You Need Help: Am I Being Unreasonable for Feeling Undesired by My Girlfriend?

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Q:

Hi there. I’ve been with my girlfriend for almost a year now. We are not u-haul lesbians because of where we live and the fact that we’re Asians. We started out great. We used to have very regular sex (at least once a week), and we hung out, went on date nights regularly for the first six months. Now, I know that honeymoon period doesn’t last forever, and I know that very well. It’s just that I feel like I’m not wanted or desired as much anymore. Once a week sex turned into once a month sex, and just earlier this month, we had a short getaway. Sex happened but after two months of not having any, it felt like I wasn’t missed or desired or yearned for. Now she wants more space and time alone, and I’m okay with that. It’s just that I’m starting to feel like I’m just at the mercy of whenever she wants sex, and I’ll just have to wait for that. Whenever I try to ask for more time together, to be more intimate with each other, I’m given indisputable reasons that I can’t be upset or disappointed about like being tired, wanting more time alone, other limitations, etc. Am I’m being unreasonable for feeling like I’m not desired in this situation? Is it right for me to feel this way?

A:

Sex and dating isn’t usually my beat, but I wanted to respond to this because I think the topic of Asian desire doesn’t get nuanced attention often enough. There are a few things that are at play here, in my view, and most of my answers will likely involve more questions for you (and also, possibly, your partner) to consider, than anything else.

First, I think there is a lot of value in being able to express your sexual wants and needs. This may not be your or your partner’s experience as Asians, but for myself and many others, Asian cultures across the board (and especially in really conservative families) can make even the idea of desire so taboo, so cloaked in shame, that it becomes even harder to learn to express our needs in healthy ways. As they say, there’s a kernel of truth in every stereotype, and there’s a reason why Asian women are stereotypically docile and passionless, having sex done to us rather than being active agents of our own pleasure. So, I think it’s important that there’s space in your relationship — and any relationship, really — to be able to express your sexual wants and needs in a healthy, non-coercive, non-toxic way with your partner, even when those wants and needs don’t match.

I’ve said it twice, and I’ll say it again a third time just to be really clear: the key here is healthy communication on the part of all involved.

And to that end, I want to share a reel from consent educator Sarah Casper that friend and fellow writer mat shared with me when we were recently talking about desire. What I love about this is that Casper goes beyond saying, “Your wants are not anyone else’s responsibilities to fulfill” — which, of course, is a must — and also emphasizes the point that the people we are with need to be able to hold space for us to express our wants. I really think that both of those are critical to having healthy communication around consent, intimacy, and sex.

In my first relationship, I was with a person who had a lot of boundaries around physical intimacy, and so, like you, I often felt at the mercy of her desires. My self-imposed response to this was to not voice my own sexual wants and go along with whatever she wanted to do. At the time, I said it was because I was respecting her space and boundaries, but after the fact I realized that it was also rooted in my own deep fear of rejection. And later still, I realized that the impulse to silence my own desires ended up recreating the sexual suppression of the culture I was raised in.

So, what does it look like to be able to express your desires in a way that is just about stating them without any expectation of change or action? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, but I do think that there’s room for work here on both your part and your partner’s. It’s hard, and in some ways, I feel like I can relate to your situation but also may be just projecting my own experiences onto them, so take what I say with a grain of salt, of course.

In my case, part of the issue was my own work around getting comfortable with my own desires. It seems like that may not be the case for you, but I would ask you to consider what “feeling desired” means to you? Is it just about having sex with a certain amount of frequency? Are there other things that are either present in your relationship or, possibly, missing from your relationship that leave you feeling undesired or, even, undesirable? Can you verbalize them clearly as your own wants?

Because the thing is, I’m not sure this is entirely about how often you and your partner have sex, and I think focusing on that may be a bit of a red herring. Sexual needs are real, of course, and I think it’s valid to want to have your sexual needs fulfilled, but that’s separate from feeling desired and, when it comes to sex specifically, as you know, your partner isn’t responsible for that, either. But, there are a couple of other ways you can have your sexual needs met: masturbating or possibly opening up your relationship, if that’s something that would work for you and your partner.

But I really would encourage you to think about what different types of intimacy (besides sex) would make you feel hot and wanted, and whether those exist in your relationship? Do you feel like you can have a conversation with your partner about them? Again, not from a lens of changing anything, necessarily, but as a simple statement of wants. Approached this way, this line of exploration may open up valuable conversations about other ways in which you can feel desired in your relationship. It might also lead you to really take time to reflect on the things that are special and fulfilling in your relationship that you maybe aren’t valuing right now because (based on the letter you shared, at least) you seem to be primarily focused on sex, specifically.

The other side of this is your partner’s ability to engage in this conversation without feeling the need to problem solve or explain why they can’t meet your wants. This has to start with you in the conversation — frame things in a non-coercive way by, for example, stating clearly, “I’m not asking you to change anything, but I need to feel like I can express my wants and desires and that they can be heard as such, and not taken as any expectation from you.” If you feel like your partner may not be able to hear your wants in this way, then it might be helpful to start by sharing that Instagram reel and engaging in a conversation about it. What resonates? What feels right? What feels wrong? How can you apply this lens to the way you approach communicating about intimacy, desire, and sex in your relationship? Do you both even want to?

The final thing I want to say, is that after having these conversations, you and your partner may find yourselves at an impasse. Maybe you’ll find that your wants are misaligned, and there isn’t really a path forward. Sometimes, the history of the conversations that have already happened — especially if there were any serious breakdowns in communication along the way — make it hard to approach intimacy and sex from this framework of stating wants without needing to act on them. And so maybe, your best and kindest option for each other is to break up.

Part of being able to name and also sit with your own wants is recognizing when you need to take action and take responsibility for fulling those wants yourself. If you’re not getting what you want out of a relationship, and that’s becoming a deal breaker for you, then you can also say the relationship is no longer working for you, end it as kindly as you can, and instead look for one where you feel more desired and have your sexual needs met. That’s also completely valid.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: My Sister Loves Me, the Sinner, but Hates the Sin

feature image photo by Johnce via Getty Images

Q:

My sister and I have been through a lot together. We grew up in a hardcore evangelical church with an abusive dad and a mom that enabled him. My sister and I have leaned on each other through leaving the church, starting therapy, cutting off our parents, her getting divorced, and me coming out.

Our parents did the scapegoat-and-golden-child thing. She’s a classic type-A person: ED nurse, highly controlled, makes decisions quickly, and never changes her mind. I’m the family fuckup: I’ve had lifelong mental health issues; I’m a wishy-washy artist; I have a non-traditional career. I’m also very queer, and that’s a problem.

My sister didn’t fully leave the church. She left the church we grew up in, but she’s still an evangelical Christian, and she still carries a lot of beliefs that are harmful to me. She’s always “supported” me, and yet she believes being gay is a sin. It’s mostly OK — she doesn’t go out of her way to make negative comments, she’s even gone on double dates with me. Classic “love the sinner, hate the sin” situation. But it hurts. It feels like her love is conditional. It feels like she’s secretly judging me, even if she isn’t saying horrible things to my face. It feels like she’s waiting for me to realize the error of my ways. It feels like any pain I go through is “proof” that my lifestyle is wrong, being queer is the source of all my problems, or etc etc etc.

It’s been like this for years. Every so often we fought about it, and then it’d end with, “Whatever, I’m tired of fighting, I love you”, and we just wouldn’t talk about it anymore. I love her. We know each other better than anyone else on earth, she’s the only family I’ve got, and I want her in my life. I’ve been willing to put this aside and accept the love she’s willing to give me. But it’s all come to a head now that my health insurance finally approved my top surgery.

Being gay was one thing, being trans is another. She “supports” trans people, but she is completely against this. First, she just had a lot of medical concerns; now, she’s trying to convince me that I’m not mentally stable enough to make a life-changing surgical decision. I disagree, my therapist disagrees, the countless doctors who’ve approved my paperwork disagree. But because of the scapegoat-and-golden-child thing, I’m the fuckup, she doesn’t trust my choices, and I’ll never convince her.

It all comes back to religion. My sister says I’m being judgmental of HER for not accepting her non-acceptance of me. She’s incredibly hurt by how much I dislike the church (and doesn’t seem to care how badly the church has hurt me). She’s comfortable being in my life, talking about my dating life, possibly helping me out post-surgery, and disapproving of me the whole time. She thinks it’s crazy that I’m hurt by that.

Am I crazy for “not accepting her non-acceptance”? Is that a fair ask from her? I don’t know where to go from here. How do I keep someone in my life when our great loves are so opposed? Is it worth building up an extensive list of things (critical, beloved things — queerness for me, the church for her) we can’t talk about, to keep the peace between us?

The general consensus from my therapist and friends is to give up and look for support elsewhere, but god, trying to fill the void of this relationship is unimaginable. Although I’m trying to make more connections, I don’t have a ton of close relationships. She’s been my anchor for many years. How do I love this person in a way that doesn’t hurt me anymore? Is it even worth trying?

Thanks, Straddlers. Love you guys.

A:

I’ve thought about your question so many times since you asked it, and every time I come back to feeling a really deep grief and pain for you. I’m sorry. I really am so, so sorry.

Our backgrounds and experiences are very different, but your bond with your sister resonates really strongly with me. I, too, grew up in an extremely conservative family, and my sisters and I have leaned on each other our whole lives: first, to escape the grasp of that family and its religious institutions and second, to make our way into the world, trying to make sense of who we are and what we want after a childhood of repression. There’s a depth of connection we share that most people simply can’t understand. These relationships are intrinsic parts of who we all are, and I get the feeling (based on what you shared) that this is true for you and your sister as well.

And so, to read that your sister has taken a “love the sinner, hate the sin” approach to you is heartbreaking beyond words to me. I really am so, so sorry.

It’s so painful and so complicated. At the end of the day, the best advice I can give you comes down to two things. First and foremost, take all the time you need — years, most likely — to name and hold and feel and process the grief of this situation, regardless of what you decide for your relationship with her. And second, know that any decision you make around this is not permanent. You are allowed to make a decision today and change it tomorrow or in a month or a year or a decade.

Whether you choose to keep her in your life or not, accepting that despite everything you have been through together, the fact that she so vehemently rejects who you are as a person is a profound loss of the kind I think most people simply cannot understand. In some ways, I think, it’s easy for people outside of these situations to say things like, “She doesn’t really love you, she’s hurting you so much, so why are you keeping her in your life?” And those things are all true, but, at least based on what I’ve observed in my own experience, there are so many ways in which she has shown you real love and support in the context of a family and community that is so bereft of it. That’s a hard thing to let go of. You share a history and a bond that truly is irreplaceable.

That said, it also sounds like your sister has internalized and adopted some of the manipulative behaviors and conditional approaches to love that you were both raised in. When I read how your sister views you as “judgmental” for not being ok with her rejecting you in the fullness of who you are, including your queer and trans identities — I don’t know, there’s something in there that feels related to gaslighting to me. She’s hurting you deeply and at the same time turning the situation around on you as being the one who “can’t accept.” What you described feels reminiscent of the toxic dynamic in abusive relationships where the abuser blames the person they are abusing for being abused. Pointing this out to her is probably not going to be helpful, but I just want to affirm to you that you really are not at all crazy or judgmental for not accepting her non-acceptance of you.

This might not be a useful answer to you, but at the end of the day, I think only you can really decide what is best for you in terms of a continued relationship with her, and your answer to that may change over time. You may find that you need to take space from your relationship so you can reassess the conditions of her love and whether or how you want that to be part of your life. You may find that you can no longer make allowances in your life for her bigotry. You may also find that you simply can’t let her go, which in many ways is the much harder road to take. In the case of my own relationship with my parents, I can’t say I’ve really figured this out, but in the 12 years since I became independent, I only recently really realized what it meant to really accept their love as conditional and have no expectations of them at all. And I only arrived at this point after years of really facing the extent of their own manipulations, self-serving neglect, and abuse and being able to name those things as such. I imagine that if you choose to keep your sister in your life, you’ll need to come to terms with something similar for yourself and your relationship with her, as well.

I do think, though, that continuing the work you’re doing to expand your network will be really invaluable to you, regardless of whether you keep your sister as part of your life or not. Part of what makes your connection so strong is the shared bond over what you’ve been through together. And while no one outside of her can really know the specific dynamics of your family history, there are many people who share comparable experiences.

In a recent A+ Advicebox, Meg shared a number of helpful reading resources that I want to pass along: an essay by Christina Tesoro on healing from purity culture and two booklists on purity culture and evangelism. You may find these works incredibly resonant, but I also would encourage you to seek out community from them: perhaps consider following some of these writers on social media to see if there are events, forums, or other community-centered activities that they host or promote that could help you meet others who share your experiences. It will likely take time, but this slow process might help you find others that you can connect with so that you’re not relying so closely on just your sister as your connection to and means of processing your past. It’ll also, hopefully, help you feel less alone in your experiences.

Additionally, I asked a friend about resources for folks getting top surgery, and he highly recommended the Top Surgery Support Facebook Group. My friend found this community invaluable for not only navigating the process but also having additional support, connections, and affirmations every step of the way. Joining a group like this, if you’re not already part of one, might fill some of the gaps of genuine, loving support and affirmation of your surgery that you know you won’t get from your sister, even if she provides the physical support of picking you up and helping you out after the procedure.

Ultimately, whether you keep your sister in your life or you seek out support elsewhere as your therapist and friends are encouraging you to do, I think you’ll have to do the deeply painful work of accepting that there will always be a void in your life around her. It’s a deep connection, which makes her betrayal of you and the loss you’re feeling around the relationship more acute and feel even more insurmountable. But as with all things, given time and space and through forging new connections, new relationships, I really believe that the gap will feel less all-encompassing.

Wishing you all the best with your top surgery! This is an exciting moment in your life, and I hope that in spite of everything going on with your sister, you’re able to find real joy in this act of self-affirmation.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

“Never Have I Ever Season Four” Stepped Right Into the Affirmative Action Debate

Season four of Never Have I Ever is entirely dedicated to college — a fitting theme as Devi and her friends, Fabiola and Eleanor, enter their senior year of high school. But, even more so than previous seasons, the main conflicts feel especially contrived. And the underlying politics of the story are more troubling than ever before.

From the beginning of the series, Devi has dreamed of attending Princeton, and we learn that this dream is rooted in a memory of her late father. On the day of the high school’s college fair, though, Devi fumbles her meeting with the representative from Princeton, cutting to the front of the line and aggressively promoting herself when the rep makes clear that she should wait her turn like the rest of her classmates. But, by the end of the day, Devi manages to turn it around with her honesty and integrity when she admits to the Princeton rep that her new boyfriend stole the rep’s wallet.

Little does Devi know, however, that her friend Fabiola has also decided to apply early to Princeton. Fabiola hadn’t been planning to even speak with the Princeton rep, knowing that Devi had called “dibs” on the university back when they were in elementary school. But at her mother’s insistence, Fabiola stops by Princeton’s table at the college fair and learns about the exceptional robotics program. And so, Fabiola secretly applies early without telling Devi and gets in, while Devi is waitlisted. When she eventually finds out, Devi lets her fury and anger get the better of her, in the way that she has since the beginning of the series.

It’s an interesting choice to make this one of the major arcs of the season, given that any day now the Supreme Court is expected to strike down Affirmative Action. The argument put forward by a group of Asian American applicants to top tier institutions is that by using race as a factor for consideration in admissions, Asian American applicants are being discriminated against and having their chances of being accepted unfairly curtailed. As countless research has shown, the real harm comes from legacy and athlete admissions, which is how the Ivies continue to perpetuate homogenous student bodies composed overwhelmingly of white students from families that fall within the top one percent of income. The argument also, conveniently, ignores the racist history of these historic institutions, rooted in slavery and segregation, that was the original basis for Affirmative Action as a form of reparations.

As I’ve noted before, Mindy Kaling sits in uncomfortable proximity to this anti-Black racist argument put forward by Asian Americans. Years ago, her brother pulled a racist publicity stunt to try to make the false point that his chances of getting into medical school improved when he pretended to be a Black applicant. Mindy has said nothing publicly, even as her brother used her fame and reputation to get a surge of media attention that his racist act otherwise would never have been afforded.

Intentional or not, season four of Never Have I Ever provides fodder for the same racist argument that her brother advanced and that is now in front of the Supreme Court. By the show’s accounting, Fabiola ruined Devi’s chances of getting into Princeton by applying early. Allegedly, Princeton will only accept one student from a high school like Sherman Oaks. The conflict becomes an opportunity for the series to finally show some character growth for Devi as she eventually realizes she shouldn’t be cutting off her best friend for being successful. But ultimately, Fabiola decides not to attend Princeton, and it’s only at that point that Devi gets accepted.

As in previous seasons, it’s hard not to feel that a show that’s theoretically about raising the profile of an often-misrepresented racial minority in America completely misrepresents racism as it exists in America. Ironically, Fabiola decides to attend Howard, but there’s no discussion of what it means for someone like Fabiola — who literally has never been portrayed as having a Black friend — to attend an HBCU. It’s all about robotics for Fabiola, not identity, even as her storyline early in the season is that she’s the president of a misogynist club. While I had given up hope that Never Have I Ever would present Fabiola’s Afro Latina identity with anything resembling depth, this final move only underscores how much Fabiola’s character is about checking the box for Black representation for Mindy Kaling.

The realities of racism and class are completely outside this show’s imagining. Paxton drops out of ASU because he doesn’t feel like he “fits in.” And as we watch dozens of white, blonde students ice him out, there’s no reckoning with his biracial identity as even a potential factor. As someone who struggled to fit in at a big, predominantly white state school, this oversight feels like an erasure of five of the most difficult years of my life where racism was always the common denominator.

Later in the season, Devi visits Blair Quan, a former classmate at Princeton, and finds out that Blair failed out of her classes and now works on campus. The show is again flirting with the realities of the real world while simultaneously twisting its way out of grappling with structural inequality: working students from low-income backgrounds (who are, primarily, students of color) are far more likely to drop out of top tier institutions because they’re unsupported and made to feel like they don’t belong.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, in a time when anti-LGBTQ legislation is passing by unprecedented numbers across the country, Never Have I Ever has more or less written queerness out of its final season.

Pretty much all of the show’s LGBTQ+ characters are either absent or pushed to the sidelines.
Problematic as it was, the incisive commentary of Devi’s trope-ridden gay classmate Jonah is nowhere to be found in season four. Fabiola’s first girlfriend Eve moved to Korea at the start of season three, but Eve’s coterie of queer friends disappeared with her, never to be seen again. Fabiola’s competing paramours from season three, Aneesa and Addison, are both present in season four, but their roles are so minor, so perfunctory, it couldn’t be more obvious that the writers kept their parts because they knew they couldn’t plausibly ignore either character.

There’s one brief scene of Fabiola and Addison making out so I guess, technically speaking, there is some queer content. But Addison can’t even make it to the prom with Fabiola, which feels like a backslide from one of Fabiola’s major season two storylines when she and Eve nominated themselves to be the Queens of the Winter Dance. And while queer and trans actresses Niecy Nash and Alexandra Billings feature prominently in the season, there’s nothing in the story to explicitly suggest that their characters share their real-life identities.

It’s hard not to feel like this was an intentional decision, especially compared to the side characters who do get actual plotlines in season four. The ups and downs of Eleanor and Trent’s incomprehensible relationship merits far more attention than either of these characters really deserve. This is in sharp contrast to the complete lack of development of Fabiola and Addison’s relationship given that at least two obvious opportunities present themselves: Addison is away at their first year of college, and Fabiola is primarily looking at schools on the East Coast.

Meanwhile, Devi’s classmate Eric, who was the subject of fatphobic jokes in season one, has a charming story of being trained in swimming by Paxton so he can fulfill his dream of making the cut for the boy’s swim team. This was one of the few storylines I actually really liked in season four, and I appreciated this complete turnaround of a deeply problematic story from season one. But it was also hard to see this time dedicated to athletes and the school’s athletics with nary a mention of Aneesa. Her appearances are relegated to the background with a couple of throwaway lines that she’s not stressed about college because she already got recruited to play soccer somewhere (we don’t even know where). Aneesa also occasionally hangs out with Fabiola without even a nod to their past romantic relationship.

And so, the show’s queer South Asian representation that was luke warm at best in the first place has been completely erased in the final season.

Many people will say that I’m taking a high school dramedy far too seriously. That I’m unfairly targeting Mindy Kaling, who is one of the few successful South Asian writers and actors in American media. That for all its faults Never Have I Ever will always be pulling off a feat of representation, and clearly over the seasons the writers have taken some of the criticisms seriously.

But increasingly I find myself asking in my personal life, in my professional life, and in the media I consume: what is the value of diversity for the sake of diversity? Surely, having non-white characters that counter (at least some) harmful stereotypes on the screen, having people of color in positions of power, is better than the status quo of whiteness as the norm, the standard for success. But when whiteness remains at the center of decision making, these changes become purely superficial.

The fact of the matter is that Mindy Kaling has always aspired to one thing, and only one thing: her personal success in a white world. And so she writes her stories to appease white audiences and, more importantly, conservative white media moguls, all while saying that she’s changing the narrative for Indians in American media.

I used to feel furious about this. But honestly, I just feel sad for Mindy Kaling now. The betrayal of realizing you have a seat at the table solely so that the white people who hold the purse strings can feel like they’re being “inclusive” hurts more than lying to yourself that if you just play the game well enough, you’ll eventually be able to change the rules.

