I felt guilty they were having to take care of her, I wanted to know she was okay by holding her in my arms, but also I was completely overwhelmed and terrified that anyone sent me home with this baby, like here you go, good luck. I kept thinking they should make you pass a certification for parenting, like a drivers license, but that wouldn’t have helped much anyway. The thing that’s hardest about parenting is feeling your own feelings, and no certification gauntlet will help you with that.

Ten years of being a working lawyer and a mom, and within that five years of parenting a kid who is a type 1 diabetic, has ushered in an identity and role which feels like 100% of my life is devoted to constantly scanning my environment for problems and fixing them or making a plan to fix them. My child was a preschooler when we ushered in the covid era of remote work, constantly toggling between parenting and working, in the desperate hope that you don’t miss anything critical that you were supposed to do or respond to, while also keeping your child safe, and somehow, improbably, happy.

It’s exhausting; it feels like there is never a moment’s rest and even when rest is theoretically possible, you can’t do it.

During the covid era my daughter was diagnosed and it transitioned seamlessly from the regular constant awareness of a child’s needs and wants of toddlerhood to checking blood sugar, did she eat, should she eat, are the numbers going up or down or steady, is there a low, do we have the supplies we need, is she ok? Always, always ok? And work still kept requiring my constant attention, every five minutes emails and slack messages are coming in, checking checking checking. My life is to check. Did someone else expect something from me, do I expect something from myself?

My child is turning eleven soon. None of this makes sense anymore. But the life and work checking becomes the well that your return to, every fifteen or thirty minutes, what do I need to check? My email, my texts, check social media to see if anyone is trying to get my attention, check her sugar, check what she needs, check the next action, take it. Constantly scanning for information about what I should be doing to make everything ok. Take the next step. Check the box.

I came on vacation. My annual pilgrimage to a place, any place, where I think I can try to unclench. We drop her at diabetes camp yesterday for the third year in a row. While we wait at the park for the buses to leave, I take out the SIM card from her phone. This is what the camp recommends, although it seems it’s not enforced and I don’t know if others are doing it. I don’t care. She can’t call or text and I can’t know what the readings are on her cgm. I don’t know anything.

But I still feel the impulse to check. I keep wanting to check on work, check on something, but it’s Sunday and nothing is happening. I came to a little cabin in the woods with a bunch of other little cabins. Kids running everywhere. Not one of them is my responsibility, but I watch them anyway. That one’s helmet isn’t fastened, that one’s shoe is untied. I do nothing. Inside the cabin it smells like cedar. Outside it smells like wood smoke and trees and other people’s barbecue. I could have paid hundreds of dollars to come here for the smells alone.

I keep reminding myself there is nothing to check, there is nothing to do. There is no information I need to get.

The modern world wrings us out with intruding on every quiet moment with information, demands, commands. Other people do it to us and then it becomes such a crutch we start doing it to ourselves. It becomes our way of existing, always trying to maximize productivity and solve problems and optimize our lives. What if I could relearn how to just be and do nothing? Not optimize or fix anything. Get sober from my addiction to “getting things done.” Release the need to constantly be fixing or checking in order to feel okay. What would I do with my time?

I watch the women my age and we seem universally stressed, rushed, overwhelmed, irritable. Waiting for the other shoe to drop and it’s all going to fall apart. My child is on the wide-open cusp of adolescence. She still feels a sense of freedom, of the expansiveness of time. She still has bold ideas and a near-limitless sense of possibility. I want that for her always, and I want it for myself now.

On the hottest summer night so far this year, I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get to sleep. The evening stretches past eleven p.m. waiting for the relief of the cool breeze to allow my body to relax. I sit on the front porch alone, listening and doing nothing. The languorous air hangs around me, nothing is moving. I don’t hear any activity from the houses around me, no clattering of dishes or vacuuming. It is, as my child says, as if everyone has completely given up.

We don’t want to move. My husband asks what I want for dinner. “Nothing.” In the end, we eat popsicles, pickles and salami sandwiches on the porch. Despite the discomfort and ennui I relish not having air conditioning. It feels like a forced respite from “hustle and grind” culture. We are languid, fatigued, unmotivated. We will not be productive. The dishes from breakfast remain piled on the kitchen table. We will do nothing, we will not accomplish our goals.

