Category: Life & Love

Using a sperm donor wasn’t part of Rachel Seltzer’s life plan. The Atlanta-based operations director always wanted to be a mom, but she spent her 20s and 30s in long-term relationships that didn’t work out. After turning 37, she was convinced it was too late—the idea of meeting a partner and having a baby in her remaining reproductive years seemed impossible—but a conversation with her therapist convinced her that she didn’t need a man to move forward. She could do it on her own.

Her story is familiar for many women, who are increasingly using sperm donors to build families, with or without partners. Perusing profiles on sperm donor websites is “like being on Match.com, but in reverse,” said Cari Rincker, who was 37 when she went through a breakup and decided she was ready to find a sperm donor to use with her frozen eggs.

Users can search for donors by education level, hair color, race, and height, all while looking at pictures of donors as babies or kids. But it’s not all fun and games. Picking a sperm donor can be an emotional process, Rincker explains, because it doesn’t necessarily line up with the fairytale that many women dream of.

And how do you know what to look for, anyway? Some women confess to being hyper focused on height, while others are dead set on finding someone with a master’s degree. But what actually matters, and how do you know when you’ve found The One? I spoke to women who went through the sperm donor selection process about how it works and what they learned along the way.

How do you start the process?

Going to a fertility clinic is the first step in the process, and while picking a doctor you’re comfortable with is important, you don’t need to worry too much when it comes to landing on a sperm bank. Most sperm banks are FDA compliant, and there isn’t really a risk involved in choosing any one of them, Dr. Zaher Merhi, medical director at Rejuvenating Fertility Center in New York City, said.

Fertility doctors will walk you through all of your options when it comes to getting pregnant, and oftentimes, they’ll even guide you in the direction of a specific sperm bank. After speaking to a fertility specialist, Seltzer signed up for an account on the California Cryobank website, one of the most popular options.

The sign-up process is simple. First, you pick a cryobank website that feels like a good fit for you. With a simple Google search, you’ll come across a wide range of options, and as Dr. Merhi said, you really can’t go wrong. It’s important to note that you don’t have to live in the area where the cryobank is based in order to qualify for receiving donor sperm. For example, you don’t have to live in California to use the California Cryobank.

Once you pick a sperm bank that feels like a good fit for you, you create an account on that website. You can pay for à la carte options as you look through the donor profiles, depending on the information you want access to. On California Cryobank, a popular sperm donor website, for example, users can look at donor profiles, medical histories, personal essays from the donors, and staff impressions of the donors for free, but additional features come at an added cost. For a bundle that includes extended profiles, childhood photos, and the “Express Yourself” feature, where donors are encouraged to describe who they are, you have to dish out $145, but doing so gives you access to the extended profiles, etc. for all the donors you search through. You can also add features to your experience. A handwriting analysis, for example, will cost you an additional $25.

Buying sperm is a lot like buying anything else you’d purchase online. “You basically add them to your cart—the way you would anything at Amazon,” said Holly Meloy, a managing partner at a design firm, who decided to pursue motherhood on her own at age 37. For most sperm bank websites – including California Cryobank and the Fairfax Cryobank, the sperm can cost anywhere from $500 to $1,300, depending on specific factors like whether or not the donor wants to be contacted.

Are all donors anonymous?

For many women, picking an anonymous donor is important. Seltzer specifically looked for a donor who chose to be anonymous, and she wanted it to be as private as possible. “A donor is someone that chooses to help others, and that’s all it is,” she said. “It’s not family,” she added. “It’s strictly to help those that need sperm donors.”

But sperm can come from both anonymous donors and open donors—those who consented to at least one form of agreed-upon communication from their offspring when they turn 18. And there isn’t necessarily a price difference; both options cost $1,045 at California Cryobank, for example. But for ID donors—those who allow the future child to request the donor’s identifying information when they turn 18—the sperm costs $1,245.

What’s the difference between IUI, IVF, and ICI?

Sperm donor material is used to conceive a baby if there isn’t viable sperm available. After the sperm is purchased on a cryobank website, it is sent to the hospital or clinic where the insemination process eventually takes place.

There are three processes you can pursue once you acquire the donor sperm: intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), or intracervical insemination (ICI).

During IUI, the doctor places sperm directly into the uterus with a small catheter. This process aims to improve the chances of getting pregnant by increasing the number of healthy sperm that ultimately reach the fallopian tubes when the woman who is trying to get pregnant is most fertile.

With in vitro fertilization IVF, the patient undergoes a range of procedures. Mature eggs are collected from the woman’s ovaries and fertilized—by donor sperm, in this case—in a lab. The fertilized eggs are then transferred to the woman’s uterus. Ultimately, one full cycle of IVF can take about three weeks, and sometimes the different steps of the process are split up, which can drag things out longer.

In the ICI process, the doctor uses a syringe to place the donor sperm directly inside of the woman’s cervix.

What do you need to do before picking a donor?

Doing your homework is important, of course, and genetic testing is a big part of that. The first step is to go to your doctor and get a genetic carrier screening. The test, which is typically a blood or saliva test, checks for recessive genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, tay-sachs, and thalassemias.

It’s also important to check your Cytomegalovirus (CMV) status, a herpes virus that becomes latent after a primary infection, but can reactivate at a later time and shed virus. Before purchasing donor sperm, a patient should make an appointment with a physician first to discuss this part of the process, said Dr. Kimberly Thronton, an OB-GYN and reproductive endocrinologist at Reproductive Medicine Associates of New York. In these cases, the physician typically routinely orders the CMV test, which is separate from the infectious disease test. “A patient could ask for this separately, but their physician should routinely order it if they know they are planning to use donor sperm,” she said. If not, as a patient, you can specifically ask for it.

If you’re CMV negative, it’s best to pick a CMV negative donor; if you’re CMV positive, you can pick either a negative or a positive donor. If you are CMV positive, you have already had a prior infection and have antibodies, Dr. Thornton pointed out. This means you are not at risk for acquiring CMV through sperm. About one in every 200 babies is born with congenital CMV, according to the CDC. Most people who have been infected don’t have symptoms, and that’s why it’s important to get tested.

“Typically the doctor’s office will just check and verify paperwork given by the sperm bank to make sure there are no medical issues or concerns regarding the selected donor,” said Dr. Thronton. Once everything checks out, the sperm banks typically ship the sperm directly to the doctor’s office in storage tanks.

Most women have personal preferences when it comes to things like education level, hair color, eye color, race, and height, but CMV status and genetic screenings should be prioritized first and foremost, according to experts. After that, “the non-medical fun party kicks in, and they can apply those preferences,” Dr. Thornton added.

How do you know the sperm is safe?

Doctors evaluate the donor’s genetic screening and CMV results and perform vigorous infectious disease testing, testing for diseases like HIV, hepatitis B, Zika, and West Nile Virus. Donor sperm has to be frozen and quarantined for three to six months to ensure that the donor does not have infectious diseases that could be transmitted through insemination, Dr. Thornton said. This process legally protects both the donor and the intended parent.

Fertility centers will also check to make sure the sperm donor has adequate sperm on a semen analysis. This test also determines if the donor is fertile, if the woman is working with a donor she knows. If you’re purchasing from an anonymous donor, however, the sperm bank checks the donor’s fertility in advance.

How do you narrow down the list of potential donors?

Narrowing down the list of potential donors comes easy for some women, but for most, the number of options and factors to consider can be overwhelming. It’s also important to have backups. “I’ve seen women get their hearts set on a donor and they’re so into it, and then the sperm is not available, and they’re devastated,” acupuncturist and fertility expert Aimee Raupp said. “There’s this real connection that can get formed.”

One of Raupp’s clients had a child with donor sperm and wanted to use the same donor to have a second child, but the donor didn’t have any other samples available. To avoid this, you can inquire about how much sperm you would need at the outset for getting pregnant and growing your family. “Ultimately, it was a lack of education, resources, and support that led to this problem,” Raupp pointed out. Women should make sure there are multiple samples available from the same donor if they’re interested in using the same person’s sperm to have another child in the future. You can buy several samples at once and save them for future use.

Evaluating the compatibility of the donor’s stats and sample—and having more than one option—is important. Once Seltzer narrowed down her decision to two donors, she printed out all of their information and shared it with her family and a couple of close friends. She was looking for someone who was tall and athletic, with dark hair and brown eyes, but above all, she wanted a donor who was highly educated. Her family and friends looked at the profiles and gave her feedback that helped her make her final decision. Before selecting him, Seltzer got to hear an interview between the donor and one of the employees at the sperm bank. “I loved his voice,” she said, adding that he sounded like someone she would love. “It was a perfect match.”

Meloy was also very methodical about her sperm donor search and final selection, creating a detailed spreadsheet that she shared with her close friends and family. She ruled out donors who had a family history of alcoholism and focused on health history, education and head size—yes, you read that correctly—as her priorities. With this in mind, her loved ones used a carefully curated checklist to narrow down the list of sperm donors.

How did the recent SCOTUS ruling impact sperm donation?

The climate surrounding terminating pregnancies shifted dramatically this year. Dobbs v. Jackson, a landmark SCOTUS decision in which the court held that the US Constitution does not grant women the right to an abortion, has “limited the treatment options many physicians are able to offer their patients,” Dr. Thornton said. In some states, women are being forced to carry pregnancies to term only to watch their child die after birth.

“In the fertility realm, there is a lot of concern how the overturn of Roe will impact patients utilizing IVF for both infertility and fertility preservation such as egg and embryo freezing,” Dr. Thornton said. Some states have been attempting to enact personhood laws that consider every embryo a legal person. This means embryos created via IVF could be at risk. Ultimately, personhood laws have the ability to limit or ban access to IVF. They also lower success rates and drive up the costs of IVF.

Is the process stressful?

The process is definitely stressful and filled with so many decisions and factors, but the women I spoke to said every moment of stress was worth it.

For Seltzer, picking a donor was stressful and anxiety-inducing, but after she landed on her final pick, she felt excited and confident in her selection. Her son Aiden is three years old now. “He makes my days bright and my life much more fulfilled and happier,” she said, adding that she’s become more joyful and stronger after having him.

Rincker felt excited about the process at first, but ultimately, it wasn’t an easy journey. “The period of my life trying to become pregnant was an emotional roller coaster,” she said. Now she puts her son, who is almost a year-and-a-half now, to sleep every night and is reminded of the love he adds to her life. “In some ways, my family is nothing that I would have dreamed for myself,” she said. “But in other ways, I have more than I ever could have hoped for.”

Meloy also said the process was “very stressful,” and she cried after buying donor sperm for the first time. “I had suddenly made this massive decision on behalf of my unborn child,” she recalled. She remembers asking herself if she made the right choice. She wondered, “Will my future child be okay? How much of growing up is nature versus nurture?” But now, her daughter—who she gave birth to thanks to a sperm donor—is almost seven years old. “Every year on her birthday, I say a solid thank you to the man who we will never know, but who gave me the greatest gift anyone could ever give me.”

Elsa Hosk was used to being photographed. The statuesque Swedish model had appeared in eight annual Victoria’s Secret fashion shows, and she’d been a muse for a Rodeo Drive’s worth of luxury fashion brands. On Instagram, she had routinely posted behind-the-scenes snapshots, playful selfies, and scenic vacation dispatches wearing lingerie for her 8 million followers. But late one morning in February 2021, the camera captured Hosk like she’d never been captured before, in the most vulnerable of scenarios: giving birth to her first child, in her own home in Los Angeles. Her nine-pound daughter, Tuulikki, was in a complex position, with her hand and her arm raised above her head and extending into the birth canal. It was a situation that could have sounded alarm bells in the hospital, and might have elicited some form of surgical intervention, like a Cesarean section or an episiotomy. But at home with her doula and midwife, Hosk worked through it with massage and pushing. There were no makeup artists, no posing, no optimization of angles—just raw human exertion. For once, Hosk wasn’t even aware of the camera. “You’re like an animal. It’s brutal,” she tells me. “I was so inside the birth that I didn’t notice her photographing me. You’re just in a different dimension.”

The camerawoman to whom Hosk is referring is Carson Meyer, a highly sought-after doula in Los Angeles, who also happens to moonlight as a photographer when she attends births. At just 28, Meyer has become a visible advocate for natural births, and is so beloved among a certain Hollywood contingent that models and actresses like Hosk, Mandy Moore, and Gigi Hadid have entrusted her to help shepherd them through the grueling and seemingly mystical experience. Meyer works with many women who imagine hospital birth as an impersonal medical ordeal, and want an experience that they think they will have more control over. Doulas are considered non-medical support and can be certified after just three to five days of training (though certification is not required), but they can be an important ally for clients. Meyer, for her part, counsels pregnant women on prenatal and postpartum nutrition; educates them on the various stages of pregnancy and labor; and prepares them for the sometimes-destabilizing three months postpartum. She also helps connect them to her many contacts in midwifery and obstetrics. And she does so while framing the birth experience not as a hellish vortex, but as a transformative undertaking. When she attends births—whether at home or in the hospital—she serves as a kind of maternal support blanket and air traffic controller.

People tend to light up when her name is mentioned. “She’s such an old soul, and so empowering as a person,” Hosk says. The birth photography is just a bonus. Spending time with Meyer, it’s easy to understand why she’s earned the trust of so many A-list clients. I first meet her early one evening in April at a farm-to-table restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, where she moved recently with her boyfriend, the musician Johnathan Rice. In a flowy, boho-chic dress with a chunky cardigan draped over her elbows, she radiates calm, intimacy, and a gentle confidence that makes you feel as if nothing could ever go wrong in her presence. She’s 10 weeks pregnant with her first child, but you get the sense she’s always glowing like this, no matter what state she’s in. She neither sensationalizes nor sugarcoats anything related to childbirth. “I try to help women really understand what the process is,” she tells me. “I think we’re raised to think that [birth] is a broken thing that you need to be saved from. But the more you know about how the process unfolds, the more trust there can be in the process.”

Because she began working as a doula at age 22 with no children of her own, Meyer has had to grapple with her own lack of personal experience in the birthing department. At first, she was insecure about it. “What am I doing here?” she remembers thinking. But then she began to realize that her childlessness could prove useful. She likes to tell her clients, “I could have a hundred kids, but no two births are ever alike. It doesn’t matter how many times I give birth; it will never be yours.” Even after she gives birth herself and joins the ranks of her birthing clients (she plans on having a home birth and will use a doula), she’ll reiterate the same sentiment: “I’m not going to project my experience onto you,” she says.

For Hosk, the experience was serendipitous. She got pregnant in the middle of 2020. Lockdown had allowed her to connect more intensely with her body during pregnancy, and she didn’t love the hurried nature of hospital appointments. She and her boyfriend watched The Business of Being Born, a hugely influential 2008 documentary about the history of birthing practices in America, and began to discuss the possibility of a home birth. She was seven months pregnant when they made the decision to give birth at home and to hire a doula.

One day while browsing through clothes in a store, they started talking about how to proceed. “The guy who worked at the store was like, ‘I know a doula!’ Her name is Carson,” Hosk remembers. “We called her, and found out that we had a lot of friends in common. I instantly felt comfortable with her, so we just hired her on the spot.” Hosk’s pregnancy was classified as low-risk, but the birth itself was “psychedelically intense”—she went through two and a half days of contractions, and it took two hours of pushing just to get the nine-pound infant’s head out. But Hosk still says she’ll never consider anything but a home birth in the future. “I felt so lucky that I got to have this other experience, and to think of my birth as this beautiful thing that made me stronger instead of taking my power away from me,” she says.

Prior to 2020, just a fraction of the pregnant women Meyer worked with were comfortable with the home birth route, instead preferring to have her beside them in the security of a hospital. In March of that year, though, attitudes changed rapidly. Pandemic shutdowns took effect, and suddenly pregnant women’s birthing plans were upended. “Overnight it was like, ‘Oh, your doula can’t be there. And oh, your partner can’t be there, either,’” Meyer recalls. “So now you’re going in completely solo.” Now the fear usually surrounding the home birth—fear of the unknown—had transferred to the hospital setting, where the threat of severe illness from a novel virus lurked. “It was a huge shift in the direction of home birth,” Meyer says. “If you ask a midwife, they had to shut off their phones because they were getting calls all day long: ‘I want a home birth!’” The demand had shifted so much that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists released an official statement in April of 2020 gently nudging women away from home births, citing a more than twofold increased risk of perinatal death. “Data has long demonstrated that hospitals and accredited birth centers are the safest places to give birth,” the statement read.

During this period, the number of births Meyer attended on a monthly basis rose from three to seven. By the end of 2021, anecdotal accounts from individual midwives and doulas became hard data: A CDC report showed that home births in the United States had increased 22 percent from 2019 to 2020, the highest level since 1990. Of course, America’s new home birth rate of 1.26 percent was nothing compared to that of countries like the Netherlands, where about a fifth of all births take place in the home. And plenty of women, Meyer says, explored the option of home birth during the pandemic before ultimately deciding to stick with the hospital. But still, 45,464 women that year decided to do what, to many, is unthinkable: fill up a pool of water on their living room floor and bring life into the world in the same space where they eat and sleep.

Among those clients was Hadid. The supermodel revealed her pregnancy in spring 2020, and gave birth to daughter Khai that fall at her family’s farm in rural Pennsylvania. Hadid had initially planned to deliver at a hospital in New York, but when COVID protocols threatened to alter her birthing plans, she started to consider other options. She’d hired Meyer, who attended her high school, as her doula. “What I really wanted from my experience was to feel like, ‘Okay, this is a natural thing that women are meant to do,’” she told Vogue. Meyer attended the birth over Zoom, and Hadid’s then partner, the pop star Zayn Malik, even “caught” the baby, generating a tidal wave of headlines about every minute detail. (“Gigi Hadid’s Doula Zoomed In for Her Birth,” read one.) Hadid, with her 75 million-odd Instagram followers, had given home birth its biggest platform ever.

Meyer first became interested in birth work when, as a young actress and student at NYU, she watched The Business of Being Born, the same documentary that inspired Hosk’s home birth. Together, the filmmakers—former talk show host Ricki Lake and director Abby Epstein—take viewers through their own childbirth journeys. The documentary narrates the history of hospital births and obstetrics, portraying medicalized deliveries as quasi-tragedies that rob women of the most self-affirming experience of their lives. The film also reframes highly common interventions like epidurals, Pitocin inductions, and Cesarean sections as choices that may have been made to suit obstetricians rather than birthing women. The film is a one-sided love letter to home birth that goes beyond simply arguing in its favor or making claims as to its relative safety—it even implies that women who receive Cesarean sections may have difficulty in adequately bonding with their children immediately after birth.

With these sorts of ideas dangled in front of viewers, it’s no wonder that the film became such a highly impactful form of birthing messaging. Still, despite the film’s pro-home-birth bent, there’s a twist at the end that offers the film an undercurrent of objectivity, and thereby commonsense credibility in the eyes of viewers who might have been otherwise dissuaded by its dogma: At the end, Epstein’s home birth plans are thwarted when she learns her baby is in a breech position. She undergoes an emergency C-section in a hospital, and later, she’s shown nursing and bonding with her son. “Maybe that’s the way he needed to come,” she says.

“I saw The Business of Being Born and I was hysterical,” Meyer tells me. “So taken aback. Fifty percent of me was sobbing to learn about the health care system and how we had been failing women and made birth into this illness, when it’s really such a sacred rite of passage. The other half of me was sobbing in absolute amazement.” She explained that she had “never seen a video of a birth that wasn’t a Hollywood depiction,” referencing the scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life where dozens of masked hospital workers swarm around a birthing mother with absurd medical machines.

Meyer, in fact, comes from the world that helped create the popular images that inform the way we think about birth. A Malibu native, she was raised in the heart of Hollywood culture: Her father is Los Angeles power broker Ron Meyer, who co-founded Creative Artists Agency and presided over Universal Studios for two decades. Her mother, Kelly Chapman Meyer, is an environmentalist and health advocate who helped instill a crunchy streak in Meyer from an early age, teaching her about clean beauty at age 10. Meyer went to Malibu High School, the institution that counts women like Kaia Gerber and both Hadid and her sister Bella among its graduates.

After graduating from NYU, Meyer found herself back in L.A. taking acting gigs. She also founded a clean beauty company, C & The Moon, which saw its sales jump after January Jones (a friend of hers) posted about her body scrub. Meyer was at a birthday party in Los Angeles when she spotted a woman who she assumed was an actress or model, but was in fact a midwife. Sensing her enthusiasm, the woman encouraged Meyer to enroll in doula training. Soon Meyer completed a three-day course, received her certification, and started attending births. Her first client was a neighbor she met one day while sharing an elevator. Meyer was also mentored by Lori Bregman, one of Los Angeles’s most prominent doulas and maternal wellness experts, whose client list includes Heidi Klum and Anne Hathaway.

The Business of Being Born, which is nearing its 15th anniversary, was a pivotal narrative of the dynamics between celebrity, Hollywood imagery, and birth. At the time, Ricki Lake was somewhat of an anomaly among her peers in her decision to give birth at home. “I’m so not the type,” Lake tells me. “I remember hearing that Demi Moore had had a home birth, but it wasn’t on my radar.” The documentary provides a snapshot of cultural perceptions of birth in the early 2000s. This was the era of “too posh to push,” the expression used by British tabloids to describe celebrities and super-ambitious career women who opted to schedule C-sections rather than deal with the hassle of a surprise labor. “These women had that view of birth that was like, ‘We gotta get it over with so we can get back on the runway,’” Meyer says.

But Hollywood attitudes about birth have swung in the opposite direction in the years since. In 2009, Kourtney Kardashian was filmed giving birth to her son, Mason, during which celebrity obstetrician Paul Crane, MD, instructed her to “pull” and Kourtney reached down and literally pulled her newborn out of her body. That scene was perceived as yet another envelope pushed onscreen by the Kardashians, but it may have also helped spark a newfound curiosity about home birth among the reality-television-watching masses. “I hear it all the time: ‘Am I going to catch my baby like Kourtney Kardashian did?’” Meyer says. “I think that was one of [few] times that kind of birth was really shown.”

Now pregnancy and birth seem to be a major part of many celebrity women’s brands, and home birth—once considered an outlandish ordeal chosen by hippies—has been reframed as an aspirational rite of passage. If birth was once an experience so sacred or traumatic as to be kept private, it is now a portal to empowerment and public self-inquiry, and sharing birth stories on social media has become one way for celebrity women to connect to their audiences and to cultivate authenticity. The subtext of some of these birth stories is that natural or home birth is another way of proving your mettle—of applying a kind of empowerment-driven ambition to every arena of life. It’s a form of achievement that dovetails neatly with the wellness-as-lifestyle era in which well-to-do women are swapping out antidepressants for psychedelics or experimenting with at-home coffee enemas. Home birth, in this view, is one more step toward being a holistically self-actualized modern woman.

The paradox of home birth, and its popularity among a certain subset of the Hollywood elite, is that it is often shown as an alternative to the medical establishment—and yet the home-birthing world can only thrive with the support of a hospital. Home births are typically chosen by self-selected pools of low-risk women, but up to 27 percent of those giving birth for the first time still end up transferring to a hospital mid-birth nonetheless. The actress and director Lake Bell had two home births, the second of which resulted in her newborn being rushed to the hospital and held in the NICU for 11 days after going without oxygen for over four minutes. “I was insistent to have a home birth. I’ve dealt with that since,” she said on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.

