We were lucky to be here: artists or researchers in the pelotons of our fields, sitting on plastic chairs in a 17th-century cloister—specifically, an artist’s residency in Paris’ 10th—banging out papers, films, photographs, academic work. It was fun, chipping away for months on a big thing and every now and then heading into town. A series of portraits of residents decorating the grounds, with titles and hometowns as captions, spoke to the variety. A director from Benghazi, some college professors, a statistician from Almaty, a poet… I think a poet… a chef. I got along best with another guy, also here from New York: a painter, Basquiat’s former assistant, who was convinced he was being hunted down by the Arnaults. And then there was Fred.

Not that I should call him that—we’re not buddies, and we never spoke. Frederick Wiseman. Based in Boston and sometimes Paris. A director of 40-plus documentary films over 50-plus years. A MacArthur fellow. A giant in his field, a singular artist. He lived on the top floor, someone said, in one of the biggest apartments—that was his editing room. You might see him once in a blue moon walking the courtyard, getting groceries from Franprix, or working at the café downstairs. But then, you might see anyone doing that.

Honestly. He emanated an aura like no artist or researcher I’ve ever seen. On the couple of times I bumped into him—not literally—it was like seeing someone on their opening night, radiating a force field, electric. Only more powerful, like a skyscraper, and steady, kinetic, like a Kobe Bryant sort of thing. He felt like an idling Ferrari. This was a man in his 90s. Even writing this feels like a betrayal—it’s not cool to get up his ass. My only actual connection with the man was that, for a season, my mailbox was next to his. But if we’re being honest, he was also the reason I heard about the convent in the first place.

A bit more about the place. Centre des Récollets, originally built in 1603 as a Franciscan cloister, was remade, after stints as a hospital and a squat, into a city-owned artists residency in the 2000s, leased to Paris’ public housing agency and managed by different housing staff. It’s a block from the Canal Saint Martin, a few minutes from the Gare de l’Est train station and a quick Lime bike ride from everywhere else. Artists, researchers, and writers live in the 80 units; the grounds share space with Café A, a restaurant run by Paris’ order of architects. The grounds also house about seven small feral cats. Some residents stay there full-time, for a year or two, occasionally longer; some have families; some drop in once; some are part-time repeat visitors, like me. Wiseman had lived in the building, I read, since before the pandemic. I’m not ambivalent about disclosing his living situation, since it was through a news story that I learned about the place. The building is revealed in the lead of a New York Times Magazine profile, published early in the pandemic. “What if the Great American Novelist Doesn’t Write Novels?” the headline asks.

I was open to that question and would probably agree with the answer (yes). I read the story a year after it came out, full of late-pandemic boredom, and it gave me an itch. Could I use it? I was working on fiction—two good years into a book—and wanted to work on it more, have more time and more space to write it. I was enjoying the process a lot. Wouldn’t that be nice… in particular, I had to double-check the scenes that took place in Europe, to do it right and measure the distance, Joyce-style, from the street to the curb.

More concretely, very few people share common ground with him, which becomes evident after watching a couple of his flicks—if you can (they stream only on Kanopy, the free library service, and premiere occasionally at the New York Film Festival and on PBS). Watching even a couple, it becomes immediate that this body of work is peerless—in the cinema canon, sure, but also in terms of the art of research. These are magnificent films: visual and emotional clinics of cinematic space, shorn of didactic explanation, navigated by mood. Do they share a theme? Maybe. Many cover institutions—a city or neighbourhood, a ballet theatre, a boxing gym, a public school or edifice—and are often set in America, sometimes in France. The films wield access—to budget meetings, to the dean’s office, to the student union, to the janitor’s room—to within an inch of its life. There is no narration or interviews, but Wiseman and crew instead eavesdrop on meetings, a perverse office birthday celebration, or a man skipping rope. And since everything that happens where they’re shooting may show up in the film, most of the work, Wiseman has said in interviews, is spent in the edit. Filming may run up to 100 hours, with Wiseman holding the boom mic on most of his shoots; in his Paris edit, he’ll take months whittling it down to three or four hours. But despite all the work, these are films about people. They observe individuals living, albeit at their jobs. (Howard Hawks’ movies are also about this.) At best, his films make the entire genre of documentary filmmaking seem simple and pointless. Like I said, I don’t have much in common with him. I’m comparatively very early in my career.

I didn’t mention any of this, of course, years ago when I found the residency’s email somewhere online and messaged them to see if they had an open room. I just wanted to work. Is the confession that I don’t belong there? No—definitely not. I had to ask to get in, and it was up to them. I was after things in Paris that I could have gotten anywhere else—space and time, a change of scenery, getting work done on the cheap—which everyone’s after. I also like speaking French. When they said yes, I made my arrangements and moved in for a few months. I bopped around, jotted my hydrant details—silver, with different bonnet colours determined by pressure; they also have special alleyways there just for firemen—drank full-fat Cokes in my studio as I edited one draft, then another. Subsequent stays were very similar; I get so much crap done there it’s incredible. I will admit, though, to an inversion of detail outside that email. Back home in New York, I had kept mum about why I was going. I may have mentioned to friends at the bar I was writing a novel. If people asked, I’d explain that’s why I moonlit in France. But I haven’t, outside of this story, written about it.

To be sure, that’s because it’s not done. I’ve noticed that sometimes when people try a new type of work, their self-perception takes a hit when they analyse what they’re doing. Someone with too much self-insight might reveal impostor syndrome, fraud, guilt, and a raft of other things. “I shouldn’t be writing this thing,” or “I don’t belong with the names on my shelf.” The confession on my end is that no part of me feels that. Everyone’s got a shot. It’s not that deep. People try to write books, especially working writers. I’m certainly not entitled to anything, but things going right have happened before. Good work is not unrealistic. Maybe that’s the confession: I’m just another working writer, trying to level up.

Hopefully, man. Maybe. Hard to say. It’s a high bar to chase and it would take me, by most measures, lifetimes to catch up to his work. There is, though, one big thing we share. There’s a reason why we came to Récollets, Fred and I, Fred and everyone else. The same reason we might say hello briefly, but otherwise keep to ourselves. We’re both there to work. He’s at his edit on the top floor; I’m in my room, a different one every season. Outside of the building, we couldn’t be more different. But in Paris, we’re both just at our desks.

Sami Reiss is a writer based in New York City. He is the proprietor of the design newsletter “Snake” and its wellness companion “Super Health.”

When I moved to New York and accepted my alternative lifestyle, he was my celebrity crush. As an adult, in every committed long-term monogamous relationship, he has been my hall pass.

Since my final years of high school, it has been the same person: Puerto Rican pop sensation Ricky Martin.

The year was 1999. I was a 16-year-old junior in high school, and I was eating dinner at my girlfriend’s house. Yes, that kind of girlfriend. She lived in a subdivision that was surrounded by an elementary school on one side and a cemetery on the other. Most people in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, spent their entire lives going from one side to the other.

On a fateful night in February, I was at this girlfriend’s house for a delicious home-cooked meal with her family. After dessert, we milled into the family room to watch TV. Someone channel surfed until we landed on the Grammy awards, which were being telecast from what was then the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

This was the year The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill swept the awards, winning five trophies, including Best New Artist. (But shoutout to Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit it,” which won Best Rap Solo Performance.) It was a staid, monotonous, boring ceremony until a relatively unknown performer—at least to non-Latin audiences—by the name of Ricky Martin graced the stage. He was wearing crotch-hugging black leather pants; a wide knit, three-button Henley sweater that clung to his pecs and abs; and a beaded tribal necklace. He was tan, he had rhythm, his teeth were luminous, and his hair was closely cropped and lightly (yet noticeably) highlighted. His performance of “The Cup of Life,“ a rousing, hip-swinging anthem pegged to that year’s World Cup, electrified the show.