I sit on the bed with the world’s most enchanting ten-year-old. She’s glowing, or maybe glistening. She tells me about how she was heckled on stage at camp, but she’s not angry at the kid who heckled her because “I think he’s on the spectrum or something.” She wants to cover her bedroom wall with Broadway posters. She’s wearing one of my old tank tops, the most worn and threadbare one I could find. We agree it’s too hot to cuddle.

I imagine I’m summering in the French Riviera. Somewhere where it’s hot and slow and everyone stops working in August. I decide air conditioning is an essential tool of capitalism to produce knowledge workers who generate 10 tonnes of email per month. This evening everything ground to a halt. I remembered being a child and spending the summer yearning for adventure and change. Bitten by mosquitoes all night long. Writing in my diary about my grand plans. Cold showers to sleep. Nothing but slow and crickets and frog sounds and tossing and turning all night.

I am in unknown territory. The female line of my family is not here to advise or guide me. I find myself bereft of the guidance of “wise elders” precisely at the moment when I am finally ready to receive it.

When you are young you don’t understand the benefits of age. Your classic teenager — and I was a mental teenager well into my twenties — thinks they are smarter than everyone else and that the elders couldn’t possibly understand.

Now that I am firmly entering middle age I feel that I have no idea what to expect — physically, mentally, or emotionally. I try to think back to my mother’s life. Which, by the way, did not advance to age 43, where I am now. She didn’t even make it to 42. I imagine her life in the summer of 1985, when her eldest child was ten years old, the same age my only child is now.

How does it feel to caress the cheek of your rapidly-changing ten year old daughter, who simultaneously pulls you close and pushes you away, when you know that there is a cancer growing inside you that very well may end you? I don’t know that part.

I want time to stand still.

I never imagined that I would be forty-three years old and mostly perfectly healthy and working a very good lawyer job and still in love with my husband and critically, desperately enamored with a ten-year-old girl whose childhood is rapidly slipping through my fingers. I don’t know what I imagined. I don’t think I imagined anything.

I think I thought I would be dead, or close.

But here I am. I can walk for miles, I can swim in the frigid Pacific Ocean, I can wake up and drink a cup of strong coffee on the porch in the dark before the sun comes up.

Aging is a funny thing in 2025. At the same time that I marvel at how suspiciously healthy I am, I search for signs of wear and tear in the mirror. I find myself pressing outward at my cheekbones to lift skin that sags near my nose ever so slightly, and wondering if Botox would make that strange divot in my forehead go away (it probably would). I worry that as the cohort of my peers seems to look younger and younger, I’ll look especially old by comparison.

I feel internal pressure to maximize every aspect of my life. Sure, my relationships with my child and my husband are good, but could they be better? Shouldn’t I have more friends? Be more successful? Make more money? Win awards and be featured in Lawyer Magazine Daily or whatever? Be more creative more mindful more relaxed more joyful more assertive better boundaries better macros more sleep?

All I can do every day is try to reject the consumerist improvement mindset toward my own life. I am here. All I want is to experience what it is to be here. With open eyes.

I reached into the pocket of my sweatshirt to take a quick picture before I remembered that I had purposely left my phone at home. I have been trying these days to look at my phone less and less. I carry around a small notebook in my belt bag and when I think of something I want to remember or look up, I write it down instead of typing a note or searching.

But this morning I didn’t have my notebook either, having snuck out of the house at 6:15 a.m. with nothing but my house key. It was the stealthy mom ritual — dressing in whatever clothes I could find in the dark strewn about my “dressing area” in the spare bedroom. No lights on, shoes carried in hand to the front door so my footsteps stayed soft instead of stompy. Pressing the door just so, upward in the frame, as I close it so it doesn’t creak.

A morning walk in civil twilight is all the sweeter when I am assured all my family members are sleeping in their beds, unaware of my departure.

