Today is the day we acknowledge everything we’ve accomplished — as a community, as a movement, as a collective of humans of every shade, size, and creed bellowing, “we can do better!” — in these last three and a half years.

In October of 2015, six of us — Nikki Gloudeman, Ruchika Tulshyan, Kelley Calkins, Ijeoma Oluo, Katie Tandy and Jessica Sutherland — set out, buoyed by a preposterously generous and believing angel investor, Shauna Stark. We took to the digital airwaves armed to the gills with the belief that there were too few publications on the whole of the goddamn internet that told stories as diverse as the world we live in.

Four year later it remains exceedingly rare to find publications that grant the marginalized, the silenced, the vulnerable — people of color, womxn, non-binary folks, the LGBTQIA community, the mentally ill, the poor, the disabled, and every intersection in between — the freedom to write about what they want. What their reality is. What threatens their sanity, safety, body, and mind. What turns their gears and gets them up in the morning.

We started The Establishment with the ambition of fundamentally shifting the narrative of
what an expert looks like, whose book gets quoted, and who gets to write the stories that shape media. Over the years our writers covered reproductive justice, the history of bell bottoms, the plight of trans youth, the power of vaginal bacteria, the impact of black nerdom, the socio-political underpinnings of the name Kevin, the economics of sex, and the danger of binge-watching television — not to mention pregnancy loss, menstruation, surviving sexual violence, neurodivergent art, hair and queer identity, and so, so, so much more. We published a kaleidoscopic rainbow of voices and stories and issues that were — and continue to be — deeply underrepresented then and now.

More than 4,000 stories by 990 writers, to be exact. (And we paid every single writer and creator.)

And people responded. More than a million people every month were reading our stories, and the conversations our content provoked were as nuanced and important as the words on the digital page.

During our time at Matter.VC — an incredible incubator focused on championing media and tech for social good — we also launched a Slack community where these conversations could continue in a safe space among the beautiful and brilliant humans supporting our mission.

We hope that in the past 1,090-odd days of The Establishment’s existence, you read stories that made you feel less alone, lanced your psychological blisters, made you think, or made you confront some perspective or implicit bias or prejudice you’d never quite dared to look at. We hope that you found a writer whose words sang such a beguiling song that you promised to read everything they ever published. (And good grief there were so many that sang their siren song to us!)

We hope that, like us, your fear and rage and anger at the infinite ways we harm one another was eased when your eyes found our site, our community of humans who were all fighting the good fight.

Our writers and readers and supporters are the humans who’ve been instrumental in keeping this beautiful ship afloat and a thank you could never suffice, but thank you. Thank you from the bottom of our throbbing hearts, the glinting depths of our souls — thank you, thank you, a million times we holler till we’re hoarse, thank you.

While we’ve tried just about everything — events, subscriptions, branded content, swag, gated content, and good ol’ fashioned donations and desperate pleas to the Internet Gods — the headwinds facing media are intense, and finding a sustainable revenue model is a Sisyphean feat.

WOULD YOU BE BELIEVE IT’S DIFFICULT TO MONETIZE INTERSECTIONAL FEMINIST MEDIA?!

We had a feeling you might.

And while we are gutted to close The Establishment — we all feel as though a slice of ourselves has gone missing — we’re also prouder than ever. Together we leave a legacy, a body of work that shows the world as it could be.

Times are dire, but know that you are part and parcel of pushing back. Whether you’ve read us, written for us, shared our articles, become a member, or donated your hard-earned moolah — maybe all of the above! — you have fundamentally helped transform our media landscape into something more inclusive, something bigger and better and brighter than the majority of the world thinks or allows to be possible.

Thank you for sharing that vision with us. We’ll never forget that feeling and we hope you won’t either. They say journalism is the first draft of history. Here’s a legacy we’re proud to help create.

Your comrades in combating the darkness,
The Establishment

PS: Please rest assured that all Establishment content will remain in the digital universe for perpetuity — we will be maintaining the site at theestablishment.co and medium.com/the-establishment, just without publishing new content, so you can continue to read and discuss the brilliant words of our extraordinary writers.

Are you still reeling in shock at the presidential election results? Are you pulling at your hair wondering, “How did this country get so racist??” Are you posting statuses about how it is now time to come together to fight racism in the face of current political threats? Have you found yourself saying, “Well, at least this administration is waking people up.”

Hi! I see you there! Welcome to the anti-racism movement. I know you were kind of hoping to sneak in the back of class in the middle of this semester and then raise your hand in a few days to offer up expert opinion like you’ve always been here — but you’ve been spotted, and I have some homework for you, because you’ve missed A LOT and we don’t have the time to go over it all together. I’m glad you are here (I mean, I’d really rather you arrived sooner and I’m a little/lot resentful at how often we have to stop this class to cover all the material for people who are just now realizing that this is a class they should be taking, but better late than never I guess) and I know that once you catch up, you can contribute a lot to the work being done here.

If you are just now feeling the urgency of the need to fight systemic racism, chances are, you are white. I know, I know — I’m starting off with blanket assumptions about you and that doesn’t feel good; you literally don’t have to tell me about it, I’m quite familiar! But seriously, you are probably white or white passing (yes, I’m aware that Ben Carson and Lil Wayne exist and some people of color are capable of holding on to baffling amounts of denial, but I do not have whatever power it would take to break through that level of delusion so let’s just stick with new white folk). I’ve written down this handy list of things that you’ve missed so far that you’re going to need to catch up on, on your own time. This knowledge and preparation will not only make your fight against racism more effective, it will allow us to continue our progress as you catch up.

If you are just now feeling the urgency of the need to fight systemic racism, chances are, you are white.
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This work is the worst.

Woah, I know — I’m starting off in the most negative way possible but look, I need you to know what you are signing up for. Fighting racism is one of the most difficult things you will ever do. I mean, reading this essay might be a little uncomfortable, but it is NOTHING compared to the conversations you are going to have to have, the privilege you are going to have to sacrifice, and the brutality and pain you are going to have to be able to look in the eye every day. Not only will this work get harder and harder the further you dive in, you will also get what at times seems like a very small return on your efforts.

If you want a fucked-up silver lining, you can always remember that people of color (POC) are also doing this work, never have the option of taking a break, and also have to live through the actual racism being fought in the process. So, buck up and get ready.

Your welcome parade. You missed it.

It was a beauty too — floats and streamers and everybody was clapping and cheering. But then it ended and we swept up all the confetti and everyone had to get back to work. Sorry.

Every idea you have for how we can better fight racism has already been discussed.

I know you might be saying “but how can you know that Ijeoma, you don’t know me?” I know. Trust me. I know. You are a 10-year-old explaining to a theoretical physicist how time travel might work. The theoretical physicist has already heard your theory and many others. She probably had some of those same theories when she was 10. And while your interest in time travel and your imagination and intelligence might well lead you to eventually help invent time travel, it will only do so after it has been paired with a lot of the education and experience that the physicist that you are trying to explain time travel to already has. But you are not actually 10, so your ideas are not cute. Keep them in your hat for now while you learn the basics.

Your journey to understanding that racism is a real problem and you have been contributing to it has already been covered.

Please don’t raise your hand to tell us all the tale of how you came to see that you are part of an oppressive system. We were there. When you didn’t know, when your obliviousness was contributing to our oppression, we were there being oppressed. When you were ignoring our cries for help, we saw you look away. As you stumbled along the path of recognition, we were the people you took down with you in each fall. We would rather not go over that all again.

But all is not lost, and your story does have real value — to people who are not in this room, who are afraid of acknowledging the part they play in a White Supremacist society. You can show fellow white people that they can survive the self-reflection necessary to fight racism. Please, share your story with them, it can do real good.

White People: I Want You To Understand Yourselves Better
theestablishment.co

Your ramp-up period. You missed it.

When POC were very, very small, we got a few years of comfort and protection from some of the realities of a White Supremacist society. When we were safe at home with our parents, the effects of systemic racism were muted somewhat, although never entirely. Then when we were 4 or 5 and went to preschool we discovered we were four times more likely to be suspended from preschool, and by the time we went to kindergarten another kid called us a “nigger” or another racial slur, and from then on we’ve been neck-deep in that shit.

So, if you weren’t there, you missed it. Nobody is going to hold your hand through this. If you fuck up, you will be called out. If you slow us down, you may be left on the side of the road. If we are angry at white people, we will say we are angry at white people, and nobody is going to add “not all white people” for your benefit. You will find a way to keep going — we have.

Nobody is going to hold your hand through this. If you fuck up, you will be called out.
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Free, individualized education is not a thing we do anymore.

