If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember a series I did in 2014 called A Year of Wednesdays.* For those who aren’t familiar or who don’t remember, A Year of Wednesdays was a loose collection of personal essays and stories I published once a week. It was something I started on a lark, after I’d been rejected for a job I really wanted. The rejection made me feel terrible, and all I wanted to do was to show those assholes what they’d missed out on. A therapist suggested that, while spite might be a powerful motivator, I was also putting a lot of pressure on myself. She suggested instead that I try writing for myself. Why not write, she said, for the love of writing.

After a not-insignificant amount of eye-rolling, I gave in and said I’d do it. I didn’t think about it much beyond that, except to promise myself that I’d start in the new year, then only a few weeks away. On New Year’s Day, I forced myself both to start immediately and to publish my work in some consistent public way, in order to create a little bit of structure and accountability. The first day of 2014 happened to be a Wednesday, and I decided I’d post every single Wednesday that year — hence the name.

I started A Year of Wednesdays without any sort of vision. I took a suggestion someone made and I flung myself into it, without any direction or sense of clarity. That’s not unusual, really. A lot of my endeavors have begun that way. And in the case of the Wednesdays, it worked out. It ended up being the sort of real-time workshop I really needed, me making public mistakes and sharing half-baked essays that weren’t great, until eventually I found what felt like a groove and ultimately shared a few things I could be proud of.

But after many years, I feel like this general approach to projects — and really to life — is suboptimal. It sucks! It’s a lot of vague gesturing and floundering and grand attempts. Not a lot of follow through and certainly no arrival at a satisfying destination. I honestly don’t know why it took me this long to realize it.

I looked back on some of these newsletters I’ve sent here, and this same theme is there too. Got laid off, started a newsletter, threw some spaghetti at the wall, watched to see what stuck. Wrote a few posts about how I didn’t know what exactly I was doing here, hope that’s okay, I’ll figure it out. Then another post saying sorry it’s been a while. See what I mean about how much it sucks? Sure, there were some good posts in there too, but overall it’s felt fuzzy and vague. You’re all too nice to say anything, which I thank you for, but I don’t like it.

Earlier today, as I was doing a little yoga video, I had a sudden zing! realization. It’s New Year’s Day, and once again it’s a Wednesday. It also happens to be the first day of 2025, a year that feels like a big turning point — for the world at large maybe, but definitely for myself. We don’t need to get into the specifics but generally speaking: There’s a big birthday coming, and I’ve made some big decisions about my life. And if you’re up for it, I’d like to involve all of you in at least one of those.

Starting today, I’m officially on sabbatical for a few months, primarily to finish my book proposal. But I also want to work on some other things, including this newsletter. I want to give it a real go and see how I feel about writing something weekly again. Unlike with my previous Wednesday essays though, I don’t want this to be wholly undefined. It’ll be a bit of a work in progress but I’m picking a lane. I’m going back to what I started writing about here: Tech, social media, how much it’s affected us, what I’ve learned, and how badly I want us to be able to find a way back to being human beings who can connect with one another and build community. I’m committing to Wednesdays over on Substack, sending something out, no matter how good (or bad) it is. I’ll also post occasionally here on Medium — maybe crossposts, maybe longer pieces, maybe one-offs that don’t quite fit here. I’m not sure yet. Am I’m committing to too much? Time will tell. The most important thing for me to do is finish my book proposal, but this feels important too.

This is likely the bloggiest I’ll get for a while (although no promises there). Next week, let’s get back to it. Thanks for sticking around.

xx

Leah

*Someone published a book called A Year of Wednesdays in 2019 and it is kind of freaking me out. How do two people come up with that title?? Brains are wild.

In December of last year, I clicked on an article from Fast Company about the most empathetic companies in the world. In fact, that was the title: “These Are The Most Empathetic Companies In The World.” I remember skimming the piece made me want to launch my computer into the sun, especially after I clicked through to look at the survey and the overall methodology. It’s been more than two months now, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about just how flawed and bad the entire underlying idea is: The idea that we can measure empathy.

