Sorry, should I be doing something with my hands? Do I just stare at your face the entire time? That can’t be right. Do we make eye contact? Do I stare at one eye? You can’t stare a two eyes at once, they are two distinct things, my god, how do humans with two eyes even look at one another? Do I flip between both of your eyes like watching a tennis match? That can’t be right and also now I have a headache, I’m just going to stare at the bridge of your nose oh god oh god, oh god, did you just ask me a question?

I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about how much I missed you. How much I missed everything. And now I’m scared it’s somehow going to go away again. Is it weird if we hug? Like, right in the middle of our I’m not-quite-sure-this-is-a-conversation? Yes. Let’s hug.

Hugging. Wow. This is nice. You smell nice.

Huh. Never realized how much, like, contact there is with hugging. There’s a lot of contact, huh? You’d think it just involves your arms, but like, man, my boobs are just all pressed up against you. I just talked about boobs while hugging you. So, yeah, that’s a thing that happened.

Is this a normal length of time for a hug? Should we stop? When does a hug end? Is there a specified amount of time? This has gone on for too long, hasn’t it? Are you pulling away? I can’t tell. Maybe that’s a regular hug thing? Or did I freak you out because I tried to maintain eye contact while hugging?

I think the problem is that I’m not at home right now, so I’m sort of out of my comfort prison. Maybe you should come back to my place. Ha ha ha ha ha, like in the 70s! Like Rand and I are swingers! Come back to our place. Oh, god, not that we’re swingers. I mean, it’s okay if other people are. I’m not going to judge someone else’s lifestyle choice. Wait, is it a choice? (Oh, god, did I just say something super offensive?) It’s totally great if they are. The world needs swingers, right? Ha ha ha ha, maybe we should swing.

Oh, god, I mean, not really. Please don’t tell people that I suggested we should swing. I do not want to swing. I mean, it’s fine if you do. And it’s not personal. You seem like you’d be a very kind and generous lover. Not that I’m looking! HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. You know what, maybe we should skip my house. I’ve been there for a year and a half, and I’m worried I have olfactory exhaustion and can’t smell my own house, and what if it smells weird? I’ve been lighting a LOT of incense. A lot. How much incense is too much incense? I go through a few sticks a day. I think maybe I have olfactory exhaustion from the incense? Oh, god, is incense culturally appropriative? I grew up Catholic, if that helps at all. I should probably just stick to candles. I have a lot of those, too. How many candles are too many candles? Oh, god, are the candles culturally appropriative? (Again, I grew up Catholic, if it helps.)

I think the church’s views on homosexuality and women’s rights are very antiquated and I don’t agree with them. I just want to be clear on that. But man, they really got the incense thing right!

…

I just want to be clear that I’m saying incense and not incest. I am not okay with incest.

Okay, I just need to take a deep breath, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, you know, I think the problem is that we’re inside, together, that’s the problem. Let’s go sit outside. Yes! Outdoors. You know, they say transmission is virtually impossible outdoors. But we’re vaccinated! So we don’t have to worry about that. No. Except there’s this new variant which they’re talking about. I tried reading the news story about it but I kept crying too hard to finish it. Ha! Typical me with my pandemic-related-trauma, amirite? The outdoors are nice, aren’t they? Look how much space we have. And the ventilation. That hug went on for too long before, huh? I’ll give you some space. Six feet, right? It’s really a shame, because you smell nice. Man, even with olfactory exhaustion, I detected that. Not that I’m like, a swinger or anything. But if I was, boy, howdy, you’d be first on my list! I mean, with your consent of course. Is it your turn to talk? I think it might be. You go ahead.

I’ve really missed you, you know.

So on a regular basis, I invade my husband’s Twitter mentions and tell him to stop whatever he’s doing and come suck face with me. Lately, he’s been working on instructional videos for his new company. While he’s great on camera (look, he just is! It’s not even me being biased because I think he’s a smokeshow!), actually doing the A/V work is pretty uncharted territory for him, so he gets on Twitter to ask people for advice on how things look, and what he should do differently. A lot of the answers are really helpful and supportive.

I also have things to say.

Lower the camera and take off shirt and maybe pants.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

okay but why are you still wearing a shirt, i thought i made myself clear

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) April 27, 2021

Anyway, apparently I’ve been doing stuff like this for a while?

I just found a picture of you as a naked toddler holding a bucket over your winky.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 4, 2016

Honestly, I’m just kind of a nightmare of a wife.

YOU CAN REPORT IT FOR ASSMENT.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) May 6, 2021

Anyway, today I did it again.

TAKE YOUR SHIRT OFF

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

The thing about Rand is that while he’s pretty good at playing the straight-man in this carnival ride of wedded whimsical fuckery, every now and then I push a little too far and … well … he’ll call me on my bluff.

pic.twitter.com/J0lw5yrU6z

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) June 3, 2021

Touché, Mr. Fishkin. Though I’d like to think we’re all winners here: him, for having that chest, me, for getting to appreciate it on the regular, and the good people of Twitter, who get to see it for the first time.

