I’ve never done drugs, but I often compare my obsession, or maybe it’s an addiction, to New York City. I arrive and the high kicks in, the way I imagine the harder drugs must feel, and like an addict, the moment I return home, I need another fix.

Los Angeles is where I live, and I love it here. The beaches, the weather, the tacos that ruin you for tacos anywhere else. But New York is a different relationship entirely. I once saw a sign that read: “New York is my boyfriend.” I laughed, because I knew the rest of the sentence. “New York is my boyfriend, and Los Angeles is my husband.” LA gives me peace, comfort, space, fresh air, and freedom. It loves me completely, satisfies me, and asks for nothing. New York throws me on the back of a motorcycle without a helmet, runs every red light, keeps me out bar hopping until sunrise, then spits me out and sends me back to LA where I can get the rehab I need. I'm sober for a while, and then the craving starts, and I'm booking flights again.

My New York habit started young, and I know exactly who got me hooked: my mother.

We were living in New Haven then, one of the many in-betweens of our lives, depending on where my father was in his “businesses.” My mother had been a dancer in New York, and every so often she’d take me on the train into the city to see a play or, if it was holiday season, Radio City Music Hall to see the Rockettes. Going to New York required dressing up. Mom would wear her best dress and high heels, even though we’d be walking the city all day. She wore them as comfortably as tennis shoes. I wore one of my fancy dresses with patent leather shoes. I’d press my face to the window of the train as Manhattan rose up out of nowhere, crazy tall, crazy loud, crazy everything. It was so big for a little girl, and I loved every minute of it.

We’d eat at some restaurant she remembered from when she’d lived there, usually grabbing sandwiches you couldn’t find in New Haven. She loved a Monte Cristo — ham and cheese dipped in egg batter and fried golden like French toast and dusted with powdered sugar. It was more of a dessert than a sandwich. I’d order something American like a BLT, because in New Haven, ninety-eight percent of what we ate was Italian. We always ordered some ice-cream-and-soda-water concoction to drink.

But what I remember most is watching my mother watch the city. She had lived inside it once, danced inside it, and seeing New York through her eyes made it more than a place. It was a former life, and it made sense to see my mother there, because she was always as lit up as New York.

I was born in Miami but raised for a while among our Italian family in New Haven, who had come from Italy to New York before settling in Connecticut. I was fifteen when we moved to Los Angeles, and I’ve been here ever since. I am more than grateful for all the years of sandy beaches and sunshine, but gratitude is not the same as desire.

For years I traveled back and forth to New York on business because our magazine publisher was there, and every single trip, I’d walk those tree-lined streets in the shadow of those tall buildings and think: I have to live here. Why don’t I live here? The rivers, the cafés, the smells (yes, even those), the vibe. New York has a pulse you can feel through the soles of your shoes. Los Angeles has a heartbeat too, but you have to drive three freeways and at least one winding canyon to find it.

The strangest part about New York is that it’s the only place on earth where I feel fearless.

This is interesting in itself, because I’m a person who seriously fears death. In my quiet town in Los Angeles, twenty minutes from Malibu, all palm trees and bumblebees, I have plenty of time to think about dying. LA gives you space, and I fill that space with dread. But in New York, there’s never any time. I’m too busy. Too alive. And on the rare occasion the thought of death crosses my mind on a Manhattan sidewalk, I feel an odd relief knowing an ambulance is seconds away. In LA, everything is twenty minutes away, at least forty in traffic, including my rescue.

The sleep tells the same story. In Los Angeles, in the silence, I rarely sleep. I’m up for hours in the dark, thinking. In New York, I sleep like a baby. Taxi horns and ambulance sirens lull me to sleep. My husband understands this completely. He agrees that I was made to live in New York City. It has everything I need: good food, great fashion, culture, an exciting nightlife, and the best hospitals.

My husband, a native New Yorker who moved to LA decades ago for medical school and never left, was offered a job at a hospital in Brooklyn. This was our chance to live in New York.

I took a leave of absence from my tenured college teaching position, packed up my LA life, and moved in with my husband, and my boyfriend. The two get along well.

It was one of the best years of my life. But first, I had to get there.

He started three months before me, so while I stayed behind in LA closing the sale of our house, we flew back and forth to be together. I’d found him a sublet on the Upper East Side, on the fourth floor of an eight-story building on a tree-lined street. It was a studio with glass doors that opened to a bed set against windows overlooking the trees, the cafés, and the shops. I loved visiting him there, right up until I saw my first cockroach. Where there’s one, there are many, and they started popping up everywhere. In a bag of potato chips on the counter. In the silverware drawer. On the walls of the elevator. That was it for the sublet. I hired a real estate agent, a gorgeous designer-dressed blonde, and to say that she understood me is an understatement.

She showed me three apartments. The first was one of the most beautifully restored brownstones I have ever seen. I was ready to sign the lease in the doorway, but she assured me there were two more to see. The second was a high-rise where Aida Turturro—Janice from The Sopranos — was walking out as we were walking in. Impressive lobby and impressive residents. And then we arrived at the last one, on the Upper East Side. We stepped into the elevator and she pressed the button. P.

Yes. P. For penthouse.

Anyone who knows me knows I am probably the biggest Sex and the City fan to walk the planet. Try me. I can practically recite every episode, and yes, I’ll even defend the two movies. And here I was, standing in the first movie. I was Carrie, and my Mr. Big was at the hospital and couldn’t come with me. She opened the doors and I lost all feeling in my legs. Floor-to-ceiling windows holding what looked like all of New York City. And then I turned to the right, and there it was: the 59th Street Bridge.

You have to understand about this bridge. My cousins Denice and Lucia, longtime New Yorkers who actually had a car, used to take my sister and me on wild adventures around the city, several of which involved hunting for the bridge from Woody Allen’s film Manhattan. Keep in mind this was pre-Google. It took us multiple trips to figure out it was the 59th Street Bridge. And now here it was. Literally in my face. I may have died several times that day.

It was a two-bedroom with a large living room, a full kitchen, and a balcony that wrapped around the entire apartment.

I called my husband to ask him about leasing the apartment. His answer, about our own heaven on 65th, was pure Mr. Big: “I got it.”

For one year, that wraparound balcony was mine. I stood out there at night with the city lit up below me like spilled champagne. On sunny days, I dragged big fluffy pillows outside and lay right on the balcony floor, the skyline above me. I drank coffee out there in the mornings and prosecco at night. And every single time I came home and opened that door, I gasped and said out loud: Oh my fucking god, I live here.

I didn’t have to ration my fix. I mainlined New York daily.

Los Angeles has its own stories, and they usually involve celebrity sightings, or overhearing someone at a café talk about their next acting part or the script they’re writing. But my best celebrity story is an LA-in-NY moment. My husband and I were at Orso in the theater district, one of those long, narrow restaurants where the next table is practically in your lap, and two guys were smashed in next to us. One of them was on the phone, talking loudly about a new movie. Across from him was Lorne Michaels. I said to my husband, sarcastically: “I might as well be in LA. Obnoxious!”

And then it happened. A third man walked in wearing a hat and a coat, sat down with them, and ordered pea soup. He began to speak, and I realized this man was one of my idols, Steve Martin.

I tried to signal to my husband between labored breathing that Steve Martin was sitting next to us, but the doctor in him decided I was having a heart attack. Are you alright? he kept asking. When I finally got the message across, he also received the second message: we would be ordering everything on the menu if necessary to stay in their world until they paid the check. So we lingered and listened. They talked about how Tina Fey is more beautiful than people give her credit for. They talked about Meryl Streep and a new movie Steve was working on with her.

I know this sounds like just another celebrity sighting, but in New York, it’s different. In LA, a sighting is an occurrence, something that creates a paparazzi stir. And you rarely run into people like Steve Martin anyway. The Kardashians, yes, but rarely The Jerk himself. And it’s usually at a place like Erewhon. The real difference, though, is that in LA, that’s the moment of the day. In New York, all the moments are memorable. Every day, from the second you leave the apartment until you get home.

One evening during Fashion Week, I left the apartment for a walk, passed some event, and was asked if I’d like to come in. Just like that. Free champagne, models, and more celebrity faces than I could count. In LA, to get into an event like that, you’d need to be not only on the guest list but ready to hand over a copy of your investment account. And that’s the glamorous version. Think Steve Martin’s LA Story.

On the normal days, I sat in cafés and had conversations with some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. The older grey-haired woman with twin gothic models in tow, who told me they were all modeling for a new brand. The cab driver who told me the story of his life, how he’d fled a war-torn country for New York, but dreamed of LA. The woman I met at a church who told me stories of a haunting; I swear the lights flickered as she spoke. There are hundreds of these stories, all living in my New York state of mind. New York is old, but it’s new. It has buildings older than the Palm trees lining Sunset Boulevard, yet every single day is new. A new restaurant to try. A new cocktail made especially for you. A new story. A new friend.

The people are kind, and the neighborhood quickly becomes home. Within the first two weeks of living there, everyone from the doorman to the bagel guy to the woman who pours the wine at the local bar knows your name, your story, and what you order.

Then the year ended, the way years do. We had talked about staying, which meant me giving up my job, my tenure, my lifetime benefits. But the day we knew we were going home was the day we stood in the freezing cold in front of the PacSun store, watching its floor-to-ceiling video of Malibu on a loop, surfers and beach dwellers glowing in the warm sun, two people shivering in front of a commercial for their own life.

We looked at each other and said it out loud: I miss LA. It was time. Or maybe we just knew it had to end. LA is better for us, we told ourselves.

So I came home to my husband, my city. Back to the beaches and the space and the tacos and the comfort and the peace and the unconditional love. Back to rehab, or as we call it in Los Angeles, spa day.

People ask me why I don’t just move there for good. It’s a fair question, and I’ve thought it over on many of those sleepless LA nights. Maybe the honest answer is that I’m afraid the marriage wouldn’t survive the affair becoming permanent. Maybe New York is only New York to me because I always have to leave it, because the high depends on the withdrawal. Maybe if I lived there year-round, I’d start noticing the noise and the slush and the garbage in July, and my boyfriend would slowly turn into somebody’s husband, the kind they’re thinking of divorcing.

Nah. That would never happen.

I need the sirens and the smell of the garbage and the noise and the heartbeat of New York, and I need the beach and the sunshine and the plastic-fantastic of LA.

The truth is, I need both in my life. And it turns out, I need both in death.

I’ve planned for the end. When my husband and I were writing our wills, I told him I want a New York death. I asked him, the doctor with access to the best drugs, if he learns I’m dying of an incurable disease, shoot me full of a killer drug and let me go out on the streets I love. Take black-and-white pictures of me. Hold a service where the photo slideshow plays to Madonna’s “I Love New York.” Then cremate my drug-filled body, fly me back to LA, and release my ashes into the ocean off Malibu, where I can rest in peace, while Joni Mitchell’s “California” plays.

Some people spend their whole lives searching for the one. I found two, and I’m keeping them both.

My husband tried retirement. It lasted about as long as a waiting room magazine.
At night he was doing colonoscopies in his sleep, hands moving, working, diagnosing. Even in a deep sleep, he couldn't stop.

He’s back for two half days, one in the office and one at a hospital, and one half day at another hospital where he teaches the medical students. This earned him two white coats, because apparently one was never going to be enough. Factor in the family and friends he consults for across California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Connecticut and New York, plus a 99-year-old Calabrian family member we call Nonna at a local retirement home who says the only one she trusts is “Doctor Michael.” Part time is a generous description and nobody who knows him is surprised.

His brother had asked the question when Michael was considering retirement that cut closest to the bone: What will Michael be without his white coat? Turns out, we found out. He had no idea.

That’s the thing about being a doctor that nobody talks about when they’re handing you the piece of cake and the plaque at the farewell party. The coat isn’t clothing. It’s a self. That coat walks in and everyone sits up straighter. It’s the reason conversations stop, faces turn, and smart, capable, accomplished people wait for the verdict. They wait for the words that will restructure their entire week, and maybe their entire life.

Doctors are rockstars. Not the messy kind who trash hotel rooms, but the kind who command a room without trying. Everyone is already seated when they arrive. The diagnosis is the production. The rounds are the tour. And like any rockstar worth the stage, they start to believe that the applause is just the sound the world makes.

My ex-husband needed the stage too. His coat was a leopard jacket and his stethoscope was a bass guitar slung over his shoulder. Take away the crowd and he didn't know who he was either.

I’ve watched it happen to doctors we know, retirement party after retirement party. The ones who stop working split neatly into two camps. Neither is what you’d call peaceful.

One friend didn’t just retire but also surrendered his medical license. He closed the door completely and now spends his days wondering why he left. “No one cares what I have to say anymore,” he told us recently, with a bluntness that landed like a small punch. He used that word, the one that haunts people who spent their whole careers being indispensable: relevant. He doesn’t feel it and probably hasn’t since the day he let his medical license expire.

Then there’s the one who retired but can’t quite leave. He shows up at the hospital most days, not to work, but just to be there. He walks the halls, grabs coffee in the break room, lingers near the nurses’ station. He’s not on call and he’s not consulting. He just needs to be in the building.

And then there are the ones who retired and promptly got sick. Or died. It happens with a frequency that is either coincidence or what happens when something essential is taken away from a person. The body, apparently, pays attention. We’ve lost too many that way. Doctors who survived decades of impossible hours and impossible decisions, undone by the very rest they spent their careers earning.

Which brings me to Michael’s close friend who is approaching 80 and recently signed a ten-year lease on a new medical office. His mind is as keen as it ever was, and he has a reputation for cracking the cases that leave everyone else stumped. He didn’t consult the statistical tables when he signed that lease. He consulted his gut, and his gut said to keep going.

These doctors cling to their white coats and stethoscopes like passengers gripping the last lifeboat, not because they’re afraid of the water, but because they’ve forgotten there’s a shore.

But this phenomenon is more complicated than ego. Both of these men are still teaching, still shaping the doctors who will outlast them. That changes the calculus entirely.

Once a week, Michael stands in front of medical students and teaches them not just technique, but how to think, how to sit with uncertainty, how to fight for a patient, how to carry the weight without being crushed by it. And he’s not doing it for the money. He made his living in the good old days, when medicine was still medicine and doctors ran the show. Now he’s operating inside the big corporate machine that healthcare has become, and he’s actually losing money. The teaching pays nothing but he shows up anyway.

Why? Because what he’s afraid of losing can’t be found in a database or a protocol. It’s judgment and instinct. The ability to look at a patient and know something the tests haven’t confirmed yet. The gut feeling that something is wrong before the labs confirm it. The thing he desperately wants these new kids on the block to know: that this profession was never supposed to be about the money in the first place.

And then there's the question he can't let go of:

Who will take care of us when we’re all gone? He means it literally.

And underneath the teaching, there’s something else, something that has poisoned the joy of medicine even as they refuse to leave it. The system has changed. If you want to see my husband furious in the way that only someone with fifty years of self-control can be, put him on the phone with an insurance administrator who has just denied his patient a necessary procedure. It happens constantly. A doctor with five decades of experience, overruled by someone on the other end of a phone line with a checklist and a mandate to cut costs. The patient waits and sometimes deteriorates, and the doctor who actually examined the patient has to explain why the answer is no.

The administrators don’t examine anyone. They don’t wake up at 3 a.m. yet they hold the keys to a patient’s life.

This is what the younger generation is inheriting, which is why Michael and his colleagues feel such urgency about what they’re passing down. Not just here is how you diagnose this but here is how you fight for your patient when the system tells you not to bother. They try to tell these young doctors how to stay a doctor when the system is trying to turn them into a billing code.

But enough about the system. Let's talk about the winery.

I went to my high school reunion with my best friend and her husband. We were in the modern dance club together and we hung out with rock musicians and low riders, so we weren’t exactly a part of the popular social butterfly crowd who ran the school. But we’d done pretty good since. She was now the vice president at an aviation company and I was an accomplished professor. We still looked good and figured we’d pull a Romy and Michelle, walk in, own the room and collect our long-overdue moment.

We walked into the banquet and the shouting started immediately, but not for us.

Dr. Albertson! Over here!

Former patients everywhere. One owned a winery and was personally pouring Michael the best bottles she had, the kind of wine that doesn’t appear on menus, the kind you have to know someone to drink. And then came the stories.

The man who said Michael caught something on a routine scope that nobody else had thought to look for. You saved my life. The woman who had been dismissed by three other doctors before Michael sat down, actually listened, and figured out what was wrong. You gave me my life back. The one who had been terrified and had put off coming in for years, and whom Michael had talked through the fear with such patience that she finally showed up, and it was a very good thing she did. I wouldn’t be here without you. On and on it went. Glass after glass of the good wine. Story after story, my husband standing there, smiling, remembering details about each of them.

My best friend, the aviation executive, and I, the professor, sat with our glasses filled with whatever cheap crappy wine came with the overpriced reunion ticket.

We had wanted our Romy and Michelle moment. We got a standing ovation, just not for us.

And here’s the thing I couldn’t be annoyed with. Every single one of those people meant it. This wasn’t chit chat. These were people who remembered the exact appointment, the exact words, the exact moment when someone in a white coat looked at them and knew what to do, when the verdict came and it was the right one.

The coat wasn’t even there that night. He didn’t need it.

And here’s the other thing nobody tells you when you marry a doctor. They don’t clock out. Not even at 35,000 feet with a glass of champagne in hand.

Twice on planes the announcement has come over the intercom. Is there a doctor on the flight? You’d think a man on vacation might hesitate. Might finish his drink. Might let someone else handle it. Instead, Michael hits the call button faster than I can down my free champagne. The first time, a woman with a cardiac issue. He was calm, steady, already in physician mode before I’d processed what was happening. The second time was a man who couldn’t leave the lavatory. He was vomiting with diarrhea that resulted in the closure of the restroom. Drunk at altitude. For my husband, a gastroenterologist, it was just another Wednesday. For me, it was a full hazmat situation upon arrival at the hotel.

But he ran to both of them, like Superman answering a call that only he can hear.

In Hawaii, we stepped into an elevator. A young man stood next to us in a Hawaiian shirt, and before the doors had fully closed, Michael glanced at his arm and said, Shark bite? The guy stared at him. Yeah. How the hell did you know that? Michael shrugged. I just know.

He just knows. He always knows. An elderly woman collapsed on a street in New York and Superman, again, scooped her up and brought her to safety before the rest of us had registered she’d fallen. He is never not working, never not scanning, never not diagnosing, The physician brain doesn’t have an off switch.

Put on a medical drama in our house and the TV might as well be a patient. He calls the diagnosis out loud and he's right almost every time. Dr. House built a career on that. Michael just calls it from the couch.

And then there’s what Michael calls the cloak of invisibility.

The white coat, it turns out, is not just an identity but a master key. Doors that are closed to everyone else open without question. He can walk into a radiology suite mid-read and the technician turns the screen toward him without being asked. He can access floors, files, colleagues, information, the coat preceding him like a credential nobody thinks to challenge. The world parts for a man in a white coat.

It has even gotten him out of a traffic ticket. He was still wearing it when the officer pulled him over. The officer took one look, handed back the license, and waved him through. I’m not saying that’s how the system should work; I’m saying that’s how the system does work.

Superman has the cape. Michael has the coat. The difference is Superman is fictional. Take the coat away and you’re just a man in traffic, waiting like everyone else.

But nothing illustrated who Michael is quite like Valley Fever.

Valley Fever is a fungal disease that invades the lungs and can kill you. It nearly did. He lost 40 pounds, couldn’t walk, and ended up intubated in the ICU, which is where a group of young doctors found him with his laptop balanced on his chest, pulling up his own X-rays, studying them with the curiosity of a man reviewing someone else’s interesting case. They stopped, looked at him for a long moment, and I heard one of them say: Now that’s something you don’t see every day.

It is in our house.

What these young doctors didn’t know was that before they intubated him, while he was flat on his back on steroids and barely able to breathe, he was on the phone with New York. This was the moment when he was choosing to leave private practice and transition to an academic institution, deciding between two positions at two major hospitals, one in Los Angeles and one in New York. He chose New York, which meant we’d be returning to the city where both our families began, the city we love. He negotiated the details from his sickbed. He made deals while the IV dripped. He chose the city, chose the hospital, chose our future, and then they wheeled him into ICU. Several weeks later after leaving rehab, he was on a plane to New York.

As I write this, even I have to stop and take it all in. Just weeks after ICU and a rehabilitation center where he learned to walk again, he was hopping subways to Brooklyn before I’d finished unpacking.

And here’s what drove him there. Not ambition, not ego, not the need to prove something after nearly dying. The patients in that culturally diverse community in Crown Heights had been waiting months for procedures. He showed up and turned the entire program around, working long hours until every patient had been seen, walking the fellows through every step, teaching at the same relentless dedication he always has, the phone calls coming at all hours, carefully explaining and questioning.

I'd lie awake listening and think that not too long ago, this man was in the ICU on a respirator fighting for his life. Is he even human? And then came the farewell celebration for the fellows and I had my answer. Maybe I really had married Superman.

He’d only been there a few months, barely enough time to learn which subway to take, but the fellows gave speeches about what Dr. Albertson had meant to them. Not polite, obligatory speeches but real ones, the kind where you can tell the person means every word.

After the banquet, four of them insisted on driving us back from Brooklyn to Manhattan. They piled into the car laughing like a group of wild Bohemians who’ve been through something hard together and had come out the other side, all talking medicine and telling stories. The young doctor behind the wheel took the Brooklyn Bridge like he'd just finished a grueling fellowship and was invincible. He had.

When we finally got out, my knees shaking and my knuckles white from gripping the door handle, Michael turned to me, still lit up from the inside, and said: Nothing will ever beat the high this gives me.

I keep asking Michael if he’ll ever slow down. If he’ll travel without scanning the cabin for medical emergencies and take a vacation that is actually a vacation. If he’ll let go and just have fun.

This is fun, he says.

This honestly is its own kind of diagnosis. Because the 3 a.m. call, the denied procedure, the drunk man in the lavatory at 35,000 feet, the student who finally understands something, the patient who gets better, is never a burden. It’s evidence that he’s still the person the room waits for. Still needed. Still known. Still the one who just knows about the shark bite before anyone says a word.

The coat was never just a coat. It was always a cape. And the cape doesn’t hang in the closet or get folded up and put away when the vacation starts or the retirement party ends or the ICU makes it clear that you’re the patient this time.

He recently told me that without medicine, he’s just circling the drain. I considered this and then it struck me. He’s never had to confront the question that consumes so many of us: Who am I and why am I here? For Michael, that was settled a long time ago.

But out here, in the ordinary world, these doctors, the ones who gave everything to medicine and expected nothing back, don’t know who they are without it.

Just human. And that, it turns out, is the one condition none of them know how to treat.