Practical Magic: COVID Is Here to Stay — So What Does It Mean to Keep Each Other Safe?

The first time I got COVID, sometime in May of 2020, it was practically inevitable. The virus had taken the world by storm that winter and spring. How it spread was still emerging science, leading to unprecedented global shutdowns in an attempt to curtail the devastating quantity of fatalities.

Two and a half years later, on October 2, 2022, I got COVID again, and a few days later I had a positive rapid test to prove it. Unlike my experience in 2020, I know exactly how I got it and from whom. And this time, it was completely avoidable, even as the U.S. and countless other countries around the world threw caution to the wind and eliminated pretty much all COVID safety measures in the name of preserving global and national economies.

From a political and public health standpoint, things were certainly going in the wrong direction, I felt. At the end of the day, that’s also not how I got COVID: it wasn’t at work, it wasn’t on the train, it wasn’t at the store or the museum or the theater.

I got COVID visiting a friend at their apartment because they were in denial about their own mild symptoms after attending a big concert, misread their rapid test results, and did not tell me about any of this uncertainty until I was already inside their apartment, after having traveled over an hour to get there.

Most of the media explainers about how to mitigate COVID risk would say this was probably ok. I was 33 at the time, healthy, not immunocompromised, and fully vaccinated with one booster. By all accounts, it should’ve been a mild case that set me back a week or two, at most, before I was up and kicking again.

The first time I got COVID, I had extreme fatigue and a low-grade fever that lasted through July. I basically worked half weeks for two months, and on the days I did work I was extremely sluggish and my head felt like it was on fire. Some nights, I’d hear phantom Bollywood music and wonder who in my building could possibly be blasting that specific genre at 2 am. And then, after plenty of rest, one day, it just all stopped, and I was able to resume my life. I ended that summer going on long walks in my neighborhood or down to Liberty State Park nearly every day.

The second time I assumed that since I was fully vaccinated, I wouldn’t get the mystery not-quite-long COVID symptoms again. But of course, nothing is guaranteed.

You can be in your early thirties, healthy, not immunocompromised, fully vaccinated and boosted, get COVID and four months later, still struggle to get out of bed some weeks, even after sleeping ten hours a night. Still find basic interactions to be so mentally exhausting your head rings for hours afterwards. Still fall asleep or wake up hearing phantom music and wonder if it’s your neighbor’s record player through the wall or your confused brain forming patterns out of the ambient sounds or both. Still struggle with memory and cognition so often that you seriously start to wonder how much this has heightened your risk for dementia or Alzheimer’s or related diseases in the future, despite having no family history of any of them. Still have symptoms so poorly understood that even after seeing three different doctors and two different specialists the best medical advice you can get is, “Well, it sounds like you get better with rest. So just keep resting,” or, alternatively, to take medications off-label that might fuck up your sleep even more. Still be so worn out and tired that you seriously debate quitting the job you really wanted and finally got after years of trying, and the only thing really keeping you from letting it go is the fact that you wouldn’t have the health insurance you need for the surgery you were supposed to have in December but had to postpone indefinitely.

There are large, systemic failures at the global level that have led to the devastation we continue to bear witness to more than three years after the coronavirus SARS-CoV2 was identified as spreading rapidly among humans. Frustrating — and, frankly, soul-crushing — as that reality is, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it, other than find our hope and joy in the small places we can.

But what we can do, is be a little more thoughtful about how we interact with others during these enduringly uncertain times. I’m not here to tell you that you can’t see other people or to wear masks endlessly. As angry as I can still be with the friend who gave me COVID when my symptoms are at their worst, I also recognize the faults of my own decision-making in that moment, largely clouded by the fact that I live by myself and was desperate for intimate, in-person connections nearly three years after we’ve all had to make our lives much, much smaller.

The Basics: Vaccinate, Test, Mask

The best way to protect yourself and others from COVID is to get vaccinated, plain and simple, and to be on top of your booster shots. Now, not everyone can get vaccinated for a number of legitimate reasons ranging from access to ongoing medical issues. This is all the more reason for the rest of us to keep our own vaccinations up to date because, more than protecting ourselves, this is about protecting others.

The same applies to testing and masking. And look, I know that tests, especially, can be expensive, are not consistently covered by health insurance, and in the U.S. at least the days of publicly available tests, vaccines, and treatments are quickly coming to an end. But honestly, if you’re planning on going to a large event (especially if it is indoors) or traveling, then add the price of several days’ worth of masks, rapid tests, and potentially a PCR to your costs. I know that’s a shitty calculation to make and in a time of rampant inflation it might make life feel even more inaccessible, especially if you are already uninsured or under-insured.

But the alternative is that you’re in a space with a large number of people, contract COVID without realizing it (maybe you’re asymptomatic), don’t test before and afterwards, don’t mask, give it to someone else, and that person may experience a particularly bad case of it or get long COVID. In other words, by not testing before attending a crowded event or after potentially exposing yourself and by not masking, you’re literally paying the price in someone else’s health.

Test Effectively and Accurately Use the Results

There seems to be a certain amount of confusion and uncertainty around the rapid tests. After speaking with two close friends, both trained in epidemiology, here are few facts to keep in mind.

First, if your rapid test result is really faintly positive, that doesn’t mean you’re less symptomatic or that your result is a false positive. The testing kits state this quite clearly, that a faint positive test is a positive test, plain and simple. There is no debate there.

Second, it can take a few days to actually turn up a positive test. So if you know you’ve been exposed or you think it’s possible (because you were in a poorly ventilated indoor space, for instance), and especially if you’re starting to experience symptoms of fever or fatigue, keep testing with a rapid kit and possibly even seek out a PCR. If you’re really not sure whether you have COVID or not, talk to a healthcare provider before assuming that you don’t.

Third, for all intents and purposes, unless you are or have spoken with a trained health care provider, operate under the assumption that there is no such thing as a “false positive” test result. There are false negatives, yes, but a positive test is a positive test, and you need to act accordingly.

Plan to Cancel

At the height of the shutdowns, I was video chatting with a friend who made an incredibly astute observation, that to be able to plan for the future is a privilege, and the COVID-19 pandemic has taken that privilege away from all of us. Nearly three years after that conversation, I still think about it, and I think about who continues to see the world through that lens and who doesn’t.

The truth is, with COVID a firmly accepted part of our lives, my friend’s words are no less true now than they were in 2020. And especially as I’ve had to live with my own long COVID, I’ve had to grapple with that reality again and again, as I repeatedly made plans that I had to later cancel and then, eventually, just stopped making plans.

If we really want to protect ourselves and, more importantly, protect each other we need to make plans with the understanding that we may have to cancel them. We might lose a lot of money. We might have to harbor disappointment and sorrow and the pain of not being able to pursue something we had hoped for. We might have to miss life events or an opportunity to connect with someone who could change our life.

Because if you test before a flight or a trip or a concert or pretty much anything that exposes other people to you and your result is positive, you should cancel. If you were in an indoor space — especially if it was poorly ventilated and you were unmasked — and you start experiencing even mild symptoms, but your test result is still coming back negative, you should also plan to cancel. If you’ve been planning for something special for months and then there’s a COVID surge right when you’re about to see those plans through, you should also really seriously think about canceling or, at the very least, take even more precautions than you would otherwise.

You almost certainly won’t get your flight or your booking refunded. It will likely end up meaning missing a wedding or a funeral or a birth or some other milestone that means the world to you. But as I said earlier, to refuse to do so, to think about your financial or personal loss first, is to literally pay the price in someone else’s life and livelihood. And believe me, whatever it is you didn’t cancel, that other person will end up paying for it tenfold, probably without you ever even knowing it. A really cruel irony, isn’t it?

Quarantine and Mask

The most basic way to “stop the spread” is to not allow spread to happen in the first place. So if you know that you have COVID, isolate for the recommended number of days from the onset of your symptoms.

Again, when I think back to that rainy Sunday afternoon in October, after which my life would never be the same again, I remember thinking, It’ll probably be fine, and I really want to see this person, I really want to explore whatever possibility might be here between us. I’ve been so lonely and so isolated for so long, after all. It’s only in retrospect that I realized that my pursuit of short-term gratification (really, we’re talking about a few hours that afternoon) came at a long-term price. I can’t even tell you how many days since I’ve spent alone, lonely, and isolated.

I do want to acknowledge that many employers have eliminated paid (or unpaid…) sick time for quarantine and isolation, if they ever even offered it, and that most people don’t have the option to work remotely, like I do. And so in that situation, where you know you likely have or were exposed to COVID but you must go to work or risk losing your job — first of all, I’m really sorry, for all of us, that this is your reality. And second, be sure to wear a proper mask and increase ventilation in your workspace to the extent possible, even if this means opening a window in inclement weather.

Be Honest with Others

Over the last few months, I’ve tried to come to terms with the fact that my luck ran out, as far as getting COVID a second time goes. I know that there’s nothing constructive from playing the blame game, but in my long months of off and on brain fog and endless exhaustion since then, I can’t let go of the fact that my friend waited until I was inside their apartment to tell me about their positive test. And it’s on me for not thinking much of it at the time, for assuming that I was likely going to be ok even if I got COVID again.

But it’s also an unfair situation to be placed in, by a friend, to have to decide on the spot whether you’re going to stay or go after you’ve traveled over an hour to get to their place and they’ve spent over an hour cooking for you. And I know that my friend didn’t mean harm. Like the countless articles I’ve read on The Atlantic, NPR, and Vox — to name a few — my friend probably assumed that the risk was low for both of us, and in fairness that was my assumption as well.

The truth is, with COVID, you just can’t know. You really just can’t know what your risk will be. That’s not to undermine the science, but as of now there’s no science that can predict long COVID risk, and I really would not wish this on anyone.

So communicate and be honest with others. Don’t make assumptions about their health or their risk tolerance. If you’ve tested and you have a faint positive result or you’re experiencing mild symptoms or anything else, let the people you made plans with know beforehand so they can have the proper space to make their own decisions, weigh their own risks. And please, if a friend asks you to test before you get together or to mask through a gathering, take it with grace and do what they ask of you.

Bonus: Things Not to Say to the Person in Your Life Struggling with Long COVID

As a final closing, I want to leave you with some guidance for approaching people with long COVID. Ultimately, this boils down to the same advice for offering someone support through pretty much any difficult situation.

Meaningful compassion is always welcome, but please refrain from the following:

• “My cousin’s friend’s brother’s aunt has long COVID, and she found this vitamin supplement helpful.”
• “Have you tried keto?”
• “Hope you get better soon!” (As my sister put it, you would not tell a cancer patient, “Hope you get better soon,” or constantly ask how they are feeling. Long COVID may not be a terminal illness, exactly, but there is no definitive cure for it, either.)
• And for the love of what little joy exists in the world, please don’t tell them to “manifest good health.”

Instead, ask the person about what they need. Reach out just to let them know that you care and you’re thinking of them. Meet them where they are at in terms of how they can connect, whether that’s over the phone, video or in-person, masked or outdoors, in a place they feel up to going to or a place that they can easily access without too much exertion on their part. And show real understanding and kindness when, inevitably, they find they have to cancel because they’re having a bad day of their symptoms.

Practical Magic is a column that curates how-to articles for living your best queer life, edited by Meg Jones Wall.

“Sort Of” Season 2 Grapples With the Many Complications of Love

Season two of Sort Of opens with a conversation between our protagonist Sabi and their close friend and confidante Bessy about love.

“It’s what I want, with everybody, not just my romantic relationships but like family and friends, with all the loves I have. Just, I want that uncomplicated Rachel McAdams love. That’s doable, right?” Sabi says. Bessy looks Sabi in the eye but says nothing, her silence speaking volumes in itself.

Setting aside that I don’t watch enough mainstream Western media to understand the Rachel McAdams reference, this conversation sets the tone for season two of Sort Of.

In many ways, this thread is the logical continuation of where Sabi’s story left off. The first season of Sort Of showed the journey of Sabi beginning to trust that they could be vulnerable with the people in the various parts of their life. The show opens with Sabi’s patchwork life as a nanny and bartender beginning to fall apart: they unexpectedly run into their mother Raffo and come out as trans to her; shortly after, Bessy enters a coma. With great nuance and care, Sort Of shows how Sabi, Raffo, Bessy’s husband Paul, and their kids Violet and Henry all must grapple with the events that have upended their lives. As the season ends, we see Sabi start to become comfortable with taking up space as themselves in the world, setting boundaries with Paul and their family, while also being more openly honest with Raffo, and, at the very end, finally admitting how important Bessy is to them.

A pivotal moment in season one is when Sabi meets Olympia at a party, which is also the first time we really see Sabi engage with queer community more broadly. Olympia is a trans femme who is inspiringly at ease with herself, and Sabi finds not only affirmation but also a path forward for themselves in her friendship. In the last episode of the season, Olympia encourages Sabi to let others in, to give Raffo a chance, and to be more honest with Bessy.

Season two starts some undefined period of time after the first ended. And in that time, Olympia and Sabi’s friendship has progressed from the pair spending substantial time together to Olympia approaching Sabi with greater distance. Sabi clearly wants their relationship to deepen, but Olympia seems to be looking for something casual and fun, and in the second episode Olympia introduces Sabi to her husband at a club. Sabi had just been speaking with Bessy about wanting an uncomplicated love, and it quickly becomes clear that, regardless of how personally important Olympia has been to them, any further relationship will be anything but uncomplicated.

It was hard for me to watch what feels like an unexplained shift in Olympia’s personality. She seemed so genuine in the first season, like a person who strongly valued honesty, so it’s unclear how she could lead Sabi on in this way. Seeing that their relationship has progressed and become more intimate (without, however, seeing how that happened) and then seeing it quickly fall apart in the span of just two episodes was incredibly unsettling. It felt both like the writers are trying to cover too much ground and also, unnervingly, real. Because it’s unclear how much time has passed between the two seasons, Olympia’s character can read as inconsistent. And, at the same time, Sort Of is aptly showing the hazards of dating, especially when you’ve come to idolize someone.

In many ways, this is what really defines the second season of Sort Of. It’s tantalizingly true to life and yet disappointingly uneven because it’s trying to do too much in too little time. One minute the characters feel real and in the next, they’ve grown or changed or deepend in some way that implies the passage of a substantial period of time, but just how life is pacing remains unclear throughout.

There are two relationships that especially suffer from this issue: Sabi’s relationship to Bessy and Sabi’s relationship with their father Imran. And, unfortunately for Sort Of, these are two of the most central relationships of the show and the second season, in particular.

Season one was notably marked by both Bessy and Imran’s absence: we see Bessy through other characters’ eyes in flashbacks and we hear about Imran from his family. That they both loom large in Sabi’s life is incredibly clear, which is why the first season climaxes with the imminent return of both, Bessy just out of the coma and Imran returning to Canada after Sabi’s cousin outs them. But the expectations set up around each of these characters in season one were markedly different and so the ways in which the second season fails to live up to those expectations also differs.

Everything we heard about Imran in season one was rife with the implications of domestic violence, whether that’s actual physical violence, emotional abuse, control, coercion, or all of the above. So many South Asians know what this looks like — never out in the open but ever present — to the extent that there are entire Quora threads dedicated to the lasting harm so many of us continue to grapple with. And that violence is always grounded in a particular brand of patriarchy: one where fathers and husbands must, by definition, keep their wives, children, and most of all daughters in line; where sons must dutifully carry on the family’s legacy in their success and daughters must uphold the family’s honor in their modesty; where mothers and wives become the enforcers of everyone’s role so that things don’t get up to the head of the family, who will always react to transgressions harshly.

The subtext of violence was expressed repeatedly in the last few episodes of season one, and the gendered implications of that subtext are impossible to ignore, particularly as a South Asian viewer. There was Aqsa and Sabi’s utter dismay that Raffo left them a voicemail urging them to “jiyo apne zindagi” instead of dictating how they must dress and act, as she had their whole lives. Later, we see Raffo pushing Aqsa into the role of enforcer when she tells Aqsa to get Sabi to change their clothes because Raffo is afraid of her in-laws seeing Sabi in all their trans nonbinary glory. Caught in the middle, like so many first-generation South Asian older sisters, Aqsa tries to, in her view, reason with Sabi, not realizing the violence of her own ask. But Aqsa’s fear of imminent danger is also palpable, when she finally declares in frustration that if their father finds out, he’ll “take a giant shit on mom.” And we see that fear in Raffo’s eyes when her brother-in-law Shehraz walks through the door and takes in Sabi for who they are, next to a giant hole in what was the wall between the living room and kitchen. Even Shehraz says at the end of season one that Imran would “make everyone’s life hell” once he returns from Dubai.

And yet, Imran walks out of a shuttle from the airport smiling, greets his family — even offering Aqsa an embrace — before being confounded by Sabi’s appearance and meekly whispering, “Hello.” Who is this mild-mannered man, who acknowledges his daughter as an equal to the men of the family and simply looks away from the child he expected to carry on his legacy?

In the first couple of episodes, we get a handful of interactions that are more in line with what I would expect: Imran’s insistence that Aqsa clean up the table with the other women instead of Sabi and his sharp retort that Raffo is “trying to turn this house into a circus” between her choice in paint for the walls (after asking for her preference) and her “untamed children.” Both of these interactions were reminiscent of some of the behaviors I’ve observed from my own father, and it’s the kind of enforcement of patriarchy and emotional abuse I would expect from the character of Imran built up in season one. But by and large, aggression and abuse don’t define Imran’s character in season two, as we’ve been led to expect. His approach to handling Sabi is more subtle and manipulative: he forces Sabi to spend time doing manual labor with him as an electrician while making thinly coded comments about Sabi’s genitals. We also never really see his wrath expressed beyond these two surface-level statements.

(As a side note, if anyone in the Mehboob family directly antagonizes Sabi, it’s, surprisingly, Aqsa, and there isn’t ever really a coherent reason as to why. Throughout the season, it feels like there’s a conflict simmering between Aqsa and Sabi, but it’s never really confronted. Continuing the thread of inconsistent characterizations, Aqsa’s callousness to Sabi in season two, in terms of their identity and the complicated situation with their father as well as their finances, also feels at odds with her real concern when Sabi had by all appearances gone missing at the end of season one. Who is Aqsa and how does she view her sibling? And how does she feel about Raffo’s unexpected acceptance of Sabi’s identity, particularly as that squares with the lines that she herself has had to toe at the behest of Raffo? None of that is really explored. Instead, we see Aqsa as heartless and inconsiderate for most of the season — a portrayal given far too often to single South Asian women with progressive values, especially in South Asian media. I’m sure this wasn’t Sort Of’s intention, but it’s hard for me to not view this particular storyline from this particular lens.)

As the season progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Imran is, effectively, powerless over his family, even as Raffo, Aqsa, and Sabi continue to live in fear of him. There can be a certain amount of truth to that, as I’ve witnessed in my own life. As children grow up in Western contexts, making their own money and moving out, we can, sometimes, buy ourselves freedom from our repressive families. But the ambiguity of time in the show also makes that hard to parse and so, more often than not, it feels that Imran “isn’t really as bad” as we had been led to expect.

I don’t think it is the show’s intention to give a pass to a patriarchal abuser. In many ways, I think Sort Of is trying to tell a messier story about the intertwined nature of love and abuse in South Asian families. Exactly halfway through the season, Raffo sees Imran standing outside her dance class and is too afraid to go home so she calls Sabi. At the time of her call, Sabi had just set up a sort of date with Wolf, a new potential love interest for Sabi who could offer them that “uncomplicated Rachel McAdams love” but Sabi seems to feel ambivalent about him, romantically speaking (a different kind of complication with regards to love — sometimes you don’t love what you can have). And so Wolf and Sabi pick up Raffo, treat her to a meal, and then take her home. As she’s leaving, Wolf makes an astute observation: that sometimes, it can be hard for us to accept when people close to us change, it can be hard for us to allow them space to change.

The question I was left wondering after I watched this, though, was what does it mean to accept that an abuser has changed? What does it mean for a community at large and what does it mean for the specific people he’s harmed?

Sort Of tries to grapple with this, to some extent. At a later point, Imran takes Sabi to see the Imam. The set up as a viewer, and to Sabi, is incredibly clear: Imran wants the Imam “to fix” to Sabi. But instead, the Imam emphasizes that love comes with understanding, and so maybe the pair should try to understand each other. Afterwards Imran says to Sabi, “That Imam needs more training. You don’t need to understand someone before loving them. I don’t understand you at all,” just stopping short of saying that he loves Sabi — he is a South Asian father, after all. But the question of what Imran’s love — which, up to this point, has been defined entirely by control — means to Sabi is one the show only very briefly addresses.

And then, out of nowhere, in the very next episode, Imran dies. Shehraz explains that he’d had a stent placed a while back in Dubai and that Imran hadn’t wanted to worry his family about his health. But honestly, it’s hard not to feel like the show’s creators simply didn’t know what to do with him. I don’t think the writers could imagine a future in which Imran stays in the family and Raffo continues her own story of growth, effectively working towards repairing her relationship with Sabi. I certainly can’t. And that relationship — between Raffo and Sabi — is one of the complicated loves that the show is, rightly, invested in.

It is this open question, though, about how to make sense of Imran and Sabi’s relationship that leads to the jaw dropping cliff hanger. But before we can turn to that, we need to talk about Bessy.

We saw just glimpses of Bessy in season one, mostly from the other characters’ perspectives. She was struggling with her marriage to Paul, which is unsurprising, frankly, because — before Bessy’s coma changes him — Paul was incredibly self-absorbed. At some point, Bessy had begun fulfilling both her sexual and emotional needs outside of her marriage, as we learned about her affair with a man named Penny and also saw that she frequented Bar Buk to chat with Sabi on what seemed to be a regular basis.