Now if you’ll excuse me …

sneaking into your office right now to make out

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) June 3, 2021

When our friend arrived at our door, Rand looked at him and said, “Hey, guess what? We’re all fully vaccinated.” They’d gotten their second shots on the same day, and the CDC recommended waiting time for antibodies to build up had elapsed. They hugged on my porch, and I stared like I was watching a documentary, something beautiful I was removed from, before I realized I didn’t have to be simply an observer. I threw myself into the hug as well. We stood there on the porch, and another friend who is staying with us (another once-commonplace event made impossible, etc., etc.) saw the exchange and said, casually, “Oh, are we group hugging?” throwing her arms around us all.

My local grocery store had signs saying that fully vaccinated customers didn’t need to wear masks, based on the recommendation of the CDC. We all still wore them anyway. A few days later, they took down those signs, and replaced them with ones saying, basically, “Nevermind, keep wearing the masks, please, the CDC has no idea what’s going on.” For me, nothing had changed. I even had a dream about it, the old cliché about going to school naked, updated for the pandemic age: I was indoors, in public, without a mask. I kept apologizing to everyone, woke up relieved it wasn’t real. A few days later a maskless woman at the Goodwill berated me for wearing plastic gloves to pick through the shelves (something I do whenever I shop there, not because of Covid, but because I once found what I hope was cat poop on a sweater). The CDC ping-pongs back and forth. No one seems to exactly know what to do. Are we wearing masks? Are we hugging? Is it safe to eat indoors? Is this the end or just a lull? Why didn’t I tell that woman to shut her stupid face?

Later in the week, we went out to dinner again, this time eating indoors for the first time since February of last year. Our friends met us outside, and the hug we fell into was effortless, so that I didn’t even realize it at first. For a second, I’d forgotten to be amazed by this foreign thing, of stepping into the sacred six feet of space around one another.

Someone asked how I was doing, and in the aftermath of my second shot, I told them I could not stop crying. “Just openly weeping at everything,” I said. “I don’t really understand it.”

“Oh, me too,” they replied. “I read something that said it’s not PTSD we’re dealing with, because PTSD is for things that have passed. And this is something that we’re still in.”

There is the truth of it. The world is opening up, or parts of it are, at least – slowly, cracking open like a window left shut too long. The wind rushes in, that flash of fresh air, but I’m still hesitant to take a breath. I’m told this feeling is “social re-entry anxiety.” (We already have a name for it, for this nervousness about stepping back into the world.) More people are set to die globally from the pandemic in 2021 than 2020. Things are far from over, and trauma, as Ed Yong notes in The Atlantic, is lingering and unpredictable. Experts (in my mind’s eye, a group people in lab coats, against a dark and infinite background, holding clipboards) say that this wasn’t it. That the real big one is coming. I try to stop my imagination from going to dark places. I’ve read Station Eleven too many times.

“These next three weeks of summer are going to be great, until the variant hits,” a friend teases, and we all laugh and wince simultaneously. It hits too close to the fear that stops us from enjoying these moments thoroughly: we’re afraid of everything being snatched away again.

I try to be in the moment, but it’s hard to know exactly what this moment is. Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel doesn’t take away the fact that there was a tunnel to begin with. When you’re in it, your only focus is on getting through to the other side, more or less intact. It’s only afterwards, blinking in the light, that you have a second to turn around and think, well … that was awful. That’s where I am now: looking back at the dark we’ve just stepped out of, trying to acclimate to the brightness, and wondering if – and how long- it will last.

Vaccines are rolling out – slow at first, and now a steady trickle. My friends and I keep checking in on one another as we have for the last year, though the topic has switched from “You hanging in there?” to “Any side-effects?” We’ve become a little bit like science experiments, marigolds clipped to electrodes. I have many hypotheses about what the effects of the world opening up again will be like after more than a year of trauma and death and lockdowns and the politicization of basic science. In the words of Jessie Spano, I’m so excited, and I’m so scared.

“Do you have your superpowers?” a man asked me as I left.

I remind myself of the luck and the privilege that allowed for this, with having internet and a governor who wasn’t corrupt, with having access and the ability to book my shot.

I treated many really sick Covid-19 patients today.

All wanted to get vaccinated but didn’t know how to navigate appointments, transportation. Might sound easy, but for many, it’s not.

Expanding eligibility doesn’t always mean accessibility, especially for the most vulnerable.

— Craig Spencer MD MPH (@Craig_A_Spencer) April 6, 2021

Rand was giddy about it when I came home – “I can’t believe it,” he said. I couldn’t either. When we went into lockdown last March he told me we’d be through by August.

“Six months, tops,” he said. By my birthday at the latest.

The time came and went. I turned 40 in lockdown, argued that it didn’t count while the skin under my neck flappingly disagreed. His grandmother died. My nephew started to walk and talk. My friends had babies. Time passed at the same time that it stood still, and I watched a lot of TV. When talk of the vaccine started, Rand said we’d probably not be able to get it until the end of summer, and he was wrong again, but this time in the best way. When that needle went in my arm I almost cried, not from the pain but because I realized I had been carrying all those damn tears around, everywhere I didn’t go.

“I need you to know,” I told him, “about some of the side-effects of the vaccine.”

