellar or awful philosopher because I am forever forgetting my own point: I’m 6 assigned pitches away from being promoted. I could’ve clinched it last month, but now have to wait until the end of June, and this is all because I generously offered up some stories to the new kid, who was struggling to find anything. It’s a pain in my ass, this do-gooder tendency, this enforced competitiveness. But instead of incessantly refreshing my pitches for the day to see what gets assigned, maybe now I’ll just...pick the things I think are interesting, newsy, that give me this little frisson when I see them and think, Hey, that could be something, this lawsuit about Twitter, Biden, and the CDA’s section 230! I will care less about how I do independently, and more about the body of things, the experience, what I get out of it.

As I did that night with the snow and the oratorio.

Because it’s easy to let the fear suck all the enjoyment out of life. And it’s an unhappy fact that most things that make life slap also make life shorter, like cheese and bone-dry rose. The challenge is, of course, cultivating a capacity for being “unafraid,” which I have learned is not throwing yourself into the ocean despite riptides (guilty), or letting the sluice rip you to shreds when the tide goes out (guilty), or throwing yourself recklessly down an icy ski slope lest anyone think you enjoy the luxury sport (guilty, but also, I do enjoy it, very much). It’s about thinking, this could be terrifying, and finding the angle that brings you joy anyway. It’s being the conquering hero, rather than singing about it.

Recently, I had to call up some high-powered NBA attorneys for a story I was writing. I hated this, hate hate hated it, because I was convinced they would know I was a child doing a grown-up’s job, despite myself being a grown-up. But I got through the calls (with the classic “no comment,” which really put my unfounded fear into perspective), and then filed my clean copy. When it hit the wire, I was stoked, because while the story wasn’t that fascinating (basic contract stuff, and not even all that much money), I looked at it and saw that I’d pushed over, under, and through my fear of cold-calling counsel.

No stopping at the wall. I think about what scares me—and I’m always at least 10% nervous—and now I just think, fuck that. Let’s give it a whirl. 

Perhaps I am making good on my education’s off-label use after all.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

a petulant prophet

"When I quit singing, I'm going to start smoking," I offhandedly told my high school music teacher once senior year. It was just outlandish enough to be annoying, and she quirked up one eyebrow as if to say, We'll see. 

Good news: I didn't quit singing. 

Bad news: Still picked up the filthy habit in college. Smile smile smile (it was the electric kind, not the analog kind), exhale, meditation, slowly in the park, don't throw yourself in the river, consider your choices, breathe in....

Like singing, but so much worse for me as a person and also, depending on whether the governor is in trouble with his constituents or not, illegal.

I've always been a musician, starting from around the time I first heard my mom's Rolling Stones/Grateful Dead/Eagles mixes on the tape deck in the car. I grew up listening to "Lola" by the Kinks and "Scarlet Begonias" by the Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen's entire discography. By the time I discovered classical music thanks to a fifth-grade field trip to see a rehearsal of the Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera, I had a perfectly out-of-date but wickedly well-schooled taste in music. And yes, my tastes got better as I got older—check my Spotify for the world's weirdest mix, including The Divinyls ("I Touch Myself") and the Kyrie from the Verdi Requiem. Currently on the docket, as we legal beagles say: "Happier" by Olivia Rodrigo, "Anthem" from Chess (a musical about the Cold War, brought to you by the minds behind ABBA!), and Vaughn Williams' English Folk Song Suite. 

Anyway, it turns out I can sight-read on a dime, and have a nice voice and a good ear. I also play the flute, which is about as glowing a review as I can possibly give myself.

And, for the record, I was supposed to be an opera singer, right until the time I realized I wanted to be a journalist instead. I was supposed to sing Laudamus Te (Bach, Mozart, Mozart II) and Voi che sapete (Le Nozze de Figaro) and Je vieux vivre (Romeo et Juliet) and the part from Lucia de Lamermoor where the good woman goes insane, the famous mad scene. I was supposed to sing all of that.

Now I can carry a tune and sing on a dime, and to give up that dream, I started smoking. If I couldn’t do it, then I couldn’t miss it. I could love it, and still sing with a slightly smokier and less girlishly crystalline voice, but I couldn’t make it happen. In closing the door, I freed myself to pursue others.

This led into a neat four-summer career as a music teacher, where I gamely taught flute and clarinet and bassoon (??? to that last one), and tried to give all the good advice I could muster while secretly wishing I was banging out the tunes on the marimba with Hayden the tiny whiz-kid percussionist, who was maybe half my height. The people I worked with were great, livening up those early morning (and I mean early—7:15am) start times.

The kids? Depends on which one, and what mood they were in, and what mood I was in, and how early it was, and whether they'd practiced, and whether they were being nice or not....

I always received stellar performance reviews despite making a habit of going to my car on my half-hour reprieve and bashing my hands against the steering wheel in sheer frustration, because I had no pedagogical training but was apparently in charge of educating actual human people. And the thing that made me a good music teacher? It was so disconnected from my actual career goals that it felt like a vacation, which meant I was free to periodically philosophize and dispense sanguine wisdom and the occasional "it's okay, no need to cry" hug or crack jokes (appropriate ones only!), because I just needed to get through the morning, learn the kids some new notes, float about the band, and make friends. Like camp, only I was getting paid, albeit not a single penny above minimum wage! 