To Sabi, Bessy is particularly important, the first person to ask their pronouns, to really see them for who they are before they even realized it themselves. And that Sabi is equally important to Bessy was implied in their one brief, uncomfortable interaction the night before Bessy’s crash. “I’m going to miss you,” Bessy said as she was leaving, because Paul had fired Sabi as the family’s nanny earlier that day, “Will you miss me?” The pain was clear in Bessy’s eyes when Sabi couldn’t answer the question. It’s clear that in season two, the show wants to follow the thread of this relationship. The season opens with Sabi and Bessy, after all.

The thing is, it seems like Sort Of doesn’t seriously want to contend with the highly unrealistic medical situation that it put Bessy in, in the first place. (Bessy’s bicycle crash does not even remotely follow how bicycle mechanics work, let alone the extremely unlikely odds of someone getting a serious head injury from a crash that does not involve a car.) We don’t know how much time has passed between seasons one and two, but Bessy went from barely verbalizing to sitting up and holding a full conversation. A couple of episodes later, she insists on leaving the medical center against the recommendation of her healthcare providers because she wants to be at home, but there clearly isn’t an around-the-clock care system in place for her. One, or at most two, episodes pass between her walking across the room unassisted, climbing a flight of stairs, and venturing out on her own.

It’s hard not to feel like Sort Of just wants Bessy “to be better” so that the show can move forward with its story about complicated loves. Throughout season two, Bessy spends far more time trying to make sense of how she’s ended up married to, in her words, “a white dude” than she does actually contending with her physical or cognitive limitations. (And even the bit of that we do see, she “overcomes” each of those limitations one by one.) This leads to both a confused and, at times, frustratingly ableist story.

On the one hand, despite Bessy’s miraculous recovery, we’re being asked to believe that her decision making has been impaired, that she’s acting on impulses — which is why she leaves the medical center without telling anyone about her decision, why she invites her ex-girlfriend to her house without thinking through the potential consequences for her kids, why she kisses Sabi. But on the other hand, she’s holding thoughtful and coherent conversations with people every step of the way.

Honestly, it’s hard to know what to make of any of it. Is Bessy compassionate and caring or selfish, and how much of the balance between those has been tipped by her crash, both the physical ramifications of it as well as the emotional toll? The show can’t seem to make up its mind. There are moments sprinkled throughout that feel like they’ve been thoughtfully crafted, but as with Olympia, the sum total feels a little scattered and like it’s being driven more by the ending than by the logic of storytelling and characterization.

When Imran dies, Bessy is unable to attend the funeral because (for once!) she’s having a particularly bad day with her symptoms. But later that evening, she feels well enough to try to attend the opening for the club that Sabi, 7ven, and Wolf have started over the course of the season as a replacement for Bar Buk.

Sabi reflects on how badly they needed Bessy that day, how they wanted to tell her so badly how conflicted they felt throughout the funeral because of what was expected of them on so many levels. But Bessy has made things complicated because she kissed Sabi. Eventually, Sabi shares that the whole day, people have been telling them, “how much their dad loved them.”

And Bessy, without skipping a beat, asks, “Did you love him?” — a question that breaks Sabi.

“That’s like such an obvious question, and no one asked me,” they reply through sobs.

As a viewer, it comes as a bit of a surprise, though, that Sabi can’t answer Bessy’s question. There’s pieces of the story as to what exactly the relationship between Sabi and Imran was throughout the season, but the connections aren’t there. There’s too many inconsistencies in Imran’s character and simply not enough time devoted to Sabi’s internal struggle for this question to feel like the obvious conclusion to the season.

And similarly, what comes next, also feels out of character for both Bessy and Sabi — though not out of nowhere. From the very beginning, the question of what Sabi and Bessy’s relationship actually is has been left open but also uncertain.

One of the things I loved about season one of Sort Of was how it showed a variety of relationships and the significance they all have on Sabi’s life without feeling the need to romanticize every one. I didn’t realize it at the time, when I first watched Sort Of, but this implicit message really drew me to the show. And of the many relationships in Sabi’s life, the one with Bessy is incredibly precious. It’s a deep connection of the kind that can be hard to come by.

What I realized in watching season two of Sort Of is that, in spite of my relatively new found peace with myself around being single, this is still a tender subject for me, and also that I desperately want to see stories that center nonromantic relationships as the focal points of people’s lives. And so, to watch Sabi return Bessy’s earlier advances and kiss her just before the show cuts to the end credits, it’s hard not to feel like something has been lost in the pursuit of telling a story about how there are no easy, uncomplicated loves. I shouldn’t fault this show for telling the story it wants to tell rather than the one I want to see, but it’s so hard not to after the shift away from themes that resonated so strongly with me in the first season.

Despite the faults and inconsistencies in season two, I really do want to know what happens next. Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo are telling a captivating, if somewhat uneven, story that focuses on so many characters who hold so many identities that aren’t often represented in media. I can’t wait to see what’s to come.

You Need Help: I Just Turned 65 and I’m Questioning My Sexuality

Q:

Help me, Autostraddle! I know I’m too old for you, but who else am I gonna ask? I just turned 65. I was single in the pre-plague 70s and made good use of it, fu#king just about anything with a dick. I got sober and stopped that, met my husband and soulmate. Loved him madly, and then he died. Honestly, I loved our intimate relationship but over time had less and less interest in sex. My hetero married friends my age are getting testosterone shots ~ for their husbands. Ugh. No.

I never even considered anything other than heterosexuality, but the vast majority of my friends, male and female, have always been gay. Always. I sponsored half the lesbians in AA for decades. I am attracted to lesbians in a way I can’t explain. My dearest friend in the world died four years ago and she was a self-described dyke. I adored her.

But I don’t want sex. I don’t actually want sex with anyone (well, myself, occasionally, but it’s not a driving force these days). I recently encountered a man who by all of society’s standards would be a catch. Smart, educated, well off, enchanted with me. So why was I feeling so cringe-y, the more interested he became? And as his sexual interest became clear, I actually felt revulsion.

I meditated and tried to work this out with my spirit guides (woo woo, I know), and I kept seeing my body outlined with bright white light, and hearing the word, “impenetrable.” Let that guy go. What a relief.

And yet now I’m on a lesbian dating site. What is going on with me? I really hope you can help me, or at least direct me to some resources. There’s no one in my life I can ask about this. I’d be too embarrassed to go to my lesbian friends and say “Hey, guess what? You were right.” (Because they’ve been telling me for years…)

I’ve been feminist for years, fought for the ERA, have hated men, felt compassion for them, pity most and, thankfully, love a lot of the poor creatures now (definitely have found peace there). But the idea of sharing my life with a hetero man is just a big fat nope. I just love women. And I love women who aren’t into all that male/female BS. It’s exhausting.

I don’t know what to do, or even if I should do anything. I’m happy in my life, just really surprised that all of this has come up and I guess a little disconcerted thinking I’ve been deluding myself for years?? Okay. There it is. Thanks for listening.

A:

Editor’s note: Every so often, a question lands in our inbox that sparks a lot of discussion amongst our staff! This was one of those questions, and as a special treat, Himani and I decided to have a formal conversation about it and then publish our transcript so you can get multiple perspectives — and of course we hope you’ll all share your perspectives in the comments per usual. This felt like an especially fun way to close out the year of You Need Help. Thank you all for trusting us with your vulnerable questions, and we’ll be back in 2023 to keep trying our best to help when you need it! — Vanessa 

Vanessa: So my first instinct here was to just be like… “babe, you’re queer!” Because I feel like being queer is expansive, and can include many identities throughout one’s life, and to me when I read this question it was like a foregone conclusion. Duh babe, you’re queer. Welcome!

Himani: I don’t disagree with you, but when I hear people say things like that, “Well of course you’re queer,” in that kind of matter of fact way — I wonder if it just reinforces this letter writer’s fear about their friends being like “I told you so.” And, I really feel for this person, because the embarrassment of telling your friends something it’s taken you decades to come to, when other people have been insinuating it forever is so real. And not to throw shade (but also throwing shade) the smugness of the queer community in situations like this really doesn’t help. In my experience at least it makes it harder. It makes it harder to come into something that is your own because it feels like everyone is going to be like “well duh” or laugh at you. And then after you do come out a bunch of people who are way younger than you call you a baby gay, which just feels so pejorative and dismissive of the life you’ve already been living.

Vanessa: Yes, I think that’s all such good info to mull over! And when we first talked about this as a group in the editorial Slack channel, you mentioned some of those feelings and I was really surprised and then really happy that you called it out and brought your experience to the table, because I hadn’t meant it that way but can totally see how it comes across that way. So then we decided to answer this question together, and now here we are! So I guess I’m wondering from your perspective, what are some ways this person can move forward that will feel affirming and empowering rather than belittling or dismissive?

Himani: I mean, I think everyone in the queer community knows this but I think we need to say it more explicitly and more often: Queerness is a journey. And also, I don’t think sexuality is a fixed thing — although that’s a tricky one to own because homophobes have been using this against us forever. But I don’t mean it that way. I just mean that if you’re older and coming out now, that doesn’t deny or negate the life and love that you’ve had. It also doesn’t negate the fact that your feelings in the present are maybe pointing to other interests than you’ve had or pursued in the past. In the case of this particular letter writer, I also feel really compelled to add: you can be straight or a lesbian or bisexual or however you choose to identify at the end of the day and also not be into sex. You can be any or all of those things and also asexual or aromantic.

Vanessa: I 100% agree on all of that. And if you’d like more resources for exploring asexuality, you can check out the articles we’ve written about it on Autostraddle, or I really loved Angela Chen’s Ace. I really want to focus on what Himani said which is that queerness is a journey. I think something I wanted to zoom in on for this answer is affirming the meaningful relationship the LW had with her husband — maybe I’m sensitive to that because my dad died just a couple of years ago and I can see how much my mom is struggling — but I feel very strongly that we do fall in love with people, not always a specific gender, and it seems clear to me they shared a beautiful relationship for many years. But I’m looking at the LW now, writing to us (which, by the way, thank you for trusting us with your question!) and wondering what her next move should be. I’m specifically looking at the end of the letter where she writes: “I don’t know what to do, or even if I should do anything.” What do you think?

Himani: Ultimately, I think there’s no wrong way about this in terms of whether she seeks out a relationship with a woman or queer community that she’s more explicitly and openly a part of or whether she continues along with the life and friends and relationships she has currently. But she does seem to be stressed by feeling like she needs a clear “answer,” and I don’t think there necessarily is one or has to be one. I think I’ve written this in response to an advice question before but when I was first coming to terms with my sexuality, I felt the most “seen” and belonging when I saw a sign at my work place that said it was LGBTQ+ affirming and included “questioning” along with the more definitive identity labels. Because it was this realization that I could just live in the Q of “questioning” forever if I wanted to and I would still have a place somewhere, and that was an ok decision to make. And I think we need to be able to accept and embrace the uncertainty. So often we get questions from folks about specific identity labels, and at the end of the day, I really do believe that you get to make a label what you want it to be (within reason, of course, I’m not sanctioning Rachel Dolezal over here) AND also you get to choose or not choose or change your labels when and how you want. In the end, I personally don’t think the labels are all that important, and sometimes I think we get caught up in them at the expense of just living. Which brings me to my next point: I do think finding friends to talk to is going to be really helpful for her, ultimately — whether that’s her lesbian friends or straight friends or otherwise. She seems like she just needs someone to talk through her feelings with, at least as a starting point. And if she is concerned that her friends will be like “well, duh” she can preface the conversation with something like, “I’m feeling really tender around this topic, and I need you to be kind to me and to take this seriously.” Or something along those lines.

Vanessa: Yes! That’s so much of what I’m thinking too. The answer to “what should I do now” is so open, and I think that in itself can be a little overwhelming, but honestly, it can be anything. I remember when I first came out to myself, I was 20, and I really gave myself such a hard time — like “if you didn’t know this about yourself how could it possibly be true now!” I wrote that in my journal! And I was only 20! So I’m thinking, if I felt that way then, it seems like possibly many queer people, no matter how old, have a really hard time coming to terms with their identity, for so many reasons… some of which are surely the idea that queer people won’t welcome them, or will scoff at them and say I told you so, or will simply be kind of cliquey. I do think this LW is at an advantage because she says she already has so many gay friends — it seems like she wouldn’t have to do much to plug into queer community because in many ways she’s already in it. My main advice is to take some pressure off yourself, be gentle with your journey, and just be open to anything. Don’t date men if that feels bad. Don’t feel like you have to date women either (though do if you want to, as it seems the Lesbian Dating Website might indicate… yes?). Roll your own eyes at anyone who acts smug about your journey. Just let it be what it is every day, and go from there.

Himani: Yeah, I completely agree with that. For me, when I accepted the uncertainty and was just like “I’m going to just keep doing me,” that really helped me just live my life and make decisions based on what I felt like doing.

Vanessa: I love that. Do you think there’s anything else we need to share with this LW? I really want to cheer her on and just encourage her to keep doing what she’s doing. Honestly, she sounds like a fucking rad person, and I wish I got to be her friend!

Himani: One last thing I want to touch on is when she says, “I guess a little disconcerted thinking I’ve been deluding myself for years.” That’s a really hard feeling to live with, and also something I can relate to, and! also something we’ve gotten asked in the past. A few years ago I responded to a letter writer in YNH who felt guilt about coming out and buried in their question was this kind of guilt for kind of letting themselves down. I don’t know if that’s the exact feeling this letter writer is experiencing, but I just want her to know that, first, she’s not alone: I think a lot of people who come out older (myself included) feel like, “How could I not know sooner? How could I have been deluding myself for so long?” And second, that ultimately she hasn’t let herself down at all. As I wrote in my earlier reply: “You came out when you did for a reason and, in all honesty, probably more than one.”

Vanessa: I will say as my final thought — if you do choose to share with your friends, which I hope you do, there’s no reason to frame it like “omg you were RIGHT and I was WRONG”… and if they’re good friends, they won’t want to feel that way either! It’s just life. You’re just living. Who cares what anyone thought until now? You’re you. This is the you of right now. It sounds like your friends are really loving and accepting, so make space for them to love and accept this version of you, even if you remain in a questioning place for the rest of your life.

Himani: I love that so much! And I think you’re right! If you’ve been friends with some of these people for so long, they probably just really love you and want what’s best for you.

Vanessa: Which is… literally whatever you want. We’re sending you so much love from Autostraddle and hoping you get everything you want and more in 2023 and beyond!

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: What To Do With This Meaningless, Single Life?

Q:

Dear lovely insightful people,

I am struggling with time passing and me continuing to be far away from the life I would like to live: I miss tangible sustainable community, and I long for being “equal partners in a very fun and exciting and safe relationship” (from a NYT article) with someone, and a family.

While my job is ok-ish, as is my health (i.e. some permanent conditions that I do address, nothing acute) — the big life sections are gaping holes: No significant other. No offspring.

And it doesn’t look like this will change anytime soon or at all.

Of course I might find a healthy relationship eventually; it is not impossibly impossible even when you’re 80. But the thing with continuing my family, breaking the cycle, and being able to pass on love and connection and values and valuables and so on, will not happen anymore (and I do not have siblings, it was all on me and I’m 41 now).

It looks like I am deemed to live a single life, where I do stuff and am socially active, but ultimately alone. Lonely. Meaningless.

It cannot be life to just keep going.

Like it’s nice to enjoy a coffee and watch the birds on the platform while you are waiting at the station, but when you are there to catch a train, and learn the train is delayed and then delayed some more and so on, the coffee and the birds are nice but not what you came for. And they do not get you to the place you were to go.

And no, I do not want to get comfortable on the windy platform of a train station.

If this is the life the universe or whoever decided for me — I do not consent!

Maybe you have clues how to deal with this?

Thank you!

A:

I want to start by saying that there have been so many times in my life — most of it, in fact — that I have felt a lot of what you’re feeling. Your metaphor of waiting on the train platform and being able to see the bits of beauty and comfort that exist there but still wanting, so badly, for the train to arrive so you can get to where you want to go resonated really strongly with me. So first of all, I want you to know you’re absolutely not alone.

And yet, in this particular moment, as I write a reply to your letter, I find myself in a different emotional place. A novel one for me, in fact. It’s not that my life has changed dramatically in that time: I’m not in a relationship; most of my closest friends continue to live far away from me, and I haven’t been able to see many of them for years now because of the pandemic; and I continue to question why I expend so much time and energy on my day job when there are many other things I’d rather be doing. Yet, something has shifted, which I’ll get to presently, but I want to acknowledge that some of what I say below may not feel applicable or relevant to you. Regardless, I want to try to hold space here for both: for your (and my, really) pain and for the possibility that you may not feel this way forever.

So, let’s start with your letter. I really am sorry. It is so incredibly disappointing and heartbreaking to have something you want so badly, something that, in your value system, feels like the ultimate “point of it all” and for that to be just out of your grasp. There is a lot of very real grief in that.

One of my favorite advice pieces is an article on ambiguous grief by Lori Gottlieb from The Atlantic. As Gottlieb writes, “Ambiguous grief isn’t more or less painful than other types of grief — it’s just different. But one thing that does make it additionally challenging is that it tends to go unacknowledged.” In my own experience, acknowledging that grief both privately to myself and, eventually, more publicly has been incredibly valuable and important.

Recognizing, naming, and speaking the feelings won’t change the reality of your circumstances, of course. But what I read in your letter (and forgive me if I’m just projecting myself here) is a lot of frustration. Perhaps taking the time and space to acknowledge your pain, both with yourself, and with close friends and family, may help you let go of some of the frustration.

In my own experience, as I started talking to my friends and sisters about my feelings of sorrow and loneliness as a result of being chronically single, a few things happened.

First, I realized that while many of my friends are in partnered, long-term relationships, there are also several who aren’t. Hearing their experiences helped me feel less alone, knowing that they not only shared in my struggle but also felt the same types of loneliness and hopelessness that I did.

Second, I also found that many of my friends in committed relationships, and even those with families, struggled with that same loneliness and hopelessness. And, as I’ve been able to internalize that second one, I think that has — albeit slowly — allowed me to shift my perspective a bit. A loving, long-term relationship won’t save me from loneliness or my ever-present existential crisis about the point of my life. I have known this for a long, long time, but there is something about seeing friends in the kinds of healthy, long-term relationships that I have always dreamed of expressing the same things I have felt for so, so long. Really being there for, and also deeply empathizing with some of my closest friends has been incredibly powerful in terms of driving that message home.

At the same time, I do understand why you say that a single life feels meaningless. There was a time in my life where my professional pursuits consumed me, and I very quickly realized how empty those pursuits were. Racism and sexism were always going to hold me back, and increasingly I questioned (and continue to question, in the present) the ultimate purpose of any of the work that I do. And so, sometime around seven or so years ago, I started believing that the only thing that matters in life is the relationships we have.

For so long, I had wanted a romantic, partnered relationship, and the shift in my values made that desire even more intense. Alongside that, I watched so many of my closest friends and sisters make difficult decisions and, because of the way society is structured, ultimately prioritize romantic relationships and family over friendship. From all this, it followed, that the only real meaning in my life would be achieved by having a romantic relationship of my own. That might not be exactly how you landed at this conclusion yourself, but I share all of that to say: Please believe me when I say that for most of my adult life, I have also felt that a single life is lonely and meaningless.

But as one year after another goes by, and I remain single, and the prospects of that changing don’t look so great, my perspective on this has started to shift. If I had told myself that a year ago, I would’ve rolled my eyes and said that that’s just a trick of the mind. Yet here I am, and maybe it is a lie I’m telling myself, but the truth is, I am so much more at peace and, frankly, happier when I can really hold things from this place.

It’s true that the structure of society makes it hard to hold friendships as close as partnered relationships. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to build deep, long-lasting connections with friends, even if you can’t speak with or see each other regularly. It might not be what you or I really want, but it’s also not nothing. A life full of rich and varied relationships also isn’t empty, even if it’s not the richness that you’re seeking. To quote from one of my favorite books, Ancillary Sword: “It wasn’t the same. It wasn’t what I wanted, not really, wasn’t what I knew I would always reach for. But it would have to be enough.”

And maybe that’s not really encouraging. Maybe that is just resignation, which is where I lived for years. But as I continue to ask myself the question, “Can this be enough?” that resignation has started to shift into an acceptance, which on occasion is even joyful. As many have written before me, there are some serious perks of being single. I live my life on my terms, filling up my days however I want and doing the mundane things in life according to my own particular habits.

Finally, I want to address this part of your letter, which I think is the hardest: “continuing my family, breaking the cycle, and being able to pass on love and connection and values and valuables and so on, will not happen.” Again, I really am sorry. We have gotten a letter previously in the A+ Advice Box from someone who wanted children but cannot have them, and again, that grief and pain is just so, so real. I can only imagine how that’s magnified by not having siblings and feeling like “it was all on me.”

I have never wanted to have children, especially biological children, so I can’t speak from a place of empathy, but when you mention “breaking the cycle” that implies to me a complicated family history. I, too, come from a complicated family, with an enduring history of abuse, and so I think a lot about “breaking the cycle.” I wonder if it would be useful to you to consider that in terms of the love you give yourself, rather than just what you impart on the next generation.