There’s something nobody tells you about becoming a grandmother. The guilt goes quiet. Not forever and not all at once, but in those first moments when you’re holding a baby who looks at your face like it’s the only face in the world and the noise in your head just stops. I had carried guilt for so long I thought it was part of my personality. Guilt about the years I stayed in a marriage when I should have left, about what my daughter watched me absorb. Guilt about working and having to be away from my children. Guilt about anything and everything I could have done better.

Then this small person arrived and looked up at me and none of that was in the room. It was just the two of us and his tiny face and my heart cracking open in the best way it ever had. I didn’t feel terror, which surprised me. When I held his father, my son, I was nineteen and so afraid of breaking him that I held my breath for what felt like months. This was nothing like that. This was my heart getting bigger than I knew it could get.

It took me a long time to name what I was feeling. It was love with nothing to fix. For me, that was new.

I had been a fixer my whole life. My mother told me so, and said it out loud when I was young. What I didn’t understand then was that she had handed me something heavier than a compliment. She taught me, without meaning to, that love is a problem you solve. That showing up means having an answer. That if someone you love is in pain and you aren’t doing something about it, you aren’t really loving them at all.

I come from a long line of women who got it wrong before they got it right.

My grandmother, we called her Granny, was a hillbilly from West Virginia who could make a room full of people fall down laughing with a single limerick. As a grandmother she was pure warmth, bony hands holding mine tight on the bus to the five-and-dime, root beer and hamburgers at the lunch counter, small plastic treasures purchased that made a little girl feel like the whole world was centered around her.

But she hadn’t always been that woman. She came from an abusive father and a mother who stayed. She married a man who was no better, mean and stingy, who she finally left after learning that his family had shut her daughter in a closet during dinner. She worked two jobs and made desperate choices, and one of them was leaving my mother alone on the front stoop at six years old while she went out chasing the man she loved. The neighbors would take my mother in for dinner. A little girl at someone else’s table, watching the door. My grandmother eventually married this man, and my mother loved him so much she took his last name as her own.

But this is how it starts. Not with monsters, but with women doing the best they could with what they had and the children who paid for it.

My mother survived all of that and built something steadier. She showed up before she was called. She covered our rent and utilities when we were short, bought groceries, and gave advice we actually took because she’d earned the right to give it. The night I was robbed, I chased two strangers out of our house in my underwear, barefoot, while my husband lay in bed screaming. I made two phone calls: one to the police and one to my mother. She got there first.

That was love as I understood it. Loud and warm, consistent and daily. And because she loved that way, I believed that love involved a rescue or a fix, something you could always do more of if the person you loved was still hurting.

She was the one who held things together, smoothed things over, made things right. And if something ever happened to her, that job was mine. She told me so when I was about ten. “If you want something done, ask Toni Ann to do it.” I believed her and I was good at it. I just didn’t know yet the effect it would have on me.

My son is five years older than my daughter. My son's father — my first husband— related to both my kids in ways my second husband never could. He was silly, and thoughtful, and always showed up, whether or not the child in front of him was his own. My second husband, my daughter's father, was missing the dad gene. When she was born he was distant, and as she entered her preteens, his expressions of love came through words swimming in alcohol.

My son left for college at eighteen, and by the time his stepfather’s drinking years settled in, he was already building his own life.

My daughter had a front-row seat to everything he missed.

I stayed for twenty-two years. I told myself I was holding things together. That was the fixer talking. What I was actually doing was modeling, for a girl who was watching every day, that this was what love looked like. That you absorbed the damage and you hoped it wouldn’t reach the children.

It always does.

There is a photograph I keep coming back to. My daughter and I in matching velvet dresses and hats, on our way to see The Phantom of the Opera. She is around ten and she is beaming, right next to me, exactly where she wanted to be. We went to plays together and held hands. When I traveled for work, she made me a small bottle filled with folded notes and trinkets, pieces of herself, so I’d have something to hold while I was gone. When she was eighteen, we went to New York together, stayed in an apartment with naked art on the walls, and she sat on the fire escape and wrote in her journal while I watched her and thought: This is it. I love being with her. Alone.

I would give anything to go back to that girl and fix all the wrongs. And there it is again. Fix. Even now.

Her second marriage was to a man who, if my father were alive, would be wearing cement shoes. I watched her move through those years the way I had moved through mine. I wanted to reach in and solve it. I didn’t know how to just be there without trying to rescue her, to fix everything. I come from the kind of Italian family where a single phone call could make a problem disappear, and I'd be lying if I said I never thought about dialing.

She got out in five years. Five years to my twenty-two. She was smarter than me, or maybe she’d just watched long enough to know how the story ended. She now has a good man, the kind of stepdad who relates to her kids on their level, who makes each of them their favorite meal and delivers it like a four-star restaurant. Who can talk vintage technology with one while they build a computer together, then pick up a guitar and sit in on a band practice with the other. He has made it clear that no one makes his wife cry, not on his watch. Maybe it's the Italian DNA that makes him so protective of this family. It also makes him a man of his word. This is the man who promised me a granddaughter long before she was born.

I am in my third marriage too. I found my own good man, one who adores my kids and our grandchildren and asks for nothing in return. I finally got that part right.

And still, my daughter and I keep finding our way.

She doesn’t want to revisit the past and go deep. I don’t know any other way. I want to curl up on the sofa with her and hold her tight. She doesn’t like public displays of affection. She likes her privacy. I wear my life on my sleeve for all to see. Once, when I told her all I wanted was to hug her, to tell her daily how much I love her, to have what I had with my own mother, she said: “Mom, you want a different daughter.”

Ouch.

She wasn’t wrong about the wanting, but what I want isn’t a different daughter. What I want is to fix any distance between us, to solve it, to find the right combination of words or gestures that closes it for good. That’s the fixer again, dressed up as longing. Maybe what she needs isn’t someone with answers. Maybe she needs me to put the toolbox down and just sit with her in the room. Maybe she needs me to just chill. Anyone who knows me knows that chilling has never been my specialty.

My mother believed in redemption. She believed that everyone deserved a second chance, or a third, or maybe even a fourth. Mine came in the form of four grandchildren. It started the moment I held the first one and felt my heart grow without having done a single thing to earn it.

I chose the name Grammy. Not Grandma, not Nonna, not Glammy, though I considered it. Grammy, like the award. I had spent years building something in the music industry, on that strip of Sunset Boulevard, in a business that is not kind to women. I wasn’t leaving that behind. Grammy felt like something I had earned.

It sounds like a second-place award. It isn’t. It is the golden ticket. The lottery that paid off in ways that changed everything.

The first one was magic in a blanket. I stared at his tiny perfect face and made myself a promise no one else could hear: This is the do-over and I am not about to fuck it up.

More came after him. Two from my daughter's first marriage—a marriage neither of them was old enough to hold together — but they loved these two. The first was a blond boy with little muscle arms and full lips who expanded my heart again in ways I didn’t think were possible. Then a second. We called him Yoda: bald, enormous blue eyes, and a wisdom about him that made no sense in an infant.

My heart, it turned out, had no limit. Then the granddaughter arrived, and I’m certain my heart no longer fits in my chest.

The granddaughter my daughter’s husband promised me came last, with big blue eyes and ringlets of curls. I see his mother in her, and I see my own mother, women who left this world before she got here but somehow still show up in her face. I see myself too. Social, not shy. Loves to dance. A wild imagination. Passionate about everything.

She’s three, and when I come to the door, she goes nuts. She hears my knock, and by the time it opens she’s already there, vibrating, making a squealing sound as she yells “Grammeeeeeee.” Pure joy that hasn’t learned to contain itself. She loves me with her whole body, as if my arrival is the best thing that has happened to her in all three years of her life. I get down on my knees, open my arms, and take in every bit of it.

There is nothing to fix here. That’s the whole secret, and it only took me forty-eight years to find it.

The magical one is twenty-two now, an honor student who just graduated college with a business degree. He freestyle raps, fearless and fresh, and I believe, with the total lack of objectivity I'm entitled to, that he's going to be famous. He's also creative and sharp beyond the mic, the kind of person who'll be successful at whatever he does. We talk on the phone for hours about his life, his plans, what he's thinking about. His insight on so many topics, everything from politics to journalism to technology, sometimes throws me. He’s so kind and I hold the phone and just think: how did I get to be someone this person wants to talk to?

The blond one is twenty-one, his hair brown now, and I have told him to his face that those lips belong on a model. He has yet to thank me for the career advice. He's smart, musically talented, and driven. He lives for playing live shows, and I've spent decades watching people walk onstage. I know what it looks like when someone's got it. He's got it. He has lunch with me and often brings his friends, mostly musicians. He introduces me like I belong there. I sit in the middle of his world feeling lucky to be included. He turned me on to Radiohead, one of the greatest bands to ever exist, which I would have known decades ago if my ears hadn’t been so clogged with eighties glam bands. He reminds me most of myself. Loyal to the end. Mess with his people and you’re dead to him. A mob mentality I recognize completely.

He is also the one who said it plainly, the way twenty-one-year-olds sometimes do. “Grandparents have it good,” he told me, “because there’s no blame there. The parents are the ones who get the blame.”

Lucky us.

The one we called Yoda is nineteen. They came out as queer and have been sharing themselves with me ever since, sending me links to unisex vintage and designer fashion I would never have found on my own. A curator of eclectic music. A gifted artist. An encyclopedia of vintage technology, with an ongoing Google Doc of things they wish to one day acquire that would make a collector weep. A foodie who will try anything, anywhere, and says yes every time I suggest getting together. The most careful person I know with other people's feelings, someone who never wants to hurt anyone. Wisdom rooted in compassion and empathy.

No history in the room. No eggshells underfoot. This is where all the love that had nowhere to land finally finds its way through.

I have spent more time than I care to admit walking on eggshells around the people I love most, afraid to be too much, too loud, too eager to fix everything in sight. Too much myself. It turns out I just hadn’t met the right audience yet.

Grandchildren, I have learned, are perfectly happy to let you be useful. Need an Uber at 3 a.m.? Call Grammy. Hairstylist who costs more than the electric bill? Grammy. Shoes, clothes, swimming lessons, driving lessons, guitar lessons, vacations? Grammy, Grammy, Grammy. A handbag filled with gifts? Grammy. I show up and I love every minute of it. For someone who was always trying to fix things nobody wanted fixed, being on the wanted list is a whole different feeling. Less toolbox, more cape.

David Bowie only promised us one day of being heroes. I want to be their hero every day. That is the whole ambition, the entire plan. And speaking of my heroes, Joni Mitchell knew it too: there’s no going back, only the circle game carrying us round and round. I used to think that was the sad part. Now I know it’s the whole point.

A child’s laugh cannot be saved for later. You spend it the moment it’s offered or it is gone. You don’t get to change the first time. That part is already written, but you get the next one. You get to show up completely, no baggage, just yourself standing at the door while a three-year-old loses her mind with happiness because you knocked.

That is the do-over. Not a chance to be young again, but a first chance to be free.

For every mother carrying a list of wrongs: it doesn’t go away. But one day, if you’re lucky, someone who looks like your child but isn’t will look up at your face and decide it’s a good face to look at. Grammy, like the award. I hope I’ve earned it.

My daughter doesn’t yet know what this feels like. I hope she gets years and years of it. I hope her grandchildren run at her with their whole bodies, and I hope she feels what I feel: pure joy, no guilt, no urge to make it better than it already is.

We are not going to get it perfect. None of the women in my family ever did. Some were gone before they got the chance to see how the story turned out. But the ones still here are still trying, still showing up in the ways we know how and learning the ways we don’t. That has to be enough, and on most days, it is.

With my grandchildren, I don’t walk on eggshells.

I dance on them.

The other night, a friend, well past the age we’re all supposed to quietly fade into invisibility, shared on one of our usual one-hour phone calls that she’s in a phone sex relationship. Not a desperate substitute or a punchline, but more like a genuine thrill that has her laughing more, wanting more, and feeling more alive.

After the initial shock wore off, something shifted in the conversation. I’d stumbled into a version of her life that no one ever shows, the one that exists beyond updates about aging parents, struggling kids, and whatever our doctors want us to worry about next. I wanted every single detail. She was more than happy to oblige.

And then I realized this wasn’t just a moment between the two of us. It was the exception to a rule we’ve accepted: that somewhere between menopause and whatever comes next, a switch flips. The heat goes out, the wanting disappears. We “dry up” so the world doesn’t have to deal with the reality of older women who still crave, still flirt, still ache for connection and pleasure.

Except we don’t.

What actually dries up is the performance and pretending. We’ve lost our tolerance for bad sex, lazy partners, and the exhausting need to be desirable on someone else’s terms. What’s left is something more interesting: women who know exactly what they want and aren’t shy about finding it, even when it looks nothing like it did at twenty-five. My friend isn’t an outlier. She’s just saying the part so many of us hesitate to say out loud.

We’re not dead yet.

The women I know are not fading. They’re radiant, but not in the way we were taught to define it at twenty. It's the kind that only shows up after you've stopped performing for an audience, the kind that’s impossible to manufacture and impossible to fake. We wear the clothes we like, keep our hair long, or cropped, or wild, and we sleep naked, in silk, or in old ripped up concert t-shirts that feel like an act of defiance.

Desire hasn’t left but it’s changed shape. It’s no longer just about a cute face or the quick hit of attention from someone who may or may not call. As we get older, we’re drawn to something more specific, like a conversation that actually goes somewhere, laughter that doesn’t feel rehearsed, the kind of intimacy that shows up in small and unexpected ways. A hot cup of coffee brought to us in bed. A full tank of gas because someone didn’t want us to be stranded. Dinner prepared, and yes, the cleanup too.

And before anyone misreads that as us hanging up our lingerie: we still want sex. Let's just say we've all been Meg Ryan’s character Sally Albright in that diner scene, faking it so convincingly that we got a standing ovation. We’re done ordering off that menu.

The other thing that nobody tells you about getting older is that you stop accepting what you once mistook for love. We know the difference now. We want to be loved, but not as a project or as something to be maintained. We want to be adored in the full complexity of who we are now and not a younger version of ourselves.

A gay male friend once said to me, coming back from the gym: “If I’m going to be old, I’m going to be hot.” I told him I was making that my motto and I meant it. The funny thing is, that was a decade ago. Age is relative. The motto is not.

After my second marriage ended, I made a list. Not the kind you make at twenty when you’re still negotiating with fantasy, but a real list of the things I was no longer willing to talk myself out of.

There were plenty of men to date. Men with money who thought that was enough, and men that flattered me so extravagantly it started to feel like a sales pitch. I went on a few dates and then went home to my gorgeous apartment in Santa Monica and opened a bottle of prosecco. I went through my list and crossed them out. Next.

I even considered dating a woman. I’d met her many years before and saw her occasionally, always in the company of others. She oozed passion in a way that didn’t ask for attention but was as natural as her wild blonde curls and tan skin that looked like she’d spent half her life in the sunshine. I’ve never kissed a girl, not in the Katy Perry sense, not in any sense for that matter, but I would have kissed her. Something about her made the idea feel like a possibility. In all my years of dating men, I had never met someone who carried that kind of passion and confidence so effortlessly.

I always knew what I wanted. She just made me think that maybe it was time to expand where I looked for it. But she was gay, and taken. What she clarified was that I wasn’t just looking for a man but instead looking for that quality of passion, that kind of aliveness. If I couldn’t find it, I wouldn’t be interested. Settling has consequences.

This is something I knew too well. So I waited, and along came a doctor. He was the list.

Must be romantic ✓

Must love cats ✓

Must love LA and NY ✓

Must love Italian food and culture ✓

Good in bed ✓

Must believe that mad, passionate love doesn’t only exist in movies ✓

As it turned out, he understood settling too. He’d stayed married for too long to someone who was, by his own description, the opposite of everything he wanted but who offered something that felt safe, predictable, and manageable. For a man like him, he told me, was a death sentence. He divorced, and then dated the wrong people, all versions of what he said he didn’t want but couldn’t break the pattern. He eventually wrote a list.

His list, after all those years and costly detours, contained exactly two words.

Sophia Loren ✓

I mean. Hello.

Before he came along, between the list and the imagined kiss and the forgettable dates, I lit candles in my own bedroom just because I wanted to. I poured a glass of wine for myself, ate mortadella and good cheese for dinner, and put on music to create an intimacy that didn’t require a partner. I never stopped believing in love. I just refused to abandon myself while waiting for it.

Women are no longer interested in fake romance or recycled excuses. We’ve been around long enough to know the difference between a man who desires us and a man who just needs a warm body next to him, who shows up dazzling and disappears into the couch.

What used to sound like a consolation prize turns out to be its own kind of revelation: we don't need a man. We are perfectly happy alone. Alone is better than dragging around dead weight we have no interest in carrying. We spent too many years being someone’s emotional support animal and we have checked that bag for the last time.

This is not meant to sound like a statement of bitterness, but more like a genuine exhale. The candles I lit in my own bedroom, the glass of wine poured for no one but me, the music that created an atmosphere just because I wanted one, that was living. Desiring yourself, your own company, your own pleasure, your own presence in a room you've made beautiful for the simple reason that you're in it is its own kind of romance. This might be the most honest one because nobody disappoints you, and nobody can love you out of the contentment that comes from finally choosing yourself.

And then there’s this: I still can’t believe I ever thought that being told I look good for my age was a compliment. I look good. Period. The “for my age” is not a bonus qualifier, it’s a leash. It serves as a little reminder to stay grateful and to stay in my lane. I have no intention of ever staying in any lane. I never learned to parallel park and I’m not starting now.

And if a man can’t do the job, let’s just say there are plenty of women who can, and will. Maybe that’s why so many of us are changing lanes these days. Once you realize you’ve been trying to parallel park in a space that was never big enough for you, driving in a whole new direction starts to look appealing.

We are in our prime, the kind of prime that doesn’t show up at twenty-five because at twenty-five you’re still apologizing for being yourself, whoever that is. This prime is built on the wreckage of every compromise we made and every time we smiled through something that deserved a hard no.

We didn’t dry up, we woke up, and the men who can handle that, the ones who find it thrilling instead of threatening, are having the time of their lives.

As for the others…who cares.

There is a moment, if you spend enough time with Brigette Lugo, when you stop listening to her words and just watch her. The way her hands move when she talks, like punctuation marks with a pulse. That gorgeous smile that gives no warning for the laugh that follows, a laugh so big and loud you can't help but join it. And those long dark signature curls when she turns her head.

Her parents named her after Brigitte Bardot, and people have been telling her she looks like Salma Hayek for most of her adult life. In her own humble eyes, she has never quite lived up to either. Everyone around her would strongly disagree.

What she will own, completely and without hesitation, is this: she is a lot.

It started in kindergarten. She remembers chasing a girl named Ashley around the playground. Ashley would later recall that Brigette was wearing a Barney shirt and kept asking, “Will you be my friend? Will you be my friend? until Ashley finally gave in. They stayed friends through high school and what Brigette remembers from those early years is not so much the friendship, but the feeling around it: the secondhand embarrassment she could see on other kids’ faces just from being near her.

“I’ve always been that way,” she says. “There’s not something I can pinpoint. I was just desperate to have someone there with me.”

The report cards said it all: Talks too much. Every year, without fail. It wasn’t malicious, she’ll tell you. She wasn’t pulling anyone’s hair. She was just being social. Her father eventually developed a signal for restaurants, a quiet gesture that meant you’re too loud. She would look at him with dagger eyes, thinking, How are you trying to control me when at home you have the loudest laugh, the loudest sneeze, and you think everything my mother says is hilarious. She laughs telling the story now. She learned, over time, to modulate in public, but with her people, she lets it go.

“They know that’s part of who I am,” she says. “We’re at a restaurant, we’re laughing, we’re having drinks, and I’m the loudest every time. They just think, ‘This is her.’”

She also shows up in every city she visits before the sun is fully up, hunting down the best menudo she can find. She has strong opinions about craft beer, loves The Clash, and is a die-hard fan of The Smiths, whom she discovered as a teenager. It was the melancholy, the emotion of the lyrics, that resonated in a way little else did at that age. She still loves the music, but Morrissey, she’ll tell you, is a piece of shit.

For the record, Brigette does not walk into rooms calculating her effect. She never has. She was the girl getting teased for her unibrow in elementary school, and she’ll turn up today in sweats with not a second thought about how she looks, which makes what happens next all the more bewildering to her.

Guy friends’ girlfriends don’t want Brigette around their boyfriends. She says it with a laugh that doesn’t quite cover the hurt underneath it. In her late teens and early twenties, learning this would break her heart, finding out through mutual friends that women who smiled at her face were talking about her behind her back. She lost quite a few male friends over this.

“It would get under my skin,” she says. “And now I just can’t care about it, because it’s who I am. I’m sorry that there are things going on for you personally that have nothing to do with me. Your insecurity isn’t mine to fix.”

The women in her life now whose husbands and partners genuinely love her like a sister, have one thing in common. Brigette identified it herself: “They’re secure in themselves. That’s all. That’s the whole difference.”

Security, she has found, is the price of admission. And for those who have it, what they get in return is something most people never find, someone who will go to the mat for them. She is fiercely loyal, and she has said it out loud in rooms full of people.

“I’m a ride or die. I don’t have a choice,” she says. “If you’re my person, I love you, I care about you, and that person who made you feel disrespected? They’re dead to me.”

The price of having Brigette is accepting all of her. Most people, she has found, want a discount.

To understand her, you have to understand where she comes from, two places that shaped her in ways she is still discovering.

Her father was born in Granada, Nicaragua, one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the Americas, its colonial architecture rising in ochres and blues along the shore of Lake Nicaragua. His mother, Brigette’s grandmother, brought the family to the United States during the political turmoil of the Civil War years. Her father went on to build his own production and promotion company from their garage, creating Spanish-language television shows for Salvadoran and Guatemalan communities. He is 6’1”, good-looking, strong, and deeply Nicaraguan.

Brigette’s mother is from Chiriquí, a province in western Panama known for its lush highland country, coffee plantations climbing toward picturesque mountains, and above them, the Barú volcano. She is a beautiful woman, and one look at her tells you where Brigette gets it. She’s been a caregiver for the elderly since Brigette was thirteen, and every one of her clients' families says the same thing: your mom's an angel.

Between these two people, Brigette was made, and eighteen months later, her brother Brian. The two have always been close, raised inside culture that never left the house. Their grandmother’s recipes. Their father’s sports idols, boxer Alexis Argüello and Pittsburgh Pirates baseball player Roberto Clemente, and his loud pride in everything Nicaraguan.

When Brigette finally went back to Panama three years ago, after twenty years away, she partied with her uncles like she’d never partied in her life.