With no way to record the moment, I just looked at the massive boat pass and tried to sear the image into my brain. A photo wouldn’t have captured it anyway. The light was dull due to dissipating morning fog, nothing for scale. It would have looked ordinary.

6:41 a.m. Passengers watched from the stern, on their balconies. Hands clasped, still, leaning on the rails. Taking it all in. I wondered if any of them were seeing the Port of Los Angeles for the first time. I wondered how long they’d been out. When traveling, you are in this in-between, liminal space where you feel yourself passing through different phases of life, spheres colliding. I saw thousands of them with a thousand crossing paths like the flight map in the back of the airline magazine. I felt the multiplicity of their reasons for going on this journey. Some adrift with nothing but time and money, some reeling from loss and looking for a fresh start or an escape. Divorce, death, a big milestone, a celebration. Was this someone’s “bucket list” “trip of a lifetime?” What did that person feel as they pulled into this port?

Perhaps someone saw me standing by the rail by the water. I didn’t wave — it felt too sacred a moment for such antics. To someone, this scene, the giant cranes, the stacks of containers, this mouth of the Pacific, felt exotic and exciting, but to me I just walked here from my house to get some fresh air. Past 4th and Grand where I usually hear the dueling roosters — today they were quiet. Maybe the fog let the roosters sleep in.

On the other side of the harbor I saw a container ship, shadowy through the mist, paused in the mouth. Turning around. I couldn’t tell whether it was leaving or arriving. I wonder if it passed the cruise ship. I ran around some boats blocking the line of sight to get a better view, but it was gone.

When I got home I looked up the Neptune. Finishing up a 32-day journey from Los Angeles to Hawaii, Tahiti and back. Leaving again today on a 16-day journey back to Hawaii.

This is not my picture. I only have the picture in my mind. I am trying to experience the world in a new way.

I walked home and up the hill, these words tumbling through me with no way to write them down. I just turned them over in my mind, forgot at least half, they slipped away.

Every time I look at my daughter I see three people. Me, my own father, and her.

I have never seen a picture of my father as an eight-year-old boy roaming the streets of Shubra, a crowded, working class neighborhood in Cairo in 1952. The picture doesn’t exist. I have created it in my mind. Me and my dad have always connected through stories, told late on summer nights or on car rides to check on the latest carpentry project. I see him, a young boy in Jesuit robes, walking an hour across the city to face the fearsome French priests. Alone. Walking, instead of riding the tram, allowed him to spend money on a sweet or a sandwich. Scolded getting home late from school. Slapped on the hands with a ruler. Distracted by the sights and sounds of the city. Making Turkish coffee for his father. Sent out to buy watercress, bones for soup, or cigarettes.

My little family moved not too long ago. There’s a tamale guy in my new neighborhood. On Saturday mornings, when I hear him walking down the street with his cooler-on-a-cart, shouting his sing-song call, which is, simply, “Tamales, tamales!” I tear up with joy. I haven’t bought any tamales yet; I’m not sure I need to. Hearing his call reminds me of the merchants of the streets of Cairo, the junk guy, the knife sharpener, the vegetable seller. Donkey carts piled high with watermelon in summer, a clutter of houseflies buzzing around that one cut wide open as advertisement to show how red they are.

I’m having daily fights with my eight year old. She seems to want to create reasons to defy us, her modern doting parents. It even escalates to physical conflict, the one-way conflict of her anger directed at us. I could overpower her, easily, but I don’t want to have to. I don’t understand why she wants to fight. I feel like we’ve given her everything. All the attention and love any child could want. Care and concern and autonomy.

But autonomy isn’t the same as independence.

When I reflect on my own childhood at age eight, and that of my father’s, compared to my daughter’s existence, I see an explosion of leisure time and convenience, which doesn’t seem to be making children any happier or healthier. All that leisure time hasn’t gotten filed with exploration and play. In the Covid era, it got filled with capital-c content. Netflix and YouTube, the 2020s child’s third parent.

My dad complained, in 1952 as now, that he was the gopher for his whole family. Sent out to buy thirty loaves of baladi bread or daily rounds of vegetables to feed a big family of ten. They didn’t have a refrigerator. Food had to be bought fresh every day.