But this, of course, meant I was not doing anything to advance my actual career goals: My friends worked for Goldman Sachs and political campaigns and research labs, and me, I put flutes and clarinets back together with teeny screwdrivers and got trumpet mouthpieces unstuck using a special mouthpiece-unsticker tool in an airless closet, which was also where I taught. Glamorous, I can hear you say, but in reality I had a stack of LSAT study guides at home I couldn’t crack into for fear of what to put on an eventual CV. I was in agony, because I couldn’t see a way out: Was I destined to always be just...smashing my fists into steering wheels wishing I could go?

This gave me lots to think about, as I tried to grapple with myself over the course of these summers and also get a tan. Prophetically, I dispensed excellent wisdom to my young charges, who were miraculously full of energy at 7:15 in the morning (did I mention it was summer? As in, summer break?), which is to say, I told them what I should have told myself, but nicer and without swearing.

To a girl whose mother was recently diagnosed with cancer, and whose cause for tears I divined from gentle prodding: "It's okay to be upset. And I'm really glad you told me what's wrong, because that's what the grown-ups are for, we're here to help you (I'm a grown-up in this scenario? Odd), and I think you're being really brave. I can't promise your mom will be better (by next summer, she was in remission), but we're here if you need to talk." 

The next school year, I would break down begging for help, remembering my own irritatingly smart wisdom, that grown-ups are there for a reason, and just being an adult doesn't mean there aren't smarter, wiser grown-ups with way better resources to KonMari your life. This girl with wild curly hair and a big smile sobbed over the possible loss of her mother and the life she expected, and I sobbed over the loss of the life I expected, too. 

I think you’re being really brave, I whispered to myself, which was a lie. It’s okay to be upset. Go tell a grown-up.

To the girl who loved the flute, loved me, and whenever I asked her to play would balk and complain and clam up: "Oh, I get it! You're scared of making a mistake (samesies!). Well, that's the point of this—making mistakes, and learning from them so you know how to do it better next time (except for me, who will not). That's why we practice (I don't, but that's besides the point). And that's the point of me—helping you learn from those mistakes. Did I ever tell you about the time I did a solo and got some notes wrong, in public, with an orchestra, during rehearsal? I was miserable! But I went back with my teacher, and I practiced, and at the performance I did really well (one review said I "looked great!")! So I know how it feels—let me help you with it."

And eventually, she did, sort of. But she was happier. And I hope she also knew that that story was, 100%, true, about me mortifyingly screwing up the only proper solo I'd ever had at full dress rehearsal, pissing off the first violinist, the entire choir who had to listen, and quite possibly my beatifically generous conductor, only to do well in the concert and earn the feedback "you looked beautiful!" from a philosophy professor, whose wisdom and generosity dazzled me.

Not very long after, I was forced to learn against my will that criticism isn't going to kill you, especially not when it's a man with a PhD correcting your thesis so you don't sound like an idiot attempting to take on the guy who literally wrote the book on justice. There's no excuse for not learning from your mistakes, because then there'd be no point to them. Try, try again (and take the edits like a good journalist).

I know how this feels, I whispered to myself. But you’ve failed before and you’ve survived it before, and you’ll fail again and you’ll survive again. That’s the point of you, which I guess would be depressing if true.

I've sung at Carnegie Hall. You can applaud me, but I was nine and it was a choral thing, not a star-making solo exhibition. And of course, everyone knows the one old saw about the place.

"How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" you ask me, an impressive young virtuoso.

"Practice, practice, practice," I reply with a wry grin, having never in my life enjoyed the discipline of practicing anything but simply being too scared to quit. 

I studied philosophy to be wise, but like, fuck that—banging out a couple of essays on the aviary metaphor in the Theaetetus (or was it Meno? See, fuck that) and expounding on the moral underpinnings of common law does not a wise person make. It just makes you good at making your point quickly, since those essays always had scant little word counts. It makes you feel...authoritative. The world looks wonderful, after all, from my high horse. I had the views, but lacked the, I don’t know, practical wisdom or actual wisdom or courage with which to make them meaningful.

But teaching? Shit, that made me wise very quickly, because I actually had to impress knowledge and lessons like an Hilaire Belloc poem ("and always keep ahold of nurse (but don't keep asking to go to the nurse!) for fear of finding something worse (seriously, I will glue your butt to the chair if you get up one more time, Devon!)”). 

Shame I didn't school myself harder where it counted, those lessons in try try try again, and how smoking is actually quite bad for you, and how petulance isn't a good enough reason to give things up. Because I actually did a good job imparting tiny daily wisdoms to my tiny little chaos agents, daily, while dodging spit puddles poured out of trumpet bells and flailing trombone slides and really, really wishing I could go outside and inhale air or smoke deeply into me, holding my breath like singing or meditating—Try, try again, you'll figure it out. Yourself, I mean. Deep breaths, and all that. 