“Do you really want it?” he sang. Yeah!

“Do you really want it?” Yeah!

Halfway through the performance, percussionists filed down the aisles and filled the auditorium. Women on stilts took the stage and inflatable air streamers swayed everywhere. In an instant, the show felt festive and fabulous! He finished and the audience leapt to its feet. Jennifer Lopez, Sting—even Beck gave him a standing ovation.

I couldn’t have articulated this at the time—I should mention here that I literally did not meet a single out and proud person until I graduated high school—but this was the singular moment in my adolescence when I was forced to acknowledge that my reaction to this particular performer was different. Special? The sensation I had watching the new guy in his tight, ribbed shirt was undeniably different from that of, say, Sheryl Crow or The Dixie Chicks.

The first time someone asked me if I was gay was the summer between sixth and seventh grade. I was at band camp in Cape Gerardeau, Missouri, and some of the bullies from the trombone section said I walked like a girl. After that, throughout my teens, I was called “fag,” “homo,” “fruitcake,” “queer,” and all the other charming things that teenagers say to the boy who likes to dance at school dances, act in school plays, get good grades, and is in the National Honor Society. I denied it, of course. I had girlfriends to keep up the front, and I’d hold my head high as best I could. But when I got home, I’d cry alone in my room.

The same year Ricky Martin performed at the Grammys, an upperclassman from my school went as “Derek the Fag” to a Halloween party. He wore a tight T-shirt and a messenger bag slung over his shoulder, walked around with his wrists bent, talked with a lisp, and wore a “Derek the Fag” sign on his chest. It destroyed me. Of course, like most gay boys, deep down part of me always knew I was what I was. But that night, watching the Grammys at my girlfriend’s house, was the moment I finally said to myself: “I am gay!” Thanks for clearing that up, Ricky Martin. “Now, how do I keep this a secret forever?”

In December 1999, Ricky came to St. Louis on his “Livin’ La Vida Loca” tour. My best childhood friends, Maria and Maja, begged their parents to let them go to the concert. I was crippled with jealousy. The girls went shopping at the local mall for new (slutty) outfits and spoke about the concert for weeks. Maria told me that a friend of a friend of a friend had heard about a secret after-party where Ricky was going after the show, and they bragged about how they were going to break curfew and go there too. I was beyond desperate to join them, but I had to act like I didn’t care, lest my heterosexual cover be blown.

At school, I rolled my eyes when they’d discuss the concert. But privately, I was fantasising about Ricky coming to my hometown just as much as they were. At night I’d have dreams about meeting him, becoming pals, sharing secrets. The night of the concert, I imagined sneaking downtown to the after-party and casually, coolly meeting him on the dance floor, seducing him, telling him I wouldn’t tell anyone about our secret relationship because I didn’t want the guys on my high school football team to find out about me either.

Nowadays, people think I’m being funny when I say Ricky Martin is my dream guy. They say he’s too ’90s, too cheesy, and that I’d be much happier with Ryan Gosling or Chris Hemsworth or Zac Efron or Josh O’Connor or Callum Turner or Jacob Elordi. They’re not bad, but none of them are Livin’ La Vida Loca.

To be clear, my affection for Ricky isn’t physical. It isn’t contemporary. My crush on him is buried deep into my childhood psychology, the journey of my sexual identity, and the foundation for the person I am today. Like all good fantasies, part of this allure is that it’s not real. I keep it alive to honour my adolescence and—this is important to point out—it’s an entirely non-sexual infatuation.

The ironic part of my big gay saga is that Ricky Martin and I became friends. In 2010, we started following each other on Twitter and began direct messaging. (I guess you could say he slid into my DMs, but not like that. Sadly.) Once we realised we were both at the airport in Miami at the same time, and we tweeted at each other until we met.

Now, we bump into each other at fashion shows and fashion parties. I came to see him on opening night when he played Ché in Evita on Broadway. He has come to my birthday parties in LA and New York. We’ve perused the fair at Art Basel Miami together.

In 2012, two years after he announced he was gay and 13 years after he came to St. Louis, I finally realised my high school fantasy of going to a Ricky Martin concert. I travelled with him to his hometown, Puerto Rico, where he’s practically a god. When he got on stage I thought the audience was going to tear the place apart.

The next day I interviewed him about this homecoming show. I asked about his coming-out journey. (After years of not commenting on being gay, he released a statement in 2010 that said he was a “fortunate homosexual man.”) “If I only knew how good and how amazing I was going to feel, I would have done it ten years ago,” he told me. I felt good when he said he was more at peace now than he had ever been before in his life, and about the joys of raising his family.

He didn’t know it, and I didn’t say it, but in that moment, I thought about how he had started me on my own journey to inner peace too.

Derek C. Blasberg is a New York Times best-selling author and a senior director at the Gagosian Gallery. His writing regularly appears in international editions of Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Architectural Digest, and he pens the DISPATCH column in Harper’s Bazaar. Earlier this year, he launched his Substack, AND ANOTHER THING.

I used to be hunched over and now I hurt all the time. One of my earliest memories was my paediatrician telling my mum I’d grow to be six foot one. I didn’t quite get there, though sometimes it feels like I did. At the time, I was thrilled—five more inches than my brother was predicted to grow. But that dream was complicated by my very quirky spine.

Let me start with my spinal condition and the chronic pain I live with today. The root issue is something called a tethered spine. In my own words, it’s when tissue connects the upper part of the spine to the tailbone, restricting growth and movement. Mine developed in utero because of an extra vertebra. My favourite weird fact about myself is I have more bones than you. When puberty hit, instead of shooting up, my body shot forwards. I developed kyphosis, essentially a hunchback. Years spent in that posture meant my back muscles developed incorrectly, leaving me with chronic pain in my back and shoulders—pain that’s been constant since my surgery thirteen years ago. So that’s the overview: I used to be hunched over, and now I just hurt all the time.

I honestly can’t remember a time without pain. Thinking about my adolescence still stings—living with pain no one believed in, not even doctors. My parents, like most, thought posture correction was a matter of discipline. “Stand up straight,” they’d tell me, again and again. I tried. I’d yank my shoulders back, strain to align my spine, and instantly be stopped by searing pain from the tether pulling downwards. From the outside it looked like I wasn’t even trying. I’d hear, “just do it like this,” as people demonstrated their perfectly straight backs, making me feel broken. I was 11 years old, hunched over, binge eating to cope, and starting to believe I was failing at something everyone else could do so easily. Even being touched on my neck or shoulders made me flinch.

Those years were a blur of appointments: orthopaedic consults, physical therapy, sports massages, endless scans. Doctors told me they didn’t know why I was in so much pain. CAT scans, with their hour-long clacking inside a narrow tube, became routine. By the end, I could handle them without panicking, but they never got easier. One doctor even came close to recommending a metal rod in my back—a misdiagnosis that would have left me with lifelong limitations. All the time spent at clinics meant I missed out on school activities and friends. I didn’t have a huge social circle anyway, but the absences deepened my sense of isolation. The silver lining: I grew very close to my mum, who carried me through every appointment and dead-end diagnosis.