I was the family gopher, too. I always assumed that in Egyptian families this was the time-honored obligation of the youngest child, sent out to bring back yogurt or soft drinks or a four-pack of toilet paper. I fixed grilled cheese sandwiches for my siblings and dutifully went across the street multiple times per day to tell my uncle there was a phone call for him on our line.

I feel lost sometimes, raising an only child outside this family dynamic. I don’t know how to create a role for her within our family. In our era of convenience, in the gig economy with a million apps at my fingertips, I don’t need her to do anything. But I see how responsibility and independence shaped me as a person, and my father before me.

My grandmother’s mother died when my grandmother was only eight years old. Then, my grandmother’s education ended abruptly in the third grade, and she took on the responsibility of cooking and cleaning, taking care of her younger siblings. In rural Egypt, she was married at thirteen and moved to the big city.

In the space of just four generations we have gone from one extreme, an eight year old girl running a household, to the other, an eight year old girl with no responsibilities at all except the ones I might invent. She spends her time watching tv, playing games, jumping up and down and kneading slime to death. My lifetime has seen both these women, my grandmother as she was and with any luck, the woman my daughter will grow up to be.

I’m trying to find my little slice of our Cairo childhood, mine and my father’s, here in our new neighborhood. I try to find ways to let my daughter assert herself instead of manufacturing pointless conflict. Maybe next Saturday I’ll send her out for tamales.

My sister died.

In the weeks leading up to her death I spent more time with her than I had in years. Even though we lived in the same city, then in the same apartment building, we didn’t see each other every day. Many of my visits to her apartment were brief, five minutes to borrow a box of pasta or pick up a document from the printer. My sister and I had a lot of fun together, but I also spent a fair amount of time being annoyed by her stubbornness. Invisibly rolling my eyes at the way she would hector our dad for not washing dishes or yell at the cat for doing the things that cats do (neither our dad or the cat minded, by the way; it was only me). Wishing she would look reality in the face instead of being bizarrely optimistic for a miracle that would happen tomorrow.

Is there anyone who doesn’t feel regret after a person they love dies? Is regret part of the human experience of dying? Maybe we can’t separate regret from longing. Maybe they’re twins.

I sat vigil by her hospital bed, then by a different hospital bed they brought to the house and set up in her bedroom. We gathered in the living room, friends and family, talking, laughing. I felt like I was cheating on her, having fun when she was in the other room approaching death.

But at the same time, when I transcended my own anxieties in moments of silence, I marveled at the beauty of this human experience.

Are we unique in time and space? Every moment, I had the sense that I was truly experiencing for the first time a fundamental human rite of passage. To sit by the bedside of a loved one as they slowly prepare to evaporate from this earth. To leverage all the trappings of human civilization — doctors, lawyers, clergy, equipment, medicine, paid help, money, supplies delivered from megacorporations. No human can live without loss. All the money in the world cannot evade death. And at death, we are at our best. We leverage all we’ve got. We come together and we connect. We grieve before the person dies, and after. Our big human brains can anticipate a feeling and think about how we would want to act knowing what we will feel in the future. And we know we will be comforted by being with the dying person, by being together with the other people they loved and who loved them. Time stops.

One night I sat in her room with my dad, aunt, and cousin and sang to her. My sister would never have tolerated this, but she wasn’t in a position to stop me. I hoped the music would soothe her. But whether it soothed her or not, it soothed me. How many humans over thousands of years have turned to music in times of grief? These threads of commonality run through our history. A history that embodies for me these twin contradictions: it is immense, vast, and mysterious, but from the perspective of the universe I know intellectually that humanity is as a grain of sand to all the world’s oceans.

I wonder if we are unique in time and space, doing this. This process of simultaneous grief and preparation. Looking forward and looking back at the same time. Standing by the bedside knowing death will come. Resisting it and accepting it. Always feeling longing and regret, like a ping-pong ball bouncing back and forth between that and the knowledge that this is an ongoing cycle, living and dying. Trying to prolong our own lives while also knowing with certainty they will end.