“They know where to go,” she says. “We stay with them and we go to the countryside. It’s beautiful.”

She has started a notebook where her mother describes how her late grandmother made dishes like arroz Valenciana, a Nicaraguan hodgepodge of mustard, ketchup, peas, ham, and sausage over rice that no one has ever quite replicated.

“I’m really trying to not let that die,” she says. “I’m unapologetically Nicaraguan and Panamanian. I wear that culture on my sleeve. I don’t want it to die with me.”

That same urgency lives in the stories she tells. Her drive to find the people whose voices were never amplified didn’t come from a classroom. She felt the injustice of erasure before she had language for it, and when she found journalism, she understood immediately that this was the tool. This was how you pushed back.

By the time she arrived in the journalism program at Mt. San Antonio College, something in her was already sharpened. She walked in hungry, and quickly became editor-in-chief of the program’s award-winning magazine, Substance, and editor of the student news media sports section. But the work that mattered most to her didn’t exist yet, so she created it. Somos Gente LA, a Latinx student media platform, was built to tell the stories that weren’t being told, among them, a Latinx all-female surf club, and Ranflas y Recuerdos, a deep dive into the Zoot Suit Riots when American servicemen turned on the Mexican-American youth and minorities who called Los Angeles home. She also penned a column called Imma Rant Real Quick, her unfiltered take on issues affecting women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.

She was never quiet about any of it.

At a journalism conference in Sacramento, when her team was struggling to find a story, she spotted a Hispanic man working on a riverboat and asked if she could talk to him. He told her to come back in half an hour. What he gave her, in a borrowed theater with no one else in the room, was a story about nearly being deported, a detention, a harrowing journey that mirrors everything happening in this country right now. From there she found a busboy from Honduras who’d been smuggled across by coyotes. He sat with her for twenty minutes, no tears, speaking calmly in Spanish about things that should have undone him.

“When you actually talk to people,” she says, “and you’re part of that culture, and you can communicate, and empathize, they trust you. And you learn stories that would otherwise never exist.”

She and her team called that piece, The Invisible People. It won several first place multimedia awards from local and national college media organizations.

“I always knew who I was fighting for,” she says. “That part was never the question.”

The question that took longer, the one that would cost her more than she ever expected to pay, was who was fighting for her.

Here is what people think they know about Brigette: that she is invincible. Too strong, too loud, too smart, too Latina to be fooled by anyone, broken by anyone. She is not the kind of woman something like this happens to. The truth is: It happened to her.

He hit her. More than once. More than she told most people.

She married him when she was twenty-three. He was an artist. They were bohemian, free-spirited, and in love, or what she thought love was supposed to look like at that age. She made excuses and did the mental gymnastics. She told herself it would get better, that this time she could talk him out of it, that if she changed something in herself, he wouldn’t do it again.

“There is so much that goes into why a person stays,” she says. “Things other than finances, or kids, or the Stockholm syndrome of knowing this person for years while he’s beating the shit out of you. There are so many reasons, and I wish people would understand this without it needing to be their daughter or their sister. How about just having empathy for all women?”

There was a night she came close to losing consciousness. She left. What followed was a particular kind of cruelty she hadn't anticipated — the silence of people who didn't know what to do with a woman like her inside a story like this, as if surviving abuse were a reward reserved for the quiet and the meek.

“Everybody holds you to this standard,” she says. “You’re this bad bitch, outspoken, you don’t give a fuck what anybody thinks, and all of a sudden you’re at the hands of this man and no one understands why. There is a shame that comes with it. Your self-confidence is already shaken, and then it’s like, how is this even possible?”

She called the domestic violence hotline from inside her marriage, more times than she can count, just to talk to someone. She shares those resources publicly whenever a story about abuse surfaces, because she remembers what it was like to need them and not know they existed.

“I will post those links every time a story like this comes up,” she says, “because if there’s just one person who clicks on it, one person who says, ‘Oh, this is why women stay,’ or ‘There’s something I can do to help someone I know’, then it’s worth it.”

She doesn’t use the word survivor as a descriptor when she’s first getting to know someone. Not because she’s ashamed, but because it reduces her to a single chapter.

“It’s not one of the first things I share at an intimate level,” she says. “I’m proud, but I don’t want it to be the headline of who I am.”

And yet, when she finally told that story of domestic violence, in her own words, it won every local and national journalism award it was eligible for. The women who reached out afterward were too many to count.

"If I can help one woman get through a situation like the one I found myself in, I've done something I'm proud of.

Trusting men doesn't come easy, and she'll tell you that plainly. The ones who approach her rarely make it easy either, and they do approach her. Often, they disappoint her, wanting the idea of her, the energy, the fire, without the full weight of who she actually is. She knows what she wants now in a way she couldn't at twenty-three: someone who pursues her without it tipping into obsession, someone stable, someone funny, not arrogant-funny but genuinely funny, what she calls Curb Your Enthusiasm funny. Someone who, when she says she's sick, sends soup.

“I haven’t mentioned roses,” she says. “I haven’t mentioned Valentine’s Day stuff. I want somebody who’s going to make me laugh and who will Uber Eats me soup because I told them I wasn’t feeling well. Little things like that.”

She watches her parents, married nearly forty years, still cackling at each other at 7 a.m. and knows exactly what she’s looking for.

“I used to think I needed to be less,” she says. “Now I think they need to be more.”

She wants children too. She has always gravitated toward kids, and they toward her. Her father beats around the bush about it when they talk, asking if she’s seeing anyone. She gives him the look. He wants what she wants, but most of all, after everything, for her to be happy. She wants that too.

"A partner who loves me, children, and doing work that matters," she says. "That's the whole dream."

If you want to find Brigette now, you can find her ringside.

At 37, she is a multimedia journalist for Xicana Boxing, a platform built by Lily Ulloa Santos, the queer founder and boxing encyclopedia who created something fierce at the intersection of sports, culture, and community. The job found Brigette through Andres Soto, a college media colleague turned sports journalist whose credits include ESPN, the LA Times, and USA Today, and who never forgot how talented Brigette is. When he crossed paths with Lily, he thought of Brigette immediately. A DM, a couple of beers at Highland Park Brewery, and a piece Brigette wrote holding boxer Tank Davis accountable for domestic violence, led to Lily asking to publish her story.

One thing led to another and what followed was a working partnership and a friendship Brigette doesn't take lightly. She loves Lily, she'll tell you, and her greatest professional dream right now is helping take Xicana Boxing to the next level.

She assists with running Xicana Boxing social, covers fights in real time, writes for the zine, and interviews boxers and wrestlers with the same fearless curiosity she once brought to Sacramento. Her favorite part of the job, she says without hesitation:

“Interviewing fighters in Spanish. We can make reels where I ask, ‘What’s your favorite salsa?’ and these guys just light up. There are people in media circles who speak no Spanish, and we’re churning out content that’s bilingual, that’s Spanglish, that’s actually for the community. There’s nothing like speaking to a fighter in their native tongue. They trust you.”

She trained in boxing herself for two years with a high school teacher turned mentor who believed in her enough to train her without charge. She never sparred, but once or twice, may have seen her ex-husband’s face on the punching bag, which she says with a small, hard smile.

She watches the fighters she covers take punches that would end most people, climb off the canvas, and keep going. She sees herself in that. Not in the hitting, but in the getting up, in the part where you have no reason to keep going and you go anyway.

“I never pictured being here, period, as in, being alive,” she says. “What I went through, I saw every day that I might not survive. I look at these fights and it’s hard not to see a parallel. I used to take hits because I saw myself as weak, and I was stuck.”

And now she’s ringside, credentialed, microphone in hand, no longer stuck.

Building Xicana Boxing with Lily into something major is the professional dream. The personal one is simpler.

“I want someone who actually puts in the work to get to know me, and who likes me as I am,” she says. “That sounds so basic, but that’s what I want.”

She pauses, then laughs.

“I know I’m too much. I’ve always been too much. And I’m done apologizing for it.”

She throws her head back, wild curls flying, and that laugh comes out, the loud one, the real one. You can’t fake that. You either have it or you don’t.

She has it.

If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. You can also chat online at thehotline.org.

I was baptized into the Catholic Church before I had any say in the matter, which is how the Church prefers it. A few years later I made my First Communion in white gloves and a dress that made me look like a small bride, receiving the body of Christ for the first time with the solemn expression of a child who had been told many times that this was not a snack.

Then came Confirmation, the sacrament where you choose your own saint’s name and the Church considers you a full adult in the faith, which is a lot of responsibility to hand to a twelve-year-old. I chose Teresa because it sounded good with Toni.

Every Sunday we went to Mass. Someone had to pray for my father’s sins. That job fell on our mother, my sister, and me.

I attended Catholic schools from first grade on, where the nuns taught me that God was watching, that suffering was holy, and that I should say this prayer every single night before bed: Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

I was six.

IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE.

I haven’t slept well since.

I pray often now, in the car, in the shower, and walking past the saints on my shelf. I carry Holy Water in my bag and sprinkle it on my family without their knowledge. I say the Hail Mary like a mantra in the dark when I can’t sleep, which is most nights.

But I’m not religious. I guess I’m just covering my ass, in case.

I no longer go to Mass and I don’t confess my sins to a priest, which would take considerably longer than it used to. I show up for the big ones like Ash Wednesday, when I let a priest drag his thumb across my forehead and then walk around all day with a grey smudge between my eyes like a woman who has reconsidered her life choices. And Palm Sunday, because I bring the palms home and tuck them into the hands of the saints and pass them to the sinners in my family who chose not to sit through the longest Mass of the year. Easter and Christmas have fallen through the cracks, which is strange considering how important these two holidays are to Catholics. I think the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus stepped in and took over for Jesus.

My best friend, also Italian, and I once made a solemn pact to attend Sunday Mass every week and become, finally, the good Catholics our parents always believed we were. The truth is we had heard there was a thriving Catholic singles group at an upscale church that was nowhere near our neighborhood but had a solid congregation of eligible men and a restaurant that served a boozy brunch directly across the street. She was single and looking. I was dating my now-husband, who at the time came with enough baggage to require its own storage unit, so I figured I could do double duty: support my best friend in her search for love and pray for his soul at the same time. Two intentions, one Mass. I’m all about efficiency.

Mass let out at 11:30, brunch started at noon, and somewhere between the Holy Spirit and the hollandaise, Mimassa Sunday was born: Mass followed immediately by mimosas, a tradition we kept up considerably longer than the actual religion. What ended it for good was an old priest who used his homily to explain that gay marriage was a sin. This is the fastest way to turn two Italian liberal women into former Catholics who are now day-drinking without the Mass part.

Not attending Mass on Sundays doesn’t mean I don’t have my rituals.

Every time I board a plane, I carry a plastic bag filled with Holy Water and small bottles of vodka, and just before takeoff I bless the pilot and the flight attendants (without their knowledge), myself, and my husband.

I have a personal relationship with Saint Anthony, the patron saint of lost things, which makes him perhaps the most universally beloved and most frequently pestered saint. Lose your keys? Saint Anthony. Lose your wallet? Saint Anthony. And then there’s Saint Joseph, who you call on when you need to sell a house. You bury a small statue of Saint Joseph in the yard, upside down, near the For Sale sign. I’ve done this and the house sold. But when I'm really desperate, I call on the lesser-known saints, because the popular ones, like Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, are swamped.

My home office has a shelf with fifty-three saints and several wooden and glass crosses. When I walk past my saints, I touch the top of each one’s head. I don’t know exactly when this started. I also have at least a dozen sets of rosary beads. This extensive devotion collection has come from antique stores, estate sales, dead relatives, and the occasional gift from my daughter, who has become an expert at finding vintage Italian saints. Some are beautiful and some are a little terrifying, like the Virgin Mary that lights up or the blown-out egg with the Virgin Mother inside.

There is also a gigantic statue of the Virgin Mary wearing a large gold crown that I bought from an antique store in New Orleans. I’m convinced she has secret powers. Weird things have happened around that statue. I won’t go into it because it gives me nightmares, but let’s just say that my dead mother appeared in my French Quarter hotel room right after I bought her. I swear it wasn’t a dream. Heading home, I never understood the stares I got going through airport security. Doesn’t everyone fly with a three-foot saint?

When my Aunt Mena died, I carried two gigantic statues of Christ and Mary on a train from Connecticut to New York, then onto a plane back to California, those saints riding with me like ceramic bodyguards. I’ve never felt so safe flying. My birthday and Christmas lists all have the same thing, right after the Fendi baguette and the apartment in New York: Vintage saints from Italy.

It’s not unusual for my daughter to call me from a thrift store or an estate sale.

“Hey Mom, there’s two church pews here and a big painting of the Virgin Mary. You interested?”

I’m always interested.

There are also the broken ones. A ceramic cross with a chip along one arm. A saint missing his hand at the wrist, Saint Francis, I think, though at this point he has enough company that he doesn’t seem lonely. A small Madonna whose base cracked through in a move. Broken sacred things are still sacred. Maybe more so. They carry the evidence of a life lived around them, maybe a fall from a shelf, a move across the country, or the chaos of a family that didn’t always handle things gently. I keep them alongside the intact ones, or in my herb garden next to my ceramic Buddha.

It’s not just the saints; it’s all of it. The old churches and dark pews worn smooth by a hundred years of wool coats and nervous hands. I can’t visit a city without visiting an old church. The lasting smell of incense smoke trailing from a thurible swung on its chain, filling the vaulted air like a secret the walls have been keeping for centuries. The hallowed quiet of a space where people have been bringing their worst fears and desperate requests for generations, pressing them into the kneelers. The candles I light, usually asking for the safety of my family, or safety on the flight home.

I don’t know exactly what I believe about God, but I believe completely in the smell of incense and the irrational comfort it delivers, something that tells me what I need to hear: everything is fine, no one you love will die, and there is probably pasta afterward.

My office wall holds the writers and women I pray to in the secular sense — quotes from my favorite writers Nora Ephron and John Patrick Shanley, and a gigantic framed photo of Joni Mitchell given to me by my sister that hangs above my white faux leather sofa. Joni watches over everything. She is my personal saint. Saint Joni.

My husband’s friends walk into my office and a particular look crosses their faces. I’ve decided it means they think his wife is one saint away from an intervention.

My white desk sits behind the shelf of saints on a large white faux fur rug. Seven old paintings of saints are propped against another wall, all collected from estate sales, each one carrying the weight of having hung in someone else’s house of grief. One is signed by several men in Italian. I’m convinced they may have been priests, or saints themselves. There is also a child’s rocking chair from Italy that I am convinced rocks on its own.

Yes, I know how it sounds, and no, I’m not changing anything.

At night, I calm myself by saying a full rosary, no beads required. After a lifetime of Masses and funerals, the words come up on their own, the way an old song does. Do I think anyone is listening? Honestly, I’m not sure. But as Joni Mitchell sings, I sent up my prayer, wondering who was there to hear.

The fear of death is not something I’ve outrun. It lives in me the way the smell of incense lives in old churches, absorbed into the walls over decades. My saints are not decoration but company. They are the comfort of objects that have been touched by loss and prayer and time, that have stood on someone’s dresser while someone prayed beneath them. They have passed through the hands of people who are gone now. My daughter finds them for me. My family has given them to me. Some came from people who died, which means they carry a residue of devotion, the trace of hands that touched them before mine. Even the broken ones.

My Nonnie put quarters under hers and prayed in Italian. I touch their heads and pray in English. I don’t know if it works, but I believe someone is listening. I’ve had too many prayers answered not to.

My name is Toni Ann Teresa, and I’m not crazy.

I’m Italian.

My mother tap-danced through chemotherapy.

I’ve lived with this since my mother died and it still makes me feel like a spiritual underachiever. While she was losing her hair and her strength and eventually, heartbreakingly, her life, she was dancing. Literally. Tap shoes. Rhythm. Jazz hands.

Her philosophy, when faced with any of life’s sucker punches, was this: Let’s face the music and dance.

Mine, if I’m being brutally honest, is: Let’s Google symptoms at 2 a.m. until we’ve diagnosed ourselves with three rare cancers and one that you later learn only affects cows. I guess the term bovine should have given me a clue that I was actually on a farm veterinary site.

This afternoon I have an MRI. There’s a mass in my uterus, found on an ultrasound, a finding that arrived like a small bomb that detonated in my head. My husband, who happens to be a doctor, has told me it’s benign. He doesn’t just say this, he guarantees it with the unshakeable confidence of a man who has been practicing medicine for five decades, teaching medical students, and apparently developing some kind of diagnostic superpower along the way.

“Have I ever been wrong?” he asks.

The answer is no, he hasn’t. And yet, I’m unconvinced. The radiologist said he doesn’t think it’s something to worry about, “probably a fibroid.” My gynecologist has offered the same reassurance, adding the “probably” which cuts the reassurance in half.

I have chosen to believe none of them and have gone straight to the dark place anyway.

I’ve already lost my hair. I’ve already scheduled the hysterectomy and the chemotherapy. I’ve cancelled my upcoming trip to New York. In the span of thirty-six hours, I have lived out an entire alternate timeline in which I am very, very sick.

This is not my first rodeo with a scary diagnosis. Six years ago, heart disease arrived without knocking. No warning, just a result on a heart scan and a doctor’s very serious face. I worked hard and changed everything. I learned I was capable of more than I thought. But it hasn’t stopped me from checking my pulse every time my heart feels like it’s skipping beats, and right now, it’s jump roping from fear.

But cancer. That word doesn’t live in the same zip code as the others. Cancer is where my imagination goes feral. It doesn’t matter that heart disease is the number one killer of women. At least with heart disease, if you have a fatal heart attack, you clutch your chest and drop dead. Cancer, on the other hand, can be slow and hard to watch. It has a way of taking not just the life but sometimes the dignity of someone you love. I’ve watched this firsthand.

I’ve had the usual scares. The abnormal pap smears, the breast biopsy that turned out to be nothing, the kind of medical near-misses that age you slightly and make you hold your coffee cup a little tighter the next morning. But there’s something about the word mass that short-circuits the rational brain entirely. It doesn’t matter that the odds are in my favor. I’m not thinking about odds. I’m thinking about wigs.

More than once, in moments of diagnostic panic, I have asked my hair stylist Aliza whether she could make me a wig that looks just like my own blonde hair. The conversation started years ago when I came in to find her styling a beautiful long wig for an Orthodox Jewish woman, a tradition of covering one's hair with a wig rather than a scarf. I already knew I was not a scarf person.

Her response, every time, is delivered with the patience of a saint and the confidence of a really great hair stylist.

“You are the only client who has ever asked me this question to prep for cancer that you don’t have,” she says. “And of course I can.”

I choose to take this as a compliment. I am unique and prepared. I am also unhinged.

After the result of the ultrasound and scheduling the MRI, I did what any self-respecting catastrophist does: I made the calls.

First, to my sister. I asked her the question I always ask: “What if it’s cancer?”

Her response, the same every time I ask: “That would really suck.”

And then, because she is the good witch in this family coven, she paused and told me she felt nothing weird. No bad energy. No alarm bells. This comes from a woman whose instincts I trust. She’s the one who has always felt the hair on the back of her neck stand at attention when something is wrong. Italian mob radar.

Next, my daughter, who Googles with the precision of a research scientist and delivers the probably-nothings like a gift. She is calm where I am chaos. She somehow inherited my worry gene and yet deploys it backward. “Mom, I’m sure it’s benign,” she tells me as she’s obviously googling. “From the results, it seems like just a small benign finding like a fibroid or polyp.”

Then my daughter-in-law, who I’m convinced has psychic powers. I hesitate before I call her because she has predicted things that came true. She doesn’t deal in empty reassurance; she deals in something more certain: “I know you’re okay.” I don’t question it. I just accept her prediction like the spiritually desperate person I am in these moments.

Finally, my best friend since we were sixteen, the woman who has seen every version of me. She doesn’t offer me comfort exactly. She offers me something better: a badass boss. She becomes someone I cannot argue with.

When I tell her what I’ll do if the results are cancer, that I’ll crawl in a corner or do a Thelma and Louise, she says, “So, you’re just going to throw in the towel? Not happening. Buck up buttercup.”

I tell her I want to be okay. I want to skip the whole chapter entirely and go straight to the part where someone says those two words and I can finally exhale. An hour passes and she’s still on the phone giving me the stern, but motivating pep talk. She has talked me off many ledges and she does it with such sheer force of will that I don’t even realize I’ve been ledge-adjacent until I’m already back on solid ground.

The calls help but there are only two words that will save me: It’s benign. Those are the only words that will allow me to dance and pop the champagne bottle.

Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge that what I’m about to write is going to make me sound like Mother Teresa. My husband would agree with half of that. The other half, he says, is Sonny Corleone. So before you judge a woman who may or may not be dying, just know you’re dealing with both of them at once.

I’ve often wondered if anyone really understands why I’m so afraid of dying.

My Brazilian cousin, a woman of rare emotional intelligence and the one I credit for my ritual of praying naked with my hands crossed over my breasts in the shower, once said something I’ve carried in the pocket of my chest ever since.

We were on her New York apartment veranda talking about death. Not morbidly, just the way you do when you’ve both watched people you love leave too soon. She said she wasn’t afraid of dying. She was afraid of not being here to take care of her family.

My first thought was: This may be the only person who really gets me.

I think my entire purpose on this earth is to take care of everyone else in it. I’m the one who fixes things, handles things, solves things. And when I go to the dark place, the cancer place, the what-if place, my fear isn’t really about dying, it’s about leaving. Who will fix everything? What happens to all of them if I’m not here?

I want to be here when my grandchildren figure out who they are. I want to be the person they call when things go sideways. I want to rescue them if they need it.

And I want time, more of it. Time spent with my children and my family and friends, more vacations, parties, celebrations. My mother wanted all of those things too. More life, more dancing, more time. She only met four of her five grandchildren, and not one of her four great grandchildren. What a loss, for her and for them.

Life isn’t fair.

And since I cannot be kind to myself for more than thirty consecutive seconds, I start playing the blame game. I call it the if onlys.

If only I had taken those heart-related blood results more seriously. If only I’d seen a gynecologist sooner. If only I took better care of myself instead of everyone else. I am apparently excellent at taking care of other people and criminally negligent when it comes to myself, a fact I’ve been told by enough people that I’ve had to accept it as a character trait rather than an oversight.

I’m thinking of making the if onlys into a board game for neurotic people like myself. The idea of rolling the dice makes perfect sense. Every day that we wake up is a roll of the dice, hoping we don’t land on cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or something worse.

And then, right on cue, I think of my mother.

My mother would be upset with me right now, lovingly, warmly upset. She would tell me to stop worrying until I had reason to. She would tell me to stop jumping to the worst conclusions. Here’s another if only: If only I could be like my mother.