I know you would prefer a nice, safe sit-down with someone who would patiently walk you through all of this, but we have millions of people we need to get right and an entire system of White Supremacy to fight. We do not have the time or energy. Also — that “free labor from POC” thing is kind of how we got into this mess. The questions you are asking have already been answered by POC — some of whom have already been compensated for their time and effort. Google is your friend. If we have to live it, the least you can do is Google it.

We care about multiple things here — at the same time.

Yes, we are aware of how dangerous this administration is. No, we do not have “better” battles to be picking right now. We are doing multiple things at once, because we cannot be sure if it is the cops that will kill us, or the racist jokes at work fostering an environment where we are seen as unreliable and dispensable that will leave us unable to feed our families. But we know that it all can kill us in body and spirit, one way or another, so we will drag people for cultural appropriation and demand that schools provide a more diverse education to our children, while also raising alarm about the Muslim ban, ICE raids, and police brutality.

You could maybe help pick up some of the slack instead of trying to refocus our efforts in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn’t actually have to live with the consequences of what you think we should just “let go.”

Your privilege is the biggest risk to this movement.

That’s right: the biggest risk. The compromises you are willing to make with our lives, the offenses you are willing to brush off, the everyday actions you refuse to investigate, the comfort you take for granted — they all help legitimize and strengthen White Supremacy. Even worse, when you bring that into our movement and refuse to investigate and challenge it, you slow down our fight against White Supremacy and turn many of our efforts against us. When POC say, “check your privilege,” they aren’t saying it for fun — they are saying it because when you bring unexamined privilege into anti-racist spaces, you are bringing in a cancer.

Your privilege is the biggest benefit you can bring to the movement.

No, I’m not just talking nonsense now. Racial privilege is like a gun that will auto-focus on POC until you learn to aim it. When utilized properly, it can do real damage to the White Supremacist system — and it’s a weapon that POC do not have. You have access to people and places we don’t. Your actions against racism carry less risk.

You can ask your office why there are no managers of color and while you might get a dirty look and a little resentment, you probably won’t get fired. You can be the “real Americans” that politicians court. You can talk to fellow white people about why the water in Flint and Standing Rock matters, without being dismissed as someone obsessed with playing “the race card.” You can ask cops why they stopped that black man without getting shot. You can ask a school principal why they only teach black history one month a year and why they pretty much never teach the history of any other minority group in the U.S. You can explain to your white friends and neighbors why their focus on “black on black crime” is inherently racist. You can share articles and books written by people of color with your friends who normally only accept education from people who look like them. You can help ensure that the comfortable all-white enclaves that white people can retreat to when they need a break from “identity politics” are not so comfortable. You can actually persuade, guilt, and annoy your friends into caring about what happens to us. You can make a measurable impact in the fight against racism if you are willing to take on the uncomfortable truths of your privilege.

Thank God For Identity Politics
theestablishment.co

You will get better at this, but at first you will fuck up a lot, and you will always fuck up a little.

You are a human being and human beings are inherently flawed. You are also a human being who has lived with an entire life of unexamined privilege and racist social programming. You are going to fuck up hardcore. You are here because you are a decent human, and because you are a decent human you are going to feel pretty shitty when you fuck up. You will probably be called out, you may even be dismissed by some folk, and that may make you feel angry and defensive along with feeling shitty. You will need to get used to the pang of guilt from realizing you have fucked up and it has hurt people. Because it will hit you again and again.

It is okay to feel guilty about things that you are guilty of. It will not kill you, but hiding from that guilt and responsibility can kill others. So feel the guilt, realize you are still alive and intact, figure out how to do better, try to make amends if possible, and move forward. You are not alone. We are all fucking this up in various ways, every single one of us. Right now, there are whole big problematic chapters in our movement. We are all trying to do the work and wrestle with the ways in which we are causing more harm than good. But we have no choice but to keep working, even when it sucks.

You are here because you are a decent human, and because you are a decent human you are going to feel pretty shitty when you fuck up.
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I’m glad you are here. I’m angry you are so late — have I mentioned that? I’m very, very angry you are so late because so many of us have been lost fighting without you. And you are going to just have to live with that anger for a while because you deserve it. But I am also glad you are here. I am glad you are seeing more clearly now and have decided that you no longer want to be a part of the problem. Eventually, I may get over my anger and I may even trust you, but until then I’m still going to need you to do the work to help dismantle the system that you have benefited from and have helped maintain for so long.

Because I do need your help, and I do know that you can help in ways that I cannot. Your reward may not be the warm welcome and heartfelt thanks that you might have been hoping for, but a more just and equal world will have to suffice.

The first time it happened, it was my mother. What perfect betrayal, like burning down the house where I was born. She grew tired in secret of the long, curved line of her belly, pendant in sweatpants and spreading over her lap when she sat. She hated huffing and puffing up the stairs, and she worried she’d become diabetic. So she underwent a radical form of weight loss surgery that eliminated over half of her gut — and taught me a powerful lesson in how intolerable it was to be like me.

Four kids and a minivan — nobody expected her to bother about her looks anymore. She didn’t tell anyone she was going to do it; she only told me I’d have to look after my younger siblings on the eve of the surgery. She made up her mind and didn’t want their judgments or their approval. The week before was an orgy of overeating that I recall as a conveyor belt of food. Carbonara thick as oil paint on piles of handmade noodles. Pot roast in flour-thickened gravy, potatoes enough to starve the Irish again, followed by bacon sandwiches that blurted mayonnaise from every side when she bit into them.

Even then, she barely cleared the insurance company’s weight requirement. Her doctor told her to make that last week count. Her best friend joked that she must be going in to get her tits done. She laughed and went under the knife at 4’11” and 285 pounds, nearly as wide as she was tall.

My mother was the first woman I knew who moved out of her own body.
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But what she really wanted was to not be like me anymore.

I went to support groups with her, in the year after the surgery. I didn’t go for the endless stories of these recovering fatties who had traded the feeling of being squeezed by the outside world for being strangled to thinness from within. I didn’t go for the stories of divorce so utterly rote and predictable that I struggled not to laugh. Men often marry fat women for very specific reasons. Conditions change and those men split like bananas. I went along because everyone there had once looked like me — and some of them had very nice clothes. They’d trade with one another, a 16 for a 14, a 12 for an 8. They shrunk before my eyes like icicles in spring. The tables marked 26/24/22 filled up and there was no one else to take those elastic dresses and 3X yoga pants. I showed up with a roll of garbage bags.

Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?

More than once I inherited someone’s favorite outfit in its entirety, replete with the story of how it made her feel. I would wear that outfit later and remember that she wanted to stop being this so badly that she let someone cut out a large section of her intestines. She had an anchor-shaped scar across her entire abdomen. She vomited every day and shit herself at least once a week, but at least, thank god, it was all worth it because she wasn’t fat anymore.

There were other people I knew who moved out of their bodies, and I could understand why: They knew they had to go. They were being evicted anyway; blown knees and exhausted pancreas pushing them toward desperate measures. Weight loss surgery seemed a fair price if the alternative was death.

But in nearly every case, the alternative was my life.

I used to joke with people that I was my mother’s before picture, in the ubiquitous and devastating tradition of photos taken to reveal dramatic weight loss, the punchline for every ad that sells weight loss to women. Beforewe had shared a silhouette, titanic ass and olympian hips, a pear-shaped and pendulous swing we rode through the world. After I had trouble believing we were the same species, let alone iterations of the same bloodline. Long legs and short arms; freckles and the same crooked pinky finger. But disparity of scale suggested two different climates; two long-separated branches on the tree of life.

Before, my mother had dealt with the way people refuse to take fat women seriously. She had endured the infantilization and desexualization, and she was ready to trade it in. Two days after the surgery, she ignored her doctor’s orders and tried to chug a coke. I watched her stand over the kitchen sink with brown foam pouring from her nose and mouth, knowing herself chastened not by a paternalistic and fatphobic doctor for once, but by the physical reality that her new stomach was the size of a Dixie cup. A month later, I watched her black out after eating a Starburst; the sugar dumped into her bloodstream so fast that it acted like heroin when it hit her vitals. She traded the agony of perception for daily physical torment. After years of trying and failing at diets that never worked for anyone, she chose the nuclear option. She weighed her options and chose this over living a life like mine.

For me, it’s only the surgery that achieves the sharp sensation of abandonment, rejection, and betrayal. I’ve seen friends through every diet, every justification of denial, misery, and elimination. A friend or a cousin will one day lose the ability to converse about anything but carbs or sugar or whole foods or animal products. I’ll stop listening and start nodding. I know they’re trying to move out, move away. They cannot bear to be what we are anymore.