I miss my sister. And yet I know that her life is another tiny jewel placed in the vast crown of human civilization, one of the billions of people whose life passed through us, whose memory will be held so firmly in our grasp, fading away to intangible wisps slowly over decades, as those of us who loved her pass through this existence into nothingness or the other side, if there is one.

To work in modern American society is to be a robot. We are the strangest robots ever created. Some of us are robots that still make things in factories but a lot of us, “knowledge workers,” are robots that, as best I can tell, generate a certain number of pounds of email per month. Email is the product we create. It must have some kind of intrinsic value, for how much of it we make. How we toil day in and day out to make more of it. Always emailing, responding to emails, reviewing more emails, sending email blasts, “just following up” on that email from last week with another email.

The primary way I interface with people now is words and images on a screen. I do that for approximately ten to twelve hours a day, conservatively. It’s not just work. It’s the text messages and pictures I send and surfing social media and the broader internet, plus work. I exist in binary, through the things I send out over the ether. I can’t run without internet. When I woke up this morning thinking about what we as a work culture are producing, before I landed on email, my initial thought was “content” or “analysis.” But we don’t create content. This piece is some of the only content I’ve created all year, and it’s August. I don’t even know what it would mean to create analysis. The only thing I’m analyzing, perhaps, is email.

One of my earliest mentors, the writer Tedra Osell, used to always say that humans are not “brains on sticks.” I remember this idea coming up in the concept of abortion restrictions. I don’t think I fundamentally understood it then, as a woman in my twenties who had not yet entered the era when I and many of my peers were having babies, trying to have babies, nursing babies, taking care of babies, having miscarriages, needing surgeries or abortions or both. At that point motherhood still seemed like a lifestyle choice, rather than a biological thing that happens to humans because we are animals who have sex.

But this isn’t just about being a parent, not really. The coronavirus pandemic is the “clash of civilizations” moment where we really saw how very much we are not brains on sticks. We get sick. We die. We emit bodily fluids and spew germs even through the simple act of breathing. Humans are a massive organism covering the planet, and this organism is having some serious problems the same way that the tomato plants in your manicured garden might be tragically afflicted with Southern Blight.

And yet, in our everyday white-collar work lives we attempt to root even more firmly into our unyielding commitment to being brains on sticks. Now I’m not just a brain on a stick, I’m a 10,000 pound dumpster of binary code that represents a brain on a stick.

It is assumed that I will keep producing and responding to emails, one after the other, and man my station here in front of the computer waiting for data that needs to be processed and turned into another series of emails.

Perhaps occasionally we will take a “bio-break.” Because in the moments before the bio-break, we were temporarily suspended in formaldehyde, non-biological, data only. It should be noted that bio-breaks are usually five minutes. It’s the sanitized way of subtly acknowledging — without saying so — that someone on your Zoom call might really, really need to take a shit.

From the perspective of the engine of American work culture, we are supposed to hide and erase our essential biology. It is a distraction and an impediment to the enterprise of producing, to do the biological things like have children, eat, piss and shit, menstruate, get sick, breastfeed, have sick family members who need care. To have “health issues” that demand attention and “medical procedures” on the calendar. To be tired, to be depressed, to be horny, to be hungry, to want to self-adorn, to move our bodies, to feel fresh air, to have sex. And now, to be a potential disease vector everywhere we go.

Shame is what keeps us inside the robot suit. If we were perfectly self-controlled brains on sticks, we would manage to conduct the business of being human without any of our co-workers or bosses knowing. We would seamlessly schedule all that pent-up human-ing into a week-long vacation where we produced enough pictures documenting that we were having a good time to make our employers (and ourselves) feel the virtue high of self-congratulation. We let, no, encourage, our employees to take vacations.

But do we encourage each other to be human? The biological kind?