As for passing on “love and connection and values and valuables,” as I have gotten older I’ve started to think about this, even though I have no desire for children. But several of my close friends do have kids, and it’s important to me to spend time with them, building loving connections and sharing my values and, someday, valuables as well. In the same way that I suggested earlier to think more expansively about which relationships bring meaning to life, it might be helpful to think about generational connections and legacy more expansively as well.

Ultimately, I hope something in what I’ve written resonates for you, even though we seem to be in different parts of our journeys of making peace with this struggle. I really do feel your pain, and, honestly, I really am sorry for both of us. I don’t know why life is so fickle in this way. I want to leave you with something I have written previously for the A+ Advice Box in response to a related question:

“It is so, so incredibly painful to have something you want with all your heart and, as you said, you know that you don’t control whether or not you will ever achieve it. But somehow, we manage to build ourselves up from those places, even if we’re always living with a little bit of sadness. (Re-appropriating Eleanor Shellstrop there.) Trust that this is true for you, as well.”

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

Writing for Autostraddle Helped Me Find the Words for My Real Coming Out

Thanks to an outpouring of support, we made our fundraiser goal in JUST FIVE DAYS!!! Thank you if you’re an A+ member or if you donated. This support means that Autostraddle can survive through January, that we’re okay for now. But as we look ahead to an actually pretty scary 2023, we have to acknowledge that we need more monthly A+ members on our side in order to continue to keep this space around. So many of our incredible writers and team members wrote posts for the fundraiser, and we’re going to run them through the 12th, during our Monthly A+ Member Drive. If you sign up at the $6/month level or higher as a monthly member before the midnight PST on the 12th of November, you’ll get a bonus pack of 4 stickers, too, on top of the usual perks. So, what do you say? Will you join?

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When I first started delving deeper into queer media and narratives in 2019 after — what else — a bad breakup, I mostly found essays by people who knew they were queer but struggled with coming out. Essays, primarily, about broken connections with families that once loved them.

I don’t mean to diminish the pain of that story, but it isn’t mine.

The question I kept finding myself asking was what did it mean to come out when those bonds never existed in the first place? And inextricably tied in this was the question: what did it mean to be queer and South Asian?

I applied to write for Autostraddle with no expectation of ever getting hired but with a small hope that perhaps, I’d be able to tell my story, which I knew had to be bigger than myself. All of the Bollywood movies I saw growing up were a testament to the fact that mine and my family’s experiences could not be unique. But no matter where I looked, I couldn’t find that queer coming out story.

The story of how love didn’t exist in a family, wasn’t allowed to, couldn’t — love was a Western concept, after all, as my mother constantly told us growing up — and so it was easier for me to not feel what I knew I could never have. The story of how, having been raised in a culture where women’s bodies are endless sources of disgust and women’s lives are not their own, I stamped down my own desire. The story of how, even as queerness gained more public traction in the U.S., because white people were always the face of it, I could never see myself clearly for who I was.

The story of how I assumed I was straight until I was almost twenty-nine.

Coming out stories are practically an icebreaker in this community, but I have long maintained that I don’t have much to say about mine: coming out wasn’t hard for me. Coming into myself — well, that’s another story entirely.

In one way or another, delicately or brusquely, people ask me, How? How could I have not known, not had an inkling, even an idea of it when I was younger? I always struggle with that question, because the real answer involves explaining the emotional abuse, neglect, and isolation I was raised under, and the lasting trauma that has shaped my life.

Three years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to use those words. I wouldn’t have been able to name it for what it is. I still remember, when my sister’s friend, a social worker, once observed, a decade or more ago, that our parents were emotionally abusive, how taken aback I was by her choice of language. I knew the circumstances we grew up in were not good and more than anything else, what we all sought was freedom. But to call it abuse? Surely not. Surely…

It’s incredible how deep denial can run, isn’t it?

From what I’ve read, from the advice questions that people have written in to us here, I think many of us who endured some extent of abuse as children, or who didn’t know we were queer until we were older, or both, can relate to that. Overcoming that denial is, in a way, a coming out of its own.

To come into myself, to really integrate my queerness as an essential part of myself, I needed to start telling the stories I had been holding in for so long. The stories that no one knew except my sisters, and at some point, we all stopped talking about them because we just wanted to live in the freedom of the present. I won’t speak for my sisters but for myself, at least — because I didn’t want my childhood past to define me. Because to do that would mean that unspoken sorrow and grief and pain were all I could ever have.

There are things that I’ve never told my closest friends, some of whom have known me for over a decade, since long before I knew I wasn’t straight, and have loved me every step of the way. They’ve all known for as long as we’ve been friends that I don’t have a good relationship with my parents but not why. One of my dearest friends once hesitantly and carefully asked me, over a year after we had become close, why I never, ever mentioned them. “I was afraid to ask, in case your parents had passed away or something,” she said.

Incidentally, the very first therapist I ever saw, when I was in college, once observed that I never, ever talked about love, except when I was talking about music.

There are emotions I’ve never had words for, things I didn’t know how to say, didn’t think I was allowed to speak of, quickly realized others would never understand, and so I drowned myself in music, letting the most despairing melodies I could find express the things that I could not. Love was one of those, sure, but there were others deep in that well, intertwined with it.

Several experiences over the last three years have made it possible for me to start to open up. But one of the definitive and most powerful ones has been writing here.

Autostraddle took a chance on me after the 2019 fundraiser. I had no professional writing experience and no training, and yet this space took me in with open arms. It is not an exaggeration to say that I would not be here right now, were it not for the support of readers like you.

I won’t say that it’s always been smooth sailing, but one of the things I appreciate about this team is the willingness to grow, and, in particular, Autstraddle’s real commitment to inclusion over the last three years. Having so many people of color at the helm has made a huge difference. Carmen and Kayla understand that I will never have a neat story that can be packaged nicely and ends with an easy moral. My essays are all open questions, all spaces for me to work through the ultimate question of my life, one that I’m not sure I will ever have a real or definitive answer to: What do I do with the childhood I had?

I cannot even begin to tell you the world of difference it has made for me to try to write through these memories, faded as they are, mere shadows but ones that continue to loom large over my life. I sent the very first personal essay I wrote for Autostraddle to my sisters, friends, and even old acquaintances who have supported me along the way. This was well over a year after I had already come out to all of them, after my first relationship had started and ended. But this was my real coming out, both to them and to the world.

Do you know, when I first pitched that essay to Kamala, I asked her if I could publish it anonymously, and she, of course, agreed. But after I finished it, I wanted to put my name and my face on it, set the words to the sound of my voice. This was my story, the best answer I could give to all the questions I have gotten about my family, about my love interests, about why I thought I was straight for so long, and I wanted the world to know it. I needed the world to know it.

Autostraddle gave me the space to, in the words of E.M. Forster, “choose a place where I wouldn’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all I am worth, facing the sunshine.”

I can’t think of a single other publication in the world that would have given an unknown, inexperienced writer that kind of opportunity.

I have so many stories in me, still, left to tell. This is only the beginning for me. But in order for me to continue, to continue to be seen, I need Autostraddle to continue, too.

This place runs on the continued support of readers like you. It simply couldn’t without it. And so, I am a paying A+ member and always will be, because it is the one small thing I can do to give back a tiny sliver of everything I have gotten from being able to write here.

There are so many others in this world, who have stories they need to share: to be seen and heard, to work through the experiences that shaped them, to come into themselves. Let’s make sure Autostraddle is around for them, too.

You can help do that by joining A+. Will you become a member and support Autostraddle today?

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You Need Help: How To Date While Dealing With Mental Illness

Feature image photo by Studio CJ via Getty Images

Q:

How do people who deal with mental illness date? I’ve had anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember. It’s mostly linked to loneliness. I’m trying to make friends which is a work in progress. I’m also trying to date which is completely new to me. (I had one relationship in college but we came together pretty organically) So far I’m finding it’s very stressful and not fun.

Like earlier this summer I matched with this girl that I thought was pretty cool. We had stuff in common, very sweet, very cute, etc. and I was supposed to take her out. But then someone from her past came back into her life and she said she had to explore it. Afterwards I was pretty sad, I’ve had brief stints of trying dating apps that never worked out but this time it felt promising. Pursuing people romantically is emotionally exhausting for me. I shut down my dating apps after that. Just couldn’t really deal with going through that again any time soon. As I’m typing this I can’t help but feel kind of pathetic. I don’t think most people dwell on these things and it’s not like I actually knew her.

None of this is very fun or sexy to me. It feels like trying to solve an elaborate puzzle. But I would still like to have romantic relationships or at least go on a few dates and enjoy the company. But I don’t know how.

Would love to hear from someone who had similar feelings and moved past it? Or just any general advice.

P.S. I’ve thought about maybe going to therapy again to discuss this but I’ve never felt comfortable talking about this part of my life with therapists and I don’t know where to start.

A:

I am, by no means, any kind of dating expert, but I do struggle with depression, don’t take rejection well, and not too long ago wrote an essay about loneliness being the enduring experience of my life. So, I thought I’d share the few things I’ve learned in the last few months or so that I think might be helpful to you, and I encourage others to offer their advice and perspectives in the comments as well.

First things first, please don’t think of yourself as “pathetic” because you were hurt when someone you were interested in turned you down. Can I tell you how many dating app profiles I have created and deleted and then created again because I was rejected or felt unwanted? Too many to count, friend. It’s really shitty and painful to be rejected, even if it’s by someone you don’t really know. But, at least in my case, what hurts the most is that it feels like a door that I was just starting to open got slammed in my face. Again.

I’ve never found trying to talk myself out of my feelings to be particularly productive, no matter how many times I’ve tried it. Slowly, begrudgingly, I have accepted that I’m a person who gets hurt easily and who cries a lot. In the past, I would have said that made me weak or, taking your word, “pathetic.” But now, I just accept it as part of who I am and accept that if I hold the sadness for what it is then sooner or later it will pass, and I’ll be ready to move forward again. And the somewhat incredible part of doing that for a few years now, is that each time I let the feelings flow, I’m able to pick myself up a little more quickly.

The second part of this is being able to unpack the dimensions of my feelings. I was rejected by someone recently, and I sobbed in my bed that night and the next morning. And yet, to this day, I maintain, that I really am ok about having been turned down by this particular person. I realize that we wouldn’t have worked out, anyways. But while I was crying into my pillow, I also knew my sadness wasn’t about that specific person. It was about the door being shut again. About another foreclosed possibly, even after I tried to put myself out there.

Again, it’s taken me years to build this type of self-awareness, but having it makes it so much easier to move on. Within a few hours, I was able to laugh about the whole thing, and even able to chat with the person I had asked out as a friend, the very same day. I know that doesn’t like much, but this is significant progress for me. (Again, I will point you to the essay I wrote trying to get over my first relationship while pandemic shutdowns raged on.)

Dating has often felt like a game I don’t know how to play. “An elaborate puzzle,” as you say. One where the pieces are sharp as knives that cut to the core of my deepest insecurities. And honestly, with online dating in particular, I have to say it’s been quite a bust lately — as in, for the last two and going on three years now. I say this as a person living in the New York metropolitan area where (theoretically) it should be easier. If I could only show you the endless list of personalized intro messages I have sent to matches that have gone unacknowledged… Also, too many to count. It’s really hard not to feel depressed about that, frankly. As a friend of mine put it, recently, the online scene is really a wasteland these days.

Suffice to say, therapy was essential to bringing me to this point. Ironically, trying to find a therapist is much like dating. Sometimes — most of the time — you have to try a few people out to find a good fit. Sometimes you ask your friends for recommendations, and you find your therapist after being referred by a friend’s therapist. But the thing I’ve found to make it easier to just open right up with therapists is that I remind myself how much money I am sinking into the endeavor. I am literally paying this person more money than I have ever spent on pretty much anything else in my life to listen to me as I talk about my problems, no matter how small or large.

With therapy, I’ve found it helpful to try to go in with a specific thing I want to work on, and then take as many deep breaths and sips of water and swallows as I need to get myself to say it. My therapist waits: she knows that I’m summoning up the strength to confront the hard things that I’m really there for. But sometimes, when I can’t muster the courage to open up about my real problems, I just talk about mundane shit in my day. A good therapist should be able to pull a strand here or there to get you to go deeper.

The other thing that’s helped me become more comfortable with opening up in therapy is being more comfortable with opening up in my life more generally. Until the last year or so, I never spoke about dating or romantic interests with any of my friends, including my closest ones who have known me for over a decade. Eventually, on the encouragement of my therapist — my logic here is a little circular, I know — I started sharing some of my dating struggles with my friends. That helped me feel less alone in my experiences, less “pathetic” for being so bad at dating, and also work through some of my feelings when I was upset or got hurt.

With dating, it can be easy to feel like “I’m not good enough” after getting rejected so many times, and getting other people’s perspectives helped me remember that the “problem” here isn’t me. This is, unfortunately, the process. But that doesn’t mean you have to slog through the process all the time, either. This isn’t a race, and there is no “right” timeline by which you should have it all “figured out” so when you need to check out, you should give yourself the grace to do so, without judgement.

Sometimes, when I feel frustrated with online dating, I try to go to in-person events (that I feel comfortable with based on the status of COVID spread at any given time) in the hopes of meeting people that way. Sometimes, when I feel frustrated with dating overall, I take a step back and just focus on connecting with my close friends and strengthening newer friendships. Sometimes, when my friends are unavailable, I try to do things I enjoy doing on my own, like watching a nice movie or reading a book by an author I like or any of a number of hobbies I’ve cultivated over the years.

It can be lonely at times, for sure, but as a kind woman I met on a layover once said to me: “Loneliness is just a feeling, like happiness or sadness.” Let yourself feel the loneliness, but don’t let it consume you.

Honestly, more than anything else, I think the most important thing is to be kind and patient with yourself.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

Letters to My Dead, Gay [REDACTED]

To my knowledge, we’ve met exactly twice.

The only evidence I have of the first encounter is a 4×6 photograph tucked away in an album at my parents’ house. Those left living on our shared side of the family sitting along a lush hillside. Your now ex-wife next to you, holding your young daughter in both arms, everyone’s faces so small it’s a deep-seated recollection more than recognition that makes any of us identifiable.

I’m sorry we never spent more time together, though that is not my apology to make. You had to know that they set the entirety of our breakneck schedule on those trips to India, and the fact that we made the slow, treacherous journey through the Himalayan foothills at all to see Masi-ji and Mama-ji and you all for, perhaps, one day and one night was a testament to how open-minded they were about women’s issues for their time — at least in their telling.

I can see the flash of memory in my mind’s eye for our second meeting. Once again, I was there for barely a day and night, taking three flights from State College to Delhi and then back again before I could mentally register the time difference, even if not physically. An unforgiving schedule created by them as they considered everything else — the auspiciousness of the day, my father and his family’s schedules, and I don’t know what else — in setting the date of my oldest sister B.’s wedding in India in the drop-dead middle of my last semester of college and grad school.

We met briefly in the rush of the crowd at the main ceremony itself, one of two events I had managed to make. Amma introduced us, but I knew you immediately. You looked the same as I had always remembered. Slight, something of an anomaly in our full-figured family, a thick, bushy mustache on your upper lip. The exact image I conjure every time I imagine a young Indian man. But you were no longer young at that point, middle aged with bits of grey showing here and there. And always, that awkwardness, that uncertainty, the discomfort clear in your silence.

You didn’t flash your teeth in a false smile like the dozens of other relatives I met in those brief few days, who mouthed pleasure at seeing me after all these years, as if I was a person they knew well enough that they could have any real feelings about our meeting again. In our tempered reaction, we shared in our lack of presumptions about each other and any connection we might have in the name of “family.”

Honestly, more than anything, I felt wonderment. Can you have any idea how often I heard about you growing up? Did you know that my stoic mother teared up a little when she said to your sister later, “I’m so glad [redacted] came”?

But this connection must have pulled at your heart, too, at least a little, because why else would you have attended your cousin from America’s wedding?

I don’t know you. I never did. But I presume that in all of our family, perhaps, I am the only one who could even begin to understand you.

You were so precious to her, technically her nephew but so close in age, I’m guessing you grew up together.

Except you didn’t, I suppose, because you went off to the Lawrence School, one of the few kids from a poor family granted permission to attend the prestigious boarding school in Himachal Pradesh with the likes of Sanjay Dutt as your classmates. The shining star of her side of the family, the one who would make something of himself and raise the family’s fortunes for generations to come. No pressure, just a small hope, with no room for failure.

Glowing with a pride she only dared show when he was not around, she’d tell me the story of how you were singly selected for admission among a group of kids in the final round of interviews.

“They asked how many steps were on the staircase from the landing, as the final question. And [redacted] was the only one who answered correctly.”

Do you know that to this day, I still count the steps when I climb a flight of stairs, as if that knowledge might benefit me unexpectedly in the future, might set me free from our family’s grasp?

In my family, no one would ever have such expectations of me. You have to know that. I was just a girl, after all, destined to marry into and serve another family and whose greatest success would be to give birth to promising sons. Like you were.

But whenever she talked about you, I realize, in retrospect, what I must have felt was something of envy. I wanted her to speak of me in lovingly glowing terms the way she talked about you. We both know, now, the price that comes at. And at some point, we both stopped paying it.

Sometimes, I wonder, when I ignore her calls and delete her voicemails without listening to them, if she thinks of you. You disappeared from the family after that incident and were barely heard from again until B.’s wedding, at least as far as I know. I don’t have the fortitude to fully disappear from her life. Ultimately, I’m not sure you did, either, except for maybe in death, and even that is debatable. But I think about it, not infrequently.

To be honest, I never really thought to wonder where you might have been all those years. The truth is, I couldn’t think of you without shame and some measure of disgust.

I can’t remember if I heard the story from B.’s husband’s friend directly or if B. told it to me secondhand.

So many questions I had at the time.

There are gay bars in India?

How could you trust a stranger like that? (This question only became more pressing after I learned about Section 377.)

Do you visit gay bars as an outsider seeking refuge, like I do? (Thinking back on it, actually, the place I went after landing in the States, after the last time I saw you, was the gay bar I frequented in State College.)

I refused to state the obvious as bluntly as B. did, as B.’s husband’s friend did, as my gay roommate would when I told him years later. I hated it so, so much, when people speculated about me. That knowing look, even when well-intentioned, always felt so smug. No, I’m not hiding anything! I wanted to scream back at the unstated presumption. It took me years, nearly a decade, to really understand the harm of my own assumptions.

But after that seed was planted in my mind, I simply couldn’t let it go. And it became increasingly pressing when I finally did stop making my own assumptions.

So let me ask you now: Are you—

No. I still can’t face that question so baldly.

Sometimes, I wonder what it’s meant for me and my life that some of my earliest memories are of watching the men in my family verbally abuse their wives. The homophobes would say that this is the reason I simply cannot trust men, and they would not be wrong.

Let me ask you a different question, one I can actually bring myself to finish: What were you thinking when you singed your wife’s skin with your cigarette?

I don’t know why I know, in such detail, this anecdote about how you battered your ex-wife, but that knowledge has always been inextricably bound with the understanding that as far as our family was concerned, the fault was hers for not staying and taking it. I know these truths the same way I recognize familial faces I haven’t seen in a decade or more: in that deep, undeniable part of consciousness we know is beyond questioning but we’d be hard-pressed to actually prove.

For years, I’ve held that masculinity is synonymous with misogyny, and your life was a testament to that belief. Your motivation always seemed so obvious that it never even occurred to me to ask. In my view, your reasons were the same as every other man in my family, every other Indian man I ever knew. Clearly, you did it because our culture has never placed any value on women’s lives. We exist to carry the honor of our families, nothing more, and, regardless of how well we fulfill that obligation, it doesn’t matter how badly our families dishonor us.

But again and again, I’ve become aware of the role that women have always had in enforcing that violence. Amma always made excuses for you, after all. “He learned bad things when he went away to school,” was her constant refrain whenever she mentioned you. Afterward, I’m told, Masi-ji blamed your ex-wife for concealing a blemish on her scalp: Clearly, she was marked from the beginning and brought her bad fortune to bear on our family.

No one, to my recollection, ever asked after your daughters. But, in all reality, I know that is for the best.

I’ve met so few of [redacted] and my mutual relatives and only when I was so young. But these are the pieces I’ve stitched together over the years.

My grandfather was a medicine man from a line of medicine men, with unfulfilled ambitions of becoming a real doctor, an MBBS, my mother always told me. Mixed in with the narratives of [redacted]’s brilliance and potential that I heard over the years, are tales of my grandfather’s medical prowess: being invited to study in England, serving the local raja, treating his own fatal injuries.

My grandmother, on the other hand, was uneducated, illiterate, and deeply religious. Their early marriage eclipsed my grandfather’s dreams, as he stayed in India with his young wife instead of pursuing the education he so badly wanted. Put another way, my grandmother was superstitious to a fault and — as my sister overheard as a child in whispered conversations between my mother and her brother — my grandfather, who drank and gambled his life’s disappointments away, would ridicule my grandmother for her beliefs, sober and inebriated both.

That tension between worldviews seems woven into the very fabric of my family, specifically. My grandmother passed her portentous reading of the world onto both my and [redacted]’s mothers, instilling in them the urgency of finding meaning in the stars and scars and coincidences alike so that they could fulfill their duties in steering us all towards the best possible destiny. But my grandfather threatened to disown my mother if she didn’t become a scientist, even though she dreamed of being a teacher like her sister, [redacted]’s mother. When my mother shares that anecdote with pride — so ahead of his time for my grandfather to have such aspirations of a daughter instead of marrying her off as soon as possible — I have to wonder if freedom really means having a new set of expectations placed on you, even if they are ones that you previously would have never been allowed to consider.

