The holidays can be challenging for the depressed. Even with years of therapy and multiple medications in my system, the number one most chronic symptom of my depression, being annoying, always seems to flare up this time of year.

See exhibit A, a recent text exchange between myself and a close friend:

I wrote this gift guide not just for my mentally ill peers, but for everyone squelching and crunching through the eggshells in our orbit, for those who have offered a kind silver lining and received a version of “I have n money and he is a millionaire” in return. I think we could all use a little guidance this time of year.

My Definitive 2025 Depression Gift Guide:

1. PRIVACY

This holiday season, consider leaving your depressed loved one the f*ck alone!

According to the DSM-5 handbook for professionals in the field of mental health, “appearing tearful” to others is a symptom of Major Depressive Disorder.

According to my lived experience as a depressed person, yeah that tracks.

If your depressed loved one is, unfortunately, like me, they could burst into tears at any moment and once the waterworks start, there’s no predicting when they’ll stop. Their tears may seem unprompted but you have no idea what terrifying, suffocating, existential thought may have just crossed your loved one’s mind or what content the algorithm may have thrust into their doomscrolling path, i.e. a video of Robert Irwin winning Dancing with the Stars intercut with footage of his late father Steve Irwin set, for some reason, to “Someone Like You” by Adele.

If your depressed loved one appears tearful in response to a video, photo, song, bite of food, the simple passage of time, or a question like “what’s new?” it’s best to leave them alone, leave the room if possible, or just turn around and face the wall. Scientific evidence shows that any attempt to cheer the depressed person up this time of year will be futile at best and provoke an onslaught of self-pity at worst.

See exhibit A:

#andheisamillionaire (allegedly)

This year, deck the halls with boughs of holly and let your loved one cry without question or comment.

2. A SHAPELESS GARMENT

It’s important to keep in mind that any physical gift you give your depressed loved one could be weaponized against you.

What is a “home good” if not a reminder that one’s home is rented, and not owned, and probably never will be owned, and even if it was owned, one would probably still be depressed but feel even guiltier about being depressed because so many others are homeless…

Sure, a fancy new Moleskine journal may seem harmless to you, delightful even, but in the eyes of the depressed, it’s a harsh reminder that they still haven’t gotten around to trying The Artist’s Way, even after buying a second copy of the book thinking they lost the original copy but it turns out they leant the original copy to a friend who returned it after fully completing The Artist’s Way and honestly that friend seems a lot happier now and guess what, they met with a publisher who wants to read their manuscript which is AMAZING, SO AMAZING FOR THAT FRIEND!!! YAY!!!!!!

There is one material product that I can guarantee is a safe zone in the minefield of shopping for the depressed and that is a giant garment, ideally something that protects 75% - 99% of the human form against the pain of being perceived.

During my 2020 depressive episode, I invested in “The Comfy”, which is basically a blanket you can wear. I’ve never looked back. It offers an incredibly soft, blissfully shapeless experience. 10/10 five stars.

3. A NON-WEARABLE BLANKET

My favorite non-wearable blanket currently in rotation is The Sophie Faux Fur Throw from Anthropologie

4. A PREGNANCY PILLOW BUT DON’T CALL IT THAT

I am living proof that you don’t have to be pregnant (or even remotely close to responsible/stable enough to consider caring for another human being) to enjoy a giant pillow that surrounds and supports your whole body! Here are some top recs that you can purchase, and then remove from any “pregnancy"-specific packaging, and gift to your depressed loved one, calling it something like a “perfectly adequate person who is not lacking anything meaningful in their adult life” pillow

5. A FRAMED LIST OF PEOPLE WHO GOT SUCCESSFUL LATER IN LIFE

When I was 14, the movie Lords of Dogtown made me depressed. When those Lords were in junior high they were already famous for being really good at an extremely cool sport. And what was I doing? Playing a desktop PC game called Howrse where you design, raise and breed virtual horses.

:(

I don’t know if it’s a symptom of depression, narcissism or both but I often find myself googling the ages of celebrities who have nothing to do with me or my life just to check how old they were when they became rich and famous. As the browser loads the results, I brace myself for an answer that will either crush my spirits or make me feel a little better about my current life circumstances, like hey Jon Hamm was 36 when he got his big break! That means I still have 2 years left to become Jon Hamm!!!