After the near-rod disaster, my mum brought me back to her orthopaedic surgeon who specialised in sports medicine. He had just read about Olympic runner Lolo Jones’s tethered spine diagnosis. Something clicked. That was it—my condition finally had a name. Surgery was scheduled. It wasn’t a routine operation. Because the tethering was close to my spinal cord, there was a risk it could affect my ability to walk. I only half-heard that warning, preferring not to dwell on it. Mostly I felt relieved. After years of unexplained pain, there was a plan.

Surgery mornings are strange—you wake up knowing someone is about to cut you open. At 5 a.m., I was groggy but more at peace than scared. I had lived with pain so long, what was a bit more? Still, when the anaesthesia hit and I was wheeled into the operating room, I started shaking. They had me count backwards. I made it to four.

Waking up was worse. I couldn’t move, I was woozy, and I cried immediately when I saw my mum. The doctor entered smiling. He explained what he’d found: the tether pulling my spine was so tight that when he cut it, it literally boinged. The release was so dramatic I grew three or four inches on the spot. Imagine going to sleep one height and waking up nearly half a foot taller. I felt like a deer learning to stand.

Because of the risk of spinal instability, I wasn’t allowed to walk for hours afterwards. Meanwhile, my bladder had other plans. The options were grim: bedpan or catheter. With my lifelong “pee anxiety,” the bedpan was impossible. The catheter was excruciating and didn’t even work. Only after much protesting did the nurses let me hobble to the bathroom, IV and all. My spine didn’t collapse, but my body felt fragile, as if I were held together by thread. I didn’t stay overnight. Once cleared, I was wheeled out to my mum’s car and sent home to recover.

I spent the first week at my mum’s, the second at my dad’s. My mum turned into a world-class nurse. Pain meds on time, incision care, meals, and endless replays of 13 Going on 30. She made sure I had comfort in every possible way. The medication wreaked havoc on my stomach, but otherwise, recovery was mostly boring: online shopping, iChatting with friends, hunting for the perfect roller backpack since I wasn’t allowed to carry more than a book.

That was the last major medical intervention for my back. The surgery freed my spine but didn’t erase the pain. Instead, I was left with a body that felt permanently complicated.

Here’s the thing: I’m always in battle with my body. Not just in the “ugh, I don’t like how I look” sense—though I struggle with that, too—but in the “living in this body makes everyday life harder” sense. Every outing comes with anxiety. Will there be seating? Will I have to sit too long? Can I carry my bag without wrecking my back? Holding something heavy for more than a few minutes can undo me. I’m constantly shifting in public, contorting myself into odd shapes just to ease the pressure in my shoulders and spine. Right now, as I write this on a flight, I’m twisted sideways, trying to relieve the fire behind my shoulder blade. I still carry embarrassment about my slight hunch. Even though I know how much I’ve stretched, strengthened, and fought for mobility, it’s a reminder my body won’t ever look “normal.” But I’m not sharing this as a “boohoo” moment. People live with far greater pain. I’m proud, actually—proud that I live fully with it, that I don’t let it erase my life.

What frustrates me most is how invisible this kind of pain is. Non-visual conditions are so often dismissed as exaggerated or made-up. Mine isn’t. And though it has been hard, it’s also made me resilient. A few months ago, I impulsively opened up on Instagram about my tethered spine and chronic pain. I expected silence. Instead, my inbox filled with people sharing their own stories. Many had tethered spines too. I had truly thought I was alone. Naïve, I know. I realised I’d spent years convinced my pain wasn’t something others would care about. But sharing wasn’t about centering myself—it was about aligning with people who understood. The comfort I felt hearing from them was something I want to pass on. Now, I’m less self-conscious about the things I do to manage my body: the stretches, the posture shifts, even my slight hunch. Talking openly about it has stripped away some shame.

I didn’t grow to six foot one. My body didn’t unfold the way doctors once predicted. Instead, it bent, broke, healed, and left me with a life of daily discomfort. But it also left me with resilience, empathy, and community. My spine may have tethered me physically, but it also tethered me to a deeper understanding of how we live with pain—and how sharing it makes us feel less alone.

Ella Emhoff is a multidisciplinary artist who explores textiles through knitting, knitwear design, brand installations, and upcycling donated materials. She also founded a community-based knit club to teach knitting and foster in-person connection.

As I left for college, the doctors who were treating me in Nebraska insisted I spend as much time as possible in quiet, cool, and minimally humid places. When I arrived on the East Coast in the early 1970s, the 18^th-century galleries of the University’s museum were ideal, as they were maintained at a low temperature and humidity, and were, with three exceptions, vacant.

The newly appointed President of Princeton was one exception.

He would trot through the Museum with prospective donors and nod as he passed me.

One afternoon he stopped me on campus. He offered that his goal at Princeton was to establish himself as a great leader in the field of education. This, he explained, had been his mission since he was quite young.

Another presence in the galleries was a man who had the aspect of someone much older (receding hair, dark suits, bow ties) but also much younger (unlined face, energetic gait, juvenile expressions). At the time we met, he was a senior editor at a nearby publishing house. We became friends. One day, he seemed unusually upbeat.

“The trick to a successful book,” he announced, “is discovering someone obscure but important.”

“And you have found someone?”

“Yes, but you mustn’t repeat it.”

I nodded.

“Hamann! Terribly important, affected many people, and is rarely mentioned.”

“Except at Purim.”

“I’ll ignore that.”

“And your man is?”

“The Wizard of the North. Johann Georg Hamann. There were all sorts of things happening in the 18^th century. New ways of thinking. Hamann was in one camp, Reynolds in another. This was the time when the self was discovered. From then on, we’ve spent most of our time trying to decide who we really are.”

“And you are?”

“Not an editor.”

“What then?”

“An author. I shall be the one who reveals Hamann to the world.”

A woman entered the gallery.

She was shy but graceful, her hair the rust colour of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Pandora. That first day, she stood motionless in front of the same painting, Pericles and Anaxagoras, for 40 minutes; then, stepping forward until her face was inches from the canvas, remained there for another 10 minutes.

As soon as she left the gallery, my friend turned to me.

“I don’t trust her.”

“Why?”

“I see through to who people really are. They can’t hide from me. But her, I’m having trouble with. I’ll need more time.”

Two weeks later, he announced that he was leaving Princeton.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I know myself, and I am a writer, not an editor. I need other writers, intellectuals, sardonic back-and-forth, that sort of thing. Princeton’s not it. John O’Hara lived here, is buried around the corner, and the University wanted nothing to do with him. There’s not a droll person in all of Princeton.”

A week after his departure, the woman reappeared in the galleries. I addressed her.

“You are, I imagine, an art historian.”

“You flatter me but I have little interest in it.”

“Then what does interest you?”

“Cupping and tenting. Are you familiar with them?”

“Not that I can share.”

We met later that afternoon at a bar across from campus. In her bag was The Pisan Cantos. She explained that after dropping out of school, she moved to Japan. There she met a man who restored screens, scrolls, and masks. His specialty was Noh masks. She was intrigued by their neutral expressions.

We met several times thereafter. At each meeting, she revealed her engagement with various topics, none of which were connected to the others and all of which were discussed with great intelligence. During one of these encounters, the President stopped at our table. He asked if I would join him for a meeting the next afternoon with a small group of alumni. With growing protests on campus, he wanted to assure them that he had matters under control. He thought that I would be a good person to join the discussion, which meant, of course, that he viewed me as sufficiently indifferent or myopic to deliver an upbeat report.