Even if one beginner student, in her unicorn headband squeaking away tunelessly on her clarinet, just roasted you for living with your parents because you don’t have a boyfriend. Which was true, about the boyfriend thing (to be fair to me, though, these kids thought I was either 15 or married). And hey, even if I couldn’t find me, she could, and with her clear-eyed wisdom suggested that I needed to find a man and a “better job, like at McDonald’s,” which again, not necessarily wrong. If I’d asked, she probably would have told me, wisely as she affixed stickers to a method book, to ask my mom what to do. And she probably would have been right, and my mom would probably have told me to, in this order, stop smoking, start studying for the LSAT, and start looking for a therapist.

And she probably would have been right, too, and much heartache could have been avoided.

But alas, wisdom comes not from what you’re told but from what you think yourself into in an armchair or agora, if my education is to believed. And it comes in stages, or so they say. Acquired from experience, mistakes, failures and fuck-ups and wrong notes and noodling around on the keys until you get it. From practice practice practice. The wisdom comes from being told to keep going even when you are thinking, Fuck this, I could still be sleeping, not trying to learn to play “Hot Cross Buns” (or the second movement of the Folk Song Suite, or the 1812 Overture, as I can play “Hot Cross Buns” virtuosically, thank you very much). It also comes from knowing when to stop (smoking).

And, for the record, my old music teacher thinks I still have a lovely voice. And I’m glad she was right, and that I never stopped singing.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

fitting in

For my 24th birthday, I was at a loss for what to ask for, and my parents were nagging me about it because it was still pandemic times so they had to factor in shipping but I famously wait until the last possible second to submit gift lists. So I found a romper online and thought, fuck it, let’s go with that—I love a good romper or jumpsuit, especially ones that fit and flatter. But it was only available online, so I had to take a best guess as to my size. When I received it, the romper fit like a dream, was everything I wanted, and then I looked at the tag.

Size XXS, petite. 

Oh. Oh, Jesus. That’s not a real size. That’s a shirt for a chihuahua puppy, not human clothing, and yet there I seemed to be, in my low-cut little romper clearly designed for a woman’s taste in a child’s body. Shit. 

It bothered me, mostly in a funny way (in numbers, what would that be? Triple-zero? Double-not-a-thing, indivisible, makes everything it touches nil?), so I did a little investigating, for science, and fucked off to the Target children’s section on their website. By comparing the chest-waist-hip ratios, I discovered that I would also fit into a cute, and far less expensive, Cat & Jack romper for children, if I got a size XL. Which is a real size, unlike that extra-triple-skinny macchiato bullshit I was wearing.

Obviously, my body is my body, and due to criminal law and the fact that I get cold easily I need to keep it covered. So I’m going to have to bite the bullet every so often and buy clothes, and those clothes should neither drown nor choke me. And mostly, I don’t look at the sizes unless I’m trying to differentiate what would fit, or suggest gift options for others. I’m not fussed about the fact that my bra size is “XS,” which I know because I boycott underwire bras due to comfort and the fact that the cups always gape on me, and because those little lacy contraptions are way cheaper. 

One time, when we were drunk, Sara and I got into a discussion at the world’s loudest bar about body image. Specifically, ours: She was hurt that no one ever found her attractive enough, and I was upset that I...I don’t know, constantly feel terrible. We were drunk, as I said, so most of what I remember was her SCREAMING my weight in a crowded bar and me replying, “Shut the fuck up, that’s not cool!” But then we talked it through, the differences between external social pressures and internal pressures, and sidled up to the bar for another round of, probably, vodka sours. 

Because that was the thing: She felt like nobody thought she would ever “fit in,” and I was convinced that whatever anyone thought I would never “fit in.” Needless to say, we sorted it and are now besties, even though I usually end up with leftovers when we order take-out. Because, as everyone knows, the best pad thai is leftover pad thai, eaten room temperature with a fat glass of wine.

I’ve read online that if you look the way I do, which is to say, adolescent, and an adult man finds you attractive, that’s a big red flag, because it might mean he’s got some profoundly bad, illegal sexual tastes and is using you to satisfy a fantasy. Which, to be fair, aren’t we all? Using other people to satisfy fantasies, I mean? And that fact fucking hurt, because I’m an adult woman, who dresses like an adult woman, but who has the body of a kid. In fact, there are lots of teenage girls out there who look older than I do. I don’t like the idea, of course, that I’d be the object of some fetish or proclivity I haven’t been apprised of, but I also don’t like the idea that attraction to me indicates some incurable wrong. Like, I’m still a person, even if I’m roughly pixie sized, and even if in my career was a music teacher I was often confused for one of the students (though when I taught 10-year-olds, I stood a good head higher than them).

And that, of course, is the thing about being short (and I’m only 5′3″ according to my driver’s license, but the DMV didn’t measure me, did it?!): You just sort of have to stay small. Or you do stay small, whether you have to or not. The metrics shift downwards. I’ve never weighed enough to give blood, and once went through the process of having my guidance counselor sign off on an in loco parentis form so I could try (I’d forgotten to ask my parents or give them the slip or even, indeed, that the blood drive was happening), and was medically cleared until they got to my weight.