Once you start noticing them, the celebrity home birth stories are everywhere. There’s Ashley Graham, who delivered her first son at home in early 2020, and even chose a home birth for her twin boys this past January—a grueling experience that included full-blown hemorrhaging. Hilary Duff birthed two of her three children at home and later posted a set of epic, candid photos of herself mid-labor, grimacing in agony. And Catherine, Princess of Wales, has lit up the British tabloids over the years with news that she was interested in birthing at home. Even those who give birth in a hospital often bring their followers along for the ride: The high-concept pregnancy photo shoot (or even short film, in the case of Emily Ratajkowski) is now part of the celebrity-content industrial complex.

All this sharing has opened up space on social media for less-perfect birth stories, too. Mandy Moore, another one of Meyer’s clients who was sold on the idea of a home birth after watching The Business of Being Born, hatched grand plans for a home birth that included her husband serenading her with his guitar, but complications prompted her to switch to a hospital birth, leaving her with a complex tangle of emotions. “Just caring about what other people that were planning to do home births and feeling this weird twinge of jealousy,” she said on the Informed Pregnancy podcast. “I know that sounds ridiculous…but I’m also kind of sad that I don’t get to have that experience that I was hoping for.”

There are, of course, a couple of obvious reasons why home birth has an outsize presence among famous women. “You run in the same circles,” Hosk explains. “It’s sad, because it’s a little bit of a privilege thing—sometimes it costs out of pocket, and there’s a little bit more work involved. If it’s not so popular in the circles you hang around, how are you going to know? How are you going to understand how it works?” For celebrities, home birth is also, crucially, a private birth, free from prying eyes and sneaky iPhone cameras. (No need to clear out a whole maternity floor, as Beyoncé was rumored to have done for the birth of her daughter, Blue Ivy.) By the same token, it’s easy to understand why someone like Meyer, who grew up among the glitterati, would be appealing to a famous mom-to-be: She is so unfazed by their celebrity that she can treat them like normal women. “Her other clients didn’t cross my mind at all. She never mentions them,” Hosk says.

Before she gave birth to her daughter, Hosk had a habit of rolling her eyes every time she came across a birth story online. “Ugh, not another pregnancy story! Everyone always makes it seem so dramatic,” she says. Then she gave birth herself. “Giving birth to a human is an insane thing. It made me realize how important it is to share it,” she admits, almost sounding a bit sheepish. Within a week, she had posted an epic play-by-play of her home birth to her Instagram Stories. “I’m beyond exhausted and my body goes into complete shutdown and sleep in between the waves,” she wrote in one slide. “Birthing is really confronting yourself, your fears and doubts, and coming through the other side.” The one thing she still has not been able to fully confront, though, are those photos that Meyer took. “I think it’s something that I’m going to have when I’m older, and able to look at it, because it’s so fresh now,” she tells me, laughing. “It’s not beautiful.”

This article appears in the November 2022 issue of ELLE.

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Monique Andre has been solo traveling around the world since she was a teenager, when she first flew to Europe by herself. Now 54, she’s traveled around the U.S. in her conversion SUV and abroad to far-off locales like Patagonia, Iceland, Bali, and many, many more, all the while documenting her travels on Instagram and TikTok under the handle @neveraroadmap. Below, in her own words, Andre talks about reconnecting with her sense of childlike wonder, resisting the narratives that make women fearful to move through the world, and the first steps anyone can take toward their own solitary adventures.

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I’ve been traveling since I was born. My parents had a boat, so it was part of my upbringing—specifically, traveling by sailboat.

When I was three years old, my parents split up, and my mother moved to the Hamptons to raise me. At age 10, my parents decided to get back together, and we moved onto my father’s sailboat. We sailed from New York to Florida in August 1978 and spent the winter in Key Largo.

While there, I won an essay contest where the prize was traveling with a few other kids to a deserted island in the middle of the Everglades. It sounds crazy by today’s standards—even though we did have chaperones—but we slept in tents on the island for a few days. We had to wake ourselves up every morning, and I still remember getting out of my tent and finding a spot on the island to watch the sunrise by myself.

It was the Everglades, so of course there were alligators and snakes, but no one ever said “be careful,” and that really helped shape the person I am today. There was virtually no one else around, and I had to take care of myself. That was the moment I figured out who I was and what I loved—I don’t ever remember feeling more alive, and I’ve spent a lifetime going back and forth between those glimmers of me, just me, and the self-imposed societal expectations of me.

As a Hamptons kid, I was in the nightclubs of New York City by the time I was 13 years old. Then, of course, I moved to Manhattan to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology—it was the next step on my way to a glamorous metropolitan lifestyle.

I was 17 when I went on my first trip by myself, from New York to Europe. I had family in Germany, so first I flew to stay with relatives, but spontaneously decided to jump on a train to Rome, and then Paris. The visa laws changed while I was there, so I didn’t know I needed a visa to get into France and was detained at the train station for not having one. I was put on a train back to Germany in the middle of the night, so I got off the train at the border, found a hotel, and secured my visa the next day. I went right back to Paris. At the time, I didn’t speak more than high school-level French, and it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be capable of taking care of myself even when hardships were presented to me.

I don’t remember anyone thinking it was strange for me to go off to Europe alone. The next year, I went to Ecuador to volunteer with Earthwatch, an environmental nonprofit that pairs volunteers with researchers. We went up into the Andes to work with Indigenous tribes. I felt privileged at 19 that I was accepted and allowed to be there, and I was cognizant of my purpose finding a deeper connection to both the world at large and myself.

During that time period, I was working as a waitress at the fancy Upper East Side restaurant Le Bilboquet with celebrities all around me, but I was absorbed in reading Diane Fosse’s Gorillas in the Mist. I felt depressed and wondered what I was doing with my life. I feel like I spent my entire 20s going back and forth between my inner self—what felt right for me and made me feel whole, which was traveling—and the adult expectations of a job and money. In some ways, it felt like a pipe dream for me to do what I actually wanted to do.

Once again, I packed up and headed to Southeast Asia for almost a year. While there I had what I’ll call a Mowgli moment. I was in the jungle with a tribe on a small island off the coast of Sumatra, Indonesia and I saw my reflection in a pool of water. I sat there in disbelief, because I realized I hadn’t seen myself in a month. Honestly, it rocked my world. It hadn’t even dawned on me to worry about what I looked like while there. I never once thought, do I have a pimple? Or if I had bags under my eyes, or if my hair was a mess. I was living with approximately zero thoughts about my external appearance. The few clothes I had were washed in the river. My nails were never done, and I found it all so liberating, especially coming out of the Hamptons and New York City society.

Spoiler: I did return to traditional life and stayed in it for over 20 years, but now I find myself casting off identifying labels like mom, wife, teacher, and reconnecting with the 10-year-old version of myself I found in the Everglades.

My social media accounts are named “Never a Roadmap” because in so much of life, we always have a destination in mind, a place we’re supposed to go, and a road map to get there. But life happens along the way—if we’re too focused on always following the path, I think we risk not enjoying the present moment. So many people talk about trying to find themselves, which implies that you lost yourself. I feel like we do lose ourselves in jobs and relationships, particularly as women.

Many women reach out to me on social media saying they’d love to travel like I do, but they’re scared. I want to change the narrative that women should feel unsafe wherever we go. If I can inspire other women who see me, an average woman, driving off-road, snowmobiling on glaciers, taking little boats to hostels in the middle of exotic locales, and staying in treehouses and boutique hotels, all the while meeting fabulous people around the world that treat me with kindness and seeing the sheer joy I feel by believing that the world is kind, I’ve done my job. My tendency to travel alone makes people feel confident about making changes in their own lives, however small. I recently told one woman who reached out, “Go to a rock climbing gym somewhere near you.” It takes bravery to go to a climbing gym by yourself, never having done it before, in another part of town—that’s a solo journey to me. It doesn’t have to be Patagonia to start.

I’ve traveled with family and friends, but I prefer traveling solo. When you travel by yourself, it really gets to the core of who you are as a person. You strip everything away, all of the titles, and reconnect with the person you are inside.

I’m going to Bali soon, and I have my first three nights booked, but then I have a month where I don’t know where I’m staying or what I’m doing. Every once in a while, I’ll look at someone else’s Instagram and think, Oh, I have to go there. Sometimes I go, but more often than not, I tell myself to stop so I can create my own vision and not just follow someone else’s. When I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going, it makes the experience more authentic—when there’s no destination, you can’t get lost.

I don’t think there’s really an end of the road for me. All I can picture is that in my 60s and 70s and 80s, I want to be doing exactly what I’m doing now. So long as I can keep returning to a place of my inner ten-year-old and where I’m most happy and vibrant, I’ll keep moving.

Sports cars often flood the forefront of the mind with alluring notions. Their charming physiques often give way to curvaceous architecture, free flowing lines, and a design aesthetic that catches even the most discerning eye. Jaguar sits at the intersection of luxurious style and automotive design. Its intricate design processes and handcrafted touches channel similarities to world-renowned fashion houses, cultivating an innate ability to create a sophisticated, timeless range of vehicles. It’s here where we see those two worlds colliding so closely—these spheres of style and automotive conception offer confluence with our own self-expression, inspiring the selections we make beyond our wardrobe armoire and more so into our driveways.

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A Bold Perspective

Designed to leave a lasting impression, the graphic silhouette and aerodynamic lines of Jaguar’s F-TYPE are a striking sight—exuding sensational beauty at every angle that emphasizes its powerful stance and superior performance.

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Luxuriating in the Afterglow

Often, our vehicles become our sense of escape. The Jaguar F-TYPE offers up the ability to cocoon you in its plush interior, swathed in rich textiles and finishes—effectively kindling a transportive experience that enlivens your daily behind-the-wheel experience. Complemented by customizable ambient lighting, it actualizes your mood to embody your own unique style and carefree attitude.

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An Unprecedented Magnetism

Jaguar has a knack for cleverly designing racing machines under the cloak of elegantly sculpted, moving works of art so consider the all-electric I-PACE an archetype for quintessential contemporary British design—all while integrating the future-forward innovation of Jaguar DNA and FIA Formula E Racing technology.

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The Statement Piece

If the little black dress or jumpsuit are considered ageless wardrobe staples, it’s the little two-seater coupe that demands attention upon arrival and departure. The F-TYPE’s Deep Desire Red shade is rich with subtle metallic pigment, achieving a glossed, midnight effect designed to catch the light at all the right angles and captivate the gaze like a form-fitting sequined ensemble.

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Tailored Sophistication

Jaguar vehicles often find influence in fine tailoring and sartorial staples too. Inside, the I-PACE boasts meticulous twin-needle stitching that echoes the effortlessly luxe style of Pitti Uomo habitués—further adding to its allure that simply cannot be dismissed.

Styled by Odile Iturraspe; hair by Brenton Diallo; makeup by Yuki Hayashi.

Something’s been happening with the ambitious women in my life. A friend who used to be focused on climbing the corporate ladder in her marketing job—while dabbling in a series of side hustles—is trying to figure out how to backpedal. A lawyer at a big tech company who’s the breadwinner for her family is taking a leave of absence. A creative force of nature who burned out mid-pandemic is trying to make peace with the not-that-difficult job she took just to hold on to her health insurance.

Then, over glasses of wine one weeknight, I found myself saying to a fellow go-getter: “I’m just not that busy lately.” As someone who has always had a sense of pride in her work ethic and found a sense of purpose in her career, this was a shocking, satisfying, and slightly shameful admission. I realized that something had shifted for me, too.

Women are in the midst of a revolutionary reckoning with our ambitions. We’re not resigning en masse—because who can afford to quit her job in this economy?!—but we are trying to figure out a new set of goals and guidance for our professional lives. Thanks to long-simmering inequality and stubborn sexism, clarified by the pain of the pandemic, our definitions of success increasingly lie outside the realm of work. We are waking up to the fact that our jobs are never going to love us back. And we are trying to adjust accordingly.

The girlbosses who once dominated our social media feeds have been ousted and mocked, and are now selling cottagecore trinkets in Brooklyn. On TikTok, “bimbofication” converts preach the gospel of not trying to prove you’re the smartest or hardest-working person in the room: Just concentrate on your looks and let someone else pick up the check. Essays about the disappearance of ambition and the liberating power of saying “no” go instantly viral. And yes, I’ll say it: When Kim Kardashian was dragged for declaring, in her signature vocal fry, that “nobody wants to work these days,” she was a little bit right. We don’t want to work ourselves to the bone, clocking overtime hours without overtime pay, for a vanity title at a soulless corporation anymore.

At this point in our collective professional history, women are looking for something more. Or is it something less?

If you narrowly define ambition as the pursuit of money and power, then the last century was one of increasingly ambitious women. In the early 20th century, just 20 percent of women worked outside the home, with Black women twice as likely as white women to have wage-earning jobs. After World War II, the numbers ticked up steadily (Rosie the Riveter is an icon for a reason), and by the 1970s, half of single women and 40 percent of married women were employed. Women were helped along by some important feminist gains: We could finally access birth control, get a credit card in our own name, and enjoy some basic protections against pregnancy discrimination and sexual harassment. But even after the heavy-shoulder-pads energy of the 1980s and early ’90s, our workforce participation peaked in the late ’90s.

Women’s progress stalled before our ambition did. In the 21st century, “although women now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men, they are still substantially less likely to reach the highest echelons of their professions,” said then-Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen in a 2017 speech. The gender pay gap stubbornly persists, even among men and women of similar education and occupation, and is particularly yawning for women of color. A 2021 McKinsey report found “a disconnect between companies’ growing commitment to racial equity and the lack of improvement we see in the day-to-day experiences of women of color.” No wonder the pandemic—and its accompanying crisis of caregiving—pushed many women with stagnant paychecks out of the workforce and into full-time childcare. In 2020, a full quarter of U.S. women considered leaving the workforce or downshifting their career, according to another McKinsey report in March 2021.

Millennials, particularly those of us with college degrees and feminist impulses, once thought we could crack the ambition code. Where boomers had failed to shatter glass ceilings and Gen Xers had failed to fully scale the corporate ladder, my generation would do better. And if we couldn’t change corporate America, we’d build our own businesses and simply sidestep the problem. We all know how that worked out! It’s become apparent that many of the promised rewards of professional striving are never going to materialize. Why, some women are wondering, should I keep trying so hard?

“Some people feel as if they’ve been tricked,” says Paco de Leon, author of Finance for the People. “And they’re waking up to this realization: There’s gotta be a better way to make money and save for all my goals—and not feel like I’m constantly burning the candle at both ends.”

In a fall 2021 Gallup survey of 13,000 U.S. employees, the top quality that women sought in a job was “greater work-life balance and better personal well-being”—just slightly ahead of higher pay and benefits. Despite the damning statistic that there are 1.8 million fewer women in the labor force than before the pandemic, the vast majority of workers don’t have the financial option to drop out entirely. Some of us wouldn’t want to even if we could.

I know a few women who are fantasizing about fundraising a seed round or making partner. But most of my friends are running the numbers to figure out if they can afford to quit without another job lined up, or go down to four days a week without taking a significant salary hit. They are applying for positions that don’t require overtime so they can be more present for their children, their elderly parents, the causes they care about, their own creative practice. Some are thoroughly burned out and want to work less for the sake of their own health. Still others spent much of the past two years collecting unemployment, and found the experience more radicalizing than demoralizing.

“Yes, I’m ambitious,” a friend told me recently, “but climbing the corporate ladder does not interest me like it used to. A title, a bump in pay—it’s not satisfying. What I need to feel successful and fulfilled is completely different. Am I doing something that brings satisfaction? Do I feel like I’m learning? Do I feel like I’m contributing? Do I feel like I’m connecting to other people? Do I feel like I have flexibility in this new way we live and work? Am I given not only responsibility but autonomy? Am I in a place that aligns with my values? The things that I am looking for have changed.”

What’s happening now is a restlessness, a searching, a wholesale reexamination of the role that work should play in a woman’s life and identity. “If we look at the second wave of feminism, the goal was to access the things that white men had,” says Mia Birdsong, author of How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community. But now, instead of breaking the glass ceiling, Birdsong says she and many other women would rather leave the building altogether. “I want to go and sit beneath trees, or sit in a field, or whatever,” she says, laughing.

Of course, some women—particularly those working for hourly wages—never had any illusions that work was a path to personal fulfillment. Work has always been a necessity, and therefore less about narrowing the national wage gap and more about just putting food on the damn table. Many of these women have been sounding the alarm about the untenable nature of American labor for years now, and are leaders in the movements to organize at places like Starbucks and Amazon.

But this rethinking of ambition is a more recent twist for those of us who get paid a salary with benefits, and who absorbed the idea that we could possibly advance feminism while also advancing our own careers. “Girlboss,” now a verb, finds itself grouped with “gaslight” and “gatekeep” in what Vox called “a kind of ‘live, laugh, love’ of toxic, usually white feminism.” The widespread Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020 prompted many of us to develop a new understanding of the unfair systems that underpin much of American life. And of course, the pandemic has revealed everything from the gaping holes in the safety net to the unequal domestic work of heterosexual relationships to the fragility of our health—both mental and physical. For many of us, the ambition to rise through the ranks in our chosen field has dissolved into something simpler: the desire to not feel so stressed and exhausted all the time.

Working fewer hours was supposed to be our collective reality by now. In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee projected that thanks to advancements in technology, workers would be so productive that we’d all enjoy a 14-hour workweek by the year 2000. (That sound you hear is the bitter laughter of every American worker.) Instead, we are clocking an average of 44 hours per week, with one in five workers working 49 to 59 hours. Meanwhile, for women, sexist barriers to professional advancement remain stubbornly in place. On The Economist’s glass-ceiling index, which ranks OECD countries from best to worst when it comes to women’s chances for equal treatment at work, the United States recently fell by two places to the 20th spot on the list.

No matter how hard we hustle, the statistics say that most of us will still hit that proverbial glass ceiling—especially if we are women of color and/or parents, and most especially if we are parents of more than one child. “I do think that there’s a very seductive element to [the idea that] if I work hard enough, if I do the right networking, if I have the right internet presence, then I will get the life that I want,” says Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former executive editor of Teen Vogue and author of the forthcoming book The Myth of Making It. And that has certainly worked for a handful of women—you probably follow at least one of them on Instagram. But for most of us, in the absence of universal health care, worker protections, and affordable childcare, those illusions have crumbled.

That doesn’t mean it’s always easy to scale back our attachment to our former professional ideals. For some former straight-A students, the challenge is psychological. There are no performance reviews for friendship or personal well-being, so it can be harder to set goals in nonwork arenas. Rainesford Stauffer, author of the upcoming book All the Gold Stars, makes a distinction between ambition that is rooted in personal meaning and ambition that is about proving external worth. Meaningful ambition often centers on things like community and creativity, with goals like feeling connected, whole, and healthy. It “typically doesn’t come with that pressure cooker sensation of, ‘Oh my God, I’m falling behind. I’m the only one who isn’t doing enough.’”

Then there’s the bigger picture: Are we failing future generations of women when we don’t throw ourselves wholeheartedly against the glass ceiling? Even the question is a bit of a trap, says Mukhopadhyay, placing an individual burden on women when it should be a collective one. It’s not on each of us, as workers, to better the world for all women. The gains of previous generations of social-justice movements teach us the truth: Collective progress isn’t gained through one exceptional individual’s achievements.

When that panicked not-doing-enough feeling kicks in, Tiffany Dufu, founder and CEO of peer coaching service The Cru, counsels women to have a clear sense of what matters most to them. “Because when you’re overwhelmed and you’ve got a ton on your plate, you need to figure out, What are you going to delegate and what is just going to, like, roll all over the floor?” Redefining ambition is about knowing which professional things to set aside, and it often takes some support to figure it out. She adds, “It’s one thing to know you want to shift your career and maybe align it with more purpose and meaning, or really focus on a more value-based way of living. It’s another thing to actually figure out, Okay, well, what does that mean? And how am I going to actually make that happen?”

Letting go of the idea that our titles or salaries define us is difficult even for those of us who say we know better, because American culture venerates the idea that we are all individually responsible for our success as human beings. We’re taught that we can get anything that we need on our own, that if we don’t succeed it’s because of some failure within us. In reality, “most of what you need is going to be outside of you,” Kate Bowler, author of No Cure for Being Human, said in an interview with GQ last year. “It’s structural justice and a community that holds you, and coming to terms with your own limitations and frailties.”

For ambition to be sustainable, it has to be personal and complex, not just about rising through the ranks. For every woman who is burned out after placing too much value on work as a key component of her identity, the task isn’t letting go of ambition altogether. It’s relocating those ambitions beyond the traditional markers of money, title, and professional recognition. Ambition does not have to be limited to a quest for power at the expense of yourself and others. It can also be a drive for a more just world, a healthier self, a stronger community. And it’s definitely achievable in soft pants.

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What Famous Women Have to Say About Ambition

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This article appears in the September 2022 issue of ELLE.

All of my childhood fantasies about marriage involved a church. I was raised in a tongues-speaking, foot-stomping, choir-sanging, tambourine-playing Black church, where my grandparents—on both sides of my family—were pastors. I loved being a church girl—spending every Sunday in a wooden pew within the first five rows, the way my world revolved around the extra aunties and cousins I gained through this spiritual family. I envisioned that one day I’d walk up the large brown staircase of the main entrance, through the vestibule, and down the aisle toward my future husband. It’s where my mother and father were married more than three decades ago, and I always looked forward to kicking off my own happily ever after the same way.

But my real wedding in 2021 was nothing like what I’d pictured. For starters, the husband of my dreams was actually my wife, Mariah. I couldn’t have conjured up a better life partner and soulmate if I tried. But queerness was nowhere on my life bingo card growing up, so when I realized, just after graduating college, that I had feelings for one of my best friends, it altered everything.

Suddenly church, this place I loved, became a place of conflict. At my church, queerness wasn’t accepted and certainly not celebrated— that was made clear to me in both overt and subtle ways. But it was also the place where I celebrated Black History Month and sang spirituals. It was where my community organizing began, where I interacted with multiple generations of Black people, and where most of my close friends spent their time. For so long, my childhood and overall cultural identity were tied to the Black church. We like to say that “love wins,” but when choosing love, I didn’t know how much it would change me. For a while, I couldn’t make out the prize I had supposedly won.

So when it came time for Mariah and I to select a venue for our wedding ceremony and reception, we didn’t even entertain the idea of trading vows in a church. I worried: Would they consider our union sacrilegious? Would we be lectured by a presiding pastor who doesn’t “believe” in homosexuality? Would I feel affirmed and loved on the day, or would we be anxious about any last-minute backlash? It didn’t feel right to invite people to turn us down during what was otherwise the happiest day of our lives. Why put ourselves through the anguish of unrequited care?

