In today’s episode, Rachel and I are talking about in this one is neurodivergence, the stigma around mental health diagnoses, asking for what we need, and having to hold other people’s feelings.

It’s an interesting thing, making a show where there is such a gap between recording and release. Every episode becomes a bit of a time capsule. There is almost always something one or both of us has changed our minds about since we recorded, or that we no longer feel. Or, as in this case the situations in our personal lives or in the world at large have changed.

We recorded this episode in August. The election hadn’t happened yet at that point, obviously, but it was also still relatively early in Rachel’s son’s cancer treatment. We aren’t the same people we were at that point, and our lives don’t look the same—in some small ways, in some big ways.

We have recorded a conversation about the election, so you know. That will be released at the end of December. It’s possible by then that the things we say in that episode won’t be relevant anymore, or won’t represent how we think or feel anymore. But that’s okay. This show has always been more about the process than the end result. As we’ve said: we don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing our best.

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Driving to pick up my youngest daughter from dance one evening, I saw a car on fire. Pulled over to the curb on the opposite side of the street, it was fully ablaze, with flames shooting up out of the open windows a good five feet above the roof. Two other cars were stopped nearby, and several people were standing around looking at it—not on their phones or taking pictures, just standing on the sidewalk a prudent distance back from the fire and staring at it. Just as I thought to myself “I should pull over and call 9-1-1,” a fire engine turned the corner, lights flashing.

*

A few weeks later, she got invited to the Balboa Park Haunted Trail by one of her friends this year. I decided to take the whole family along, thinking it might be a fun thing to do out of the house. It turned out to be pretty scary, so much so that my older two kids wanted to exit early. Fortunately, my youngest was happy to go on with her friends and their parents, so we just took the emergency exit and waited for them at the end.

I think the thing that surprised me the most was how relatively calm I was through the whole thing. I don’t actually like haunted houses. Nor horror stories, for that matter. Usually it’s enough to get quite an adrenaline response out of me. And this was a pretty scary one—to me, anyway. Even between the jump scares, the company did a pretty good job of making the grounds very creepy. It felt like wandering around in a nightmare, but even though I did jump a few times, I was pretty steady throughout.

Part of it, I think, was being there with the kids. I knew that they needed a calm presence with them to help them feel safe, and that must have helped keep my nerves in check. But I wonder how much might have been just the fact that I have been so on edge for such a long time now with thoughts of impending social and political and climate collapse, that being in a fantasy of a horror actually felt a little tame. And in some ways, terror—the jump scare and the fight-or-flight—is an easier kind of fear than dread—the anticipation of danger that hasn’t yet appeared.

*

I took myself out to lunch a couple of weeks ago, to my favorite bakery. Now that I’m single again, I’m trying to do some nice things for myself and get out of the house at least once a week. In any case, the place was packed when I got there and there was no seating available on the patio, so I took my sandwich and iced tea to go. Liberty Station has a bunch of nice tree-lined, grassy promenades with benches and tables, and it was a nice day out.

The table I finally sat down at was next to a small fountain that was set into the ground with just a single layer of brick bordering it. While I ate, four different toddlers wandered up to it and, of course, tried to get into the water. Each one was gently foiled by a watchful parent, some with a word, some by being picked up. One parent simply stood between her child and the fountain, nonchalantly interposing herself while she talked on her phone. Oddly enough, none of the kids got particularly frustrated by being thwarted thusly.

*

I usually eat outside when I’m at work, which is partly because I’m still masking at the office and partly because our building has a nice courtyard. A few weeks ago as I was headed out to lunch, when the elevator doors opened to let me on, a small dog ran out and into our suite.

She was a cute little doodle-type dog, wearing a pink collar, and was clearly kind of freaked out. I got down on one knee and held out a hand to her, trying to gently get her to come over to me so I could check her collar for a contact number, but she didn’t trust me. Within a few minutes, four or five of my coworkers were trying to coax her in, but to no avail.

Finally, the elevator dinged again and a man I didn’t recognize stepped out. “Are you looking for a dog?” I asked, and his face—worried at first—relaxed into a relieved smile. He called to Moxie—that was her name—and she came running around the corner, jumping up on him and whimpering with joy. They left together, reunited.

*

I went out to lunch with my friends Y and T last week, two women I met and worked with during my time as an activist, and who I admire a great deal. It had been a while since we’d all gotten together, so we spent some time catching up on personal stuff before the conversation turned toward political stuff and, of course, our anxieties about the election. T mentioned that she would be going to DC in January no matter what happens, and Y asked if she would go to the Women’s March.