“Oh?”

“I might get cranky if I don’t snack regularly.”

“I see.”

“That one seems to be unfortunately permanent.”

“And we’re going to attribute that to the vaccine, are we?”

“We are.”

Other things that, in the last two days, I have claimed were side-effects to the vaccine:

1. Demanding to be hand-fed Cheet-os as though I am a baby bird.
   –
2. Crying while watching The Great Pottery Thrown Down, a program which should not actually elicit tears, but reminds me that my studio has been closed for a year, and I don’t know if I still remember how to throw, or how to apply surface decoration, or the name of the woman with the dark hair who inspired me to spend a year reading female authors. Also, one of the judges cries all the time and it’s wonderful, truly, but that sort of thing is contagious.
   –
3. Farting.
   –
4. Eating an entire bag of kettle corn for dinner.
   –
5. Crying after learning that 7 million people will not get the vaccine because they are concerned about the cost of it, and they don’t realize that it is free.
   –
6. Being very scared that I am going to look back on this year having accomplished nothing besides surviving it.
   –
7. Crying while watching that very stupid Google commercial where people do searches and at first the searches are all “pandemic family activities” and then the cursor deletes “pandemic” and oh my god.
   – 
8. Absolutely losing my mind with sobs when I ended a phone call with my brother and heard my little nephew say “Bye-bye” in the background.
   –
9. Screaming “I have had just about enough of everyone’s bullshit!” and then refusing to specify who everyone is and what bullshit I am referring to.
   –
10. Crying while watching The Muppets because technically shouldn’t some of them have died by now?
    –
11. Losing several hours to looking up the lifespan of the average Muppet.
    

    Oh god.

    –

12.  Going to the store to buy groceries and forgetting the one thing I went there to buy but picking up a whole bunch of other things that were not on my list but looked good at the time.
    –
13. An overwhelming worry that I’ve forgotten how to be in the world.
    –
14. More crying.

So, that’s where I am. Normalcy still feels elusive and I miss everyone and everything. If I think too hard about it and the last year, my eyesight gets all watery, and it makes it hard to see, but still – there it is, that stupid light at the end of that stupid tunnel, forever too late for some of us.

“It’s a side-effect,” I say into his shoulder as we sit on the couch.

“Okay,” he replies, and puts on a show. It makes me cry, but what did I expect?

So, last week, or maybe two weeks ago, or three months (does it matter? Does anyone remember? Are we still keeping track? HOW IS IT STILL MARCH? IT HAS BEEN MARCH FOR A YEAR.) I did something that caught people’s attention on Twitter, and it amused some folks and rankled others, the way anything that catches people’s attention does.

And since it’s International Women’s Day, I thought I’d talk about it.

A little while ago, Lauren Boebert, a Representative from Colorado (she was the one who was livetweeting the location of several sheltering Democratic officials, including Speaker Pelosi, during the armed siege of the Capitol, and also vowed to take a loaded glock onto the Senate floor) posed in front of her bookshelf, onto which she’d precariously shoved a bunch of firearms.

I decided to do the same with sanitary pads.

Decided to display menstrual products on the bookshelves behind me the way Lauren Boebert does firearms. pic.twitter.com/GGfai6gdqL

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Generally if I tweet anything vaguely critical of the free-for-all smorgasboard that is American’s gun control laws, or anything that acknowledges the horrifying truth that menstruation happens for some humans, my mentions become a shitstorm for a few days. But this, dear friends, managed to hit the sweet spot in the Venn diagram where those two concepts overlap, and so I was hit with a monsoon of crap.

(Nice things were said, too. The problem with a monsoon of crap is that you tend to lose sight of all those nice things.)

At some point, even Boebert herself saw the tweet and felt the need to weigh in, with some weird transphobic comment that still remains baffling to me.

But what’s amazing is just how unoriginal all the insults were. They were the same thing I’ve always gotten. Every single time. Again and again and again. And they’re virtually identical to all the comments my friends get, again and again and again. It’s like Groundhog Day, but I’m surrounded by white supremacist misogynistic transphobes who are just deeply unloved. So, I figure, I’m just going to cover all the insults I get online here, so we don’t need to go through this again next time.

Narrator: she would absolutely be going through this again next time. 

1. “You are mentally ill and need help!”
   
   
   Yes, please lock me up in a home for the unstable, for I have a wandering uterus which is giving me fits, and have developed a nasty habit of literacy, as well as an acute infection of feminism on the brain. The only cure is a mixture of laudanum, writing up legislation to repeal the 19th amendment, and planning my future dream life when I become Mrs. Matt Gaetz.
   –
2. “You look like a dude/ You secretly ARE a dude.” Please, if I was a dude, people would be listening to me right now.
   –
3. “Your husband is a girl.” Someone literally said this because Rand likes to cook.
   Anyway, this is sexy as hell and calling someone a girl isn’t the insult you think it is.
   –
4. “You are super ugly.”
   Oh, no, the guys on Twitter who are frightened by menstruation and find grammar as baffling as they do the clitoris doesn’t want to fuck me, whatever will I do.
   –
5. “Your husband doesn’t actually love you”/”How the fuck are you married, you’re disgusting” etc, etc.
   