Every morning, she drank her coffee like it was a religious experience. “Ahhhh,” she’d say, closing her eyes like someone who had just found nirvana in a coffee cup.

“Did you do something different with the coffee today?”

“No, Mom. Same coffee.”

“Well, it’s the best cup I’ve ever had.”

Every evening, she ran outside to watch the sunset. Every single one was the most beautiful she’d ever seen. I told her once that I’d never watched a sunset without wondering if it was my last. She gave me the look, followed by the Ted Talk.

“Don’t ruin your present life worrying about a future you can’t control. You could get hit by a bus.”

In a few hours I will be lying in an MRI machine, shaking, bargaining with every saint and dead relative I can name, and hoping the bus doesn’t arrive disguised as cancer.

It’s only 10 a.m. and I’m wondering if it’s too early for champagne.

My mother’s voice arrives immediately: It’s five o’clock somewhere.

My own voice arrives half a second later: No champagne until you have a reason to celebrate.

So I’m here, writing this instead. Trembling. Trying to be present, occasionally stopping to once again check how many times the word cancer appears when you Google “uterine mass.” The answer, for those wondering, is: too many times.

Here’s the thing I can’t shake in the middle of all this panic: My mother lived in the present. She died having loved her life and everyone in it, fully and completely, even the parts that were terrifying.

I am not my mother. I will never be my mother. I have accepted this the way you accept a lot of things about yourself after a certain age. She faced the music and danced. I face the music and immediately check if our will and trust are current.

So until I get the results of the MRI, I’ll do what I always do: prepare for the worst, keep one eye on the door for the bus I’m convinced is coming, and hold off on the champagne until I have an actual reason to open it.

And if the news is good?

Pop the cork, turn on the music, and dance.

Update:

When the MRI was completed, I got dressed. My husband was already speaking to the radiologist, and then he mutters the two most beautiful words in the English language:

It’s benign.

No mass. Just a cyst.

I stood there and ugly cried in the parking lot, which is the other thing I do besides worry. Then we went to dinner. I ordered a bottle of prosecco and a board piled high with salami and mortadella. What the hell, I’m not dying.

What a relief. I am so happy. And then, almost immediately, I remembered that I'm still mortal. But for now I'm not dying of this. My mother was right. Skip the cancer panic and get hit by a bus like a normal person.

I am not a good flyer. My son likes to say I don’t have a fear of flying — I have a fear of coach. He’s not entirely wrong. First Class doesn’t cure the terror, but it makes it survivable. A few extra inches of breathing room, a proper glass, the comfortable illusion that if this plane goes down, at least I went down in a decent seat.

I drink when I fly. It doesn’t really take the fear away so much as soften the edges. I cry less during takeoff, which I consider progress. Somewhere around the second Bloody Mary, I start to wonder why I’m even afraid. By the third, I’ve removed my claws from my husband’s arm and put the Holy Water back in my bag.

So there I was, settling in, trying to talk myself down from the low-grade panic that flying on an airplane always produces in me, when I noticed the man sitting directly across the aisle. He looked to be in his seventies, nicely dressed, white mustache, The Wall Street Journal open in his lap, looking like the kind of man who reads it on a plane because he actually wants to, not because he’s performing something.

Then something spilled. I’m not sure if it was his fault or the flight attendant’s, but it landed on him, and he snapped. He stood up yelling, refused his breakfast, and when told to be seated, began flicking his Wall Street Journal with the barely contained fury of a man who has been inconvenienced one too many times by a world that really should know better by now. When the man sitting next to him, a quiet, kind-looking man with a long beard and a yarmulke on his head tried to engage him gently, the angry man told him flatly to leave him alone.

The quiet man, a rabbi, did not leave him alone.

“Why don’t you eat,” he said. “I don’t want to!” came the reply, loud enough that several rows turned to look. And then the rabbi did something unexpected. He reached over, placed his napkin carefully across the angry man’s tray, and took hold of his arm. Not aggressively, but in the way you take someone’s arm when you want them to know, without any fuss, that you see them.

He said something I couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, I watched the angry man’s face change in real time, something cracking open around the eyes, the jaw, the rigid set of his shoulders. He looked like a person who had been holding something very heavy for a very long time and had just been given permission to put it down.

By cruising altitude, they were laughing together. The angry man had ordered a vodka. The rabbi, a bourbon. Whatever had been sitting on that man’s chest when he boarded seemed to have shifted, not disappeared, but moved just enough to let him breathe.

I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

My mother had this thing she did when someone behaved badly in public, when someone cut her off on the freeway, snapped at a cashier, or stood in line radiating misery like the sky before a storm that ruins everyone's plans. Not as an excuse, just as a question worth asking before you decide what someone is made of based on their worst ten minutes. She wondered what they might be going through.

I know what it's like to be on the other side of that judgment. Years ago, I drove home from the hospital after sitting at my mother’s deathbed and ran a stop sign in a complete daze. A man in another car screamed at me, flipped me off, and made sure I knew exactly what he thought of me. I sat at that intersection thinking: if you only knew. I wasn’t reckless. I was wrecked. There’s a difference, and it almost never shows on the outside.

As for the man on the plane, I’ll never know what he was carrying. A diagnosis. A phone call he’d gotten in the gate area. Grief that had just chosen that day to make itself known. Or maybe he was simply a difficult man having a terrible day. Maybe both were true at once. People contain multitudes, including the exhausting kind.

What stuck with me is that the rabbi didn’t take the bait. He didn’t match the anger or back away from it. He just stayed, and waited, and offered a napkin and a little dignity, and made room for something else to happen.

I think about the moments in my own life when someone did that for me. When my husband was in the ICU in critical condition, I was the only journalism adviser, the only professor my students had. I wasn’t sleeping. I was going straight from the hospital to the newsroom and back again, running on nothing. My students knew.

One morning I walked in to find a basket on my desk. Notes. Flowers. Snacks. Chocolates. A candle. A coffee mug. Balloons. And sitting next to it, a framed photograph of my student who had posed as Frida Kahlo for a photo shoot, shot by another student, and on the back, a handwritten Frida quote:

“I leave you my portrait so that you will have my presence all the days and nights that I am away from you.”

That photo still sits on a shelf in my living room, and most mornings I drink my coffee from that mug. Both are still with me because someone saw me in the middle of the hardest thing and decided to do something small. And that small thing held me up.

A napkin on a tray. A basket in a newsroom.

I think about my mother often when I catch myself being the angry one, laying on my horn on the 405 when someone cuts me off, canceling a lunch because I was too busy, not knowing the person on the other end needed a shoulder that day. My mother had a patience I have never fully inherited, a capacity to give people a break that I am still, at this age, working toward. Whenever we complained about someone or something, she would stop us with the same reminder, a quote by Helen Keller: “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” I understand it now.

Small things. Gratitude. That’s what I keep coming back to. Not grand gestures or carefully chosen words or the perfect thing to say. Just the willingness to stay in the room and try again. To reach across the aisle even when you’ve already been told no.

I don’t know the rabbi’s name. I don’t know the angry man’s name. I’ll never see either of them again. But I think about that flight more than I think about a lot of things, and I’ve decided it was one of the more important things I’ve ever witnessed at thirty thousand feet. Given how much I dread being up there, that speaks volumes.

We are all carrying something. We all have our El Guapos, our impossible thing, our heavy load, our worst day wearing our face in public. The rabbi knew that. My mother knew that. I’m still learning it.

I can’t stop thinking about Juniper Blessing. She was 19 years old. A gifted singer. A lover of weather and big skirts and Pokémon. She came to the University of Washington to study atmospheric science because she loved the sky. A friend who knew her wrote that it wasn’t possible to dislike her, that if the man who killed her had just talked to her, she probably would have made him laugh.

Instead he stabbed her more than 40 times in a laundry room.

She could have been one of my students. She was someone’s everything.

They are coming for the people I love, and they’re doing it under the banner of Christian values.

Not metaphorically. Right now, in this country, transgender people, children among them, are being stripped of healthcare, pushed out of schools, erased from public life, and driven toward suicide by a political and religious movement that calls itself Christian. Calls itself a defender of some sacred, God-given moral order.

I have spent over two decades teaching college journalism. In that time, the student newsroom became, for reasons I’ve always considered a gift, a home for the queer community. Editor after editor, gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary students ran our publications with a standard of excellence I still hold up as a model. They were, without exception, among the finest, most creative, most deeply kind students I have ever taught.

So when I hear someone invoke God to justify taking their rights away, I don’t hear theology; I hear an attack on the people I love.

I need to tell you about a conversation I witnessed in our newsroom years ago that I have never forgotten.

One of our student writers was a strict Baptist. One of our editors was a gay man. She knew he was gay, everyone in the newsroom did, because he was out and easy about it, the way people are when they finally feel safe enough to be themselves.

She came to him a day before the election and told him that her pastor had instructed her to vote yes on Proposition 8, California’s ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage. Prop 8 is what many of us called Prop Hate.

I was nearby and I just listened.

She asked him, sincerely and without cruelty, how he knew he was gay.

He told her about being a young boy and feeling drawn to other boys in a way he couldn’t name yet and couldn’t stop. And then he asked her a question I have never forgotten: Why would anyone choose this, knowing how hard their life would be?

Then he told her what he wanted. Not special rights or anything complicated, just the right to marry the person he loved, the same thing she wanted, the same thing most of us want. She listened and gave him a hug.

The next day she told him she had voted against her pastor’s recommendation. That she could not, in good conscience, take that right away from him.

I went to my office and I cried.

Two people. A real conversation. An empathetic decision made by a young woman willing to let her humanity override her instruction. That is what’s possible when we actually talk to each other, when we see each other as people first, instead of positions.

I am writing this partly because I’m not sure we know how to do that anymore. Social media has made it too easy to hate at a distance. The rhetoric coming from pulpits and legislatures has gotten too loud, too vicious, too proud of itself. And the people paying the price are real human beings — my former students, my friends and family members, kids who just want to exist without being legislated into shame.

I know these people. I have watched them walk through the newsroom door and leave their mark. The young Latino man, a gifted writer and artist, who was sent to conversion therapy for being gay and nearly didn’t survive it; the student who quietly changed their name and is now a proud trans woman and a practicing lawyer; the gay editor who fought the college administration to run a controversial abortion rights cover and won us every journalism award we’d ever received. The stories go on and on.

And there is one more I need to tell you about, the one whose story changed me in ways I still carry into my classrooms today.

They were one of the best editors-in-chief our student magazine ever had. Brilliant, creative, gifted in ways that still make me shake my head. They wore colorful vintage clothes that looked like they came straight out of a pinup model’s dream closet. They were always smiling, always giving the most generous and thoughtful feedback to their staff. I never once saw them make even the most amateur, first-time newbie writer feel lesser than.

Early on, they let me know their pronouns were they/them.

I have to be honest and confess that I struggled. I would say “she” naturally, automatically, the way you reach for a word you’ve always used, and then catch myself. Apologize. Try again. Fail again. Catch myself again. For months.

And then they decided to write their story, to put it into words and share it with the world. What they had survived. The abuse, and the cruelty visited upon them in ways I will not detail here because it is not mine to tell. It was the kind of thing that breaks people. The kind of thing that would give anyone every reason to close themselves off, to turn hard, to stop trusting the world entirely.

Instead, they chose this. Vintage outfits and a smile that lit up a newsroom. Patience with struggling writers and grace toward a professor who kept getting their pronouns wrong, never once getting angry, just hugging her and telling her how much it meant that she kept trying, kept apologizing, kept catching herself.

Thanks to them, I’m a better professor. I understand now, in a way I didn’t before, the real harm that misgendering causes. I still stumble sometimes, and when I do, I think of them. They made me never want to stop getting it right.

That lesson came wrapped in a hug.

I keep coming back to the same thing: the people being called groomers, sinners, abominations, and threats to children and civilization. These are the most patient, most generous, most empathetic people I have ever known and taught. The cruelty flows in one direction. The grace flows back the other way, every single time.

That should tell you everything.

Now, about that Bible.

I am consistently astonished that people who appear to be otherwise thoughtful and intelligent will reach for a book written thousands of years before science, psychology, and the most basic understanding of human sexuality, and use it as their moral guide for policy in 2026.

And not even all of it. Just the parts that suit them.

Because here is what else The Bible says, for those keeping score:

Raping virgins: "If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels[a] of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives."(Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

If a woman grabs a man by the genitals during a fight, even to defend her own husband, her hand must be cut off: "When two men are fighting and the wife of one of them intervenes to drag her husband clear of his opponent, if she puts out her hand and catches hold of the man by his privates, you must cut off her hand and show her no mercy." (Deuteronomy 25:11)

A man named Lot, upheld as righteous in this text, offered his virgin daughters to a violent mob outside his door: “Do what you like with them.” (Genesis 19:8)

Soldiers killing boys and woman and keeping the virgin girls for themselves: "Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man." (Numbers 31:17-18)

Pimping out your daughters: "Look, I have two daughters, virgins both of them. Let me bring them out to you and you could do what you like with them. But do nothing to these men because they have come under the shelter of my roof." (Genesis 19:8)

Slaughtering innocent women and children for rebelling: "The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their women with child ripped open." (Hosea 13:16)

I am not listing these to mock people of faith. I am listing them to make a specific point: you are already picking and choosing. Everyone who reads this book picks and chooses. The question is what you choose, and why, and who gets hurt by it.

When you choose the passages that let you deny a transgender teenager medical care, but set aside the passages about stoning rebellious children and cutting off women’s hands, you are not following God’s law. You are following your own bias, dressed in Scripture, pointed at the most vulnerable people in the room.

That is not faith, it’s a weapon. Don't let the Sunday clothes fool you.

And the consequences are not abstract.

LGBTQ youth are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight, cisgender peers. For trans youth, the rates are worse. Every bill that tells a trans kid they don’t belong, that their body is a political problem, that their existence requires a legislative solution, is another weight placed on someone already struggling to survive. When you say “I’m just following my faith,” you are not making a neutral statement. You are participating in an environment that kills children. That is not rhetoric but rather a documented, measurable fact.

Calling it faith does not make it less lethal.

I know there are people reading this who are struggling with where they stand. People who know someone queer, or know someone with a trans child, or who were raised with beliefs they've never quite questioned. I have extended family members whose feelings on all of this I honestly don't know. And I find myself hesitant to ask because some things, once said out loud, can't be unsaid.

So instead I'm writing this, and hoping they read it, and hoping it moves them the way a Baptist girl in my newsroom was moved twenty years ago.

She didn’t abandon her faith. She just chose, when it mattered, to see a person, to really see him.

I have to believe that’s still possible.

And I keep thinking about my editor in their vintage dress, hugging a professor who kept getting it wrong, patient beyond anything I deserved, teaching me something about grace that I carry into my classroom every single day.

Two people. Both of them showing me what it actually looks like to lead with love.

Because the alternative of hiding behind an ancient and self-contradicting text to justify cruelty toward the kindest, most creative, most alive people I have ever had the privilege of teaching is not righteousness.

It’s just cruelty with better PR.

I am on the floor again.

This is where I end up when something is truly lost, when the drawers and the files and all the reasonable places have all failed me. On the floor of my office, surrounded by my 53 saints, the religious prints, the rosary beads, the little hand-painted faces that have been watching over me from every shelf for years.

I am pulling canvas boxes from the lower shelves and going through them again, for the ninth time, maybe the tenth, the way you search for something when logic has left the building and what remains is determination and the inability to accept it’s gone.

Saint Anthony knows me well. We go way back, he and I. This is an Italian family tradition, talking to him, calling him when things go missing. He’s like a friend who has your number, knows why you’re calling again, and picks up anyway. My mother did it. My sister does it. We are women who lose things and know who to call. As my dad would say, “I gotta guy.”

He has come through for me before. A diamond earring that had gone so completely lost among the bags of Christmas wrap that I’d stopped expecting to see it again, but he found it. Things I’d given up on, things I’d grieved. He finds them. So when I sat down on that floor, among the saints, I wasn’t performing a prayer so much as continuing one that has been going on in this family for generations.

Saint Anthony, I said, out loud, the way I always do. You know what I’m looking for. You know what it means to me. Please.

It was a poem Michael wrote for me on one of our anniversaries, the way he does every year. And this one had the words dragons beware in it. I can’t fully explain why those two words broke me open the way they did, except that as someone brought up in an Italian family, we understand protection as love. We understand a man who would stand between you and the fire. Dragons beware. He would fight them for me. Every last one.

I have kept each and every thing he has ever written, the notes he puts beside a freshly peeled tangerine, arranged in a circle for my breakfast before I’m even awake. The cut-out hearts he writes on and leaves scattered on the table. And then there’s the love letter written on the back of a photograph of an unknown patient’s colon polyps, left on my windshield when he didn't have time to run inside and grab a notepad and instead grabbed whatever was in the car. He is a gastroenterologist. A love note on the back of a polyp photograph is the most romantic thing in the world, because it means he can't wait. It means I am the thought that interrupts everything else.

All of it kept. All of it safe. Except the poem with the dragons.

I searched for this poem for the past two or three years, in drawers, in files, inside books. And as our anniversary approached, I did what I do when I have run out of all options. I asked Saint Anthony again: Please. I need a sign. Help me find it.

I am that kind of woman and I come by it honestly. My father wore an Italian horn around his neck, the gold cornicello, because you don’t take chances. My Irish mother would scream if you opened an umbrella in the house, would not allow a hat or a pair of shoes on a bed, and if her palms started itching, she’d quickly check if it was the right or the left one because the left meant she’d be receiving money and the right meant she’d be losing it. We were people who understood that the universe communicates, that objects carry meaning, and that absence can be a message.

I almost lost him once to Valley Fever, a diagnosis that turned our world from tranquil to terrifying and landed him in ICU for three months. So when the poem went missing, the very large superstitious part of me, which is most of me, worried. Did it mean I would lose him to something even worse than Valley Fever? Would he die in a car accident? I tend to spin.

So every day, I said my prayer to Saint Anthony in hopes he’d have time to listen.

And then my son, Andy, mentioned the Wayback Machine. He was visiting and it came up in conversation, not because he knew I was looking for anything, not because I’d told him about the poem. He simply mentioned that all of my old writing might still be there. The site I’d taken down years ago, the one that held stories from before I met Michael, stories written when my mother was dying, stories from after, all of it preserved somewhere in the architecture of the internet, whether I’d wanted it to be or not. Sometimes I’d published things Michael had written for me there too.

I wasn’t looking for the poem. I just thought there might be some story ideas worth revisiting. It was all there, at least one hundred stories from my past. I copied and pasted about five into a Google Doc and started reading with plans to revisit the site and copy and paste more when I had the time.

And there it was.

Dragons beware.

I don’t have the words to explain exactly what it felt like. Saint Anthony comes through in his own time, sometimes minutes, sometimes days or even weeks, depending, I suppose, on how many lost souls like me he’s managing at once. The diamond earring took nearly three weeks and then appeared miraculously on my bedroom floor after already sweeping every inch of it. But this? It had been hiding in an archive the entire time, and it took a saint and the suggestion of my son, who is kind of a saint himself, to find it.

It felt like proof. Like the universe lifting its head and saying: You see? Nothing is lost. Not the things that matter. Not ever.

Do you believe in kismet? In serendipity? In the idea that some people are simply meant to find each other? Soul mates? That the distance between them is never really the point, that the point is always the finding?

We do.

Michael believes he remembers me from before we ever met. He recalls a little blonde girl on Brighton Beach, years and years ago, the kind of memory that doesn’t quite make sense but won’t let go. I went to Brighton Beach as a child, with my parents. Whether it was me or not, whether it could possibly have been me, I don’t know. What I do know is that he has that picture of me on his desk and it feels true to him.

I have my own. I was a young girl on a moving walkway at the World’s Fair in Flushing, New York, the city where he lived, being carried slowly past the Pietà, Michelangelo’s marble so luminous it seemed lit from within. There was this nerdy older boy with black horn rimmed glasses. We locked eyes, the way kids sometimes do. I have thought about that boy for decades, and I’m convinced it was him. I also have that photo on my shelf, sitting inside a souvenir cup from the New York World’s Fair.

Before this divine intervention of sorts, we lived in the wrong loves. Both of us. And then, at 47, I fell deeply, madly in love.

There is a moment I return to, when I want to remember the exact instant I knew.

We had already said yes to each other, already chosen each other, but there is knowing and then there is knowing. I was sitting on the bed, folding his sweater. It sounds so small. I finished folding it, lifted it to my face, and I breathed in his scent, Ralph Lauren Polo.

That sign. This was it. He was it. I was done.

I will embarrassingly admit that I cannot walk past the men’s cologne counter in a department store without stopping and picking up the Ralph Lauren green Polo bottle, bringing it to my nose and feeling something I can only describe as swooning.

He has his own moment. It was our first trip to New York together and we stayed at the Paramount Hotel, a small room but beautifully artsy, the kind of place that has personality instead of space. He went out to buy the New York Times and I was, truthfully, just happy to have the bathroom to myself for a few minutes. I have IBS, Italian Bowel Syndrome. It tends to flare up when I eat pasta, and when in New York, eating pasta is a requirement.

He came back sooner than I expected and I said, back already? Casual. Unbothered. And something in him shifted. He told me later that he had braced himself when he walked back in, that in his past life he had lived on a short leash and that coming back too soon or too late or wrong in any way would result in a fight or an inquisition. But I was just sitting there, on the bed, minus a stomach ache, just glad to see him.

He told me it was the first time in his life he had felt this at ease with a woman. That he could simply be himself. That he didn’t have to perform or explain or become something he wasn’t. He was just him, and it was enough.

And then, on that same trip, he got to be a hero. Not the medical kind, which he does every day, but the other kind. The kind he hadn't felt in a very long time.

I needed a new suitcase. My sister and my best friend had extracted a promise from me before I left: Please buy yourself a proper piece of luggage, for Christ’s sake,” my best friend said. So I promised.

I found one and called my sister from the store, very excited. She knows me well. I’m more than happy to spend money on clothes and shoes and handbags, but suitcases or household items? Not my thing.

Where are you? she said. Tell me the truth. I told her I was at Macy’s in the luggage section. Where are you really? she asked again. I was at Big Lots, a discount store that sells overstocks and damaged goods. I told her I’d found a red Samsonite suitcase. She asked, “Are you sure it’s not Shamsonyte?”

I bought it anyway.

When it came around the baggage carousel at JFK it was in two pieces. My underwear and bras were making their own leisurely trip around the belt, greeting fellow travelers, seeing the sights. Michael handled everything, went straight to the airline clerk, made sure it was replaced, and had a new one delivered to the hotel. I was in awe. He was calm, capable and unfazed. He told me later it made him feel like a hero.