Ultimately, my mother’s job as a microbiologist is how she met my father, whose star chart aligned with my mother’s, as my aunt confirmed before they got married. My aunt, and not my grandmother, because [redacted]’s mother played a maternal role throughout my mother’s life, in part due to their large age gap and in part due to my grandmother’s many responsibilities of not only taking care of the household but also feeding the family. In our family, this seems to be a requirement of sisters, to fill in the gaps left by mothers while the men get all the credit.

My father’s ambitions would eventually take us to America, arguably giving our family the greatest opportunity for success of all. One can weave this story however they like, superstition and science both playing a part in tipping the balance of destiny.

As I tried to make sense of my parents’ decisions growing up in America, it felt like superstition won out over science more often than not, though. One of my very few memories of them seeking out medical care for me is when I was hit on the head playing baseball with some kids in the neighborhood. A profusion of blood, the fact that my friend’s parent knew about it, and the seriousness of a head injury were, I speculate, background factors. Mostly, they were worried about a scar on my face, especially after the stitches went in.

I can still see that scar if I look for it in the mirror, but most people don’t notice it. “Marked from the beginning.” But I was always so good at hiding it. Only now I think to wonder, if they did ever succeed in trying to marry me off to some good, sanskaari family, would they say nothing of it, like [redacted]’s ex-wife’s family? Or would they confess to it and insist that the scar signified nothing about our family’s karma, that I was not, in fact, born this way?

After B.’s wedding, I heard, you would disappear and surface again. Sometimes living with one sister or the other. Working by day as a chemist, or so I’m told, and drinking your sorrows away at night, or so it’s implied if I read between the lines.

(The same lines that know who you are, a man with a failed marriage, that know who I am, an unmarried woman in her thirties.)

Where did you go in those other times, and why?

(It’s so easy to project yourself on someone you know so little about, especially when you share a shred of a connection, no matter how nominal.)

When did you first find yourself in the arms of another man? Was it at the Lawrence School, as Amma always speculated? Did you have a lover like so many of the leads in the colonial-era, homoerotic novels about English school boys I read in my teens and early twenties? Or did you suppress yourself so deeply, like me, that you spent your life trying to make sense of your desires?

Did you drink yourself to destruction because your heart was broken? Or as a passive manifestation of your own self-hatred?

Did you batter your wife because we come from a family that takes all its anger out on its women? Or because that was the one thing in your life you could control?

None of these questions are mutually exclusive, I suppose.

They said that when you were found homeless and destitute on the streets of Bengal, over a thousand miles away from your nearest relatives, you were unintelligible. She blames that fact on the Bengalis, as if Hindi and English haven’t become near-universal languages after decades of political maneuvering and violence in India. But B. and N. and I speculate that a lifetime of trauma, manifesting in one way or another, brought you to that point of incoherence.

So the nonprofit that found you sent you to their main location in Rajasthan. It seems almost like a twist of fate: Nani’s family originally came from that desert, Amma used to tell me. In your final days, did you inadvertently make your way back to a homeland?

The story I heard thirdhand goes that in Rajasthan they could finally understand you. Sort of. “Dakshai,” you replied when they asked where you were from.

I have fleeting images of that house in my early childhood memories: dark wood, so different from the flattop stone and concrete constructions of his family’s residences in Punjab and Delhi, and the endless raucous of monkeys banging on the gable roof. I can’t see Masi-ji’s face in my mind any more, the house itself becoming my only remaining memory of her.

How many years has it been since anyone in your family lived there? I often wonder what happened to that house, that hillside, those monkeys. Only now I think to wonder if you even went to Masi-ji’s funeral two decades ago and Masar-ji’s some years after that. You would have been the one to inherit it all, regardless of your attendance — or so I assume.

Dakshai.

Was your mind trapped in the childhood that was taken from you? Or the young adulthood you didn’t know what to do with but burn?

For all that family binds us, it is also our saving grace.

[Redacted]’s sister is the one who found out what happened to him, placing ads in newspapers after he went missing and unheard from for just a little too long. By then, it was too late. But at least she was able to arrange a proper funeral.

In one telling, he died alone, passing his days in the care of strangers who could barely understand him. But as long as there are people looking for us, I suppose, we’re never really alone, are we? There’s comfort to be found in that thought but also, it’s a reminder of the inescapable grasp of the family that made us this way.

My sisters are also my saving grace — this is another thing we share. But living in a different time and a different place, they were able to protect me from getting married off for family’s sake, from the certain destruction that would have lain at the end of that path.

I never really believed that I would see [redacted] again, that I ever could or would ask him about any of this. But there was something about knowing that somewhere in the world he existed: another person born into the same family, expected to carry on the same legacy, trying to make sense of how to exist in the midst of the same interminable conflict.

The queer community likes to say that we were born this way, that to resist our desires is a futile attempt to deny our own reality.

Our family insists that our lives have been crafted even before we were born, that any deviation from the course set for us can only lead to devastation.

But there are many things we are born into. I have always known there is a destructive streak in our family and, when I was younger, [redacted] was the face of it. But I’ve since learned that it is not a streak.

For years after I heard that he danced with other men, I couldn’t help but wonder if violence is the only real path available for gay people in a culture and a family that vehemently negates our very existence. And if that were the case, then I could only wonder, who is it that gay women raise their hands against, other than themselves?

Destruction is the enduring legacy of both sides of my family. Destruction turned outwards, destruction turned inwards, both stemming from the same emotional repression and lack of agency we’ve all been raised on since before birth.

They say abuse is a cycle. Are we destined to repeat it?

Putsata Reang’s New Memoir Fills In the Gaps of Lost Family History

Loss of family history is a sadly quintessential experience for many Asian Americans and immigrants. Migration is necessarily a severing of bonds, which leads to a pervasive silence in so many of our families. There’s not only an unwillingness but also an inability to speak about the place and the history that was left behind, which becomes compounded when that history is racked with the trauma of poverty, war and loss.

Putsata Reang’s memoir Ma and Me resonates powerfully because of how definitively she fills in that silence for her own family. Reang had a long-established journalism career before writing Ma and Me, which makes the book more than just a memoir of her life. Based on interviews she conducted starting in 2011 with her parents, older relatives, and siblings, she pieces together the story of her Cambodian family going back three generations to her maternal great-grandfather.

In tracing her family’s history so far back, Reang uncovers the traditions and the traumas that have crossed generations. Her grandmother Nhim came from wealth but was married off to a former monk in training, the son of a farming family from a nearby area. What followed was a marriage rife with violence and abuse, which gave rise to two competing desires within Reang’s mother Sam-Ou Koh Reang: dreams of completing her education to become something more than a Khmer wife and the inescapable pull of fulfilling her obligations to her family.

Ultimately, war tipped the balance for Sam-Ou. After her drunk father promised her in marriage for the dowry to sustain his gambling, Sam-Ou ran away to eastern Cambodia. But America’s war in Vietnam — which stretched across Southeast Asia, into Laos and Cambodia — quite literally exploded in Sam-Ou’s life, and back she went into the arms of her family who quickly prepared her for the wedding ceremony. In the long years that followed, Sam-Ou ran away more than once, on one occasion at least, taking her children with her. But always, she returned. As Reang writes: “duty was what brought her back every time — because a Khmer wife stays.”

This tension between freeing herself from her family’s expectations and being bound to them by duty, obligation, and debt intensified even further in Reang’s life. Born just as the Khmer Rouge was coming to power across Cambodia, Reang barely survived as her family escaped the communist regime on a severely overcrowded boat. Reang heard this story from her mother repeatedly growing up, how Sam-Ou managed to keep her youngest and most sickly child alive in the most extreme of circumstances. The message Reang internalized was clear: Reang owed her life to her mother, and the only way to repay her was by being the perfect daughter.

That debt — coupled with her mother’s cultural, traditional, and gendered expectations — left Reang in an impossible position, especially as her family grappled with the enduring trauma and grief of surviving war and genocide. As Reang awakened into her sexuality, the tension only mounted, because the Khmer culture she was raised in had no place or space for queerness. Reflecting on a particularly difficult period in her adolescence, Reang observes: “When the pressure in my head mounted, I did what came naturally, what I had learned by watching Ma: I ran away.”

Ma and Me is a masterclass in processing intergenerational trauma. Interspersed through Reang’s narration of her and her family’s lives are deep reflections on how those events shaped Reang and her family for years to come, connecting past, present, and future as Reang takes the reader from her own early childhood through her contentious fallout with her parents when she married her wife.

At times, these open-ended reflections cut right to the core, with Reang leaving her readers to consider the limitations of words when it comes to the lasting effects of trauma. Taking just one of many powerful examples, early in the book, as Reang describes her family’s flight from Cambodia, she juxtaposes the concrete and the abstract:

“It didn’t add up to much, what my family packed in the final minutes before leaving home. But how do you count loss and regret and sorrow? How do you measure the things you carried inside and that you will continue to carry for all of your life? How do you weigh the guilt of leaving and living?”

With passages like these, Reang draws readers into her experience, even if they don’t share her cultural heritage or family circumstances. In addition to immersing its audience in Khmer culture, Cambodian political history, and the refugee experience, Ma and Me effectively makes readers feel the emotional and personal implications that all of those forces had on Reang.

Reang grapples with what it means to carry intergenerational trauma not only as an Asian American, immigrant, and refugee but also as a queer person. Ma and Me is a narration of Reang’s lifelong quest to reconcile the obligation and guilt that is embedded within her family history and heritage with all of the identities she holds, all the conflicting privileges and hardships she was born into and raised in. This memoir is complex and nuanced, showing the many sides of the people and circumstances who have shaped Reang. In spite of the many painful and heart-wrenching experiences depicted throughout, Ma and Me is ultimately a hopeful story about finding one’s freedom as a queer Asian American while staying true to all of those identities.

Reang’s engaging writing makes this heavy book a compelling read. As Reang says in her opening chapter, “We are both storytellers, Ma and I.” Reang’s prowess as a storyteller makes Ma and Me a book that I will keep coming back to.

Ma and Me by Putsata Reang is out now.

Never Have I Ever’s Queer South Asian Representation Is a Cop Out

This review has spoilers for Never Have I Ever Season Three.

Never Have I Ever returns in season three with even more relationship drama for the Sherman Oaks High School teens. Devi finds herself with no less than three love interests: her nerdy frenemy Ben, the hot jock of her dreams Paxton and a new paramour aptly described as the combination of Ben and Paxton if they were also Indian. Her best friend Eleanor weighs dating Paxton’s stoner friend Trent, a convenient pairing introduced at the end of season two. Best of all, though, their mutual friend Fabiola gets to explore the breadth of her own romantic interests for the first time in the series.

Fabiola’s story opens with an abrupt announcement from her girlfriend Eve: her family is moving to Korea. Granted, the specifics of how this was handled feels more than a little racist in the same way a lot of season one’s attempts at humor badly missed the mark. But this is a very welcome change for Fabiola as a character. This pairing has never really made sense from the beginning of the series, beyond the simplistic logic of “obviously the two lesbians have to be into each other.”

Across the first two seasons, NHIE failed to convince me why Fabiola and Eve were together. They had no common interests and the entirety of season two was spent showing how Fabiola was repeatedly alienated by Eve’s friends for being a geek and out of touch with (white) queer culture. At the very end of season two, in what’s supposed to be a moving scene where Eve accepts Fabiola for all of who she is, including her nerdiness, Eve tells Fabiola she loves her because Fabiola is “the most beautiful person [she’s] ever met.” Clearly the writers couldn’t come up with a single justification for their relationship either, and they have finally decided to cut their losses.

After a brief period of trying to make a long-distance relationship work, Fabiola decides to end things with Eve because the strain of the sixteen-hour time difference starts affecting Fabiola’s grades. Surprisingly and fairly unrealistically, Fabiola never expresses any sadness about the end of her first queer romance which — if I’m following the time span of the series correctly— had lasted nearly a year. An unconvincing end for an unconvincing relationship.

This does leave Fabiola available to explore the wide world around her, though. Eve’s coterie doesn’t reappear in season three, and, instead, the show pursues a relationship that fans were clamoring for after season two.

But before we get there, we need to talk about the most recent addition to Devi’s friend group: Aneesa. Introduced as a transfer student in season two, Aneesa is a South Asian Muslim who eventually started dating Ben after Devi left him for Paxton. Season three starts by laying bare how badly matched this couple is. Aneesa can’t understand Ben’s relentless obsession with grades and “going to a good college,” and Ben devalues Aneesa’s passion for soccer. The nail in the coffin for their relationship, though, is the fact that Ben clearly isn’t over Devi and is constantly condescending to Aneesa, who eventually decides that she deserves better.

Part of what convinces Aneesa to end things is the contrast between how poorly Ben treats her and how sincerely Fabiola cares about her. At one of the lowest points in her relationship with Ben — when he misses her winning goal in the district championship game because he’s too busy flirting with Devi over text — Fabiola runs into a crying Aneesa in the bathroom. As narrator John McEnroe says, “Aneesa just wanted to feel seen” and in walks Fabiola gushing over Aneesa’s incredible play, even though following sports isn’t her forte. Caught up in a wave of emotions, Aneesa kisses Fabiola.

As she tries to sort out her feelings about her relationship, Aneesa asks Fabiola to forget about the kiss. Later, after breaking up with Ben, she friend-zones Fabiola. Months pass in a montage, and we find out that the pair have been spending more and more time together, but Aneesa doesn’t talk about her sexuality to anyone, and they remain good friends with an ambiguous chemistry. Though I wish we saw a bit more of Fabiola and Aneesa’s gradual transition from just friends to more, this part of their story is generally handled in a charming way. In one of my favorite scenes of the entire season, Paxton observes the pair’s awkward tension, casually asks Fabiola, “So you guys hooking up?” and eventually gives her a lesson in flirting. But before Fabiola can put her newly acquired skills to use, Aneesa cuts to the chase and asks Fabiola if she wants to date.

So far so good, and so much better than Fabiola’s love life has been up until this point, at least in my view. But from here on out, the show raises a lot of questions for me in terms of what it means to tell queer stories, especially when it comes to telling the story of a person from a greatly underrepresented racial group within the queer community as a whole and queer media overall.

Aneesa never comes out, beyond her joint announcement with Fabiola that they are a couple. The show offers no explanation of how Aneesa views her sexuality, not even a paltry, “I always knew I was bisexual.” There’s also no exploration of how Aneesa came to terms with her queer identity, which I would expect for a teenager like Aneesa. Maybe I’m just projecting, given my own long journey of coming into my identity as a queer South Asian, but given how few portrayals of us there are in media (and especially media targeted at teens), I don’t know that I am.

Similar to the pointed assertion that Aneesa is Muslim in season two, it’s hard not to feel like Aneesa’s queerness is a matter of convenience for the writers of Never Have I Ever. The introduction of Aneesa as a South Asian Muslim was a necessary corrective in response to season one’s unabashed Islamophobia, but Aneesa’s religious identity isn’t integrated into her character in any kind of convincing way. Likewise, Aneesa’s queerness is ancillary to putting her in a relationship with Fabiola: the writers seem more interested in giving fans the pairing they wanted to see after season two rather than developing Aneesa as a nuanced character in her own right. Honestly, by the end of the season, even Eleanor’s on and off clueless boyfriend Trent has more depth than Aneesa does.

To be clear, I’m not saying the show should have leaned into tropes about Muslims to depict a Muslim character, and I greatly appreciate that the series has walked back its flat, stereotypical portrayal of queer people. I also don’t think that every queer story has to be a coming out story. But the superficial presentation of Aneesa’s queer and Muslim identities feels analogous to the show’s lazy approach to portraying racial identities without any real depth. After three seasons, Fabiola’s Afro-Latina identity still hasn’t been explored, and season three never again broaches Eleanor and Paxton’s respective Chinese and Japanese heritages, even in passing.

And, as Fabiola and Aneesa’s story unfolds, Aneesa increasingly feels like just a prop to move the story along. Eventually, Fabiola falls for Addison, a nonbinary student from another school who is a science geek like her. As Aneesa watches yet another one of her partners show more interest in someone else, she encourages Fabiola to pursue her crush, as if Aneesa herself would have no feelings about that. With no tears shed, Aneesa calls it off with Fabiola, merely saying, “I gotta take a break from you bookworms,” before (essentially) walking offscreen for the rest of the season.

The show tries to chalk this up to Aneesa and Fabiola just being a bad fit. After they start dating, they struggle to hit their stride as a couple, misunderstanding each other’s interests and misreading each other’s body language and cues. But it’s hard not to feel like NHIE is trying to sideline the existence of queer South Asians. We get no further insight into Aneesa as a character after the breakup, and the season ends without her ever explicitly saying she’s part of the LGBTQ+ community.

This failure of representation feels both striking and unsurprising, in the context of the larger show. On the one hand, Never Have I Ever’s main objective seems to be to move the needle on narratives for South Asian women in media. The series’ nuanced portrayal of grief after the death of Devi’s father Mohan, from both Devi and her mother Nalini’s perspective, allows for a level of emotional complexity and growth not often seen in media in general — but especially not often granted to South Asian women. Devi’s cousin Kamala’s story has also come a long way, from living with her relatives who are setting her up for an arranged marriage in seasons one and two, to moving out of her aunt’s house so she can pursue a relationship on her own terms in season three. And Devi herself, from the beginning of the series, is seeking out a social and dating life that she knows is at odds with her family’s expectations and her mother’s rules.

Never Have I Ever is a show that understands that to be a South Asian American woman means to navigate the tension between the patriarchy deeply embedded in South Asian culture and the agency so many South Asian women are claiming for themselves both within and beyond South Asian communities. How, then, does it fail to factor this dynamic into its sole portrayal of a queer South Asian girl?

The problem is that NHIE wants to push the South Asian community — and specifically the Indian community — but only so far.

We see this through the relationships that the South Asian characters pursue throughout the series. Kamala is exerting the right to choose her own relationship but the man she’s dating is, conveniently, a Brahmin, on par with her own family’s status. Devi’s primary love interests, though not South Asian, are white or white-passing and come from comparable wealth and social capital. The show also introduces an Indian love interest for her in season three, and I have to imagine that this decision was made at least in part to quell any grumblings within the Indian community that Devi never pursues “one of her own.” Nalini’s brief relationship with her Black colleague Dr. Jackson in season two has been completely written out of the show: there are no references to it and season three opens with the declaration that Nalini leads a boring friendless life, as if her tryst with Dr. Jackson never happened at all.

In other words, all of the lasting and sanctioned relationships involving South Asians in Never Have I Ever are ones that upper caste Indians with sanskaari values — undoubtedly a core part of the show’s audience — will approve of. To that demographic, really exploring and developing a queer South Asian character who truly embodies all of those identities would be one step too far, in the same way that they believe certain lines in straight South Asian relationships simply cannot be crossed. So, the show cannot and will not show an inter-caste relationship; its only reference to a Hindu/Muslim relationship was in the context of a cautionary (and Islamophobic) anecdote from season one; and it seemingly walks back both the notion that a Hindu widow is allowed to move on and its only serious South Asian/Black interracial relationship. (Aneesa and Fabiola were, of course, the other South Asian/Black interracial couple, but the show turns their relationship into a bust before it could even take off.)

In season one, Nalini casually makes a deferential reference to India’s Hindu supremacist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has spent the last eight years enacting a Hindu fascist agenda that promotes a casteist, Islamophobic, misogynist, racist and homophobic worldview. Indian Americans are divided enough on Modi that NHIE doesn’t make the mistake of referring to him again. But the show also clearly wants to play both sides and appeal to audiences who fall all along the American and Indian political spectrums.

And so, Never Have I Ever’s brief flirtation with portraying a queer South Asian character is a lukewarm attempt to appease fans with competing sets of interests across its queer and Indian American audiences. The question I’m left asking is: what about those of us who actually straddle both of those identities?

Li Kotomi’s “Solo Dance” Is Haunted by Death and Literature

Li Kotomi’s Solo Dance is unambiguous about its subject matter from the beginning: The first chapter opens with words, “Death. Dying.” Following the story of a Taiwanese woman living in Japan, the novel is a somber reflection on finding meaning and purpose in life as a social outcast and in the wake of enduring trauma.

Chō Norie is an office worker in Tokyo who grew up in Taiwan. Written in the third person, Solo Dance alternates between narrating the protagonist’s life in the present and the past experiences that shaped her and, ultimately, led her to change her name and move to Japan. As the story unfolds, bit by bit, we see how the wounds of her past continue to manifest in the present.

From a young age, Norie has always been different, a bookworm and a bit antisocial. But in fourth grade, just as Norie is beginning to awaken to her sexuality, Shi Danchen, a classmate Norie has a crush on, dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Not long after, Norie’s home gets destroyed in the Taiwan earthquake of 1999. Deeply traumatized, she begins exhibiting troubled behavior: endless crying, screaming nightmares and actions that imply suicidal ideation. Her parents take her to a youth mental health center, but the closeted Norie can’t bring herself to tell the therapist the deep pain she carries because Danchen, a girl she loved, died.

Eventually, Norie turns to writing to find her motivation to keep going. But her youthful writing focuses on the same themes that pervade her thoughts as an adult in Tokyo: darkness and death. As Li so poignantly puts it: “It was strange how writing about death had allowed her to keep living.”