   DAMN IT, THEY HAVE FIGURED US OUT, HE JUST MARRIED ME FOR THE DOWRY AND THE TITLE OF MR. “SHE SEEMS LIKE A BITCH” pic.twitter.com/DY9zvuWq5T

   — Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 19, 2021

   Yup. It’s all a sham. And my husband is a girl. And I am a boy. We’re very unhappy. It’s been two decades of hell. I’m too gross to be loved.
   We only stay together for the children, which is how I refer to our shared Netflix and Amazon Prime accounts.
   –
   –

6. “Just take the L!”
   
   Ah, take the L. I assume that this also what they say to women after they’ve failed to given them an O. HEYOOOOOOOO!!!!
   –
7. “You are gross/disgusting/need to bathe more.”
   
   
   
   Fear not, gentle souls: when I am on my menses I will retreat to a dark cave in the forest until I am done, and should the dark day arise that I ever need to defecate, I will flee into the hinterlands, never to return to polite society. (Also, of all these folks who are very eager to tell me how gross I am, none of them are using their real photos. Because I’m sure they’re super comfortable with how they look.)
   –
8. “Some other insulting comment about my glasses/nose ring!”
   –
   Oh. Oh, JayeMarie. What was that about glasses?–
9. “You are old! You are menopausal! YOU ARE 80!”
   
   Sit down, my little kittens. Let me tell you a story. Sometime at the closing of the 1970s, in the sunset of Disco, my parents did lie together and begat a child of that long-ago epoch. Now, decades later, I watch my bones wither to dust and my memories fade. “The first time I saw Back to The Future,” I whisper, tears rolling down skin as thin and creased as crepe paper, “it really was 1985.”Anyway, I will continue to strive to be as comfortable with my withering looks as you, grown woman who uses cartoon avatar and guy whose profile pic is a blurry group shot.
   –
10. “You don’t know you’re talking about!” It’s literally a photo of me in front of tampons, Dave. I’m not sure that there’s that much to scrutinize here.
    –
11. The Death/Rape Threat. Of course, no discussion of online abuse would be complete without these guys, who truly are at the bottom of the shit barrel. They take a few forms, most of them single-celled. Some try to hide behind hypotheticals, like “How are you going to protect yourself when a rapist comes busting through your door?” and comments that assess our value according to how rapeable we are – i.e., “You are too ugly to rape, anyway!”. 

    This dude felt the need to decapitate me because he got upset at the sight of menstrual pads. Imagine having this many books about programming on your shelf and still being this fucking bad at Photoshop.
    –
    –
    Or being this mad because I. Posed. With. Maxi. Pads. He’s is about to give himself a rage stroke because he had to look at overnight super absorbents with wings.
    –
    

12. The absolutely baffling.
    
    –
    Me:–
13. Bonus: The unintentional self-burn.
    The poor dipshits are so unfamiliar with basic human anatomy that they don’t understand why someone would need pads of different absorbencies.
    

What’s funny is I actually PREDICTED this would happen:

If you did this with menstrual products and contraceptives, the GOP would lose their minds pic.twitter.com/zyoYXG5VQs

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) February 18, 2021

Because the insults s are always the fucking same. Because hate is inherently unimaginative. It’s the opposite of creativity. If you hate, you haven’t put any thought into anything.

To anyone who feels the urge to repeat any of these messages to me, I would *strongly* encourage you to try to come up with something new. You might even find yourself thinking. And that might lead somewhere good. Because as things stand, y’all are getting a little predictable.

Until next time …

I think I hit mine. (I say “think” because I realize that it may not have been it – that something worse might still be coming.) It happened a few months ago, knocking the wind from my lungs. I wanted rage at something, at the world and the circumstances that had shaped it into what it was, but it was like those dreams where you try to scream and nothing comes out. It just stays inside of you and you feel a little like you’re drowning. I was uncertain of what to do – everyone is falling apart at different times, and so whenever I do, it feels like I’m the only one who is.

I took long walks and cried and I did that again and again until the bruise from hitting the wall didn’t hurt so much, even when I pressed on it.

In all of this, I have been trying to be creative. I’ve spent a year working on a book and made little progress, and it’s a daily battle with myself and my brain. I look at the book that I wrote, years ago, and it is a piece of alchemy I do not understand. I put words together, again and again, enough of them to make a memoir, and it feels like someone else did that.

I spoke to my friend Rachel Friedman the other day, who wrote one of my favorite books about creativity (a book that made me cry because she wrote about things that I had felt acutely). We talked about what it means to try to create right now.

For me, I feel like I have no excuses. I have large swaths of time, a quiet office, few distractions. I don’t have children to homeschool or feed or keep alive. I have a husband who is clean and tidy and considerate and makes me dinner almost every night, and sometimes when I am tired and cranky he makes me lunch, too. The only thing stopping me, as always, seems to be me. This is insufferable, I know. No one wants to hear about a writer struggling to write. It’s a navel-gazing ouroboros, a nice big loop of self-woe from people with too much time on their hands.