The fat people who become obsessed with counting calories and steps, the ones who try to vacate their bodies a little at a time . . . I don’t worry about them. They’ll never make it. Sooner or later they all come back.

The ones who follow in my mother’s footsteps are the ones that really leave. They get something cut up and cut out, they install new hardware to stop them from eating the world. They pack it in and they don’t return. I stay me.

I’ll be polite to my fellow fatties when they fall prey to the pressure; I understand what they’re going through. Thin people talking diets fill me up with liquid murder. I cannot abide their careful warding, hanging up knots of garlic and crossing themselves three times when they see me coming. I will not listen to their terrified superstition or their smug pseudoscience when they tell me again and again what they are willing to go through rather than become like me. When their talk rolls around to calories and their moral obligation to hate themselves, I typically spread out as wide as I can. I can expand like a jellyfish; it is a particular advantage of the very fat. I conform to the shape of my container like a water balloon. Displaying maximum width, I’ll eat anything I can get my hands on while they talk. On one notable occasion I shut down a discussion on the evils of white rice by calmly eating a trick-or-treating sized bag of mini Snickers while nodding my fat head to show I understood.

In outraged weariness of being seen as a cautionary whale, I seek out ways to weaponize my own image. I haunt thin people at the gym as the Ghost of Fatness Yet to Come. It started off as a demoralizing phenomenon; I began by refusing to shrink away from the pained glances and open hostility I receive for having the audacity to live in a fat body without making a constant apology for myself. My gym in San Francisco is a caricature of bodily obsession. Its ad campaigns are notorious, and lithe trainers cruise the floor like sharks sniffing for blood. There are no other fat people there. An orca among eels, I cast my shadow over their swimming and striving, and they look upon me in naked terror. I am the reason they get up at 5 a.m. and wear a monitor that counts their steps. I am the worst thing that can happen.

‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me

One after another, the fat people in my life have left me. Not through diet or exercise, not through the much-vaunted “lifestyle change.” They get the surgery and they cross over to the other side. Many of them have been self-accepting, even fat-positive. They came through hell to love themselves and live in their bodies without apologizing. But they’ve gotten tired of haunting the gym. They get tired of people lecturing and begging. They get tired of men at the bar shouting “man the harpoons.” They get tired of their seatmates on airplanes asking to be moved. They get tired of hearing they were too fat to fuck, or that this dress does not come in that size. They’ve done the impossible math: one set of humiliations they’re willing to trade for another. They come to agree with our thin friends; this life is the absolute worst fucking thing that can happen to a person.

I made new friends with a fat girl. She is beautiful and smart and holds an enviable position in my community. I tried several times to engage her in the casual sorority of fat girls, to talk brands and clothes and share a little eye roll at the way things are. She rebuffed me in a kind but cold way, and I didn’t know why. I thought spitefully that she might be one of them, in long recovery from the knife and not yet passing for thin. Months later, she published her own story of dysphoria in a lyrical cry that broke my heart. I adjusted. I took another step in the direction the conclusion toward which most of my life has been leading me: No matter how much they hurt, the actions of others are entirely for and about themselves. They aim those harpoons at their own hearts.

My mother did not opt for invasive surgery to leave me behind. She did it because was tired of the inescapable fight that is life in a fat body. I am not the victim here. I am only a casualty.

Yet another friend went in for the surgery, early this year. I tried to look at her life without judgment, without centering my own emotions, and figure out why she would choose this. We’re old enough now that vanity itself does not seem like enough. Maybe she’s lonely and thinks this is the answer. Maybe she wants to travel without being a spectacle and an inconvenience. Maybe she just wants to live in another body before she dies. In the end it doesn’t matter. She’s doing the thing that everyone but me will understand. It’s what they would do in her place.

The first day I knew she was home and recovering, I briefly considered having a dozen donuts delivered to her door.

But I didn’t. Because there are worse things a person can be than fat.

To read this content in Comic Sans, thanks to one of our awesome readers (That means you, Abby!!), click here.

It’s cool to hate comic sans. But it’s also problematic.

The day my sister, Jessica, discovered Comic Sans, her entire world changed. She’s dyslexic and struggled through school until she was finally diagnosed in her early twenties, enabling her to build up a personal set of tools for navigating the written world.

“For me, being able to use Comic Sans is similar to a mobility aid, or a visual aid, or a hearing aid,” she tells me while we’re both visiting our family in Maryland. “I have other ways of writing and reading, but they’re not like they are for someone who’s not dyslexic.”

The irregular shapes of the letters in Comic Sans allow her to focus on the individual parts of words. While many fonts use repeated shapes to create different letters, such as a “p” rotated to made a “q,” Comic Sans uses few repeated shapes, creating distinct letters (although it does have a mirrored “b” and “d”). Comic Sans is one of a few typefaces recommended by influential organizations like the British Dyslexia Association and the Dyslexia Association of Ireland. Using Comic Sans has made it possible for Jessica to complete a rigorous program in marine zoology at Bangor University in Wales.

The day my sister discovered Comic Sans, her entire world changed.
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Yet despite the fact that Comic Sans is recommended for those with dyslexia, the gatekeepers of graphic-design decency routinely mock those who use it as artistically stunted and uneducated.

It turns out the ongoing joke about the idiocy of Comic Sans is ableist.

Microsoft font designer Vincent Connare created Comic Sans — based on the lettering by John Costanza in the comic book The Dark Knight Returns — to be used for speech bubbles in place of the unacceptably formal Times New Roman. The font was released in 1994.

“Comic Sans was NOT designed as a typeface but as a solution to a problem with the often overlooked part of a computer program’s interface, the typeface used to communicate the message,” Connare says on his website. “The inspiration came at the shock of seeing Times New Roman used in an inappropriate way.”

Today, Comic Sans is the font everyone loves to hate. There’s a petition to ban it from Gmail and myriad stories about how terrible it is. Even Weird Al chastises people who use Comic Sans in his music video for “Tacky.” (“Got my new résumé/it’s printed in Comic Sans.”)

A Ban Comics Sans movement began in 1999 with graphic designers Holly and David Combs. In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Holly said, “Using Comic Sans is like turning up to a black-tie event in a clown costume.” Their manifesto states, “By banding together to eradicate this font from the face of the earth we strive to ensure that future generations will be liberated from this epidemic and never suffer this scourge that is the plague of our time.” Their website sells t-shirts for anyone who wants to drop $26 to make sure their stance on this font plague is clear.

There are other websites dedicated to ridding the world of Comic Sans as well, including a Ban Comic Sans Tumblr page and ComicSansCriminal.com. The latter frustratingly has “Alternative Dyslexia Fonts” on its nav bar, as if acknowledging that attacking Comic Sans disadvantages those who are dyslexic is enough to absolve the site of its ableism. (It is not.)

The line of thinking behind these movements is “quite elitist,” Jessica says. “It’s belittling and condescending.”

The line of thinking behind anti-Comic Sans movements is elitist, belittling, and condescending.
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I asked Jessica to tell me what she’s up against. She’s been told that Comic Sans is “unprofessional. That it’s juvenile. That it’s stupid. That it basically shouldn’t be used for anything at all, unless it is a comic.”

There are fonts that have been specifically created for people with dyslexia, all of which lack the clean minimalism or elegant balance and perfect kerning favored by typography snobs. But they are crucial disability aids. Some are free, such as Lexie Readable (which calls itself “Comic Sans for grown-ups”), Open-Dyslexic, and Dyslexie. Others are for purchase or are publisher-owned and unavailable to the general public.

But for Jessica, Comic Sans is still the best. “I don’t use Open Dyslexic because it’s not as easy for me to read,” Jessica says. “It’s not my font. I was dyslexic before Open Dyslexic happened. My mind has been getting used to Comic Sans.”

Not everyone with dyslexia uses Comic Sans to help them read and write. “Other people with dyslexia find that having colored paper makes it easier,” Jessica says. “Or some people find Arial easier.”

Comic Sans and Arial are readily available because they are included by default in many operating systems and word-processing programs, and they are web-safe fonts. A pamphlet from the office of student services at my sister’s school on accommodations for dyslexic students is printed in Comic Sans on blue paper in both English and Welsh. Other common fonts suggested by the British Dyslexia Association include Century Gothic, Verdana, Calibri, and Trebuchet. (Trebuchet was also designed by Connare.)

According to my sister, the truly villainous font is the ubiquitous Times New Roman. “I don’t know anyone [dyslexic or not] who reads Times New Roman well. It’s definitely my least favorite font.” To her, the serifs turn the text into a dense blur at small sizes. My sister tells me of a particular time Times New Roman made school unnecessarily difficult for her during a tutorial on scientific data analysis and graphing software.