The themes of Solo Dance are deeply reminiscent of Qiu Miaojin’s iconic novel Notes of a Crocodile, which is also a lesbian coming of age story about a young Taiwanese writer. Li calls this connection out explicitly and repeatedly, starting early in the book. Norie has immersed herself in Qiu’s short life and measures her own against it:

“If she hadn’t fallen in love with Danchen, then maybe she would never have begun to write. If she’d never discovered the world of literature, then maybe she would never have encountered Qiu Miaojin’s writing. … she was here in Tokyo, a place that Qiu had once visited herself. She was in junior high school when she discovered Qiu, but now here she was, in the blink of an eye aged twenty-seven, and she had outlived her.”

It’s hard not to feel like Solo Dance is a sort of contemporary recasting of Notes of a Crocodile in a globalized world. (Though, admittedly, that is the only one of the many Taiwanese, Japanese and Chinese works Li references throughout Solo Dance that I’ve actually read.) Norie’s high school romance with her classmate Xiaoxue feels reminiscent of Lazi and Shui Ling’s relationship with the recurring conversations about death and literature.

But the toxicity that defined every relationship in Notes of a Crocodile isn’t as pervasive and foundational to the relationships in Solo Dance. Three decades after activists like Qiu paved the way for the visibility and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan, Li’s young lovers can form a sincere bond, built on respect and trust in a way that Qiu’s never could.

Like Lazi, Norie ruminates on death and struggles to connect with others, but, even though she and Xiaoxue are both closeted, the young Norie doesn’t carry the level of despair manifested as abuse that leads Lazi to ultimately destroy her relationship with Shui Ling. For Lazi, being a lesbian is “a monstrous sin,” causing her to repress and fear her sexual desires and leading her to a deep self-loathing. For Norie, though, being a lesbian means she can’t imagine a future for herself — gay marriage not yet having been legalized in Taiwan when Solo Dance was originally published. Coupled with her early experiences and proclivity towards darkness, Norie can’t shed the sense that she’ll probably die young, like Qiu Miaojin.

Abuse enters Norie and Xiaoxue’s relationship after Norie is sexually assaulted. The traumatic experience, followed by social ostracization, deeply affects Norie’s mental health, and she takes out her fears on Xiaoxue in cruel outbursts. Norie recalls that the rapist targeted her specifically because she is a lesbian, leading her to blame her assault on their relationship and her sexuality. “It’s because we were together that I went through what I did,” Norie says to Xiaoxue in the heat of the fight that leads to their breakup.

It’s a subtle difference that shows how much and how little the world has changed. Notes of a Crocodile is a heartbreaking read because the book seems to imply that society’s ultimate rejection of queer individuals leads them to an inescapable path of self-destruction. Qiu’s suicide not long after writing it actualized that painful reality. Solo Dance has no illusions that in the present day, the implicit and explicit violence of homophobia still leaves lasting scars on young queer people. But, ultimately, this is a book about being able to integrate one’s trauma in a world where acceptance, while not universal, can be found. Norie has a future, full of ups and downs, even as she tries to escape her past, in a way that Lazi and the rest of the characters in Notes of a Crocodile simply don’t.

About a third of the way into Solo Dance, Xiaoxue says to Norie, “We’ll rewrite Notes of a Crocodile so that it doesn’t end in tragedy.” Solo Dance isn’t trite in the execution of that. Being queer and Asian continues to be a fraught reality for so many people, twenty-five years after Qiu killed herself. But in spite of all the pain and trauma, Solo Dance is a testament to the possibility of a path forward that exists for queer Asians today, a path that Qiu made possible with her works and her death.

You Need Help: How Do I Deal With the Inescapable Sexism in My Industry?

Q:

Hi everyone! I work in an industry where 90% of my colleagues are straight men nearing retirement age. I am almost always the only woman in the room.

For the first few years of my career I managed to brush off microaggressions (and worse) as harmless ignorance. As I’ve progressed, and become more confident in my professional skills, I’ve realized that at least half my colleagues will never listen to me, believe me, or take my advice. It makes it hard to bear the small things, like people joking about how I talk too much or using a diminutive of my name.

So basically, how do I deal? How do I deal with knowing that I’m not likely to progress in my career because I can’t make male colleagues listen to me, and how do I get through the day without getting angry/sad every time I encounter one of the microaggressions that remind me I’m not going to get anywhere?

For what it’s worth, this is an industry-wide issue; for some perspective, a company where I experienced some really sexist hiring practices just won a national diversity award. I do work to improve things for the other women in my current org, but of course my power is limited.

A:

I’ve been thinking about your question a lot since you submitted it and, honestly, since long before. The limiting effects of sexism (and racism) on my career have plagued me for years, and, like you, I’ve been left asking myself what exactly I’m working for or towards. The sad reality is that sexism and racism and ableism and classism and transphobia and homophobia exist in some form or other in every industry and, I would argue, in every workplace.

So, what do you do about it? I wish I had a real answer for you, but every time I’ve sat down to try to write this response, I’ve been faced with a web of unsatisfying half answers. The best I can offer you is a window into my own trajectory to show how I’ve dealt with these types of issues at various points over my professional working life. As I’ve written so many times in response to advice questions, I don’t think there’s ever a “right” path in terms of how to grapple with these issues, though it doesn’t always feel that way. Sometimes, you just have to make the decision that can give you the most peace of mind in the moment, knowing that no decision is ever really permanent.

For years now, I’ve felt pretty hopeless about pursuing a “career” the way so many people talk about it, because the pattern of being overqualified for the positions I’m offered and then working above my title and pay has played out far too many times. And then, I would watch white people and men get a smooth path up the ranks, while one obstacle after another was thrown at me.

At various points, I’ve channeled my frustrations in different ways. In my previous organization, I tried to make changes in the limited ways I could, for instance, by joining the Diversity Council and pushing for more ethical recruitment practices so that I could feel like I was at least making a marginal difference in other people’s lives, if not my own. Eventually, as I saw my efforts repeatedly undermined, I decided it was time to leave that organization. (It’s incredible the twisted way in which people can, on the surface, appear to agree with you about changing their practices in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion and yet refuse to actually implement those practices in their own behavior because they think it doesn’t need to apply to them…)

It sounds like you’ve been trying to affect these types of changes yourself in your own industry and organization. It’s a long, slow and, at times, infuriating game that can feel really pointless depending on the leaders you’re dealing with. But what I’ve realized, in retrospect, is that even if the organization I was in didn’t really implement the changes I wanted to see, I myself learned important things through the process that I could then implement in subsequent positions where I did have a little more say and power. From seeing other people’s shortcomings and failures, I was able to really hone in on the insidious ways in which prejudice and bias reinforce themselves, even in places that are recognized for being “inclusive.” Because I had to come up with concrete proposals to try to pitch to leaders, I ended up researching and reading a lot more about the practices that really matter in terms of equity and inclusion. This is both useful to know in terms of how I approach my own work and interactions with others, and it’s also allowed me to read a lot more into job postings and how the way they’re written speaks volumes to what I can expect from an organization I’m interviewing with.

At the time, though, that experience led me to a certain nihilism and hopelessness about work, that feels relatable in your letter. I ended up making, essentially, a lateral move to another position that I was once again overqualified for, and I used the additional mental bandwidth (and time) that I now found myself with to reassess what I wanted out of my life more broadly. By that point, I had already completely changed careers (I had majored in music in college with the dreams of being a professional violinist), and so I already intellectually rejected the notion that work and career should define us. But I hadn’t been living it because my jobs up until then had completely consumed me. So I was able to use that lateral move to focus more on relationships and, eventually, pursue personal interests outside of work, like writing here. I still faced microaggresions (and worse) at work, but keeping in perspective that I had so much more in my life outside of my full time job helped me take those incidents in stride a little better.

What I’m suggesting can look like a lot of different things. It can mean really putting boundaries around work so that you can focus on other passions that give you more joy and satisfaction (and, hopefully, involve dealing with shitty people less or, at least, on your own terms). It can mean no longer pursuing career advancement in your field so that you don’t have to butt heads with all the bigotry quite as often. (You’ll still deal with it, of course, but at a bit more of a distance.) It can also mean changing fields entirely.

If you love your work for what it is, if you find it meaningful and fulfilling, then I know what I’m suggesting is actually incredibly heartbreaking. In many ways, I went through this with music. I loved playing violin, and music meant the world to me, and yet the racism of that industry really did push me out of it, ultimately (though I hadn’t been able to see it that way at the time). It really is an incredibly hard and painful thing to have to do, but sometimes we have to do what’s best for us. I don’t consider this quitting or giving up or letting the bigots win, even though they have, essentially. It’s about balancing your own needs in a world that is so flawed both fundamentally and structurally that the only changes we can hope to make happen on a truly microscopic level, in the scheme of things. That isn’t to say those changes aren’t worthwhile, but rather that sometimes those changes are so small our day-to-day life is still really quite unbearable.

All my strategies above are about resignation and acceptance, but ultimately, your question is about how to find hope in the midst of the inescapable bigotry that defines the working world. Not knowing your industry, where you work (geographically) or even what point you’re at in your career, my next suggestion might be completely irrelevant, but I feel compelled to make it, nonetheless. For me, at least, my hope of one day moving into a position of leadership with appropriate recognition of my skills and more say in how things are done has kept me going. (Admittedly, in fits and starts, but I think that’s fine. Nothing in life is really linear, anyways.)

This is, undeniably, a long, difficult and, at times, incredibly demotivating game, but a while ago, I realized that if I continued to be in mid-level roles, I would always be left feeling powerless and hopeless. It’s taken me far too long to get the leadership position that I have done under a lower title for years and that I’m qualified for, in large part because of some of those -isms I listed above. Would my story be different if I were a cis white man? Without a doubt. But ultimately, I have gotten an opportunity that I feel genuinely excited about.

Having more power can mean more than just moving up the ranks within your specific field, though. It can also mean doing similar work in a different field or at a smaller organization that might be more willing to hire people on, you know, actual qualifications and not how they present. Or it could mean moving into a space of self-employment where you can dictate and guide in what ways, to what extent and with whom you deal as part of your day-to-day work.

Concretely, the strategies of how to get there are probably things you’re already familiar with. Make sure your work is seen and recognized, even if it means that people will say shitty things like “you talk too much” or “you’re too aggressive.” Find allies in your field, which can include people you don’t fully see eye to eye with but at a minimum generally mean well. Rely on this network to help make meaningful connections to opportunities that eventually move you into positions where you’ll have more say in how things are done. And most importantly, make sure you have a set of personal champions who understand and acknowledge the reality of your experiences while encouraging you to keep trying, because none of this, by any means, is easy or comfortable.

Any way you choose to go, the hardest part (again, for me at least), is believing that change in the status quo that has defined so much of my professional life is even possible and, therefore, worth trying to work towards. This is something I’ve struggled with for a long, long time. It might seem a little hokey, but I’ve tried to find my inspiration by immersing myself in the work of other women who have transcended boundaries and who speak openly and honestly about the structural issues inherent to their experiences, women like Serena Williams and Rhiannon Giddens and Rachel Levine, to name just a few.

On a more personal level, it’s also meant learning strategies for how to play the game I am faced with, and for this I have to credit my closest friends and most especially the Black women in my life. Growing up, I witnessed firsthand as my parents dealt with endless racism in their own careers, but they themselves had no tools for confronting these issues while continuing to move forward. And, spending so much time in white spaces meant that I was either met with outright denial of any issues at all or a severely limited understanding of what I was up against because neither the gay men nor the white women wanted to really acknowledge the elephant in the room of my brown skin. Over the years I’ve found that the Black women in my life have been able to fully appreciate my experiences and struggles, even helping me see things I’ve missed at times, while continuing to encourage me to keep moving forward, because what is the alternative anyways?

Having close friends who I can discuss the details of specific issues I’m facing with has been so, so important to me over the years. Even people who are outside my field but know the realities of sexism and racism have offered me invaluable perspective, advice and encouragement. But, having at least a few people who understand those realities and know the ins and out of my field is also really critical. I know you said that 90% of the people in your industry are white men, but it might be worth seeking out the other 10%, if you haven’t already. See if there are affinity groups for women in your field that might help you connect with others who are in similar boats as you. It might take some time, but eventually you might find a trustworthy mentor or even some friends.

In the end, the things you’re struggling with are really an inescapable part of life and work. That might be a grim way to look at it, but that also means you aren’t alone, even if it doesn’t always feel that way. Perhaps the most important thing to keep in perspective is that the way you approach all of this can and will change as you progress through different parts of your life. Sometimes, you might find you need to move work and career advancement to the back burner and focus on things where you feel more fulfilled and validated. Other times, you might have the motivation and wherewithal to fight the fight for what you deserve. I hope that in sharing some of my experiences in my professional trajectory this far, you’re able to find a few strategies that might sustain you at one point another, as well.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

You Need Help: Trying To Live Through the Pandemic Is Destroying My Mental Health

Q:

Hey y’all,

I am fucking tired, and stressed, and low-key su*cidal, and just don’t know what to do about it anymore.

Things were getting better with the pandemic. And then suddenly every government around the world decided to give up on trying to contain the virus and it just gets worse and worse and worse and I don’t know what to do.

I could
1) spend four hundred dollars on a switch and become a recluse
2) go back to drinking and call it quits
3) ?????

I am so tired with people pretending that the pandemic is no big deal. I’m sick of seeing hospo friends being forced to work when I know their bosses aren’t obeying any of the remaining regulations. I hate seeing people I used to respect post on social media in favour of all those stupid and harmful protests that are going on. I’m scared to death for my disabled and immunocompromised friends and family. And finally, I’m counting down the days until my small town hospital is overrun by cases.

I don’t know what to do. Leaving the house makes me anxious and angry and afraid, but staying in as someone who’s got schizo makes me sick. I’ve made unbelievable progress on my mental health in the last decade, and I’m scared that’s all going to errode in the current global climate.

I’m logging off social media, but I also feel really isolated.

This is big and rambling and you probably can’t answer it, but if you do… halp? pandemic? what do?? aaaaaah???

Lots of love,
MC

A:

First things first: if you are feeling suicidal, please do not suffer alone.

• The Trevor Project provides chat, phone and text-based crisis support for young LGBTQ+ 24/7.
• In the U.S., the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be reached 24/7 by phone at 1-800-273-8255. They also have an online chat and offer services in Spanish and accessible services. You can find this information on their website.
• Crisis Services Canada can be reached by phone 24/7 at 1-833-456-4566 and they can be reached for text support between 4pm and midnight Eastern Time by texting 45645.
• In the U.K., The Samaritans can be reached by phone at 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org. Also, here is a list of hotlines available in the U.K., including some that can be reached by text or chat and serve specific populations.
• Lifeline Australia can be reached at 13 11 14. And here is a list of hotlines that can be reached by phone or chat.
• And more generally, here are three compiled lists of services available by country: Open Counseling, Find a Helpline, and Wikipedia.

In terms of the pandemic, I want you to know that you are absolutely not alone. Without a doubt, governments are moving away from protections, pretending like the whole thing is over, when in fact, even health experts are saying that we are (once again) throwing caution to the wind. And, as you point out, the most recent conversations around pandemic safety measures completely devalue the lives of the people who are the most at-risk if they get COVID, putting the burden entirely on those individuals and their communities to keep themselves safe, which often means further self-isolation while everyone else moves on with their lives.

I know I’m not saying anything you already don’t know, but I just want you to know that I see you: I see your pain and your fear and your anger. I don’t know if any of this will be helpful, but I want to offer you a few thoughts. You may already be doing some of these things or they may not be relevant to you, and so I hope that others share additional recommendations and advice in the comments as well.

As I was thinking about your question, one of the things that came to mind for me was the idea of existing in the present moment. I believe there are certain lines of Buddhist thinking that say, for instance, that hope is an illusion; we must live in the present, even when it feels unbearable. Honestly, I am of two minds on this. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly found value in existing more in the present rather than living for the future. Often times, when I was younger, I’d pin my hopes on some point in the future only to arrive in that future moment and find it didn’t live up to all the expectations I had placed on it, leading me to even greater despair and disappointment. At the same time, though, some of my hardest, bleakest times have been when I truly had no hope for the future at all.

Ultimately, I think it’s a matter of balance. Acknowledge the pain and uncertainty you feel in the present when you feel it. But also seek out joy in the small places you can, like video or phone conversations with your close friends and family or other means of communication and connection in ways that are safe. One of the things I’ve found to be really helpful is to create recurring video chats with at least some of my friends, because it gives me something regular to look forward to and reduces some of the burden of having to reach out cold and say, “Can we chat?” Also, read books or watch TV shows or movies that bring you a little bit of solace to break up the periods of hopelessness. It’s hard and this is certainly something I am continuing to work on, but I think we need to hold and make space for both the pain and the pleasure in our lives, now more than ever in the pandemic.

Personally, I don’t think healthy distractions (like games) are bad, as long as you don’t spend the entirety of your time suppressing your feelings in that way. For me, this has been a matter of ebb and flow. There have definitely been times in the pandemic when I was just burying my feelings with games constantly, and I’ve had to find ways of pulling that back, recognizing when playing games is crossing the line from comforting to numbing.

Another thing I’ve found helpful is to create projects for myself to work on that I’m genuinely excited about, like learning a challenging piece on violin or writing projects here. I’m not the best at prioritizing those over the games all the time, but having an activity that I enjoy, which isn’t completely mindless with some kind of “goal” helps me break the numbing patterns of endless games and TV sometimes, at least.

For me, alcohol is kind of similar to the games, though more extreme and with an even more substantial toll on the physical body. I’ve personally had to pull back on alcohol and limit my consumption to buying single serving drinks at the liquor store or drinking socially with people who I’m less likely to drink too much with. As before, I think it’s a matter of balance. I don’t think forcing ourselves to exist in our pain, anger and uncertainty all the time is particularly useful, but I also don’t think we’re served by running away from these emotions constantly.

When it comes to social media, honestly I basically stopped using it a few years ago because, similar to what you’re describing, I was finding myself increasingly disgusted and caught up in seeing fucked up posts from people I thought were at least somewhat decent or even some who I actively liked. That said, social media can be a great place for finding out about virtual events and making connections to feel a little less lonely. The way I’ve struck this balance most recently is I’ve essentially deactivated the accounts I had the longest and had the most connections on (in my case, Facebook) and created a new, extremely private Instagram account that I hardly post on and basically didn’t tell anyone except very, very close trusted friends about. I use that IG account to follow artists, groups and organizations I like and respect. That helps me also know about upcoming events I might be interested in and engage with content that I find entertaining without having infuriating political content randomly pop up into the mix. (Though I did have to block a few pro-Trump posts on Instagram a few times before I fully got anything political or news-related off my feed.)

My approach in terms of my news consumption is quite similar. Sometimes, I find that reading the news is another kind of addictive, numbing activity, much like games and social media, but one that takes an even greater toll on my mental health. There have been times where I catch myself spinning through one news site after another, reading endlessly and becoming more and more depressed with each article I click on. Again, I’ve had to recognize when that’s happening and cut myself off. There have definitely been times where I intentionally don’t engage with the news at all because I knew I was already in a bad headspace. Honestly, when it comes to local news I often live in a place of willful ignorance, only checking COVID rates insofar as it informs what I might feel safe doing. I don’t think it’s helpful (or realistic) to fully disconnect from the news all the time, but again it’s about being kind to yourself and recognizing when staying engaged with the news is doing you too much harm.

Balance is really the underlying theme in everything I’ve said. And given the stakes of the situation we’re in, balance often feels impossible. I’ll be very honest: at some point in the pandemic I had to reckon with the way I was taking care of my mental health. I was already in therapy before the pandemic started, but as things started to feel worse and worse (for me, the lowest point was really when things initially started reopening across the U.S. in the summer of 2021), I finally made the decision to take an antidepressant. Undeniably, I have probably struggled with some form of depression for most of my life and in the years leading up to the pandemic, I do believe I was finding non-medicated ways to take care of my mental health. But the pandemic did two things to me. First, it very, very strongly triggered a lot of the isolation and loneliness and lack of control that defined the entirety of my childhood, undoing work I had been doing to deal with that and second, that pushed my struggles with depression to a point that was untenable. It was only after starting medication that I was able to approach my life and what was happening in the day to day with the kind of balance I’ve been talking about. Before then, this type of approach was impossible for me to accept intellectually or emotionally and act on.

I don’t know what this means for you. As a starting point, if you aren’t in therapy, please do try to seek out services. If you haven’t already, share some of the things you’ve written about here with mental health professionals and talk to them about different forms of therapy you might benefit from, different types of treatment options or tweaking your current mental health care approach, as needed. As a dear friend said to me when I first confided that I had started medication, you should not have to suffer like this.

I know that none of this actually changes the reality of the pandemic or the reality of the situation we are in. I know that reading this, it might feel like all I’m doing is telling you more things you should do, when really the problem is all the anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers and conspiracy theorists and right-wing politicians who are literally just cashing in the deaths and suffering of the same people who have always paid the price for everyone else’s convenience. I really am so sorry for all of us for the situation we are in. Sometimes, what makes me the most angry and the most depressed is the knowledge that none of this really has to be this way. We (as a society, as a world) are doing this to ourselves and, worse, to each other.