I think about empathy a lot, whether in a business setting or nowhere near one. What empathy looks and feels like and are those different things, whether I’m being empathetic or whether someone else is, how to be empathetic in a way that doesn’t emotionally exhaust everyone, and so on. But I don’t much like to declare how empathetic I am because I often think empathy is sort of like teenage boys and sex: The more a teenage boy talks about how much sex he’s having, the more likely it is he’s having none at all.

So the idea of – if you will forgive this quote — “Empathy as not a soft nurturing value but a hard commercial tool,” made me really mad. So did the concept of “empathetic companies,” whose empathy quotient was determined by surveys through Glassdoor and Survation plus data collected on Twitter. Even typing this now makes me want to throw my hands up and yell a lot, but that won’t get us anywhere.

Instead I want to share what’s so cockamamie about this entire thing. Or maybe part of what’s cockamamie — there’s so much to say about this topic, enough to fill articles and books and talks for days, so for now I’ll focus on the heart of it.

What is empathy, anyway?

In the simplest of terms, empathy is a feeling.

Let’s stop and think about this before we get any further. Empathy is a feeling. If the klaxons hadn’t already been sounding when you read “empathetic company,” I hope they are now. I don’t even mean in the “corporations are people too!” way, where you roll your eyes and go “companies can’t have feelings.”

No, I’m talking about something really basic and straightforward. For a company to value empathy, it has to have a culture in which feelings – at work, in the workplace, in a business setting – are not only acceptable but encouraged. You can’t foster empathy or be an “empathetic company” if you’ve got a culture in which feelings are not okay at some fundamental level.

Even more than that, the culture has to be one in which emotional labor is not only recognized but valued. It’s hard enough for people to recognize and acknowledge emotional labor in their personal lives, let alone value it! How do you do that at work? How does a corporation do that?

The answer is not “create a metric.” The answer is “find a way to value empathy without needing a metric to measure it.”

Soft skills and emotional labor aren’t valued

One of the things I find most interesting about the transformation of empathy into corporate buzzword and measurable tool is the way this tells us what’s really at work.

As nearly anyone can tell you, things like empathy, emotional labor, or simply being good at dealing with people are considered “soft skills.” When I’ve brought this up on Twitter, people have taken the opportunity to remind me that anything sort of holistic or “you know, we can’t measure it” is a soft skill, and anything that’s overt and quantifiable is a hard skill. And sure, this language plays into the idea that some things are amorphous, squishy, or in some way hard to delineate, while other things are specific, rigorous, task-based.

But language like “soft” and “hard” is incredibly loaded and gendered. Lots of women are exceptional at “hard skills,” and there are certainly men who excel at “soft skills.” But softness is, at least in recent tradition, considered a more feminine trait, while hardness is masculine. Emotional labor is women’s work.

The world of business is historically a masculine environment, where an employee left feelings at the door and came in to do non-emotional, highly visible compensated labor. Believe me, I know this: At my first full time job out of college, when I had a boss who occasionally threw things near my head and told me how I paled in comparison to my male counterpart, the two most senior women in my department hauled me into a conference room to chide me for crying at work.

Taking empathy and turning it into a number, a metric, a hard tool is a way of saying that in order to value something, we have to strip it of softness, feelings, and any sense that it’s a touchy-feely-can’t-exactly-measure-it-on-an-employee-evaluation sort of thing. But to do that means it’s no longer empathy. And if you can only engage with empathy in terms of its market value, then it’s not something you value in the larger sense.

Feelings are difficult, and that’s okay

Like a lot of feelings, empathy is often very difficult. Having empathy for another person, whether a coworker or a customer or a manager or your mom or a stranger or even someone on Twitter, requires you to be be open and receptive to their experience and feelings. It often means you have to be uncomfortable, because you’re taking in feelings you don’t like or want in order to acknowledge and understand them.