6. DRY SHAMPOO

Another unimpeachable gift option for your depressed pal is dry shampoo, aka stuff that makes dirty hair look clean!

If your favorite depressed person, like me, has co-occurring OCD, I recommend a powdered dry shampoo since I vaguely remember hearing aerosols linked to cancer and anything that could vaguely be linked to anything has the potential to ruin an OCD person’s day or week or month or year(s).

My hair stylist told me The Crown Affair Dry Shampoo is the gold standard in luxury powdered dry shampoos and it comes with a little brush that you can use to really shellack that powder deep into the greasiest, most bed-worn of roots.

I also love The Crown Affair Texturizing Air Dry Mousse because it magically gives my hair some volume on days when the sound and weight of a hair dryer feel impossibly oppressive.

7. A READING LIGHT / NOISE CANCELING HEADPHONES

Insomnia-related items! For those depressed whose ruminating kicks in the moment their head hits the pillow, consider a Bookmark Style Reading Light or noise canceling headphones! If you have the burden of sharing a bed with a depressed person, you might want to gift the noise canceling headphones to yourself, to block out all the audible sighs and deliberate rustling your partner is sure to stir up, hoping to highlight how unfair it is that sleep seems to come sooo easily for you.

8. SOMETHING TO READ

I recommend Margot’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe for a fun, well-written escape and The Gilded Razor by Sam Lansky for my depressed/addict combo comrades and honestly All Fours by Miranda July was worth the hype IMO. I also really enjoy Miranda July’s substack. She wrote this week, of her younger years: “I was twenty-nine and completely under the hoof of all the things I wanted and would somehow have to make happen within the next ten years.” Dispatch from under the hoof: IT SUCKS DOWN HERE!

My new friend Alberto writes great book reviews over on Well-Read and Overfed. Check it out!

9. A GLUCOSE MONITOR AND NINJA CREAMI SWIRL

According to my recent google search history (see Exhibit B)…

…A depressed person was at one point interested in these two contradictory, or perhaps complementary items - an ice cream maker and a blood sugar monitor. Science says there’s a non-zero chance the depressed person in your life will be interested in them as well.

10. SOMETHING PREVIOUSLY OWNED BY A DEAD PERSON

Returning to the DSM-5, another symptom of depression is:

“Inappropriate guilt (which may be delusional) nearly every day (not merely self-reproach or guilt about being sick).”

I appreciate the DSM-5’s implication here that a moderate amount of self-reproach is appropriate and that us depressed folk should feel at least a little bit guilty about being depressed.

As previously mentioned, being annoying is my most chronic depression symptom and part of how I live with that symptom is by constantly apologizing for it, to the extent that my apologies for being annoying become more annoying than the annoying behaviors themselves.

My depression tells me I don’t deserve anything good, and that anything good I do receive will be taken away from me immediately, so there’s really no point in celebrating it anyway. (Invite me to your parties!!! I’m a blast.)

You might think purchasing something extra special and shiny and expensive for your depressed loved one will boost them out of their rut, which - hey, maybe! But it’s more likely they will look up the price of the item, measure that number against the endless blob of worthlessness they see in the mirror, and fall deep into a spiral of “inappropriate guilt”.

If your ego insists on getting your beloved sad sack something big, I recommend purchasing it from an estate sale. That way, when the “You shouldn’t have, I don’t deserve this, I deserve nothing more than rat-regurgitated sewer trash” spiral starts, you can put a stop to it with a firm statement that this item used to belong to a dead person and was therefore purchased well below market value.

I’m a huge fan of AuctionNinja.Com , an online estate sale marketplace where I’ve purchased a chaise lounge for $1, a headboard for $60, and four sewing machines for $43. My apartment feels a little extra haunted and a bit cluttered by all the sewing machines, but my mind can rest knowing I can’t and won’t have nice things unless they came cheap because they used to belong to a dead person.

11. FLEXIBILITY

Loving a depressed person means letting go of the results. Be flexible in your standards and try not to hold your depressed person accountable to any declarative statements like, “I’m going to get really into sewing this year!” They might do as they say, or they might bring home four sewing machines to your small one bedroom apartment and leave them stacked, collecting dust in a corner for weeks, even months on end and THAT’S OKAY! The fleeting belief in a new version of themselves, a fantastical version that hand-crafts funky halloween costumes and elegant table dressings, helped get your depressed person through an entire weekend - and that’s priceless.