The truly villainous font is the ubiquitous Times New Roman.
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“The lecturer printed out these handouts in Times New Roman. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god. This is so easy!’ I handed him the thing back and I was like, ‘It’s not that your instructions are difficult, I cannot read them. I’ve nearly cried three times during this.’”

Since the handout was available online, she was able to modify it into a readable format.

“What I did is I eventually downloaded the handout, blew it up to 16 point font, turned the paper green, and turned it into Comic Sans.” Then the assignment became just as easy as it was for her classmates.

Sometimes people ask Jessica why she doesn’t begin in Comic Sans and then hand in her papers in Arial or Times New Roman.

“Have you ever tried to format a scientific paper when you have to get everything lined up so specifically? You’ve got all of your legends that have to go underneath your figures. 12 points in Comic Sans is not 12 points in Arial is not 12 points in Times New Roman. You can spend hours formatting your paper in Comic Sans and then turn it into 12 point Arial and it will mess up everything.”

In addition, she cannot proofread in a font that’s difficult for her to read. “You cannot fix formatting errors you cannot see!” To her, asking her to change to a font she cannot adequately use “is the epitome of ableism.” Sometimes she can ask someone in her cohort to help her spot errors, but it’s a lot to ask. “I can and have had people in my class look over my work, but you need to understand that we’re not collaborators, they’re my peers. This is an encroachment on their time.”

Asking her to change her font is asking her to take a task that is already very difficult for someone with dyslexia and demanding that she take extra steps to please the aesthetic preferences of someone for whom reading is easy.

“If you work with someone with dyslexia, maybe even if you don’t know if they’re dyslexic, if something is laid out well, if someone has gone through the time to carefully format something, please accept it in whatever color, whatever font people want to use. You never really know what is helping someone. If it’s not hurting you, then just leave it alone.”

People without dyslexia need empathy for those who need concessions to manage the disability. “You have to think about how massive this issue is for me, and you have to think about how tiny the issue is for you.”

In summary, she says:

“Get the fuck over yourself.”

If there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

White people, you have a motherfucking problem.

You lie too goddamn much. You teach your kids to lie too goddamn much. You tell your families to lie too goddamn much. All you fucking do is lie and lie and lie about lying to the point that you are killing everyone, including yourselves.

You lie at the highest levels, so much so that we expect it from our elected officials. Our presidents have told lies that resulted in the death of more than 50,000 American soldiers. You lie about civilian massacres. You lie about terrorist attacks against Black Americans. You lie about sex education and risk the health of your children. You lie about your friends’ qualifications to run national agencies, which results in unnecessary deaths. You lie about your experiences while reporting. You lie about American history. You lie about historical heroes. You lie about slavery. You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.

You lie about the littlest things, like if you ate the last cookie. You lie to your spouse about their annoying habits. You lie to your kids about how to make babies. You lie to your neighbors about your debt. You lie to your boss about sleeping in. You lie to your co-workers about your weekend. You lie to your doctor about your body. You lie to everyone and say you are fine. And you lie to yourself about how wonderful and nice a human being you are.

You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.
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But you aren’t nice. You wear a veneer of nice. You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy. When you start to smell, you use mouthwash and mints to hide it. When you start to visibly decay, you try to hide it with whitening gel. When you start to hurt, you take pain medication. When the pain becomes too great, you finally seek help — and that help is to numb yourself, pull out the nerve, then slap a crown on it so that no one can see your empty core. Instead they see a perfect veneer passing for a healthy tooth. But it is a tooth that feels no pain and only emulates the others.

In case you didn’t know, that ability to feel is called empathy. And as far as I can see, white America has none.

Or maybe you do. Maybe you have empathy, but it’s overshadowed by the centuries of stinky, infected rot left by your presidents, your congressmen, your police, your lawyers, your corporations, your lobbyists, your business leaders, your forefathers, and your motherland, all in the name of colonialism. Maybe you don’t know what empathy even feels like anymore.

Human rights violations are so interwoven with American history that you can no longer tell what’s right . . . if indeed you ever could.

You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy.
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I know, I know, not all white people. My husband is white. Except I wrote an entire fucking essay about how I needed to put his ass in check for his lack of empathy. Except that I spent years tuning him into what the fuck is going on with the huge swath of the population that doesn’t look like him. And I still deal with the empathy-less white people he’s brought into my life. Not often, because I love myself too much to deal with that weird combination of superficiality and toxicity that permeates white society and dictates their interactions, but still. They are in my life, kind of.

And at work? The fact that these people categorize murder by cop as politics makes me want to throw a goddamn table. “I don’t talk politics at work.” People were murdered and you liken it to the ego-stroking and ass-kissing office bullshit that I put up with for my check? Get the fuck outta here!

Seriously, get the fuck outta here.

Can you really not see the difference? Does this really not resonate with you? Does the constant replaying of the murder of Black people really not matter?

You don’t have to answer that. I already know. We aren’t human to you. We never have been.

But you won’t admit that because it means telling the truth. And if there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

I keep asking myself — when will they see the monster in the mirror? When will they see who they really are? What they do? How they destroy the world with their endless quest for power and the tireless subjugation of others to do it? When will they admit their fucking inability to see the humanity in difference?

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if so many white people didn’t have so much fucking power. But y’all do, and your consistent abuse of that power has destroyed countless lives and continues to do so. From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.

But I have hope for you.

My hope is that one day, enough of you will stop lying to yourselves and heal. That one day you will stop lying to yourself and admit that you are an empty shell, existing on the continued pain of others as you beg, borrow, and steal from EVERYONE else to feel relevant.

One day you will stop killing everyone who doesn’t fit your image.

One day you will stop attacking anyone who questions your decayed foundation.

One day you will actually love instead of trying to destroy people who live, love, and somehow thrive despite your oppression.

From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.
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In these times of tragedy, we talk about Black healing. It’s a necessary conversation about something we have a lot of practice doing. Hundreds of years worth, actually.

What we need is white accountability. Are you strong enough to do it?

I’ll wait.

Sometimes you have to face hard truths by stating the painful facts baldly. I am 33, I have never been kissed, and the only guy who ever wanted to hold hands with me was killing time while he tried to find someone hot enough to date. I know this because that’s what he told my housemate when he hit on her.

To the best of my knowledge, no one who has seen me in person has ever been attracted to me. I’m not catcalled or harassed. The only relationships I’ve had have been online. The only boyfriend who met me offline would not do more than give me a hug. I have met potential partners from the Internet, only to watch the interest in their eyes die when they see me.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to. And I am ashamed — in part because this is something no one ever talks about.

I often feel like the only woman on the face of the planet who no one is attracted to.
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We turn virginity into a punchline — a sign of misplaced religious conviction, physical grotesqueness, or social ineptitude. We try to escape the reality that sex is a choice that some are never offered, and ignore the fact that trumpeting sexual freedom also has the power to wound deeply. The sexually inexperienced (especially those with no choice in the matter) feel a strong urge to hide this fact, in order to let people assume a common level of sexual history. It’s a lot easier than trying to explain the truth, and it hurts less, too.

I’ve sat through countless conversations with groups of women, praying that the conversation wouldn’t turn to sex, cringing inwardly when it inevitably did, and trying to laugh with the others until the topic changed and I could relax again, my secret safe. For now.

When I was growing up, the conversation was always about how to say “no,” how to not be pressured into sex, how to turn down a date honestly and fairly. My educators, ministers, and youth group leaders never told me what to do when I wasn’t pressured, when I wasn’t asked out on dates. Teenage me was practically quivering with excitement over my first chance to say “no,” because even “no” contained the possibility that I could choose to say “yes.” But the question never came.

I thought that, perhaps, things would get better in college. Surely, the smart guys would at least be attracted to my intellect. Instead, while I made friends with lots of great guys who I’m still close with, I was never once asked on a date. No one ever tried to cop a feel at an event or in the movie theater. There was never the hint of a hookup. Perhaps, if my upbringing hadn’t been so conservative, or if I’d had a few dates in high school, I would have had the courage to ask someone out for myself instead of waiting, but that was unthinkable to me.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended. Most of my friends got married right out of college, and those that didn’t at least had dates. I sat down to take inventory: Why wasn’t anyone interested? Was it my appearance? I’ve always been on the large side of curvy, but I knew plenty of girls my size and larger who had found happy relationships. Was it my face? I’ve never been pretty, but again, I knew women who were objectively less “pretty” than me who had found love. Was it my personality? I’m shy and reserved (unless you bring up Star Wars or Dune, then good luck getting me to shut up), but I’m comfortable talking to friends. I was part of several active social groups, and enjoyed spending time with friends. I couldn’t find a persuasive reason why no one was interested in me. And in the decade or so since college, as the disinterest has persisted, I still haven’t.