This can be hugely difficult. It’s why so many people immediately offer a solution when someone says “I’m depressed” or “This terrible thing happened and I’m devastated.” A solution is a way of saying, “I’d like to solve this for you as soon as possible, because your feelings are making me uncomfortable and I need that to end.” Solutions and advice are incredibly valuable, but you can’t come up with either one if you haven’t listened to the person, and they won’t be well received if the person feels like they’re not being heard.

And you know what? Sometimes empathy is exhausting! Where do you draw the boundary? When? With whom? Will people be empathetic to you when you need it? How do you recognize the times when being empathetic means you can’t in fact help solve another person’s problem? That last one is especially tricky with empathy at work, because most of us don’t have jobs where we sit around feeling our feels all day and helping other people feel their feels. We’re at work to make things or do things or solve things, and sometimes empathizing with a colleague or customer doesn’t mean you can also give them a solution.

Empathetic people can engage in compassionate acts. Companies can create environments where people are able to be more empathetic, or to learn what that means. Companies can support compassionate acts and designs and more. A company can encourage empathy but it can’t enforce it.

Stop trying to measure empathy.

Stop trying to turn it into a quantifiable metric based on data that doesn’t reveal actual empathy. Stop taking the heart out of empathy, the emotional labor that has marked it as soft and rendered it invisible. All of this reveals an incredible lack of empathy, for your employees, your customers, your people.

Instead of trumpeting a meaningless number, turn inward. Look at whether your corporate culture is a place in which empathy and compassion can flourish. Recognize that emotional labor has value, and reward it accordingly.

1. Buttermilk/vinegar/chess, but buttermilk is the best one. You can argue with me ONLY IF you have at least once served exactly one kind of pie (and no other desserts) at your birthday like I did with buttermilk pie.
2. Sour/tart fruit pies, but mostly sour cherry or rhubarb (and if you argue for strawberry-rhubarb that pie better still be TART) and then I guess this sort of includes apple.
3. Peach
4. Sweet potato
5. Blueberry and all other fruit pies

I am intrigued by this pie but have not tried it. I will consider ranking pecan if it is not too sweet/made with Karo, and anyone who thinks pumpkin deserves to be ranked in any way should not be allowed to publicly voice an opinion on anything.

Dessert Pies, Ranked was originally published in De Gustibus on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The artist looks at the blurry decades-old tattoo on my back. Over my shoulder I say to her, “It hurt so much. It felt like he went too hard, but maybe not? I don’t know. I didn’t know anything at the time.”

She touches the blown-out ink. “You have tough skin,” she says. “A lot of artists don’t know how to work with skin like yours. This guy certainly didn’t. He went so hard and deep to try and get your skin to take the ink that he basically spent two or three hours cutting you. God, of course it hurt.”

“Is tough skin ok?” I ask.

“Of course! You just can’t tattoo it like normal skin. No, tough skin is great. You have the best skin for being out in the world, out in nature, for doing almost anything.”

A few hours later I text a girlfriend. “The universe has given us an incredible joke: I have tough skin! Me!” There are not enough exclamation points in the world to convey how ridiculous this is, or how perfect.

Here are some things I have heard over the course of my life:

Your skin is incredibly soft.

I hate you, your skin is so perfect.

Jesus Christ, you are so goddamn thin-skinned. It makes me crazy sometimes.

Do you ever age?

I worry about you. You’re too tender to be out in the world. It’s like you’re a turtle who took off her own shell to offer herself up for soup.

Later I sit alone on the steps at the back of my house and think about my skin. I think about how it is slowly losing collagen, how it creases and folds in ways I did not expect, how time has worn almost imperceptible grooves into it like the slow water erosion of limestone.

I think about how I spent a lifetime feeling thin-skinned and delicate, easy to wound. How ridiculous it sounds to say, “I have tough skin.” I have never had tough skin, not even for one moment of my existence.

But I have. For all of it. Not just some moments but every single one, millions upon millions of them.