Trust me, there’s nothing to be gained from following up on the purpose of the hypothetical sewing machines and don’t you dare try to move them. It’s imperative that the hypothetical machines are left stacked where the hypothetical depressed person left them, just in case the hypothetical depressed person randomly decides to pick up that dusty old hobby one day. One of the best gifts you can give a depressed person is the illusion of order.

12. SUBSCRIPTIONS

Just as the depressed cannot be held responsible for the hobbies they invest in on a chaotic whim, no depressed person should ever put themselves in the position of being responsible for a subscription.

The energy required to subscribe to something is fueled by dopamine, the instant satisfaction of getting to READ FURTHER or LISTEN SOONER or WATCH NOW WITHOUT ADS! The energy required to unsubscribe is weighed down by shameful facts - the depressed brain is much too fragile to take a good, hard look at the reality of what it agreed to pay $2.99 or $4.99 or $9.99 to consume.

If left to navigate the modern subscription landscape alone, the depressed person risks paying to get beyond the paywall of a podcast their ex boyfriend was on as a guest, then forgetting their Patreon login and continuing to fund said “comedy” podcast for years, with no end in sight, and no way to justify the expenditure besides telling themselves they are a “benefactor” of the “arts” and a “supporter” of “small businesses.”

This holiday season, I beg you to consider paying for a subscription for your depressed loved one, so they don’t have to!!!

You’re going to want to steer clear of any food-related “cheese of the month” subscription options, because food expires, evoking the absurd brevity of life on earth and the foolishness of our pitiful human attempts to make meaning of it.

May I suggest instead gifting your loved one a paid subscription to a substack!?!?!

I highly recommend Experimental History by Adam Mastroianni - he writes insightful and hilarious studies on human behavior that almost always make me feel better about being human. Two of my recent faves of his are The drug that taught me how much I should suffer and The Decline of Deviance. Experimental history was recommended to me by Hallie Haglund of That Hurt My Feelings, recent fave: Who Watched It Better?

Shout out to Antonia Cereijido’s wonderful new substack for breaking the news of Dick Cheney’s death to me in her birth announcement.

I enjoy the takes of Sema Karaman, particularly this one on Elizabeth Gilbert and, like thousands of my peers, I was Recently Radicalized By father_karine!

Listening to the podcasts of Casey & Danielle’s Garbage World has truly, chemically improved my mood on several occasions since I first started listening to them in 2015 and their Bravo takes are, in my opinion, unparalleled. A paid subscription is beyond worth it!

For podcasts I also love Maintenance Phase, a friend of mine whose taste I deeply trust recently recommended JENNAWORLD and I think I am going to start listening to Posting Through It because my Lexapro has kicked in enough that I can take on a bit of political commentary.

The NUMBER ONE subscription I recommend gifting a depressed person for the holidays is PEACOCK PREMIUM, BABY!!!!!!!

Peacock has everything. It lacks nothing. It handled a true crime show with tact, it airs the best awards show our culture has to offer, and for a small premium fee, it’ll give your depressed loved one the entire Bravo library commercial free.

Recommended depression watch: the latest season of Married At First Sight (which is basically the original, better Love is Blind).

While Netflix seems to cast Love Is Blind with the sole intent of giving the most cancellable hair stylists in the country a platform, Married At First Sight maintains a layer of legitimacy by employing a team of “experts” to match couples together. The result is still a dumpster fire, but one that at least doesn’t let you smell the burning trash until the latter half of the season.

Married At First Sight Season 19 features one couple in their sixties, three couples in their 20s-30s and even a mother daughter pair. I won’t spoil anything else, but there is a grown adult man in the cast who actively cries when his new wife admits she may never want to attend Burning Man with him:

That’s all I have to suggest! This is sure to be a tough stretch for us serotonin-challenged but I promise these holidays, too, shall pass!

What could possibly be more humiliating than launching a substack? Announcing the “rebrand” of your substack!

I’ve changed the name of my publication and it would be weird not to acknowledge that, right? I’m calling it “Light Disorder” because someone recently referred to my essays as “light takes on disordered behavior” and that felt… true. Rest assured, I will always be 4 the Drama, spiritually.