The gathering was held in his mansion on campus. Following sherry, a provost gave an introduction to the President, praising his efforts to reach out to the students involved in the protests and emphasizing that the President was respected by all students as a man of great moral character. When the President rose to speak, his chair struck my foot.

Of such pain I had no memory.

I rushed from the room.

The next day, a doctor delivered the verdict. Gout. It was something that I’d inherited from my father and grandfathers. The slight jostling of my foot when the President moved his chair ignited the pain. I was, according to the doctors, the youngest person so afflicted.

My relationship with the President was never the same. Whenever we passed one another, he nodded but kept his distance. I, in turn, never explained my abrupt exit from the gathering that afternoon.

At the end of my freshman year, the woman invited me to a celebratory dinner. She selected a Japanese restaurant in New York. The restaurant was small and attractive, and the staff appeared to know her. When she finished ordering, I handed her a gift, a novel by an author from Nebraska. Thanking me, she added that she had a gift for me, but it was not yet ready.

The meal was singular and the dessert especially so: a sugared pineapple from Okinawa topped with vanilla sauce. She had made certain to order it in advance.

With the dessert cleared, she took my hand. It was the first time we had touched. Her face emptied of all expression.

Guiding my hand below the table, she closed it around the napkin, which was tucked between her thighs. As I held it, the napkin grew warm and moist. When I finally returned my hand to the table, my fingers were fragrant. The present she had mixed inside herself.

At around the time that I graduated, the President left Princeton to run the Mellon Foundation. He continued to write texts on education and serve on boards and committees.

After his death, it was revealed that while at Princeton, he had a long affair with a female undergraduate, who, half his age, was also working as a nanny for him and his wife, helping raise their daughter. The affair was known by certain administrators, alumni, and teachers but no one intervened to stop it or insist that he step down.

When an alumni magazine threatened to expose him, the editor of the magazine, who was gay, was informed that should he proceed with the article, he too would be exposed. The article was never published.

It has occurred to me that the President thought that I’d left the meeting with the alumni because I knew of his affair and could not bear listening to tributes to his character.

At the time of the President’s death, Harvard Magazine described him as “the essential educator of our time.” But the most remarkable tribute came when the then President of Princeton eulogised his predecessor as a man who had “touched every corner of this great University.” Reading this, I immediately wrote to my friend the editor, informing him that I’d finally found one droll man at Princeton. But the letter was returned. My friend had moved along and then along again. He wrote nothing, putting it off until he found the one place which would tend to the mouldering self he’d strapped to his back.

The President, in the meantime, found any number of places to nurture his self as the great educator, but that self lived with the malignant disquiet that someone was coming to slay it.

As to the woman, she too left Princeton. She, unlike the other two, was driven neither by a sense of who she was nor where she belonged, but rather by the sole desire to replenish the material which she randomly gathered and which, when sufficiently mixed, arose brilliantly and erotically inside her.

Michael Rips is a reclusive memoirist, collector, and former supreme court law clerk.

So often when you hear from me, it’s someone else’s news, someone else’s story, and I’m just there as a vessel to bring it to you. Or as a mama bird to chew it up into more digestible pieces and then… feed it to you? That’s gross. Let’s walk that back.

EITHER WAY, today I’m going to drop some V Spehar lore. My high school years: living at home with my mom, a hospice nurse, who ended up taking in her elderly uncle with dementia to live with us. It was a job that was supposed to only last a few weeks, months at best—and somehow went on for almost a decade. She was maybe too good at nursing, and her methods, while unconventional, were iconic.

To be clear, no one, not even my mom, had experience with dementia care. But we did have experience with magic and whimsy. Instead of fighting the situation, we leaned into it. Our 80-year-old Uncle Hughie thought he was in his mid-30s? GREAT! Let him. We took down all the mirrors on the first floor of the house, where his room was, so he wouldn’t get confused seeing the reflection of an old man where he thought a young man should be.

Flashbacks to his time in the Navy working as a mailman? No problem! My siblings and I were now his little mail clerks, filing envelopes and sorting love letters for the boys. Flashing back to college years? Fantastic! We’re all on the Cornell soccer team now, practising drills in the yard. Anything was possible.

Because Uncle Hughie had invested wisely, he had cash available to keep the adventures coming. He had a very extravagant French girlfriend named Vazzy, who lived in a well-appointed artist loft on Second Avenue in New York. We took the train in from Connecticut to see her frequently, and he could take her on little dates. He loved Broadway shows, so we’d all go together. One time we went to see Swing! and—you guessed it—the flashbacks began again and we were all back in the 1940s at a big band show. He enjoyed the 2 p.m. show so much that he walked out to the box office and got us all tickets to the 8 p.m. show. Our seats were much closer to the stage that time.

He and his wife never had children, and some part of him knew that he didn’t have children. But each day when he woke up to three kids running around in the house, he allowed himself to be surprised and believe that he did have kids, telling us how grateful he was we were there, how much he wanted us, and how sorry he was for not remembering he didn’t have kids because clearly he did—here we were!

We used to play little pranks on him. One Halloween, my friend Tom (an Italian guy who started shaving in sixth grade and quite often kept a five o’clock shadow) dressed as Mary Katherine Gallagher and came over to pick me up to go out to a party. I was dressed as a Spartan Cheerleader, and we told Uncle Hughie that my friend Mary Katherine was here. He politely spoke with “Mary” for a while, but after we left for the party he told my mom how sweet I was to be so nice to such an ugly girl. What a good friend, being so kind to that unfortunate, homely looking girl!

It wasn’t all easy. We had bad days too. Sometimes the flashbacks weren’t about sorting mail; they were about combat, manning battle stations, and being extremely scared. In one such case, my nine-year-old brother got stuck “hiding in a bunker” being perfectly quiet with Uncle Hugh for several hours before being “liberated” by my mom. Other times, he would be extremely aggravated by the rules that kept us all safe in the house, become destructive, and cry out of confusion and frustration. It was tough on everyone. Sharing space with someone who has significant medical needs can also make it feel like your youth is being sidelined. Can’t have people over and be loud at night because Hughie is sleeping. Can’t really go away on vacations because what will we do with Hughie? In some ways it was like he was the child. My mom navigated this incredibly well, finding many ways for us to maintain our nuclear family of five and have private moments outside the care she provided to Hughie, without making him feel left out.

When Uncle Hughie passed away I was in college, and it felt more like the death of a cousin or peer than an elderly family member. It was an unusual feeling to unpack, knowing he was about 90 when he died, but for all those years he was “one of us.” One of the kids. I mean, my mom had to care for him in a very similar way to how she cared for us. He relied on her for everything: making his lunch, making his doctor appointments, taking him shopping for clothes, planning his birthday parties, and even hearing about his broken heart over the loss of friends. He got sent outside to “get some fresh air” the same way we got told to go outside and play. He even got grounded sometimes.

I’ve never publicly talked about this experience growing up with Hughie and all the opportunities having him in our life afforded me. He loved coming to see my plays, and he’d sit for hours listening while I practised singing, or practised a monologue. He’d come to our high school football games and watch me cheer. He paid for my braces… twice. I loved his fancy girlfriend from NYC. They met after his wife had died, and I loved her and all the cute little old-people adventures they went on well before, and during, his time living with us. I loved knowing that he got to have the experience of having kids, something he wanted so badly but biologically didn’t get a chance at. I appreciate deeply the sacrifices my parents made to extend his life, enriching ours in the process. I appreciate most that my parents’ love for each other didn’t fade, though they were navigating the incredibly difficult experience of caring for someone with dementia, alongside raising three kids.