Until an overcast spring day, walking on a grassy shoulder of a thoroughfare in in Rockville, Maryland, I believed I was going to die young. I can remember the exact moment that I realized that I might live. I can feel my feet in the damp grass, the cars speeding by. I had a pack of cigarettes in my purse that I had purchased, weeks earlier, after a particularly difficult client meeting. I don’t remember that client at all — not her name, not her issue, why we were sitting in a conference room at my office with her berating me and making whatever it was my fault, but I remember after she left I walked three blocks in downtown DC to one of those deli-slash-convenience stores where office workers somehow spend ten dollars on a mediocre sandwich and a bag of chips. I wasn’t a smoker then; I had quit some years before, and mostly transitioned to being a moocher who would bum a cigarette from a colleague after a tough court hearing, in the clandestine alley behind the office. These were old souls, if not literally old (though some of them were) and they’ve always been mine.

But I had that same “emergency” pack of cigarettes in my purse that day. My husband was out of town. He had driven my car across the country to take it to my sister. I was selling it to her. So, with no car, I had taken the train and the bus to a beige strip mall in Rockville, Maryland, to meet with a genetic counselor who told me that, despite my expectations and foregone conclusions, I didn’t have any of the identified genes that were going to make me one of the extra-lucky ones who is basically destined to get breast cancer.

After the appointment, I walked back to the train station instead of taking the bus. It was a long way. I walked, smoking those emergency cigarettes one after the other, getting my sneakers wet with cut grass from a place that no one intended people to walk. Me and the guys with backpacks, either undocumented or with a history of DUI or both, relegated to walking in a suburb intended only to be navigated by cars. And as I breathed out the smoke I breathed out for the first time the knowledge that maybe I wasn’t going to die.

I mean, of course I’ll die like everyone dies. But maybe I’ll die an old lady, unremarkably, from heart disease, from that whole “collection of many health problems” that often kills old people, or maybe suddenly overnight, for no discernible reason other than simply being ancient and worn out.

From my earliest childhood memories, to be a woman in her thirties was to be sick and die. I don’t remember a time before my mother was ill. One of my earliest memories was of her showing me her mastectomy scar. I must have been two or three years old. I remember the creaky wooden wardrobe we were standing next to, mirrors on both sides. I was a cheerful child, not given to being maudlin. I was a believer. I believed fervently in god and had a powerful sense of my own greatness and potential. I was ebullient. I wanted to share myself with everyone. So for the next three or four years I remained steadfastly assured that my mother would get better. That we were in a tough spot, but it would pass eventually. I was certain.

Until it seemed clear that she wasn’t getting better and wouldn’t get better. And then I began praying for her to die. I confessed this to one of my first grade classmates who told me that I was going to go to hell for wanting my mother to die. I wasn’t bothered by that — I existed on a higher plane in my own mind than her and all the other children who could never understand how you could pray for your own mother to die because you believed with all your heart that that would end her suffering and begin her afterlife in paradise next to god.

She did die, eventually. Three days before my seventh birthday. Just like her sister two years before her. I knew then that there was something deeply wrong with the women in my family. But as cheerful a child as I was, I was fatalistic about it. I believed that fate was coming for me. I heard so many times that only the good die young. That my mother was so special and beloved and wonderful that god wanted her near him again. It seemed plausible to me. I desperately wanted her near me. Everyone did. So why wouldn’t god?

When people say that sort of thing, they mean it to comfort. And I suppose it was comforting, in a way, in the way that thoughts of heaven generally are comforting to those who are facing death. But it wormed its way so firmly into my consciousness that I didn’t even notice it until that day on Rockville Pike.

I believed that I was special. That I possessed unique talents, that I was gifted, that I had a higher perspective that could change the world. This is the egocentrism of childhood. But in my twisted childhood mind, that also meant that I would die, just like my mother. That I was too special to get to keep living.

And long after I stopped believing in god, and was no longer that egocentric seven year old believing that I was uniquely important and destined for greatness, that belief had firmly wedged itself into the deepest parts of my brain. It stayed there.

The fatalism of my whole life has been not being willing to look beyond the next few months of my life. I feel like I can’t plan for the future, because I don’t know if I’ll still be alive. When I was a child, adolescent, and young adult I assumed that I would get sick and die in my 30s. The only question was whether I should risk bringing children into the world and leave them without a mother when I inevitably kicked the bucket, or do the responsible thing and decide not to have children because it’s not fair to do that when you won’t be around to take care of them. Because surely I would meet the same fate as my mother and my aunt. It would be too lucky, too improbable for that to not happen.