“How old are you?” the nurse asked me, not actually looking while I handed over the form and my school ID.

“16! This is the first time I can give blood, I’m really excited!” I said, actually terrified at the idea of watching a pint of my blood leave my body but firmly believing it was for the greater good.

"Oh, wonderful! How tall are you?” Still not looking, which in the end may have saved us some time.

“Five-foot-three, if I stretch.” Which I did, tippy toes in my ballet flats, but subtle, to avoid making it obvious. Smile smile smile, be happy, be light, give the gift of life and avoid showing up to trigonometry on a school-sanctioned do-gooder mission. 

“Alright! How much do you weigh?” 

Oh, always the killer, isn’t it? I was determined to be brave and let them stick a large-bore needle in my goddamn arm, so I played sweet and dumb.

“I’m not sure!” A goddamn lie, because at the time I still had physicals at least once a year, so I had at least some sense of my unchanging weight (I’ve been the same size, more or less, since I was...13, maybe?).

The scale, traitorously, betrayed me: I was, in fact, around 98 pounds, but it turns out that the under-18s have a separate weight class, so I would have needed to weigh around 130 pounds under the law. I was, needless to say, way off. I was then informed that even when I turned 18 I would need to weigh 110 pounds to donate, and was then offered apple juice and a packet of cookies for my time.

Which I proceeded to sullenly eat in the junior well at my high school, kicking my heels against the concrete bench. The teacher who I’d forcibly subjected to my fears about the blood draw (and who, in frustration, said “No one is making you do it!”) asked me how it went. I replied, glumly, that I did not do it.

She asked, Then how did you get the snack, that’s supposed to be for blood donors only? She may have also been a bit of a bitch and a stickler for rules.

I glared up from my apple juice, and said, They gave it to me because it still took half an hour for them to find out I���m too little. Also, you can’t donate blood on the medication I take. None of this was on ANY of the literature!

Devastating, it was, to have the CDC discount my blood because of my size (and much worse, its policies on gay male donors, but as I am neither gay nor male, such was not my particular battle). 

And in any case, I think this illustrates perfectly the perennial tension in my life: I am very small and look much younger than my age. This is a champagne problem, of course, because it is honestly flattering to turn over my ID at the liquor store holding a bottle of Freixenet to celebrate electing someone who is not the Former Guy, and have them notice that I’m an adult who presumably has a college degree and, incidentally, unimpeachable taste in champagne. But I don’t look like a person who can buy alcohol—I don’t look like a person who can drive a car, much less ride in the passenger seat, and yet I’m actually 24. In 10 years, this face will be a blessing, when I am constantly mistaken for being in my mid-twenties. 

Will this body ever be a blessing, though? It can’t donate blood (mine turns out to also have like, no iron, and again, wish someone had told me that before I spent half an hour in line at that blood drive), but it does the stuff it’s supposed to, mostly. And I am saving an absolute fortune on delicates—the upshot of the sexualization of preadolescent girls, for me personally, was that I got way more options at way cheaper prices. Children should, of course, be allowed to be children, not objects or mannequins, but while I can still wiggle into Cat & Jack, and the patterns remain charmingly cute and whimsical, I expect I’ll be stocking up. 

And I’ll throw some apple juice and cookies into the cart...just in case.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

speaking peace and telling truth

The BBC’s motto is “Nation shall speak peace unto nation.” The New York Times chooses “All the news that’s fit to print,” but recently unveiled its “Truth” campaign which includes, well, truisms, like “The truth is hard” and “The truth is worth it” and “The truth is more important now than ever.” The Washington Post picked “Democracy dies in darkness,” shortly after the ascendancy of the Former Guy. The LA Times once used “Stand Fast, Stand Firm, Stand Sure, Stand True.” I assume that Bankruptcy Times’ motto is “Why go Chapter 7 when you could go Chapter 11?” but to be fair I’ve only ever skimmed it.

The point is, journalism come with lofty goals. And what, after all, could be loftier than the idea of speaking peace and truth, nation unto nation, person unto person, with the ultimate goal of some capital-E enlightenment, that society would cure its own ills if only you give it direction? Notice how in Plato’s Republic, while he explicitly casts out poets (in Book X, the last one, really burying the lede) because of their ability to fill the heads of his metallic youth with concepts like “evil” and “war,” he never says much about journalists.

In the ideal world—and certainly Plato’s philosopher king-governed Republic—there is no need for journalists to speak peace slowly and articulately, or rake up rallying cries for justice and goodness, because those in power would simply do the right things for the right reasons (to borrow from my buddy Aristotle, who would not like me had we ever met). But while we are governed by people who are often idiots, or at least not philosopher kings and queens, we need journalists to spell it. 

What is it? 