“No,” T said. “That doesn’t do anything but make white women feel good about themselves.” Mind you, T and Y are both white women. But T went on to say that she wanted to spend her time on things that actually make a difference.

One of the things the three of us spent a lot of time and energy on during the Trump administration was meeting regularly with our centrist Democrat congressman and trying to get him to take action, to move him even a little bit to the left. I don’t even know how many hours I spent on policy research, legislative vote monitoring, bill tracking, let alone during the actual meetings. But for all that, I’m not sure how much impact we actually had with him. On the other hand, the canvassing and postcarding and phone banking that T has been helping to organize are things we know move the needle.

The week before, I’d been at an ACLU phone bank, reaching out to ACLU members to give them a push on three of the ballot measures this year. (For the record, the ACLU’s position—and mine—is Yes on 3, Yes on 6, and No on 36.) At the beginning of the session, the coordinator asked us to tell the group about someone who inspires us. I said T.

*

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what comes next, as I’m sure we all have. And there is a lot of fear in the not knowing. I have stepped up my own work to contribute to the grassroots electoral efforts, but I don’t know if it will be enough. And there will always be the question of whether I could have done more. (The answer is probably always yes.)

But in the end, whatever happens will happen. The work will have been enough, or it won’t. Whoever wins, there will be difficulties and probably violence. And after that, there will be more work to do and more fights to fight.

But I guess I’m thinking, too, about all the lives each of us touches, whether or not we notice. I’m thinking about the ways that people do help strangers for no reason other than that it’s the right thing to do. I’m thinking about the phone calls and text messages and meals shared with friends and family. I’m thinking about how none of us gets through any of this without a web of support so big that we can’t ever see all of it.

I don’t know what’s coming. I’m grateful to have the knowledge that, whatever it is, I won’t go through it alone. And neither will you.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened when I was five years old, and growing up in that area, it became one of my favorite places and really one of the only “touristy” places that I really loved. I worked there for two summers, once as a volunteer in high school and once as an intern with the Visitor Presentations department when I was in college. I often say that it was the best place I ever worked. All that is just to say that I have been fascinated with marine life for about as long as I can remember, so it makes sense that I would enjoy an essay collection where the central metaphor is based around the ocean and the creatures that live in it. I do know a fair amount about sea life but there’s always more to learn.

What I did not know and never would have thought of on my own is just how potently marine life works as a metaphor and vehicle for examining queer love, mixed-race identity, family history, body fluidity, and self-knowledge, among other things. Yes, this book is intelligent and insightful and beautiful. Yes, it is moving and affirming. What most surprised me, though, was that while reading it I experienced recognition and joy not only for other people—which I did expect—but also for myself. It’s not to say that I need to see myself in a work of literature in order to appreciate or be moved by it. I don’t. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting to see pieces of myself in this particular work of literature, and yet I did.

As always, if you have thoughts on this book or any of its essays, I’d love to hear them. And if you haven’t read it yet, here are some purchase links:

• The Book Catapult (San Diego, CA)
• Bookshop.org

I am always so happy when I get the chance to talk with Sarah Gailey. They’re now officially part of the Four Timers Club on KTCO (along with Rachel Zucker), and I couldn’t be more pleased about it.

For this latest conversation, we talked about Sarah’s new novella, Have You Eaten?, which follows a group of four young, queer friends as they traverse a collapsing America, and which asks the question “What does it look like to take care of each other in a time of crisis?” It’s a question that feels so urgent right now, and for a while now. Sarah and I talked about the experimentation in fiction, vine-ripened tomatoes, cooking as an act of care, and what apocalypse means. And in the second segment, they almost made me cry by being nice to me (though they would vociferously deny that “being nice” was what they were doing, and fair enough), and then we talked about sin-flattening and high-control groups, and the necessity of interpersonal repair.

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(CW: cancer, grief)

After the message you heard in the previous episode, it understandably took some time for things to get to a point where Rachel and I could sit down and record a conversation. When your son gets diagnosed with terminal cancer, it changes a lot about your life. But eventually we did find a time to talk to each other about what her life has been like since her son’s diagnosis. It is, as you might expect, a difficult conversation. But I suppose that is what we’re here for.

