When we first got together,
I needed you more
than you needed me.
But what rises
always falls.
Years in,
you reach for me more
than I reach for you.
Because tides turn,
and need has seasons.
My feet
in your brown leather shoes—
I remember that earlier fear
shedding its hard chrysalis:
Will we stay this close?
Will we stay gentle, stay kind?
And all the once
cringey promises—
the fate-thread, soul-mate lines
I used to roll my eyes at—
suddenly feel true:
it's us till the end;
we will find each other
in every lifetime; and
no one knows me like you.
For all the things I could say,
all the things I’ll still miss,
nothing rises like this—
this quiet miracle
of being chosen back.
I choose you, again and again,
morning after morning,
night after night.
I know that fear—
I’ve stood where you stand—
and I will give you now
the love you once gave me.
It was never about
who needed whom more,
but that we both
turn toward each other,
wanting to need—
again, again, again.
In 2002, I was fourteen and in an inpatient treatment program at a downtown hospital. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure how long I was there. It could have been two weeks or two months—time didn’t really exist then. I only know that I disappeared toward the end of eighth grade and returned entirely different. The angry, dark girl who left came back finishing out the school year in cardigans and calling herself Christian, and no one really knew why. During that time, I had only my schoolwork, a wall “radio” that played a single classical station, and a Bible—the same kind they keep in hotel drawers.
I remember a girl about my age who always dumped a packet of Equal into her half-pint of milk, and a boy who was the most depressed person I had ever met. I didn’t understand why. On family therapy day, his mom and dad seemed nice. They were together, organized, prepared—they'd done all the therapy assignments and never complained about him. It was a stark contrast to my own situation. I understood why I was there. I understood the girl with the milk. But this boy? What was wrong? Didn’t he have it all?
It was jarringly bold when milk girl flat-out asked him, “What the fuck you so sad about?” He tried to explain, almost breathless, about the news: starving kids in Africa, bombings overseas, oceans dying, forests burning. He listed everything as though the U.N. held him personally responsible for the state of the world.
And then she said, “Yeah, but none of that shit is happening to you. How are you so sad about nothing that concerns you? You won’t even meet one of those starving kids. If you cared, you’d help them instead of just be sad.” And I guess it cured him, because not long after, he was discharged. That night, lying in bed listening to my one radio station, I kept thinking about how he was just a kid himself. There were adults—powerful adults with real resources—who should be tackling world hunger. Not some kid with scuffed sneakers and a nice mom.
A lot happened during that stint in the hospital. I read the Bible because there was nothing else to read. Milk girl and I begged the staff to let us do the Darrin’s Dance Grooves VHS tape, and they actually agreed. But what stayed with me most was the idea of wasting a perfectly happy, healthy home and family in order to stew over starving kids in Africa. I suppose I could sit and simmer in international starvation and burning forests now. But I don’t.
As an adult, I understand more about that boy’s sorrow—how overwhelming the world feels once you realize suffering is infinite and you are finite. I see how easily people get lost in unsolvable puzzles: inequities, tragedies, mysteries that belong to a life beyond understanding. So I try not to do the same. I donate to a women’s shelter and an animal rescue. Not because I’m fixing anything, but because my days are limited. I’m almost middle-aged. My strength is limited. My time is limited. And I’m not going to waste a perfectly happy, healthy home and family on things outside my control. I’d rather give what I can and be grateful for what I have, without setting myself on fire trying to solve the unanswerable.
Anyway, here is a gratitude list. I bask in the wealth of my life, and I’m unashamed of that. Yes, there are many who have less, and many who have more. But this is mine. All mine. And I’m not going to feel guilty for anything that belongs to someone else.
Glitter polish and stickers.
Friends being in happy, loving relationships.
Taco Bell.
Texting with past co-workers.
Friends who reach out to me for comfort and support.
A new season of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Fresh-ground coffee.
Avocado toast with a little bit of everything seasoning.
Maxing out my 401K contributions this year.
Getting more tasks at work.
Sending and receiving Christmas cards.
Perfume.
Wrapping presents.
Decorating the tree.
Realizing how many of my year’s goals I accomplished, and planning for next year.
How this blog has evolved with me over the years.
How fortunate I am to grow and evolve in profound, beautiful ways. I am not the same today as I was even a year ago.
My husband cooking.
Costco.
Making “Super” Peanut Butter Cookies (peanut butter dough with ground peanuts and peanut butter chips).
My menses is consistent and healthy.
Grapefruit.
New ChapSticks.
A text message from a friend I haven’t heard from in a while.
Progresso soup.
Music.
"There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."
—Ernest Hemingway
When I got sober, they constantly pushed gratitude lists. I can still hear the old, weathered faces telling me to have “an attitude of gratitude,” and me thinking, Easy for you to say!
Cause they were people who’d been sober for decades—people with spouses, houses, cars less than five years old, and probably health insurance. Meanwhile, I scribbled down whatever scraps of gratitude I could find. In those first few months, gratitude was simple: a warm coat from my friend’s neighbor who was giving things away, or a filling lunch because someone from the program took me out after a meeting.