Preparing for this next phase, I felt lonely for one of the first times in my life. My career was beginning to take off, and I’d actively worked toward the healthiest relationship I’d ever had. Yet a community that always felt like safety for me couldn’t, or wouldn’t, bear witness to the home we’d found in one another. Growing up, we were taught that God is love, so what did it mean that love’s earthly representatives didn’t find us worthy of binding ourselves in what was supposed to be a sanctuary and source of refuge? We were lucky to have amazing people in our lives who’d supported us from the very beginning, but in those early moments of being engaged, I was coming to the realization that the one thing I had craved for so much of my life might never be.

The thought of having to jump through hoops to find a church that felt culturally relevant and was willing to accept us made me reflect on all the hardships we faced just by being our authentic selves: The holidays we spent away from extended family. Our constant internal conflicts around religion. The never-ending need to educate loved ones. The friends and family who weren’t there when it mattered most. There was so much time we’d never get back—and so much disappointment still in store.

I may have drowned in that loneliness had it not been for the land—89 lush, green acres of Southern land that my paternal grandfather spent his pension and the final years of his life making possible. He affectionately dubbed it Baker Acres: a plot of land covered in thin, towering pine trees and roaming white-tailed deer with two sprawling freshwater lakes fed by a winding brook. It was to be a safe haven for any of his children or grandchildren. And less than a decade later, the Baker Acres became a refuge for my wife and I when we said “I do.” I can’t remember exactly when I first had the idea of getting married on my family’s land, but it was like having a song stuck in your head. Once I entertained the thought for even a moment, it felt like what I was always meant to do.

The family land freed me in more ways than one. There was no gatekeeper there to tell me that our love was too blasphemous or that the Lord’s house was too sacred. As Imani Perry wrote in her bestselling book South to America: “The trees don’t know your race or your gender identity or your sexuality. The trees don’t expel you for rumors or bigotries.” In fact, the hallowed ground modeled what love really was: the insistence upon blooming no matter the conditions. Over the years, this land has been home to many people; first, the Indigenous Lumbee people, followed by colonizers, and eventually, us Bakers. Through extractive agriculture, natural disasters, and over-yielding, the land never stopped being exactly who She had always been. In good times, the land offered bountiful harvests and a foundation for shelter. In bad times, the land listened and learned resilience. She welcomed Mariah and I without judgment, presenting us with a clean slate. As a queer Black couple, everything about it felt too good to turn down. With my grandmother’s blessing and my aunt’s support, we set to work planning our special day.

When Aug. 14, 2021, finally rolled around, I no longer felt alone. I was better at setting boundaries and unwilling to be phased by anyone who wasn’t there for the explicit purpose of celebrating our love. I cherished those who had traveled to be with us. I realized that the sacredness of the day wasn’t lost, and God didn’t need a building to make His presence known. I felt God through my mother and Auntie Tyra, who pulled me to the side, just before I got dressed for my big day, to share marital wisdom. I felt God when what should have realistically been a 90-degree day was cooled off by a rain that completely encircled the land—without more than a drizzle reaching our party’s plot. I felt God in my Uncle David, who walked me down the aisle and always affirmed that being Christian and being queer are not mutually exclusive.

As our sisters co-officiated the ceremony, I stared ahead at my bride, thankful. “How lucky am I,” I thought to myself, “that God saw it fit to send me a life partner and use this wedding as a reminder that church exists all around us.” I thought about my ancestors who were enslaved in this county and may have worked this land with their dirt-caked hands. I thought about the white men who tried to beat this land and Her stewards into submission but failed. I thought about what it meant to build a love strong enough to withstand not only the test of time but also fear—to be brave enough to find God and love everywhere I go.

In an 1996 article for Orion Magazine called “Touching the Earth,” bell hooks wrote:

For many years, and even now, generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the South, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature…When the earth is sacred to us, our bodies can also be sacred to us.

In this way, I’m grateful for every closed door that led my wife and I to the land. I haven’t looked back since.

On a dry, hot weekend in August, a crowd of several hundred appeared among the pine trees of Idyllwild, a former gold rush town in the San Jacinto Mountains of California. These were members of Friends With Benefits, or FWB for short, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that was taking its online community offline for the first in-real-life gathering of its kind, billed as an “immersive conference and festival experience at the intersection of culture and Web3.” I’m crypto-curious, resistant to anything that requires I spend more time online, but optimistic about its promises of wealth equity and anticipate our collective surrender to its inevitability. I went to FWB Fest to answer some nagging questions: Am I late to the party? Do I want to be at this party?

Skeptics (hi, dad) think cryptocurrency is too risky and speculative. Believers think it’s the currency of the future, and that it has the opportunity to close wealth gaps, empower artists, and change the way we use money, as cryptocurrencies are exchanged without central regulatory authorities like banks or PayPal. Crypto’s fans are also not afraid of the world’s many acronyms. Fest attendees were largely in the latter camp; one described this moment as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to change money distribution.”

The festival took place at Idyllwild Arts Academy, a private high school on a sprawling campus in the woods. Being white and in my 30s, I appeared to be in the majority, though the population skewed male. Otherwise, I made no attempt to blend in with crypto’s cool kids—I ignored the “bucket hat” bullet on the packing list that we were sent in advance. Many others didn’t. The uniform, as one attendee explained to me, was coded luxury: “Your sunglasses are from a truck stop and your shorts are Old Navy, but then the sneakers are Balenciaga.” On day one, I was deeply off-brand in a pink floral LoveShackFancy dress. I also had the feeling that everyone was on mushrooms without me.

In between performances by artists like Sudan Archives, L’Rain, Kilo Kish, and James Blake, there were hikes, meditation, and foraging. Panelists hosted talks on the future of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and topics like “How To Eat a Fruit.” Tickets to the all-inclusive weekend cost .5 ETH (shorthand for Ether, the currency on the Ethereum blockchain), or about $927 at the time of writing.

Full membership to the FWB community will cost you 75 FWB tokens. A single token currently trades at $9.33, though it’s been as high as $186. (FWB does offer a “local” membership for 5$FWB, or around $50.) Unlike other DAOs, where entrance requires only buying the token, FWB functions like an internet version of Soho House, requiring both an application approval process and purchase of their currency. As holders of the token, members are incentivized to contribute to projects that raise the token’s value, and they can earn more of it through their participation. After you’ve gotten through the gates, it all goes down in the Discord, the private server where members vote on issues and discuss NFT drops and new projects.

Every DAO serves a different purpose—some raise money for charitable causes, while others offer rewards like first access to NFTs. There are thousands. In 2021, the singularly-minded ConstitutionDAO raised $47 million in ETH to bid on a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby’s. (They lost, and the organization has since disbanded.) FWB is a social DAO, “focused on merging culture and crypto.” Its co-founder is Trevor McFedries, a DJ, music artist, and tech luminary who created the token in 2020 and sent it to his network of friends, granting them access to a private Discord. At first, FWB was essentially a chat room for artists and musicians who were impacted by the pandemic; it’s since grown to 3,000 global members.

A key difference between members-only places like Soho House and a DAO is that “our members vote on expenses every month, our members vote on partnerships every month. Nothing happens without people’s say. Even my salary, if someone had issue with it, they could vote ‘no,’” said Raihan Anwar, one of FWB’s cofounders and their “digital social butterfly.” Like many other FWB members I spoke to, he had an extreme level of enthusiasm for the community. “Our goal was to build the most positive workshop for artists and creatives to explore crypto.”

A few festival attendees brought their dogs and some bought their kids, including a baby named Eeth, after the cryptocurrency. Everyone seemed less interested in the Web3 gold rush (Web3 is the umbrella term for crypto, NFTs, and DAOs) than they did in meeting their Discord friends IRL. McFedries explained a shift towards crypto’s new era: the crowd wasn’t so much Libertarian types but those “interested in creating better economies for creators.” The weekend had at the forefront energy without being smug.

Next to a Menotti’s truck on the festival grounds, where one could get a coffee and a coffee NFT, I sat down with Eileen Skyers, FWB’s head of marketing. “It’s so important for me to be here early and for me to onboard other underrepresented creatives,” she told me. (Skyers is Jamaican and Filipino and identifies as both African American and Asian American). “I’m a first generation immigrant—a lot of our parents didn’t have 401ks. I’ve talked to people here who identified that same way, where they were like, ‘Yeah, I got into crypto for this expansive possibility it has to close wealth gaps.’ On top of that, I think we’re just in a generation that was born into the internet and financial crises—we don’t really believe in 401ks. Why am I going to build forever for this financial future when there may be no future? There are all these questions coming out of the pandemic that make investing in this space look really attractive to young people.”

Although there was plenty of Instagram bait in the swag and scenery that was also attractive to young people, I didn’t see a single arm extended for a selfie, and hardly any bent-neck scrolling. At the music sets I attended in the parachute-covered amphitheater, festival-goers watched not through the screens of their phones but, radically, with their own eyes.

In this universe, social currency isn’t earned through Instagram followers or by how closely we can reach the ever-changing beauty standards. Web3’s main platforms are Discord and Twitter, where identities are often shielded by avatars. Expertise, connections, and getting “alpha” info ahead of the curve—that’s the clout this crowd runs on.

But the educational elitism and buy-in comes at the cost of accessibility. “Crypto has an access problem. There’s such a high barrier to entry in terms of understanding half of what is going on,” Makayla Bailey told me in between music sets. Bailey is a 28-year-old Black woman based in New York and a director at Rhizome, a digital arts nonprofit. “I think saying ‘we welcome everybody’ is not enough. You have to do things that address some of the structural issues at hand, like class, race, and diversity.” But of FWB, she said, “It’s one of the more welcoming spaces in Web3 that I’ve experienced so far.”

While Web3 promises for equity and access—the language can at times lean utopian—the same dynamics that exist in corporate spaces exist in these communities, too. The “Social Justice and Web3” event, led by Naaya Wellness founder Sinikiwe Stephanie Dhliwayo, was one of the most dynamic but least attended events I sat in on. At another discussion, held in a classroom and led by three women, one male attendee walked in late, sat at the teacher’s desk, and seemed to speak louder and longer than all three women who were leading the discussion.

Still, there’s progress. At Saturday’s keynote “Dissent by Design,” Nadya Tolokonnikova, a member of the feminist protest art collective Pussy Riot, discussed using Web3 for activism. In response to the war in Ukraine, Nadya’s UnicornDAO raised nearly $7 million in two days with the sale of an NFT of the Ukrainian flag. Without the threat of government interference or the bureaucracy of a traditional non-profit, funds were raised and quickly distributed to Ukrainian citizens. One major donor was the Ukrainian-American owner of OnlyFans, Leonid Ravinsky, who donated $1.3 million. “It showed us the power of Web3. Crypto is useful not just for people pumping their bags, but for public good and for peace,” Nadya said at the panel. And in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, UnicornDAO created an abortion fund that provides transportation, lodging, and health services.

Since cryptocurrency can be used without the location tracking of banks or ATMs, it’s been critical to Nadya’s survival. “As an activist in Russia, we needed to use [cryptography] to stay alive.” After Pussy Riot performed an anti-Putin “Punk Prayer” at a Moscow cathedral in 2012, Nadya, along with her fellow members, was jailed for 21 months. She’s considered a “foreign agent” of Russia, and due to her status, she doesn’t share her location in real time.

Later in the evening, she and I sat together on a porch outside the artists’ cabin, behind the twinkle-lit bar serving natural wine from Martha Stoumen and offering cans of the disturbingly-named water Liquid Death. The artist Weyes Blood was playing a set in the amphitheater. I asked Nadya, whose latest Pussy Riot album is titled MATRIARCHY NOW, how to bring more equity into the cryptosphere. “In a lot of cases, when women or any other underrepresented communities are being asked to participate in something, they’re just being used as currency for virtue signaling, and it’s important to make sure that they actually get paid or get tokens for their participation. Make sure to bring real value to people who contribute to your diversity,” she told me.

“Last year only 5 to 10 percent of total NFTs sales were done by female artists, which is terrible,” she said. To shift those stats, UnicornDAO collects art by women-identified and LGBTQIA+ people. Its board members include the musicians Sia and Grimes. “If we keep [this community] exclusive, it’s gonna be just a room of white males sucking their own dicks, which is how most of the parties look these days.”

I considered our psychedelic-forest surroundings; how I hadn’t been at a gathering this large since 2019, or one this specific, ever. Is crypto the future, or is it just a moment in time? I asked Nadya. “I believe it is the future. It brings ownership back to people. On Instagram your account could be deleted at any given second. Even though I provided my content for free, and helped [Instagram] to develop their platform and create generational wealth for Mark Zuckerberg, I can be kicked out at any time. When you join Web3 social media platforms, you own your piece, you own your properties. You own a piece of land in that social media system.”

Another accessibility issue is the time commitment that understanding and keeping up with a constantly-evolving ecosystem demands. The always-open market breeds a culture of FOMO. On Sunday, a conversation on mental health was led by Yana Sosnovskaya of Zora, where artists expressed the anxiety of seeing their NFT prices fluctuate, and others shared the pressure they felt to have all the right expertise and language in the Discord. A great way to deal with the ups and downs of crypto and Web3, one attendee said, was “to have friends who don’t know what crypto and Web3 is.”

Despite the anxieties, there was a hopeful and quietly rebellious energy to the weekend, perhaps not unlike the gold prospectors who rushed the region in the 1860s, most of whom came up empty-handed. These Friends With Benefits seemed happy simply to find relief from pandemic loneliness and a place to channel millennial disillusionment. That’s a party I can get behind. Whether or not it yields gold feels beside the point.

The world’s driest desert, the Atacama in Chile, is a wonderland of natural phenomena. Along with the expected cacti-studded landscapes and craggy canyons, there are towering red sand dunes and salt flats that are home to flamingos, snow-capped expanses studded with geysers, and a delightful oasis at the center of it all. The Atacama desert offers the best stargazing on the planet—and a seemingly endless cache of textile waste.

Fashion is empowering, energetic, and emotional. The industry can also be frivolous. It’s estimated that 39,000 tons of textile waste are dumped in the Atacama desert each year. And it is just one of the world’s landscapes overflowing with clothing waste. According to some reports, 90% of clothing is thrown away long before it should be, which has significant negative effects on the global environment. Perhaps more shocking: Less than 1% of discarded clothes are recycled into new garments.

The reality of the Atacama (and similar textile dumping sites) deeply resonated with Electrolux. As experts in clothing care, the world’s second-largest appliance maker is an industry leader focusing on sustainability. And as the Swedish company develops advanced garment-care technologies, that are gentle on fabrics to preserve their quality, it is committing to a goal of making clothes last twice as long for half the environmental impact by 2030. Extending the life of clothes by just nine months, for example, can reduce their climate impact by 20-30% in terms of the water used and waste produced. The Atacama is a metaphor for how unsustainable fast fashion has become, which can incite a critical conversation about the need for taking better care of garments to make them last longer.

Powerful Partnerships

In addition to technological goals, Electrolux has collaborated with visionary sustainability leaders. One such initiative is with Rave Review, a Swedish design duo dedicated to crafting high-end fashion with upcycled materials. Together the brands imagined a capsule collection created solely from discarded garments sourced from the Atacama desert.

The collaboration is a model for how designers can approach upcycling—it’s about rescuing waste materials to exalt and beautify them. “We all must change in one way or another,” says Livia Schück, Rave Review’s co-Founder and Creative Director. “When it comes to fashion, taking care of what we already have is probably the most tangible and easy way to do it.”

After being salvaged from the desert and shipped to Stockholm, the chosen garments were washed and cut. The designers then built their creations based on available fabrics. All clothes were then dyed in an Electrolux high-efficiency washing machine in hues of purple and green. In this design, the duo wanted to reinforce the feeling of imperfections and create character in the fabric, making it even more eye-catching.

In tune with the circular purpose of the initiative, the collection will not be for sale; instead, its purpose is to provoke a conversation about the ability to reuse fabrics.

Waste not, want not—one key to mitigating fashion’s environmental footprint is through garment care that extends closet longevity. Consumer behavior can have an impact: We are what we wear, and individual change can help break the pattern to achieve progress in the fight against the climate crisis. In partnership with Electrolux, here are some simple yet impactful tips for creating a sustainable wardrobe.

Take Care: On average, clothes are worn only ten times and thrown away long before they need to be. Making them last longer not only saves time and money, it cuts our consumption and helps reduce our carbon footprint. And it all starts with more sustainable laundry practices.
Step one: Wash less. Unless something is visibly dirty or hard on the nose, challenge yourself to wear your garments at least three times before they hit the laundry.
Step two: Reduce the amount of detergent you use and go for liquid rather than powder. Liquid detergents tend to work better than powder in eco-friendly cold-water wash cycles and are gentler on fabrics. As a rule, use half the prescribed amount of detergent and half a cup of baking soda, which acts as a detergent booster. This will make your clothes just as clean and can help you lower your footprint.
Step three: Turn down the temperature. According to the company, if colder washes became the norm across Europe, it could be the equivalent of removing more than 1.3 million cars from the road. “Lowering wash temperatures and switching to liquid detergent from powder could mean saving the equivalent of approximately 50kg [110 pounds] of CO2 per appliance per year. It could create a huge impact when scaled up to millions of consumers following the same example,” says Vanessa Butani, Electrolux VP for Group Sustainability.

Invest in Pieces: Buying long-lasting items is the ultimate sustainable power move. Choose cross-functional and versatile staples to get more use per wear. And be ready to eschew trends. By repeating favorites (and buying less), you can help to reduce unnecessary landfill waste and diminish your overall environmental impact.

Repair and Store Right: Another key to giving your closet longevity is proper storage. Invest in shoe trees, for example, and cubes for sweaters. Repair is also an essential part of sustainability. Buy from brands with alteration and repair services, and look for local specialists, including tailors and cobblers, to help maintain your garments.

The most sustainable clothes are the ones we already have. Find out how to make them last longer at experience.electrolux.com/breakthepattern.

Put simply, mental health is health. But for women and girls—especially those from marginalized communities—it’s an aspect of human health that continues to be underfunded and undervalued. For this year’s Global Mental Health Day on October 10th, the kate spade new york Social Impact Council is raising awareness of the importance between female empowerment and mental health—two issues that have historically been seen as separate, but are in fact very interconnected. The Council is an inspiring lineup of women activists, each with unique backgrounds, who are focused on initiatives that work toward one overarching belief: Good mental health is a fundamental right, and is now more than important than ever.

Founded in January of 2022, the kate spade new york Social Impact Council champions women and girls on a global scale by financially supporting organizations that empower gender and mental health as a primary objective. This year, kate spade new york and its foundation, in partnership with the Social Impact Council, are investing over two million dollars to provide access to women’s empowerment and mental health resources around the world, with the ultimate goal of empowering 100,000 women and girls with mental health support by 2025. Watch the video above to get to know this collective of galvanizing leaders, and read on to learn more about each.

Taraji P. Henson

You know Taraji P. Henson from barrier-breaking films and television. What you might not know about the charismatic, award-winning actor, filmmaker and entrepreneur is that, in fall 2018, she launched the Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation in honor of her late father who struggled from mental health challenges without support or resources. The foundation’s mission is to get rid of stigmas around mental health in the Black community.

“World Mental Health Day is taking a very difficult conversation and putting it on a global platform. When you do that, you dismantle stigmas,” Henson explains. “Every walk of life, people suffer from anxiety and mental health struggles, so it’s important that we have these platforms to talk about such a heavy subject. You create these circles of people where you can create a safe space to talk about the hard subjects in life; you find commonalities with other humans and you build from there.”

Elisha London

A UK-based entrepreneur and mental health advocate, Elisha London is the Founder and CEO of Prospira Global, a mental health consultancy that works with businesses, philanthropists and investors to implement mental health support programs. London’s personal and professional journey has focused on mental health for years now. Prior to her launching Prospira Global, she was the director of the Heads Together campaign, a mental health initiative from the royal foundation. In 2018, London founded United for Global Mental Health, an organization which works to raise awareness, reduce stigma, and increase support for mental health on a global scale. “Having good mental health is about having a healthy mind that enables a life well lived,” she says.

Catherine Tinsley

Catherine Tinsley is a chair professor in the management department at Georgetown University. There, she studies gender dynamics in organizations as well as personal and social perceptions, which she describes as how we process information and form judgments about other people.

In her view, “Mental health is about balance. It’s about awareness. It’s about some modest amount of self control. You can’t stop yourself from having feelings and you can’t stop the ups and downs of life, but good mental health creates a positive boundary between you and the outside world.” In her role as an expert on gender intelligent leadership, Tinsley has participated in global symposiums as a speaker on the role confidence plays in economic empowerment for women.

Latham Thomas

Latham Thomas works to advance reproductive justice and birth equity. She’s the founder of Mama Glow, a maternity lifestyle business that includes a women’s center and a roster of doulas who support women at every stage of reproduction. She also launched the Mama Glow Foundation—an organization focused on birth equity that works to transform reproductive health in the United States through education, advocacy, and the arts.

“A lot of us suffer because we don’t have access to a sense of empowerment. We don’t have access to a sense of personal wellbeing,” she says. “Our mental health is just as important as every aspect of our wellbeing. In the West, we separate physical health from mental health and emotional health, [but] all of this is connected.”

Jazz Thornton

New Zealand mental health advocate, award-winning film director, and author Jazz Thornton co-founded Voices of Hope, a non-profit working to erase the stigma around mental health, in 2014. Her short film, Dear Suicidal Me, captures real people—including herself—reading suicide notes they wrote, then explaining why they’re grateful to be alive. It struck a major chord, garnering over 80 million views within the first 48 hours of being posted online.

“Empowerment means knowing that you have the potential to live out whatever it is that you may want to do,” she says. “For me, growing up facing mental health battles from such a young age is what made me understand the importance of talking about it, learning how to look after your own mental health, and also how to look after the mental health of those around you.”

Norette Turimuci

As the former executive director of Resonate—a leading women’s social enterprise in East Africa that offers education and confidence-building workshops to women and girls—and a gender equality advocate, Norette Turimuci has dedicated her career to empowering and fostering future female leaders.

When asked, during our video shoot, to define mental health she said, “Mental health is when my thoughts and my heart are aligned in a space that is free of judgment, of guilt, of shame, of control, of worry, and when it has space for gratitude. For feeling grateful for life, for my own being, and for feeling like I deserve to be here.”

A memorable date doesn’t have to be as extravagant as a fancy candlelit dinner at the hottest neighborhood bistro. There are plenty of ways to show your partner you care, all in the comfort of your own home. And, no, we’re not encouraging another round of streaming roulette before calling it a night. We’re talking about truly fun and innovative ways to spend time together—right in your backyard, living room, or kitchen.

Partake In a Friendly Cocktail Contest

A little healthy competition is always a good time—and so is a tasty drink. Why not marry the two and challenge each other to a mixology competition? Choose a single spirit, like Johnnie Walker High Rye, then assemble two identical baskets of ingredients. Turn on some tunes and get mixing, each of you creating a unique cocktail for the other. Trade drinks, give a little cheers, take a sip, and rate each other’s beverages on a scale from 1 to 5 for presentation, creativity, and taste. Whoever wins is exempt from cleanup duty.

Play—or Learn—in Cyberspace

Board games can wait. There’s an emergence of online experiences that will make you feel like you’ve been transported well beyond your four walls. Take a peek at a virtual event platform where you’ll find all kinds of games—murder mysteries, trivia, Bingo, escape rooms—as well as classes such as whisky tastings and chocolate making. Choose an activity and spend some quality time making memories with your boo. For even more fun, make it a double (or triple) date, and invite some friends to join you.