That’s the thing about the right love. It doesn’t ask you to be someone else. It just takes you, the woman with the Shamsonyte suitcase and the man who just wanted to buy a newspaper without bracing for impact, and it hands you back the version of yourself you’d either lost or have never been allowed to be.

From the very beginning of us, we held each other and swayed. Not at weddings or formal occasions, just everywhere, anywhere, for no reason. In the kitchen, in the living room, on sidewalks. Friends and family would watch us and smile. And so Sway, by Dean Martin, became the soundtrack of our lives. It was played at our wedding.

And let me tell you about our wedding, which was not just a wedding. It was an opera, a love story performed live, and we planned it that way on purpose.

We took over Il Cielo in Beverly Hills, the whole jewel box of it, the kind of place that makes you forget you're in Los Angeles and convinces you that you've been transported to a villa in Tuscany. In the front garden, where twinkling lights are threaded through twisted vines along the garden walls, a three-piece ensemble played. In the back courtyard where the roof opens to the sky, I walked down an aisle of flowers on my son's arm toward my person as the opera singers who played Mimì and Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann’s La Bohème sang Quando me’n vo’.

Not wedding singers. The real ones. Because when you are walking toward the love of your life, the music should be large enough to hold what you’re feeling. And what I was feeling was enormous.

I had spent months collecting vintage handkerchiefs, lace ones, embroidered ones, tiny monogrammed ones that belonged to women I’d never known. I placed them in a basket at the entrance for our guests, because I knew there would be crying. I am a woman who plans for the crying and they needed every single one.

Our invitations featured Marc Chagall's The Three Candles on the front, and my dress, an open back held together by a single satin ribbon threaded through lace, was my version of it. Flowers and framed posters of our favorite operas adorned the tables. Each guest left with our playlist on a CD and a black and white cookie in a pink bakery box, a homage to our city. New York. The cotton string was tied with a tag that read La Dolce Vita, the sweet life, the life we planned to live.

He is my prince. My king. I said so in my vows, and I meant it. He calls me his Sophia. He recited his vows in English and Italian, and he spoke of other lifetimes, of distance and time, and of true love. He said that maybe one day when I was eight and he was eighteen, the gods blew us apart only to find each other again, now. I believe him.

Every year on our anniversary, we make a playlist of all the songs that were the soundtrack of our life that year. The song that was playing when something wonderful happened, the song that broke our hearts because of illness or loss, the one that somehow became ours for those particular twelve months. On our anniversary, we get in the car, we press play, and we drive back to Il Cielo.

We don’t always make it without pulling over.

There are years when a song comes on and we just look at each other, and that’s it. Two grown people pulled over on the side of the road, completely undone by a song. The year he survived Valley Fever, Dusty Springfield sang If you go away on this summer day, then you might as well take the sun away. We didn’t say a word. We just sat there. Or Billy Joel's New York State of Mind that takes us back to the year we moved to Manhattan and a state of mind we often find ourselves in. Or, of course, Sway.

Puddles. Every time.

Today is our 21st anniversary. This morning, like every year, we’ll drink bellinis, the way we did at our wedding, and we’ll watch the wedding video. We’ll cry. We always do. Twenty-one years later and that day still wrecks us.

He wrote me something, a list of everything he wants to always do for me. Here’s just a few: Hold an umbrella over you in the rain. Hold your hand when you fly and when you don’t fly. Slip money in your wallet when you’re not looking. Make you laugh. Say I love you more than once a day. Carry any package that is too heavy for you. Dance with you in the kitchen and the dining room and wherever. Hum the songs you sing and whistle. Cook for you. Never go to bed without you. Kiss you a lot. Take you back to Italy. Fill the house with tulips and yellow roses. Listen to you tell me about your day. Give you the half of the bagel with the seeds on top. And then, at the very end of the list, three words:

Marry you again.

I would, in a heartbeat. With the opera singers and the vintage handkerchiefs and the black and white cookies. Or in a field with flowers in my hair. Or barefoot on a beach. Or even at a courthouse, like Carrie and Big, wearing Manolos, obviously.

Don’t settle. That’s what I want to leave you with on this anniversary morning, with the bellinis and the wedding video and the poem I lost and found again.

There is a film called Dreams for an Insomniac whose poster hangs on my office wall. The main character, Frankie, named after Sinatra, has a line I have never forgotten. When it came time to say my vows, I used hers:

There are too many mediocre things in life. Love shouldn’t be one of them.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. That real love exists. The can’t-live-without-you, pull-over-on-the-side-of-the-road, gods-blew-us-apart-only-to-find-each-other-again love. It exists and you deserve it and it’s worth every wrong turn it takes to get there.

We still sway. We still pull over. I still breathe him in when I hold his things.

And his poem, the one with the dragons, is safe now, right where it belongs. He would fight them for me. Every last one. And this is how I know:

Toni, my beloved
You are the woman who
Gave me back my life
Looked into my soul and found truth
Purged my demons and made me whole
You are the woman who, hating hospitals
Crawled into my bed after surgery,
Amidst the tubing and the monitors and the urinal on the bedrail
And slept for nights beside me
You are the woman who is mother to all who know you
A duck with all her ducklings who grow and spread their wings
And fly off to do great things.
Andy is right that you are the most loyal of friends and the most
Protective of family.
You are my friend and lover and sweetheart and wife and Queen and Princess.
You are the castle of our kingdom and I defend it against all, to the death.
Dragons beware that this place is sacred and protected.
I am in love as never before
And have never been happier than
Now.

Happy anniversary, my love. Twenty-one years ago today, two singers from La Bohème watched me walk toward you, and I thought what I still think every single day.

You are my king. My prince. My person.

The Gods blew us apart. The saints, the angels, the universe, and every force I have ever lit a candle for or whispered a prayer to, blew us back.

You bring the bellinis. I’ll bring the tissues. Let’s go remember.

Mel Robbins is charming. She has great hair and cool glasses. She speaks in a confident, punchy tone that makes you feel like you’ve just figured out your whole life while sitting in a TJ Maxx parking lot listening to a podcast.

Her “Let Them” theory is straightforward in its simplicity: Let them make their choices. Let them disappoint you. Let them be who they are without you twisting yourself trying to control, fix, or manage the outcome. Stop exhausting yourself. Release and detach. Let them.

I’ve read her books and I’ve heard her message. And then I thought about Teresa and I laughed out loud.

Let me explain who Teresa is, because she requires explanation.

Teresa is 99 years old. She is Calabrian, and if you know anything about the people from the toe of Italy’s boot, the ones who survived centuries of invasion, poverty, earthquakes, and pure atmospheric hostility, you understand that Calabrian women are not a breed you casually let anything. She weighs 75 pounds and is, in the most affectionate terms, a curmudgeon of the highest order.

She is also my ex-mother-in-law from a marriage that ended what feels like a lifetime ago.

From the moment I walked into her life as a sixteen-year-old girl on the arm of her precious son, she looked at me the way you might look at something you’ve tracked in on the bottom of your shoe. She never said it outright but communicated in cues. A resting bitch face. A silence three minutes too long. A compliment with an insult buried inside it, like a razor blade in a cannoli.

I was only seventeen when her son proposed. In our family, marriage was the sole path to any kind of freedom, and since her son was the only man my macho Italian father approved of, he decided to step in and fix things.

I’m not sure what my father said to her, but old-school Italian women of a certain generation listen to men of a certain stature, and my father was very persuasive. “She’s a good, tough Italian broad,” he told me, and almost overnight, she was helping plan the wedding.

I was only eighteen when we married. The marriage lasted five years. I gave her a grandson, a kind, genuinely wonderful human being, and then the marriage ended. My father died, and with him went the consigliere who had brokered the peace. Teresa and I were left with each other, connected by a child.

Years later, I remarried, and then I had a daughter. And with my daughter came the clawing anxiety of leaving a two-month-old in someone else’s hands. I had to work.
I had no choice and I was spiraling.

And then Teresa said, bring her to me.

Just like that. No negotiation, no conditions, no performance of generosity, just a statement of fact from a woman who had decided.

So I did. I brought my daughter to Teresa who held her sweet little face and body close and fell in love with her at first glance. She became my daughter’s Nonie, not by blood, not by any paperwork that would make sense to anyone outside our particular group of people, but in every way that counts.

For the next five years, she taught her to bake and how to craft. She sat with her at the kitchen table and passed down the particular genius of a woman who was raised in the Depression era and wasted absolutely nothing. Nestle’s Quik? Teresa made her own chocolate milk powder. Store-bought crayons were a luxury for people with less imagination so she taught my daughter how to make her own. Nothing was disposable. Everything could be remade into something useful. Furniture and clothes came from thrift shops. Comforters were patchwork from old clothing and blankets, hats and slippers were knitted or crocheted.

And that philosophy has carried down to my daughter who is raising her own toddler now. Not a single item of clothing in that child's closet was purchased new. Neither is much of her own. She bakes practically everything from scratch, and if something is listed as free on one of the neighborhood marketplaces, my daughter is in the car before you can finish reading the post. She inherited Teresa's eye for what other people throw away and what those things can still become.

I understood later that this is the philosophy she had built her entire life on. She never threw anything away. As it turned out, that included me.

I will never forget what she gave me in that season of my life when I had nowhere to turn and she rescued me. That is not a small thing, but is, in fact, everything.

Because here is what I didn't fully understand yet, back when I thought I already knew everything about Teresa. I knew she had left her husband. What I didn't know was why.

She was a woman who decided to rewrite the terms of her own life. This was not a common thing to do in 1962. She had a husband with a good-paying job and a house in the Chicago suburbs. She had three young children and a future that looked exactly like every other future available to a wife in mid-century America: cook the meals, raise the children, and be grateful for an allowance. So what did she do?

She packed her three children, all under eight years old, into a car and drove to Los Angeles.

Her reasons, as she has told us over the years, are the reasons of a woman who understood freedom, or wanted it desperately. He wouldn’t let her work. He controlled the money. He wanted her to be a supporting character in her own story. And so she left, which in 1962 was not a lifestyle choice but rather an act of sheer, radical nerve.

She got herself a job at a newspaper. She rented an apartment, eventually saved enough money to buy a house, and then proceeded to build a hold so powerful that her children never fully escaped its orbit. She pulled them back, one by one, not with force, but with something more effective: the calculated warmth of a woman who made her home feel like the only place in the world where things made sense.

If you’ve seen the film “Moonstruck,” you already understand this completely. There’s a moment when Johnny Cammareri flies back to Sicily because his mother is dying, just weeks to live, the doctors say. He tells her he’s getting married and she gets up from her deathbed, walks to the table, and “eats a meal that could choke a pig.” An Italian mother is not subject to the same physical laws as everyone else.

Teresa understood this instinctively.

There’s an old saying: the best thing you can give your children is roots and wings. Teresa gave her children roots and weights. She added rooms to accommodate them. She grew vegetables in the backyard and cooked for them. She covered the windows in blackout shades, actually pieces of cardboard and black plastic bags, so they could sleep late on weekends, which is either the most maternal thing I’ve ever heard or a mild act of psychological warfare. Possibly both.

Her sons devoted their lives to her. They came for Sunday dinner and never quite stopped coming. She didn’t really trap them; she just made freedom feel like abandonment, and so they chose her, again and again, the way Italian sons always do.

Her daughter died in that Los Angeles home too, though her story carries a different kind of grief. After her marriage ended, a terrible car accident had left her completely dependent on the care of others, and when doctors and social workers suggested a group home for her rehabilitation, Teresa didn't deliberate. She brought her daughter home and cared for her herself, until there was nothing left to care for.

Her oldest son, my ex-husband and the father of my son, died a few years ago at 67, single, still living in her house. Her youngest son died recently at 70, single, still home, still taking care of her until the very end.

And then there were none.

Outliving your children is one of the devastations the universe sometimes hands out without explanation or mercy. There is no name for what you become when that happens, no word in English, or even in Italian, for a parent who has buried every child they made.

When they were gone, all that was left behind was a house filled with three lifetimes of memories and a 98-year-old woman inside, alone for the first time in her life.

Her only other living relatives were either too far away or too old to care for her, or shunned for reasons nobody knew or understood.

So the responsibility fell to the only person left to pick up the pieces: my son.

It didn’t matter that he lives three hours by plane from her house. It didn’t matter that he is busy, that he is married and has his own child, or that he is not a trained geriatric caretaker. “Let them figure it out” or “let them go to a nursing home” are not phrases that exist in our vocabulary. We don’t have that setting. It wasn’t installed. You can argue with us about it all you like, but you’d have better luck arguing with the ocean about the direction of the tide.

So my son hopped a plane and moved her back to Los Angeles, staying here for months at a time. He made spreadsheet after spreadsheet, the kind that tracks medications and appointments and the names of doctors in a font size large enough to be read across a room. He got her fitted for hearing aids and took her for cataract surgery, which she protested, and then later admitted was “fine.” He found her a beautiful Italian senior community. He filled her old iPad with free books and hooked up cable TV with her favorite Western movie channels.

What he did is nothing short of remarkable, and also slightly absurd, and also the most purely loving thing I have ever watched a person do.

Piece by piece, he put her back together again, like Humpty Dumpty, except Humpty Dumpty occasionally responds to this level of devotion by being, in the most loving possible terms, an absolute pill. You cannot blame her. She is now 99. She has buried her children and has earned every syllable of complaint.

Here is what I’ve been thinking about in the idle hours when I’m driving in LA traffic and half-listening to podcasts about personal liberation:

The “Let Them” theory is genuinely useful for certain kinds of suffering. The suffering of waiting for an apology that will never come. The suffering of trying to change another adult who does not want to be changed. The suffering of performing love for someone who doesn’t see you and never will. Sure. Let them. Excellent advice.

But there is a different category of showing up that has nothing to do with control, and nothing to do with martyrdom, and nothing to do with whatever a divorce attorney turned motivational speaker might classify as “enmeshment patterns.” There are people in this world, often Italian, but not exclusively, for whom love is not a feeling so much as a practice. A commitment you hold even when your arms get tired.

The stubborn refusal to let someone be alone at the end of their life is not a failure of self-actualization. It's what real love looks like.

My son is living proof of this. He did not learn it from a book or a podcast or a motivational speaker. He learned it the way these things are actually learned—by watching what it looks like when people show up for each other without being asked. He is, in every sense, his own man. He didn’t follow the path of the men before him in this family. He married his childhood sweetheart and has been happily married for decades to someone who gets him, including the part that boards a plane the moment someone needs him. She understood what moving Teresa back to Los Angeles meant before he even finished explaining it. She helped pack a house filled with decades of memories, loaded it into a U-Haul, and drove it back to Los Angeles herself.

The "let them pack their own U-Haul" chapter apparently didn't resonate.

I went to visit Teresa last week.

She was sitting at her table, the one she insisted be brought to Los Angeles because it was the first piece of furniture she ever bought with her own money. It sits by the sliding glass doors that open to a courtyard where the afternoon light comes in sideways and falls across the walls covered in old family photographs and framed fall leaves her children made with their hands decades ago. On the table across from her, ceramic saints stand watch beside her rosaries and her son’s ashes. Among them, the Sacred Heart, which belonged to her mother, and which she will tell you about in detail if you give her half a chance. She has made it her personal mission to educate every nun in the building on the story of each one.

Beside the saints is a basket filled with yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks, the tools of a woman who has never once sat still. In that light, with all of it around her, the room looks like an old photograph itself. She is so small now. Ninety-nine years of living compressed into 75 pounds of pure, unrepentant will.

But something was different.

On the table beside her: a library book. She told me she won at bingo again. She has made a friend, an Italian woman who speaks her language in every sense, a woman who refers to herself as “one hundred percent dago red.” It is, for the record, an outdated and derogatory term associated with Italian-American culture for a cheap Italian wine. At a combined age of nearly two centuries, they have earned the right to call themselves whatever they please.

She asked if I did something new to my hair. She told me I looked pretty.

And I sat there thinking: she’s free.

Not free the way Mel Robbins means it, and not free from obligation or expectation or the gravitational pull of other people’s needs. Free the way you become free when there’s nothing left to prove, no one left to take care of, no future to protect.

She drove out of Chicago in 1962 because she was done belonging to someone else. She spent the next six decades belonging to her children, which she chose and which was also a long and loving surrender. And now I think she may finally have what she was looking for when she packed three children into a car and pointed it west.

Herself.

I have grown to love Teresa, not despite all of it but because of all of it. She is interesting and her stories are extraordinary, and when we sit together, she talks about her life with the clear-eyed honesty of a woman who made her choices and is still, at 99, examining them without regret and without apology.

She is not a woman who says things for effect, so when I tell you she calls me her daughter, I want you to understand what that looks like in practice.

Three years ago at the ripe age of 96, she came to my daughter’s wedding. Her son was working and couldn’t take her so she boarded a plane alone and flew two hours to Los Angeles. She wore her version of Sunday best and sat near the front in the row reserved for grandmothers, because that is exactly where she belonged.

The universe has a Calabrian sense of humor.

I have known this woman since I was sixteen, more than half a century. She has been a thorn, a mirror, an education, an adversary, a mystery, and eventually, a gift.

You don’t let a woman like that go. You sit with her in the sideways light and you let her tell you she won at bingo, or listen to her complain about the woman who crowds her at the dining table, and you stay.

That’s not self-abandonment or codependence. It’s not a failure to implement a theory about personal liberation. That’s just what you do.

She's Calabrian. She will turn 100 next spring. She survived everything.

The least I can do is show up to watch.

Some people cannot stand to watch a woman refuse to disappear on schedule. Madonna is just the latest reminder.

Two weeks later, the hate is still coming because she showed up at Coachella in the same boots and corset she wore during Confessions on a Dance Floor twenty years ago. She joined Sabrina Carpenter for “Vogue” and “Like a Prayer,” and announced a new album in front of millions of people. She called it a full circle moment.

Predictably, the internet lost its mind in two directions at once. Half the world was on fire with joy while the other half was typing “grandma” into comment sections like it was an insult that meant something. She was dressed too young, they said. She should know better. Apparently, there’s a point at which a woman is supposed to surrender the corset, leave the stage to someone younger, and go away grateful to be someone’s version of alive, but out of the spotlight. In other words, age gracefully.

What a fucking disgrace.

The praise wasn't much better. People marveled that Madonna could get up from a kneeling position without help. That's the bar. That's what we're celebrating now. A woman on her knees getting back up and everyone acting like it's a miracle.

What pisses me off most about this Madonna backlash is that I spent years in the music business and I can tell you that nothing has changed. Aging was always a privilege reserved for men. It was perfectly fine for some decrepit male rock star to parade around with a teenager on his arm, tight pants showing every wilted, sagging inch of him.

And God forbid a woman put on a few pounds. It didn’t matter that Ann Wilson of Heart could sing as well as, if not better than, Robert Plant. During the MTV years, Ann’s weight gain became everyone’s obsession. The record label pressured her to lose weight but until she did, they came up with a solution. Hide her behind gigantic amplifiers. Amps stacked in front of a woman with one of the greatest voices in rock history because she wasn’t thin enough to deserve being front and center.

Mick Jagger, 82, is praised for his stamina and dance moves. But Madonna? Please.

Madonna didn't get to where she is by pretending the rules didn't exist. She got there by refusing to follow them. When she accepted Billboard's Woman of the Year award, in 2016, she explained exactly what those rules are:

There are no rules — if you’re a boy. If you’re a girl, you have to play the game. What is that game? You are allowed to be pretty and cute and sexy. But don’t act too smart. Don’t have an opinion. Don’t have an opinion that is out of line with the status quo, at least. You are allowed to be objectified by men and dress like a slut, but don’t own your sluttiness. And do not, I repeat, do not, share your own sexual fantasies with the world.

Here’s what I saw on the stage at Coachella at home dancing to “Vogue” in my lace underwear. I saw an icon who still has something to say, still has a killer body, and still shows up in the same boots she wore twenty years ago. Why? Because she can. It wasn’t for your nostalgia or your approval. She performed with someone less than half her age on her own terms, with a new album coming out and zero fucks available for anyone who has a problem with that. Imagine having that kind of confidence. The haters can’t because they’d rather hide behind a screen name, dragging down a woman who hasn’t thought about them once in her entire fabulous life.

And the “grandma” comments were never really about her age. They’re about the rage people feel when a woman refuses to put on the age appropriate costume they’ve picked out for her. You know, the gardening gloves, the sensible shoes, the granny panties. The “grandma” comment is jealousy dressed up as a dress code violation.

I know this because I’ve faced my own criticism. I dress the way I do because it’s who I am and who I’ve always been. A Betsey Johnson dress, the leather jacket, the band tee, the boots, that’s not me trying to be younger. I've just never been anyone else.

My college students get it. They compliment me on my fashion, want to know where I found something, and then move on with their lives. Young people are too busy being themselves to worry about how anyone else is showing up. The only criticism I’ve ever gotten about the way I dress has come from women my own age, wondering why I don’t just wear solid colors or something “more comfortable.” I am comfortable. I'm just not their version of it. It's women in my own generation that have suggested I trade in my Manolo’s for Birkenstocks and my band tees for solid colors.

When hell freezes over.

It's fascinating that the harshest dress code enforcement doesn't come from the young. It comes from people who are perfectly happy with their own choices but can't seem to leave anyone else alone with theirs.

And to be clear, if a woman wants to let her hair go gray and live in comfortable shoes and linen, I’m cheering for her. Go makeup-less. Wear whatever makes you feel like yourself. That’s entirely the point.

What I have a problem with is the woman who made that choice and then wants to make it for everyone else. Age discrimination cuts both ways. Telling a woman to dye her gray hair is just as ugly as telling her to trade in her leather jacket. Both are just different ways of saying women are supposed to age on someone else's terms.

Nobody embodies this better or gets punished for it more publicly than Cher. The woman has sold over 100 million records, won an Academy Award, a Grammy, an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and a Kennedy Center Honor, and is the only solo artist in history to have a number one single on the Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades. And what are we talking about? Her clothes and the man on her arm.

Cher is seventy-nine years old, dating a man forty years younger, living her life exactly the way she wants to, and people are absolutely losing their minds. The insiders are always "so concerned,” always so conveniently anonymous, rushing to tell anyone who will listen that she’s “an embarrassment” or that “she needs help.”

Nobody said anything when Warren Beatty was doing exactly this for forty years. Nobody staged a wellness intervention for Mick Jagger, who just had a baby with his 38-year-old girlfriend. And nobody wrung their hands over Hugh Hefner, who spent the last decades of his life in a bathrobe surrounded by women young enough to be his great-grandchildren and was somehow considered a legend for it. Cher picks a younger man and suddenly it becomes a referendum on her judgement.