“I don’t think writer’s block exists,” Rachel says to me delicately, when I tell her that I am wrestling with trying to make something in all of this mess. “I think what it is is fear. I think we’re afraid, and that fear means that we stop creating.”

There is truth to this, of course: I am soaking in fear and self-doubt. But I also have to get something done, I tell her. I need to make sense of this time. Because simply getting through this stretch doesn’t seem like enough. “Everyone keeps talking about how Shakespeare wrote Lear during the plague,” I say.

Rachel laughs, but it’s somehow gentle and light, not mocking. She tells me she doesn’t even know if that’s true. (I am inclined to agree. I tell her how I think Emilia wrote half his plays, and one day I’m going to write a book from her perspective, just one more in a list of projects that I talk about but never do.) Rachel tells me she thinks creativity isn’t as isolated an activity as we often think it is, and at a time when we’re all so alone, it’s unfair to expect that we can produce art.

And there is the crux of it, the catch-22 of it all.

So many of us are trying to create, because it seems like the only way to make sense of this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

But it’s so hard to create right now, because of how we feel in this lonely, sad, impossible moment in time.

I don’t really know what the answer is. Sometimes I tell myself that the only way I’ll get through this is if I finish this manuscript. Other days, I remind myself of the lesson in Rachel’s wonderful book – that there are so many ways to be creative. Like finding a new way to calm yourself down when the world feels impossible. Maybe it is a doodle you draw while you are on a Zoom call, or the cookies you bake your neighbor. Or the thread of texts that you and your friend send one another so that you each feel less alone in the quiet hours of the night.

If you are my husband, your creativity is in the food you cook, so lovingly that it makes my heart itch a little.

These are the things we make that are not books. But they make these days easier, and maybe that is miraculous in and of itself. Maybe that is its own kind of art.

I decided to spend 2020 reading only women authors. It shouldn’t have been a revolutionary act, but somehow, by the end, it started to feel like one. There’s a clear gender bias in publishing (male authors are published more often than women, have their books submitted for more awards, and are highlighted in publications more frequently). When much of the world is already written by men – not just books, but history itself – it felt like this was some small way in which I could try to tip the scales.

It wasn’t a strict rule, nothing set in stone, and I even made the occasional exception (including my friend Mike’s fantastic graphic novel, Flamer, which he published last summer). My goal for the year wasn’t a limitation or a constraint, but a focus – to seek out women writers in a way I hadn’t before.

Beyond this commonality, there was no shared theme between the books I read, and I kept no comprehensive list – it felt like doing so might somehow rob me of the magic of it, might end up imposing order when all I wanted to do was meander. I went from non-fiction memoirs to young adult to literary fiction. I loved a few, hated none, left no book unfinished. And even though not every story was joyous, I found that there was something beautiful in them, in surrounding myself with the words of women. A patchwork quilt of experiences, woven together by this facet of our identity.

Not once was I irritated with how women were portrayed, and while I was often angered or upset by how the world treated them, it never felt gratuitous. Their pain was real, and it was theirs, and they shared it with me. There was something strangely comforting in that – these complex and imperfect women existing in a vicious and stupid and unforgiving world, and knowing that none of us were alone. It had been a long time since I’d found a friend in a book. I thought I’d outgrown it. But maybe you never do.

And god, they were so gloriously, beautifully human. They had acne and mastectomies and unpleasant voices and long noses and were too tall or too fat. They were irritable and unkind and wore the same sweatshirt too many days in a row and drank too much or not at all. They befriended dragons and defeated monsters and fell in love and were hurt or raped or murdered and these things were significant not because of the men they were related to or the ones they loved but because it happened to them. These stories belonged to women. Both the characters and the authors.

(There were zero descriptions of pert breasts or erect nipples.)

When the new year started, I picked up a book by a male author in a genre I hope to one day write in. I had heard of his work, and this latest novel had gotten rave reviews.

There were things that I took issue with, and somehow I thought these things were just my problem. The teenager in a sexual relationship with someone seven years older than her; the classic depiction of a beautiful woman who ends up being a betrayer; the woman who is fragile because of her mental illness. The book and the author were so beloved that I figured it was my inability to just be cool, another example of me being a humorless bitch because that’s what feminism does to you.

It was like all the lessons of the last year just vanished.

About halfway through the book, seemingly out of nowhere, there was a graphic and horrific rape scene. I read it late at night, and found I couldn’t sleep afterwards. The act of violence was between two men. I don’t know if that makes it less of a problem. I find sexual violence against women is terrifying for a lot of women to read. And sexual violence against men is also terrifying for a lot of women to read.

Because it’s sexual violence. And a lot of us have personally experienced that.

Men have a right to tell those stories, too, of course. We all do. But we have to do it responsibly. Especially if you wield a bigger audience, and you come to the conversation with a great deal of privilege, as men so often do.

I put down the book. Over the next few days, I went through a strange mental exercise that I’ve been through before – wondering what I did wrong, wondering if I should have been more careful (should I have read more reviews? Looked up triggers for this book?), wondering again if the problem was with me. I felt betrayed, somehow.