When I walked down Rockville Pike that day and realized that maybe I wasn’t going to die, maybe I wasn’t special and I was just an average person who could be allowed to live, I became suspended in time. I had never had a future, no big dreams to speak of. Modest ones. Finishing college, going to law school, getting married, having a decent and interesting job. Even having children seemed like an impossible dream, such an audacious thing to do for a person destined for a tragic death.

And now my future appeared in front of me, and it was blank. It’s still blank even though it has been ten years since that day. I feel like I’m tumbling forward into it with my eyes closed. I didn’t learn how to dream or plan. All I learned was how to deal with the present. But not in a joyful way, not in a way that is vulnerable or takes risks. Protective. Wings closed.

This is the year my daughter turns seven. The same age I was when this belief took hold. The same age I was when I learned how to exist without a mother, which is a different, edgier kind of existence. In our culture, the love and care of a mother is synonymous with safety and security. To be without one is to be on your own in some fundamental sense, no matter how many caring adults you have around you (and I had many). So perhaps I was already at risk and couldn’t afford any more risks. Perpetually in danger.

But as I’ve rounded the corner on forty I realized I’m still making decisions with my seven year old motherless brain. And I’m tired of not having a future. Tired of not having any dreams or big plans. Tired of existing in the next three-to-four months only. I have to forge ahead with something, build the architecture of my life. Remove the blindfold from my eyes, focus my vision and try to see something.

The last couple weeks of the pandemic have seen two things happening in my world. One the one hand, after many months of shutdown and delay, eviction trials are starting up again in Los Angeles county. I have a colleague picking a jury today, over multiple objections and requests for continuances, and on threat of sanctions for appearing via video instead of coming in person. On the other hand, every morning when I check the news I see increasingly dire news about the state of the pandemic. Los Angeles has had its worst week ever in terms of new cases — by a substantial margin. The daily positivity test rate is 12%. Only a week ago it was 7%.

Me and my colleagues at organizations that provide eviction defense services across the county have been desperately begging any authority who will listen that the court needs to stop eviction trials.

No one is listening.

I never thought that when I took an oath to uphold the constitution and swore to abide by my ethical duties as an attorney, that the legal system in which I worked would see it fit for me to put my literal life in danger in order to zealously advocate for my clients. I never thought that I would have to sit on my couch and cry at night because of the stinging unfairness of not being able to have a relaxed conversation on the couch with my own father, but feeling compelled to go to a courthouse and stand around in crowded hallways waiting to beg a judge for my client’s right to exist. I field multiple calls every day from the people I supervise, who are tied in knots figuring out how to defend their clients without giving away to opposing counsel that they are absolutely terrified of going to trial. Not because we don’t have good cases. We do. The trial itself is what is dangerous.

I am filled with anger. I lay in bed at night scrolling the LA times, checking the court’s website just one more time, crawling Twitter to see if anyone has any new rumors about when the court might shut down. It’s 11:50 pm and I’m laying in the dark, trying to parse a 12-page order from the Mayor of Los Angeles that seems to allow me to get my nails done and shop at a mall, but not go for a walk.

I don’t get it.

I had hope this spring. I had hope, in the wake of the stimulus bill, of extra unemployment dollars, of the groundswell of support for Black Lives, of lengthy hearings at City Council talking about canceling rent, that maybe, finally, our society was starting to take a turn. That the people were demanding more of their government officials. That government officials would take bold and decisive action to protect people’s lives, even if it was unprecedented, even if it cost bucketloads of money.

I’m haunted by a tweet from brand-new city council member Nithya Raman from the other day that said “If this pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that our government can act boldly and urgently when required by an emergency. Housing in LA is an emergency, even absent COVID-19, and we should be treating it that way.”

I can’t stop thinking about that.

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that three different companies have managed to produce a vaccine — that seems to actually work! — in a little under a year. That the IRS just sent basically everyone some money in about a month. That our congress full of capitalist Republicans passed a bill that just handed out money to people. The state legislature of California passed a bill saying that no one can be evicted for rent that they didn’t pay between March and August of 2020. The Homeless Service Authority took over rec centers and hotels.