I discovered that gratitude comes more naturally when you have nothing, not when you have everything. It’s harder to feel once your life settles and survival is no longer day-to-day. A free lunch hits differently when you genuinely don’t know how you’re going to eat that day. A free lunch today is a nice perk, but I would have been fine to pay.
Even now that I am sober for years—now that I have a spouse and a house and all those things I once envied—I wonder if what I’m writing is a true gratitude list or simply a list of things that I like. But then again, isn’t appreciation just another form of gratitude? Maybe there’s something meaningful in being grateful for things that aren’t about life or death.
How lovely, really, to be grateful for Christmas decorations and painted toenails instead of not starving today. It is a genuine gratitude list—but the shift is noticeable. Back then, I felt lucky simply to be alive, to pay my rent, to eat, to wake up another day. The things I was once profoundly grateful for are now givens, and that, too, is something to be grateful for.
I don’t normally add trigger warnings. I’ve never believed most people are truly “triggered,” at least not in the way the internet frames it. If the mere mention of death or abuse can undo you, then surely the warning itself—announcing those very words—would undo you too.
So why include one this time?
I’m not entirely sure. It feels different. Heavier. More shameful.
Death, after all, is just a fact of life. And when it comes to abuse—most people already know my biological father was a child molester. I don’t carry shame around that; that’s his burden.
Maybe I give a trigger warning because this time, I want to give people the choice to look away. When I talk about death or abuse, I want them to stare and acknowledge it.
But this—bulimia—has been mine alone since I was fourteen.
So: trigger warning.
The last time I purged was two years ago. I hadn’t planned to stop—not in any ceremonial way—but I was tired, and had been “trying to stop” for months. In the first year after we moved here, purging was just part of my daily life. Like waking up. Feeding the cats. Getting dressed.
I remember the last purge only because of what I’d been watching: Prey, the newer film in the Predator franchise. Nothing about the purge itself stands out. Many others were more notable like when I tried to make myself throw up while I had COVID. That was a low point—still wince-worthy years later. There are many others that qualify.
Bulimia came and went in waves for me, the same way cigarettes did. I finally quit smoking the way some people fall out of love: suddenly, without warning. One day, on my thirty-minute drive home, I lit a cigarette out of habit. Halfway through, I realized I hadn’t taken a single puff. I tossed it out the window and never picked one up again. No coincidence I was going through a divorce then. Pressure pushes some things out; it rinses other things clean.
Though lately—over the past month or so—I’ve been chewing a piece of nicotine gum once or twice a week. I can’t fully explain why. Maybe it started when my husband stocked up after saying nicotine “helps with depression.” I don’t believe that, but I like the feeling of a fake vice—the ritual without all the ruin.
My good friend’s father once claimed we crave nicotine because it “converts to vitamin B in the blood.” It doesn’t. Nicotine merely resembles niacin—Vitamin B3—in chemical structure. But diamonds and the fizz in soda are both carbon, and no one mistakes them for the same thing.
I call her my good friend, not my best friend, because when I was twenty-one and my best friend died, I quietly retired the term. Some concepts die with the person. Yet she is, for all practical purposes, my best friend. She knows the deepest, darkest parts of me. We talk almost every day. She’s the person I reach for—whether I’m hurting or happy.
She was the one who comforted me when bulimia became an everyday occurrence.
“My therapist says we’re like oranges,” she told me. “When we’re squeezed, the same thing will always come out. Orange juice, not lemonade. Not apple juice. Under pressure, an orange always produces orange juice. This is just what comes out of you when life gets hard.”
That metaphor settled over me like a soft blanket. I was under immense pressure then. Honestly, I’ve been under pressure for most of my life—at least since fourteen, if we’re measuring by vomit. Purging was simply the juice I produced—one of many.
So as much as I sometimes worry that I’m failing, or stagnating, or quietly collapsing, the truth is I’m probably doing alright. I haven’t been under real pressure lately, because nothing harmful is leaking out.
This morning, I remembered the years when I supervised a group of 18- to 25-year-olds at work—"kids" who saw me as grounded, dependable, someone worth seeking guidance from. A bona fide professional adult.
We’d sit across from each other over lunch, discussing their résumés, their futures, their lives.
To them, I must have seemed composed. Organized. Prepared. Sat at the table worried about their own little stain or onion breath. Wondered when they could be more like me.
In reality, I was ducking into the bathroom to vomit and then conceal the evidence. Or—as I insisted to them—freshen up.
Life is all about point of view.
Like how I kept full-size candy bars in my desk drawer. Everyone knew that on a bad day, they could count on me for a sweet pick-me-up. That was also my binge drawer. A memory that feels wholesome to them is, for me, a small private ache.
Not to be morbid, but death is simply a fact of life. I will die someday—but not anytime soon.
Recently a kid—well, she’s nearly thirty now, but I still think of her as "a kid"—one of my former employees reached out.
“Would you be my reference? Could you review my cover letter and résumé?”
Of course. I’m happy to help. I don’t have a candy drawer anymore, but I still have that part of myself to offer. I can still play professional. I might even really be one now. Who knows?