Set Up A Spa Night

For something a little more low-key, turn your bedroom into the ultimate spa experience. Go all out in terms of setting the mood—don your coziest robes, turn down the overheads, light lots of candles, and turn on some new age music. Break out your essential oils and give each other sultry massages, run a bath, set up a home pedicure station, or lie back on the couch with homemade face masks on your skin and cucumbers over your eyes. Use this time to relax together at the end of a long week and reconnect with your partner.

Host a Staycation

Don’t bother jetting to the tropics for the weekend—bring the island to you! Pick a destination, then go all in on it. “Travel” to Hawaii and dress up like you’re heading to a luau—even though you’re just rolling into the living room. Whip up cocktails made with Johnnie Walker High Rye and tropical favorites like pineapple and coconut, turn on some yacht rock, and lounge in beach chairs set up right on your carpet. Make like a tourist and embrace those steamy, shore-front feels.

Go Camping…

…in your backyard, that is! On a clear, balmy night, there’s nothing better than spending the evening under the stars with your partner, complete with a romantic campfire to cozy up around. Pitch a tent stocked with lots of fluffy pillows and blankets, then mix yourselves a pitcher of your favorite cocktail made with Johnnie Walker High Rye. Set up a s’mores bar, light your bonfire, then sit back and relax. For bonus points, drape a white sheet over a low-hanging branch and project your partner’s favorite rom-com onto it for a movie under the stars.

Maria Claudia “Cloclo” Echavarría has always known the treasures that her native Colombia holds. Though she was educated in Switzerland, has lived in London, and now resides in Milan, Cartagena has remained her family’s base. So when the announcement of Echavarría’s engagement to Prince Josef-Emanuel of Liechtenstein was made last July, there was little doubt that a very Colombian wedding would be in store. The bride, co-founder of former talent incubator/fashion consultancy Sí Collective, has dedicated herself to raising the profiles of Latin American designers, and her wedding, a weeklong, three-destination affair, was no exception. “It was important to me to keep the team as local as possible, and to be able to truly offer our guests a taste of the best of Colombia,” Echavarría says. “Colombians are so proud of our country, and we want people to see and experience everything it has to offer.” Here’s how the couple celebrated across three cities.

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Cartagena

Among the first to receive a call: childhood friends and designers Esteban Cortázar and Edgardo Osorio. Cortázar, despite having created many a wedding dress, had never designed one for a wedding in Cartagena. “It’s one of the most romantic cities, and it has always inspired me. You’re walking down the street and it’s like you’re in a Gabriel García Márquez novel,” says Cortázar, who had the idea of fashioning the dress from antique linens in order to stand up to the Caribbean heat, appeal to the bride’s passion for sustainability, and feel sufficiently grand for a royal wedding.

“Cloclo has impeccable taste, but she’s also a down-to-earth girl, so I wanted to create something that would command attention,” he says. “I envisioned her as the Princess of Cartagena, a mix of both worlds, because she’s lived all over the world but she’s always been in touch with her roots.” The grandeur of the church, the 16th-century Iglesia de San Pedro Claver, called for a long train, which was created in part by joining four enormous, early-1900s curtain panels found in Paris—pushing the bride out of her usual flats and into skyscraping platforms by Osorio, founder of shoe brand Aquazzura. Osorio embellished the pumps with remnants from the dress fabric.

After the ceremony, guests rode chivas (distinctly Colombian open-air buses) through dense crowds hoping to catch a glimpse of the newlyweds as they emerged to the sounds of traditional drummers and dancers, whose white cotton dresses echoed the bride’s. The dancers were “totally a surprise to Josef, which shows on his face in many of the photos!” Echavarría says. “Cloclo was absolutely sure she wanted to have the reception at home,” says her mother, legendary hostess Evelia “Chiqui” de Echavarría, who started planning last summer. “I said, ‘Oh my God, I have to get all the orchids now, so that they’ll flower in March.’” Flower they did, complementing the lush garden Chiqui has been cultivating for decades. And when she decided that the space still wasn’t quite green enough for her liking? She hired an artist to paint vines on the white walls and ceiling.

After the dinner, catered by Juan Felipe Camacho of restaurant Don Juan, and the cake, a coconut and mamey pie by Cartagena’s Pastelería Mila, musicians playing vallenato got the party started, followed by a salsa band and DJ Carlos Mejia. The Echavarrías’ parties are legendary, but knowing a full day at the beach awaited them, most of the guests retired before dawn.

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Barú

Barú, a small island where the Echavarría family has a thatched-roof beach house, feels a world away, making it the ideal spot for guests—including the Grand Duke of Luxembourg and family, handbag designer Carolina Santo Domingo, and Princesses Maria Laura and Luisa of Belgium—to unwind after the previous day’s festivities. Echavarría arrived in a hand-crocheted minidress created with costume and set designer Diego Guarnizo (it was decorated with shells at her mother’s boutique, Casa Chiqui) and a bikini designed with Cali-based Juan De Dios. “I wanted to highlight artisans and smaller brands that might not be as internationally recognized,” Echavarría says. “This has always been central to my work and something I believe in strongly, beyond it being a professional endeavor.” Later, she changed into a Gabriela Hearst dress, with Casa Chiqui earrings and a headpiece by her cousin Lucia’s brand, Magnetic Midnight.

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Bogotá

A few days’ break before the celebration’s wrap-up in Bogotá gave guests ample time to explore Colombia. A country house owned by Echavarría’s aunts stood in for an Alpine setting as guests donned tracht (traditional garments of German-speaking countries) and explored a fruit and flower market created by Guarnizo. The Alpine-style table linens—created in collaboration with illustrator Crystal Ochoa, a former Sí Collective director—featured yellow embroidered butterflies, reminiscent of Gabriel García Márquez’s symbol of love, hope, and peace. The motif recurred throughout the week, in the invitations and even fluttering around events. “The whole process felt like working with friends,” Echavarría says. “From putting together my looks, to developing the graphics and choosing the vendors, it felt like I was tapping into my network of loved ones.”

This article appeared in the August 2022 issue of ELLE.

When I was 23 years old, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Little did I know just how straightforward cancer treatment would be relative to the unknowns I’ve struggled to wrap my head around in the eight years since—namely, my fertility.

Since finishing treatment (a relatively standard protocol of a double mastectomy followed by three months of chemotherapy and one month of radiation), perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve become unequivocally obsessed with my health. When you realize just how fragile something is, coupled with a type A personality, you want to do everything in your power to be proactive and get ahead of it. Sadly, this is where the healthcare system, designed to be reactionary, fails us. None of my doctors cared to engage in a conversation about my reproductive future. It was up to me to figure out how to optimize, execute, and in some instances, totally recalibrate.

And that’s where things can get dangerous. As a motivated patient dedicated to minimizing my risk of cancer recurrence, I resorted to the internet and the wellness industry writ large to supplement what I wished my doctors would tell me. I wound up self-experimenting according to what I heard has worked for others (intermittent fasting, keto, IV therapy, HRT…the list goes on), who don’t necessarily share the same medical history, risks, or even goals. And then I held my breath, waiting for my desired outcome, hoping I didn’t cause any harm to myself or my body in the process.

I followed the guidance I received through podcasts, blogs, and Dr. Google. I became so restrictive about what I should and couldn’t eat, and when I should eat, that I pushed myself into a chronic state of stress. In other words, my body shut down.

Given how far along we are in the wellness boom, and how prevalent women are as consumers of wellness services, it’s surprising just how little many of us know about our own bodies. With the conversation now trending towards maximizing longevity and slowing down the aging process, it’s no surprise women are constantly trimming fat, restricting calories, doing HIIT workouts, etc. Unbeknownst to me, the research around these modalities has primarily been done on men, and their constitution and their hormones are jarringly different from mine. According to a 2010 study from the National Institute of Health, “Underrepresentation of females in animal models of disease is commonplace, and our understanding of female biology is compromised by these deficiencies.” In fact, it’s mostly the opposite advice anyone trying to get pregnant should follow. “Wellness” is not created equal, nor is it one “time” fits all.

Ultimately, that’s where I went wrong. I tried to optimize without any guidance, and ended up hurting myself—and my fertility—along the way. Eight years into remission, and my pregnancy journey ended up being way more complex than my cancer journey. I struggled to figure out why I was no longer ovulating or producing a period. I went through several rounds of IVF and IUI, but ignored the big elephant in the room: my weight. I was too skinny (my BMI was hovering around 16.4) and stressed, and each step in the process somehow made it worse. After several failed IVF attempts, I pursued surrogacy. I feel extremely fortunate to have been able to choose that path, but if I could do it all over, I would tell myself to just gain five to 10 pounds and try my best to relax.

The fact of the matter is, I should have received a more comprehensive approach to my fertility. I went to the best reproductive endocrinologist in New York City. He looked at my hormone levels and was confident my deficiencies would be resolved through IVF alone. As long as I took the required medications, he said, I should have no problem getting pregnant. Two miscarriages later, I realized it was time to get a second opinion.

What I later learned was, yes, I could get pregnant, but I couldn’t carry a healthy pregnancy until I reversed the damage I had done to my thyroid and hormone health. To this day, it’s hard to say why my doctor felt the way he did. But what I do now understand is that intermittent fasting coupled with an overly restrictive diet, overwork, and overexercise is not the way to support fertility—at all. According to a 2022 study using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, “There [is] a non-linear relationship between BMI and infertility, with each unit increase in BMI reducing the risk of infertility by 33 percent when BMI was < 19.5 kg/m2.” I had been so focused on optimizing my health for cancer prevention, that I had lost sight of how my obsession with my health and wellness was actually hurting, not helping.

I can’t say I look back on my cancer or infertility experience fondly, but I am grateful for the insights I gathered, because it led me to build The Lanby, a healthcare members club. Wellness, just like medicine, needs to be personalized. Healthcare requires an integrative approach, and we can’t rely exclusively on physicians to carry that burden. I wish I had been able to collaborate with a registered dietician (or in our case, a designated wellness advisor), who could’ve guided me to a healthier lifestyle around my needs and goals at the time. Equally importantly, wellness modalities should be monitored and tracked by a medical professional to ensure patients are optimizing safely and effectively.

As a “professional” patient, it’s easy to see just what needs to be done to bypass the archaic, incomplete, factory-like experience of traditional primary care, in favor of a healthcare system that considers our future as well as whatever is ailing us in the present.

I was 45 when I had my first hot flash—arguably the most common of the vasomotor symptoms (VMS) associated with menopause. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before: This whoosh of heat appeared out of nowhere and spread quickly through my body. Then, just like that, it was gone, leaving me sweaty and irritated. I’d heard about this phenomenon from my friends who had already approached menopause, so I realized that what I had just experienced was, indeed, a hot flash, not some strange illness, and that there were plenty more in my future.

The worst part was the frequency, coming every 20 minutes or so. Right after getting out of the shower and applying my makeup, I’d have a hot flash, leaving me feeling like I needed to jump back in the shower and start all over again.

Since they never lasted very long, I decided I could handle them and would hang in there unless they began interfering dramatically with my quality of life. Unfortunately, they began interfering dramatically with my quality of life. Overnight, it seemed, elements of my daily routine were now being challenged in unmistakable ways:

• My stress levels went up. The intensity and length of each hot flash quickly went from being simply irritating to extremely uncomfortable, leaving me short-tempered and sweaty. I soon discovered that stress not only triggers a hot flash, but the stress of having a hot flash exacerbates the intensity of that hot flash!

• I changed my approach to getting dressed. I never found a natural product, cream, or vitamin that worked for me, so I made lifestyle tweaks. Because of my tendency to become extremely hot and then very cold afterward—thanks to sweat-induced damp clothing—I dressed in layers. Loose clothing was also a must, while white jeans were completely off-limits.

• My skin broke out. That’s not all—my face became ultra-sensitive. And for the first time in my life, I had rosacea [a common skin condition characterized by redness and visible blood vessels in the face]. Making matters worse—and treatment tricky—some parts of my face were oily, while other areas were dry.

• I wore less makeup. My old routine became obsolete pretty quickly. On days I could get away with it, I went without makeup altogether. Otherwise, I pared back my look. I kept a stash of towelettes, powder compact, travel-size baby powder, a small spray can of facial mist, and a personal fan in my handbag at all times. I lived in the South at that point, and the summer heat only added to my misery. I’d turn on the air conditioning in my car ahead of time to cool it down before I got behind the wheel. I remember vividly pulling up to a boutique, dressed for a day of shopping, and having a terrible, prolonged hot flash. I broke into a sweat, my hair and makeup were ruined, my dress was soaked through, and I couldn’t do anything but drive away.

• I swore off foods that turned up the heat. It felt like my internal temperature regulator was out of whack and certain foods made things worse. I knew that giving up coffee or tea was not something I wanted to do, so I didn’t try that, but I stayed away from spicy foods.

VMS Relief… At Last

After six months, my VMS had become untenable. I knew I couldn’t let my schedule be determined by hot flashes, causing me to stay home, or return home during the day just to take another shower and get dressed all over again. I needed help, which ended up being a bit of a process. One doctor suggested I take homeopathic pills for any symptoms that might occur, but that did nothing to alleviate my symptoms, which now included sleeplessness and irritability.

After white-knuckling it for several more months, I finally found a doctor who helped me find an effective treatment. Since then, my symptoms have disappeared and my skin isn’t as dry either. I’m sure homeopathic medicines and teas and staying away from foods like chocolate and coffee work for some women, but sadly this wasn’t the case for me. I have a strong relationship with my new doctor, and together we’re building a plan for me as I move through menopause.

A Fresh Start

Menopause may seem like an ending, but for me it feels like a new beginning. For one thing, there are no more periods, PMS, cramps, and monthly mood swings. Also, if you’re in good health and fairly active, you still have time to make an impact on this world. You may even decide—like I did—to start a business at age 50. All the new possibilities are very exciting.

Best of all, you quit sweating the small stuff—pun intended!

Alison Bruhn is a New York City-based personal stylist and cofounder of The Style That Binds Us.

I’ve never read a self-help book before. I don’t like when people tell me what to do, and I really hate when they’re telling everyone else the same thing. Yet here I am, earnestly and soberly poring over a quiz in a self-help book about relationships, which I actually spent money on because I’m 33 years old, and I’ve been single my entire life.

Not single “for a long time,” but single forever, the whole time. Single may not even be the right word, because absence implies a memory of what once took its place. I’m single the way a baby is single.

By most sociocultural standards established since the beginning of time, my adult life could be viewed as inadequate and incomplete, if not tragic.

One thing about being unhappily single in your thirties—besides the very real biological and social pressure to reproduce—is everybody thinks there must be a reason why. A reason that you must be somewhat content with or aware of, if you’re taking no steps to improve your situation. As long as a person is unhappily single, there must be something wrong. You must need help.

Everyone has an opinion, whether I ask for it or not. Even strangers assume the authority to spit out armchair wisdom about what I need to do, acknowledge, let go of; how to get out of my comfort zone or “be open” or whatever. Because, of course, it’s the task of the single person to receive and carry out any instruction from self-help books, magazines, friends, coworkers, mothers, people on buses, seminars, cab drivers, etc.

When it’s not friends or Uber drivers with hollow clichés and prepackaged, one-size-fits-all advice, it’s middle-aged businessmen at hotel bars or chatty randoms on airplanes with the gall to throw the question at me, shaking their heads like I’m a math problem. Sometimes it’s people I’d hoped might be interested themselves, men who would go on to kiss or sleep with me, and even those who’d already done so.

“Why are you single?” they press, in disbelief or suspicion, rattling off my many fantastic qualities.

Rarely am I speechless. But I never have a witty quip in response to this question, and the words you tell me feel like glass shards leaving my throat. “Slavery, white women,” I replied once. Another time, on what I’d foolishly thought to be a date, I pressed my palms to the table and announced, “I believe I am the least desirable woman in America.”

“I’m just not in a good place for a relationship right now,” they say, before starting one with somebody else a week later. One such man lamented to me that he was an anxious avoidant personality. Usually, they’re just hung up on their exes.

When white guys say it, I hate that I have to wonder if they’re also trying to avoid the reality of actually having a Black girlfriend—bringing her home to the family in Maryland or Milwaukee; potentially adjusting the makeup of his social life; becoming compelled, as if possessed, to blurt out, “My girlfriend’s Black,” in defense, or as confession, explanation, excuse.

“You deserve someone better,” they say. But “I’m not good enough for you” is just another way of making the rejection feel like my fault. No one answers the question.

I mentioned the anxious avoidant terminology to my psychiatrist, the one who’s always telling me to go on dates, and who’s been trying to steer me away from “young men who are artist types.” She recommended this book on “attachment styles” and explained how the authors suggest that people are either anxious, secure, or avoidant in relationships. She said I’m attracting the wrong attachment style. So I bought the self-help book and endeavored to read it.

I barely skim the intro, guiltlessly gliding over the authors’ case studies about their friends—Pam’s low self-esteem, Sam’s obsession with his ex, Eli’s boredom with his marriage—but when I read the bulleted list of each attachment style’s tendencies, my throat drops to my stomach: Every column’s unhealthy patterns and self-sabotaging behaviors ring uncomfortably true. In lime-green pen I write lol next to a short paragraph on the “rare combination of attachment anxiety and avoidance,” a category that “only a small percentage of the population falls into,” because it describes 99 percent of my dating pool. You can find anxious avoidant people, me included, among most “artist types,” especially the young men.

I know what you’re thinking.

“Have you tried the apps?”

Everyone offers examples of happily committed app users, sometimes including themselves. Even people who don’t know what the apps are suggest I try the apps. People love the apps.

I created my first online dating profile fresh out of college and still hopeful, curled up on a curb-salvaged loveseat in the funeral home for mice that was my Avenue C apartment. My roommate, who worked in fashion, told me it was an “instant confidence booster.” After 10 years and countless starts and stops—including profiles ghostwritten by expert friends and even a full-year premium membership at no small cost, albeit subscribed to by an accidental slip of the thumb—I’ve formally decided I hate the apps.

My thing about the apps: They make me feel terrible about myself. Like I’m back in middle school. Like I’m watching The Bachelor or whatever reality show it is, with all the white women standing in a line being desired. Like I’ve felt too many times before.

Once something becomes a cultural phenomenon—a mode of communication, an economic system—it begins to feel necessary, and not engaging with it means risking detachment or ostracization. For this and other reasons, including smoking bans on planes, I hate living when I do, and hope eternal for a more suitable placement in my next lifetime.

In order to even be considered eligible for courtship, you have to first be good at taking pictures of yourself on a phone, which projects your face back at you, taunting. You would be judged only by this snapshot of yourself, conveying just a hint of a personality—careful! Not too much!—and a level of sex appeal on par with that of an “Instagram model,” whatever that is.

And it’s not just that there’s no smoking on planes, it’s also those little pictures of cigarettes slashed through with a hard red line, glaring at me from every surface. The reminder of restriction.

I hate taking pictures of myself on my phone. I don’t care to spend time staring back at myself in reverse, practicing a face. Instead, I’m good with words, and I’ve tried to develop my awkward version of in-person charm—what one reader called “a quirky and relatable vibe.”

Vibes and words on dating profiles are secondary at best and might go unread entirely. There’s no point in fretting over authenticity when most of the messages you receive just say hey, how’s your day going? copied and pasted with no personalization or effort required, like being seduced by a greeting card that’s blank inside. The About Me doesn’t matter because “bored, might delete” would perfectly suffice; and the standard template on both ends is little more than I’m just a regular girl, I love music, food, and staying fit! Down for an afternoon hike and a craft beer?

Nothing against the regular girl, whom I probably know and love. She’s by all cultural standards happier than I am. She gets to relax, check off the boxes of adulthood, certain of her worth and beauty. I’m not and don’t really want to be just a regular girl. But I want what she has, what she seems to so easily get.

The Why are you single? conundrum has sidled up easily to the shame I’ve felt about the ugly sides of my depression, which piggybacked nicely on the isolation of growing up a weird Black girl in a traditional white suburb. It’s not like I needed any extra encouragement to discipline and punish my every flaw, everything that makes me different, anything that someone else might not like about me.

How would I act or even feel if there were no movies, self-help studies, or think pieces teaching me how, teaching all of us the same how, telling us what to desire?

I’m a scholar of my surface-level self-esteem stuff and the African American self-esteem stuff, the consequences of an unconventional artist lifestyle, being intimidating, fearing commitment, and abandonment and intimacy and rejection—basically all the fears. I understand my culpability and self-sabotage. (Additionally, it cannot be overstated how impactful the transatlantic slave trade and its resulting political and economic values has been in determining the results of my love life.)

I’ve been Girl with Impossibly High Standards, Girl Who Puts Career First, Girl Who Self-Sabotages Out of Fear, Girl Who Needs to Love Herself First, and Girl Who Gets in Her Own Way, Girl with Unresolved Questions About Sexuality, Girl with Unhealthy Trauma-Based Defenses. I’ve lived and shed every rom-com protagonist’s problems.

There’s a cultural assumption that as soon as you’ve worked those things out, you find your person and start making a family/household/life. Until then, you’re not ready, and you’re tasked with headbutting and knocking down each internal issue, no matter how much it hurts or how unfair it is that you must assess, Valentine’s Day after Valentine’s Day, what’s wrong about your body or “energy” or psychology or vocabulary or life choices.

Surely not even half the people who’ve been in love have endured such extensive and unceasing analysis. It seems other people quit critical self-assessment as soon as they’re seriously partnered, and instead assume the authority to assess what’s wrong with me and the life choices I’ve made. Unlike me, they have a piece of paper someone signed, promising not to freak out and leave when they’re having a bad mental health day.

Before I’ve seen such commitment with my own eyes, how can I be sure?

Until you’ve been in love, until you’ve had your heart broken, there’s a large portion of popular culture that’s sung at a pitch you can’t hear. I can’t sit through an episode of Sex and the City without spiraling into a fervent scree about expectations of femininity and pointing out oppressive value systems.

Lately, even true crime pisses me off, because serial killers on death row are somehow managing to fall in love left and right. I can’t stop thinking about how many chances for plots I’ve missed, and how I’d never wear that or put up with that, and that must be the reason I’m alone.

I went through high school without a boyfriend; college without a boyfriend or girlfriend; my twenties without cohabitation or postbreakup Ben & Jerry’s; no sloppy one-night stands at a bar in Williamsburg or a club on the Lower East Side turned into anything more. As years go by, narrative after narrative evades me; the possible storylines and adventures dwindle, and little gasps of optimism deflate, and deflate, and deflate.

There is a difference between being single in your thirties and being “still single” in your thirties. Even I get turned off by restaurants on Seamless with no reviews and none of the stars colored in. Not worth the risk when there are so many other options with rave reviews and familiar names.

I know it’s not like I missed my chance or anything, but part of me mourns the love stories that could’ve been.

What I mean is: I’ve grown up from a lonely girl into an alone woman.

The attachment-style quiz is the main appeal of the self-help book for me, a former straight-A student happy to be given a tangible task, instead of “practice being more open.” In spite of steadfast doubt that I’ll be in any way transformed by the book’s theories, I catch a gust of excitement at the prospect of righting the wrong of my style, the promise of becoming secure and even potentially attracting a secure person.