But we can’t seem to do anything about the fact that people are sleeping — and dying — on the streets in one of the most prosperous cities in the world.

We could do it. This is what government is for. This is why we consent to be governed, and hand over our tax dollars and follow laws even when they’re confusing or inconsistent. It’s for this moment. Because government has the power to fix this.

But we won’t. People now have pandemic fatigue. Enough relief for poor people. Enough eviction moratoriums. We did our part, didn’t you see? I can’t even blame the government. I can’t blame the right. California is about as liberal/democratic as you can get, for a state. Run by Democrats from the top on down. It’s a mess. Ballot measures that would legitimately help poor and disenfranchised people were on the ballot this year in California and most people voted them down. Our elected officials are doing exactly what most people want them to do.

Inequality is the design. It’s not an accident.

But sure, let’s expend a huge amount of resources fighting over restaurant dining instead of helping restaurant owners and restaurant workers. Let’s tell people they have to make every possible personal sacrifice and never see their families or friends, but that judges, lawyers and court staff should show up to court so that poor people can be evicted onto the street.

It looks like we’re just going to let it happen. I just don’t know what to do anymore. I’ve been fighting in various ways since the moment I became a lawyer, but I’ve never felt this demoralized.

I know better now when I look at the pictures. My face was a child’s face, rounded cheeks and confused chin.

The director of the play called me in around lunchtime to speak with him in the theater, shortly after the casting decision had been announced. I was giddy with excitement. I had wanted to be an actress since I was four years old. At five, I tagged along with my mother and brother to auditions for a community musical, only to be turned down and told that the minimum age was 8.

He told me that he wanted me to lose some weight before the performance, which would be several months away. Fifteen pounds or so, he said, he thought that would be good. That number is burned into my memory.

He told me the dance teacher, a tall, thick-thighed Black woman with impeccable grace and style, would be speaking to me about the proposed diet and fitness plan to get me into shape for the performance.

She never did. I can only assume that she had nodded and was mentally telling him to go pound sand. Only now with my adult perspective do I know how the conversation probably went.

I didn’t lose any weight. I remember thinking, how dare you, don’t cast me because you know I’m the best there is and then tell me I’m not good enough. This is a middle school play. I’m in 8th grade. Relax.

I’d never met anyone like the dance teacher. She wasn’t skinny, but she was elegant and incredibly strong. She wore leggings everywhere with slouchy sweatshirts over sports bras. She seemed utterly at home in her body. She was mesmerizing. She seemed like the kind of person that lived in New York City. I have no idea where she was from, but in my mind, she was the first real New Yorker I’d met.

I don’t remember her name, but I remember taking her class a few years later. She made me feel like there was absolutely nothing wrong with me. Just her existence made me feel beautiful. At the year-end recital many of my relatives came to watch. My performance was a solo piece set to a Tori Amos song. I don’t think they liked it. I was trying to be avant-garde. I was the quintessential tortured teenager. I didn’t want to do things that were pretty or cute. I remember hearing adults rave about the one girl in our class who looked like a “real” dancer. She had trained as a child in the US. How she looked was unattainable for me.

I didn’t dance again for many years after high school, except on occasion in sweaty clubs or in the driver’s seat of my car with the windows rolled up. Not until I was over 30, and I started going to a women-only dance party in DC where we’d turn off the lights, turn up the music and not speak to each other for an hour. I started taking African Dance at a black-owned studio in Brookland called Dance Place.

The class was women from 18–60. Some were old and wiry. Many were fat, maybe not like me, but not skinny either. Most were Black. I reached a kind of physical ecstasy in that class. Where your face hurts from smiling, you lose your inhibition. It doesn’t matter if you’re no good. What matters is you’re moving, you feel the drums in your bones, the sweat pools inside your bra, your eyes are hot with tears of joy.

I don’t know why the clean mandates of white femininity want to deprive us of this, messy, jiggly, sweaty, primal joy of dance, but even a lifetime of being steeped in it didn’t totally work on me. I can still feel that freedom, somewhere in there.