Well, isn’t that the question! The BBC has the World Service, which partly used to do “E by R,” or “English by radio,” which sounds a bit like assimilation. But also communion—that we are all, across the globe, worried about how to ask for the bathroom or a glass of water politely among those we do not know. Small peaces, if you will. But the point of the news media, while to inform and enlighten, goes beyond “Biko ị nwere ike ịgwa m ebe ụlọ ịsa ahụ dị?” or “Posso avere un bicchiere dell’acqua?” Their job is not to tell us what to think, per se, but the give us the information we need to do the thinking in the first place, help us link feelings and anecdotes into actions and maybe even world views.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker writes about the “hermeneutical gap,” the idea that we cannot question or comment on the things we lack a concept for. If you don’t have certain concepts, living naively or without agency, then you need the information before you act, before you do your own peace-speaking and truth-telling. The job journalists have is patching up those hermeneutical gaps by telling stories about things we ought to know about, because even if they don’t impact us they can inspire us, or push us to push our governments in better directions, or help us come to tighter grips and give us knowledge as comfort and empowerment. 

Journalists, after all, toppled Richard Nixon and Harvey Weinstein, because intrepid teams found people willing to speak truth slowly. It isn’t always peace—the New York Times advocated hard for the Iraq War based on an un-fact-checked lie, and sometimes the point of betterment for nearly all means the affliction of some, like the powerful who keep escaping consequences—but the goal, the point, often is. Peace of mind, peace of nation, peace among the people.

When I was a college journalist, I got called into a meeting at midnight, whose point was to direct the perspective of our news coverage. It sounds sinister, a midnight meeting, but the reality was that our schedules were all fully booked until that time with obligations like “class” and “choir” and in my case, the cleverly-placed “appointment,” which often was code for “I am doing nothing and would strongly prefer to be unbothered,” since I looked like a hero when I showed up for rescheduling my “appointment” to figure out how we could speak peace unto nation or at least, unto Columbia, or just make the admin sweat it out a bit. 

“This is a service job,” I said, holding a Bud Light Lime and strongly wishing I was in bed while I was, instead, sitting in a beanbag in our offices. “The point of this job is to inform, to affect change, to make this place better.”

“Yeah, Ainsley’s right!” my editor replied, and despite being the only senior and indeed, only over-21 at that meeting, I tried not to look smug. 

Sometimes, it’s easy to treat journalism like a game, and I’ve certainly had editors—who have in several cases gone on to be extraordinary journalists, so don’t take my word as gospel—who did. The game is one of dramatic irony: You know things. You want other people to confirm that the things you know are right. These things are almost always things you’d rather they not know that you know, and which, by the way, they are going to hate that you know. You use probing questions and a bit of acting like an idiot to avoid showing your teeth too soon, and when they slip you head for the jugular until you get a mouth full of truth. It’s a fun game, to be sure! Because what feels better than making someone more powerful than you quake?

I’ve had public relations folks terrified of me, even though their bosses were literally in charge of everything from my living arrangements and meal plan to my academics and the cost of my education. Clearly, the person scared of me had way more of an ability to ruin my life—but I knew things about their plans, and I had questions, and that was terrifying. And it always made me laugh, because I’d go home and need desperately to take a drink or have a smoke while I typed up my transcripts, thinking how silly it was to have PhDs scared of a kid with a byline no one cared about. I wasn’t speaking peace, but hey, I’m not the Beeb and that wasn’t my job—I was all about truth-telling. Sometimes, to get to the point of peace or tranquility, you’ve got to get through some shit. There are a million sound-bites on that, so I won’t add to them.

My grandparents, especially when my Opi was alive, were Fox News (and emphasize the word “news,” in a “what the fuck are they on about?” tone) watchers, and every so often I would have to explain the point of journalism to the average reader. 

“You don’t have to like it, because facts don’t actually care about our feelings. They just...are. I care about how my stories turn out, and I care about what’s happening, but my job isn’t to make the facts reflect the world I’d like to live in. I’m just supposed to tell it like it is.” But of course, they lived in Port Washington near a tony country club, not on my campus, and so they’d never read my work. 

Nevertheless, they were impressed, because their Ivy League granddaughter said it and so it must be true. Speaking peace slowly, as it were, since they couldn’t fucking hear unless you shouted and, even then, clearly enunciated.

I, of course, did care about how things turned out, because they impacted me in practical ways, even when those were superficial—but my job as a journalist wasn’t to tell the story of how I felt, but to tell the story of how other people feel about X. And think of it this way: Jodi Kantor and Meghan Twohey had a point, namely that Harvey Weinstein did crime and got away with it for far too long. And they could have found hundreds of actresses in his films who said, He never made a pass at me! 

And that’s true, for those people!

But the issue was never that he was fine for most people, but that he did a crime against some of them. And it’s not a journalist’s job to say, You’re a criminal, even though every time Ghislaine Maxwell asks her judge for something I think, You are simply prolonging the inevitable consequences of your heinous actions, because you are obviously guilty. So we hedge it, with words like “alleged” and “accused” and “suspected” and, my personal favorite, “said/says/claimed/claims,” which cast reasonable doubt, so that we can tell the truth, and behind our “allegedlies” we mumble, Factually, actually. Because the thing is, even when we know, we don’t know—we are fact-sharers, not prophets.