I run my hand along my shoulder. Was I wrong all this time? How could I live an entire life inside my own skin yet fail to understand it?

The sun is hours from setting. My arms are still warm to the touch but prickly now, goosebumps rising from the cool breeze blowing off the Bay. I think about how close I came to leaving this feeling for one I found in London. I think about my time there, how far away it all seems now, how much like an unfortunate dream whose specter will haunt me only at moments when I least expect it. In the warm California evening I can no longer imagine the feeling I had that drew me to London. I can remember only how my skin felt as I walked down the street with the cherry tree and I imagined maybe the city could one day feel like home.

That was a story I told myself, that London story. I told it because I did not know how to change the stories I’d told for so many years, the stories of California and Colorado, of east coast and west, of where I’d been and where I wanted to go, of myself and my skin. I cannot erase those stories or leave them behind. I can only write over them with new ones.

I stand up from the steps and turn to go inside. I am buoyed by a strange euphoria, a calm satisfaction, an unfamiliar sense of invincibility. I feel self-contained for the first time.

My skin is the best for being out in the world and doing almost anything.

Maybe this was what it meant to find my way home.

Conclusion: Journey On was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Heartbreak, they tell you, goes away eventually.

“Time is what you need,” a friend will say. “Time and maybe more exercise, get out of your head and into your body. And stay away from the internet.”

So you trudge on, dutifully, like someone who has wildly overpacked for a trip. You drag your stone heart and a steamer trunk full of memories good and bad. Bulky bags too, packed with hurt and anger and confusion and bitterness. Nothing has wheels, everything is unwieldy, all of it you want to leave at some rest stop, in a friend’s living room or at the bar down the street. But you can’t figure out how to let any of it go.

Onward you go until that fateful moment when, indeed, you find you’ve gone minutes, hours, days, weeks without thinking of it at all. When you do, you tell an old friend a well-worn anecdote about what happened. You hear yourself as if from across the room. It sounds like someone else’s story. You wonder whether it was ever you at all.

It was you, but maybe also not you.

Heartbreak heals. Sometimes it heals poorly, with angry, visible scars, none of the pieces properly aligned but too late to do anything about it now. Sometimes it heals most of the way, like a hole that closes up but waits occasionally for you to catch your finger in it and rip it back open from time to time. Sometimes it disappears entirely, and you wonder what all the fuss was.

But what about heartache? That, I fear, is a permanent condition.

One day I tell someone I am good, but a little heartache-y. Not heartbroken, but suffused with a longing that makes my heart feel as if it is on a journey of its own in the expanse of my ribcage. Then again, I say, I am always a little heartache-y.

“You were made that way,” he replies. “You think heartache is home. But they are not the same thing.”

I get quiet and think about this. What if he’s right?

He is, but maybe also he isn’t.

If home is where the heart is, where is your heart when home is at once everywhere and yet not entirely anywhere? Can you forgive one place for not being the other? Love one person for exactly who he is and not who you wish he could be? Accept your very human restlessness?

Heartache as home is a way of loving and longing at the same time. There is room enough in your heart for both, you know.

Chapter 23: Forever And Ever was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Someone once told me that craving a particular thing is your body’s way of trying to tell you important information. You want sugar because you’ve been eating too much of it. You want red meat because you’re low in iron. You want fresh greens because you’ve spent two weeks on holiday eating croissants and cheese. You want to eat an entire pot of mashed potatoes to fill up the hole where your heart was. You want what’s bad for you, you want what’s good for you, you want to access the knowledge buried deep in your blood and bones. You squint at cells, as if DNA is printed on them like a list of ingredients.

But a body can tell you about other types of hungers. What if in my joints I can feel an ache for a city? What if my deep fascia is made not of connective tissue but of knitted-together desire for a person? What if it’s not blood that runs through me but the melted remains of everything I never left behind?

A friend writes to me: “I have often wondered if you would have, could have been more yourself if you had grown up somewhere else.”