I read a few more chapters, wondering if the assault would be addressed, if the character’s own trauma would be discussed (it wasn’t, except his attacker threatening to do it again). From a plot perspective, it wasn’t even relevant. I tried to figure out the purpose it served, other than to be homophobic and terrifying. I read spoilers for the book, hoping someone would make sense of the scene. No one did, or could. In the middle of the glowing reviews, a few people commented on how horrific it was, how blindsided they were, how it was never talked about again.

I’ve read stories of rape last year, written by women, some of which were autobiographical. It felt like they were holding my hand and leading me through the pain, and then out of it. Their assaults were not the heart of their story.

They were the heart of the story.

I told myself to keep going – that I could get through this damn book. I am a completist, after all. It was words on the page. Then I got to another chapter, where a woman with a disability was being tortured.

And I decided that I was done.

But enough about that book. Let’s not shift the spotlight away from where it should be. That happens enough already. I don’t need to do it in this post, as well.

Instead, let’s go back to the books I loved last year.

It’s still far from a perfect collection. I had hoped to read more poetry and more plays, I wish that I had sought out more women authors who remain underrepresented in publishing: trans women and indigenous women, and women with disabilities. But I remind myself that nothing ended when the clock hit midnight. My reading list is a work in progress, something malleable and alive. It goes on and on. And I keep adding to it, every damn day. There are some men on the list, of course.

And a hell of a lot of women.

Here are some of my favorites from last year:

Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo (TW sexual assault, plane crashes, death. This is YA, and it’s handled very delicately but still.) A story about two sisters – one in the Dominican Republic, one in New York, who deal with the aftermath of their father’s death, and discover that he was living a dual life, with, yes, two families in two different countries. It’s heartbreaking but ultimately beautiful and redemptive and it’s written in verse.

Circe by Madeline Miller (TW sexual assault, violence, murder. Honestly, this one was the easiest to handle for some reason.) Okay, it’s not like you haven’t heard of this one, right? It was on everyone’s list. But, damn. It’s so, so good. Told from the perspective of Homer’s witch, she is given life and agency, and it’ll leave you feeling like everyone who got turned into a pig maybe had it coming.

Fleishman is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (TW, mental breakdowns, divorce, child bullying and abandonment) Admittedly, I slept on this one, too, and was probably the last person I knew who read it. But it’s such a fantastic exploration of a marriage (and people) falling apart, done with precision and vivid writing, and it unravels like a mystery.

An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon (TW sexual assault – alluded to, violence, racism, child endangerment and murder). An afro-futuristic tale of a genderqueer doctor/scientist struggling against a racist, oppressive system on a spaceship. Simply one of the most unique and captivating books I’ve read. It’s a tough read, emotionally, but so, so good, and Rivers Solomon’s voice is unlike anyone else’s out there.

A Heart In the Body in the World by Deb Caletti (TW gun violence, murder, stalking) A young woman tries to grapple with an act of violence by (literally) running across the country. It’s so sad, but also redemptive and sweet (it takes place partially in Seattle, and the family at the heart of it is Italian, which hit close for me for a lot of reasons.)

My To Be Read (TBR) list includes Culture Warlords by Talia Lavin (where she goes undercover and infiltrates white supremacist groups online), Wow, No Thank You – Samantha Irby’s book of essays (another book I’ve been sleeping on), and Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism. I also just bought Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, and I’m planning on picking up Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind. If there is something you want to recommend, please do so in the comments. (My book buying attitude over the last few years has basically been this.)

I wonder what the universe will try to squeeze in at the end of this miserable year, if a massive fault line will be discovered right under my home, or a portal to hell found in my toilet. I am glued to my phone, to endless headlines of awful, and I read them aloud to my husband like the newsreel of some parallel universe where everything has gone to shit.

In the midst of all of this, one story has floated up to the top, a bit of inconsequential flotsam in a sea of miserable news, something for me to cling to in this storm of a year.

“Have you seen the Hilaria Baldwin story?” I ask him. I might, as these words escape my lips, be frothing at the mouth. My eyes are wide, and I’m feeling a sort of giddy frenzy at this, the crumbling of a curated social media facade. My husband, to his credit, does not look at my wild expression and dismiss me as a madwoman. He does not whisper “My love, you are shouting,” as he sometimes does because I often am. Instead, he looks at me with the patience that you would expect from someone who has made a relationship work for twenty years, where you pretend very much to care about the things your partner cares about, even if it’s only as long as it will take for them to explain that thing to you.

“Who is she?” he asks. This question is a gift.

Most people know by now, thanks to the osmosis of social media, but my husband did not, so I describe her as though I am unmasking a Shakespearean villain. I tell him how she is from Boston, how she put on a fake Spanish accent and professed to be from Mallorca. I describe the time she pretended to forget the English word for cucumber on television. How she gave her children Spanish names. She was a social media influencer/yoga instructor whose prided herself on authenticity, I say. I liken it to Marcus Brutus’ betrayal of Caesar.

My husband does not ask (for he is an obliging soul who has to cohabitate a space with his wife during a pandemic), but so many others have: why on earth do we care? Why am I, a reasonably intelligent person who didn’t even know that Alec Baldwin was remarried, so obsessed with this story when there are so many bigger things to worry about?