The math isn’t complicated and the bias isn’t subtle. An older man with a young woman is a trophy situation but an older woman with a young man is a cry for help that requires immediate media coverage and a team of concerned anonymous sources.

To the people typing 'grandma' into comment sections, Madonna fills arenas while you sit behind a screen. Cher doesn't need a man to survive, and she certainly doesn't need anyone telling her what to do. As she once said, “Men are a luxury, not a necessity.” She also said, "If I wanna put my tits on my back, it's nobody's business but my own."

These are two different women who arrived at the same conclusion from two different directions. Madonna put it this way: "I have never apologized for any of the creative choices I've made, nor the way I look or dress, and I'm not going to start."

Same.

Yesterday, Madonna and Sabrina Carpenter dropped a collaborative single, “Bring Your Love.” Carpenter is 26 years old and seems to have no problem standing next to a legend. Funny how that works.

Writer and editor Becky Tuch’s post on X should have had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t the writer she accused. It wasn’t my Modern Love essay she was calling AI slop. And yet I read it on a Tuesday night and by Wednesday morning I was standing in front of my strategic writing class, teaching students how to write a strong lede for a feature profile, and all I could think was: would this get them flagged?

I have a Modern Love essay sitting in Google Docs. I’ve been editing it daily, the way I teach my students to edit, cutting the fluff, earning every sentence, trusting the reader. It’s the most carefully written thing I’ve produced in years. And now I can’t read a single line of it without hearing Tuch’s voice in my head, asking the question she asked about someone else’s work.

Too clean. Too precise. Too good to be human.

She wasn’t talking about me, but I can’t stop thinking she could be. I don’t use AI to write my articles but that doesn’t mean I won’t be called out for it. Then the story got more complicated. The Atlantic reported that Kate Gilgan, the author of the Modern Love essay, confirmed she had used AI tools in her process, not to write the column, she said, but for inspiration and guidance. She’d prompted ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity to help her stay on topic, using AI as a collaborative editor rather than a content generator. She claimed that she hadn’t copied and pasted. She also claimed that she hadn’t outsourced the writing. But she had let the machines into her process. The New York Times, for its part, said its ethical-journalism handbook requires freelancers to abide by established journalistic standards and editing processes, and that substantial AI use should be clearly disclosed to readers. It wasn’t.

That distinction between using AI and being AI is exactly the line nobody knows how to draw anymore. And it’s the line I keep tripping over every time I open my own Google Doc.

Modern Love is one of my favorite reads. It’s where real people bare their souls in polished, carefully crafted essays. It’s not a place you’d expect to find slop, artificial or otherwise. And yet here we are, in a time where writing something too professional can get you flagged.

A dear friend of mine had an essay published in Modern Love. I was proud of her in the way you’re proud of someone when you know exactly how hard that is. I’ve done the research. I attended a Modern Love panel at the Tribeca Film Festival that featured its editors. They receive thousands of submissions per year and publish about 52. That’s less than one percent. The odds are not in my favor, but my friend inspired me to try. Somebody must be one of the 52.

But thanks to Tuch’s post, I may never finish my essay because somewhere between her accusation and my own blinking cursor, AI got inside my head and it’s messing with everything I thought I knew about my own writing.

I’ve spent years being shaped by the best. Professors and professional writers who drilled into me that good writing is clean writing. Precise. Concise. Intentional.

Even that staccato last sentence sounds like AI.

I once sat on a panel at a journalism conference in New York with Roy Peter Clark. If you don’t know that name, you should. Clark has been called America’s most influential writing teacher. He’s a senior scholar at the Poynter Institute who has spent decades shaping how journalists and writers think about their craft. His book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer has lived on my desk, in my lecture slides, and in my bones. I’ve taught from it in nearly every magazine writing and newswriting class I’ve ever stood in front of.

His tools are gospel to me. And now, one by one, AI is turning them into evidence.

Begin sentences with subjects and verbs. Activate your verbs. Cut the adverbs. Lead with meaning. Make every word count. Use periods as stop signs. Clean, direct, purposeful sentences.

Sound familiar? It should. It’s also a checklist for what an AI detector flags as suspicious.

The smooth transitions. The active voice. Everything Clark spent a career teaching writers to do is now, in the age of AI, a potential red flag. The fundamentals of good writing look like something a machine would produce.

Here’s the devastating irony: AI learned to write by consuming the best of us. It studied Clark’s tools right alongside us. It read the same essays, the same journalism, the same carefully crafted prose that shaped a generation of writers. And now it mimics it well enough that we can’t tell the difference, or worse, we’ve stopped trying.

So what are we supposed to do? Write badly on purpose? Ignore everything we were taught? Bury the lede just to seem more human?

Clark built his life’s work on the belief that writing is a craft worth learning, worth teaching, worth fighting for. I believe that too. I’ve believed it every time I’ve put his tools in front of a student and said: this is how it’s done.

But now, when a student asks me what good writing looks like, I pause.

Today I have 33 papers to grade, all written mostly by seniors and grad students in my entertainment public relations class. I already know what I’m going to find. Many will have the telltale flags we’ve all been trained to spot: the overly smooth transitions, the suspiciously balanced sentences, the kind of writing that technically says everything and somehow feels like nothing. The em-dashes. So many em-dashes.

But here’s what’s keeping me up at night.

As I work through my undergraduate strategic PR writing class where students are just starting to learn how to write short, concise, tight press pieces, I find myself lingering over the worst ones. The clunky ones. The ones that miss the mark. And I wonder if these might be the real ones.

Is bad writing the new proof of life?

I brought up the use of AI in the entertainment PR class last night and asked my students directly: have any of you had a paper or something you wrote flagged for AI?

Several raised their hands with stories of false accusations. Students who swore that the work was theirs, only to be told that the detector said otherwise. AI detectors, by the way, are wrong more often than anyone wants to admit.

But then one student said something that stopped me cold.

We know how to tell AI to make our writing sound more amateur.

I haven’t been able to shake that.

We have arrived at a moment where students are actively prompting AI to write worse, to mimic the stumbles and roughness of someone still learning, because clean, competent writing has become suspicious. The very thing I stand in front of a classroom to teach is now a liability. Polish is a red flag. Everything I learned from brilliant professors and working journalists now must be hidden or dumbed down to pass as human.

I keep coming back to something that should be simple: what does human writing actually look like anymore?

For most of my career, I thought I knew. Human writing is specific. It’s the detail only you would notice, the memory only you could have, the sentence that embarrasses you a little because it’s too true. Human writing leaves marks on you. It has the writer’s fingerprints all over it.

But AI has been trained on all of it. Every feature story, every memoir, every deeply personal Modern Love column ever published. It has consumed the fingerprints. It can do specific. It can write the sentence that feels almost too true.

So where does that leave us?

I’ve been a journalism professor long enough to have watched the entire landscape shift beneath my feet. I watched the internet gut our student newsroom. I watched social media rewrite the rules of storytelling. I watched SEO turn good writers into keyword masters. And every time, we adapted. But this feels different.

Because this time the threat isn’t coming from outside. It’s inside the sentences themselves. It’s in the way a paragraph flows, the way an argument lands, the way a writer knows when to stop. AI has moved into the craft and set up shop, and now none of us can look at a clean piece of writing without wondering who or what is behind it.

That’s not a technology problem. It’s a trust problem.

And once trust goes, everything gets harder. The writer doubts herself. The reader doubts the page. The professor doubts the student. The editor doubts the submission. We are all now suspects.

My undergraduate students are navigating this in a way my generation never had to. They’re learning the craft at the exact moment the craft is being weaponized against them. Write too well and you’ll be accused of cheating. Write badly enough and maybe you’ll pass as real.

What a thing to teach someone.

It is becoming more difficult to stand in front of a classroom and say: here is how you write a strong lede, here is how you cut the fluff from a sentence, here is how you earn a reader’s trust knowing that those same skills might someday get them flagged, questioned, or dismissed.

I still teach it anyway. Because the alternative of telling students to write worse, to perform imperfection as proof of humanity, is not something I’m willing to do.

My Modern Love essay still sits in Google Docs. I’ll finish it, and I’ll send it in, clean and precise, the way I was taught. I’m not roughing up the edges to prove I’m human. I’m not writing worse to seem more real.

If that makes it suspicious, then the thing we’ve broken isn’t trust in writers. It’s trust in writing itself.

He was standing against a cigarette machine with a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand. Tight pastel skinny pants, cropped t-shirt, a fitted blazer, and Chelsea boots. He had the bluest-green eyes, long lashes, and a blonde shag, looking like he stepped straight out of a British rock magazine.

It was one of those rare nights out with my group of friends who had very different tastes in men than I did. They were hot for muscular, short-haired guys with money. I was a single mom with a three-year-old son, so going out was reserved for every-other-weekend arrangements with my ex, and I always chose anywhere I could hear live rock music. The Rainbow Bar and Grill was the after-hours hub for all things rock.

And there he was.

I needed a good pickup line and went with: “Who cuts your hair?”

He told me he cut it himself and asked if I’d like him to cut mine. A few drinks later, we exchanged numbers. He called the next day and asked if I still wanted a haircut.

I drove down Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles figuring this guy must have some bucks but the gigantic mansions slowly became apartments and liquor stores. His home was an old, beautifully restored Victorian on a tree-lined street. He lived in the back house.

He answered the door in a tight pair of sweatpants and a leopard t-shirt with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. His apartment: a mattress on the floor, Music Connection magazines stacked everywhere, a bottle of whiskey, and some dirty glasses.

“Can I get you something to drink?”

I opted for Jack Daniels to calm my nerves. I hate whiskey, but it was that or tap water.

He gave a good rocker cut. When finished, I looked like a blonde Joan Jett. I took a seat in the only place available, his bed. I moved the rumpled sheets aside to find a pair of women’s Betty Boop bikini underwear. Typical rock musician. I was scared, though not scared enough to leave. Like the many women in my family before me, I was drawn to bad boys. I invited him to dinner.

I made pasta, meatballs, and bought two bottles of Chianti. When an hour passed from the time he was supposed to arrive, I assumed he wasn’t coming. This was pre-cell phones, so there was no way of knowing he was lost. I opened a bottle and drank it. I was a sugary cocktail girl and that bottle of wine had gone straight to my head.

I heard the rumble of his sports car coming up the hill and opened the door to find him apologetic and looking hotter than ever. I had put serious effort into getting ready and looked almost as hot as him. I was also very drunk.

I spent the night on my hands and knees, but not in a good way. I was bent over the toilet.

If you really want to know someone’s character, let something like this happen on the first date. There was no taking advantage of me in my easy-to-unzip dress. He just kept checking on me to make sure I was okay.

I pulled myself together long enough to serve him dinner while I sat across the table looking like what is now the green vomit emoji.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Dinner was delicious.”

He smoked a couple of cigarettes, said he’d call, and left. He called the next day.

We started seeing each other, and soon enough he had to pass the final test. He had to meet my son. And my son had to like him. My boy, at three, was smart beyond his years and had a mad sense of humor. I told him mommy was seeing someone, asked him to be nice, but made sure he understood that if he didn’t like him, we wouldn’t see him again. Andy had his own test ready. When Bryan arrived, my skinny little curly-headed boy walked out of his room naked, wearing his glasses on his penis, dancing. Bryan thought he was hilarious. This was the first child he’d ever bonded with.

We moved in together two months later. Shortly after, I was pregnant.

We married on New Year’s Eve, seven months after we first met. The ceremony was in a small non-denominational church in our neighborhood, and the pastor showed up drunk in a dirty suit with leaves in his hair. Somehow, he fit the scene perfectly. The guests were an eclectic mix of family, rock musicians, drag queens, and Hollywood types. Kelle Rhoads, the brother of my friend and guitar hero Randy Rhoads, sang the Alice Cooper song You and Me as I walked down the aisle in my Stevie Nicks white lace dress with flowers in my hair. He wore a fitted white suit and Capezio shoes.

My vows were Chrissie Hynde. His were Led Zeppelin:

If the sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you. If mountains crumble to the sea, there will still be you and me.

The reception was at a restaurant on top of a hill with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the San Fernando Valley. We danced to Jeff Beck’s instrumental Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers. We were the quintessential rock and roll couple and we were in bliss.

Six months later, our daughter was born. Bryan showed up to the delivery room wearing Groucho Marx glasses and mustache, scrubs, his camera in hand. We both wanted a girl. She was beautiful with blonde hair, green eyes, and tiny hands. We named her Summer.

Bryan had trouble connecting with her. He bragged about her beauty but couldn’t do the things that should have come naturally like holding her or playing with her. He told me early on that he never felt a connection to little kids, and he’d already had two of his own. The first was a daughter he'd never met, fathered at fifteen. A story straight out of Chinatown, her grandparents raising her as their own. The second, was a boy from his first marriage that he rarely saw.

Given his history, I’m not sure why I expected fatherhood to come naturally. I was sure I could change him. That’s how my warped fix-it logic works.

The first half of the marriage was a wild hurricane and the second was a tornado that tore through our home, causing damage that could never be fully repaired.

For a while, life was good enough to make it easy to look away. We moved into a house in the Hollywood Hills, a two-story perched on the edge of a hill, our bedroom windows facing the Hollywood sign. The neighbors were an interesting bunch. The guy across the street walked his Siamese cat on a leash every morning, and a famous music producer lived up the street, so the sounds of rock bands recording drifted through the hills at all hours.

Our life became a series of parties, camping trips with the kids, and live music shows. Deer wandered onto the property like the rest of our guests, unannounced. Our house had become that house: my mother in the kitchen, Bryan's bandmates on the couch, the kids running around, and somehow it all worked. Until it didn’t.

Someone once told me that the one thing that initially attracts you to a person will be the downfall of the relationship. I thought it sounded cliché until I watched Bryan's Keith Richards routine go from fun to fucked up.

What no one tells you about alcoholics is that many of them can outdrink everyone in the room. Bryan never seemed drunk at first. He could down ten drinks and show no effect. But years later, two drinks led to slurring and stumbling. That's when I knew there was a problem. But it was just the Keith Richards persona, right? And in rock and roll, that behavior didn’t read as decline, but rather as identity.

Bryan grew up in Virginia, and by sixteen he was already on the road, playing bass guitar and touring with the Shangri-Las, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and a long parade of rock bands through the DC area. His band got signed and then dropped, so he did what any self-respecting rock musician would do. He moved to Los Angeles and landed on his feet in the Sunset Strip glam scene.

Then he turned thirty. In rock musician years, that’s ancient.

He contemplated leaving music, but that was never a real option, so he continued to play in headlining glam bands on the Sunset Strip, recording albums, being featured on movie soundtracks, and still hoping for that elusive record deal. It never came because by the 1990s, we could all feel the air going out of the Strip. The labels had packed up and headed to the Pacific Northwest, chasing grunge, and just like that, the scene we’d known was gone.

For Bryan, the only way to ease the pain of aging out of something you loved was to drink. So the drinking got worse.

As for me, my offices above the Whisky a Go Go emptied out quietly. The bands stopped calling, then the labels, and then there was nothing left to call about. The Sunset Strip, once a wall-to-wall circus of spandex and enough Aqua Net to puncture the ozone, had gone still. The posers with their flyers and their big hair had vanished, leaving nothing behind but empty clubs and the faint smell of hairspray and broken dreams.

I was always thinking about my next move. My sister and I created a new magazine, leveraging our contacts to land a deal with a major publisher and distributor in New York. It took off. That made things worse for Bryan. I had one foot in the music business and one at home, still moving forward. He had neither.

We moved an hour north to a sleepy beach town where the fog rolled in at three p.m. and the sidewalks rolled up at nine. The music scene was as dead as the fish that left their stench on the shore. Bryan stopped playing music and poured his energy into wiring hot rods, which became a fairly successful business. But when the sun went down, the drinking began. Glasses of wine became jugs of wine. Jugs of wine became boxes with spouts.

“He’s three sheets to the wind,” my mother would say.

It didn’t matter that he’d stumble into our daughter’s room thinking it was ours. That he’d fall asleep on the floor at family gatherings. That he went face-first down the stairs and ended up in the emergency room. That he passed out at a wedding with an open bar and was later found asleep in the bushes near the venue. By my account, he had a sleep disorder. That was my story and I was sticking to it.

We lived next door to my sister and her husband, but we were isolated. I rarely invited anyone over in fear of Bryan getting drunk. Family gatherings worked best in daylight. The threats to leave weren’t working. He’d beg and make promises, and then I’d find the big bottle of vodka hidden in the clothes dryer. The first DUI came without warning. I was sitting with my mom at a local hamburger joint, waiting for him to join us. He never showed. He was in jail.

On Mother’s Day, we all waited at a café for brunch and he never showed, again. The obligatory call came. He’d checked himself into a rehab, or something like that. Then they let him go and I picked him up. More of the same.

My mother’s illness ran alongside all of it. Metastatic breast cancer eventually took her life. We held her service at an old Catholic church in North Hollywood. After the reception, my cousin invited us to spend the night at her home in San Diego, a good 2-3 hour drive from Los Angeles, as a way to get away from the fresh open wound of it all. I drove in my cousin’s car with Ave Maria still ringing in my head. Bryan was supposed to drive down later. Hours passed. He never arrived. I spent the night with my cousin calling every police station and jail from Los Angeles to San Diego until we found him. He’d been arrested. Another DUI.

This was one of many final straws, but ending the marriage would mean I failed. I could make him a better father. I could make him love Italian culture, see the beauty in opera, in Sinatra. I could make him stop drinking. My daughter had other ideas. Her words were the harshest I’d ever heard from her: If you stay with him, I’ll lose all respect for you.

But I stayed. I stood by him as we released my mother’s ashes over the casinos in Laughlin, Nevada, just like she’d asked.

Then things changed. The house was quiet without my mother to distract me. My master’s thesis was done. My son was at Berkeley. My exit plan was written.

And it wasn’t the second DUI that finally did it. It was an episode of Sex and the City. I watched Carrie standing on a bed, fixing Mr. Big’s tie, and I couldn’t help but wonder, why am I with this guy? It was way past loyal. The man I’d fallen in love with had been replaced by someone who complained nonstop, had grit under his fingernails from working on cars, kept his hair long and straggly, and still wore shirts that could fit a toddler. And let’s not talk about the leopard bikini underwear.

I wanted a man with manicured fingernails and toes, who went to an actual hair stylist, who wore crisp shirts fresh from the dry cleaners. I wanted someone who wasn’t a stumbling drunk. I wanted my own version of Mr. Big.

Bryan tried to be sober. He promised it for the millionth time, and I believed him.

And then Thanksgiving came. My mother had died months earlier, so the day already felt hollow. My sister planned a vegan dinner. My closest friend knows how I melt down when family traditions are altered so she offered me a real Thanksgiving meal with all the trimmings at her sister’s house. After choking down some tofurky roast, I left for my friend’s house but forgot something at home.

I called him once, then again, but no answer. I drove back to the house and there he was, sitting at the table, guzzling down a large bottle of vodka.

He looked at me, then at the bottle. No excuses. No performance. He knew this was it, that there was nothing left to deny. The truth was finally undeniable.

I signed a lease on an apartment in Santa Monica.

And it was over.

*Author’s note. Bryan gave permission for this article to be published with his photo. He left Los Angeles for the desert years ago. He plays music for fun, builds guitars, and is still working on his 1930 Ford hot rod. He says he’s been sober for six months. I want to believe him.

The man who taught me how to be a great professor also told me to wear my hair in a ponytail.

I was up for my first full-time tenured professor position. His position. He was retiring and had chosen me to fill his enormous shoes. He was large in both body size and personality, the kind of professor students quote for decades, the kind who fills a room before he opens his mouth. He was determined that I get this job so he coached me, making sure I was prepared to answer the kinds of questions asked by college hiring committees. I made it to the top three.

The final hiring decision belonged to the college president, a strong woman who he’d gone head-to-head with on numerous occasions. He gave me his advice.

Tone it down. She’ll be intimidated by you. Dress down. Wear your hair up. Maybe a ponytail.

I did what he said. I didn’t wear my pink suit with the cropped blazer. I didn’t wear my layered blonde hair down. Instead, I borrowed a navy blue Ann Taylor suit from my best friend and tied my hair back in a ponytail. I toned it down and I got the job.

He took me out to lunch to celebrate and gave me more tips.

Buy the student media staff pizza but don’t let them take advantage of you.

Keep your head down and don’t piss anyone in administration off until you get tenure.

Don’t shit where you eat.

And then, out of nowhere, he asked if my boyfriend had proposed yet. The man I was seeing. The man I would eventually marry. He hadn’t.

Then came the confession.

If you were mine, I’d whisk you off into the sunset and never look back.

I sat there drinking my iced tea, not knowing how to respond, so I went with the kind of answer a woman gives a man when she wants to end a conversation while staying respectful.

Thanks, that’s very sweet.

This is the man who had coached me to make myself smaller so another woman wouldn’t feel threatened. He had worried I might intimidate her just by being myself and yet he saw no contradiction in sitting across from me making his case. That he knew what to do with me. That I was worth a sunset and a marriage proposal.

He made me small for her but I was plenty for him. I never stopped wondering if I would have gotten the job anyway. Would she have liked me exactly as I was, pink suit and all? By following his advice, I hadn't just changed my hair and clothes. I pre-judged her. I accepted his version of her before she ever had the chance to have the version of me.

If that isn’t the oldest story about women, I don’t know what is.

But looking back, I learned this lesson long before he taught it to me.

My mother believed in me the way only mothers can, completely and irrationally with an intensity that left no room for doubt. She would tell me there was no competition because I was the best at everything. She said it as a fact, like something that didn’t require any further discussion. And in the next breath she’d tell me: You catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.

She wasn’t wrong about either thing. That’s what made it so hard. She was handing me two truths that could not both fit in the same body. You are exceptional, but be careful how you show it. You are the best, but the world will not always thank you for acting like it. Go get everything, but smile while you’re doing it. Don’t scare anyone.

I grew up fluent in this contradiction. What that looked like for me was me smiling, nodding, and tamping it down until something finally snaps and I become a person I can’t entirely explain or defend.

Like board games.

I am so competitive that I once told my entire family that they sucked and walked out of a Scrabble game.

I was in my thirties. My son and I were arguing over a word. Everyone sided with him. I grabbed the glass of wine I’d been nursing all evening, pushed back my chair, looked at the people who have loved me my entire life, and rendered my verdict.

You all suck.

My mother did not consider this honey.

I wish I could say that the Scrabble game is the most embarrassing example. The same force that sent me storming out of a board game in my thirties is the same force that makes me lie awake at night thinking about a 0.3.