The me that I am is a very particular me, built over time of any number of parts, many of which are unmistakably products of my environment. Not all. Somewhere else I would have been rebellious and too chatty. Everywhere else I would have been like a pint of ice cream, quick to soften and with a wide ribbon of melancholy running throughout the core of me. But I wonder about the others. Like that part of me that felt so keenly the distance between myself and others. The part that needed to close the distance, no matter the risk or what was required to do so. Would I have wanted that no matter where I was?

What is need, anyway. If your body tells you it needs something, how can you be sure it’s need and not want? Need and not an idle fancy? Need and not a sleight of hand, or of stomach, or of heart?

Or maybe the problem with the body and its wants and needs is how can you know ever really which one to listen to. How can you ever know which is the right one, and which one will lead you down the long path far away from whoever it is you would be, could be.

My body tells me things, but I don’t listen. My heart, gut, mind. All have loud voices, loud enough that sometimes I wonder if someone close to me can hear them when they cry in chorus. But loud as they are how can they be a match for the muscle memory, for the craving to follow the same path over and over, for sugar and salt and steel and skin.

Chapter 22: Body Language was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s a picture of me stuck somewhere between the pages of a photo album with a group of friends. I am slouched at the very bottom, sliding off the bed on which we were piled for the photo. My bangs are ratted and Aqua-Netted into another plane of existence, separate from the one my drunk-on-peach-schnapps eyes seem to be searching for. My lips are bright red, a color purchased that day at the only store in Denver that carried Doc Martens and a color that would later be smeared on the door jam of the bathroom when one of our group fell over in a haze and slid, mouth to wall, all the way down to the carpet below. I am very definitely 15.

Being 15 is terrible. I hate it. I hate how desperate I am to fit in, how badly I want to be cool and detached, how much I know that I will never be either.

There’s a picture of me somewhere in a photo album with a group of friends. I am at a bar, excited and nervous, a little embarrassed I had planned my own going away party. My bangs are heavy and straight. My bright red zip-up sweater stands out in the dark of the bar. I am smiling a big if somewhat uncertain smile next to my boyfriend who is mugging for the camera. At least I think he is my boyfriend. We started dating because I was moving, and we kept dating even after he threw up on my floor and slept with his ex over Christmas. I am very definitely 25.

Being 25 is strange. I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it. I hate that my dad nearly dies, that I spend too much time getting too drunk, and that I still wish I felt at home anywhere, with anyone. I love that I am moving to New York, where I am convinced it will all come together for me, even though I don’t know what all or any of it is.

There’s a picture of me somewhere on the internet. I am in a hallway of a hospital, and I am crying. My bangs have long since grown out. My cheeks are red, hot with fear. I am crouched on the floor, outside the closed door to the room where my mother is in a bed. I am not sure if she is going to live, but I am very sure I am going to do whatever I can to try and make sure she does, as if I have any control over the matter. I spend the rest of the week at the hospital, until my mother is discharged. I am very definitely 35.

Being 35 is hard. I don’t have the energy to hate or love it. I spend most of the year at my mother’s side, except when I am trying to finish a PhD. I can’t care about fitting in or being cool. I can’t care about very much at all.

There’s a picture of me on my phone. I took it on my birthday. I am in my house, and I am alone, smiling. My hair is a mess. I spend most of the day like this. Somewhere in the afternoon I wonder if I feel at home with myself, or if I ever will, or if maybe accepting I never will is as close to home as I’m going to get. When one thing becomes easy, another gets hard. I feel all at once 15, 25, 35, but when I look in the mirror I can’t tell how old I’m supposed to be. I’d say I don’t care, but I do. I always have, maybe too much. I am very definitely 40.

Chapter 21: Happy New Year was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Five years ago I lived, for a time, in a large one-bedroom apartment on one of the most beautiful streets in the city. A half block stroll to the west and a quarter turn to the north, I could see the bright bridge rise up in the distance. Some blocks onwards and there I was, perched on a rock above the strait of the Golden Gate, watching as the bay disappeared into the Pacific Ocean. The street bordered one of San Francisco’s wealthiest neighborhoods, but more importantly it bordered — or came very close to bordering — the edge of the city itself.