The fact is, She said. Maybe that’s the truth, maybe not—but I am telling her truth, as she knows it. I am telling the truths I can know, the things I am told, the things I have lived. 

My parents, by contrast to my grandparents (R by C? reading by contrast?) did read my college paper. When I graduated, I found a stack of my news articles printed out with awful formatting in the basement, because every day my dad checked my college paper to see what was going on, and what I was up to. Maybe it was just his way of connecting (weird, because I did call home a lot), but I like to think he got my point: That when you love a thing, you hold it to high standards. It’s why we care more that our kids turn out well than the kids of some people down the block (but I don’t have kids, so maybe I’m wrong). You love the thing, and believe in it, so you want to see it live up to its promises and potential. And sometimes, it fails, or moves in the wrong way, and you tell it. You tell it the truth, you speak peace slowly and clearly and sometimes with great anecdotes, unto nation, in the hope that it will take that information and arm itself with anodyne transparency and olive branches and a basic bend of the moral arc towards goodness. 

My mom and my boss tell me when they think I’ve messed up, after all, so I can be better tomorrow. And sometimes my job is to say the federal government fucked up, so in that case, it really matters that I can fix my mistakes, to avoid massive liability. Nevertheless, no one can make me choose to be better, and that is the hope of the journalist which springs eternal: If I say it enough, loudly enough, you will do the right thing, the better thing.

If I tell the truth, you will make change, and you will speak peace. Person unto person, nation unto nation. You will make this place better.

But (but!), you have to choose it.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

how to issue revelations

I didn’t have a burning bush, but I’m fairly sure I had a cloud of either my cigarette smoke or someone else’s to speak into on the corner of 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, outside a dive bar, when I dropped a bomb on my best friend. Our other friend had just been racially profiled at another bar, so while we were trying to not-quite-soberly deal with that, I mentioned that I’d fucked up royally earlier that day.

“Yeah, so, I accidentally triggered a Title XI report, I think, which is bullshit because it didn’t even happen when I was in college, but I could not keep my stupid mouth shut.” Wishing, I assume, that if the cigarette wasn’t mine I had one, just so I could shorten my lifespan or maybe disappear into the fog.

Like many things I say, I don’t know why I said it—to Sara, or to a dean earlier that day, totally failing to remember the concept of “mandated reporters” despite being a journalist who should have known.

Sara—a 5’ 8” half-Jewish, half-Japanese dynamo who is way more of a Karen than my tiny white self could ever be—was ringing the manager at the racial profiling bar (and if you ask me nicely, I’ll even tell you which one it was, but suffice to say, it was a Wednesday night, and all the seniors at Columbia were there). While she was on hold, she took the phone away from her ear. “Wait, what?”

And so the story came tumbling out, about a sexual assault a month after my eighteenth birthday and my adolescently shit taste in men and how I told this administrator at 12pm and then at 6pm she met my parents at an awards dinner and I very casually tried to keep them from meeting alone because, in this massive fucking nightmare I had created, I had to be the fixer, ensuring that the only on-the-record comments from anyone were banal and reflected positively on me while I fantasized about going back to my room, yanking off my high heels, and uncapping a bottle of wine, which I would drink for a personal pity party before figuring out if my ass could fit in the eight-inch jumper prevention clearance of my 16th story window.

She looked at me. “Jesus, I’m sorry, that really sucks. Do you want to talk about it?”

“No thanks,” I replied, having clearly already told the tale with breathless energy, “But could we please go get Roti Roll, I’m very hungry and it’s literally in between these bars.” I didn’t want to talk about it, but I did have a pool of sour mix and vodka in me that would be best soaked up with a pickled paneer (tomato, no onion) wrap, and a promise that we would do breakfast the next morning (two eggs, scrambled, cheddar, tomato, broccoli, NO ONION).

And that was the thing, of course: I didn’t really want to talk about it, because then I’d have to get into messy things like trauma and perpetual virginity and what I really needed to do, I guess, was just…say it. Just say the words. These statements don’t always have to be courageous or public or heartbreaking. They don’t always have to be momentous, these revelations, or be part of future criminal proceedings or reluctant and traumatic efforts to keep a total jackass off the high court. They can just…be.

I just wanted to say it. I wanted to be seen, known, not pitied but also not alone in being the only person who knew. At the time I was a journalist, and I knew what “bearing witness” and “speaking truth to power” and “afflicting the comfortable” meant, because I did them all the time. And I wanted someone else to know, someone else to bear witness to me.

It’s hard to explain why this matters; it’s also hard to explain why my venue choice for these revelations is just so shitty, all the time, other than the fact that I don’t seem to think much before I blurt things out.

When that administrator apologized to me for what I’d just done, I sat in her office and stared at the clock and felt the blood literally rush to my ears. “I didn’t want it to be real, but now you’re going to make it real,” I said, quiet for possibly the first time in my life.

Words, as we all know because of that quote attributed to Shakespeare or whomever, have power. We see it all the time, in books and television and music and journalism and stand-up comedy. These words meant something to me, something deep and aching, a truth you lug around with you but aren’t sure what to make of. 