I’m a professor with a 4.7 out of 5.0 rating on Rate My Professor. Do you know what I think about that 4.7? I think about the 0.3. I think about whoever gave me less than five stars, what I said or did that made one student withhold a perfect score, what they needed that I didn’t give them. A 4.7, by any reasonable measure is pretty great. I know it the way I know my mother thought I was the best at everything.

And I still want the five.

So I go back and make the lectures better. I study the professors in my field with the five star scores. I am, in the most absurd way possible, competing for a perfect score on a website that students scroll through between classes on their phones.

And then there were the student media conferences.

I was a college student media adviser and my students competed in journalism competitions, not the Pulitzer, but you would not have known that from my energy. I made sure they submitted their very best work. I made sure they were all given matching custom made t-shirts because if you’re going to walk into a room full of competitors, you might as well walk in looking like a team, a force. I would sit beside them as they waited for the winners to be announced and I’m pretty sure my seat was vibrating. I know for sure that my heart was racing right along with theirs.

Every time we won big, I would lose my voice screaming and cheering for them. And if they lost to another college, I would sit in silence thinking: the judges were wrong. I would tell them that winning isn’t everything, that they did their very best and should be proud of themselves, but on the inside I was thinking: we were robbed.

I mean, come on. I was their coach. I knew they were the best because I had made them the best the same way someone once made me believe I was the best. The same way a woman once told me there was no competition because I was going to win.

Sound familiar, Mom?

This is what competition does when it has nowhere to go. It doesn’t just live in the big moments like the job interview or the book deal. It lives in the small ones too. The constant monitoring of whether you’re enough.

What I’ve come to understand as a woman is that you are never playing one game. You are always playing two.

The first game is the one everyone can see like the job, the pitch, the byline, the promotion. You prepare for this game and you get good at it.

The second game has a rulebook that exists but no one will give it to you. You have to learn it by losing. By being called too much, too aggressive, too ambitious. By watching a man do the exact same thing you just did and get called a leader for it. By being told by a man who claimed to believe in you more than anyone, to pull your hair back and tone it down so the woman interviewing you wouldn’t feel threatened.

And then there are other women, which is its own complicated territory. We’ve gotten better at performing solidarity. We like the posts, share the wins, and show up with encouraging comments. But when someone else gets the one thing we wanted, something inside of us stirs. Not because of her. Because of us.

We’ve been conditioned to be pitted against each other, and even when we resist, it’s still there. Our mind plays tricks on us and we conclude that some women are not really our allies and others are not really our competition. We spend time trying to sort it out which is exhausting work that men are never asked to do.

The man who mentored me was not a villain. He believed in me and handed me a future with both hands. He also told me to sand down my edges to receive it.

This is what the second game does. It doesn’t stay with the hiring committee or a professor rating website. It follows you to a place where you find yourself competing for your own sense of worth.

We live in a world that says women who compete too openly are problems to be managed. Take your drive, your talent, and your ambition and pull it all back into a neat and tidy ponytail.

I’ve been told not to get my hopes up by people who thought they were protecting me but I have to wonder, from what? From wanting things? From believing I might actually get them? Maybe my competitiveness is deep rooted in optimism. Maybe I believe that I’m capable and haven’t given up on the idea that putting in an effort results in a positive outcome. Or maybe I just hate losing.

My family still laughs about the Scrabble game. I laugh too. And then I ask if they want to play again and they all suddenly have somewhere else to be.

I’ll never stop competing. Somewhere between my mother telling me I was the best at everything and a man handing me my career while asking me to change myself for it, I realized that my competitiveness was never the problem.

The terms are.

The Zoom background looked like a stock photo, the kind Airbnb uses to make you believe every cabin looks like this. Wooden walls, a window full of trees, and a blonde who looks like she came with the listing.

But it wasn’t a background and she wasn’t a model. She was my friend. It was her temporary office that consisted of a bed with messed up covers and a pillow for a desk.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, her long blonde hair wild and untamed, like her. She was writing from a rented cabin in the mountains for a few weeks. No office, no city noise, no neighbors. Just her, lots of notes, and whatever the wilderness decided to offer up between sessions. The wifi was terrible but she didn’t seem to mind.

I would never stay in a cabin in the woods alone. My idea of roughing it is flying in extra room seats. And yet, the women I’ve loved most in this life have all been some version of her. Wild, untamed, and completely at home in a world that terrifies me.

These are my people. The ones I live vicariously through.

I should be clear about who I am. I’m the woman who can walk into a room of strangers and feel her shoulders drop with relief. Give me a crowd, a podium, a city I’ve never been to, and my nervous system ignites. I’ve spoken to hundreds of people at media conferences and felt genuinely calm. I have walked up to people I’ve never met at parties my entire life without a second thought. And don’t even get me started about New York City. It’s my obsession. I lived there for a year, visit often, and dream of moving back. I’ve compared the feeling I get to heroin. I’ve never done drugs but have been told it becomes an addiction after the first hit.

They have the wilderness, I have New York. We’re all addicts.

But the real outdoors? I wouldn’t know which berries to eat. I would eat the wrong ones and die. And if a bear came at me, I’d run, which is apparently the one thing you are never supposed to do.

And yet, I’m drawn to these women like mosquitos to a campfire I could never build.

I met one of my first wild ones the way you meet all the best people. Unexpected and in a crisis.

Ozzy Osbourne was suing me for libel. I was running an LA magazine with my sister, doing what editors do, deciding which stories to publish. This decision ended with us sitting in a tall Los Angeles building, being deposed on video by his lawyers. One of them looked up from his papers and asked, Do you have a degree in journalism?

No, I do not.

In a moment of either genius or panic, or because I felt like a total loser, I decided what I really needed was a journalism class. After my final deposition, I walked into a local community college, the way you do when your life is on fire, and there she was.

Short skirt. Long dark hair. A raspy voice that sounded like it had lived somewhere interesting.

What’s your deal? she said.

I told her. She laughed and encouraged me to sign up for her class. She was a former music journalist. We clicked immediately.

I was released from all liability in the lawsuit, and she’s the reason I got my master’s in journalism and became a college professor. I want to shout that out loud because it still amazes me. I believe that none of the women in my life arrived by accident. They were placed by something divine.

And here’s what I remember most. We went to New York together for a journalism conference. We drank champagne at a restaurant in Grand Central Station after trekking through the snow, an idea she came up with close to midnight. That part was easy for me, the city girl in her natural habitat. The next day she called me to her hotel room. She had something to show me.

In her bathtub was a wild bird she rescued from the streets of Manhattan.

She hadn’t just found the bird. She spent hours on the phone tracking down rescues, and when she finally found one, she put that wild creature in a New York taxi and delivered it herself.

I should mention that I’m terrified of all wildlife, including birds. Even the pigeons of New York give me the creeps. I would have walked past that bird, said a little prayer for its soul, and never looked back. She nursed it back to health and hailed it a cab.

She once eyed my Louis Vuitton bag and said, “Honey, for what that thing costs I could buy myself a horse.” I didn’t confess that the only time I ever got on a horse, it was at a sketchy pop-up circus, the kind that appear out of nowhere in an empty parking lot. After several glasses of cheap wine on ice and a candy apple, I climbed on that pony and lasted about thirty seconds before jumping off. I was twenty.

When her mother's dementia worsened, she left the California beaches behind for Florida, where she describes her property as “emerald green as far as the eye can see.” She loves the wildlife that wanders onto her property, including bears. We stay in touch the way old friends do. We talk about New York again, or maybe her place this time, sitting on her porch, watching whatever the wilderness decides to send our way.

I’m ready. She just needs to protect me from the bugs, the wildlife, and anything that makes a sound after dark. She’d do it without thinking twice.

And then there’s the one in Berkeley.

If my wild women friends make wildness look natural, this one makes fearless sound like a starting point. She operates on a frequency I can’t access. She has a house on an island in Canada that she describes as magical. Before you picture a ferry or a sturdy bridge, let me stop you. Getting there requires a seaplane. One of those small planes that lands directly on the water, which I’m told is perfectly safe and which I do not believe for a second. I can barely summon the courage to fly on a commercial plane with two engines and a beverage cart stocked with vodka. She island-hops on something that floats.

She invites me to the island every year. I really want to go but I’m not sure I’d survive the trip.

And here’s what tells you everything you need to know about her. When she needs a ride, she doesn’t call a car or rent one. She makes a sign, hangs it on her body, and stands somewhere until a stranger takes her where she needs to go. Something that requires a level of trust in humans that I’ve never had. This lifestyle has resulted in hundreds of friends she’s made along the way.

I recently went to her birthday party, a moveable feast across four houses with more food and friends than I could count. Her friends are a bunch of eclectic Berkeley types ranging in age from their twenties to eighties, every single one of them a story. She was dancing in the center of all of it, lit up like sunshine in human form and completely in her element. She doesn’t find her people, she accumulates them.

But the one who has been there the longest, since we were sixteen and the world was already complicated, is my best friend. The Italian one. Calm, loyal, and sometimes a little scary, but in a good way.

When I went through my second divorce, she handed me the keys to her house. No discussion, no conditions. She fed me, got me drunk, and made it clear that nobody was getting near me without going through her first. There was a gun in her closet. She mentioned this once, the way you mention where the extra towels and Italian cold cuts are kept. She knew how to use it. One night the security alarm went off. I saw her shadow standing in the hallway, dark hair loose, white silk nightgown, gun in hand, calm as a woman who has already decided how this ends. And where was I? In bed, covers over my head, hiding. Luckily, it was just the Santa Ana winds.

She had a chicken coop in her backyard in a city where chicken coops are not allowed. Three chickens who gave her eggs and good conversation. One of them was named Peg, after my mother. I don’t have the words for what that meant to me.

We’ve traveled together and every single time she takes care of me the way only she knows how. I’m terrified of flying, gripping the armrest, bargaining with God, holy water in one hand and a mini bottle of vodka in the other. She’s a former VP of a private jet company, which means she knows every trick, every workaround, every bump. She makes sure there’s food and booze, even when they say there isn’t. She has bought me proper suitcases, travel packs, a warm throw, chargers, and everything a person needs to feel safe in the air. She holds the chaos at bay so I don’t have to.

She was doing this when we were sixteen. I was jumped by a group of girls in high school and she was there. This new friend, this girl I had just met, stood by me without hesitation. She visited me at the hospital. She told my father who did it. She knew who he was and she knew he'd take care of it. I’ll leave it at that.

Decades later, she’s still standing there.

I fear her and I love her, in equal measure and for the same reasons. She’s the kind of woman who would kill someone with her bare hands if they hurt the people she loves. No one has tested her. God help whoever does.

She is my person. She always has been.

She dreams of leaving the suburbs north of Los Angeles for the Pacific Northwest. A farm. Land. Room to be as wild as she actually is beneath the civilized Italian girl who is waiting for permission. I believe that one day she’ll do it. I also know that when she goes, a part of me will grieve it like a small death. Having her close by has always been my comfort. She would take a bullet for me.

So why am I drawn to these types of women? I’ve asked myself this question, usually while watching one of them do something that would leave me hyperventilating.

I think it may be that I know who I am. I’m the city girl who loves the crowd. The sound of sirens makes me calm. I’m at home in the kind of commotion that has sidewalks, a wine bar, and a good hospital.

But there’s a part of me that has always known there’s another way to live. Wilder. More unafraid. Less concerned with what comes next and more awake to what’s right in front of me, like the bird on the street, the stranger with a truck, or the island you can only reach by landing on water. I could never access that part on my own.

So I found them instead. Or maybe they found me.

They have let me live through them. The one writing in a cabin with terrible wifi, the one who made lifelong friends from a handwritten sign, the one with chickens, a gun and decades of showing up. They’ve taken me to places I would never go alone, protected me from things I can’t name, and loved me anyway, Louis Vuitton bag and all. I envy and celebrate their wildness.

Some people collect adventures. I collect the women who have them.

*Author’s note: A special thank you to the incredibly talented artist Robin Eisenberg for graciously allowing me to use her stunning work in this story. From the moment I began writing these women, I pictured each one as a Robin Eisenberg drawing. Her art doesn’t just depict women; it celebrates them. And it’s no surprise because Robin herself is beautiful inside and out.

I watched my friends apply to colleges across the state. Santa Cruz. Humboldt. Santa Rosa. I watched them open their acceptance letters and felt that familiar twinge of jealousy.

College was never an option for me. I was expected to get married or get a job that paid the bills. In our house, those were the only two roads, and one of them was a dead end.

My father had made his feelings about education clear long before I was old enough to test them. My brother once brought home a straight-A report card and Dad threw it aside. “What good is this?” he said. A female cousin back East got into Yale. Her father told her she’d be wasting her time. These men weren’t outliers, they were a type. And my father was their patron saint.

The irony is almost laughable. My father’s mother came from an aristocratic family in Italy who were barons and lawyers, some who ran the education system. The men and women in that family were learned, accomplished, and most had law degrees. Somehow, in one generation, that inheritance got buried under cement. My father became a mobster who couldn’t see the point of a report card. He barely made it through eighth grade.

I went on to get a master’s degree. I think about that sometimes. But that came later. First, I had to find a way out of his house.

Dad had a word for daughters who lived alone or lived freely. Puttana. For those who don’t speak Italian slang, the word means whore. In our house, no daughter of his would be one. The only acceptable exit was a husband.

So I dated Steve. He was Italian, 21 to my 16, and the only guy my father approved of. He was a wonderful person who treated me like a queen. I loved him like a brother but I was not in love with him. He proposed when I was 17 and I said yes because I didn’t know what else to say. I was a teenage girl who wanted to hang out with rock-and-roll bands, travel the coast, and go to college.

A girl can dream, right?

When my friends piled into our friend Pammy’s pink VW bus to move up to Santa Rosa, they invited me along. Mom said yes, and told Dad it was an hour away. It was nine hours. Pre-internet. Pre-cell phones. Pre-Google Maps. Lies were so much easier then.

I had never felt freedom like that. Not once in my life.

The house sat back among redwoods on a hill near a creek. Our friend Laurie was already there, and her roommates Jan and Tom met us in the driveway. Tom was tall with brown hair and brown eyes and looked exactly like James Taylor. I was gone.

Within the first week, we were inseparable. We walked through the woods. We swam naked in the Russian River. We caught abalone, battered it in beer, cooked it over an open fire while he played guitar and we all sang. I’d never slept next to a man all night in a bed. I’d wake up to his long brown hair on the pillow and his arms around me and think, oh. So this is what it’s supposed to feel like.

Tom was a photography student and I became his subject. My friends joked that the house was becoming a shrine to me, his photos he’d taken propped up along every wall. I was living in a fantasy where I was Joni Mitchell and he was James Taylor and Joni played on the record player all day long.

By the second week, he asked me to stay.

I called my mother and begged. She said Dad was getting impatient. I said I had nothing to come home to. She reminded me I had a fiancé who called the house daily. I told her I wasn’t coming back.

She told me my brother was coming to get me. He drove nine hours on a Friday and arrived to a long wooden table, twinkling lights and my beautiful hippie girlfriends. My brother had also never quite been allowed to be himself under our father's roof. Dad had a very specific idea of what a son should look like and he was the opposite.

We all ate together in that bohemian house. My brother took one look at Pammy, 18, petite, long blonde hair, and forgot entirely why he'd driven nine hours. By morning, the two of them were walking out of a bedroom together.

Neither of us wanted to go home.

We spent the drive back to Los Angeles along the Pacific Coast Highway talking about someday maybe getting a place up there together. Fantasy built on fantasy.

By the time I got home and reached for the phone to call Tom, it was already too late. He’d gotten my number from my friends. He’d already called. My mother had already answered.

Never call here again. She’s getting married.

That one stung. My mother was always on my side, but she knew better than anyone what my father was capable of. He once chased down a man in a truck just for whistling at her. He pulled him out through the window and punched him in the face. She wasn't protecting tradition when she answered that call. She was protecting Tom.

So instead of planning for college, I planned a wedding. A traditional Italian one. Large amounts of money spent on things I didn’t want. A Catholic church. A country club reception. A long-sleeved lace white gown with a high neck. Pink bridesmaid dresses. Plated prime rib. My mother’s stuffed shells. Pastel almonds in white net.

We honeymooned in Vegas. On our wedding night I thought about running away, catching a plane to Santa Rosa, disappearing into the redwoods. I stayed. Steve didn’t deserve that. Tom didn’t deserve any of it. Neither did I. But my parents were happy.

Tap dance, Toni. Tap dance.

We stayed married five years and had a son. My father died five months after that from a massive heart attack, and I left Steve not long after.

Steve never stopped being family and he never remarried. He called every anniversary with the same line: “Hi toots, we would have been married X years today.” He mailed anniversary cards each year with “ex” written in front of Happy Anniversary to my Wife. My daughter from my second marriage called him Daddy Steve and he earned it. He never missed a holiday call and never missed a chance to show up. When her father didn't come to her wedding, Steve did. No fanfare, no explanation needed. That was just him.

He was 67 when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He had left Los Angeles for Las Vegas years before and I flew there to be at his bedside. Old-school Italian, in sickness and in health, even after it’s over. He was hallucinating near the end and asked me if he and I were still married. I said yes.

I held his hand. I told him I loved him, that I was lucky to have met him, to have married him, to have made our son together. And I meant every word.

He asked that his ashes be spread among the redwoods.

Whenever I’m among the trees, I think of him. Tom doesn’t even cross my mind.

Some things take a lifetime to understand. My mother was my hero. I know that now in a way I couldn't then. I was only 21 when my father died. I was still so young, still so sure I'd been robbed of something. And maybe I had been, but nothing that turned out to matter. I look back now and think she may have known me better than I knew myself. I'm a city person. I would have grown tired of Santa Rosa. I need music and art and busy sidewalks under my feet. The mountains go quiet too fast for me. The trees are beautiful but they don't talk back.

I eventually bought my own pink VW bus. Pammy would have approved. It had no business attempting the LA canyons to the beach but it tried anyway, and my little curly-haired son and I loved every rattling mile of it. We'd stop for ice cream and apple juice in Malibu and stay at the beach for hours, Joni Mitchell playing on the old tape deck the whole way there and back. I had more fun on those beach runs than I ever had in Santa Rosa. The fantasy was real, but the fling would have faded.

I may not have been in love with Steve, or at least not in the way I thought love was supposed to feel at 17. But I loved him my entire life. He was one of my best friends. He was always there. Maybe that's its own kind of love story.

She was seventeen years old, standing in front of a man who held her future in his hands, and he looked at her the way people look at something that needs fixing. Her nose, he said, was too long. Her mouth was too big for the camera. Her face was too much. Her presence filled rooms in ways that made certain people uncomfortable, and if she wanted to succeed, she would need to become something more manageable. Something easier to look at. Something smaller.

She was Sophia Loren and she refused to listen.

“I don’t want to touch nothing on my face because I like my face,” she said.

You have loved this story your whole life. You have told it to other women. You want to believe it yourself.

And yet you type into the search bar: Am I too intense?

Maybe it was two in the morning. Maybe you were lying in the dark replaying a conversation, picking it apart, wondering where you crossed the line that apparently exists somewhere between passionate and unhinged, between loving deeply and being too much to handle. Maybe someone said it to your face. Maybe they didn’t have to because you read it in the way they stepped back, changed the subject, or went silent in that typical way that told you you’d done it again.

The thing is, it rarely comes as a direct accusation. It doesn’t always arrive loud and obvious, something you can point to and defend yourself against. It comes sideways. Offhanded. It finds you in the moments you least expect it.

It comes from a family member who asks why you pose a certain way in a photograph. Never mind that your mother, another too-mucher, a woman who understood that you take up space on purpose, taught you exactly how to stand in a frame and to own it. The question isn’t really about the pose. It’s kind of a signal: you are doing too much, even in a photograph.

It comes from a much younger family member who looks at you across a room and says it plainly, the way younger people sometimes do, as if the words have always been there, picked up from somewhere unnamed: you’re too intense. So you just smile because what else can you do, while something in you rises up wanting to answer back and then goes quiet because you know the trap. The moment you defend yourself against “too intense,” you become proof of it.

It comes from a friendship, the kind that makes you feel like you’ve committed a crime by simply showing up as yourself. Nothing you could ever quite name. Nothing you could hold up as evidence. So you make excuses. Maybe you’re being too sensitive. Maybe you misread it. Or maybe you’re just too intense.

So you add it to the pile. You know the one. The one that keeps getting heavier and heavier that you refuse to be buried under because this is what too much actually looks like. Not dramatic or villainous, and not something you can easily explain to someone who wasn’t there. It’s just a slow accumulation of small moments. A photo. Words from across a room. A drive home in silence that adds up to a woman alone in the dark asking the internet if she’s broken.

I am writing this to you, not the version of you that’s currently auditing yourself. The real one. The one who has opinions that are treated like something that wasn’t supposed to be said out loud.

Here is what I know about women like you: you were not born believing you were too much. That was taught.

Maybe you’ve learned to monitor yourself. To front-load apologies. To laugh and then immediately check the faces around you to see if it was too much, too loud, too long. You learned to serve yourself in small portions. To take the whole, complicated, beautiful mess of yourself and reduce it to something easier to digest.

A storm became a sprinkle. A hurricane became a light breeze. A flame became a flicker.

And still they said it. You’re a lot. You’re too intense.

The world that tells you to be less does not reward you for complying. It simply finds new things to ask you to surrender. Your voice first. Then your opinions. Then your needs. Then yourself. And let’s be honest about what’s happening right now. They are asking us to go back to a time when our voices were background noise and our opinions were tolerated at best. They are framing it as tradition, as virtue, as the natural order of things. But we know what it is. We have always known what it is. It is the same request it has always been, in a different dress.

I named this project Like Sophia because I saw myself in her. Growing up Italian, she was everywhere, on the walls, in conversations, and in the way the strong women in my family moved through a room like they owned the floor beneath them. But it was more than my heritage. It was recognition. Here was a woman who looked like something the world wanted to change and she didn’t let them.

There is a quote of hers that I return to again and again. She once said that she knows how to say no in twelve languages. Think about that. Not yes. Not maybe. Not let me make myself smaller so you’re more comfortable. No. In twelve languages. As if she understood, from the very beginning, that the world would come for her in many forms, from many directions, and she prepared accordingly. She did not learn twelve ways to apologize. She learned twelve ways to hold her ground. That is the woman I wanted to build this space around.

Sophia went on to win the Academy Award, to be called the most beautiful woman in the world, to live exactly the life she had always known was hers. Not because she fixed anything but because she refused the premise that she needed fixing.

Here is what I know after a lifetime of being told I was too much. Too intense is not a flaw or a character defect. It is not something a good therapist is going to fix. It is what someone says when they cannot keep up with you and would rather label you than examine themselves. They dress it up as concern. They deliver it as feedback

There is a difference between a flaw and an inconvenience to someone else.