I was so confused. This wasn’t how the movies went. This wasn’t how the novels ended.
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Over the past few years, I’ve made a certain amount of peace with being single. It took some time, especially since I could find very little to help me. The books I found on being single were almost exclusively geared toward “being single until you get married because of course you will.” The singles activities at my church were rare, and everyone in them was a good 40 years older than me. I eventually realized that I could not rely on a guide to help me; I had to find out what the single life meant for me. I had to build a life of my own, instead of waiting to find my “other half.”

It’s not my preferred choice, but I’m not going to fling myself at someone out of desperation. This sense of acceptance comes and goes. There are days when I’m tempted to run outside and proposition the first man I can find. But most days, I just accept that this is my reality right now, and change will not happen quickly or easily. Regardless, the frustration lingers: I would have liked it to be a real choice, not a matter of mere acceptance.

I’ve tried talking about my story a few times. I’ve pushed back when people assume that certain levels of romantic history are universal; when people make offhand remarks that assume that, given my age, I’ve had several intimate relationships, I correct them. I try to remind people that “virgin” is not an insult, and that sex isn’t the guarantor of adulthood. The rare times I’ve brought up this pain, I’ve been told that I simply didn’t notice guys who were interested, or that I just needed to “be myself” and admirers would miraculously appear.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience. The insistence that I don’t know my own life. The appropriation of my narrative to turn it into a more palatable story for the comfort of others. I’ve tried to understand why my story makes others uncomfortable. It’s possible that it’s because it introduces an element of uncertainty into all relationships: What if a lot of it comes down to luck? If there’s no real reason behind my lack of relationships, maybe it’s just a coincidence, an accident of chance. And that means they found their partners due to chance as well, and their lives might have been like mine if a few things had gone differently. And so they rationalize and explain my story; if it’s due to something I’m not doing, then they are safe in their relationships. They didn’t make my mistakes.

Female friends try to assure me that I am attractive, but have no explanation for why men don’t seem to agree. They don’t understand why I rebuff their compliments, assuming that I’m only operating from a foundation of low self-esteem, when in actuality I’m just trying to keep my grip on reality. If it were true that I were attractive, then at some point, someone would have acted on said attraction. No one has, and my narrative accounts for the truth better than their perspective does.

That’s what hurts the worst: the absolute refusal of others to believe me when I talk about my experience.
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And yet, my friends seem to think my rejection of their narrative is a personal rebuff; I spend my energy protecting their feelings from the truth of mine. I laugh away the pain that runs deep so they won’t feel sorry for me. I go to their bridal showers, their weddings, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I enjoy dinners at their houses, trying not to be jealous of the cookware that they received when they married. No one throws showers for single women; all my cookware comes from the thrift store or the cheap aisle at the grocery store.

I wish I could talk more about others who have shared this experience. But the truth is, I don’t know of any others within my personal circles. I have many single friends, but all of them have had their share of admirers. According to CDC research conducted a few years ago, 2% of women age 25–44 (and 3% of men in the same age range) have never had vaginal sex. Surely some of these millions of virgins include those like me, who want physical intimacy but have never been offered it.

But we hide our stories, afraid of being judged, laughed at, or worse, pitied. We miss out on the support of others with similar stories.

The question I find myself facing now is whether or not to keep trying. As L.M. Montgomery wrote in The Blue Castle, “Yes, I’m ‘still young’ — but that’s so different from young.” The reality is that if no one has wanted more than a hug from me by now, that’s not likely to change as I age. I don’t want to be single forever. I would very much like to be kissed at least once. Do I keep trying to find someone, or do I accept my situation for what it is, and direct my energies elsewhere? Will other people let me accept being unwillingly single, or will they keep pushing me to believe that I am somehow secretly attractive, in the face of all experiential evidence that suggests otherwise?

I may never stop wanting my story to change, but I will keep fighting to tell it my way. I intend to cling to the truth, even when it’s a painful one. I hope others with more normative experiences will start to understand, and find ways to include women like me in discussions about sex and love, without resorting to alienating comments about what “all women” experience.

We’re all women, we all have our stories, and we all want the chance to tell them with dignity and truth.

Most people I knew were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

I wasn’t trying to lie — not to outright deceive, anyway. I liked to think I was getting straight to the point. People were always asking questions that I already knew they didn’t want the real answers to. They wanted to be reassured and sent on their way. Like when my mom gave me the rest of her finely smoked bacon before she and my dad went on vacation. It was a way of thanking me for a ride to the airport. Though if they had ever looked in my refrigerator, they would have known I was trying to cut down on my meat consumption. If they paid attention to how I lived, they’d have asked for a ride a week in advance.

“So how was the bacon?” my mom asked a week later. They had dusted my backseat in a light layer of sand. I told her that it was great. It was fantastic. I knew it was, she had told me so herself. Its quality had not diminished because I left it on my counter overnight and did not want to eat afterwards. It wasn’t not great because I threw it away.

“Okay, good.” My mom nodded and we said nothing more about it.

“Well, that’s on you,” my ex-girlfriend, August, might say. She was the kind of woman who was always showing up for friends who sometimes got so worked up that they had to take space and not talk for months. She liked to encourage me to take some space myself or take up more space or create space — the space around me wasn’t right.

One night, August and I got drinks with some new friends of hers and when I dropped her off at home I said, “That was fun, thanks.”

“Was it?” she asked.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said again. I meant it. We all sat around a cozy booth in a bar I liked and laughed and drank cheap beer and drew pictures of our young queer selves. I was charming and understanding and funny — because I knew that was what August had invited me there to be — and we really were an excellent team in that particular department. I enjoyed being those people together. But now with her pouting out the window, I wasn’t so sure.

“I don’t know anything about you. I tell you everything about me and you never tell me anything. Why is that?” she asked.

I watched her head shake and I tried to imagine that several months ago, we had not sat in this same car, in this exact driveway, her head faced away from me in the exact same posture, while I cried because she was breaking my heart and she had asked me to stop because I was making her uncomfortable. That this kind of pressure on her was exactly why we were breaking up.

So, now, as we sat again in her driveway and she wondered aloud why I was not open and forthcoming with her, I told her what I thought a person without my painful memory of that driveway conversation might find helpful. “We have different ways of being friends,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie, it was absolutely true. But it wasn’t everything I was thinking right then, and I knew I was not taking up the requisite amount of space.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m not mad or anything, I just want to know about you.”

“I know,” I said. “I really care about you.”

“I don’t just care about you, I love you a lot.” August said this with more than a hint of exasperation. She leaned over to give me one of those car hugs, where you hang half of your body over someone else and then pat each other. I felt simultaneously stupid and comforted by this because it was sharing myself with another person, but also more of a redistribution of weight than anything else.

I went home after that. I put on my t-shirt that featured a Mt. Rushmore configuration of adorable kittens. I watched Friday Night Lights and lusted after Tim Riggins and Tammy Taylor until that got boring. Then I tried to read an old New Yorker article about Jeb Bush and charter schools, but fell asleep instead. I woke up a little while later and the lights were still on. I considered that maybe in another version of my life, there could be a person who would know to turn the light off for me, and how nice it would be to let them do that.

“So what did you do last night?” my co-worker Ben asked me the next day. He popped his little head over the top of the wall between our cubicles.

“Nothing,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining that I’d spent the evening working toward a productive friendship with my ex-girlfriend. So many of my friends tended to scoff at that idea. But then, most of my friends had an incredibly easy time finding people to turn their lights on and off for them, so I didn’t think we were operating with the same value system.

Ben seemed to notice that I was just standing there too long, fingers hovering over my keyboard. “Must have been some crazy nothing,” he said. “Mama’s a little slo-ho this morning.”

I sighed. “Mama did have some beers last night and then she didn’t sleep all that well.”

Ben shook his head. “Taking a page from Daddy, I see. Well the aspirin’s on my desk if you need it.”

This was the kind of lie that I didn’t feel terrible about because Ben knew I was not telling him everything and he didn’t mind. Ben also just wanted to get straight to the point.

“Okay,” he continued. “If you had to be stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean with me or Allan, who would you choose?” He paused to adjust his glasses. “And remember that I’ll feel bad if you choose Allan, but that I would also understand because he is more handsome than me and I’d choose him because I’d hope he’d hold my head to his perfectly hairy chest and then fuck me.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Don’t worry, I like you better than Allan. If I were going to die on this raft, I’d want it to be with you.”