I started this substack over two years ago in August of 2023 and a lot has changed for me since then. A lot seems to change for me constantly, and I’m not sure if that’s just the nature of life or if it’s the nature of my specific personality. Perhaps my relentless metamorphoses are symptomatic of the several “disorders” I’ve been diagnosed with over the years (eating disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, substance use disorder, panic disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, etc.) “Obnoxious, repellent behavior” could be considered a symptom of every one of these conditions, and so when I tell you I’m “recovered”, or “sober now”, or “trying exposure therapy” or “on a new SSRI”, what I’m really saying is “Um no. Whomever I was when you last saw or thought about me is no longer me. I’m the new Devin.”

I DO NOT regret starting this substack when I did, but this fall I enrolled in my first real writing class (ever) and I’m learning that I have a lot to learn?!?

Of course I wish I’d done this whole thing differently now, but I do trust that whatever I purged here in the past two years served a purpose.

On day one of my writing class our teacher commented on the importance of “time”. She advised allowing “time” to pass before writing about a breakup, for example, to avoid taking on a bitter, angry tone. Okay why didn’t anyone tell me that sooner?!?

I am whole-heartedly committed to writing honestly about my feelings and experiences, because I don’t really know another way to write and because I’ve come to rely on the honest, vulnerable writing of others to help me make sense of my pain. But I’m beginning to understand the point in putting space between feeling and publication.

In the span of May 2022 to May 2023, I experienced three breakups with two different people and then arrived at the traffic-cone-orange gates of substack brimming with material of the “why are men?!?!?” variety. Now, two years later, I’ve realized there’s more freedom to be mined from the question “why was I?!?!??” Why did I enter into these relationships, why did I stay, why did I end them and then restart them again and then end them again and post seven million pointed quotes and transparent thirst traps on instagram in between?

I wish I’d done a little more unpacking before I took my resentments to public text, and though I will never stop writing about my relationships and breakups, I am now much more conscious of the urge to justify my own resentments under the guise of “female rage”.

So anyway, that was the old me. And this is the new me. For now.

On the topic of updates, here are some photos to commemorate my summer as we are now well into the depths of my favorite season (fall):

That’s all for now! Hope you’ll continue reading (perhaps even liking, sharing, upgrading your subscription to) this newsletter with its new title! LIGHT DISORDER!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

Happy weekend! Due to the exhausting way in which I choose to live (under the assumption that everyone in my orbit is on the verge of realizing I am undeserving of good things), it feels very risky to write a list of suggestions and reccommendations. It is vulnerable to recommend because recommending implies people value my opinions and since self-loathing is my comfort zone, I’d prefer to hide under the assumption that one or more people might see this list and think “why would anyone take a reccommendation from her? Who does she think she is, Gwyneth Paltrow?” Well, I don’t think I am Gwyneth, okay? All we have in common is nepotism and an affinity for cigarettes.

Nevertheless, I shall share the following suggestions, despite all the naysayers I’ve conjured up in my brain, because I hear this type of list is a good way to gain subscribers.

WHAT I’M WATCHING

BELOW DECK
The newest season of Below Deck (regular, though I also dabble in Med, Sailing Yacht, and Down Under) has been a pretty dramatic and fairly horny one, with lots of rich, awful yacht guests getting exposed for being rich and awful.

The rich people always think they will come across as chic and cool and fun! Then their literal shit stains and sloppy, drunken demands for MORE CHAMPAGNE are memorialized, forever on Peacock. It’s…magnificent.

This year’s star of the yacht crew is Solene, a beautiful, former French Love Island contestant with seemingly zero work experience.

Solene quickly hooks up with a male deckhand, then shortly therafter with a female deckhand, then with the male deckhand again, which causes the female deckhand to feel scorned enough to vengefully kiss Barbara, Solene’s roommate/co-stewardess, in turn making Solene jealous enough to kiss a DIFFERENT male deckhand in front of everyone.

Of the group, I unfortunately don’t identify with any of the hot, cool hooking up people. I see myself in “Rainbeau”, the American girl no one likes, whom experienced a full blown panic attack over having to vacuum.

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF ORANGE COUNTY

Before you watch Below Deck Regular, I suggest setting aside as much time as possible to catch up on The Real Housewives of OC. I’ve been a late bloomer in nearly every aspect of my life, but I can proudly say that I was an avid (more like rabid) Bravo viewer from the very first episode of the very first season of Real Housewives. At age 14, a lifelong passion was born in me as I watched Lauri picking up her son from Juvenile Hall, and Jo attempting to rekindle her failing marriage with Slade.