I’ve never really asked them what they thought about caring for Hughie. It’s so funny how we never really ask our parents about their feelings. Instead, we understand our own life based on if our parents did or did not serve as an ideal part of our life experiences. Isn’t that wild? I’m a professional question-asker and I’m just realising now that I’ve never really asked my mom how she felt. How did she balance being a mother, wife and caregiver? Does she regret anything about it? Would she do anything differently knowing what she knows now? I’ve got a phone call to make.

V Spehar is an award winning digital journalist, TikTok personality and podcaster. Spehar launched UnderTheDeskNews with the aim to make news media less intimidating and easier to understand.

With a podcast titled Tell Me Something Messy, I’m no stranger to confessions. I’ve talked about feet and fart kinks, estrangement from a religious mother, being in a polyamorous marriage, sugaring my asshole, surviving sexual assault, and more. But with the first draft of this essay due tomorrow, I’m coming up with scraps. In a desperate attempt to source anything to write, I Googled confession, hoping it would spark inspiration. There were a few definitions offered, but the pertinent one was: acknowledgement, admission, avowal. What wasn’t offered is the inherent vulnerability of confession. How a confession exposes us to potential harm or embrace. For most, admitting to a kink or a strained family dynamic would be enough to give a person heart palpitations that render them silent. But since that’s not true for me, I’m curious what my vulnerability looks like. Truthfully, as soon as I type that, I begin to dread the work of such an exploration. I’d much rather confess something fun, like the time a guy changed my life by eating my ass.

His name was Derrick, and he wanted to toss my salad. I was in my early 30s, and my husband and I had just opened our relationship. At this time, I wasn’t into letting anyone eat my veggies. But Derrick was attractive, kind, had a monstrous dick, and I craved his ranch dressing. (See what I did there?!) So I agreed to use his face as a bearded lounge chair. He used his mouth for more than 30 minutes, which had me on the verge of making him clear out a drawer so I could leave my integrity at his place. The crash out was loading, babe! His skill for slopping up the booty meat opened something up for me. Yes, my hole, but also my head (as in brain).

In the last week, I have pumped out seven drafts around this confession prompt––none of them satisfying. Perhaps I’m just overthinking. As a last-ditch effort, I tried to release my idea of what the final result of this piece should be. My hope was that through surrender, a confession buried deep in my psyche would suddenly reveal itself. After a few minutes with no reveal—I’m a deeply impatient Taurus—I opened my phone. A quick scroll through an erratic Instagram timeline served me punchy podcast clips, endearing dog videos, and dystopian government chaos. I felt a whiplash of emotions. Chief among them, fear.

Did I just confess something?

I’m not even sure I’m allowed to admit fear. My career is built around being messy, as in human. Cheekily and compassionately saying the quiet things out loud—particularly as it pertains to sex, relationships, and identity. I regularly put out content with the intention to uplift and empower, which has garnered me the nickname Messy Mom—a title I cherish. At best, moms nurture, protect, and make us feel like everything is going to be okay. It’s how I’ve aimed to use my digital platform over the years. But it’s become more challenging to be that version of myself, so much so that I wrapped the first season of my podcast a few episodes early and scaled back on my regular online presence. As I write this, I’m realising that the whiplash of what’s happening in our world has left me deeply disoriented, with my hope deteriorating. But if hope fuels action and change, how can I show up usefully if I’ve lost it? Ugh. This is not what I wanted to write about. I want to reach into my trusted bag of charming anecdotes and tell you about the time I took a dance cardio class with Beyoncé.

I arrived an hour early, cuz bitch, I wasn’t gonna let a delayed subway make me miss the most important day of my life. Like a good student, Beyoncé was set up in front, next to the trainer. Casually, I stood in the back of the room on her left side, discreetly gawking at her perfect skin and her iconic blonde bangs. I was ready to live out my middle school fantasy of replacing Farrah Franklin (IYKYK) as the new member of Destiny’s Child. By the time class finished, we were all bathed in sweat. Beyoncé, who worked just as hard as us, didn’t have a bead of perspiration on her. It was a reminder that she is not like us pedestrians. She is… Beyoncé.

A month ago, I was in West Hollywood, standing in front of the gay bars on a Saturday afternoon waiting for my partner to arrive. Music blasted from every direction while muscled go-go boys threw ass on platforms. On my phone, I watched a video of an ICE raid in my hometown at an Upper West Side restaurant, which was immediately followed by videos of the disastrous floods in Texas. Followed by a trailer for the newest season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

When I looked up from my phone and back out at a seemingly carefree crowd, I wondered, *in my Carrie Bradshaw voice*: Are we relying on astrological readings, manifestation techniques, and good vibes to numb ourselves from feeling the tragedy of a collapsing democracy and man-made apocalypse?

The world’s operating mode continues to be business as usual amidst so much that is unusual. Or is this in fact the norm, just the first time we’ve been able to access it all at once? Perhaps the most jarring part about all of this is being able to see the tragedies but not feel my personal reality disturbed yet. I’m currently writing this wearing a crop top and hoochie-daddy shorts, whilst nibbling on some freezer-bag sweet potato chips I just air fried. That said, I’m now constantly warding off anxiety attacks because contending with so many realities existing on the same globe while also managing a personal life is disturbing. Awareness is a symptom of adulthood no one warns you about. Sometimes it makes me—and this I hate to confess—freeze. It’s not a state of being detached, but rather a mix of being stunned and overwhelmed. A questioning of what is the right way to react and the perfect way to be of service. In 2020, while creating content around race and intersectionality, I saw how quickly people began to get “allyship fatigue.” Think about how massive the culture’s divestment was that a term had to be coined. Social media exposed itself as a performance stage for people to curate the appearances of caring, and the algorithm only supports it when profitable. So whether it’s right, wrong, good, or bad, I now find myself suspicious of people’s posting intentions. I always wonder whether they create content because they care, they want to look like they care, or they want the dopamine high from a double tap. Of course this is a generalisation. There are plenty of activists, educators, and folx who sacrifice everything for change and progress. I guess what overwhelms and stuns me is how in the face of all that sacrifice the world continues to turn, seemingly unbothered. It sends me into a spiral of depression and heartbreak that I intentionally have to tend to so that I don’t become numb.

I’m taking a lot of deep breaths writing this. I’ve got a jazz station playing in the background, helping me regulate so I can pour all of this thinking out onto the page. I really just want to haphazardly change the subject again and confess something else, like how even as a non-binary person I occasionally mess up other people’s pronouns, which feels deeply embarrassing for obvious reasons. But I’m not going to. Instead, I’ll sit here and feel this.

I’ll soothe myself by remembering that, just as the algorithm is a mixed feed, so are my emotions. Fear is not the singular feeling. It’s just the hardest one to acknowledge. Ironically, it comes with more fear: of judgement, ridicule, and criticism. But fear is part of being human, and in a time where there are concerted efforts to extinguish our humanity, perhaps the most important thing any of us can do is admit it. Perhaps this collective acknowledgement allows us to interrupt business as usual, and do something about the reality at hand. Perhaps it melts us from a frozen state and gives us permission to take action without getting caught in the barbed wire of perfection. Perhaps my fear is evidence that I’m not numb. I’m not desensitised. I’m aware. I care. And perhaps confessing this fear is part of finding my hope again.

xo Messy Mom

Brandon Kyle Goodman (they/them) is a writer, actor, and sexual wellness advocate. They’re best known for their work on Netflix’s smash hit and Emmy nominated animated comedy series Big Mouth and its spin-off Human Resources; Amazon’s Modern Love, Hulu’s Plus One, and ABC’s Abbott Elementary. Goodman is also a co-host of the new E! network awards season after-show RE!CAP. Every Monday you can catch them on their Substack livestream, Messy Mondays at Night! On Thursdays, you can hear episodes of their iHeart relationship podcast Tell Me Something Messy And this fall they’ll be premiering their solo stage show The Heaux Church at Ars Nova in New York City.