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(CW: cancer, grief)

It’s kind of a strange thing to be making a podcast that is more or less about just ourselves, and one of the stranger parts of it is recording the episodes so far in advance of when we release them. The version of us that you hear in an episode when it posts is not the same as the one living in the world on that same day. That’s always been true, and it’s always true of any podcast. But Rachel’s life has changed a lot recently, and in very difficult ways, and it’s felt a little weird that the show hadn’t caught up to that yet. Well, now it has. Rachel’s son has cancer, which she found out not long before the message she sent me that we’re sharing as this episode.

This episode is different from our previous ones, in form and in content. It’s kind of hard to listen to—though, at that, not as hard as living through the things Rachel talks about. But if this show is about us, then this is where we are right now. Or, at least, it’s where we were at the time we recorded these messages. Life continues to proceed, often painfully, sometimes with spots of peace or joy or levity. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing our best.

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I have been a fan of Sarah Gailey’s writing since before they published their first book, River of Teeth, back in 2017. I’m always happy when I get to read something new from them, in part because, yes, they are one of my favorite writers and I know that it will be a good read in and of itself. But it’s also been wonderful and just interesting to watch their progression as a writer, to see their skills continue to grow, and to see what through-line emerges. I think one of those through-lines is the fundamental tenderness that Gailey’s stories have toward their characters.

Here, we follow a group of young, queer refugees as they make their way through a near-future America that is in the process of collapsing. There are echoes, perhaps, of Alas, Babylon in the broad strokes of the story and setting, but what’s so interesting and vital about the approach Have You Eaten? takes to the post-apocalyptic genre is that each chapter takes place in the in-between. The travel and conflict that we expect from the genre mostly takes place off-screen, and what we see instead are the quieter, more personal moments during which this little family finds ways to nourish each other, both literally and emotionally. What are the ways we take care of each other in a crisis? That’s what the story is asking. The answers are sometimes messy, sometimes imperfect, but there is a core of love in every interaction that shines through. The result is lovely. I hope you’ll read it.

Here are some purchase links:

• Kobo
• Apple Books
• Amazon

I’m going to share an anecdote that, on its own, probably seems small and possibly even a little petty, but it’s my hope that this will take us somewhere.

I went through a period last year of making banana bread regularly. I’m not much of a baker, but banana bread is fairly easy and the recipe in Joy of Cooking has always turned out well enough for me. (This is the thing about Joy: the recipes in that book are never the best or most interesting but they are always at the very least good enough, and, more importantly, they’re very achievable for beginning cooks. I learned how to cook a lot of things from my mom’s old 1970s copy of Joy when I was a kid, and when I moved into my first apartment, she bought me a copy of my own to help make it a home.)

In any case, one day late in the year I was working from home and decided to take advantage of some down time to make a couple of loaves of banana bread, and when they were done I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption “WFH day.” I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to post so many pictures of my food to the internet but it’s at least in part a sort of proof of life and in part a form of showing off. The loaves were surely imperfect but they were good enough for me, and I was happy enough with them to want to show people.

People usually like my food pictures, so I was a little surprised when a guy I only peripherally knew popped up in the comments to tell me what I’d done wrong. Now, having a relative (or total) stranger come out of nowhere to criticize something I’m happy about is not a new experience for me, nor for most people who spend any amount of time on the public internet. But just because it’s a common occurrence doesn’t make it a pleasant one, so I responded and let him know that I thought unsolicited criticism is rude, especially when it’s about something I’m happy about. To which he responded by accusing me of attacking him, and ultimately him telling me to fuck off and blocking me.

In retrospect, I could have phrased my pushback differently. Instead of framing things in terms of his behavior (“that’s rude”), I could have focused instead on how it impacted me (“that hurts my feelings”). That might have gotten a more thoughtful, less defensive response. Still, as much as it might be beneficial to me to be able to consider someone else’s feelings when they hurt me, and as much as I do try to do just that, it still always strikes me as unjust.

But, more than that, I can’t help thinking how rare it has been in my life to get a real apology about anything. How most times, no matter how I phrase things, telling someone that they have hurt me simply makes the person angry with me for making them feel bad about themselves, and resentful for having to consider my feelings. Or sends them into a spiral of self-loathing that I then have to pull them out of by minimizing my own pain, and that results in no change or real self-reflection. Or results in them simply dismissing me, telling me that I am wrong for being hurt. But how few times it has ever resulted in the person being curious about me, in them making an attempt to understand rather than judge or defend, in them trying to make amends, or at least stop doing the thing that hurt me.