And perhaps that’s where the appeal lies – in the absurdity, the absolute madcap set-up, the fact that it has nothing to do with death or illness or pandemics. In a world that has become a dystopian apocalypse film, this storyline is a sit-com plot gone awry. When did Alec find out? Did she tell him at some point? Did she keep up the accent all the time? Like, all the time? What about her family? Was anyone, at any point, like, “Hey, Hillary, you know we’re from Massachusetts, right?”

Was there an evening where she was double-booked as both Hilaria and Hillary, and she had to scamper from one event to the other?

I NEED TO KNOW.

I mean, look: it’s been a rough goddamn year. So many of us are barely holding it together. But as we change from our day pajamas to our night pajamas, brushing crumbs from our breasts as we silently judges ourselves for being shadows of who we once were, we can find comfort in this: we never spent a decade of our life creating an elaborate, culturally-appropriating alter-ego which then became our undoing.

I am wearing pajamas. It is after noon. Hilaria Baldwin’s story is fading from the headlines, as stories do – I once again find myself reading about Americans starving and dying and the government failing to pass stimulus packages. But in this year of awfulness, watching her story play out like a pop culture Greek tragedy has been a welcome distraction. One I want to hold on to for just a little while longer.

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am at home. I can’t remember the last time this has been true. It’s been more than a decade, and probably closer to two. I’m usually down in California at this time of year, listening to the seasonal screams of my family while opening incomprehensible gifts from my mother. But nothing this year has been normal, and the holidays are no exception.

Recently, a dear friend told me that he was going to visit his family for the holidays. He’d been isolating, but they hadn’t been nearly as careful. They were planning an indoor dinner, and he was going to attend. There was an aging relative he wanted to see. Keeping my voice as steady as I could, I told him that it was his decision, but I didn’t think it was a wise one.

“It might be our last holiday together,” he said. I was only half-paying attention. Mostly, I was trying not to sputter like a coffee pot. The force of my own anger blindsided me. This holiday season has been the busiest stretch of travel since the pandemic began. Airports are packed with people.

Rand and I flying to see family for the holidays last year.

What if this is my last holiday with them? I’ve heard this refrain countless times this season – every time someone flouts CDC recommendations in order to visit family members. It’s a hard sell for me. I never spent a single holiday with my father, nor a birthday that I know of (if they did happen, I was too small to remember them). The closest we ever came is that one year, around 2005, that I went to Oktoberfest with him and my mother. (I realize that this is a very niche piece of travel advice, especially given that my father has been dead for four years, but still I offer it to you: do not go to Oktoberfest with my parents.) I’ve written a lot about my dad – how I struggled to accept him within the confines of who he was, the scarcity of the time we spent together. I have memories of him, and I pull them out on occasion when I want to sit in that space, in the cold, efficient, reliable austerity of who he was. I know that memory is a malleable thing, so I try not to do this often. What I remember of him sits on periphery of my mind, because I know if I look at it head on, it’ll change, or worse still, vanish altogether.

It’s strange to look like someone. To just to go around in the world with features you got from them.

The last time I saw him was years ago in a hospital room in Germany. It was not a holiday. It was not anyone’s birthday. I don’t even remember the exact date – I only know that I wondered if it would be the last time I saw him, because I wondered that every time I saw him. That was the nature of our relationship – so much time spanned between our visits that it was completely reasonable to assume that one of us might expire before we saw the other again. Despite this, I clearly didn’t say anything memorable or poignant. Those moments are impossible to engineer. Even when you try to make a goodbye meaningful, the last time you see someone is never, ever going to be enough. Even when you expect it or plan for it or know its coming, you’re never really ready to lose someone.

I remember the last words my dad said to me. They were wholly inconsequential.

All this is to say that when you tell me you need to have another holiday with your relative, when that act might actually be the thing that kills them or you or someone else, I am unpersuaded and honestly, a little hurt. When you say it is your decision, and that you are accepting the risk for yourself, I want to draw you a diagram of how diseases spread and then I want to roll up that diagram and smack you with it. When you argue it might be your last Christmas together, I wonder, truly, what makes you so goddamn special. For those of us who have already had our last Christmas with the people we love, or never had one at all, these words sting in a way I can’t describe.

My brother and Dad at Christmas, before I was born.

I went a lifetime without seeing my father for the holidays, and I can tell you: you will survive it. But losing someone when they are far away, and being unable to go to their funeral is a far worse thing, and one that I don’t recommend. No one deserves that. Not you, not your loved ones, and not some random stranger who sat too close to you on a flight or a bus. I want you to do everything you can to avoid that.

I know you’re fed up. We’ve all given up so much of our “before” lives in this pandemic, already. To have this taken from us, too – knowing that we might not get another one with our families, is enough to make you rebel. No, no, fuck this. I’m hopping on a plane, I’m getting in the car, I’m seeing people, because that is, like, the fundamental thing that makes us human.

My aunt and I laughing about something at Christmas last year. I can’t remember why.