I was missing lore; a crucial ingredient of being in the public eye. I might have shared some controversial opinions on my social media, but compared to other rising stars of the niche high-fashion pond I was dipping my toes into, I was an unseasoned chicken.

They say, “Go with the times or the times go without you.” And we are in a time where people need to care deeply about you in order to not fall into irrelevance. Having fans is not enough; you need to have haters, too. People have different opinions on when exactly we have entered the post-truth era, but most would agree that a healthy level of controversy contributes to your worth. Pull, buzz, social currency—if your name is mentioned at a dinner party, could people have a heated discussion about you, or would the conversation die down within two minutes?

The next morning I woke up to a link to a “brendahashtag” Reddit thread. Did you know that Reddit––a platform used both by edgelords looking for valuable information on biohacking, alternative methods for raising children, and insecure millennials with nine to five jobs who feel better about their own miserable existence by bringing others down in anonymous forums––is owned by Advance Publications, which owns Condé Nast? We can talk about that another day.

I was excited at first. Finally people cared about me! There is a subreddit called “NYC influencer snark” (snark, what a great word btw), and if you are a New York-based influencer who doesn’t have their own subsubreddit in the subreddit, you should consider hiring a publicist, because you are close to obsolescence. You definitely won’t get the backstage TikTok-interview gigs for Tory Burch, WSA won’t host your closet sale for free, Charli XCX won’t ask you to appear in one of her music videos, and ThePeopleGallery won’t ask you for your outfit details on the street, because you have no sauce. No street cred.

The queen, in this case, being Reddit users. To be honest, it could have also been one Reddit user with several accounts. The Cut came out with an article this year (https://www.thecut.com/article/reddit-influencer-snark-confessions.html) interviewing the anon users about why they hate with a passion and what they get out of it. Surprisingly, the users were a bit older than we had all assumed. While Gen Z is pretty busy with online activism, the subreddit users were often in their 30s, with real jobs, tired of watching ungrateful influencers (me) live their dream. Because they would live it so much better.

My excitement about my snarky thread wore off pretty quickly when I realised how low these users would go—and also how far from reality they were at times. With enough therapy sessions under my belt, I know that when I get offended over something that concerns my persona, there is some truth to it. “Snobbish,” “arrogant,” and “pretentious” were some of the recurring words used to describe me. Your Honour, the evidence clearly shows that the defendant is guilty of every charge she stands accused of. I am arrogant AF. Sometimes I still shock myself when I hear my own thoughts, even after living with this brain for over 30 years. All I do is judge all day, but at least I don’t spare myself from said judgement either.

I have a double-barrel last name, and both names are attached to two very successful family businesses. Weischer, the family on my dad’s side, is a media company in Germany that acts as a special agent for outdoor advertising in the DACH market (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). I read on my Reddit that my dad is the most powerful man in German media and that he got me all my jobs, even my first ever interview, which was with Virgil Abloh. While neither of these things is true (he has not heard of Virgil Abloh nor is he the media mogul of Germany), he did pay my rent until I was 25 years old and helped with paying for my university degrees. (To clarify for the Americans: the student loans where I live are not as bad as yours. My dad covered my bachelor’s degree in Berlin, which I believe was 20K; I then covered my Central Saint Martins master’s—I think it was less than 10K, a European fee that was still a pre-Brexit amount.) I had all expenses covered and my retail jobs were merely play money for Berghain weekends and EasyJet trips. If I lost all of my jobs from one day to the other, “Daddy’s money” would surely come to the rescue.

My other last name reads way worse. It is a successful, legacy family business in shirtmaking—that is prominent in the fashion industry. I have the name through my mother, who cut contact with her family when I was an infant, so I have only met a few family members in my childhood; I have never seen any money from that family or used the name for anything. At least one DEBUNKED! I gave some super-stupid quote to a magazine one time after they asked me if I grew up with fashion, explaining that I lived with a single mother as a kid who was sometimes on government support and there was no time to think about fashion choices. It wasn’t a lie, but I left out my rich dad, who I saw only during school holidays for the first decade of my life. So I gave a half-truth. This is what came back to haunt me on Reddit. While I do regret the interview, rule number one of the internet is never apologise or argue with strangers who won’t change their opinion of you. They aren’t booking your jobs, after all. If you hired a McKinsey consultant for your Reddit crisis management, they would tell you that fighting for your life in the comment sections is a high-risk, zero-reward situation.

Anyhow. Like most privileged kids, at least the ones who are willing to look at their own inherited advantages, realising that I am privileged did not immediately make me a better, more grateful, self-aware, humble person. Almost daily I have to accept that I have a step up in life and that the things I am proud of were achieved with help. That the underdog story that I like to believe about my own career was not as challenging as other people’s. My own lore is made up—by me.

I am known as the outspoken one in fashion, yet I can afford to be outspoken because I have a safety net to fall back on. It’s simply not the same as other creators who risk it all. The Reddit thread said that I was incapable of receiving criticism. And it’s true, I run my social media like a dictator. On any given day, I block and restrict people simply because I can. I think of it this way: my accounts are free, not paywalled. I try to give industry knowledge and entertainment, and in return I want you to leave heart comments. If you fail to hold up your end of the bargain, you will be shunned from the kingdom that is Brendahashtagland. I am in constant war with parasocial relationships between audience and content creators, and I make it very clear who is the messenger and who is the receiver. I do not ask to receive, I am a top. You can see yourself out.

Another thing I read about myself was that I’m “selling out.” I do not understand why people assume that just because I write for media outlets, I have the journalistic integrity of a reporter at The New York Times. I am not @VVfriedman!!!!! I’ll post your collection for a paycheck—DM for more info. I never call myself a journalist; I have a master’s in fashion journalism from Central Saint Martins; the two are not the same! I write for money, I write for clout, I write for fun, and sometimes I don’t want to bite the hand that feeds me. I danced around in Maria Grazia Chiuri Dior for my Haute Couture tickets, and I’d do it again!

The anon user’s point of view is that they wouldn’t. If they were the millionaire daughter of Germany’s most powerful media mogul, they’d give it all to charity, or to Daniel Roseberry. They wouldn’t even think of entering the fashion industry. They would make space for talented writers and designers, and they wouldn’t say yes to their dream career if they were offered it, because other non-nepo-babies are more deserving.

I recently listened to The Cutting Room Floor podcast, where Paloma Elsesser gave her point of view about people saying what they would do if they were in her shoes––and it spoke to me. If you weren’t offered the job, the campaign, or the cover, then you don’t get to have an opinion of what I did with an opportunity that was presented to me. The anon users will not accept the reality of the media landscape we live in; it’s not about who says it in the most eloquent way, it’s about who screams the loudest. I happen to bring clicks, shares, and comments, which more often than not drown out the thoughts and knowledge of better writers. It is what it is!