Your intensity is why your phone rings when things get hard. It is why you’re the one people call at midnight, not to chat, but because something is wrong and you are the person they trust to handle it. It is why you are the fixer, the first call, the one who shows up with solutions before anyone even has to ask. It is why the people in your life lean on you the way they do and sometimes without even realizing how much.

And yet somehow you are the one sitting alone at two in the morning wondering if you are too much.

Think about that.

You are not too much.

That is what this whole project is about. Not fixing your nose or anything about you. I’m a woman who was handed bigness like a birthright, and I’ve decided to keep it. All of it. So many people in my life had opinions about that but I love being a Sophia. I love the fullness of her, the defiance of her, the way she stood in a room and simply refused to be anything other than exactly who she was.

So be a Sophia, a leading lady in your own movie and your own life. And never forget that you, too, can learn to say no in twelve languages.

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Every year the same routine: the dreaded CT angiogram. The scan that tells you whether all the work, the drugs, the exercise, the diet, the constant vigilance has mattered at all.

This year was no different. As I drove through Los Angeles traffic to my cardiologist’s office, my hands gripped the steering wheel a little tighter than usual. The what-ifs were relentless. What if nothing had changed? What if six years of discipline, fear, and determination still hasn’t moved the needle? Or what if it was worse?

I had already prepared myself for the answer I’d gotten before: Stable, no progression. Not worse, which was good, but not better either.

But this time, it was different.

This time, the hard work had finally paid off. He looked over all my reports and said the words I had been waiting for six years to hear: “I’m seeing reversal.”

The stenosis was better. The plaque was regressing. There was a 30 percent increase in the blood flow to my heart. It was all good news.

Saying I cried tears of joy would be putting it mildly. My first instinct was to leap off the exam table and tackle my cardiologist in a life-saving hug. Even I know that’s socially unacceptable. So instead, I settled for thanking him properly for being the first doctor to actually take my family’s heart history seriously and, frankly, for saving my life. Because let’s be real: without him, I might not even be here to tell this story.

I’m writing this for anyone with heart disease who is scared and just wants clear, actionable answers and real solutions, especially for women who are so often dismissed because heart disease is still seen as a “man’s disease.”

Can I tell you exactly what resulted in this positive outcome? Not for sure, but I can tell you that after being diagnosed with heart disease, I took the diagnosis seriously.

I followed the advice of my cardiologist, a research specialist in atherosclerosis and preventive cardiology who has authored more than 1,000 papers on reversing heart disease through lifestyle changes, prescription drugs, and supplements.

I did it all. I treated it like a full-time job with overtime.

I’m sharing what worked for me, in detail. The notes in bold that follow each of the protocol below are important to read because I explain the tests, why these drugs were prescribed and why I take them.

I want to add that I’m aware of the privilege I have in this moment. I have health insurance and lifetime benefits from my former college teaching job. My already broken heart breaks even more for the people who don’t, those who can’t afford coverage at all or who pay astronomical premiums for insurance that barely protects them. The healthcare system in the U.S. is a mess, and too often whether you live or die comes down to what you can afford. My advice is to advocate for yourself. Read the research. Ask questions. Look for hospitals running clinical trials. Do whatever you can to protect your health because no one will fight for it harder than you.

Diagnostic Tests

No doctor’s order required at many radiology facilities

Coronary Artery Calcium CAC scan: A CAC score is a number doctors get from a quick, non‑invasive heart CT scan that measures how much calcium has built up in the walls of your coronary arteries, an indirect sign of atherosclerotic plaque and heart disease risk. A score of 0 means no detectable calcium and generally a low risk of a heart attack in the near future, while higher numbers suggest more calcium and a greater likelihood of plaque buildup and cardiovascular risk. Mine was 256, all in Left Anterior Descending Artery LAD, aka “The Widowmaker.” *Insurance does not cover. Average cost is $99. Everyone should have one. This is how I found out I had coronary artery disease.

Ordered by Standard of Care cardiologist who said I was fine

Nuclear Stress Test: A heart imaging test that shows how well blood flows through your heart muscle, both at rest and during activity. Mine was normal. This test only shows blockages 70 percent or more. *Most insurance will cover

Lab Tests: Complete Blood Count CBC (normal), Metabolic Panel: Glucose: 170, Lipid Panel: Total Cholesterol 280, Triglycerides 272, LDL 172, A1C 6.6, HS-CRP 10 Homocysteine 14 (All abnormal) *Most insurance covers

Ordered by my research cardiologist who said I wasn’t fine and is now managing my heart disease

CT Angiogram: A non-invasive CT scan that takes detailed images of your heart and blood vessels. It helps doctors see blockages or narrowing in your coronary arteries, assess plaque buildup, and evaluate your risk for heart disease. Mine showed coronary artery disease with a large percentage of vulnerable mixed plaque and a 50-60 percent stenosis (blockage) in the LAD. CAC score is also calculated as part of the test. *Most insurance covers. I have this test done yearly.

Cleerly Study: An advanced form of coronary artery imaging that uses AI‑enhanced analysis of a CT angiogram to create a detailed 3D view of your coronary arteries, showing not just blockages but the type, amount, and location of plaque buildup. Allows doctors to more accurately assess your heart disease risk and tailor prevention or treatment strategies based on what’s actually happening in your arteries. Mine showed large plaque burden in the LAD with a large percentage of vulnerable mixed plaque and a 62 percent stenosis. *Insurance does not cover. Cost: $950. I have it done yearly with CT Angiogram. Is it expensive? Yes, but for me, it’s worth it.

FFrct: Advanced test that combines a CT angiogram with computational analysis to measure how well blood flows through the coronary arteries. It helps doctors determine whether a blockage is actually limiting blood flow and causing risk, guiding decisions about treatment without needing an invasive procedure. Mine was .61 in the LAD which equals a 30 percent reduction in blood flow to the heart. *Most insurance covers it if your cardiologist feels its warranted. I have this done yearly with the CT Angiogram.

Lab tests: Ordered a complete genetic heart panel that included the LPa aka “heart attack gene.” Mine was negative. Positive for the MTHFR gene, which runs in my father’s side of family that presents with an elevated homocysteine. *If you knew my family, you would understand why the acronym fits perfectly.

Blood tests run every three months: CBC, Metabolic Panel, Lipid Panel, A1C, HS-CRP, APOB, Homocysteine. Insurance covers.

My Current Drug Protocol

Crestor (rosuvastatin) A prescription statin medication used to lower “LDL cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke. It works by blocking a liver enzyme involved in cholesterol production, helping prevent plaque buildup in the arteries. I’m on 10 mg daily Started six years ago. My LDL stayed between 90-100 but new studies show that for people with Coronary Artery Disease, an LDL below 70 is not only beneficial, but sometimes result in reversal. He explained that raising the dosage will not ever get the LDL down below 70. *I have Familial hypercholesterolemia FH He decided to add a PCSK9 inhibitor (Repatha).

Repatha An injectable medication that helps lower LDL cholesterol by blocking a protein called PCSK9, which allows the liver to remove more cholesterol from the blood. Prescribed for people at high risk of heart disease who need extra help beyond statins. I am on 140 mg twice monthly. I started taking this two years ago. My cholesterol numbers are now all normal and my LDL is below 30.

Ramipril A prescription medication called an ACE inhibitor that helps lower blood pressure and reduce strain on the heart. By relaxing blood vessels, it makes it easier for the heart to pump blood and helps prevent heart attacks, strokes, and other heart-related complications. I take 5 mg. once daily. I do not have high blood pressure but I get agitated easily, especially in LA traffic or when reading politics, so I’m on this to keep my blood pressure from spiking. My BP stays at about 110/70

Colchicine An anti-inflammatory medication primarily used to treat and prevent gout flares, and reduce cardiovascular risk in patients with coronary disease. I take 0.6 mg. My HS-CRP is now under 2.

Jardiance: A prescription medication for people with type 2 diabetes that lowers blood sugar and helps protect the heart. It works by helping the kidneys remove excess glucose through urine, which can reduce the risk of heart attack, heart failure, and other cardiovascular complications. I take 10 mg daily for my blood sugar spikes. I do not have Type II diabetes but I have been pre-diabetic for years.

Mounjaro A prescription medication that helps lower blood sugar, support weight loss, and reduce the risk of heart attacks in people with type 2 diabetes. It works by mimicking natural hormones that regulate insulin and appetite, improving blood sugar control and overall metabolic health. I take 5 mg. injectable weekly. After my CT angiogram in 2025 was still the same with no improvement, and my glucose continued to spike even when fasting, I was put on a low dose of Ozempic. The side effects of nausea were so bad that I was switched to Mounjaro. I have been on GLP-1s for nine months. Glucose spikes and chronically high blood sugar damage the endothelial lining of blood vessels, leading to inflammation that encourages plaque buildup in the heart. My glucose no longer spikes and I have no side effects.

Low Dose Aspirin: I take 81 mg once a day

I wear a Freestyle Libre 15 day continuous glucose monitor. Since starting the GLP-1, my glucose is normal for the first time ever.

Supplements

• High Absorption Magnesium Lysinate Glycinate 200 mg, 2 tablets twice daily

• Wild Alaskan salmon oil: 1,000 mg, 1 gel tab twice daily

• Co Q10 100 mg once daily

• Kyolic Aged garlic 600 mg 2 tablets twice daily

• Vitamin D3 125 mcg once daily

• Nattokinaise 2,000 FUs, 2 tablets twice daily, plus fresh natto (from the Asian market) once daily

Diet

I eat a low carb Mediterranean diet that consists mostly of fish (especially salmon), chicken, eggs, vegetables (mostly greens), tomatoes, avocados, a very small amount of fruit, usually berries, dark chocolate and coconut. I use olive oil and don’t use seed oils. I stay away from potatoes, pasta, bread, rice, and occasionally eat beans and whole grains like farro. Small amounts of cheese and sugar free Greek yogurt. Almond butter on protein bread. No processed foods, junk food or fast food. No sugar. For snacks, I eat veggies and hummus or salsa, and Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud olive oil popcorn. Love coffee, red wine and prosecco. And yes, I occasionally indulge in a small amount of pasta or a small piece of pizza, but it better be a really good one.

Exercise

• Treadmill: 30-40 minutes a day, five days a week

• Pilates: Twice weekly

• Weights: 3-4 times a week

• Dance whenever I feel like it, because why not?

Results of All Tests As Of March 2026

• CAC Score: 370 (average increase is 20-25% per year) Mine has only increased by 117 points in six years, which equals about 7.5% per year.

• CT Angiogram: Improved from 2025: LAD stenosis decreased, plaque went from severe to moderate. No new lesions.

• Cleerly Study showed plaque volume decrease and mostly all calcified plaque in LAD, changed from 2025 which showed about 50 percent of non-calcified mixed plaque, the kind more vulnerable to rupture.

• FFRct: Showed a 30 percent increase of blood flow to my heart. This is a BIG deal.

• Bloodwork (all normal) Lipids: Total cholesterol 135, Triglycerides 98, LDL 22, HS CRP 2.2, APOB 34, Homocysteine 11, Hemoglobin A1C 5.4

Life is too good to ever give up, and I’m done letting my heart, the one in my chest and the one that loves big, be run over by fear, doctors who won’t listen, or anyone else.

So here’s my advice to every woman and human out there, whether you’re dealing with troubling symptoms, worrisome family histories, or symptoms of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune issues, or anything else: SCREAM UNTIL SOMEONE ACTUALLY HEARS YOU!

Never be intimidated by a white coat because these doctors took an oath to do no harm, and ignoring you counts as harm. And if you run into a doctor who refuses to listen, treat them like your Waze app trying to save you one minute by taking you on an unwanted tour of the city: ignore the directions and find a new route.

Note: The art used in this story was created by a So Cal Chilean artist who is also the mother of one of my former students and current photojournalist, Pablo Unzueta. I admired this piece and sent her a note about how much I loved it. I told her about how I had just been diagnosed with heart disease and she sent it to me, as a gift, out of love. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and it hangs in my home office. I look at it and am inspired to keep going. Give her art a look and support her. She’s a talented badass.

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I lay in my cropped blue paper gown on the white paper sheets of the examining table at my OB-GYN’s office staring at a cheesy cat poster on the ceiling. It’s the same poster I’ve seen many times before. It’s been there so long that the orange cat face has faded and the paper is creased. I’m guessing this cute little furry face is placed above the examining table to distract from the uncomfortable feeling of having a plastic speculum shoved inside of you. The blue paper gown that covered my bare bottom was ripping from the constant movement.

“Scoot down,” he said.

My feet were in the cold metal stirrups and my ass was hanging off the edge of the table but he continued to tell me to scoot, so I scooted. He inserted the speculum, did the quick swab he needed, then pulled the speculum out. A moment later his gel-coated, gloved fingers were inside me.

“Ouch,” I said.

“Wow, you’re always so sensitive down there!”

“Isn’t everyone?” I asked.

He pulled out his fingers, stood up, yanked off his gloves and said, “You have the vagina of a 20-year-old.”

Most women might find this comment offensive, but not me. I was flattered. So flattered that I left his office with a skip in my step and a smile on my face.

“I’ve still got it,” I thought quietly to myself. I’m not entirely sure why I took it that way. Maybe I was at a low point that day and needed the ego boost.

It was post-Covid and I hadn’t seen him since the pandemic started. I relied on daily Google searches for answers to all my medical questions because it gave me the privacy to indulge what my friends and family might call obsessive behavior. I had a simple test: if I searched my symptoms and the word cancer didn’t show up in the results, I could exhale, at least for the day. It didn’t matter that I was now married to a doctor. I still felt embarrassed by how much space those fears took up inside me.

Maybe the worry made sense. I had already lost two of the people I loved most to cancer.

My grandmother died of breast cancer that metastasized to her bones and brain. My mother prayed and pleaded with God or one of the saints to just give her a limp and not the same cancer that took her mother’s life.

Apparently, God or the saints were too busy to grant wishes.

We watched in anguish as our mother faced the same disease that took our grandmother’s life. It took our mother’s life too but not before taking her breasts, her hair, her memory and her dignity. She died a horrible death which left my sister and I grief-stricken and terrified.

Each yearly mammogram brought body-shaking anxiety until the “normal mammogram” was reported. My daily long drives in L.A. traffic to the college where I taught often involved feeling myself up for any sign of a lump. I would sometimes press my breasts so hard that they’d ache and bruise. The thought of losing my breasts, my hair and my mind consumed me.

My mother once told me that worrying about something that may never happen was a waste of energy. Her favorite line was, “You could get hit by a bus.”

And then the bus hit.

In all my Google research, I never searched for heart disease because I’m a woman. Let’s be more specific. I’m a passionate Italian woman whose heart beats loud and strong; who feels it break when hearing Puccini, and never once did I think my heart was broken from coronary artery disease.

After all, heart disease was for men. It didn’t matter that my father dropped dead at 57 of a massive heart attack and all but one of his five brothers died of heart attacks at a young age. It didn’t matter that their sons were dropping dead. It didn’t matter that every doctor I’d seen was told about my family history, including numerous cardiologists. According to them, I was fine.

It also didn’t matter that I’d had decades of alarmingly high cholesterol, off the charts glucose levels, and nonstop palpitations that started from my 30s. I guess I just presented well. This is how doctors describe patients. “The patient presents…”

I “present” as charming, charismatic, and younger than my age, or so I’m told. I wear fashionable clothes, have long blonde hair, and as my son says, I walk into a room like I own the place. On the outside, I don’t look like someone with heart disease. But looking healthy doesn’t mean being healthy.

Even someone like the actress Susan Lucci didn’t fit that stereotype. She was thin, fit, and known for daily Pilates. She was given a clean bill of health when doctors later discovered major blockages in her main artery. Her risk factors were there all along. Her father died in his 40s from heart disease yet the focus was often on her mother, who lived past 100, rather than the warning embedded in her family history. Even with a healthy appearance and reassurances from doctors, the disease was quietly progressing.

Doctor’s note. “The patient presents as a healthy, vibrant woman complaining of shortness of breath, concerns of her high cholesterol and glucose numbers, and insomnia. Family history of heart disease and breast cancer. Discussed anxiety. Gained 15 pounds during Covid. Suggested weight loss, exercise, a statin, and consultation with a psychologist. Oh, and she has the vagina of a 20-year-old.” Okay, the last sentence wasn’t in the notes.

After my daughter and daughter-in-law told me that the comments made by my OB-GYN were “gross” and “inappropriate,” I decided to follow up on my own. I went to a lab for comprehensive blood work to get concrete answers. Some of the results were nothing new: abnormally high cholesterol and glucose, but now I was pre-diabetic, insulin resistant, and had high inflammation levels.

I made an appointment with a cardiologist who looked at my bloodwork and said it was “nothing that abnormal.” He prescribed a statin and a baby aspirin. This is what is known as “standard of care.” What it really means is that the doctor has been doling out the same medical advice and prescription drugs for 25 years. But I was armed with research and dressed like a lawyer ready to make my case. I demanded a Coronary Artery Calcium Scan, also known as a CAC. He refused and told me that it was unnecessary, so my husband ordered it. Result: 256 CAC score with plaque all located in the Left Anterior Descending Artery (LAD), aka the “widowmaker.”

This nickname for the LAD says it all. The medical community’s use of this term reinforces the patriarchal notion that only men suffer from heart disease, even though heart disease is the number one killer of women. Let me say that again. HEART DISEASE IS THE NUMBER ONE KILLER OF WOMEN. Not breast cancer. Not ovarian cancer. HEART DISEASE. This fact caused me to stop obsessively examining my breasts.

I went back to the cardiologist who I will now refer to as “Dr. Clueless.”

“So now what? You found that you have something to worry about? The treatment is the same so what’s the big deal?” he said with a smirk on his face.

So I did something I vowed not to do. I cried.

“You’re not the first woman to cry in my office,” he said.

My tears quickly turned to rage and I scared him into ordering a nuclear stress test which he said was the “gold standard for finding blockages.”

I arrived in my pink sweats and tennis shoes ready to run. I jumped on the treadmill with Cher’s music blaring in my ears as they injected me with dye and moved me from the treadmill into a scanner that took pictures of my heart.

The verdict was in. “No blockages!” he said. He added that I have the exercise tolerance of a 30-year-old. Do they teach this dialogue in medical school? I can’t tell you how many women have shared that they’ve been told they have the bloodwork of a 20-year-old or the stamina of a much younger person.

I did some research and learned that nuclear stress tests only showed blockages greater than 70 percent. I went back to Dr. Clueless to discuss the results and my findings.

I asked for a CT angiogram to determine if there were any blockages. He refused and said the treatment for blockages is the same. He told me that I was just looking for something else to stress me out. He also told me (again) about a woman who cried in his office over the results of her CT angiogram.I guess this guy has all kinds of women crying in his office. But I didn’t cry this time. I just vowed to never step foot in his office again.

I returned home and turned my office into a research lab. I moved from Google to PubMed and researched every peer-reviewed meta study I could find on heart disease. My desk was piled with folders marked “CAC/CT ANGIO” and “CAD/ATHEROSCLEROSIS,” and “DIET” and ‘FAMILY HISTORY OF HEART DISEASE” and “TREATMENTS.” I contacted members of my father’s family who could tell me more about our health history. I found that many women in our family had high cholesterol, high glucose, and diabetes. And none had ever had a CAC scan. They just took a statin and an aspirin, as recommended by their doctors.

As I looked through the studies, a world-renowned research cardiologist and expert on coronary artery disease and CAC scoring kept coming up. To my surprise, this doctor conducts his research at a major hospital in Los Angeles County. My goal was to get this rockstar cardiologist to see me and thanks to a very persuasive email, I became his patient.

My first appointment with Dr. Rockstar was unlike any of my past experiences. This doctor didn’t make jokes or tell me I looked healthy or young for my age. He just listened. We discussed my CAC score and he ordered a CT Angiogram, an FFRCT blood flow study, and a Cleerly AI study that breaks down the plaque in your heart to show vulnerable vs. stable plaque, and pinpoints the level of blockages, if any.

The test was easy but the results were frightening. I had coronary artery disease with a 50-60 percent stenosis (blockage) in my LAD with a 30 percent restricted blood flow to my heart.

We decided on an aggressive treatment plan that includes a Mediterranean diet, daily exercise, and a slew of the latest and research-proven pharmaceuticals and supplements.

There is no cure for coronary artery disease but you can do your best to stop the progression.

This became my goal. I immediately lost the Covid pounds I’d gained and reversed all of my abnormal blood tests. Dr. Rockstar repeats the CT Angiogram every year and he closely monitors my bloodwork every three months. He tweaks the plan as needed and I trust his instincts.

So far, I’ve managed to stop the progression, or at least slow it way down. I’ve also slightly increased the blood flow to my heart.

There are Italian family members on my father’s side who say they’d rather die sooner than give up their favorite foods, or that they just want to take a statin and be left alone. These are the same people, who like me, lost their fathers, uncles or brothers to heart disease. And I fear that some may one day lose their mothers, sisters, and aunts.

For a long time, I thought that appearance worked in my favor. Now I wonder if I should have dressed the part of a sick woman instead, bent over a walker, barely breathing and impossible to ignore. But even then, I suspect I would have been dismissed. I would have likely been written off as already a lost cause.

Looking back, it’s hard not to feel defeated. So many years passed before a doctor finally took my family history seriously. There were never any tests ordered other than a lipid (cholesterol) panel and the standard complete blood count and metabolic panel, which is how I knew I had chronic high glucose. I saw several cardiologists throughout my life and not one ever even put a stethoscope up to my heart. They all wanted to focus on my confessions of anxiety and they always attributed this to any symptoms of concern. I’m told this is often too common.

When my anxiety comes rushing in, usually in the middle of the night, I picture my father looking like a million bucks in his custom made suit clutching his chest and collapsing on a Los Angeles sidewalk. The paramedics cut the designer silk tie off his neck and worked on him until he was pronounced dead on the way to the hospital. Like me, my dad presented well. He was strong and handsome and no one would ever suspect that beneath his expensive suits, thick mustache and bulging muscles was a damaged heart that would kill him.

I told my cardiologist about my father’s death and how scared I am of dying of a heart attack. He reminded me that the therapies available today were not an option for my dad in the 1970s. Having heart disease is stressful but I’m lucky to live in a time when medical advances help keep me alive. Sometimes not knowing is its own kind of comfort, but data and early detection might save your life.

I recently took the MESA test which scores your risk of a heart event in the next 10 years. My risk is 6.2 percent. It also calculates your artery age. Mine is 76.

All things considered, I’d rather have a 76-year-old vagina and a 20-year-old heart.

Update: Heart disease reversal is possible. To read the protocol that’s changing my life, read my latest post:

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