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 and opened it like a starving duck’s bill, 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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For most of my adulthood, I wore terribly uncomfortable high heels because my mother said it made a woman’s legs look better. My daughter wears combat boots because they’re comfortable. I put on lipstick before my husband woke up because my mother told me I looked dead without it. My daughter could give a shit what she looks like in the morning. I dated 21-year-old guys when I was 16. My daughter now finds this gross.

Her reaction today exposes how different our definitions of normal have become.

My mother was a beautiful creature who dyed her hair blonde, wore red lipstick, and carried tap shoes in the trunk of her car. If I’m looking at contradictions, she was a walking one. She was confident, independent, and charismatic and had lived a pretty exciting life as a dancer in New York City, but after marrying my father, a macho Italian mobster, she lived under his thumb. She put out his three-piece suits, put on his socks and ties, and combed his hair. She made dinner every night and breakfast every morning. He was the king of the castle and she was his queen, but it was obvious who was in charge. He made all the rules and she was happy to abide. In her eyes, he was a saint, but nothing about my dad was saint-like.

I often wondered how she could put up with a brute like him. She could have married anyone she wanted. I can remember when she’d get angry at something he’d done and her only reaction was to aggressively chop vegetables while muttering expletives under her breath, but that was as far as it ever went. I vowed to never bow to a man.

I married twice before the age of 26, first to the only man my father approved of. He was Italian, respectful, and intimidated enough to know better than to cross him. After my father died, I married his antithesis, a long-haired, skinny rocker in skin-tight jeans, cropped leopard tops, Capezio shoes, and always a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Jack Daniels in the other. This guy was the type my dad would have thrown across the room with one hand.

Both of those marriages ended in divorce, but I was the one who left. I used to tell myself I was in power because I earned my own money and made my own decisions.
I thought that was the proof, but if I’m honest, I was just living a different version of the same patriarchal model that my mother lived under.

It’s taken me years to understand that control and conditioning can look almost identical.

I defended bad boys when they showed me exactly who they were, whether it be stumbling alcoholics who were also shitty fathers, or misogynistic idiots I worked with in the music industry because somewhere deep down I believed that defending my choices made me strong and accepting them made me weak. I tolerated a culture that demeaned women because walking away felt like admitting defeat. I was called “Queen of the (Sunset) Strip,” but my male business partners and rock musician clients often blurred me with the groupies and girlfriends they treated as arm candy or sexual props.

I didn’t really understand this until recently. Maybe this is what happens when you’ve lived long enough to stop lying to yourself and finally become a wise woman.

And when I trace it back, I see that it began in the contradictions of my childhood. Church-going standards for the women and kids, while my father and uncles lived by a different set of rules. A father who protected me from dating boys my age but somehow saw nothing wrong with his 16-year-old daughter dating a 21-year-old Italian man because he fit his idea of acceptable. Maybe this is a generational or cultural thing, but just because something was normal in our house, or in that era, doesn’t mean it’s okay. It shaped the way I learned to measure love, beauty, womanhood, and power.

And now I find myself reexamining everything I once accepted without question. How dating rock musicians over 21 when I was 16 felt normal instead of troubling. How I once adored Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan” and now watch it through a lens of discomfort. How I instinctively trusted only male pilots and doctors with gray hair and even felt a flicker of apprehension when a woman was in the position. How being told I “look young” was the highest praise I could imagine as if youth, male authority, and their approval were the measures of my worth.

Well fuck that shit.

As I sit here drinking my second glass of prosecco, I’ve been thinking about today’s feminist culture in a way that feels a lot more personal. Women my age say we’re empowered, but we’re still chasing youth like it’s the ultimate prize. We want tighter skin, smaller waists, and bodies that almost erase our adulthood, as though aging itself is something to apologize for. And something about the attention from men makes us feel desirable and sexy. How sick is it that we were taught to call that power?

When everything about Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful men connected to him came barreling back through the stories of these brave women, I was shook. I began to see the patterns that had always existed around me. I thought about my father and how he would call my mother Marilyn Monroll if she gained a few pounds. He poured us shot glasses of wine when we were young girls, telling himself it would make us strong enough so no man could ever take advantage. I guess he thought that preparing us for the world meant hardening us for the very men he wanted us to marry.