In chapters 3 and 4, the authors promise a two-step process for determining my attachment style and that of my partner. I skip the worksheet asking me to list examples from past relationships, and the whole chapter about the partner, triggered and ashamed that I can’t even advance to step two. I sternly tell myself to discard the feeling that I’m automatically disqualified, beyond help. My most comparable experience to real relationships is situationships. So, not nothing. But kind of nothing. I satisfy my sexual needs by waiting around for “hanging out” to turn into drunk, which then turns into “hooking up”—or, simply put, I have sex with my friends. Ours is a generation that thrives on vagueness, whatever gives us the most leeway in the end. We don’t go on dates, we “hang out”; we despise labels.

None of the authors’ case studies depict someone in this label-less predicament, devoid of exes altogether. I scan my heart’s memories, searching for any dalliance that might, with the right embellishment, suffice as data, at least for these purposes.

I’ve briefly entertained infrequent and ill-fated possibilities for romance, but one could convincingly classify all these instances as flings or one-night stands or some variation/combination thereof—flirtations I knew wouldn’t work out but irrationally hoped might finally be my romantic storyline. Growing up I was the guys’ “closest girl friend,” first by default, as the less desirable option than the white girl, then when I realized there was little hope in escaping the platonic identity. At least I could delude myself into imagining a Will-they-or-won’t-they? plot brewing three layers below reality. There are a lot of movies with romantic narratives like this, so probability-wise, the friend zone isn’t the absolute worst place to hang out. But situationships are just wax fruits in a bowl: They look like the real thing until you try to taste.

I take the attachment-style quiz like it’s the fucking SAT, reading and rereading every statement, hounding myself to be truthful (how much would I care if I saw my date checking out someone else, really?), counting and recounting and crossing things out. I even put it down and return to it days later with fresh eyes.

This is the kind of thing I choose to take seriously or assume that I must. With any luck, correctly calculating my score will illuminate the long-elusive question posed by men in my bed and kind old ladies alike: Why are you single?

I’ve been genuinely trying to “be open” and “put myself out there.” I go to bars alone like it’s my job, and I even look around, resisting the glow of my phone and merely pretending to read. But what I’ve found is nobody is interested in looking at anyone, not right away, not by any means of effort. At least not at me. What I’ve found are people scrolling Tinder. In the bar. Right next to a single person. Never making contact, not even to say, hey, how’s your day going?

In real life, no handsome stranger reaches for the same bell pepper in the produce section, no glances are exchanged in bookstore aisles, no martini appears “from the gentleman at the end of the bar.” Everyone is terrible, and putting yourself out there really means putting yourself into the phone, where someone might actually be looking.

It’s a tie: five points in the anxious category; five points in secure. In the avoidant category, one point.

I believe my singleness should be considered a community issue; that anyone who knows and regularly interacts with me should be as equally invested in my struggle-search for love. But since the apps became ubiquitous, nobody has set me up.

It’s much easier (read: effortless) to blurt the name of an app you saw on a commercial than to ponder who might be eligible, let alone reach out to facilitate a setup. Personally, I wonder why they’d rather me meet a stranger on the internet with a one-line About Me, who could be a murderer or rapist or regular old white supremacist, than to suggest a mediocre date with a mediocre guy from their office cafeteria. At least I’d know he’s a proper human, and if I disappeared, they’d have a lead.

In our early twenties, singleness was a community issue. We took our responsibility as wingpersons moderately seriously, prioritizing locations where we might meet potential mates, scanning rooms and doing a lap around the dance floor for prospects. This is no longer the goal of the collective. It’s just my problem. I am nobody’s responsibility.

Something else about the apps: They’re like a whole fucking part-time job. Apparently, you have to put in several hours a week, otherwise you won’t even show up on anybody’s radar.

As if. I could write four whole books with all that time, and have.

Another game-changing storyline I missed is meeting someone before I became a “public figure” (i.e., on Wikipedia).

As I chose poetry readings over clubs, blazers over party tops, I was aware on a surface level that I was guilty of “putting my career first” and risking prospects. I sort of expected to be in the musical-chairs conundrum I’m in, feeling like I missed an important window. But I didn’t realize that by the time I was ready for a relationship, I wouldn’t be just a “person” anymore, that I’d have another incarnation.

I’m “out there,” everywhere, a lot. According to several unhelpful opinions, that’s part of the problem. Flaunting a gregarious stage presence has done little to quash my problem of being “intimidating,” feedback I first received at age 12.

If you’re an artist in front of an audience, your best bet is to take whatever you already are and make it extra, be yourself to the extreme. In dating, the opposite is advised. Apparently, you’re not supposed to put it all out there at once. I find this vehemently counterintuitive, if not insulting.

It would be impossible for me to mind the traditional rules about stuff you’re not supposed to say on a first date, since I say it all the time to audiences across the country. I’m just not in the habit of being demure or mysterious. What’s the point of a slow reveal, if my whole job is going around talking about how sad I am, blowing off any opportunity to be coy or cutesy? I think that’s why I find even the idea of dating boring. Who has the time to pretend to be one person, then hope your partner doesn’t notice you slowly morphing into another, more complicated, and less shiny version?

In the absence of real intimacy, without proper experience or acceptance of it, I’ve practically professionalized vulnerability—to my assistance, and to my detriment.

To one of the standard OkCupid profile prompts, The most private thing I’m willing to admit, I answer, is probably already accessible on the internet. If you Google me, one of the first things that comes up is a personal essay detailing how many antidepressants I take.

By now, my destructive patterns are obvious. It’s easier for me to hear no and dismiss it than to wait for yes. Men tell me they’re unavailable or unfit, yet obviously I pursue them, virtually begging them to make out as soon as “un-” is uttered, as soon as I know it won’t work. Traditional, practical dating rituals are so much less interesting than the outcomes of wild, destined, and illuminating love, or the opportunity for more self-loathing and sticky emotional conundrums.

Conventional dating practices might actually lead to something promising, and what then?

My primary skills of adulthood concern survival and salvage: cleaning up after my every innocent blunder; “figuring it out”; embodying man, woman, and child of the household. Flipping from one to another quicker than a code switch. To an extent, I’m incapable of imagining how I might fare or function in a couple. What if I’m too far behind, too embittered or untrusting?

Sometimes, consoling or debating a potential-love-interest-in-my-imagination about his Actual Relationship, or anxieties or philosophy books or trauma, I’m aware that this guy’s being someone he isn’t or can’t be with his current partner (who’s usually of the Carefree White Girl variety). I wonder if that makes me immediately less desirable, not sexy—knowing them on that level. Being real.

I’m not the one they choose to make official. I’ve never been wanted enough to be. I’ve also, consciously or not, chosen not to be.

Both the problem and appeal of nonrelationship relationships is that they remove any responsibility from the deal. A foolhardy attempt to resist narrative and do away with the consequences of linearity.

Part of me is romanced by these terms. There is safety in clinging to the options of only wild and sticky, in being the one to make things difficult for myself before anybody else can.

You give: blow jobs, compliments, hours of unpaid emotional labor. You get what you get.

I have a good life. Though it’s caused inordinate grief in my daily existence, my continued and seasoned identity as Single Woman in this socioeconomic situation—as my life becomes more complicated and ambitious—has required me to get creative about my definitions of romance, of fulfillment, of growth. It’s required me to reinterpret community and capacity. To be strong in surprising ways.

I am loved and cared for by a close family and warm, inspiring friends. I have my platonic “husbands”—a group of 14 diverse in race, gender, orientation, and actual marital status—who’ve committed to me at least in title, and to whom I’m willing to commit and call my people. In the absence of the real thing, and because I’ve found it is necessary.

I see how it could be easy to overlook just how handy another person is. Just how many large or small gestures that make all the difference in avoiding misfortune: missed flights, that last drink, losing your phone (a bunch of times), keeping plants watered, getting somewhere on time. Not to mention affection and, frankly, regular sex. I’m certain that as a partnered woman I’d receive far more respect from strangers and especially Black elders. I’d be safer.

I was taught that Miss and Ms. were placeholders until one grew up into Mrs. Traditional American family value systems are always in the backs of our minds. Even when we insist they’ve been transcended, even if we pledge a life of defiance against them, they still define how things are “supposed to be.”

The bylaws of American capitalism never meant for me, a descendent of slaves, to be a rights-holding citizen, or for me as a woman to be financially independent(ish). I’ve burst through several systemic barriers that should have left me dead or destitute by now. And in the same way, the social structure that adjusted itself to American capitalism is meant to favor the heteronormative patriarchal unit.

On a practical level, I’m less equipped than my cohabitating and committed peers to achieve the markers of successful and respectable adulthood, to meet all expectations without significant loss or charitable assistance. These are things I have a feeling my paired-off friends don’t take into consideration when evaluating the appropriateness of my incessant despair. While you don’t need a partner to be happy, coupledom is assumed to be an integral part of adult life and essential for anyone with too much ambition and not enough serotonin.

If, for example, I’m traveling as a Black woman with more than two suitcases, as I often am. If I forget to drink a glass of water all day. If two people are required for assembly. When sometimes, on tour in another city, I realize no other person in the world has any idea where I am or what I am doing, and nobody needs to. If I am so depressed I can’t pull myself from bed to take the dog out. If I am depressed.

If I am depressed, and I think: Who would want this mess to bear? Why would anyone take this on, and wouldn’t it be too much to ask of a co-parent, and would it even be responsible to reproduce or build a family, considering the hazard?

Sometimes, I’ll just refuse to care for myself, in protest. Just to display how incapable I am, how unreasonable it is to expect one person to be so casually adept at so many things at the exact same time.

A text notification says the number of gun owners nationally has doubled, and those who already had guns are buying more, many citing civil unrest and racial tensions as their inspiration.

The next alert tells me my OkCupid account has been deleted due to inactivity. I didn’t even know that could happen.

The problem is time. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Time means regret. Regret means self-punishment. It’s not just the general embarrassment of having the romantic subplot of my movie being introduced so late into act 2, it’s also the close-fitting sense that time runs out faster for women like me.

What if I die before getting a look at myself in the bright mirror that is partnership, before tasting what everybody’s talking about? Before finding somewhere to pour this devotion I’ve stored up, all this romance I’ve accumulated and dreamed? I’m a poet who’s never experienced true romantic love; I believe this is an American tragedy.

When I go on strike against myself, nobody is there to see the display. No one rescues me, because I’m not a damsel. I can only care for myself by myself.

These days, stillness is the new hustle, the new collective goal. I’m just as tired as we all are, just as ready to exhale. I fantasize about moving to the Valley, a suburb outside the city—settling into the aloneness I know so well, before it’s too late to get comfortable at all. Nobody wants a single artist living at the end of their suburban cul-de-sac, front porch blasting Fela in the morning and wafting weed smoke in the afternoon. Planned communities have no tables for one. Protection is built that way.

I am a 33-year-old single Black female, self-employed, mentally ill, foulmouthed and politically radical. I can’t move just anywhere. My safety is never in my control. My comfort isn’t guaranteed.

While it doesn’t invalidate my successes, the inability to achieve this one life goal—to “find love”—casts a little sorrow on the others. Even major achievements have a sour aftertaste. The more exciting things get, the more disappointed I am. Without a witness, a stakeholder, a rock—why bother?

If one is always in wait of one’s Great Love, if every story depends upon this arc, how am I to be proud of the life I’ve created, who I’ve let myself become? When am I allowed to get comfortable, feel grown? If I choose to keep hoping for a romantic plot twist, does that render my story incomplete, still a pulsing cursor? And if I settle down, officially give up fretting over profile pages and wanting more from my flings and situations, would it be resignation?

Sometimes it hurts to think about, but then I just write another book, masturbate, cry, complain on Twitter, write another book.

I’m bored of being lonely. I’ve whined about it, gotten good at it, made it useful. I’ve learned and lived with my heart, the emotional sting of yearning. But there’s still lack, and difficulty. There’s still danger, everywhere.

The self-help book collects dust on a nightstand under an inspirational-type book from my other therapist, the one who’s always telling me to “maybe just start thinking about possibly going on dates.” We don’t talk about loneliness anymore. Mostly, we talk about fear.

My life is a good one.

I don’t want to keep it to myself.

From “Self Help” Copyright © 2022 by Morgan Parker. Excerpted from the book SEX AND THE SINGLE WOMAN: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic, edited by Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson. Compilation and introduction copyright © 2022 by Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson. Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins. Reprinted by permission.

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When Heather, a small business owner in Virginia, walked down the aisle at her wedding in October 2015, her mother, Anna, sat in the front row smiling. Heather knew her mom as a “hippy” who wore comfortable clothes like jeans and clogs, but for her daughter’s wedding, Anna had made an exception, wearing a sequin navy dress with low heels. “It’s what you dream of, and I got the chance to have it,” says Heather (not her real name), now 36. “If we had gotten married any later than that, things would have been vastly different.”

Life for Heather and Anna changed quickly—too quickly. Just over a year after her wedding, Heather found out that Anna, 61, had been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurological disorder for which there is no cure. Two and half years later, Heather witnessed her mother starve and dehydrate herself to death; Anna could not bear to live with ALS any longer.

Anna’s ALS diagnosis left Heather with more questions than answers. Her uncle—Anna’s brother—had also died from ALS, in August 2014. With two close familial ties to the disease, Heather worried she, too, may carry the gene. Only a genetic test would reveal the truth. A positive test result would mean that Heather would likely later receive an ALS diagnosis and she could put her unborn children at risk of what she refers to as the “most sadistic disease.” But what would such knowledge give her? There would be nothing she or anyone could do to prevent symptoms from appearing, and she had no way of knowing at what age the symptoms would start. What can a young woman do with the knowledge that she could die in the same cruel manner that her mother did? Is there value in knowing that you have the gene for a disease for which there are no cures or preventative measures you can take to delay its onset? And is there anything that a person can do to change their children’s fate?

When most people think of ALS, they think of the Ice Bucket Challenge or celebrities—mostly white men—associated with the disease. The first famous person to be diagnosed was, of course, Lou Gehrig, a New York Yankees player, who was forced to retire after his diagnosis in 1939 and after whom the disease is now nicknamed. Others may think of Stephen Hawking, the renowned physicist, and a medical anomaly in the ALS community, as he lived with the disease for 55 years.

Today, around 15,000 people in the U.S. are living with the disease. The average person lives two to five years from diagnosis until death. In the majority of ALS cases, the cause is unknown and is referred to as sporadic ALS. But familial ALS occurs in 5 to 10 percent of cases when there is more than one incident of ALS in a family. When a parent has familial ALS, there is generally a 50 percent chance that the gene responsible will be passed on to each child.

When I think of ALS, I think of my mother. Twelve years ago, I watched my mom take her last breath 17 months after she was diagnosed with the disease. Throughout my life, I watched my mother tell people—usually men—that they were “full of shit.” I saw her ice skate on a frozen canal in Washington, D.C. on the rare occasion it froze; I smiled as she flipped off drivers who tried to cut in front of her as she rushed us to school in the mornings. Then, I watched my mother’s sharp mind listen as she was repeatedly told by neurologists, “No, there is nothing we can do to save you.” After months of listening and of losing the ability to play tennis, talk to friends, or eat, her demeanor changed. She rarely smiled and her communication decreased. In the final months of her life, she had lost so much weight that her body could barely carry her own head. She couldn’t even lift her body to hug me goodbye.

When I learned about my mother’s (sporadic) ALS diagnosis, I knew the disease would kill her and there was nothing I could do. When Heather learned her mother’s ALS diagnosis, she too knew Anna would die from ALS, but also that she and any children she had could very well be at risk of the same fate. Heather became determined to find out if she could have children and not pass the gene on. She spent hours researching online, and discovered there might be a way to do so through in vitro fertilization (IVF). A simple Google search of “Familial ALS IVF’” led her to a thread on Reddit where a woman, with the same ALS gene as Heather, shared that she had successfully used a process called Preimplantation Genetic Testing, or PGD, which can test an embryo for a specific gene condition, to ensure that her baby didn’t inherit the gene. It is now available for most known single gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease, and Huntington’s Disease.

Heather’s research provided her with the hope she needed. But to save her unborn child from the risk of ALS, she first had to find out if she was at risk of dying from the disease herself. “I think it goes back to this question: do you want to know how you’re going to die?” Heather says. “There are people that would say ‘yes’ and there are people who would say ‘not a chance.’”

Less than six months after her mother’s diagnosis in March of 2017, Heather sat in a small windowless medical room with her husband waiting for her genetic test results. She had spent weeks searching for a lab that would test her anonymously. Maintaining her anonymity was important to Heather, because she had read online that a positive test result on her medical record could prevent her from obtaining life insurance (which later proved to be true when her real name was mistakenly revealed on a medical chart).

Heather was tested for the C9orf72 (c9) gene, which, in addition to ALS, is responsible for frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and for over a third of familial ALS cases. C9 was identified just three years before Heather’s uncle died, but Heather knew that he had tested positive for that gene. “You’re positive, I’m sorry,” Heather remembers the genetic counselor saying to her before swiftly leaving the office. “She just looked at me basically like, ‘You’re going to die from Lou Gehrig’s, your mom died from Lou Gehrig’s, and have a nice day,’” Heather says.

Tears poured out of her eyes. Given the recent discovery of C9, the number of people with the gene who will later develop ALS is not known, Terry Heiman-Patterson, the neurologist who treated my mother and director of the ALS Center of Hope, told me via email. But according to the ALS Association, most people carrying the C9 mutation will eventually contract the disease.

A month after she received a positive test result, Heather reached out to a local fertility clinic. She started her first round of IVF in December 2017, five months before her mom died. Once Heather’s eggs were fertilized, the embryos were sent to be tested, but none of them were deemed healthy. (Three out of four embryos had the C9 gene, and one had a genetic abnormality.) Five days after her mother died, in May 2018, Heather learned a second and third round of IVF (batched together to reduce costs) had also been unsuccessful at producing healthy embryos.

The emotional toll was unbearable. Heather says she cried alone in the shower, stopped caring about her work, hated the way she looked, and dreading socializing, leaning on her husband and a Facebook IVF and PGD group for support. She was angry at her insurance company for not covering additional rounds of IVF, and overcome with jealousy whenever she saw pregnant women. She tried to force herself to believe that she would be okay if she never had kids, but couldn’t shake her desire to be a mother.

In early 2019, she did a fourth and fifth round of IVF, and in March, she learned she had finally managed to create an embryo without the C9 gene. In July, the embryo was implanted, and in March 2020, she gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Heather said she felt disbelief as she cradled her daughter in the hospital. She couldn’t believe that she was finally holding her child—and that that child would not face the same fate that her mother did, and that Heather likely will. “It’s so important that people can know that, while everyone is searching for a cure, in the meantime, there is actually something that you can do,” she says.

Heather doesn’t share her gene status beyond close family and friends. “When you look at me—and I’m not bragging—but I get told a lot that I’m beautiful, that I have a good-looking family,” she says. “No one would ever look at me and know I’m going to die of Lou Gehrig’s. I don’t want the gene to be my definition.” But she no longer says “someday.” In every aspect of her life, she is trying to live to the fullest.

Though Heather can’t control when or how she will likely experience the first symptoms of ALS, she lives each day knowing that she protected her daughter from what we both know is one of the ugliest ways to die. “I can’t wait to hold her hand and tell her that I did everything I could so that my future was not going to be hers,” Heather says.

The next day, photos of Heather and her toddler daughter, surrounded by snow, wearing puffy winter jackets and matching white winter hats pop up in my Instagram feed. In the second picture, taken by someone standing behind her daughter, I can see Heather’s smile as she stands looking at her little girl. Staring at my phone, I smile too, knowing that Heather’s daughter won’t face the same fate that our mothers did.

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The man is an acquaintance. He brings me a drink. His hand glides over my ass with confidence. My stomach jumps. His lips are on mine. He says he loves me, asks me to run away with him. His car waits down the block, ready for our departure. Did he call me “mi amor”?

Hours later, my husband crouches next to me on our bathroom’s cracked black tile. I hear his voice. “What happened?” The softball-sized lump on my forehead marches toward my eyes. “My head hurts,” I say. He hugs me. My chest is covered in barf. I assume it’s my own.

When I start writing a novel, I know only how it will begin and how it will end. Trying to piece together what took place between the drink and the morning after reminds me of my early book-plotting process, when there’s nothing in the middle but blank pages.

The following days are a blur of naps in doctor’s waiting rooms and trips through tubes that snap pictures of my swollen brain. I’m prescribed rest. The timeline for any sort of recovery is essentially a shrug emoji. In September of 2020, my hibernation begins.

Sleep never felt so delicious. Vertigo from my rattled inner ear and headaches from the concussion twist minutes, hours, weeks, months into indistinguishable intervals. With the light hidden behind my blackout curtains, day and night mean nothing. At 7:30 p.m., the dog brings her empty food bowl, asking that it be refilled.

Meanwhile, the world continues outside my window. President Trump is hospitalized with Covid. The Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett. Young people chant the names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain. Pfizer announces early vaccine results. I’d covered the 2016 presidential election as a journalist, but Joe Biden is elected without my hurried fingers over a keyboard.

I lie in bed, trapped in a kind of solitary confinement, my novelist mind running wild with potential character arcs. What if my body never heals? What if my brain is permanently damaged? What the hell happened?

AUTUMN

Daily Sleep: 22 Hours

Because I am both accident- and sickness-prone, or have what Victorian doctors once labeled “a weak constitution,” this was not my first brush with death.

I was born premature with an Apgar score of 1. As a toddler, I was attacked by our family dog and had to have my face reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. A few years later, my father accidentally sliced my forehead with electric hedge clippers. I broke my ankle stepping out of a van. I was once hospitalized with a rare and painful virus that caused my veins to explode. In most company, I easily earn the record for lifetime stitches (107 at last count).

In college I fell ill with what would eventually be diagnosed as a severe staph infection that had seeped into my bloodstream and joints. I awoke to my father crouched over my sickbed, pleading with his God to let me live. I had a fool’s confidence in my immortality and was starting an internship in Washington, DC a few weeks later. On my first day, I toured the Voice of America building with my new boss and prayed we’d stop walking before I fainted. I was still weak but didn’t want to show it. I pushed myself forward, as I had always done.

This time, though, my body and mind were waving a white flag.

My best guess as to what happened is that my drink was spiked. And then once I was back at home, while attempting to wash vomit off of myself, I must have slipped in the shower, sending my forehead on a high-speed collision course with the ceramic corner of our bathtub. A massive bump bloomed near the middle of my forehead, the spot many refer to as the “third eye,” or what ancient Indian tradition calls the “Anja Chakra,” said to be the source of inner wisdom and intuition. I was feeling the absence of both and had no desire to step outside into a world that was half-asleep itself.

All of my past traumas squatted stubbornly on my chest in the brief stretches of waking silence. They played table tennis inside my aching head, danced in odd shapes in front of my purple raccoon eyes. All I wanted was to curl up in my hibernaculum of blankets and pillows and fall back into warm, sweet sleep.