I wonder sometimes what the impact of the involuntary sexual experience is, on the development of taste. How much of it is natural, and how much is reactive? Would I always have been the uptight little thing in her tight dress and sneakers dodging out of the party to find a snack with the world spinning boozily around her, or could I have been different—outgoing or confident or self-assured or unafraid? I don’t know, and I can’t know, anymore; it’s like wondering what I could have done but for mental illness. I could have done anything, but then I would be different all around. And I’m not.

In the hands of the right philosopher it could be a fun thought experiment, but it’s also pointless (as much philosophy, it turns out, is). That boy and I could have gone to prom (he didn’t ask, which incidentally is the reason why I never told anyone at the time: It would have looked so obviously like I was jilted and bitter), but then maybe I wouldn’t have had to grow in quite the same ways, and I wouldn’t be me, as I am. Even if things don’t happen for a reason, you just sort of have to deal with it. It shapes you, indelibly, as trauma does, or like a lipstick stain on a collar or a chocolate stain on a brand-new sweatshirt (feel free to guess which of these is my experience and which is from a television show).

Sara and I got breakfast the next morning, as promised, both of us hungover and more intersted in resolving the previous night’s racism and our physical states than resolving my four-year-old assault over eggs and hash browns and coffee. I don’t think we talked about it again, at length, and I think that’s great: Sometimes it’s enough to just say what you need to say. Sometimes the people who love you and care for you will let you drop bombs and revelations on them, and they hold them for you. It turns out sharing things is something you do when you care for people, and not just popcorn and booze and phone chargers.

It’s easy to think, as a journalist, that you cover revelations and keep your own secret, hidden, and then one day you’ll die. 

But I’m not so sure. I don’t have a view from nowhere but a view from a very particular somewhere instead, and because I don’t have another view, I can appreciate it. No one else has ever had the life I’ve had, the experiences—for good and bad and nothing much at all—that I have. And there’s something to sharing experiences. 

When I taught journalism, after all, via Zoom the first summer the pandemic raged, I explained that there were three kinds of stories, broadly: breaking news, feature stories, and people stories. People stories, of course, being the ones we love to read about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or extraordinary people just doing their thing. They remind us what’s possible—scaling mountains and swimming across the English Channel and winning Nobel Prizes and being brave and healthy and whole. We love reading them (I know, because in my job I suggest a lot of them, and they are often big hits). We love being inspired and encouraged and strengthened and awed by others.

And maybe that was the point, the fullness of it: That I was a person who had experienced something. I didn’t talk about it much, the same way I don’t talk about being a vegetarian much, because it just is. But sometimes, things like that, which hurt and make us vulnerable and leave us open to the gaze of others, to being seen, are are worth saying. We rarely can acknowledge ourselves in the abstract, after all, and even journalists need the lens that reflects us back.

So I said it. And it was, I think, a sort of tiny revelation, at least to me.

[ainsleyandherproblems]

the goodness impulse

I decided to become a vegetarian on impulse, and due to an absolutely bananas confluence of factors: We were watching “Food, Inc.” in AP Bio, after everyone but me had taken the exam because I had to take the make-up exam (due, I think, to a conflict with another Big Test), and I had a weird craving for tofu. So I declared that I would be a vegetarian thenceforth, and my mom replied, “Okay.”

I had not expected that response, but I was a brand-new 18-year-old, so I guess as an adult I was allowed to decide the ethics of my diet.

If you spend more than seven consecutive seconds considering factory farming in the United States, it’s hard to stomach (ha!) the idea of eating meat. I’m sensitive to the realities of how Tyson is run by pricks who bet on how many of their workers would get COVID-19 (really, there was a lawsuit and everything!), and about the realities of how many employees at factory farm are working-class and/or undocumented immigrants, and what that means for them. I just think there’s got to be a better way—for the animals and for the workers, who in wildly different ways lack a lot of the agency that lets people like me decide my diet for “ethical” reasons.

Being a vegetarian, it happens, was easier than I expected: I think the last meat I had was bacon on a particular and renowned deli sandwich, where I asked them to swap the chicken for eggplant but totally forgot the damn sub even had bacon on it, and fish and chips when I was somewhere in the wilds of suburban England (possibly near Harrogate? Definitely not London, in any case). It turns out that, while tofu is blah when cooked by me, I can work magic with tempeh, and that quinoa is actually pretty good!

(Actually, the hard part is when my family and I go out to eat, and I have to cobble together a sad little meal off the appetizer menu, but it turns out artichokes are good!)

This ethic eventually expanded: I wouldn’t buy leather (not a problem, since neither my budget nor style had previously accommodated it), and I endeavored to buy my cosmetics cruelty-free and ideally vegan. But what a nightmare it is, and not just from a research perspective! Did you know that fake leather is made of plastic, which is famously bad for the environment? Or that inexpensive things are often made using either slave labor or labor abuses, often to vulnerable women and children in foreign countries like Taiwan or Vietnam, or undocumented migrants right here in the States? Or that your almonds and kale and spinach and strawberries are farmed by under-appreciated and underpaid workers, often seasonal migrants, and take up a ton of water in drought-stricken areas?