I get it. It’s fucking shitty to see shitty people be successful. Expecting people to be happy for you at a time when most are just getting by is just not realistic. And I don’t know why I thought I’d get some Pulitzer Prize for saying that a Jacquemus collection was bad. That’s low-hanging fruit.

By the summer of last year, the lore I had so desperately wished for had taken over. I had TikTok and YouTube creators taking deep dives into “the downfall of brendahashtag.” Combing through several Reddit threads, I began to believe that the general public hated me. In the same week, my management signed a contract for me to have a shoe with Adidas, I had invites to all the fashion shows I wanted to attend, was flown around the world by brands, and was presented with more work opportunities than ever. The seasoning in the form of gossip added to the uncooked chicken seemed to work, with my own ego as collateral damage. One year ago I stopped looking up my own name in Google searches, forums, or any social media. While I know that the lore around me somehow ends up contributing positively to my worth, I can’t handle the heat, and I am staying the fuck out of the kitchen.

Is there a moral to this story? Not really. I faced the reality that I am not the victim in this situation. Nothing unfair was happening to me. My entire life is unfair to other people and will remain this way unless I give it all up and live in exile. I faced my own desire of wanting to be liked, approved, and made to feel worthy by strangers. And I learned that most bad press is indeed good press. Now the challenge is to feed the beast.

Brenda Weischer is a fashion influencer and writer based between Berlin and New York. She is the host of her weekly podcast “brendawareness,” where she talks about her own career and the inner workings of the fashion industry.

The zine quickly sold out online last week, but we’ve just restocked some copies that are available here. The zine is also available for a limited time at the stockists below.

• Casa Magazines (New York)

• Iconic Magazines (New York)

• Hotel Chelsea (New York)

• The Ludlow Hotel (New York)

• Architecture Books (Los Angeles)

The morning I left for trauma camp, I’d woken up from a nightmare around 3 a.m., my skin absolutely crawling. As I itched my burning limbs, angry white lumps started to emerge.

Just what I needed before my week away.

I’d been feeling *fine* about going to the Funny Farm. It would be a welcome break. No phone, no kids, no opening of an envelope to attend. No big deal! I needed a rest, TBH. I needed to dry out. I was fresh from fashion week and even fresher out of ideas; this would be just what the doctor ordered. A little reset.

Only the doctor hadn’t ordered it, I had, and in a moment of sheer madness. Why was I doing this again? There’s literally nothing wrong with me. Basically, what had happened was we’d had one of our friends stay with us before Christmas, and she’d been banging on about how her time at this American treatment centre, which specialises in a whole host of sexy mental health issues, had really changed her life. I guess I was feeling bored and restless, and only slightly shame-spiralling about what I’d said and done a couple of nights before. And besides, I thought I might meet some cool, hot, and vaguely interesting people. It might even be fun. Why not?

Obviously, I never expected to follow through with it. Surely I’d book some semi-glam, but semi-degrading job and have to cancel. However, someone, somewhere, had other ideas. So that was that. But it was all going to be fine, I’d breeze through it. I mean, sure, there was some childhood stuff to work through, and some teenage stuff, and some young adult stuff, and some stuff that had arisen since becoming a wife and mother. But no one at the camp needed to know about that if I didn’t want them to. I’d been incredibly vague on my intake form. So why the fuck was I suddenly covered in hives? I was fiiiiiine.

I must have fallen back asleep again because when I woke back up, I wasn’t fine, I was late. A mad dash to the airport and suddenly I was on my way to Nashville. A few white wines, an indie flick and some high-altitude crying later and I was sailing through immigration. That was when I started to panic. What would I say to the immigration officer? I wasn’t there for work, nor was I there for vacation. I didn’t want to tell him I was going to a trauma center because I didn’t want him to arrest me or ship me back to England, so I just mumbled something about a wellness retreat, for unwell people, and he happily hurried me through. That’s when I saw the Irish guy from One Direction. Maybe we were going to the same place? Maybe he would be my trauma buddy? Maybe we’d have an affair? I read that happens a lot when people are emotionally vulnerable. But then I remembered Nashville isn’t just a place where crazy people come to get better, it’s also where they come to make music.

I spent the next two hours listening to country music in the back of a dirty cab, having my ear chewed off by a sweet man named Buck. It was just getting dark when we arrived in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. “This is like a horror movie,” he laughed, looking at the ominous building in front of us. “Oh, Buck, you have no idea,” I replied, itching my once again burning body—the furthest thing from being fine a person could be.

After calling my family for the last time and handing in my electronics, I was shown to my three-person dorm. As someone who shares a bed most nights with at least two people, I don’t mind having company, but this was something else. And then there was the bathroom situation. I like long baths and shitting in private. How is this my life for the next week?

Later that evening, we piled into the auditorium where we were sorted into our groups and forced into bonding activities. And that’s when I realised that basically everyone here voted for Trump.

For the first 48 hours, I kept to myself. I rarely shared in group and I went to bed immediately after the evening activity was over. It was heartening to see everyone stay up late by the fire, playing games, eating snacks, and lol-ing about mental illness (side note: crazy people are so funny), but I honestly couldn’t face it. I was tired, jet-lagged, and homesick. As the only English person, I didn’t really get many of the references or jokes, despite sharing the same language. And my problems weren’t even real problems—right?!

I’d woken that morning feeling weirdly chipper. The cute little coffee shop had reopened and I had finally been able to shit. That day we were recreating scenes from our childhood. I’d gone first and found it surprisingly easy. The listless house, the dead dad, the grief-stricken mother, the inanimate antique objects we were never allowed to touch, and getting told off for talking, wriggling, breathing. That was all easy to perform. It was only when I was asked to play the role of Ben, let’s call him, as a child, in a very specific situation, that finally something clicked. In that moment, I saw not just my younger self, but my future self too, as time and space seemed to collapse. Suddenly, things that I never thought were connected began to make sense. I cried for myself, my parents, and my children. Maybe I hadn’t really been fine all this time. I was just going through the motions.

That night we went out into a field and sat in a special stone circle, where each stone was connected to an animal or spirit. The one I happened to be drawn to symbolised the wolf (my son’s middle name and the tattoo my husband has on his upper arm), which all felt very appropriate and emo. After that, I was fully locked in.

For the rest of my time there, I ate my meals with my group, stayed up chatting in my dorm, and participated in all the non-obligatory activities like playing Cluedo, which Americans call Clue. I cried when my fellow inmates cried, and I even let them hug me.

By the end of my time there, the people in my group knew more about me than most of my friends on the outside. And I learnt more about myself in that short amount of time than I ever thought possible.

Eventually, it was time to leave. I said my goodbyes, collected my electronics, and headed back to the airport with Buck. “So, how was it?” He asked. “Are you glad you went?” I looked at my skin, where my hives were no longer visible, took a deep breath, and replied: “You know what, Buck? I think I am.”

Tish Weinstock is a London-based writer and editor specialising in fashion, beauty, and culture. She is currently a contributing editor at British Vogue, director of System Beauty and author of the Substack “I’m Sick, *Coughs*.” She loves Babybels, vintage dresses, arbitrary belts, and her kids—not necessarily in that order.

You subscribe to regular dispatches from one of your favourite thinkers and enjoy their musings on the news or pop culture; what they’re reading or watching or listening to. Some are breaking stories and some are reacting to what’s swirling around them. It’s like having access to the journal of a person you find fascinating. To take that a step further, we worked with Substack to have ten of the platform’s most interesting writers share something they’d never written about before. A real confession, just for i-D.