It feels so strange for me to tell you not to do this. Me, who clings to the people in my life like a bead of water on the hood of a car – the kind that you wipe away with your finger only to have it instantly reappear. I want the world to return to normal just as much as you do. When this pandemic ends, I promise we will celebrate every single holiday and celebration we missed – possibly all at once. We will run in the streets and scream and dance and hug strangers. It will be Christmas and New Year’s and Halloween and your birthday and mine. It will be every special day you ever missed. It will be every holiday I never had with my father.

I want us all to be there, together. And for that to happen, we have to stay home this year, and have a quiet, lonely Christmas. With any luck, it’ll be the last one.

Or – hear me out – you could just stay home for the holidays, closing the curtains and doing your best impression of tranquilized zoo animal. because the CDC has actually said that you do not need to see your family this holiday season! You don’t need to host anyone. Are you hearing this? A governmental organization dedicated to making sure people don’t die is telling you to sit on your ass and have a Nic Cage marathon instead of listening to your family members recall that one time you peed your pants in the grocery store at the ripe old age of 9. THIS IS A GIFT, PEOPLE.

Call your family (if you haven’t already) and tell them you aren’t coming over. (Sorry!) You can tell your friends that – ugh – you aren’t hosting. Yeah, I know it’s last minute. And they’re going to be so disappointed. *Insert shrug.* But this is for everyone’s safety, and also, you’ve never seen National Treasure.

Some of you might still be contemplating hopping on a plane or jumping into your car and dipping your hands in a big old communal pot of stuffing. Millions of people are traveling even though the CDC has asked us not to, and I am going to lovingly scream that you not do that (through a mask, because guess what? Screaming is dangerous.) If you want, you can go over to your loved ones house and wave at them from a distance of at least six feet.

YES, I KNOW THAT SOUNDS AWFUL AND STUPID. WE’RE TRYING TO SURVIVE A PANDEMIC WITHOUT ANY FEDERAL OVERSIGHT OR SUPPORT. IT IS DESIGNED TO BE AWFUL AND STUPID.

We’ve been at this shit since early March. The last time I hugged my mother was February. I haven’t seen my nephews in a year. The little one now walks and talks. I missed all his round-faced, dimpled-elbow babyhood. Last month my husband’s grandmother died, and her final months were spent away from her family, wearing a mask, absolutely done with all of this. We had her memorial over Zoom.

But just because we’ve had all that we can take doesn’t mean this is over. El Paso Texas just ran out of morgue space. Reno, NV is planning on turning a parking garage into a Covid unit. Mississippi has essentially run out of ICU beds. We had 180,000 new cases of Covid on Friday which is basically the population of Salt Lake City, Utah, and that’s just people we know about. The chart of new infections looks like something someone in a marketing meeting would pull up because they were gunning for a raise.

A quarter of a million people are dead, and the current administration is acting like a bunch of high school seniors with two months of school left. They do not give a fuck, because pretty soon they’re going to be out of here and taking a permanent gap year in a country without extradition treaties. They are just leaving us to fend for ourselves during a pandemic. So I am asking you, please, please, please stay home and fend for yourself during this pandemic.

I know that many of you are thinking that this might be your last holiday season with your relatives. I get that. IT FUCKING SUCKS. You are talking to someone who never spent a single holiday or special occasion or birthday with her own dad, and who didn’t even get to go to his funeral. It is not great, but also I can assure you, it’s not the end of the world. I have a lot of great memories that don’t happen to fall on specific dates.

And if you insist on seeing your relatives because you’re worried this holiday season might be their last, you might actually ensure that this holiday season is their last. 

You may think that traveling is simply your decision and this is about your health and your autonomy but it is not. You are a vector. You are someone who could infect dozens of people around you without even knowing it. Who could endanger cab drivers and essential workers and healthcare professionals and your entire family.

One of the things that we agreed to when we decided to live in a society is that we take care of one another. It’s like the ONLY thing that old dead philosophers agree on – if you decide to live in a community, you don’t get to kill your neighbors or your grandma, and you don’t get to break that rule because it’s the fourth Thursday in November. For some damn reason individual liberty in America has become synonymous with “I get to endanger and kill anyone I want” and we need to rethink that immediately.

I promise, when this is over, we’ll celebrate every single special day we missed, possibly simultaneously. I’m going to stand in the middle of my street pelting people with Halloween candy while screaming Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” regardless of what time of year it is. But that cannot happen now.

My career literally consisted of making out with my husband on planes. I am just as determined to get back to normal as you are

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be angry – damn it, you should be pissed. We have been left in the goddamn lurch by the people elected to protect us. We are the only country where things are this bad, and it’s because our leadership literally doesn’t care if we live or die. That should make you incensed. We should be fighting against that every single day.

That is where our rage should lie – not at the ordinances and the rules and the scientists and doctors trying to keep us safe, but at the government who took our safety and holidays and our loved ones from us in the first place. The ones who didn’t take this issue seriously when they could have stopped it, and who have access to better health care than we will ever get.

I am not asking you to not be angry. I am just asking you to be angry at home. Sit down in the butt groove on the couch that you have so bravely been working on for the last nine months. Turn on the television. And if anyone tries to guilt you for not showing up this holiday season, remind yourself that this selfless act is the embodiment of your love for them. You, sitting alone, missing them with all your heart.