And here’s where it gets complicated for me: I’m a passionate woman who loves romance and chivalry. I like when a door is opened for me or a chair is pulled out. I like looking good. I love makeup and fabulous clothes. And yes, I even like the occasional shot of Botox to remove those two wrinkles between my eyes that make me look like I’m frowning. But wanting to look good is not the same as wanting to look like a girl. And who am I trying to please? I can try to convince myself it’s for my own confidence, but in reality. I’m chasing approval from a system that taught me my value lived in how I looked to men.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about giving a big middle finger to these ridiculous standards that fetishize girlhood instead of honoring womanhood. I’ll dye the gray hairs that pop out of my roots blonde, and I’ll wear fabulous clothes until I die. And I’ll embrace the wrinkles as they come. I earned these fuckers.

I sometimes long for the days before I taught journalism, when I was simply working in it. I published a local music magazine in Hollywood, co-founded, wrote, and edited an internationally distributed entertainment magazine, penned a music column, and worked as a feature writer for a daily newspaper.

Back then, my biggest fear was spotting a typo after the ink had already dried.

Now, what unsettles me isn’t a printing error. It’s the very kind of feedback I’ve been confidently giving my college students for more than two decades.

I can’t decide if it’s the thousands of student’s journalistic pieces I’ve read and graded over the years teaching community college, or the hundreds of stories crafted by undergrads and graduate students at the university level that have made my own mind so tangled and self-critical that I struggle to write at all. It seems that the higher I climb, the more visible my fear of publishing becomes.

Maybe it’s that dreaded imposter syndrome my students always talk about. I never believed I had it until I found myself staring at a blank screen, suddenly afraid of being judged. Am I actually a good writer? I used to think I was. But even worse, will my students read my words and wonder why I’m the one teaching them?

Before the magazines, stories and columns, I wrote a blog about love and death and grief and the fragile beauty of being alive. I hit publish with reckless freedom, and if three people liked a post, I felt triumphant.

Maybe it isn’t the writing that scares me now. Maybe it’s everything that comes after. The pressure of publishing into the void. The self-promotion. The performance of it all. Social media. The critics. The haters.

It’s almost ironic. I owned a successful entertainment PR and booking agency while working in journalism. I pitched major music clients. I built brands. I secured coverage. Today, I teach that expertise to my students. They learn how to craft strong pitches, write strategic releases, and position clients and themselves with confidence.

But positioning myself? Stepping into my own spotlight instead of building it for everyone else? That’s the part that rattles me.

A student editor of the community college magazine I advised once asked me a question that still lingers on my sleepless nights: “When will you stop making all our dreams come true and start making your own?”

His words reflected everything back at me. I’d tell students about my projects, my ideas, my plans, but rarely made space to finish them.

The stories I wrote would sit like unfinished drafts, waiting quietly while everyone else’s work moved forward. I cheered them on. I told them not to be afraid to publish. I watched them get published, saw their work go out into the world, and celebrated as they landed internships and jobs. I felt, and still feel immense pride in their success.

But me? I became the cliché “wind beneath their wings” while delaying my own flight.

It takes a rare kind of courage to put your work into the world now, where something celebrated this week is dismissed the next yet somehow lives online forever. A byline doesn’t fade with yesterday’s paper anymore. It lingers. It waits. It invites judgment. And judgment always comes.

So here’s the truth. I can’t control the noise, the critics, or the fears in my head. But I can control this moment. Love me. Question me. Disagree with me.

Either way, I’m hitting publish.

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There’s a certain kind of woman the world doesn’t quite know what to do with.

She’s been told she’s too much. Too emotional. Too passionate. She loves deeply and refuses to turn herself into something more convenient. She wants connection that feels cinematic, loyalty that feels unwavering, and a kind of love that most people insist only exists in movies.

Sophia Loren has always been that woman for me. Too beautiful, too bold, too wholly herself in the best possible way. She never softened her edges to make anyone else more comfortable, and she never once looked like she considered it.

Like Sophia was born from that energy. It’s for the women who don’t apologize for their spark and who refuse to dim their flame. It’s for women who feel everything fully, who lead with heart, who crave beauty, depth, and meaning in a world that often settles for mediocrity.

I’m romantic and passionate. I’ve been called “a bit much” more times than I can count and I’ve come to realize that “too much” is often just another way of saying “unapologetically alive.”

So instead of changing myself into something that better suits others, I put on my glittery crown, refuse to dim my light, and dare the world to meet me exactly as I am or step aside while I shine.

I write from the heart about the things that make me pause, that make my pulse quicken, that make me furious, that remind me I’m still here and still feeling everything. This publication is about love, passion, desire, and the quiet and sometimes loud rebellion of refusing to settle. It’s about redefining what’s “too much” and realizing that maybe it’s exactly enough.

If you’ve ever felt like you don’t quite fit into a world that wants you a little more contained, a little more convenient, a little less you, you’re in the right place.

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