And yet, somehow, we must find the strength to live, despite it all. One of the things I sometimes try to hold is the idea that while I cannot personally change or end the suffering of people in worse and more uncertain situations than mine — whether that’s people who are immunocompromised or disabled during this pandemic or people living in war torn areas or the people most affected by climate change — I must honor their lives. Part of honoring their lives, to me, is about bearing witness to their experiences, doing what small things I can (like voting and donating to trustworthy organizations) and, to the extent possible, making personal decisions that support them (for instance, being mindful about the kinds of activities I’m doing during this pandemic and where I shop). But the other part of honoring their lives is living mine. I cannot materially change other people’s realities, but losing myself and sacrificing my own life by being debilitated by depression from trying to hold it all is a disservice and, honestly, disrespectful to everyone.

Finally, more than anything else I’ve written, I want you to hold this: Even though the world is kind of terrible, your life is precious and valuable, and you are loved.

You can chime in with your advice in the comments and submit your own questions any time.

It’s Time to Make the Call, Because We Cannot Filibuster Another Year

It’s been close to a year since Democrats took control of Congress and the White House. How much has happened: a much-needed COVID stimulus package in March, funding for infrastructure in November and critical appointments to the federal judiciary peppered throughout the year.

So much and yet… in the context of everything going on in the country and in the world, so little. The social services bill died on Fox News — of all places — after months of negotiation. Even more concerning, as Republicans are poised to steal more elections through partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression, Congress has yet to pass a single piece of legislation protecting voting rights. And this isn’t even getting into various social issues like, say, enshrining LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights or criminal justice reform into federal law.

There are a number of reasons why things stand as they do, but I can name three without stopping to think: Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and the filibuster.

One of many arcane rules in the U.S. Senate, the filibuster allows the minority party to stall most legislation unless 60 senators sign onto it. Currently, the Senate is split 50-50 between senators who are part of the Democratic caucus and Republicans; Vice President Kamala Harris casts the deciding vote. Even without the filibuster, getting a simple majority to pass legislation means that every Democrat has to be on board, which is a substantial feat in the first place. The filibuster makes this threshold even higher because it effectively requires an additional ten Republican senators to also vote in favor of what they see as “Democratic” legislation. In the current highly partisan, highly politicized environment, that’s basically impossible.

So even though Democrats have a slim majority (which isn’t nothing — those judicial appointments, for instance wouldn’t happen without it), much-needed reforms and legislation protecting basic rights simply aren’t getting passed. And, given that the Senate already gives disproportionate power to a minority of the population, effectively what the filibuster means is that Republicans can entrench their minority rule into law and still call it “democracy” because they continue to obstruct voting rights protections.

It seems that Democratic leadership has finally had enough of the stalemate. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has threatened to force a vote on the filibuster so that everything is out in the open, and he’s strategically tied it to the vote for the Freedom to Vote Act. That won’t solve all the problems: Manchin is the one who killed the Build Back Better Bill, after all, he’s strongly anti-abortion, and he won’t even support the Equality Act. More to the point, both Manchin and Sinema have said repeatedly that they refuse to eliminate the filibuster, and a majority is needed to to  change the filibuster rules. Still, being forced to justify their position, particularly when voting rights are on the line, might make them think twice.

The thing is, the last time I looked into this, Manchin and Sinema weren’t the only Democratic Senators who were ambivalent (at best) about the filibuster. While more have expressed a willingness to change the filibuster rules in recent weeks, we need to make sure that every Democratic senator votes to end the filibuster and that Republican senators know their constituents oppose their obstructionism.

So now is the time to call your senators and make sure they are in favor of filibuster reform.

Find the phone number for your Senators here.

Here’s your script:

Hi! My name is //your name//, and I’m a constituent of Senator //name of official//. The Senate filibuster has stalled critical legislation to protect LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, voting rights and more. These laws must pass in order to preserve our democracy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he will hold a vote on filibuster reform soon. I urge the Senator to vote in favor of filibuster reform and end the filibuster. Thanks for your time.

Pro-tips for your call:

+ Practice saying the script before you call. Adjust the phrasing to what feels natural to you.

+ Make it personal. In 1 or 2 sentences, explain why this issue matters to you, personally.

+ Make sure you say you are a “constituent.” If you live in the state that the senator represents in Congress, you are their constituent, even if you can’t vote. They may ask for your zip code or the name of the county or town/city you live in.

+ Has your senator already publicly expressed their support for filibuster reform? Call them and say “thank you!”

We know there are many big issues at stake. We’ll be back with other topics, but in the meanwhile share the top issues you want folks to call Congress about in the comments. And if there are any state or local priorities you’d like to highlight, drop that in the comments as well.

Live outside the U.S.? Any issues in your country you want to call attention to and have others in your area organize around? Share that in the comments too!

Oh, and do let us know how those calls went!

HBO Max’s “Sort Of” Tells The Story of Three Transitions

Sort Of tells an inherently queer story and not because the main character Sabi Mehboob (played by the show’s co-creator Bilal Baig) is a non-binary trans person whose parents immigrated from Pakistan. In an interview with Complex Canada, Baig discussed what convinced them to collaborate on this project with a straight cis white man like Fab Filippo. Their thoughtful answer perfectly encapsulates what undergirds this quietly incredible, deceptively understated show:

“[Fab Filippo] talked about his own personal transition that he was navigating… a thing in his life that was really changing how he was looking at the world, how he was looking at his own relationship to himself, to his family, to his child. There was such a power in a cis person using the word transition, without any sort of taboo, stigma, like, ‘Oh, I can’t say that word, that word is for only one community in particular.’ … There was a real power in acknowledging that it’s a human experience to evolve. And we, the more we all embrace it, the better we all are. … [I]f we can put work out into the mainstream like this, we really are at least evoking some conversations on what it means to evolve. And I think what that does is it helps build empathy for trans and non binary people, because we’re seen as the ones who evolve and transition in very particular ways. But when we can all kind of tap into that for ourselves, I think trans and non binary people start to feel less like outsiders. And actually, we are among everybody else. There’s such power in that.”

Sort Of is a story about transition, but, exactly as Baig said, it’s about the universality of transition as a human experience. Part of what makes the show impressive is how masterfully it conveys that point again and again. Over the course of eight short episodes, pretty much every character in this story has to contend with their assumptions about themselves and the world around them.

Starting with our protagonist, Sabi, their journey isn’t about coming into their identity. From my read, Sabi is plenty clear on who they are. Their struggle lies in being able to trust that they can occupy space in this world as they are.

In episode one we see the life that Sabi has patched together for themselves. They have two part-time jobs as a nanny to two biracial kids and as a bartender at a gay bookstore / bar. They live with their sister Aqsa in downtown Toronto. They have a small network of close friends and confidantes, including Aqsa, their best friend 7ven and Bessy, the mom of the two kids they care for.

But immediately we see that this life is falling apart at its seams. Sabi finds out that their cis white queer-ish boyfriend Lewis is cheating on them, just hours after having been unironically told by Lewis that Sabi “doesn’t really see him.” They get fired from their part-time nanny job with no real explanation, though the father Paul’s offer to help Sabi find another family “because it can be difficult to find the right family for someone like you” says it all. Later, Sabi has an uneasy conversation with Bessy, who eventually says, “I’m going to miss you. Are you going to miss me?” — a question Sabi leaves uncomfortably hanging in the air. And, if all that weren’t enough, they unexpectedly run into their mother — who Sabi has been avoiding because they aren’t out to her — on their way home from breaking up with Lewis.

Until that moment, Sabi had been taking it all in stride, responding to everything that’s been thrown at them with an emotionless deadpan. With this last straw, though, they finally crack and start crying.

Earlier, Sabi’s friend 7ven had presented them with an escape: 7ven was just offered a paid internship in Berlin (a queer oasis in 7ven’s eyes) and 7ven invites Sabi to join her rent free. Sabi had been on the fence, but under the weight of everything — the breakup, the lost job and changed friendship, the impending fall out with their mother — Sabi decides to take up 7ven’s offer and run away from it all.

Who here hasn’t fantasized about this: when life feels unrelenting, to escape to a European city we’ve fetishized as an open and welcoming place where we can “live our truth”? How many shows and novels and movies have been built on this exact premise?

But mere hours after Sabi has made their decision to go to Germany with 7ven, Bessy gets into a crash on her bike that leaves her unresponsive. And so, Sabi is faced with a choice: cast all this turmoil behind them so they can build a new queer life in Berlin or stay in Toronto to support Bessy’s kids?

Sometimes, our greatest journey, the one where we really find ourselves, is the journey we take when we stay and face the cracks in our relationships to uncover the self-truths we’ve been running away from the whole time. And that is Sabi’s story.

They stay to be there for these two kids they love so, so dearly because it’s clear that Paul really cannot get it together. They stay out of a sense of duty to Bessy, a person who has been so critical in their life, even though they’re afraid to admit that — to themselves or to Bessy. They stay because they know it’s the right thing to do.

And in staying, they both uphold their own status quo, burying their own needs to care for others, while also being forced to confront that status quo. In my own life I’ve found that when we can finally stand up for ourselves within the relationships that have come to define us, we learn longer, lasting lessons than if we had run off and started fresh somewhere else. Because after all, setting boundaries with the people who already know us requires a greater degree of trust — both within ourselves and in others — than starting off anew elsewhere.

Of course, Sort Of isn’t about staying within toxic, abusive relationships either. And that’s where the other stories of transition come in.

First, there’s Paul. Cis straight white man Paul is so used to being the center of it all, so used to having everything he wants the way he wants it. But when Bessy enters the coma, he completely falls apart, unable to answer simple questions about his wife’s health or even be present to the fact that his kids are also really struggling with the uncertainty of their mother’s future. Eventually, he learns even more about how little he actually knows the woman he is married to and the family that “is everything to him,” as Bessy put it in episode one to Sabi.

See that’s the boon and the curse of having privilege, especially being at the height of privilege. The rest of us have no choice but to contend with what it means to be who we really are because from a young age it’s incredibly obvious that the world has a lot of opinions about that and isn’t shy about enforcing those opinions. In the case of someone like Paul, though, he only has to face that question after great loss, incredible grief and complete uncertainty over the future.

It would’ve been easy for Sort Of to fully demonize Paul or to offer him some great redemption. But this isn’t a show that goes for easy, one-dimensional characterizations. We never walk away feeling completely bad for Paul, but we also don’t hate him. He’s just a real person, going through something unbelievably traumatic that has forced him to confront his own shortcomings. He’s self-absorbed, as so many cis white men are, enough of a woke liberal to know what he should and shouldn’t say about his own privilege — in a way that, of course, still centers him — but he grows, slowly, painfully, bit by bit, over the course of the season.

And then, there’s Raffo, Sabi’s mother. Ellora Patnaik gives a masterful performance of Raffo’s slow transformation over the course of the season. Like so many South Asian women of her generation and who grew up on the subcontinent, Raffo has accepted the role that’s been prescribed for her since birth. But in Aqsa’s refusal to get married and Sabi’s coming into their identity (and accidentally coming out to her) Raffo has begun to realize that if she wants to have any sort of relationship with either of her children, she’s going to need to reassess some of her own beliefs about what life should look like.

As I said before, Sort Of isn’t endorsing staying in toxic relationships merely for the sake of preserving relationships. Raffo has to work to earn Sabi’s trust, and that doesn’t come easy for her by any means. Already in denial about Sabi’s trans non-binary identity, 7ven outs Sabi’s work as a nanny to Raffo in episode three. Horrified, Raffo berates Sabi, saying, “You’re telling me you’re a servant, for this man? You had so many choices, but you became a nanny?”

One of the things Sort Of does so masterfully in its portrayal of queer trans South Asian identity is how it demonstrates the complicated interplay between race, class, immigration and gender. It’s clear that Raffo is just as upset by what she sees as Sabi’s “choices” around their gender identity and sexual orientation as she is about their occupation. Parents immigrate to afford their children better opportunities, or so we’re always told, and here is Sabi taking on what Raffo derisively considers a low-class woman’s occupation.

(As a side note, I greatly appreciate Sort Of for explicitly showing that this classism isn’t unique to South Asians. Since episode one, it’s clear that everyone looks at Sabi’s occupation with a degree of disdain coded in care — they’re not living to their full potential, people keep telling Sabi. And, Raffo pointedly asks Paul if he wants his son to grow up to be a nanny when Paul tries to woke white man her by asking, “Are you saying there’s something wrong with being a nanny?” One of the show’s main themes is not only is there dignity to Sabi’s work but also that Sabi’s work is invaluable.)

It’s through that same occupation that Raffo begins to finally see Sabi for who they are. After having some time to take it all in, Raffo confronts Sabi while they’re at work. She’s still confounded by everything, by Sabi “choosing” to take on the life of being a caretaker for a man and children that was thrust upon her, but she wants to try to hear Sabi’s perspective. Eventually, they’re able to bond, food bridging the gap, as it does in so many Asian immigrant stories. It’s a tenuous peace that breaks as soon as Paul comes home. His quiet anger eerily reminds Raffo of her own husband, and she later warns Sabi to not lose themselves in caring for other people. Even though she doesn’t fully understand or accept Sabi, Sabi knows that their mom’s words on this point, in particular, are true.

Eventually, Raffo realizes she needs to turn her own advice inwards. After all, accepting other people’s differences often requires taking a hard look at the ugly parts of our own lives we don’t want to confront. Raffo’s journey is only beginning when the season ends. There are so many questions left open, most of all the specifics of the dynamics of the Mehboob family. In Raffo’s eyes when she talks about her husband, and in Aqsa’s fears in episode seven, I can’t help but read gender-based violence (which is disproportionately high in South Asian communities), but the show never says this explicitly. For so many reasons, I sincerely hope Sort Of gets renewed for another season, but one of my main interests is to see more of how the show will grapple with gender dynamics within Sabi’s family.

For the many things that Sort Of does incredibly well, there’s one character and one storyline that left me disappointed. Bessy is largely seen through other people’s eyes, but the bits of her we get don’t hang together, in my view. Worse, the catalyst for the entire show, for all the changes and evolutions that all the characters must undergo, is Bessy’s incredibly unrealistic bike crash, which reinforces the harmful notion that cyclists just get themselves killed in “bicycle accidents” and taps into troubling stereotypes about Asian women being bad drivers transposed onto biking.

It’s a small thing, mere background context for the actual story, but it’s hard for me to ignore given that there are five memorials I know of for cyclists and pedestrians killed in car crashes within a mile radius of my apartment. It’s also hard to see something so violent and painful played off for laughs. (At the hospital, a health professional tells Paul that Bessy crashed into a parked poutine truck, going for the same kind of dark, deadpan humor that tempers many serious moments throughout the series.)

Despite this, Sort Of does a masterful job. It’s incredibly well-done slice of life TV. In just eight short episodes, Sort Of covers so many issues and develops so many characters, it’s hard to say the show is about one specific thing. But if there’s one theme that seems to transcend them all, it’s that we find ourselves by working through the messiness of our relationships.

The Stories We Tell

One of my earliest memories, perhaps my earliest one, is watching the snow fall from the sliding glass doors to the balcony of the small apartment my family rented in a Boston suburb. Each flake following its own chaotic path, collectively burying the short blade-like green leaves of my favorite yew bushes in white. Were the yews also laden with those precious crimson berries I loved picking and pulling apart to reveal the small, green-black acorn-shaped seed inside? I’m not sure. The sky itself was heavy with clouds and yet hued with that intoxicating shade of blue I’ve come to hold so dear after all these years, somewhere between cerulean and cobalt, a particular way the sky looks during a blizzard.

I can’t remember, anymore, what that balcony looked out on. A courtyard, I think. We might have a photograph of it, somewhere, but sometimes I prefer the vagueness of my memories, because it’s a reminder that this particular recollection was important to me and not to whoever took those pictures. I’ve held onto it all these years, because I myself had imprinted the image into my mind.

Was it real? I can’t say. A snowstorm in Massachusetts certainly isn’t a novelty. But I have so few other details around that specific moment. When was it? What day or month or year?

And that’s when the storytelling begins.

Sometimes, I fancy, it was my birthday. It very likely could have been. Sometimes, I wonder how much my love of cold weather and snow stems from this association I’ve built over the years, tied to this one nebulous memory. Sitting at the table where we ate, looking out the panes of those glass doors, at the snow falling relentlessly, beautifully, enchantingly on that balcony. Was that table even near the balcony? I don’t know. Did my mother prepare feasts of Indian specialties for our birthdays at the time, as she did in later years? I’m not sure. We certainly didn’t buy ice cream cakes from Carvel — was Carvel even a national chain then? — that was a ritual that started later, the closest thing to a “tradition” my family ever really had.

Was it the year my parents bought me a three-dimensional puzzle? Those had become all the rage, storming through the inescapable, holiday-themed commercials on our snow-laden TV screen. I don’t know how old I was when my parents bought that gift, but I certainly wasn’t older than seven. I can’t remember what monument the puzzle was supposed to turn into, but the squishy pieces were a slightly grey off-white, like the color of a snowbank in the fading light.

I do remember that I never even attempted it because, after my parents struggled to put the puzzle together, they returned it to the store. I know I shouldn’t blame them for this. Scarcity, after all, was the defining feature of both their childhoods and young adult lives, of my family’s first several years in the States. But there’s a tinge of bitterness I just can’t let go.

“The Holidays” were something I had to learn, Christmas not yet having fully dominated Decembers in its circuit around the world in the late eighties, when I was born, and early nineties, when my family immigrated.

In those early years, my family never celebrated any of them. The most basic understanding of Thanksgiving is a feast centered around a turkey, but my family was strictly vegetarian. I don’t know that my parents ever said this explicitly, but I can imagine that, for them, the notion of celebrating Christmas might have been personally offensive: a seemingly Western holiday and India having fought hard to win its independence from the British after two hundred long years. But perhaps I’m projecting my own feelings about colonialism and Christianity onto the past; I can’t say. In any case, we didn’t celebrate it. There was something of a Jewish community in a few of the places we lived, so Hanukkah was at least mentioned in school, and Kwanzaa was paid lip service in early nineties television, but both of these seemed equally foreign, entirely irrelevant to my Hindu, Indian family.

The alienness of American holidays isn’t the only reason why, though. Diwali often falls in November as well, and my parents did say prayers for it, lighting all the fixtures and placing candles in every room. But I don’t remember my parents making a ritual of going to any of the (relatively) nearby temples or connecting with other Hindus to celebrate it or any of the other holidays we observed at home. My parents’ religion was a solitary practice, or so I remember it, followed with a strict solemnity that detached us not only from our non-Hindu and American peers but also other members of the South Asian diaspora whose traditions seemed, at times, similarly removed from what my parents were looking for.

My sister tells me it wasn’t always quite this way. She has memories of small celebrations with our neighbors and relatives in India, from before my family came to the States. But immigration is often a lonely experience, after all. And loneliness can grow into a habit before you know it, a way of living that becomes so routine everything seems worse for want of a forever unattainable more.

For the entirety of my childhood my parents only went through the motions of seeking out personal connections, and even then only sparingly. Instead, they bought a string of multi-colored Christmas lights to decorate a small shrine that my family moved to every apartment and house we lived in, which to this day adorns the sanctuary of Hindu icons that takes over a full third of a spare bedroom in my parents’ house in Maryland.

In many ways, they had set themselves up for perpetual isolation. Family was the only thing that mattered, or so my parents always said, but they had left all of theirs behind, half a world away, hoping to return but never quite managing to see that through. And in that time, India changed, and, though they’d never admit it, every subsequent trip back made them strangers in a strange land, strangers among their own siblings and parents and nieces and nephews. What they wanted was to return to a place frozen in time, a place that no longer exists and, perhaps, never really did except for in their memories.

It was impossible for my family to not be touched by the culture all around us, though. At some point, I don’t remember when, I don’t remember why, we bought a red tinsel Christmas tree garland and a few ornaments. Possibly, we even had a small plastic tree — my memories around this are imprecise. I imagine that the allure was hard to escape, even for my penny-pinching, religious parents, after years of watching the ever-cynical Garfield soften in the spirit of the season and Charlie Brown’s sad little Christmas tree perk up with a little bit of love.

That tinsel garland also followed us, from one place to the next, but I want to say this was largely on the effort of my sisters. I have a few scattered memories of my sisters trying to bring us together. One Thanksgiving, we made one of our favorite recipes — baked ziti with spinach, olive and ricotta — and an apple cake. Our mother entertained us, briefly, as we ate in the rarely used formal dining room of our now much-larger house in New York. Our father ate alone while watching TV in the living room, as always.

Whether for holidays or birthdays, the vast majority of the gifts we got from our parents was money we were never allowed to spend. So my sisters took to crafting elaborate presents that we worked on all year. There were beautifully intricate outfits for our Barbies sewn together from scraps of our mother’s old silk saris and inspired by the fantasy novels we read constantly: an overlay skirt made of royal blue silk with gold trim, a lavender ball gown with flower buttons sewn into the border, a hooded cloak of the same fabric I can just barely see in my mind’s eye.

Looking back, I can only admire my sisters’ resilience in creating wonders that brought us so much joy out of so little. One year, we made a hanging mobile decoration from sticks we collected in the yard and carefully painted and folded paper cranes. Eventually, we managed to get our hands on actual origami paper and built delicate landscapes in shoe boxes using guides from library books: a garden with two-toned purple irises, flame-colored lilies and tissue-paper thin marguerites; a jungle with a pair of roaming elephants alongside a little green snake of braided embroidery floss; a cloudy starlit sky with such incredibly detailed dragons you wouldn’t believe they were just folded from paper.