Before snakes sink into brumation, the cold-blooded version of a bear’s deep winter slumber, they shed their skin. Any protective barrier I’d been cultivating fell away the night I hit my head, the raw questions I’d spent a lifetime avoiding now exposed, demanding my attention. My body and the world were in the process of transforming, painfully, into something new. But reckoning with this sea change, both internally and externally, was too much. Like many of my pajama-clad neighbors, huddled in their homes playing Animal Crossing, I chose hibernation.

WINTER

Daily Sleep: 18 Hours

A new year, 2021, has started. I’m able to stay awake a few more hours per day. The doctors still can’t tell if my condition is mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual. I’m not sure it matters.

I’ve been cleared to read with frequent breaks and dive into books, seeking answers for what might have happened to me. In Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear, I learn that would-be predators look for someone who will allow them to be in control, who will react to their advances with shyness or intimidation rather than directness and refusal. De Becker calls this process “the interview.”

Did the interview start when I let this man sip from my wine glass, weeks before the concussion? He worked at a restaurant that my husband and I frequented. We moved our meals to the patio when indoor dining restrictions began. When the man pecked me on the lips, I said nothing. When he invited me to come by before the restaurant opened, telling me it would be the perfect place to write while my husband was at work, I didn’t go, but shrugged off the offer as kindness. He even told me that he loved me.

I had come up with several rationalizations for his questionable behavior. He was from Europe! He greeted my husband the same way! He meant “love” in a hyperbolic sense, as in, he loved me as a customer.

After the concussion, I peppered women with questions and hypotheticals — what would you do if a European waiter at a restaurant you frequented kissed you on the mouth? Or hugged you too long? Or invited you to the beach with him?

Most said they would have done the same, i.e. nothing.

Since developing boobs as a pre-teen in the Evangelical South, I’d made a habit of freezing when confronted with a sexually awkward or threatening situation—I stared straight ahead when a family friend ran in naked as I was about to get in the shower, as middle school boys slipped their hands up my shirt, as grown men leered. Before my husband, my two longest relationships were with a man who regularly slapped me and another who confessed to breaking his mother’s ribs. I was an expert at ignoring.

The writer Melissa Febos describes a similar detachment from her body in Girlhood: “The same sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed. Not girl, but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon bumping the closet ceiling.”

Like many women, I could easily—poof!—dissolve into a ghost of a girl. So, I was not there when the server kissed me. Just as I was not in bed, recovering from a concussion. I was a spirit, invisible, easily slipping between this world and another, rising somewhere beyond thoughts and fears, between consciousness and unconsciousness.

Otherwise, the what-ifs would come tumbling back out: What if I had stormed out after that first kiss? What if I had yelled or pulled away or talked to the manager or never gone to that restaurant again? If the protagonist had done any of those things, would she have avoided getting roofied and falling in the shower?

In The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk explores how trauma rewires our brain’s alarm system; survivors of trauma are more likely to misinterpret safe situations as unsafe and unsafe situations as safe.

I’d spent a lifetime silencing every alarm in my body. Was this habit handed down from my mother, who was molested in a barn as a child? Was it passed to her and then to me like the perfect recipe for buttered lima beans and the whispered stories about our relatives in the Civil War? According to van der Kolk, the body stores these memories, whether our own or from generations past, in our cells.

SPRING and SUMMER

Daily Sleep: 14 Hours

Six months after the concussion, my puffed-out face is mostly deflated, the watercolors of my bruises have faded, my headaches occur less often. I’ve returned (remotely) to my work as a journalist, but spend my off hours taking naps that might be better described as three-hour comas.

I still don’t have a label for the man who set these events in motion—assailant? Abuser? Assaulter? Asshole?

I haven’t spoken with him or pressed charges. There is no proof of what happened, and I’ve been occupied with my injury. So while I nearly lost my life from our last encounter, he has only lost a customer. The cosmic unfairness of this difference taunts me as I watch him continue his life unbothered from my apartment window, serving outdoor tables and beckoning to passersby, menus in hand.

COVID-19 vaccines are widely available, but even with both doses, I’m hesitant to leave home. I’m told that when my husband swooped in to rescue me that night, he’d yelled at the man to stay away from me. I’m worried his threat won’t be enough. I also hate that I am a woman who needs to be rescued.

In July, I sign up for a women’s self-defense class. As I sit on the grass at Madison Square Park waiting for it to start, I listen to the sounds of a city slowly awakening—the bow strokes of a distant orchestra, friends catching up over wine in plastic cups, children playing on the monkey bars.

Following the instructor’s lead, I swing my elbow, imagining it making contact with a man’s jaw. I kick at a pretend groin with the confidence of the high school soccer star I once was. My fellow classmates and I scream at each other: “No!” “Get away from me!” “I don’t know him!”

But squashing a decades-long practice of capitulation is difficult. I’m reminded of when my accountant spread his arms, saying “I’m a hugger,” and how I did not want to hug my accountant but still dove into his waiting arms, how he held on too long, and how I didn’t pull away.

TODAY

Daily Sleep: 12 Hours

The bump on my head tormented me for the first year of my recovery, a permanent reminder every time I saw my face on a work Zoom or rested my forehead on the ground in Child’s Pose. I still, at times, require as much rest as a toddler, at least according to standard sleep charts. I’m working with a neurologist on this.

The bump is smaller now, but still there. My husband has taken to calling it my unicorn horn. To remove it, my doctors say they’ll have to peel back the skin on my forehead and sand down the place where my brain pressed against my skull.

Looking out the window of my new apartment, I can’t help but think that every person on the sidewalk below is suppressing their own tragedy from this time, a story that still needs to be shared and grieved. A line from The Body Keeps the Score stays with me, about how telling your story is one of the most important parts of healing and integrating a traumatic experience: “As soon as a story starts being told, particularly if it is told repeatedly, it changes—the act of telling itself changes the tale. The mind cannot help but make meaning out of what it knows, and the meaning we make of our lives changes how and what we remember.”

There is so much I want to tell, and even more I’m determined to change as I slowly make my way out there myself. For one, when a friend shares a story like this with me, I don’t want to nod sympathetically. I want to be able to say, with vigor, “What the fuck?”

Over the past year, as I’ve reunited with friends and family, I’ve told this story. With each telling, it gets a little easier, the lessons become more clear, and I need a little less sleep.

Today, I’m thankful to be awake. I ride public transit and carry pepper spray. I’ve even gone out to dinner by myself, though I will never go back to that cursed spot. My workplace is threatening a return to the office, and, amazingly, I’m ready. I practice my self-defense moves on my husband and tell myself to “get the fuck away” in the mirror. I remind myself to be nice to that unicorn-bump girl. She’s unlearning something important.

On a spring Monday morning in Washington Square Park, 28-year-old congressional hopeful Rana Abdelhamid spoke about the future she wants for New York.

“This is a historic race,” Abdelhamid told supporters. “Not just because if I win, I will be the first Muslim woman representing New York, but because we’re building a coalition that we’re going to take with us once elected.”

Abdelhamid, who was campaigning in a black puffer jacket, hoop earrings, a teal headscarf and white sneakers, has never before held an elected political office.

“Seeing the neglect, lack of investment, and lack of representation for my community, working people across the city, immigrant communities and people of color, lead me to realize that we need representatives that are going to fight for us the way we fight for each other,” Abdelhamid said in an interview with ELLE.com.

Abdelhamid faces an uphill fight for New York’s 12th District nomination, challenging incumbent Democrat Carolyn Maloney, who was first elected to Congress in 1992 and has held her current seat since 2013.

After nearly 30 years in Washington, progressives criticize Maloney, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, for voting to deregulate Wall Street banks and supporting punitive “tough on crime” legislation. A spokesperson for Rep. Maloney said in an email that “Congresswoman Maloney is a proven progressive leader.” The spokesperson also pointed out that Maloney was an original co-sponsor of the Green New Deal and is a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

But in 2002, like most other House Democrats, she voted to invade Iraq. In the weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Maloney infamously wore a burqa on the House floor, railing against Afghanistan’s treatment of women to make the case for American military intervention.

It’s an image that had a lasting effect on Abdelhamid.

“I was nine years old when I watched my congresswoman wear a burqa to justify the invasion of Afghanistan,” Abdelhamid said in a tweet. “For the rest of my life, I knew that as a Muslim woman my identity would be weaponized to justify American wars.”

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Growing up in post-9/11 New York was difficult for Abdelhamid. “My community was super stigmatized,” she explained in an interview with ELLE.com, “I internalized so much of that. It was difficult for me to cope as a young person.”

Abdelhamid began engaging in different forms of activism and social justice in her early teenage years. “Politics has always been a part of my existence,” she added. When she announced her bid for congress, it didn’t shock any of her friends, “They all were like, ‘it’s about time.’”

Unseating a longstanding incumbent is no easy task. But in 2018, insurgent challengers Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ayanna Presley in Massachusetts stunned the nation with victories over long-serving incumbent Democrats, launching a wave of young progressive candidates across the country. Many of these candidates were backed by Justice Democrats, a political action committee started by former leaders of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign and other progressive organizations.

Taking a page from that progressive playbook, Abdelhamid is running on a platform of supporting Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and housing and economic justice. Abdelhamid has earned endorsements from local council members, state senators, the Working Families Party of New York, and other progressive groups, among them New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council member Tiffany Caban, and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, who all turned out for her rally.

Sochie Nnaemeka, the New York director of the Working Families Party, praised Abdelhamid’s ability to leverage her story “in a way that feels very universal.”

“Her campaign is grounded in what it means to be a working-class New Yorker, a woman of color, a young person growing up in the United States,” Nnaemeka said in a phone call.

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The daughter of Egyptian Immigrants, Abdelhamid grew up in Astoria, Queens, where her family moved many times due to rising rents and poor housing conditions. She attended New York City public schools and has long been a community organizer. At 15, she was the victim of a hate crime when a man attacked her and tried to remove her headscarf. In response, Abdelhamid founded WISE, the Women’s Initiative for Self Empowerment, now known as Malikah, which teaches Muslim women self-defense tactics. The collective is still active and has hosted workshops in more than 18 cities around the world.

Just a few weeks ago on the campaign trail, Abdelhamid held an outdoor self-defense class for Asian women in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, in response to the recent spike in hate crimes against the Asian American Pacific Islander community.

“It was really powerful,” Abdelhamid said. “There was a parent there who had brought her daughter and she was so grateful that her daughter was learning self-defense. I love running these classes and I plan to do more of it.”

The diverse neighborhood, where many of the residents are Latino and Asian, made national news weeks later when a gunman opened fire in a subway station there, wounding 10 people.

At Middlebury College, Abdelhamid majored in international politics and economics and established the school’s Amnesty International chapter. After graduation, she attended Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on a scholarship and earned a master’s degree in public policy. In 2014, Abdelhamid founded a social media project, “Hijabis of New York,” to humanize the public narratives of Muslim women who wear hijabs. The page has nearly 30,000 Facebook followers.

Currently, she lives in Queens and works in the marketing and partnerships department of Google’s Women Techmakers’ program, which aims to provide visibility, community, and resources for women in technology.

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Ahead of her Washington Square rally, Abdelhamid sat on a bench in Rainey Park, Astoria and told me Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who in 2020 won races over more centrist Democrats in Missouri and New York, inspired her to run for Congress.

“They spoke in ways that resonated with me,” she said. “When they talked about health care for all, or about fighting for the eviction moratorium, fighting for our schools, I had never seen elected officials speak in that way.”

More than 70 percent of residents in New York’s 12th District, where the median household income is around $120,000, are renters, according to Census data. (In 2020, the city’s median household income was just over $67,000.) But even that income level puts much of New York real estate out of reach as rents continue to rise.

“We shouldn’t be seeing rent spike 33 percent, 40 percent over one year. People are leaving the city,” Abdelhamid said. “Fighting for national rent control is important. We are fighting for opportunities, where we’ll be able to build and subsidize the building of affordable housing.”

District 12 is home to both the Upper East Side and the largest public housing unit in North America, the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City, Queens, along with parts of Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Abdelhamid supports the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act, introduced last year by Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, to improve living conditions for public housing residents across the country by investing $172 billion over 10 years. The bill also focuses on health by addressing lead paint and mold in apartments. Data for Progress, a progressive research center, estimates that, if enacted, it could reduce asthma in these public housing communities by 18 to 30 percent. Abdelhamid grew up in a Queens neighborhood situated next to peaker power plants, an area known colloquially to residents as “Asthma Alley” due to the poor air quality, she explained.

“They don’t put peaker plants in rich neighborhoods,” Abdelhamid told supporters in Washington Square Park. “They put them where there are immigrant communities where Black and brown communities are, they think we won’t advocate for ourselves.”

But Abdelhamid’s fight could get even more difficult. Recently, District 12 was redrawn to remove Williamsburg, where Maloney suffered losses against candidate Suraj Patel in the last primary, as well as parts of the Lower East Side. The redistricting added parts of the Upper West Side, SoHo, and Greenwich Village.

Hank Sheinkopf, a veteran New York Democratic strategist and political consultant, explained that the newly drawn maps would likely be a boon for Maloney. “The parts that were added to her, are areas where she [Maloney] would do well.”

Earlier this month, however, a New York judge struck down the newly drawn lines. Just last week, an appeals court ruled that the new maps favor Democrats. Gov. Kathy Hochul and other top lawmakers are expected to appeal.

With the primary less than 100 days away, the Justice Democrats are supporting Abdelhamid’s campaign with critical infrastructure. Waleed Shahid, the communications director for the group, praised Abdelhamid as “a quintessential working-class New York story,” saying, “She represents the district that Maloney has increasingly grown out of touch with.”

Since 2018, Justice Democrats has endorsed fewer candidates. Instead of backing dozens, as it did that year, it’s picking its battles more selectively and has only so far endorsed six candidates nationwide for 2022.

“Ninety-seven percent of incumbents are re-elected every year,” Shahid said. “But we’ve shown that we’ve been able to overcome that financial gap before and I think we have a good shot doing it again.”

According to recent campaign finance filings, Maloney has so far raised just more than $2.2 million; Abdelhamid’s campaign has so far amassed just under $1 million.

Despite the fundraising gap, Maloney’s last two races have been close. Suraj Patel, a lawyer and Democratic operative, lost the 2020 primary by just 3,000 votes and is running for the third time this year.

Nathaniel Rakich, a senior elections analyst at FiveThirtyEight, noted that Maloney is not out of the woods. “She got less than a majority in 2020, only 43 percent,” he explained. “That certainly indicates that an incumbent is vulnerable.”

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Being a young woman in politics is not easy. Despite plenty of support for her campaign, Abdelhamid has drawn some negative coverage from outlets like The New York Post, which recently critiqued her for working at Google while running an anti-corporate campaign.

“Having an issue with the fact that corporations have money in politics, and fund elected officials in politics, is different than being someone who is a worker at a company,” Abdelhamid told ELLE.com. “I’m not an executive at Google. I’m a worker, and my job at Google is actually to train women in online safety.”

Abdelhamid said she entered tech to help pay down her college debt, but now sees her experience as a benefit that “will allow me to legislate tech policy,” she said. She also said of the criticism that “My whole life has prepared me for this,” and that growing up in post-9/11 New York City, “There was so much stereotyping and mischaracterization of Muslim women.” Now, she said, her family and community are her source of strength.

Besides, the responses to her and her campaign so far have been far more positive than negative. “The campaign has been the most beautiful thing I have ever been a part of,” she said.

Whether the trend of insurgent progressive victories will continue is hard to predict, said elections analyst Rakich, but it partially depends on how these young candidates do.

This year, the trend of progressive Democrats running against incumbent Democrats is going strong with Abdelhamid, Summer Lee in Pennsylvania, and Kina Collins in Illinois, among others. In Texas, Justice Democrats endorsed candidate Jessica Cisneros, a 28-year-old immigration lawyer challenging Rep. Henry Cuellar, one of the most conservative Democrats in the House.

“AOC’s success inspired other people who thought, ‘AOC did it so maybe I can do it too,’” Rakich explained. “But if these candidates have a bad election cycle, that might have a dampening effect.”

Still, Abdelhamid is confident. “This is a multi-racial, inter-ethnic, inter-class, interfaith community that we are building in the city I love the most, for the city I love the most,” said Abdelhamid. “It’s a dream.”

The primary elections in New York are slated to be held on June 28.

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I was first christened “African booty scratcher” in fourth grade—my second year in America. It sounded ridiculous, but it pricked when my classmates would belly-laugh at my expense. This is also my earliest memory of Black America.

It wasn’t white America that first outed my otherness. It was the Black American boy in that overcrowded South Bronx public school classroom, with chipped walls and worn books, that called attention to my foreign status at the mention of my traditional first name when the teacher took attendance: Abiemwense. A name I would later invert in high school with my second first name (our tribe’s tradition) when I grew tired of being mocked. A name that sounded bizarre to him, that when coupled with my thick, unbound hair and strange pronunciations, suggested I was the other within his othered-ness.

In those early days, settling into the South Bronx and encountering Black Americans calling me out because of my accent or mismatched Caldor-bought clothes or the Payless Pro Wings sneakers, I’d cry to Mom: I don’t belong. She would always tell me not to mind them. She promised this country would make us better. To focus on working harder.

Mom had sacrificed a life full of acres and cars and nannies in Benin City, Nigeria to ensure a path in America for me. To ensure my brothers and I would not be impacted by the deterioration of a flawed system with year-round school strikes, dwindling human (mostly women’s) rights, poor infrastructure, high unemployment rates, government scandals, and nepotism. Studious as she was, my forever compass, she entered this country as one of the nurses who benefited from the Immigration Act of 1990—a federal law whose previous iterations had excluded people with her skin color but now sought highly skilled nurses from countries like Nigeria and the Philippines. My mother was so brilliant, America wanted her. That was something.

Some Black Americans believe that African or Caribbean immigrants come here with so much wealth that we gain an advantage over Black Americans. That wasn’t Mom. At one point, my single mother worked three jobs to ensure she was crafting the path to her American dream for us. Yet she was always present on our road to achievement. She didn’t praise anything but distinction. If we received an A-, she would look at the exam or assignment and tell us to correct the ones we got wrong. Even as we adjusted to our new life, even as she struggled to feed, clothe, and house us and those she left back home in Nigeria, she embodied the excellence she so desperately wanted for us.

Our story is one with common threads shared by many African and Caribbean immigrant families. It makes the chasm between our lived experience and the narrative some Black Americans attribute to families like mine piercing. When this perennial, charged them vs. us narrative recently cropped up again around the internet, I thought back to my early interactions with Black Americans, who ridiculed me with cruel remarks like, “Yousa’ monkey! A gorilla! Do you guys jump from tree to tree in Africa? Why don’t you go back to your hut? Do you speak African?”

In sixth grade, I experienced the most definitive and violent example of the them vs. us conflict. A Black American girl, who would tell me often to “Go back to Africa,” walked up to me during recess as I stood by the barricades that blocked cars as students played on the streets. She punched me dead smack in my face. Unprovoked. Just standing there minding my Nigerian business. I began to cry as I had done many times before. But this day, a wave of unusual anger spun me. I had had it with her, with them and their jeering. I decided to fight back. I lunged toward her, and both of us crashed onto the heated concrete. In the wild frenzy, I hit her with uncontrollable, flailing hands. It felt good. Like I had regained my confidence in me—in reclaiming my Nigerian-ness within their Blackness.

At that point, I had started to develop what I now know was an unconscious anti-Blackness mentality. An unconscious anti-Blackness rooted in how we Black immigrants come to this country, wide-eyed, gazing upon its endless feast of educational and economic opportunities, joining those with whom we share the same skin color but share no bond. But I was still searching for a sense of home, of community, in America, so it seemed simpler to adopt Blackness.

Between middle and high school, I went through my blue-haired-cornrows-Lil’ Mo-Superwoman phase. My Pepe Jeans and Sergio Valentes and Baby Phat velour tracksuits phase. My clip-on nails and pressed-up-do and Moesha-braids-with-burnt-ends phase. And through each passing phase, I still knew I was an other. Though our differences were stark, White, Asian, and Hispanic Americans never ridiculed or made me feel more like an outsider. To them, I was simply Black. But forming an identity within Blackness was jarring and complicated.

During my high school and college years, full of application forms for this or that program, it dawned on me for the first time that Black immigrants and Black Americans shared the same racial checkbox. I became African American, willingly or not. This is where some members of the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) community believe Black immigrants “take” academic and professional opportunities from Black Americans. But if that single checkbox classifies us all with this skin, what then—despite America’s history of prejudice against all racially Black people—separates us at those points of entry?

The term ​​American Descendants of Slavery was coined in 2016 by Antonio Moore and Yvette Carnell to establish a separate categorization for Black Americans, an effort to add nuance to that one-size-fits-all checkbox. The political movement calls for the federal government to give Black Americans their own racial category on the census and applications for colleges, jobs, etc., to differentiate between them and us. In doing so, they want those institutions to prioritize Black Americans to benefit from national policies like affirmative action—laws initially designed to help descendants of American slavery. (Those policies are now under attack.)

A flood of migration fueled the ADOS movement’s fight. From the mid-90s—when my family first arrived in America—to 2019, the Black immigrant population more than tripled, going from 1.4 to 4.6 million, with Nigerians making up a quarter of that increase. African immigrants are more likely than Black Americans to have a college degree. And when compared to the general U.S. population, Nigerians, in particular, are more likely to have bachelor’s or advanced degrees.

These disparities are real, and in pushing to address them, ADOS supporters believe Black immigrants shouldn’t fall under the same “African American” grouping. As the argument goes, Black immigrants who choose America are free from the legacy of being enslaved in this country. It’s an assertion I’ve come to understand and respect. Given our divergent histories, my family and I shouldn’t benefit from any form of restitution meant for “African Americans.”

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Identity is often fraught, but my identity will always be my ethnicity, not the American definition of race: I am Nigerian first and always.

In Nigeria, our tribes—Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Édo, and hundreds more—coupled with our belief systems, make up our identity. Those markers of ethnicity and religion are not visible to the naked eye. And because we all visibly look the same, save for colorism, the idea of race has no bearing in our homelands. To be us—this skin that’s so problematic in America—is synonymous with excellence. We come from a history full of it—the stories our ancestors passed down to us were of literal kings and queens, colonization be damned. Stories of flourishing in gold and oil and gemstones are all we ever knew. Academically and professionally, the grind for achievement was instilled in us because everyone strives for the same caliber of accomplishment. It’s passed down. It’s the norm.

In the legal sense of belonging, my birthright citizenship will always belong to Nigeria, and my naturalized citizenship is with America. But in a social sense, my identity is never singular. In one country, my identity is my ethnicity, my tribe. In the other, race—those physical characteristics of skin color, hair, facial features—is prominent; my tribe holds no value.

As I’ve tried to grab hold of my Édo-ness in America while forming ties to American Blackness, I am often reminded, still, I am from Africa. This resistance made me delve further into why there remains an unyielding need to segregate them from us.

Starting in my college years, I deliberately began studying the breadth of Black American history to better grasp their struggles. That’s when I also met my best friend, a Black American, and we began discussing this tension. She became a safe place to ask questions about how they perceived us. Even asking silly questions like, “What does ‘yo’ really mean?” Because I had another phase where I punctuated almost everything with ‘yo’ without really understanding its many variations. I never even attempted to adopt the N-word as I delved into Black vernacular; there are layers to its complexities I dared not cross. (Take “That’s my n*gga”—it has this affectionate subtlety, this history, that I have no claim to.)