All of this came up for me as I was listening to the latest episode of Between the Covers, in which David Naimon talked with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad about her recent book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and the lecture that it was based on. At one point, talking about moments of recognition and what stands in the way of such moments, Hammad says this:

Isabella Hammad: The lecture I gave is about recognition, but the opposite of recognition is denial. And I think that, first of all, the West is in denial in many ways. Less and less so. More and more people are confronting what’s happening, among the populace. But the institutions, the cultural institutions, the universities are denialist institutions. And I think it’s quite helpful to talk about denialism as a kind of phenomenon. Which is a denialism not only about Palestine but about structures of empire and genocidal histories which are, you know, not acknowledged. . . . So, there’s an ongoing denial about these histories which are now coming to the surface. So, you know, we’re seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg but there’s huge mass underneath. And there’s no wonder that people are in denial, because to confront that reality is to confront many things that structure their lives and structure their societies, and that’s really scary. I understand that that’s really scary.

Now, I want to be clear: I am certainly not equating an abrasive internet interaction with genocide. That would be wildly irresponsible and harmful, that kind of flattening. What I am saying is that hearing Hammad talk about how hard it is for people to have to confront the uncomfortable realities that structure their lives and societies, that made me think again about how great harms are so easily facilitated by the inability to consider that oneself might be in the wrong, that oneself or one’s people or one’s state might be the oppressor. How thinking of oneself as the victim can be and so often is used to excuse great harm. And that is true at both the personal level and the global level.

I believe that on some level, conflict is inevitable when people are in contact. On the level of individuals, the closer two people are, the more certain it is that they will hurt each other and come into conflict. And the question, then, is how to resolve that conflict. What do we do when someone tells us “You have hurt me”? In the best of circumstances, I think, we can say “It wasn’t my intention to hurt you, but I see that I have.” We can demonstrate that we understand why what we’ve done was hurtful. We can say, truthfully, that we are sorry. And we can commit to trying not to do the hurtful thing again.

In order to get to that kind of real apology, though, we have to be able to take ourselves and our own intentions and how we want to see ourselves out of the center of the interaction. And that is hard to do. It often feels like it’s too hard for most people. And so instead we will say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and you should focus on that instead.” Or we say, “No reasonable person would be hurt by that.” Or, “Well now you’re hurting my feelings, so we’re even.” Or, “I can’t do anything right, can I?” Our own sense of emotional self-preservation keeps us from looking inwards, because to do so would be too painful. And so it keeps us from making amends.

I don’t know if fascism and genocide, patriarchy and white supremacy, can be defeated by learning how to apologize on an individual level. Probably not. Probably, those forces are bigger than what can be influenced by anything anyone does individually. And even if these problems could be solved with individual compassion, I don’t know how to convince anyone to choose compassion and curiosity in the face of emotional pain. But I know that my own moral journey wasn’t able to really start until I was able to first ask “What if they’re right and what if I’m wrong?” And at least this feels like something I can get my arms around. The world is too big to change. But maybe I can help a person change themselves, if they’re open to it.

I had a chance to read Rachel Edelman’s debut poetry collection, Dear Memphis, this past spring, and I was struck by how familiar the feelings and questions of these poems felt to me. Questions about what it means to be from a place where you and your people are held apart. About what heritage and inheritance mean, about the difference between exile and diaspora and migration. About being part of a minoritized, oppressed group that nevertheless experiences privilege, and sometimes participates in the oppression of others. About what home means. For Edelman’s speaker, these questions arise from being Jewish in the South. For me, similar questions arise from being Japanese American. It’s not the same, of course, but the way our experiences seemed to rhyme intrigued me, and led to a wonderful conversation about the book, about self-awareness, and about connection through letter-writing.

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For September’s first episode of Hey, It’s Me, I wanted to talk about Chappell Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. More specifically, I wanted to talk about why it wasn’t quite hitting for me, despite being a breakout hit and despite the fact that I both appreciate and admire it. That led to a broader discussion about participating in culture that isn’t your own, and how respectful distance can be problematic.

Then, for the second episode, Rachel sent me the audio for a forthcoming episode of Commonplace, in which the guest was her undergraduate photography mentor, Lois Conner. I should note here that that Commonplace episode is still forthcoming, so you can’t listen to it yet. But I think that our conversation about the episode is still interesting and comprehensible without listening to Rachel’s conversation with Conner, because we’re talking less about the details of the audio and more about things like the nature of photography, why we make podcasts, and what it means to give attention (and to want it).

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