There was a communality to these gifts. My sisters and I often made them together as a joint present for our parents, who had no use for such things and so they became our treasures. When we were older and had money of our own, we tried to buy our parents things they might actually enjoy. But even that would spectacularly and unexpectedly backfire, like the time my sisters and I bought our father a new briefcase, specifically of manmade leather, only to be told he couldn’t use it because a guru reading his star chart once said he should only carry a leather one.

In many ways, it was impossible to know what it is my parents wanted, because I’m not sure they ever seriously confronted the magnitude of that question themselves and because they’ve long been devoted to religious ideals that constantly devalue a sense of self. What was quite clear, though, was that somewhere in those years of self-inflicted seclusion, they had lost the ability to see the present as anything but lacking. Loneliness has a way of doing that, I’ve found.

More recently, as my parents have gained just enough self-awareness to realize they should, in fact, do something for their children, their gifts have been tied to their expectations of what a person should want. Their inability to really see the people that they claim to hold the closest in the name of family has transcended time and place, both. And so the material presents my sisters and I have received from our parents these past few years are either things society has deemed valuable or are tied to stories they’ve built about us based on a scattering of memories they’ve held onto from when we were young — memories that never quite align with our own recollections, carefully editing the parts they don’t want to acknowledge and pretty much always out of touch with who we are, past or present.

For a number of reasons, my family shared gifts in December growing up: the spirit of the Holidays already in the air; the end of the year as a single time to celebrate everyone’s birthdays; the practicality of having a full year and the entire summer break to work on our craft projects. And so my sisters would take those few ornaments and that red tinsel garland out of the closet, draping everything along some unused corner of a living room. No one ever said it, but somewhere in all this, I convinced myself that December was only a time for collective celebration, that my birthday was nothing special.

Individuality was something my parents neither believed in nor fostered, actively tried to stamp out at times. They prepared special food and bought a cake for all our birthdays, but it was often with only token consideration for the things we particularly liked, my sisters’ and my parties largely indistinguishable from each other, save the name written in icing on the frosting.

Even outside of my family, my birthday often fell by the wayside. Any celebration I might have had at school or among friends was curtailed because my birthday, only a handful of days before Christmas, almost always fell during winter break. Besides, after many long years, I had learned that individuality at school had never served me, save to become the butt of jokes and bullying.

So year after year, relentlessly, I convinced myself I didn’t care, that it didn’t bother me if no one remembered, I didn’t want anything anyways. That was what I told myself because that was what I saw reflected in the actions of so many people around me on so many days of the year.

And all the while, I swallowed my disappointment deeper and deeper, when people couldn’t fulfill the desires I worked my hardest to hide from myself and from the world. And as a consequence of that suppression, I also refused to acknowledge the moments of affection and care I did get: from my sisters who at some point started making gifts specifically just for me, from a classmate who spent the day with me our freshmen year of college, from my first boss who bought me a mug and small cake during my shift, and from several dear friends who’ve celebrated with me countless times since.

All I needed, all I wanted, all I allowed myself to cherish was a cold winter day buried in snow and the memory of a toy I didn’t get to play with.

Isn’t it nice how the city gets all decked out for your birthday?

A precious friend of mine made this observation a few years ago as we took a stroll among the silhouettes of trees etched out of the crisp night sky in bright white string lights. I think it was some weeks, still, before my birthday, but I can’t tell you for sure. I know we were in midtown Manhattan, but I can’t say exactly where. Did she say it before or after we had met for dinner and a drink? Before or after we were no longer coworkers? I only wish I could remember her exact phrasing.

My friend’s words were a bright spot in the darkness I had built around myself, and I’ve held onto the memory of them in all its imperfection and imprecision and uncertainty. And slowly, over the years, as they’ve become a part of the fabric of the story I’ve woven for myself, those words have allowed me to begin to take a wider view.

It’s hard, at times, for me to hold my life in the full extent of its depth, nuance, and complexity. Having grown up in a family where feelings did not exist, I’ve needed to take the time to express the depths of my despair. Loneliness is a story I’ve told myself for so long, built on memories that are undeniably real. But they’re not the only memories, and that is not the only story. It never has been.

Hallmark, Dabur and the Politics of LGBTQ+ Inclusive Advertising

I tend to roll my eyes when corporations market to the queer community because it’s usually empty pandering, often accompanied by back door donations to anti-LGBTQ+ conservatives. And while I still believe that, I was reminded recently that these advertisements — and all the hype around them — can speak volumes about the state of LGBTQ+ rights in a given place.

Remember the Hallmark commercial from 2019? The wedding registry site, Zola (owned by Hallmark), aired an ad featuring a lesbian wedding. Conservatives lost their shit and waged a campaign against the commercial for being a desecration of marriage, especially because the two women kiss at the end. Hallmark’s TV Chief decided to take the ad off air. After mounting pressure from GLAAD, countless celebrities and a public boycott campaign against Hallmark, the company issued an apology for pulling the commercial. A month later, that TV Chief stepped down in recognition of his huge mistake in the whole debacle.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think much of the whole thing. In fact, I was traveling at the time and only heard echoes of what happened weeks after it all unfolded. But when history seemed to repeat itself in India at the end of October, I couldn’t help but think back to the Hallmark mess and see the clear parallels and, also, the substantial divergences.

Dabur, an Indian brand that sells health and beauty products, aired a commercial for a skin-bleaching cream featuring a lesbian couple celebrating the Hindu holiday Karwa Chauth. The advertisement raised a lot of questions on all sides. On the left, progressives, feminists and LGBTQ+ activists took issue with the advertisement for its coloristic promotion of skin-bleaching and its celebration of a deeply misogynistic festival. But, the backlash from the Hindu ultraright was swift and unrelenting. Ultimately, Dabur buckled to pressure from the ruling Hindu nationalists, pulling the ad and issuing an “unconditional” apology.

Hallmark and Dabur. These two incidents started out similarly and yet the outcomes couldn’t be more different. And if this were just a story of a corporation with a poorly-conceived attempt at pro-LGBTQ+ messaging, I wouldn’t be writing about it. But there are so many layers to unpack here, starting with the details of the commercial itself, and each layer reveals something different about the political situation in India.

The emotional thrust of the advertisement — and also the heart of the controversy — is the fact that two women are holding the Karwa Chauth fast for each other. To fully appreciate what Dabur was trying to do and what the Hindu right rallied against, you need to know what Karwa Chauth is.

Growing up, my knowledge of Hindu holidays was limited and based largely on observation. The theme generally seemed to be that women must celebrate, honor and worship the men in their lives: fathers, brothers and, most of all, husbands. Karwa Chauth was, perhaps, the epitome of this. My mother would rise before dawn to start an all-day fast of food and water that she would only break at moonrise. My father would go about his day as per usual. I don’t recall seeing my parents enact the climax of the ceremony — emotions, most of all love, being nonexistent in my family, after all.

Bollywood filled in that gap for me. One of the key moments in probably the most enduringly popular movie of the ’90s, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, is when the heroine Simran holds the Karwa Chauth fast. Her family thinks she is fasting for the man they expect her to marry, Kuljeet, but she subverts the rituals to be true to her own love, Raj. Once the moon appears, the wife (or, in this case, bride-to-be), looks at the moon through a sieve before turning to her husband. The husband then gives his wife her first sip of water of the day. In the most dramatic telling, the wife also breaks her fast by being fed by her husband. In DDLJ, just as Kuljeet is handing Simran water, she pretends to faint and is caught by Raj who offers the water to her instead. Simran winks at Raj to emphasize the symbolism of the moment for him and the audience alike: the sanctity of their secret relationship is preserved.

I learned the point of Karwa Chauth years after the fact: the belief is that wives fast for the longevity of their husbands. Wives must sacrifice at all costs for their husbands.

Some modern takes on Karwa Chauth have attempted to blunt the misogyny. Returning to DDLJ, for instance, Simran refuses to break her fast until she can eat with Raj, but Raj is being detained by family at the celebration. When he finally manages to sneak away, she scolds him, saying that he must have been stuffing his face while she was dying of hunger. Simran’s sister reveals, though, that Raj, a true modern gentleman, has actually been fasting all day too, for Simran. This perspective isn’t unique just to Bollywood. While many Indians have decried Karwa Chauth altogether, others celebrate it as couples, participating in the ritual fast of their own agency and as a sign of their love.

The other side of modernity, of course, is consumerism. There is a booming industry around Karwa Chauth, with the sale of cosmetics, henna, clothes, designer sieves and even phone apps being marketed to women.

And this is precisely where Dabur’s ad fits in.

While I might not personally agree that a custom like Karwa Chauth can be reinterpreted to have a place in a feminist worldview, I have to believe this is what Dabur had in mind when they created their ill-fated ad.

In fact, as the two women are getting ready for the ceremony, they ask each other why they’re holding such a difficult fast. “For their happiness. And you?” one woman says, using ambiguous pronouns in her response that don’t reveal the gender of her partner. “For their long life,” the first woman replies, similarly ambiguous. Hindi is a heavily gendered language, but it’s possible to refer to someone using formal pronouns that would not reveal gender, which is how the women are referring to their partners. That same level of formality is often used by wives to speak with and speak of their husbands, especially in the most traditional settings.

The ad pulls off a bit of subversion beyond the linguistic usage. In the first portion, the viewer is led to believe that these two women are getting ready to celebrate Karwa Chauth together socially for their respective husbands. When a mother-in-law appears, commending them for their “impressive preparations” and hands them their outfits, we think that maybe the two are sisters-in-law living in the same household. It’s only when the ceremony unfolds, and we see the two women turn to look at each other that the true nature of their relationship becomes clear. These women aren’t just together, they are married, and their marriage has religious underpinnings. In a country where gay marriage is still illegal, the political and social ramifications of such a representation really can’t be overstated.

In this respect, the Dabur and Hallmark ads share much in common. Both are subverting and reimaging marriage to be inclusive of queer relationships, specifically, between two women. They’re also normalizing queer relationships and affording them the same social legitimacy as heterosexual relationships by placing two women at the center of customs and traditions typically reserved for heterosexual couples.

But what exactly is Dabur selling in its supposedly woman-empowering advertisement? Skin bleaching cream. There’s a sick irony to marketing harmful and coloristic so-called “beauty” products to women in an advertisement that is seeking to subvert misogynistic gender norms and depict women’s agency in their relationships. And this is what makes it so difficult for Indian feminists and the LGBTQ+ community to wholeheartedly support Dabur’s ad the way many comparable American groups did for the Hallmark ad. Hallmark was being equally consumerist by marketing Zola, the wedding registry site, but it wasn’t marketing a blatantly racist product that upholds a narrow and sexist view of “beauty.”

As an atheist who was raised Hindu, I hate the idea of Karwa Chauth and everything it stands for, modern rebranding be damned. I have spent the larger part of my life in defiance of the notion that love is entirely about the sacrifice of women. So it’s easy for me to write off the whole thing as a company that made an especially poorly-conceived attempt to pander to the LGBTQ+ community. And so I largely agree with journalist Sandip Roy, who sums up the issue by saying:

“The Dabur ad tries to queer two topics that are viewed with disdain by many who consider themselves socially progressive — Karwachauth and [skin-bleaching] creams. … Do some rainbow sprinkles somehow radically reinvent our obsession with fairness and the long lives of husbands (but not wives)?”

But I also recognize the very real tension for the Indian LGBTQ+ community and particularly for women in that community. As the Instagram account for the #IWillGoOut movement to end street harassment in India put it:

“I’m more than happy to see a queer couple in love on the national digital space, with a happy mother in law standing by them. Instead of the usual problematic queer representation, we now have a lovely queer representation in a very problematic ad. Ugh. Progress? Who knows. Progress within a patriarchal space is still infected by patriarchy after all. But I know many queer couples urgently need to be able to imagine possibilities of safety, love, hope and home. Until better desi queer visuals come along, this problematic ad will do.”

Beneath it all, there’s a peddling of a particular narrative of Hinduism and India. Karwa Chauth isn’t universally practiced by Hindus in India, but looking at mainstream Indian media you wouldn’t know that. So many Bollywood movies and even made-for-streaming shows center this celebration, from DDLJ to another beloved Bollywood classic Khabi Khushi Khabie Gham to the recent Netflix show Bombay Begums. And, while the big Hindu holidays like Holi, Diwali and Karwa Chauth are seemingly inescapable in mainstream Indian media, the country with the third largest Muslim population in the world offers, at best, a much more barebones acknowledgement of major Muslim holidays like Eid.

Despite being such an unabashed promotion of Hinduism, for India’s Hindu right the fact that Dabur’s ad deviates from Hindutva is what’s really at stake here. While those of us on the left are conflicted over the ad for what it’s selling and how it’s selling it, Hindu nationalists (who hold power both nationally and in many state governments through the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP) are enraged because, to them, the idea of two Hindu women in a religiously sanctioned relationship is an unequivocal desecration of Hinduism itself.

Whereas the campaign against the Hallmark ad was led by the ultraconservative website One Million Moms and its social media pages, BJP politicians themselves stepped into the fray against Dabur. The ad was pulled after the Home Minister of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh threatened legal action against Dabur. While the hubbub around Hallmark died down after the company issued an apology for pulling the ad in the first place, Dabur, posted to Twitter that the company “unconditionally apologize[s] for unintentionally hurting people’s sentiments” (emphasis added) and removed the advertisement from its social media.

Journalist Sandip Roy offers some context for Dabur’s ad, which was only the latest foray by an Indian corporation into social issues that are seen as anathema by the BJP. Most of the previous ads created controversy for testing Hindu nationalists’ tolerance of Muslims or anything they view as remotely Muslim-adjacent, even when it isn’t. This is, sadly, unsurprising in India’s current hyper-Islamophobic political environment. One jewelry ad from 2020 delved directly into India’s Islamophobic political debates by showing an interfaith marriage. Shortly after the ad was pulled, India’s most populous state, Uttar Pardesh, passed a law (that had been under discussion for over a year) criminalizing interfaith marriages. Reflecting on all this, Roy observes: “Until now, though, LGBT issues had been a safer and less controversial place to exhibit liberal values rather than religion.” And the recent controversy around an ad that challenged the Hindu marital tradition of kanyadaan, or giving away of a daughter to the groom’s family, would seem to reinforce his thesis.

I would argue that it becomes impossible to really talk about LGBTQ+ rights without delving into religion because religions the world over have long called us sinners. This is as true in America as it is in India, as true of Christianity as it is of Hinduism.

I would argue that it becomes impossible to really talk about LGBTQ+ rights without delving into religion because religions the world over have long called us sinners. This is as true in America as it is in India, as true of Christianity as it is of Hinduism, even before we get into Victorian sensibilities and the legacy of two hundred years of British colonialism. Roy gives the example of two pro-LGBTQ+ Indian ads that didn’t evoke the kind of controversy the Dabur ad did, but neither of these ads made the mistake of explicitly placing LGBTQ+ people inside rituals that are entirely designed to exclude us. (As an aside, one of them is an incredibly touching trans-inclusive ad by a jewelry company and shows a trans woman getting ready for her wedding. But the ad doesn’t actually show the wedding ceremony itself, which, in my view, is at least partly why it didn’t draw as much negative publicity as the Dabur ad.)

At its core, rightwing backlash against Hallmark and Dabur were both about, more or less, the same thing: an insistence that queer people  should have no place in the world. But the difference in the outcomes indicates that the fights for LGBTQ+ rights are in very, very different stages in these two respective countries and societies. America is not, by any means, a bastion of equality, and it has been three years since Section 377 was struck down in India, decriminalizing homosexuality. Yet I struggle to shake the sense that among Indians, being queer remains something to hide and is a cause for shame. In an attempt to challenge that view in the mainstream, Dabur made an ad celebrating a fundamentally misogynistic festival to sell coloristic beauty standards to women. But the fierce outcry was against the notion of a happily married lesbian couple, instead.

And that has only served to reinforce my view.

Advice Columns Were My Guilty Pleasure Until They Became My Connection to Community

Growing up, I used to make jokes about Dear Abby and roll my eyes at the notion of advice columns.

And then, somewhere in my twenties, I became obsessed with them. I devoured Dear Prudence, waiting with great anticipation every Tuesday and Thursday until it published, clicking endlessly through the archives, re-reading Danny Lavery’s responses to tide me over until the next post was up.

Danny Lavery’s writing is, of course, amazing, but what always hooked me into reading an advice column was the question. Sometimes, the questions were insights into the lives of Other People, who I wanted so badly to fit in with but fundamentally couldn’t understand. People in love, people falling out of love, people having affairs, people fighting with their in-laws. So parched for love myself, reading advice columns helped me temper my own understanding of relationships and expectations of romance beyond the little experience I had of both through watching romcoms.

Sometimes, the columns tapped into problems ancillary to my own, like how to deal with conflicts at work or navigating difficult conversations with friends. Isolation was a big part of my childhood experience, and so I’ve struggled a lot with “social norms.” Advice columns filled in the gaps I never learned growing up.

And then, on very rare occasions, the questions went right to my heart. Like the time Lori Gottlieb very kindly, very gently helped a single person acknowledge her own grief. Or a column I read earlier this year about a fraught parent-child relationship with a few phrases I still remember by heart all these months later.

Autostraddle took a risk on me, a person with no professional writing experience. I still remember the call for applications from back in July 2019: “looking to hire 2-4 new writers.” The editors ended up bringing on a team of over a dozen writers, instead. I know that reader support during the July 2019 fundraiser is entirely the reason I am here today.

Help us out?

Honestly, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into or where to start. Overwhelmed by information and writing opportunities, I browsed the Slack channel for You Need Help and stumbled on a comfortingly familiar question I’ve spent years of my life considering: How to pay your bills while trying to make the world a better place? I can do this, I thought.

The first thing I ever published for Autostraddle was advice. And from there, bit by bit, I started to find my voice.

I haven’t written very much for You Need Help because, most of the time, I feel entirely unqualified to answer the questions, and there’s something incredibly vulnerable about publishing a piece you feel uncertain of on the internet, especially in the context of offering guidance to others. But I’ve always loved talking to people about their problems.

One of many, many changes Nicole implemented when they took over fundraising and A+ was making Into the A+ Advice Box a regular, biweekly column with a mission to answer every question that’s submitted. For a year, I sat on the sidelines, occasionally reading the questions but still hesitating to venture into the conversation. At the start of this year, though, I challenged myself to contribute to A+ content by trying to answer at least four questions in each post because I know that A+ subscriptions really and truly are the lifeblood that keeps Autostraddle alive.

Join A+!

But over the course of the last ten months, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with the A+ Advice Box. What started as a personal mission to participate in fundraising activities has morphed into joining a collective goal to help as many people feel seen and less alone as possible. And as a writer, writing for this column has been incredibly freeing. I can be more bare, more vulnerable, more honest, more raw, more real because I don’t have to worry about my employer, my professional colleagues or other acquaintances finding this content.

The questions we get really and truly run the gamut, and I have learned so, so much from my fellow writers and from so many of you who share your thoughts, knowledge and experiences in the comments. That’s what makes these posts so special, really, is that they’re not about a singular person bestowing their wisdom onto faceless readers but rather a coming together of a community to help each other sort through their shit in confidence. The confidentiality and community of the A+ Advice Box affords people the space to come to terms with their identities again and again and again, and it’s beautiful. That same confidentiality allows others to start facing their biases.

And then there’s all the people who are just trying to make sense of the hellscape of a world that we live in. A few months ago, we heard from an A+ member who had always wanted to be a parent and was struggling with grief over their personal decision to not have kids because of climate change. Though I’ve never wanted kids, this member’s pain was so deep and so clear and that really resonated with me. Answering the A+ Advice Box has really pushed me to see beyond myself, to try to hold other people’s struggles and challenges and offer them whatever comfort I can for their feelings. My response, which was grounded in the article by Lori Gottlieb I mentioned earlier, encouraged this member to acknowledge the reality of their own sadness and loss for the future that’s been closed to them. “That pain is real,” I wrote. This struggle resonated very strongly with many A+ members.

In addition to all the sex and dating content you’d expect from an advice column, Into the A+ Advice Box has covered a range of different issues:
+ Working through internalized biophobia
+ Coming to terms with one’s asexuality
+ Unpacking complicated feelings around gender identity that arise from putting pronouns in an email signature
+ Unlearning fatphobia
+ Facing a negative, knee-jerk reaction to other cis people sharing their pronouns in meetings
+ Discussing bras with one’s child in a way that is affirming and not body-shaming
+ Resources for teachers on creating space for kids to explore their genders and sexualities
+ Grappling with being chronically single
+ Growing up evangelical and struggling with an unshakeable fear of the apocalypse
+ Balancing full-time employment and creative pursuits
+ Two entire posts about divorce
+ All the queer fashion questions you could imagine
+ Making a place feel like home

And so, so, so much more! There really is a little something for everyone who goes Into the A+ Advice Box!

If you have the means, I really hope you’ll join us by becoming an A+ member. And we also have our A+ Gift Membership Pool where you can donate or put in to receive a free one-year membership.

Join A+!

Cobalt memberships start at $4 per month or $30 for the year. Not only will you be supporting independent queer media, but you’ll also become part of this community of LGBTQ+ readers and writers who just want to hold each other up in these hard times. And if you sign up today, you can join us for an A+ Ask Me Anything tomorrow 12 to 4 pm Pacific to ask your most burning questions. (And if you’re not available at that time, the A+ Advice Box is open 24/7 for A+ members!)

At Autostraddle, we don’t always have answers, but we have a lot of heart, a lot of commiseration, and it’s almost always the case that someone in this community will shed some light on what you’re struggling with.

I hope to see you at the A+ AMA tomorrow!