One day, two weeks before my birthday, I stood in our bathroom and looked in the mirror. A change was coming, I told myself. I could feel it. And so it was that within a month my mother nearly died, and then didn’t.

The last time I had lived in San Francisco was in an even larger apartment on a smaller street in a neighborhood to the southeast, nearly on the other side of the city. The wind whipped through the valley every evening. I would stand at my back door in the kitchen and watch the plastic chairs skitter across the large deck, where fat raccoons prowled at night. I had lived alone, but I had been restless.

Almost a decade spanned my departure from that life and my arrival in the one overlooking the ocean. A busy decade. I had gone to New York, to Washington, DC, to Southern California. I had accumulated a variety of degrees. I had discovered many things that didn’t work, and very few that did. I had always had one eye on the escape hatch.

I hadn’t meant to go out and search so hard, but then, we never do.

My affair with San Francisco started from across the bay. I was very young, a teenager still, and I was in Berkeley, dancing on the grass of the marina. We arrived at 4:00 am and left at 10:00. In between those hours the sun rose behind us and lit the city in the distance. I stopped dancing long enough to watch it awaken like a sleepy lover on the first morning of a doomed romance.

As they start, so too do they continue: San Francisco and I always enjoyed each other best from a distance. I liked to live in it only if I could live close to an escape. I like to look at the city from a hill on high across the expanse of water, or to see it pass by like a silent movie through the struts of the bridge. And now, finally, I wonder if even that distance is not enough, or if maybe the distance is not even the problem at all.

Before I left Southern California and moved to that street at the end of the world, I broke up with the boyfriend I had been with for a number of years. He was five years older than I was and one of the most beautiful human beings I have ever seen.

We were uneasy creatures together — insecure, competitive. We held one another at arm’s length even as we each thought we were growing closer. I could not figure out how someone with so much could think so little of himself, until I realized he saw the same in me. It took a long time for me to understand this at all and to understand that I had arrived at the place he had been when I left.

I stood in the bathroom again, five years on, and stared at myself in the mirror. A change is coming, I told myself.

So I wrote to him from my house in Northern California across the bay from San Francisco, no longer so insecure or so competitive. I wrote to him, not from the edge of the city but the edge of a decade.

He responded, this unearthly, beautiful twin of mine, and in his understanding and own wisdom I could see, for the first time, a beautiful city shining and waiting for me across the distance. Not San Francisco, but one of my own making.

Chapter 20: A Certain Arrival was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of the legends that have been told about this lake, about the range of volcanos that separate the big lake from the smaller lakes, about the chieftains and maidens whose bodies and tears formed the landscape, there is one I take home with me and return to. I can even hold it in my hand.

The legend is about the moon. The moon, like the beautiful moon in many myths, fell in love with a mortal man. He was a powerful Pomo Indian chieftain who loved the moon in return. But the moon could not stay with the chieftain, no matter how much she loved him. The light of the moon could not belong to one man alone. She lit the night sky for all people, and she guided them through the seasons.

The moon wept to leave her lover. She cried millions of tears that sprinkled the earth, tiny brilliant drops of clear crystal that remained long after she had returned to the heavens. You can still find the moon’s tears, scattered in the earth. They sparkle like diamonds, and if you hold one on the lake’s edge, you might feel the moon’s grief so powerfully that you forget your own.

To drive home from the lake, I have to take the highway that twists and kinks like a new gray hair. It rises up and over the mountainside. Rumor has it there was once a bar on one of the highway’s pullouts many decades ago. The bar is long gone, and likely its patrons too, although one wonders how many survived driving a Model A or even a Model T down the winding hairpin turns after a nightcap or two.