Not to be a downer, but it turns out that the ethical impulse is expensive—and challenging to navigate, in a capitalist system which is very much designed to pit interests against each other and force you, the consumer, to choose. It’s hard to hold the impoverished and disadvantaged responsible, because these are expensive choices—luxury choices, even. If you’re worried about paying rent, or purchasing groceries, the additional concern of animal cruelty is an obscene burden to add to purchasing choices. And it’s just one of the choices you’ve got to consider, both the global and the personal (“what is best to feed my baby?” and “is this something I can afford in order to meet my other obligations?”are valid questions which compete with shit like “do the farmers at Dole receive the protections under the FLSA they are owed?” and “are these peaches organic?” and “wait a fucking second, Chiquita Banana helped fund a Colombian paramilitary group?!”).

But for the rest of us, who can use our dollars to make a point, and yell at companies on Twitter? We should do it! We all know that the happiest chicken gets to stretch her wings and scratch around, and that cows force-fed don’t happy Wagyu steaks make (those cows get massaged! They get treated better than we do, and it shows! Hannibal Lecter would definitely think you tasted better if you got a massage…which is perhaps not a sterling advertisement for a massage).

And we know that happy workers are better workers, and that some things are just viscerally wrong. Maybe they make our lives on the other side of the equation easier and more convenient, but that’s still an icky place to be.

So maybe my issue isn’t with eating meat, but with factory farming under capitalism. I try not to proselytize about vegetarianism (a favorite “frate,” or “friend-date,” with Sara, included us going to a French restaurant near campus where she got duck confit that both looked and smelled delicious, compared to my sad pile of salad), but it does matter. Corporations are liable for so much of climate change because of their industrial practices, but we do get some “power of the purse,” the ability to try and force change for the better—like insisting on carbon-neutral policies an a basic adherence to the civil equivalent of the Geneva Conventions or United Nations’ policies on labor.

As a result of this power, I don’t buy meat, and I don’t eat it, and I don’t buy leather (though I do own some, gifted, because I know a nice handbag when I see one), and it’s still complicated! The use of your power, however small, is challenging, as is weighing needs and wants and limitations and the cold hard facts of existing. 

Where it comes to diets, my position, based on my experience, is that vegetarianism is relatively easy to achieve if you don’t have underlying medical conditions, allergies, or intolerances. Might even make you vegan!

But if you don’t have the money to keep refreshing your kale stash or splashing out for tempeh—or you don’t have the time to handle it or cook it right—then, yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard to weigh where your morals need to be, especially for those of us with some shitty do-right gene that leaves us paralyzed in the face of certain situations (perhaps the Trolley Problem, by Philippa Foote?), or guilt-riddled by things we’ve done and choices we made, especially when they cause harm that we can see.

Though it’s in the parenthetical, I think a lot about my moral failings, especially as they relate to others (my moral failings against myself are, of course, super different and very existential). Vegetarianism is great, and makes me feel good about my actions as a consumer. My past cruelty does not. When I was depressed, pre-diagnosis but also afterwards, I was mostly angry and confused. Like a tumor or a pandemic, I infected others with it, and my jokes and observations about it weren’t even funny. I was fiercely defensive of the “uniqueness” of my suffering and made no space for anyone else’s problems. I had no tolerance for them, and lashed out at perceived advantages I didn’t have. I’d violated my own moral code, and since fleshing it out thanks to a four-year philosophy degree, I feel really shit about it.

Vegetarianism isn’t a panacea for my other failings as a moral person—none of us gets to simply make up for one set of wrongs with a separate set of rights. This is the calculus we have to do, and there’s a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to it called “utilitarianism,” maximizing the most good for the most people. The problem with this calculus is you can always skew it so you and your interests come out on top, and you excuse your obvious moral failings as necessary to your own means-ends. 

(The problem with any calculus is that it’s not easy, to be fair.).

We will all be faced with impossible choices every day, of what to wear and eat and how to act and treat others, the best way to navigate moral situations personal and political. The trick, as I understand it with my four-year philosophy degree (have I mentioned that I studied philosophy yet?) Is being fundamentally decent to others. Striving to be better tomorrow than we were today, whatever that looks like for each of us. Learning, especially when we put our foot in it. Making the best choices for ourselves and the things we care about that we can, ideally without lighting too many fires behind us.

The real wisdom can be summed up in one of the only things I remember from AP Bio, a sort of dirty joke which was stuck on the back wall of the classroom: “We all start out as deuterostomes, but some of us stay that way.”

Whether you eat meat or not, or buy organic or fair trade or not, or buy domestic-only, or try to atone for your wrongs directly or indirectly, we could all probably do to evolve a little bit, which I believe Aristotle calls “eudaemonia.” Walking the walk in our union-made, fair-trade-sourced, vegan-but-not-plastic shoes, as it were, to avoid being what 17-year-old bio students and Aristotle would have called assholes.