The “Confessional” Zine created in collaboration with includes personal essays from , , , , , , , , and .

• Casa Magazines (New York)

• Iconic Magazines (New York)

• Hotel Chelsea (New York)

• The Ludlow Hotel (New York)

• Architecture Books (Los Angeles)

GET THE ZINE HERE

The fries are transcendent, sure. But the vibe? Undeservedly smug. The crowd? Sceney, but soulless. A coven of foul energy vampires, sucking down each other’s cigarette smoke under dim red lights, draped in anything money can buy. People come to be seen, to shit-talk over €30 martinis, and to pretend that the aggressive exclusionary politics of the place is a kind of Parisian charm. It isn’t. It’s just racist—macro and micro—and exhausting. But on this particular October morning (date redacted to protect the guilty), I acquiesced.

Why? Because it was breakfast, and my nemesis—the host-slash-manager of this cursed establishment—doesn’t work mornings. And, again, the fries.

Five minutes into my very professional meeting with my very professional Italian client, I very unprofessionally picked up my unmuted phone to check a flurry of notifications. The first was from my colleague Mark Guiducci: “Are you okay?”

Then came many more from many others—from Julia Fox. From… Offset? How the fuck did Offset get my number? From my sisters. What time even is it in LA?

I opened Instagram because I have a Pavlovian compulsion to do that anytime I have one second of unaccounted time or my phone is, simply, in my hand. And there it was.

What an oddity to discover the artist formerly known as Kanye West absolutely DUNKING on me on main. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. My trauma response is to downplay everything. Even now, I imagine my own tragic demise featuring the phrase, “Lol, oh my god, you guys, it’s fine…” as the light fades from my eyes. I could chalk this up to being part of a family that’s endured more than its share of sudden loss, but it’s more likely my generalised anxiety and devotion to avoidance. (Growth moment: identifying that both/and of this paradigm! Healthy stuff is happening in this essay!)

“This is not a fashion person,” he had written beneath the absolute worst photo of me that exists. “I know Anna hates these boots.”

But even more damaging than the jab was how quickly I internalised it. I scanned his words like they were gospel, looking for truth. Because with surgical precision, he’d found the exact spot I was softest: my imposter syndrome. The thing that haunts me even now, after years in this industry.

That I don’t belong. That I never did.

That my presence in this space is a mistake. That the quirks and textures that make me me—being fat, not skinny; Black not white; frizzy not flat-ironed; wearing a quirky collage of the only clothes that come in my size—are not just unremarkable, but disqualifying. That I looked like someone who didn’t matter.

I adore posing for photographs—in addition to “Everything happens for a reason” my most oft-repeated mantra is, “I will never be as young and hot as I am today,” and I want to capture it so the evidence lasts long after my memory fades.

The gag is, I did look sloppy that day. I was in the Place Vendôme, so I must have either been running from a Schiaparelli appointment or a meeting at the Ritz, and one lone street style photographer sheepishly approached. The art of a street style photo is trying to look effortless while simultaneously trying very hard to look good and cool—it’s an art I’ve never tried to master and in this moment, it showed. But it looked like she mustered some courage to ask, and I hate to say no…to literally anyone…Big people pleaser over here. Instead of explaining this, and running from her lens, I stood half-in and half-out of the moment, with a half smile and half a brain cell. The picture stinks: my fraying chenille Wales Bonner skirt just grazing the top of my throwback high-heeled Timb boots, tongue askew, laces barely tied, sunglasses smudged with what I can only assume was croissant butter residue from my fingertips. I was in a rush and under a hangover.

I must’ve stared into my phone in a catatonic state for minutes, because by the time I blinked, my client was asking for the check before we’d gotten our coffees. We hadn’t spoken for about 15 minutes, my head was in the clouds, and all I could say to him was “Kanye is trolling.” Not sure that quite translated to an Italian ear. I paid the bill (which was disproportionate and insulting, as always—DID I MENTION I HATE THIS PLACE?) and reopened my phone.

Eva Chen, omnipotent Head of Fashion at Instagram, had texted a warning: the fanatical Yeezy hive was rising, an eerie foreshadowing of the death threats that would come.

All of this… over a T-shirt.

Not one cut perfectly by The Row and justifying a three-figure price tag, one that challenged the semiotics of a slogan—one that was stained in pseudo-satire.

The day before, I had begged PR Consulting and the Lucien Pages team for a ticket to the secret Yeezy show. As ever, Ye had turned the industry feral. When he summons fashion, we come frothing. If you weren’t there, you weren’t in the know. If you weren’t in the know, you had no social capital. And if you had no social capital… were you even in fashion?

The show started over an hour late—and no one left. Unheard of.

And then: a spectacle of quiet violence. An agit-prop performance drenched in thinly veiled contempt for Black life. A stage for slogans weaponised against the very communities that built him. A humiliation kink come to life. I watched, sick to my stomach.

Later, I posted on Instagram. As I do. I expected a chorus of rage. But the industry at large, ever allergic to discomfort, said nothing. Silence and apathy reigned. My post hung in the void. Alone. Easy to spot.

After several days of pick-up—and a bit too much attention than was comfortable for my colleagues—at the behest of my boss, I agreed to meet him. The venue would be the newly acquired Yeezy Headquarters—as close to a corporate high-rise you could get besides the Arc De Triomphe.

What followed felt like the opening scene of a Jon M. Chu movie. I showed up flanked by a motley crew of unlikely allies: a Vogue Paris administrative executive, Baz Luhrmann, Paloma Elsesser, and her publicist. I knew I needed buffers, and more people than you’d think said, “No.” But the gang I managed to gaggle together put on a pretty tough show. I’m convinced we could’ve nailed a choreographed dance battle if it came to it.

On the other side: photographer Hugo Comte, a half-dozen faceless handlers, and yes, bigot supreme Candace Owens (no way she could stay on beat, we definitely would have won the dance battle). The whole thing was insane. Minutes after arrival, the standoff started. Candace has absolutely no live juice—wack as hell. Came out the gate hot and ready for a fight, which was curious because she has absolutely no hands. Unfortunately, she didn’t realize that I STAY ready to rumble and have the kind of left hook that would paralyse Hilary Swank… intellectually speaking. Right off the bat, the vibe was combative. None of that safe space mumbo jumbo. Someone was getting spanked and it wasn’t going to be me. Ye is a talented mediator—maybe because he is capable of commanding stadiums. When he speaks, the room falls silent. Within minutes, everyone was out. Only he and I and our respective documentarians (mine recording, artfully, for legal purposes and his for who knows?) remained. He talked. I mainly listened, interjecting every so often to remind him that he picked the wrong one. It was frustrating, and my people-pleasing reared its ugly head a couple of times.

I can’t say that the meeting was productive. I can’t say I understand his choice to make that shirt anymore. What I can say is that somewhere between the folding chairs and the folded arms, I remembered:

I sat through over two hours of madness. I won’t share all the details, but locked somewhere in the Condé Nast corporate vault is a feature-length iPhone film, directed by an Oscar winner, capturing every moment of the madness. #ShotOniPhone, baby.

The cinematography? Probably award-worthy. The dialogue? Impossible to script by even the best screenwriter in the world.

What did I learn? That language is a weapon. That silence is a choice. That sometimes you become the story because you refuse to be erased. That T-shirts can crumble an empire, hurt the cause, and also my feelings.

And above all else: that I can never go back to Hotel Costes. Not even for the fries.

GET THE ZINE HERE