I spent my childhood amongst mountains that were far bigger and were much farther away from the ocean. We certainly had lakes in Colorado. I knew people who spent time fishing at the lake, who went swimming, took boats out to water ski. I went to a lake only once, where I learned the hard way that a poor swimmer and first-time water skier should not wear a bikini. I supposed for many years that I was not a lake person. Mostly I spent my time hiking or biking, longing for one city or another and occasionally for the desert.

Falling in love is often a surprise, but having my heart stolen by this lake and the land that surrounds it was truly unexpected. The stillness in the morning, interrupted only by the endless ripples undulating all the way to smack the shore like some tiny ocean. The silver-blue surface that reflects the birds and the clouds. The golds and greens of the hills, and the dark blue-green volcano that, another legend has it, was formed from the body of a dying chieftain.

There’s a pullout on the northern side of the highway just a little ways before the summit. It looks across the mountains and volcanos and offers a slice of the lake in the distance. When I stand there, next to my car, I think about how I want to turn around and drive back down, go back to the lakeshore and stare across at the volcanos whose earth is rich with the tears of the moon.

Chapter 19: The Moon and The Mortal was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

All my life I wanted to be cool. Of course, the wanting to be cool is where it all goes wrong. It is the wanting.

I don’t know where the desire came from or when it first made its presence known, but I remember it as vividly as I remember all the sparkling, this-will-last-forever-won’t-it feelings of falling in love time and again. The want of what I was not was always there, lurking below all my other feelings. It was not so much a want as a need, a neediness to be transformed from the outside in. Sometimes I understood even that falling in love was related to that deeper yearning: If you love me, I will be different. If you are mine, I will have whatever it is I see in you that I do not see in myself.

Where did I look for everything I thought I wasn’t? In the idols and icons I saw from afar, but just as much in whatever was just out of reach. The junior high girls at the sleepover who would not talk to me. The high school deathrock kids who let me hang out with them even as I drunkenly blurted “I’m one of you now!” The vintage queens and their lanky disaffected kings. The pretty girls and the rough-edged boys. The artists and muses. The photographers and musicians. The writers, the writers, the writers.

I wanted to be all of them. I wanted too much.

The fine crafting of a public image is not a new invention. It is simply more present, more relentless and aggressive, and more accessible to both image creator and image viewer. You can as easily mistake someone’s happiness in a series of images as you can mistake someone’s sense of self in a parade of perfect outfits on successive Friday nights, only now you can do it alone in the cover of darkness, with only your loneliness to accompany you on the way down. You can quietly drown yourself in your own deep well of want.

I would be ashamed to admit how much I once lusted for cool were all of us not ever more obsessed with it. Adulthood should free us from this tyranny but still we chase it, debate endlessly what cool even is. Is it the hiding out of reach what others cannot help but show? Is it the appearance of being perfectly unavailable? Is it beauty, thinness, style, glamour, wealth? Is it being uncomplicated, unemotional? Is it in the act of not wanting and not caring? Maybe it is the ability to care just enough, but not so deeply that it ever cracks your surface. The same image, never faltering, never giving anything away.

One day I sat alone on a bluff high above the Pacific Ocean. The fog skimmed the surface of the water and lazed above the hill behind me, softening the light of the setting sun, enveloping me and the rocks and the wild irises. I wore old pink running shoes, a pair of jeans, a cheap plaid shirt over a t-shirt with a fresh coffee stain, a too-big scarf, and a backpack with a special sleeve inside to protect a laptop. In the distance I could see one or two houses, and on the road high above an occasional car passed by, but otherwise I saw no one, save the hawk that bobbed lazily overhead.

I looked down below at the waves and thought about what I had given away in the months before that moment. Everything, I thought sadly, I gave everything. I always did. I cared too much, wanted so deeply I cracked my own surface over and over.

Then, at the edge of the world, cradled in a tiny crook of California grass, I heard it, as if the wind were whispering to me. Everyone wants. Your mistake has been in wanting the things you had all along.

Chapter 18: The Birth of Uncool was originally published in The Book of Home on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.