The juvenile ridicules of “African booty scratcher” and huts and “do you speak African” no longer mattered the more I realized they never knew my history the way I could know theirs. The history books in America all but eliminate the depths of who we—Africans and Caribbeans—are: That’s why many swirl in misconceptions that Africa is a singular place, not a continent with 54 countries. They could never know the extent and effect of colonization. Or the need to flee a country for better, sustainable upward mobility. But I could commiserate with their history without it being my own.

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The more I’ve understood the vastness of African American history and the need to cultivate an identity steeped in cultural and ethnic integrity—far from the way it was taught in Social Studies or AP History—it became clear we both have direct ties to Africa. We both value cultural identity. Yet, the ongoing battle of the them vs. us discord centers on the need to differentiate how we each came from Africa.

To the ADOS community, to be a proper African American means to claim the African heritage through their ancestors from American slavery and the Americanness gained through Emancipation. Tracing their heritage to 17th century America when the primary exports from sub-Saharan Africa to American colonies were people, this African American history riddled with lynching, castration, servitude, the short-lived joy of Emancipation, the strife of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, the urbanization of Blacks that led to extreme concentrations of poverty, drugs, racial violence, and incarceration, to rallying freedom demonstrations in the Black Power and Civil Rights movements, to the present-day struggle against subjugation and an institutionalized generation, is their story, not mine.

Still, all with this skin are subjected to the same racial inequities. Because when an officer pulls me over, I’m not asked, “Are you a Black American or Nigerian?” We’re both stereotyped the same.

That reality cemented for me when my eldest brother was unjustly stopped, frisked, and deported years ago. I fully recognized just how indistinguishable we were from Black Americans.

All these years later, far from “African booty scratcher” taunts, I have come to value the similarities in our cultures. The vibrancy in music, with resounding influences from the likes of Fela Kuti and Bob Marley. The need to let our bodies loose in liberation at block parties and family gatherings. The need to express our identity through our hairstyles, clothes, and art. It’s a thing to behold, to be proud of. There’s a connection there. So this continued infighting between Black Americans and Black immigrants must be reconsidered with an eye toward who has the most to gain. In this time when critical thinking and African American history are being combated and very nearly eradicated, who really benefits from one of the most subjugated groups of people nurturing wider divisions between them because of our composite histories?

Black immigrants will never bear the burden of American slavery and its intergenerational trauma or experience the institutionalized school-to-prison pipeline in the way many Black Americans have. Even still: Black immigrants are not unfamiliar with such deep-seated biases. In our homelands, it takes shape in tribalism, colorism, and class divides, all similar inclinations found within Black—and even white—America. A way to distinguish one from the other. A way to say, ‘Here is my perceived power over you, because we collectively fall short in this fundamentally racist system.’ My brother’s imprisonment and deportation unraveled that reality for me.

But I cannot shake the fact that our ancestral distinction would always be the thing that divides us in a country that already abandons us.

When the story of “Hollywood Madam” Heidi Fleiss’s arrest broke in June 1993, it simply didn’t compute for writer Molly Lambert, who was growing up in Los Angeles at the time. Why was this woman being hassled for selling something people wanted to buy?

It’s a question that runs through Lambert’s new podcast, “Heidi World.” The 10-episode series, the first episode of which is out today, traces Fleiss’s rise to infamy: growing up the daughter of a progressive pediatrician-to-the-stars in crunchy Los Feliz, making a name for herself on the party-girl circuit, and, finally, becoming a powerful madam with a stable of hundreds of high-class escorts and an A-list black book (reportedly actually a red Gucci planner) of Hollywood’s rich and powerful—before it all came crashing down.

Lambert spoke with ELLE.com about casting the pod with dozens of L.A. personalities, actors, and collaborators to bring the story to life (with the captivating actress Annie Hamilton voicing Fleiss); what media narratives about sex work miss; and why America still can’t get over our hang-ups.

Take me back to the beginning. What first drew you to Heidi Fleiss’s story?

I am from Los Angeles and I was a kid when the Heidi Fleiss scandal broke. It was a huge story, especially here in L.A., and just completely fascinating to me. I think it was just the first time that I was like, “Oh, well, why is it illegal to sell sex?” Especially in Hollywood, where we all know that everybody uses sex to sell stuff.

I was just kind of surprised nobody had really done a really deep dive into yet. Then when I started getting into the research, I was like, “This is everything I’m interested in. It’s a story about hypocrisy and money and sex and everything interesting.”

What nuance did you want to bring to telling this story that was missing from the public conversation when news of Fleiss’ arrest first broke?

I really wanted to make a podcast talking about the story in a pro-sex work way. I also just realized when the story happened, the media was sort of incapable of saying, “Well, what if this weren’t criminalized? Why is this criminalized?” They could never make the turn into asking that question. Or, instead of saying, “Why does this happen?” or, “How can we stop this?” Say, well, “What if we actually protected the people that are selling sex? What if we acknowledge that sex is a thing that people want to buy and sell, and it’s a consensually sold thing? How could we actually protect sex workers and make it a safe thing for them to do?” instead of this American thing where we pretend, That doesn’t happen here. People don’t have sex outside of marriage and they certainly don’t pay for it. Whereas yeah, we all know that does happen.

I also think just the media in the ‘90s, even in this allegedly progressive moment when everything was, “We’re going to be less sexist! We’re going to be less racist now!” than the ‘80s, it was still just very puritanical in this way, punishing Heidi for selling sex, but not punishing any of the men who bought sex.

I think now we’re in this moment where people have to sell themselves more than ever. Everybody has to have five jobs and be a sort of brand in a way. It all just seemed like a really good time to revisit the Heidi story from that kind of angle.

Right from the first episode, you foreground that the podcast is structured around calling to decriminalize sex work. Why was that an important place for you to start?

Because I was just shocked at how little had changed since this moment when the Heidi Fleiss scandal really drew attention to the fact that sex work was criminalized. There were people at the time saying, “Hey, why is it criminalized? Why is this person being punished?” I think now we’re in this moment—we’re in essentially a recession. I think more people have stuff like OnlyFans, side hustles that involve monetizing skills or monetizing selling aspects of yourself. But it is also being criminalized more than ever. The way in which apps and platforms de-platform sex workers and shadow-ban people for posting, not even obscene, just lightly sexual content. But people like Kylie Jenner can post whatever they want. There’s this incredible double standard still of, yeah, hot women are used to sell everything, especially on social media. But if hot women say, “Hey, I’m using this to sell my pictures or my videos” or anything like that, it becomes That’s not OK. They don’t want women to make money off of their own sexuality. But if we keep sex work criminalized, that allows for people like Mark Zuckerberg to be in control of who gets to sell what.

I’m curious for your read on how, if at all, Americans’ attitudes toward sex, sex work, and women who profit off male desire have changed since Heidi’s arrest?

I think it’s more that it’s not changed as much as you would expect. Especially because that felt like such an inflection point of people being like, “Hey, what if we didn’t criminalize this?” Also, just because the way in which the cops expected that everybody would side with them against Heidi. It was a couple years after the L.A. uprisings; I think people in L.A. were able to see that this was just a big publicity stunt by the cops, that it didn’t fix any of the real problems—this wasn’t even a problem that anybody wanted fixed. It wasn’t a problem at all. It was a consensual exchange. It just feels like so little has changed, but also, more than ever, we live in that world.

Heidi’s trial and public reemergence were also set against the rise of media forces we now take for granted: 24-hour cable, courtroom TV, reality TV. What was it about Heidi’s story that so captured the public’s imagination? Why did she make a perfect villain, especially for mainstream women?

What I loved about her was that she’s not who you would necessarily expect to be this incredible madam. People think of a madam as being sort of an older woman who is experienced in this. She was this Gen X, young, cool madam who understood implicitly how to market sex to these super-rich guys in Hollywood who wanted to buy sex. How to brand her escorts as being higher-end, more exclusive, better than everybody else, and how that worked. Because these were super-rich guys in Hollywood who wanted to spend all this money on sex. So I just thought that was so brilliant of her to brand it that way.

I think she just really understood how to sell stuff from a really young age. She’s this full hustler. I think all the great American stories are about hustlers and people who got one over on this system that’s really rigid, one that says, you can climb as high as you want, advance as high as you want, but we all know that there are things in place to stop just anyone from doing that.

She was able just to make a name for herself just by talking her way into all of these situations, these guys in Hollywood completely vibed with her, because they were also all incredible hustlers, incredible talkers. I just found all of that interesting, and I guess as a podcaster, that’s a little what I’m doing too, being like, “Hey, please listen to me.”

That’s also why this is such an L.A. story, right? Los Angeles is, in some ways, our most American city.

Yeah, 100 percent, L.A. or Vegas. My dad says it should be the capital rather than D.C. And just looking at the way that the vice industries are so intertwined with the mainstream industries. Not just entertainment obviously, but everything has this kind of secret underground that we don’t necessarily want to acknowledge, where any time it pops up and people have to be like, “Oh, wait!” There’s like this whole other world under the stuff we hear about.

It also reminded me, after watching Ryan Murphy’s Impeachment, that one of the upshots of the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal was that Republicans thought they had him dead to rights, but the public ultimately kind of shrugged and regarded the sex scandal piece of it as a private matter.

Right, and Monica was the only one who really suffered any of the consequences of that scandal; she was slut-shamed by everybody. Bill Clinton got to come out looking like a cool guy, Hillary looked like a shrew. It’s the misogyny that seeps into everything, and I think Heidi was aware of all of this. Again, I think it just backfired on the cops because they thought, Oh, we’re going to look like heroes for busting this person. Then, similarly to the OJ trial, it became a referendum on power and class and how things work in L.A. People sided against the cops, because nobody likes the LAPD, because they’re psychopaths.

I think Heidi became this folk hero for thumbing her nose at the LAPD, for refusing to play the game the way that it had been played. I think it just really speaks to our current moment in terms of where we’re at with fame and sex and social media—this idea of, as long as you’re watchable, that’s all that matters.

They were saying Heidi “was being exploited” when she was doing sex work, even though she wasn’t being exploited. She wasn’t really exploiting her girls. That went against all these narratives of, “Oh, well if someone’s doing sex work, they must have been coerced into it. Something bad must happen.” It was like, “No, it’s just a job and work is exploitative.” There’s this patriarchal condescension of, “Oh, well, they don’t know any better. They don’t know that it’s degrading for them to sell their bodies.” Which again, the people who are saying that are the people who are buying.

I was just thinking about this yesterday, you used to have to pay money to see pictures of hot girls. Now you can just see it for free. That’s what Instagram is selling—people posting photos of themselves. Or selling “take a look into my life,” whether it’s sexual or not. But then being in this denial that they’re selling anything.

Then turning around and shadow-banning or censoring the people that have made their platform a destination in the first place.

Exactly! That’s the thing with social media and a lot of media: Sex workers are the first ones in, then the first ones to get punished when that thing becomes successful. Pornography is always the first thing to launch a new form of media.

What they tried to do with OnlyFans, where they were like, “Oh, we’re going to pivot away from sexualized adult content.” I thought that was interesting, because people sided with the sex workers there. People sided with people who take nudes and lewds to pay their rent, because I think also more people than ever can imagine having to do something like that in order to make rent.

Shifting gears slightly, you cast the podcast with an ensemble of L.A. and internet personalities playing the real-life people in Heidi’s story. Why was it important to you to hear from these people in the form of their own words?

Just getting into the research, I realized there were so much quoting of people. People gave so many interviews. Heidi especially did a lot of profiles at the height of her notoriety, because I think she also was trying to control or take charge of her narrative once it started spinning out of her control. I thought it would be fun to cast a lot of people and see these characters. I was thinking of things like Inherent Vice, because it’s just also a story about these sort of unexpected ways in which all these powerful people know each other, kind of above the public line and below in this sort of underworld.

Annie Hamilton, who voices Heidi, is great, she has this amazing, sort of husky voice.

I knew her through my friend, Naomi Fry. She posts these great Instagram Q&As, where she walks around New York and answers people’s questions. I just thought she had this great quality that Heidi has, of just, you can’t look away. This person knows how to keep you interested and get you on the line with their charisma.

Given the timing of the recent Ghislaine Maxwell trial, I feel like there are people who might try to draw bad-faith parallels between Heidi’s story and Maxwell’s story.

It’s just so different. It’s actually the woman who snitched on Heidi. One former Heidi Girl is now a right-wing political figure, who like a lot of right-wing political figures, is behind this movement to try to classify all sex work as trafficking. Right-wingers, but also liberals, lump everything in with trafficking. Trafficking is a crime. Trafficking is exploitative. That’s not what this was at all.

This was all women who wanted to do sex work. A lot of them were failed actresses who needed money. Or aspiring model actress types who… None of it was coerced. Nobody was getting forced to do anything. I think that idea is just still really hard for people to swallow, because there’s this baked in idea that, if somebody does sex work, it’s because they’re down and out. I think if you talk to any sex workers, you see that that’s not what it is.

I wrote a piece a long time ago about the porn awards, the AVN Awards, that was the first time I sort of saw the way sex workers were all in the gig economy, that nobody could just have one job, everybody has to have five jobs now ​​and sell off whatever assets they have in order to make rent. I think it’s a time of extremes, and the mainstream media still portrays this narrative that sex work as this very degrading, exploitative thing, but somehow working at an Amazon warehouse where you have to piss in a jar is okay. Of course, there are exploitative forms of work, but sex work isn’t automatically exploitative. Again, it’s just so nuanced, it’s hard for people to talk about, I think. It’s so easy to railroad people.

I have to ask about the name of the podcast, Heidi World. What’s the legacy of “Heidi’s girls,” her arrest, and her treatment by the media? In what ways are we living in Heidi’s World?

I really think she foretold the social media world, where it doesn’t matter what you do as long as people are looking at you. She didn’t set out to become famous; her being famous ruined her life and her business. I also think there’s this thing that happens in culture where, if a woman wants attention, people are like, “Well, let’s give her attention.” “Let’s attention her to death.” Which I also think is really what happened with Monica Lewinsky: “Oh, you wanted people to look at you? Well, now we’re all looking at you and we’re never going to stop.”

Heidi was just so smart that once she became famous, she found ways to monetize it, using her own notoriety to be like, “Well, all these people in the media are making money off of me, how can I use it to make money off of this story?” Now, for better and worse, that’s the world we live in. As long as you can keep people’s attention, that’s all that really matters.

New episodes of the podcast will be released all podcast platforms each Monday. Lambert also has a Patreon for the show, where backers will get access to bonus episodes, merchandise, and more.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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My body has belonged to tennis for so long. I gripped my first racket at age 3 and played my first pro game at 14. The sport has torn me up: I’ve rolled my ankles, busted my knees, played with a taped-up Achilles heel, and quit midgame from back spasms. I’ve suffered every injury imaginable, and I know my body.

When I found out I was pregnant two days before the 2017 Australian Open, my body had already switched allegiances. Its purpose, as far as it was concerned, was to grow and nurture this baby that had seemingly materialized, unplanned. Being pregnant wasn’t something I could tell Alexis over the phone; I told him to fly out to Melbourne right away. When he got here, I handed him a paper bag filled with six positive pregnancy tests I had taken all in one afternoon.

Of course, being pregnant didn’t mean I couldn’t play tennis. I was scheduled to compete at eight weeks along. I wasn’t sure how the Open would go; during training, I was getting more fatigued between points. Each morning—and I’m not a morning person to begin with—I was still determined to play fast and hard before the Melbourne heat socked me. I won seven matches, all in straight sets.

Since I’ve had my baby, the stakes of the game have shifted for me. I have 23 Grand Slams to my name, more than any other active player. But winning is now a desire and no longer a need. I have a beautiful daughter at home; I still want the titles, the success, and the esteem, but it’s not my reason for waking up in the morning. There is more to teach her about this game than winning. I’ve learned to dust myself off after defeat, to stand up for what matters at any cost, to call out for what’s fair—even when it makes me unpopular. Giving birth to my baby, it turned out, was a test for how loud and how often I would have to call out before I was finally heard.

Let’s go back to the beginning. My first trimester brought headaches and a weird metallic taste in my mouth, but all in all, I had a wonderful pregnancy. I guess I’m one of those women who likes being pregnant; I enjoyed the positive attention. I’m used to getting negative attention from the press and critics, but this was different. I settled into a whole new way of being. I was relaxed not playing: my life was just sitting at home, and it was wonderful. I still had plenty of work to do, but my focus narrowed to keeping myself healthy for the baby.

Don’t ask me why, but I was obsessed with having the baby in September, so I put off the doctors when they wanted to induce me in late August. I finally went in on August 31, and they inserted a little pill inside of me to get things going. Contractions started shortly after that, and it was great! I know that’s not what people are supposed to say, but I was enjoying it, the work of labor. I was completely in the moment. I loved the cramps. I loved feeling my body trying to push the baby out. I wasn’t on an epidural; to get through it, I was using my breath and all the techniques I’d learned from birth training (I had taken every birthing class that the hospital had to offer).

By the next morning, the contractions were coming harder and faster. With each one, my baby’s heart rate plummeted. I was scared. I thought I should probably get an epidural, but I was still okay with the work so I didn’t. Every time the baby’s heart rate dropped, the nurses would come in and tell me to turn onto my side. The baby’s heart rate would go back up and everything seemed fine. I’d have another contraction, and baby’s heart rate would drop again, but I’d turn over and the rate would go back up, and so on and so forth.

Outside my birthing room, there were meetings going on without me—my husband was conferencing with the doctors. By this point, I was more than ready for the epidural, but after 20 minutes, the doctor walked in, looked at me, and said, “We’re giving you a C-section.” She made it clear that there wasn’t time for an epidural or more pushing. I loved her confidence; had she given me the choice between more pushing or surgery, I would have been ruined. I’m not good at making decisions. In that moment, what I needed most was that calm, affirmative direction. Since it was my first child, I really wanted to have the baby vaginally, but I thought to myself, “I’ve had so many surgeries, what’s another one?” Being an athlete is so often about controlling your body, wielding its power, but it’s also about knowing when to surrender. I was happy and relieved to let go; the energy in the room totally changed. We went from this intense, seemingly endless process to a clear plan for bringing this baby into the world.

I was nervous about meeting my baby. Throughout my pregnancy, I’d never felt a connection with her. While I loved being pregnant, I didn’t have that amazing Oh my God, this is my baby moment, ever. It’s something people don’t usually talk about, because we’re supposed to be in love from the first second. Yes, I was a lioness who would protect her baby at any cost, but I wasn’t gushing over her. I kept waiting to feel like I knew her during pregnancy, but the feeling never came. Some of my mom friends told me they didn’t feel the connection in the womb either, which made me feel better, but still, I longed for it.

When I finally saw her—and I just knew it was going to be a girl, that was one thing I knew about her before we even had it confirmed—I loved her right away. It wasn’t exactly instantaneous, but it was there, and from that seed, it grew. I couldn’t stop staring at her, my Olympia.

I spent the night in the hospital with my baby in the room. When I woke up, she was nestled in my arms. The rest of my body was paralyzed. I couldn’t get out of bed because my legs were still numb, but it didn’t matter. Alexis and I sat there, alone with our new baby. It was surreal to feel the presence of this third person in the room. Who was this new little creature?

So much of what happened after that is still a blur. I may have passed out a few times. In my haze, I wondered if I should ask someone about my drip. In 2010, I learned I had blood clots in my lungs—clots that, had they not been caught in time, could have killed me. Ever since then, I’ve lived in fear of them returning. It wasn’t a one-off; I’m at high risk for blood clots. I asked a nurse, “When do I start my heparin drip? Shouldn’t I be on that now?”

The response was, “Well, we don’t really know if that’s what you need to be on right now.” No one was really listening to what I was saying. The logic for not starting the blood thinners was that it could cause my C-section wound to bleed, which is true. Still, I felt it was important and kept pressing. All the while, I was in excruciating pain. I couldn’t move at all—not my legs, not my back, nothing.

I began to cough. The nurses warned me that coughing might burst my stitches, but I couldn’t help it. The coughs became racking, full-body ordeals. Every time I coughed, sharp pains shot through my wound.

I couldn’t breathe. I was coughing because I just couldn’t get enough air. I grabbed a towel, rolled it up, and put it over my incision. Sure enough, I was hacking so hard that my stitches burst. I went into my first surgery after the C-section to get restitched.

After that, I thought, “Well, now we’re all set.” Little did I realize that this would be the first of many surgeries. I wasn’t coughing for nothing; I was coughing because I had an embolism, a clot in one of my arteries. The doctors would also discover a hematoma, a collection of blood outside the blood vessels, in my abdomen, then even more clots that had to be kept from traveling to my lungs. That’s what the medical report says, anyway. To me, it was just a fog of surgeries, one after another.

My husband left—to get food and shower back at the house—and this started a trend in which every time he’d try to leave, I’d wind up back in the operating room. I had to get a second surgery, and before he could get home, he had to come right back. When I woke up from that surgery, in the hospital room with my parents and my in-laws, I felt like I was dying. They were trying to talk to me, and all I could think was, “I’m dying, I’m dying. Oh my God.” I really thought I would faint. I got up somehow, and I went into the other room because I didn’t want my mom to worry. I didn’t want her to hear me; she’s the world’s biggest worrier.

In the other room, I spoke to the nurse. I told her: “I need to have a CAT scan of my lungs bilaterally, and then I need to be on my heparin drip.” She said, “I think all this medicine is making you talk crazy.” I said, “No, I’m telling you what I need: I need the scan immediately. And I need it to be done with dye.” I guess I said the name of the dye wrong, and she told me I just needed to rest. But I persisted: “I’m telling you, this is what I need.” Finally, the nurse called my doctor, and she listened to me and insisted we check. I fought hard, and I ended up getting the CAT scan. I’m so grateful to her. Lo and behold, I had a blot clot in my lungs, and they needed to insert a filter into my veins to break up the clot before it reached my heart.

Surgery number three. Something I never knew: Athletes have bigger veins. I was under for a long time because they couldn’t find a filter to fit in my veins. This filter that fits every other patient wouldn’t fit me.

Poor Alexis. He tried again to leave for a moment at home, but they found another blood clot. He was distraught—and the man needed a shower! But back to the hospital he went, and I went in for surgery number four. I went into the same operating room so many times that I started to say, “I’m baaaaaack!” each time they wheeled me in. Alexis—and I can barely say this without laughing myself into tears—gave up on trying to leave. He showered in the hospital room because he was terrified to walk out the door. He didn’t try again, and I didn’t have any more surgeries.

Needless to say, I was exhausted. Despite fighting for it, I didn’t like being on the heparin drip. I just wanted to be with my baby. I remained calm through it all, but afterwards, when everyone was retelling the story, I thought, “Wow, no wonder everyone was panicking.” My mother, my sister, my good friend Jill Smoller, my father — they were having their own mini heart attacks at my side. And I was just sitting there, telling the nurse what I needed. I had a totally different experience from everyone else. I was hiding my fear so well in the room that I didn’t even feel it, while other people were hiding their fear from me in another room. It’s a good thing I didn’t realize that I was doing so poorly—panicking would’ve made everything worse.