“Awww, thanks,” he said and reached his hand down from his giraffe height to pat my shoulder.

“But,” I added, “if there was any chance of a rescue — any at all — I’d better be with Allan, because Daddy would definitely do something stupid and get us killed.”

“It’s like I can’t even argue with that, because you’re so right,” Ben said. His voice betrayed his unreasonable gratefulness to me. “You’re so wise,” he murmured, and I heard him descend into his desk chair.

These were the kinds of truths that my friends applauded me for dispensing. I didn’t know what to do with the fact that I felt no ownership, no special relationship to these types of “truths” — that they were no more or less real to me than the greatness of the bacon or mine and August’s friendship. Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. There were just other peoples’ versions of reality that you could acknowledge and learn your way around and eventually find a reasonable place to stand within. That was what I meant when I said that I liked to get straight to the point. I wanted to find a good place to stand in other peoples’ lives, where I liked the scenery and felt that I was wearing appropriate shoes.

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Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist.
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In Ben’s case, he was far too logical to ever let me die in a raft. But we both carried the hope that his manic hysteria — which was the trademark of his nighttime alter-ego, Blackout Ben — would claim a greater part of his life and lead to his satisfaction one day. It was a familiar sentiment. I, too, hoped one day to become bold and satisfied. And so I pretended that we were. That was the short, sandy beach where our realities overlapped, and it was enough to make us feel united in the world.

There were other cases that weren’t as easy, but which I’d learned to navigate, all the same.

“Would you consider me to be high maintenance?” Goldie, my first love and now an exquisitely costumed drag king, texted me one evening. As if our relationship had not been born out of a shared obsession with Goldie. As if the question, itself, were not the answer. It was 10:30 pm in California, too late in New York City for unloaded banter.

“Ferraris are high maintenance,” I texted Goldie back. “They also feature high performance.”

“Thank you, that’s right,” came their prompt reply, and I heard nothing else for a week.

This was all well and good, though sometimes I lost track of the points I was trying to get to. With Goldie, it seemed that for more than a decade, the point had been to efficiently remind each other that we knew each other — that this prevented us from being entirely alone in the world. But it did occur to me that getting straight to the point left certain territories of our lives — namely the more recently developed, somewhat more mature portions — perfect mysteries to each other.

And it wasn’t just with Goldie. There were large swaths of my life that nobody knew about. This was absurd because I had so many people in my life and they all knew so much about me. Still, there were nights when I went out walking, just to let the sharp prick of the stars make me feel lonely.

Sometimes I went into a dark dive bar alone and ordered a whiskey soda. I drank it very slowly and closed my eyes to really listen to the music. I made up dishwashing challenges for myself. I stood in front of the mirror after I got dressed and told myself, “Girl, I don’t know what’s up with that thing your pants are doing, but damn, you look cute today.” I played the keyboard with my headphones on and recorded catchy tunes that got stuck in my head. My voice was so deep in the morning, so high and bright at night. I drank coffee on my tiny deck and imagined that the whoosh of the train passing by was the sound of the ocean. There was so much delicate beauty in my life.

And everybody had ruined it, just by being there. Though there was an exception.

“I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is,” was Sophie’s conclusion. This observation was not unlike one of the “truths” that I would dispense myself. This made Sophie the lone fixture on the lawn of my life. It didn’t matter where she stood, it was always reasonable and did not require shoes — that was my highest level of friendship. We both lived for the moments when the movie we were watching on Netflix paused to buffer and rendered an otherwise flawlessly beautiful woman, horrifying. We believed success was living in the eye of a storm — in absolute calm, but at the center of everything.

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‘I’m worried about your particular happiness because nobody else knows how fragile it is.’
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There was no direct point to get to with Sophie and so I never pretended anything. We wrote long meandering letters addressing every detail and turn of thought in preparing for and executing routine errands, like getting gas or going to the grocery store. When she came to visit me in the first apartment I’d ever lived in alone, she said, “It feels exactly like you, like home.”

I couldn’t have agreed more. But I understood that this sentiment was not even remotely available to anyone else. I had to consider that the series of direct points to which I’d been intent on adhering, had led me astray. Because I was 30 years old, and while I didn’t expect to fall into deranged love anymore, while I didn’t presume I’d be moved on a daily basis, I did hope that one day I would find others to contribute to the delicate beauty in my life. At least one person for whom the conflation of me and home would be natural. Which is to say, I still believed in an uncynical kind of romance. And if this wasn’t happening through my active social life, then maybe my writing would take me there. Either way, it hinged on my ability to share my most private of property.

So the only reasonable action, I supposed, was to leave the gate open, if you will. To let people wander where they would and give them the chance to try to find a good place to stand. I began with August, who, as a poet and my ex-girlfriend, was already familiar with the landscape. Even if she couldn’t contribute to the delicate beauty herself, I knew she would facilitate my own contributions.

“Let’s rent a cabin,” she emailed me one afternoon. I figured since she was the expert on space, I’d follow her advice. I chose a little place in Mendocino, in California, surrounded by trees and nothing else. I imagined I would reconfigure my space into a little donut, the hole of which would contain the final touches on the novel I’d been wrestling with for three years. Why not? Everything was tenuous. Reality did not exist. If we declared ourselves good friends, we were. If my novel sounded finished, it was. Afterward, in some other reality, these things would not be more or less true, but August would be there to remind me that I wanted them to be.

She and I had dinner together one evening in a beautiful restaurant with a high wood beam ceiling and low, warm candlelight. It reminded me of a cabin. “I can’t wait to get away and just disappear into my book,” I told her.

“What if you could do that all the time?” she asked me. “You’ve been wanting to quit your job since I met you. You might want to get started on that sometime.”

“I might,” I said. Then, instead of going home and putting on my kitten shirt and looking for life advice from Friday Night Lights, I said to her, “I might also need to admit that if I haven’t quit yet, I lack the will and gumption to be a real writer. I fear I may not want it enough. Or maybe I fear that I do.”

August pushed the last of our chocolate torte at me and shrugged. “You might, you might not. Don’t you think just doing it is better than all of this navel-gazing? I, for one, believe in you.” She said this like it was no big deal, but in that moment, we’d finally found appropriate places to stand, and it nearly brought me to tears.

I had to admit that I was feeling emotional. Assessing the value of my life and its collection of lies and truths seemed urgent because I’d suddenly gotten accepted into a writing residency in Vermont. It was not an altogether life-changing situation. However, if I were getting straight to the point with myself, I had really wanted it to be. I’d applied to the program knowing it would make a graceful way to leave my job. If I were going to brashly dispense my own “truth,” the entire purpose of all of my private property — each delicate beauty — was to have a rich and endless abyss from which to pull threads for my writing. And the purpose of my writing was to create public pieces of my own private property, where myself and maybe others could feel that they’d come home.

Which wasn’t happening. Or at least it wasn’t happening at any rate that could propel me into the eye of any storm.

“I have to agree with August,” Sophie sighed. She didn’t like having to agree with anyone who had ever made me cry in a driveway. But she and I saved all of our letters so that when we became famous writers one day, the journey there would be preserved for any curious bystanders. There was no question about the point of our lives and yet, it had never seemed obvious how to get directly to it.

For the first time, I allowed myself to go around and ask for advice — not for validation, but for actual answers. “What do you think?” I asked everyone: the glitter-faced women with whom I sat around in Dolores Park on Pride, old friends who liked to make bread and cookies, new friends who liked tiki bars, my sunglass-clad art friends in LA and New York, my aunt who gave me the best gifts I had ever received. “Is it crazy and selfish to quit my job and run away with my writing? Am I just ungrateful? Will we all die alone anyway?”

“Hmmm,” they said. I think it was safe to say that everyone had been aware of my private property for some time and had wanted to look in without being intrusive. Now that my proverbial gate was unlatched, they all hesitated briefly. My internal landscape was more cluttered and hilly, less sunny than they’d imagined. Not everyone appreciated my brand of delicate beauty. Eventually, however, they offered me a collective, “You know, why not?”

When I asked Sophie what I should be doing with my life she said, “The hard part is that you’ve yet to fall into serious decline and so it could start at any time. But that’s okay because you already have such a beautiful life. You can always make that again.”

Sophie was leaving her job in a month. There was a new life stage ahead of her, in which her boyfriend was going to attempt to become a lawyer in New York City and they were likely going to become a family — the kind that included children and a home, maybe even a legal contract. It didn’t change the point of Sophie’s life now, but I didn’t see how it couldn’t eventually have an effect on where we would stand. I told her as much, of course.