My personal OBGYN was amazing. She never made me feel dismissed. Another doctor was supposed to be checking in but I didn’t see him very much. In fact, I saw him only once.

In the U.S., Black women are nearly three times more likely to die during or after childbirth than their white counterparts. Many of these deaths are considered by experts to be preventable. Being heard and appropriately treated was the difference between life or death for me; I know those statistics would be different if the medical establishment listened to every Black woman’s experience.

A week later, I finally left the hospital with Olympia. In the span of seven days, I had gone through four surgeries back-to-back, including my C-section. My body, my entire being, was just so tired at that point. When I first got home, I couldn’t walk down the driveway. When I finally made it to a tree halfway down the driveway, it was a big hurdle for me. Everyone in my family cheered me on, telling me, “You’re doing so good!” They must’ve been aching on the inside, but they still all acted like nothing was wrong. My dad was so encouraging, saying, “Look, you did it!” This, after he coached me for years, all tough and relentless. I’m glad they didn’t let me see how bad it really was.

Despite my body’s wreckage—and the fact that I couldn’t get in much breastfeeding—connecting with Olympia at long last was amazing; it was both the reward and the validation for all I’d been through. I went from not being able to really imagine her in the womb to us being completely inseparable. I still feel like I have to be around her for every day of her life, as much as possible. I’m anxious when I’m not around her. Honestly, it’s a little much!

Olympia has a great sense of humor. If you tell her to draw a bunny, she’ll draw a chicken instead, and she knows she’s making a joke. She loves to laugh. I thought I was going to be really strict, but so far I’m the more lenient parent. This kid has me under her finger. I didn’t know what kind of mom I’d be, and I still don’t know. Instead, maybe for the first time in my life, I’m just being.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue of ELLE.

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Adapted from Arrival Stories: Women Share Their Experiences of Becoming Mothers, an anthology collected by Amy Schumer and Christy Turlington Burns, out April 5.

This article appears in the April 2022 issue of ELLE.

I always knew I wanted to have kids. When I was in kindergarten, I would surround my bed with stuffed animals. When Cabbage Patch Kids hit shelves for the first time, I made my dad wait outside Kmart for 10 hours so I could have my very own baby. Even my first job was as a dog walker—clearly, I just couldn’t wait to cuddle, nurture, and I suppose, clean up poop.

Years later, as a young, miserable lawyer in New York City, I spent my days sneaking glances at the wallet-sized picture of my niece, Maya, that I kept pinned up behind my desk. Back home, my walls were plastered with photos of us together, and I longed for the day when I’d have snapshots of my own kids to hang alongside them.

From my late 20s to late 30s—the time my doctors would call “peak fertility,”—I quit my job, ran for a seat in the House of Representatives, lost spectacularly, got married, wrote two books about women’s leadership, and launched a company teaching girls to code. And during that same decade, I also had 5 miscarriages, underwent more rounds of IVF than I would like to remember, and cried myself to sleep countless nights, before finally welcoming my son Shaan into the world in 2015. My son Sai followed in 2020.

Like any mom, I love my children more than anything in the world. But I can’t help but wonder if—had I started my career now rather than in the early 2000s—I would have fought so ferociously to become a parent at all.

During the pandemic, life beyond my Zoom screen didn’t look so hot. I did my best to keep up the façade—throwing on red lipstick and hoop earrings every day—but the new baby in my lap and five-year-old in Batman pajamas banging on my bedroom door didn’t exactly scream, “SUCCESS!” During one especially brutal afternoon in which both Batman and a wailing Robin decided to crash a video call, a 20-something-year-old woman who works in my company said, “I look around at all of you and think, There’s no way I want to put myself through that.”

She’s not the only one. Today, the American birth rate has plummeted to a historic low. More and more women say they never want to have children—at least in part because of the transparency so many of us moms have championed. Women are speaking out about feeling overjudged and under-supported by our government, our communities, and even our spouses; about how a lack of childcare options has forced us to abandon paying jobs to become unpaid personal chefs, fight-referees, and splinter-removers. We’re sounding the alarm about workplaces that have taken us for granted; never given us the support we need to do our best work. Throw in a global pandemic—and a front row seat to the tantrums, stains, and the impossible charge of doing it all, let alone having it all—and it’s no wonder women are closing the door to motherhood.

I’m extraordinarily grateful that the whisper of discontent has grown to a primal scream; that I’m no longer expected to confine my personal life to a school photo hidden behind my desk, or to pretend that everything is okay when it feels, so often, like the world is falling apart.

But at the same time, whether it’s for fear of being a “wimp” or a need to focus on their own challenges at work, too many non-moms are unwilling to add their voices to that cry for help. And I know moms’ problems aren’t going to go away if childless women—and childless men, for that matter!—close the door on not just motherhood, but mothers. Because whether you have kids; or want kids, but don’t know when; or don’t want kids, but may change your mind; or have no idea whether you want kids, but believe you have the time to figure it out, you have the obligation to ensure that the choice to parent—and the ability to parent without sacrificing your sanity and everything you’ve worked for—is yours, and every person’s, to make.

Fortunately, young workers have more leverage than ever before in protecting that choice. Faced with a Great Resignation and a historic labor shortage, companies can’t afford to not listen to the demands of their workforce, and finally provide moms the resources they need to make work, work. And already, we’re starting to see employees exercise that power. According to one poll out of England, one in five employees aged 18-35 have quit their jobs over poor parental leave policies. Meanwhile, over half of millennials consider reproductive rights a deciding factor in accepting a job offer, while 9 in 10 employees want flexibility in where and when they work—with millennials twice as likely as baby boomers to leave their jobs for more accommodating ones. We have to keep the pressure up and convince even more allies to fight for moms’ rights. Because today, as we reimagine everything about how we live and work, we have a once in a generation opportunity to make sweeping changes on behalf of parents—present and future.

It’s why I encourage my niece, Maya, now only a few years younger than I was when I first hid that photo of her behind my cubicle, to start considering family planning and fertility. Will the company she’s set on working for offer paid time off after an abortion or miscarriage? Will the insurance they offer cover IVF or egg freezing? I ask her to think long and hard about starting a career in a city or state that bans abortion, or fails to offer paid family leave, or universal pre-K—even if the need for those things in her life feels impossibly far away right now.

I urge her to become an informed advocate for the workplace policies, practices, and perspectives that would make working parenthood not only possible, but actually enjoyable and sustainable for her—and for the millions of moms who have left paying jobs and see no pathway back to them. That includes everything from flexible scheduling and predictable hours, to on-site childcare and paid sick leave; from returnships and mental health resources for moms reentering the workforce, to performance evaluations that prioritize output over face time.

And I ask her to take an active role in dismantling the “motherhood penalty”—that is, working against the biases and policies that prevent moms from reaching their fullest earning potential at work after having children. It’s a penalty that comes with a steep cost: one study found that women’s earnings decrease by four percent for every child they have; men’s earnings, on the other hand, increase by more than 6 percent upon becoming fathers. The only way to close that gap is to cultivate a workplace culture in which men are not only encouraged but expected to take parental leave and do their share of unpaid labor at home.

I always knew I wanted to have kids. But now, I know that having kids can’t be the sole impetus for fighting for parents. Because only when we get everyone on board—moms and dads, women who aren’t yet parents, and women who never will be, people who love kids and even people who can’t stand them—can we hope to create a world that anyone would be proud to bring children into.

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The dermatologist did a quick scan of my body, barely opening the back of my medical gown that ballooned over my pregnant belly. “What about this?” I asked him, pointing to a growth on my shoulder. “It appeared a few months ago.” He looked at my shoulder and smiled. “It’s just a growth from pregnancy. I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll bet it goes away on its own.”

I was relieved, and even laughed with him about the strange things that women’s bodies do while pregnant. But this wasn’t an obvious result of pregnancy like the varicose veins that pulsed from the expanding weight of my uterus. As much as I wanted the growth to be nothing, the ease at which he blamed pregnancy without even considering a biopsy nagged at me.

A year and a half later, the growth on my shoulder still there, I made an appointment with a new dermatologist. I was comforted by the time she took to inspect my body, the magnifying glass she used, and her confident, “We should biopsy that,” when she got to my shoulder.

But I cried days later when the nurse called to tell me it was skin cancer. Even though I was assured that basal cell carcinoma was the most common and “best” kind to have—slow growing, easily treated, and minimal damage—I couldn’t shake the fear of what might have been if I’d never sought a second opinion.

Until this point, I had always given doctors absolute authority and knowledge over my body. I strived to be a “good” patient—never complaining, enduring discomfort in exams with a smile, and not questioning a diagnosis even when I felt in my gut that it was wrong.

According to Elinor Cleghorn, author of Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World, women have faced gender bias in medicine from as far back as ancient Greece. “Women’s illnesses and diseases were consistently related back to the “secrets” and “curiosities” of her reproductive organs,” Cleghorn writes in Time magazine. While my doctor didn’t go as far as leeching me for my wandering uterus, it was clear that my mysterious, understudied pregnant female body wasn’t being taken seriously.

Recent studies have uncovered dangerous outcomes for women in the ER: women with abdominal pain are 13 percent to 25 percent less likely than men to receive pain medication, and wait nearly 20 minutes longer for care; chest pain in women was misdiagnosed five percent of the time, and it took an average of 12 hours longer to be admitted. Women are also less likely to obtain a correct stroke diagnosis. Women of color experience even more bias; a 2021 article in the International Journal of Women’s Dermatology shows the limited data collected for women of color causes suspicion from providers and hinders appropriate evaluation and care.

As a woman in my twenties, I never thought about my medical care as being anything different than my male counterparts. But when I look back over my medical history, I realized my skin cancer misdiagnosis was not the first time my symptoms were downplayed. In January 2013, after weeks of feeling weak and nauseated, I dragged myself to my doctor’s office. She all but rolled her eyes, telling me it was most likely anxiety over my upcoming wedding. When I asked, apologetically, if she could order a mono test, she reluctantly agreed. It came back positive. That night in the bath I felt two swollen lymph nodes in the creases of my groin, my body sending SOS signals.

Eight years later, with eight fresh stitches in my shoulder following the removal of the cancerous mole, I considered contacting my original dermatologist to tell him he was wrong. When I broached the idea with Dr. Sareh Parangi, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School and Chair of Surgery at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, she encouraged me to follow through. “Ninety-nine percent of physicians will really, really want the information, so that they can improve their care for the next set of patients,” she says. “Physicians know we’re not perfect—we are always listening and learning, which ultimately makes us better doctors.” Doctors are considered the authority in medical care, but as Dr. Parangi points out, “patients know themselves the best and should rely on their own gut feeling and intuition about their health.”

For years I dreamed of contacting the doctor who dismissed my mono symptoms as anxiety, and now I had my new skin cancer misdiagnosis to reconcile. But Dr. Michelle E. Flaum, EdD, LPCCs, DCMHS, and associate professor in the Department of Counseling at Xavier University, encourages patients to have realistic expectations when reaching out to a misdiagnosing doctor. Patients may want an apology, but the physician may become defensive. “The patient could walk away feeling like they are being minimized or invalidated,” explains Dr. Flaum. But, with expectations in check and a good support system, Dr. Flaum adds there is strength in speaking up: “Advocacy can be really powerful for us as patients.”

Maya Dusenbery, author of Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick, understood my pause in approaching the doctor, and emphasized another issue: “We need a systemic way that the feedback happens, and one that doesn’t put so much of the burden on the patient.” In reporting her book, Dusenbery asked experts how to make progress against misdiagnosis in women and found the consensus was that the lack of feedback is making doctors overly confident in their diagnostic skills. “It’s a huge part of the problem,” Dusenbery says. If women are told by a doctor that their symptoms are a result of anxiety—or in my case, pregnancy—the misdiagnosing doctor’s biases about women and such symptoms will never be questioned. “That in turn affects how they view the next woman who comes into their office,” Dusenbery explains.

I eventually worked up the courage to send an email to my original dermatologist. With a friend’s help and encouragement, I drafted a letter that felt informative, but not confrontational. “Dear Doctor X: I wanted to let you know that the growth on my shoulder was not a result of pregnancy. After getting a second opinion and biopsy it was found to be basal carcinoma. I am writing with the intention that this note can help inform care for all of your future patients. Thank you.”

I nervously waited for his response, worried I’d find a defensive message in my inbox, maybe even an insinuation that I misunderstood him. The response came quickly. “Thank you for letting me know!” he wrote. “It’s always helpful to get follow up and feedback. I’m so glad you had it reevaluated and biopsied.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. I was grateful that not only did the doctor appreciate my feedback, but I was proud that I advocated for myself, and in the process, perhaps opened the door for at least one healthcare professional to think twice before dismissing a woman’s symptoms again.

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Before she woke up drenched in sweat on the floor, Andrea thought the Zoom call was going great. What she remembers next are snippets of sensation: the coldness of the hardwood on her face as she willed herself to stand up, the nagging sense that she needed to get back to work. Never mind that it was past 3 a.m. or that she had, apparently, passed out in the middle of an eleventh-hour production meeting. As the 38-year-old account director for a major advertising agency, Andrea (who prefers not to share her last name) was used to the long days leading up to a major launch. Recent company turnover had only ramped up the pressure; for the past several months, she was effectively doing three people’s jobs. But as a single woman in the middle of a global pandemic, there wasn’t much else to do, anyway. Besides, she thrived on the adrenaline rush of an impossible challenge. Twenty-hour days and 90-hour weeks, unthinkable production windows for make-or-break campaigns—these were her moments to shine.

She eventually hauled herself back to the video call, still shaking, a bruise forming over her left eye. Her colleague later recalled that the scene—Andrea losing consciousness, closing her laptop as she fell—was “like something out of a horror movie.” Andrea remembers none of it. For two years, as COVID fortified the divide between parents and nonparents, women’s respective experiences have been framed in terms of work: emotional work, care work, career work. The image of the exhausted, overburdened mother has been emblazoned on the collective imagination. We saw it in the hard numbers—nearly 33 million Americans resigning from their jobs between April and November 2021, mostly women and extremely burned out. And we heard it in the “primal scream,” as a viral New York Times package called it, of mothers struggling to balance the demands of career and family in a time of virtual schooling, curtailed childcare, and not-so-secret disparities between men and women at home. The childless working woman, presumed frivolous by extension, her problems trivial by comparison, often quietly dissolved into her job. In the absence of contact with family and friends, the remote workplace became many white-collar workers’ stand-in for community. No doubt, work is work and, all told, parents had more of it. But career work, unlike parenting, does not offer love in return.

Andrea was one of more than a dozen high-achieving women without kids who generously shared their experiences for this story. In our phone conversations and email exchanges, they described internal and external pressures to assume ever-mounting responsibility, sometimes while caring for relatives or grieving a loss. Some recalled how their sudden, housebound isolation cut them off from the companionship and rituals that normally gave their lives meaning—not to mention work-life balance. And most spoke of the guilt and emotional baggage that comes from being a woman of child-rearing age who has opted, at least for now, to put career first.

Throughout the pandemic, childless women who were fortunate enough to keep their jobs, and who could do those jobs remotely, comprised a privileged minority within a privileged minority. Their struggles were different from those of working parents, but they were no less real. Among some high-achieving women, the elimination of boundaries between work and nonwork life became a recipe for disaster—and, from there, a catalyst for a major reevaluation of priorities and purpose.

Jordan Treadaway, 33, can’t help but laugh when describing her former career aspirations. “My dream job was always CEO,” she says. She came close, having worked her way up the corporate ranks to become the chief operating officer of a major hospitality company in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Then the pandemic hit.

“I was working from home and without kids, so there was kind of a combined assumption from my peers that I would always be available, because what else would I be doing?” Treadaway says. “But also, for myself, there was this kind of guilt. If I wasn’t always available, or if I would stop work to take a shower in the middle of the day, then I felt like I was taking advantage of the situation.” Treadaway dealt with the anxiety by working through it—literally. She worked upwards of 14 hours each day, taking breakfast, lunch, and dinner at her desk. She worked with partial pay through a furlough; when the furlough ended, she worked through every holiday. “I was constantly stressed,” she says. When she began to experience chronic headaches and intermittent panic attacks, she worked through those as well.

Women aren’t supposed to be workaholics. In American culture, it’s men who are often praised for going all-in on their jobs at the expense of their relationships and hobbies. It’s not actually good for them—one 2014 meta-analysis of 89 studies linked workaholism to lower levels of satisfaction in work, family, and life overall. But the high-profile successes of unapologetic workaholics, like Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey, ultimately frame these otherwise controversial figures as aspirational models of work-first fanaticism.

Women, on the other hand, are told from birth that motherhood is the most valuable potential vocation—the role to which they should be directing the bulk of their time and attention. Because of this, workaholism is more psychologically taxing for women than it is for men, even if their professional achievements are a point of pride, hypothesizes Malissa Clark, PhD, associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia and coauthor of the 2014 meta-analysis. According to Clark, workaholic moms are likelier than their male counterparts to feel guilty for their compulsion to overwork. Workaholic non-moms, on the other hand, wrestle to pin down the value of their labor in a world that’s still very much structured around the nuclear family and home.

In other words, regardless of their parental status, all women suffer when they feel compelled to overwork. “There’s a discrepancy there, and that can cause a lot of stress and tension,” Clark says.

That discrepancy also elides the reality that women are disproportionately tasked with nonmaternal caregiving responsibilities, along with other assorted duties that get lumped under the umbrella of “emotional labor.” This work is essential, yet is rarely acknowledged, let alone accommodated, in the professional sphere.

Rochelle Ritchie, a 40-year-old in Chicago, assumed primary responsibility for coordinating her father’s care when he was hospitalized for COVID-19 in the spring of 2020, a role that fell to her as his oldest unmarried daughter. Working remotely in a senior communications role, Ritchie sometimes found her long workdays punctuated by back-to-back calls with her father’s critical-care team and work meetings. While colleagues with children were given some leeway to step away throughout the workday, Ritchie says she was expected to show up to every meeting and pick up the slack for others on her team. “I feel like people think, ‘Well, you’re single, you have no children. So you should be able to just take everything off,’ ” Ritchie says. “The thing about being single and with no children is that we are all we’ve got, at the end of the day.”

“Women are seen as a mother, as a mother, as a mother,” says Carrie Thornbrugh, a 37-year-old “child-free by choice” tech worker in Richmond, Virginia. Between caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, long hours for her start-up job, and other adult responsibilities—a mortgage, a husband, pets—she says she is “always working,” yet feels guilty when she stops. “I don’t see a way out,” she says. “It’s a necessity, which makes me feel trapped.”

Like most human behavior, compulsive overwork can be learned. Several of the women I interviewed mentioned having had workaholic parents. Workaholics also tend to be type A perfectionists and achievement junkies—the sorts of people who thrive on external validation. They’re the person at the office who can solve the impossible problem, the one who can outwork everyone else without breaking a sweat. If the situation calls for someone to step up, they’ll step twice. And in a society where their personal life decisions remain widely perceived as unserious or self-indulgent, it stands to reason that they’ll overcompensate in other arenas. They’ll take more and more on, and they’ll get results.

In that sense, the pandemic played to the workaholic’s deepest vulnerabilities: an ache for approval, and to feel seen. It also brought new pressures in the form of remote teams, fear of layoffs, and heavier workloads as coworkers fell ill or became less available due to responsibilities at home. Clark says circumstances like these can definitely make workaholism worse. She adds that the blurred work-life boundaries brought on by working from home can exacerbate these tendencies even further, an observation that seems to be supported by 2020 Robert Half survey data. Among American professionals who transitioned to remote work in the pandemic, 70 percent reported working weekends and nearly half logged more than 8 hours a day.

Sonia Byun, 32, noticed the shift firsthand. She was already working 12- to 18-hour days as a management consultant in New York City when the pandemic began. Once the job went remote, however, she noticed that without in-office social cues to take breaks, she simply wouldn’t take them. “I wasn’t really sure when to eat, when to wake up, when to work out, all that stuff,” she says. She has since left the company, joined a new one, and also cofounded a women’s health start-up. But she still struggles to set limits on work. She’s been meaning to freeze her eggs, but can’t seem to find the time.

Whatever the circumstances, workaholism doesn’t just go away on its own. As with any addictive behavior, a person sometimes needs to recognize that they’ve hit the proverbial rock bottom before they’re inclined to make changes. “Maybe this”—the pandemic—“is their ‘aha’ moment,” Clark says.

For Arden McLaughlin, 43, the “aha” began last June, when she passed out in her living room after going for a run, and came to in a pool of her own vomit. She wound up being hospitalized for life-threatening dehydration and complications from heatstroke. Her bowels shut down; for two days, she had to wear an adult diaper. Her balance and peripheral vision remain impaired. “I literally could have died,” she says.

McLaughlin, who lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, admits that her health scare was the culmination of months of personal neglect. She wasn’t eating enough, and she wasn’t drinking water. The full force of her energy went into her PR and marketing business, which was floundering in the first year of the pandemic.

Alyza Berman, a psychotherapist based in Atlanta, says she’s seen an influx of new clients who have hit a similar wall. As a result, many are suddenly asking themselves what they really want out of life. “We live in a society that’s grade-driven, bank account–driven, social media–driven,” Berman says. “There are all these external influences, and nobody knows who they are anymore because [their motivations] are all externally driven.”

The women I talked to are fed up, no longer willing to go through the motions of what they think they should be achieving. They increasingly want to set their own terms for a life well-lived, haters be damned.

Ritchie, the communications director, cared for her father for more than five months until his death from COVID-19. She started a new job a month later—a mistake, she now realizes. Deep in grief, she wasn’t ready to be the best manager she could be; she says her new employer, meanwhile, wasn’t willing to offer her the consideration or psychological support she needed. Last summer, she quit.

Ritchie has since taken on an assortment of consulting projects and public-speaking gigs, including a lecture at a mental health conference for Black women shortly after she left her job. She spoke about letting go of “Superwoman syndrome,” the armor of indefatigability many Black women adopt in the face of white supremacy, to the detriment of their own mental health. These days, it’s a subject close to her heart. “It’s okay to take off the cape,” Ritchie says—a message for Black women in particular, but one that she thinks all women could stand to hear from time to time.

Treadaway, the former hospitality COO, says her wake-up call came last April. After months of unending work, she took one of her 45 accumulated PTO days to get married. When she turned on her phone that evening, only to be met by a flurry of frantic, work-related demands from her colleagues, she knew something had to give. She began seeing a therapist shortly thereafter, who diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her job. In June, she quit.

She now works as an office coordinator for an organic skin care start-up in Asheville, North Carolina. The role is much more junior, and the pay is 60 percent less than what she was earning at her last job, but it doesn’t feel like a step back. “I’ve never worked for somebody who is so understanding and progressive, and believes in the same things that I do,” she says.

Andrea, the advertising director, quit too: She gave her notice in the fall, shortly after passing out on the Zoom call, and she left the agency in January. She figures she’ll travel and recuperate for a few months, but her plans are open-ended. The time for decision-making isn’t now. “I think I just realized it’s okay to take a break,” she says.

This article appears in the March 2022 issue of ELLE.