She had answered my phone call while riding her bicycle and I heard the click of her chain and the rush of her breathing while she considered this. “I don’t know who I’ll become yet, but if all else fails, I think I’d like the option to be happy,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, maybe,” I replied.

I was generally all-in or all-out. I wasn’t sure I knew how to maintain a back-up plan like that. I saw friends most nights of the week, felt fleetingly alive and then went home to put on my kitten shirt and then watch TV or write or cry or read until I fell asleep with the light on. There was a certain beauty in that. It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness. It did keep my mind and my heart in constant motion, but it wasn’t bold and it wasn’t satisfying.

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It both was and was not comfortable. It both was and was not happiness.
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I understood, then, why my parents wanted me to have their high-quality bacon in the first place. And why — when I told my dad that I was going to Vermont and quitting my job, too — he looked crazed and said to me, “Do you want to be poor and helpless at 50, is that what you want? What you’re supposed to do is support yourself and maybe have a good time doing it!”

“You can’t be like Elizabeth,” my mom added sternly. Elizabeth, her massage therapist, who unequivocally gave the best massages my mom had ever received. Elizabeth, who purportedly couldn’t get her cavity drilled because she had no dental insurance.

My parents wanted my reality to be like theirs. Everyone who loved me did, too. Most people I knew and even some I didn’t, were quite invested in my happiness. So much so, that I lived in fear of disappointing them.

It was so much easier to construct half-truths and direct points that we could use to skirt around the real issue. Happiness, theirs or mine, was not the point of my life, exactly. It sounded melodramatic and inflammatory when spoken aloud. It sounded a lot like a lie.

Because I was well-known for my pool floatie collection, for colorful nights out, my love for pizza, personalized gifts and peaceful weekend getaways. I was incredibly fun. My private property, however, was something else. It was my place for exploring my unproductive tangles and knots. It was where I kept all of the people I was and might become and knew and resented and loved and missed and would lose — I hung around with lovely ghosts who left me with the same perfect ache as a loose tooth.

Together we wallowed and navel-gazed, were wistful and nostalgic, occasionally hopeful and forever incomplete. That was where my writing and I wanted to bask. It was life at its most gorgeous. And maybe that was selfish and irresponsible. I’m not saying there wasn’t more to do with a person’s life — with mine specifically. I certainly wasn’t sure who could be expected to find a good place to stand, let alone a home in that. But this was my reality and I didn’t have to keep it a secret. It was no more or less valuable than anyone else’s. If the point was to keep company for my fluttering heart and its garden of sweet misery, there was no reason to make it private.

“It’s like, what is happiness, even?” Ben had asked me on one of the quiet, dull days in our office. “It’s basically just a social construction.” He’d meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t really. It was what August and Sophie had been telling me the whole time. I was allowed to make the people in my life acknowledge my private property, to spend as much time as I wanted wrapped up in its nuances — that was one version of what it meant to be bold and satisfied.

And I could live there if I wanted.

Now see folks here’s what we call a McCon-essay, a — a McConaughe-rant, or what have you. Tu comprendo brother? This is just a way to be, a way to be your best self — me — I am your best self. Just believe me when I say that, amigo. But I know what you’re thinking though, aight — you’re thinking “How could Academy Award winning actor, Matthew McConaughey, the living embodiment of McConaissance AND the baby angel plus the alien emoji — have time, have actual time, and not to mention the d e d i c a t i o n for this kind of social enlightenment?” Now, see, there’s a darkness, right? But with all those kinds of dark there comes a light . . . ness.

A reservoir of truth has shot out of me and I shall not betray it, no sir, I am for the people, by the people, I will serve in all my mighty capacity to bring y’all to some good ol’ McConaughey state of livin’ no matter. Let me bring you to that J(ust) K(eep) L(ivin’) kind of goodness, hombre. I am me, but you can be me, too. You and I can both be me, together, in the holy light towards the sunsets of providence (not the city) onwards to the betterment of humanity, to the betterment of us, right on right on to the end goal of real true protruding happiness. I am my own hero in 10 years — so, let me be yours, too. I’ll show you the way, brother.

Alright, alright folks here are some much needed tips to be more like me.

Numero Uno: If you do not have a McConaug-drawl — as in part Texan, part mildly stringed-together Spanish, and part whatever the fuck you want — then what are ya really doing with yo life, brother?

Numero Two: Now, see, I am the epitome of the great Southern American Dream. I am tan enough to look ethnically ambiguous but I am white enough to not make white people uncomfortable. It’s a win-win hombre. So here’s my second Mcconaugh-tip to you — become white and get a tan, it’s just that easy folks.

Three: Now, what you might not know — might not synthesize when you first happen upon my great physique — and now I don’t blame you, no, no, I’m just saying, I’m just saying I wouldn’t blame you for not knowing that I am . . . actually . . . very . . . fun. I am funny, I am fun, you know what I’m saying brother? I’m a funny person. I make jokes, I know how to wield a joke so it creates laughter in the very deep pits of your stomach that’s so real, so intense, so hilarious, ha ha you know what I mean now, don’t you brother?

I’m funny.

Four: I read, you know homie? Like, read. I don’t read that 50 Shades shit, nah — I read like deep shit, you feel me? I read words on the pages, but they also read me, you know? They read me. You ever read Kafka? Kafka writing to Max Brod, ya feel me brother? Talking about death, tuberculosis, and shit. Awww yeah!! That’s the good stuff right there brother. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann — life changing, man. Read that shit brother, read it.

Five: Now let me tell you a story: okay, okay, it’s the year twenty-oh-nine, you follow me? I’ve just finished the very successful Ghosts of Girlfriends Past with the wonderful Jennifer Garner — hey Jen — and I’m just pondering, you know, I’m feeling the feels, I’m doing the searching of my life, okay, of my l i f e. My wife Camila asks me: “Matthew, are you happy?” And I think to myself, “No, no I’m not.” Now, I couldn’t lie to myself if I wanted to, you know, it’s that good Southern upbringing — shout out to my mother and the great city of Houston — and I think: “What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?” And then it hits me — get your life fucking together, man. And so I do.

Now I’m Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey, chyeah, shit brother!

Six: I used to be a Hollywood joke, okay. There’s just no way around it, and I wanna be real with you, homie: I was a joke. Not just to Hollywood, but to myself, too. I didn’t take roles where I had to take my shirt off — no siree — I added that part right in brother. Did that all by myself, all for myself. But you’re going ask me why, Matthew? Why did you want to take your shirt off, Matthew? And I’ve just got three words for you hombre: I look good. Oof, yah, I look fucking good. And I still do, but that takes discipline, see. It’s true I don’t take my shirt off as much anymo’ — in Dallas Buyers Club nobody wanted to see me with my shirt off, I was n a s t y, fuck, but did you see Rustin Cohle in ‘95 — that hair, that ass — I ain’t gonna deny it — I looked good. So, look good too, I believe in you brother.

Numero Sept: I think on my feet all the time, alright — when I’m at award shows, which is a thing I do a lot, I just gotta think on my feet. I gotta be me, and think. Let me tell you a story, once I was at Buffalo, I wasn’t a buffalo, I was in Buffalo — the state — and I was with my son Levi . . . cute kid . . . we were just hiking up some pretty tall mountains when out of nowhere, and when I say “nowhere” I ain’t kidding — out of nowhere — this mountain goat just appears. Now Levi starts screaming, the goat’s huffing, I’m panicking, what do I do? This animal is looking at me dead on, like I’m one of him and he’s one of me and we’re just looking at each other like we’re carnal animals looking into the depths of each other’s souls, right? And I know what’s going on, I feel it, I know what he’s thinking and that’s when I decide that there’s just no two ways around it: so I throw my son Levi over the mountain and then I scream like a hyena and just jump the fuck right out of there.

So be like me; think on your feet.

Eight: Shit, son, you gotta have chill though. Nobody likes somebody with no chill, mkay? When you’re having a panic attack because, you know, you lost your job, or, or you realize that — that one day you’re going to die, or you’ve just watched Interstellar and you’re like why the fuck would Anne Hathaway wanna live on a planet on her own — think this: chill out homie. And you will. That’s a McConauguarantee.

Nine: Smoke weed, brother. Smoke that goddamn weed. There’s a reason why that shit was put on this beautiful, pristine earth we have here. Weed elucidates, it educates, it elevates — there’s a reason it’s called a high, homie — just think of that.

Ten: JKL. Just. Keep. Living. Don’t stop living, homies. Don’t do it — there will be times that the devil, and I mean metaphorically the devil, it could be you, you could be your own devil, ya feel me? You’re thinking I can’t live another day — no, I can’t do this: but you can. Live. Just keep living, hombre, don’t give up.

That’s it homies. Just some easy tips to live yo life with some McConaugh-ease. Try this shit out, and then thank me later brothers (and sisters, I don’t discriminate). Peace out from the McConau-crib.

Watch a dramatic reading of Matthew McConaughey’s tip-filled McConaughe-rant below!

Whatever mutations social media undergoes in my lifetime, I will always associate it with porn.

Let’s start at the beginning. From 2007 to 2011, I was an independent contractor in a Bay Area BDSM house; imagine a kinky version of Miss Mona’s in the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. For me — a scruffy young punk with a very dirty mind — it was kind of like a femme finishing school.

My fellow pro-dommes (and pro-subs, and pro-switches) inspired in me a newfound gusto for all the things I had never liked about being a girl during my adolescence. And while I’ll admit that the context of performance and the reward of cold hard cash were my first motivations in constructing a feminine persona of grace and charm, I eventually amplified my sexual id through the gleaming sound system of this new persona.

I called her Tina Horn (after fictional teenage temptress Audrey Horn of Twin Peaks, and soul survivor Tina Turner). Sex work permitted me to invent a fantasy character I could embody, and it was thrilling. I became well known for my intelligence and my healthy ass, and I was very successful.

The house had a simple website, and some presence on an online forum for sex work. With a couple of fetish gear pictures and a few hundred seductive words, I advertised time with Tina Horn to the world. I emailed with a few of my clients to arrange appointments, but mostly we booked over the phone.

It never would have occurred to me in a million years to give Tina Horn a Facebook page, or even to keep a blog. Rather, I created an ironclad persona that dematerialized and rematerialized at the discretion of my clients. This was part of the sustainability of this work. Intimacy with the Real Me was not on the menu.

Including fallibility. Many tools of the sex trade that I learned in that house have stuck with me for life. One that really stands out? “Mistresses don’t get sick.”

The house had a rule. If your coworker was ill, and you had to cancel her appointments for her, you never told her client the true reason. We made excuses: the house had accidentally double booked her, or, “We’re so sorry, but unfortunately she has unexpected, important business to attend to.”

Our boss had decided — around the time she started the house in the mid-nineties — that it was important to maintain the mystique of the Mistresses. Our clients didn’t need to know we were fallible. (Or that we were grossly snotty.)

Let’s Dismantle The False Dichotomy Between Porn And Erotica

This made complete emotional sense to me. Tina Horn did not exist outside of the walls of the house. I was safe to explore dangerous zones because it all happened within a very structured and heavily boundary-ed system.

The original “Tina Horn” was like a robot. You put a coin in her slot, so to speak, and she powered up to perform a custom dance for you. She was clever, she was naked, and she tied you up. You could spank her and she would squeal with delight. She would totally kiss other robots. She cared about your problems and she had a penetrating gaze that looked deep into your soul. When you left the house satisfied and several pounds lighter, Tina Horn powered down. Which meant that I could eat a sandwich, giggle with the other girls, count my money, do my paperwork, change into my bike shorts, and leave the house.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.

After a few years of working in this house, I started performing in porn. Filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston and Madison Young hired me for video projects just like my clients had hired me for private BDSM services. I kept the name Tina Horn. But the way I related to Shine and Madison was not the way I related to my clients — the camera was now the proxy for the client.

One of the defining characteristics of the queer porn genre is the behind-the-scenes performer interviews. The directors who were hiring me expected me to answer tons of questions about my personal sexuality on camera. In fact, it often felt that those documentary interviews about gender, desire, identity, and community were as much, if not more, the actual point of the films, rather than the hardcore sex.

This was around 2010, and people were starting to get really serious about Twitter. I thought Twitter was fucking stupid. It felt like a short-form promotional tool that I didn’t think I needed.

Please remind me to put “hermetically sealed humiliating seduction revenge scenes” on my list of services #JessicaJones

???@tinahornsass

It seemed “social” in the worst kind of way — a distillation of fair weather friendships designed as a vehicle for narcissism. Then some porn friends tricked me into joining it by creating an account for my ass. They shared the password with one another. The first tweets of @TinaHornsAss were collective jokes. My friends knew I would use the tool once there was an ironic distance.

I animated Tina Horn, but I was not Tina Horn.
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How could anything I said ever be truly serious, when it was couched within the raunchy concept of tweets emerging from my butt hole? And they were right. Eventually, I took over the account and started tweeting in earnest. Now that I understand the essential role that Twitter plays in being a public figure — now that I’m a journalist, writer, media-maker, and modern prankster — @TinaHornsAss is still the account I use.

And the irony remains that even after almost five years, Twitter and I still don’t really jive. It still feels like an unpaid obligation. I can’t ever seem to find my voice. I struggle to balance ethics and mediate my own love of attention. I agonize over 140 characters: concision is not exactly my forte.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me. In a room, I feed off the sexual energy of another person. Without that nervous system interaction, I grow exhausted and burn out quickly. Twitter makes me feel that way, too. It doesn’t give me anything I want. Sometimes my followers and I interact, but at this moment I have 7,781 followers, and I interact with maybe 50 of them — mostly colleagues — and occasionally fans. Unlike a client in the BDSM house, I can’t look them up and down and read them. I don’t know how to be Tina Horn to them.

Like sometimes you gotta drink that much whiskey and wear that much leather and frown that hard to be a fucking woman in this world

???@tinahornsass

In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkov reminds us that the point of all Internet activity is to be social. In my concept of her, Tina Horn doesn’t socialize. Or rather, she does in controlled environments. When I socialize with another queer porn performer, I do so as The Real Me. But when @TinaHornsAss talks to, say, @AndreShakti, we are interacting with the knowledge that our fans can voyeur, and that this interaction is good for business. But that doesn’t give me the social satisfaction of human connection — it makes me feel like I’m putting on a promotional show. I’ve yet to be convinced that this is good for business, or that it’s meant to satisfy anything other than my ego.

But I learned to use Twitter. I learned to give out the information I wanted people to know. I basically tweeted any time I felt “on” as Tina Horn — when I was shooting a scene, or attending an event “as” Tina.

An artist friend teased me that I only tweeted when I was in public at porn events. I looked at her and blinked. “That’s the only time Tina Horn exists!”

Nobody else seemed to think this was reasonable. They were tweeting their impulses, their dark emotions, their vitriol, when they were going to sleep. The closest intimacy I felt comfortable sharing was how I liked my coffee.

But Twitter wanted more from me. Twitter wanted to know as soon I was set up at my desk in the morning. It wanted to know what I was eating. It wanted my funny observations, my insight. It wanted quotes from what I was reading. It definitely wanted my vacations.

Digital communication has always seemed like the opposite of sex to me.
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Everything became potential fodder to contribute to the public character development of Tina Horn. I felt I wasn’t permitted to be The Real Me — even during my most cherished private moments, like while reading a book or masturbating or working out. Those un-Tina Horn moments needed to contribute to the Tina Horn brand, to keep me relevant, to keep people wanting to work with me and hire me.

 

I tried to teach myself to get pleasure from it. Like the occasional dopamine rush of seeing my work retweeted by someone I admire. Once I posted a dream I had about Samuel Delaney, and he responded with a story about Tim Curry. That felt magical, like a real connection with a distant icon.

Trying to find pleasure in social media kind of felt like trying to develop a taste for cigarettes even though they made me nauseous. As we all know, cigarettes make you cool and help you relate to others. And some people really take to them. But there’s probably a reason they make me nauseous. I’m not built for cigarettes, and I’m not suited to Twitter, and I don’t really understand why I should condition myself to need something that feels bad for me.

I am aware that my aversion may simply be a defense mechanism. It is possible that I have convinced myself that if Tina Horn doesn’t have an inner life, I am protected from the horrible things society tells me will happen to me because I’m a whore. That my father will be disappointed in me, that I will be shut out of the jobs I want, that I will lose my ability to have intimate orgasms, that I was just doing it for the attention.

literallyme

???@tinahornsass

On one hand, I’ll admit that it’s incredible for people who enjoy my sex performance to see what I have to say — about sex, or coffee, or music, or an article. But on the other, sometimes I get the impression that people feel entitled to it because of what I am — which is a whore — and what I do‚ which is making money by working hard at the words and sex I love. I feel as if the world expects me to outsource my imagination, and every ounce of my gut screams at me to stop. After all, my imagination is my livelihood.

And yet I tweet on, because I still believe in the potential, and because I am afraid of becoming obsolete. But I long for the time when I was allowed my simple private moments; when I could count my $20 bills, put on my street clothes, and just go home.