Over the years, the Orange County franchise has lost its luster, but this season, a pathological liar is involved…. and liars are my favorite genre of entertainment. Which brings me to…

LOVE. CON. REVENGE.

This is a new Netflix series following Cecilie Fjellhoy, the romance fraud victim at the center of the hit docuseries TINDER SWINDLER. Not unlike Nev Schulman, Cecilie takes to the streets in this new show, teaming up with a female Private Investigator to expose the perpetrators of romance fraud scams across the U.S.

The series brings moments of humor…

…and heart.

If you’ve read my substack before, you know I foster a deep, enduring desire to expose the wrongdoings of men, and Love Con Revenge makes me feel less alone in that desire. As Cecilie, our graceful Norwegian guide explains, it’s nearly impossible to achieve legal recourse for love fraud cases, but exposing these men (on Netflix, no less) can “stop them in their tracks”, so that they are unable to claim further victims. That’s what this show is about and it will take you all the way from a fake wellness center called “Sanjara” to a world renowned “geek convention” and everywhere in between. DO NOT MISS THIS SHOW.

Honorable mention to the high school catfish documentary, of course.

WHAT I’M READING

Check out my Goodreads :), where I recently gave five stars to All Fours by Miranda July and Good Material by Dolly Alderton. I also just finished re-reading the book Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld - a huge hit from my adolescence. Her writing describes the social anxiety that plagued my youth in such remarkably accurate detail, I can feel it in my bones. From the book:

“As the weather got nicer, seniors were outside on the circle constantly…Why didn’t I ever join them? I wanted to, but there would be that one unbearable moment after I approached when I stood on the fringes of the group, and they would shade their eyes and wonder why I was there. There was something I would have to say, there was a place in the grass I would have to sit, a posture I would have to sit in. For other people, these decisions seemed effortless, not decisions at all; for me, they had never stopped being decisions.”

I also recently picked up Rehab: An American Scandal by Shoshana Walter and am excited to read it because I have a lot of life experience in and opinions on the inner workings of the “recovery” industry. Will report back.

WHAT I’M USING

Product recs!!! Yay!!

One singular person in a dimly lit room recently asked me what my skincare routine is, and since I regularly scroll on my phone late into the night, until I’m too tired to wash my face, I can only attribute the appearance of my skin to the “makeup-free” makeup routine I’ve been doing. Here’s my step by step “getting ready” process with PHOTOS INCLUDED! Content warning: I am not good at this, but I do my best to listen to people who are good at it, especially Berlant & Novak podcast.

In my core, I will forever be a crusty college girl, slouching cross-legged on the floor in front of a door-hanging mirror, applying my makeup at super-speed while pregaming with shots of cotton candy vodka. I’m now over a year sober (again), but her essence refuses to leave me.

So, here’s me at step one before anything:

Step one, I mix a few drops of ILIA super serum skin tint in “Rendezvous” with a generous squeeze of Ciele prime & protect and I rub it all over my face, neck and chest and ears and back of my neck and hands (because all of these areas need sun protection for me!)

Next, I powder it up with Laura Mercier Translucent Loose Setting Powder.

And I add a little LYS Beauty Higher Standard Cream Glow Blush Stick in “bubbly” which was hawked to me via Bethenny Frankel’s tik tok. Sometimes, not all the time, I’ll throw on some Charlotte Tilbury Legendary Brow Gel and Lancome Lash Idole Lash Lifting Volumizing Mascara. And folks, behold the “Before & After” (I messed this up and forgot to take a final profile shot, so the “after” profile is after the skin tint, primer, powder and blush but before brows and lashes):

Top it off with this:

That’s all I can suggest this Saturday! Tune in next week for my hair care routine I guess?

When Donald Trump was elected President for the first time, I was 24 and living with my then-boyfriend in an overpriced apartment in downtown Manhattan. I got home from work on election night and smoked cigarettes and cried and posted something on my instagram stories that if I saw now, would likely render me catatonic with cringe—something ascribing racism and misogyny to Trump voters in myopic terms like IF U VOTED 4 TR*MP U HATE ME BECAUSE I AM A WHITE WOMAN AND THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME SO JUST PLS UNFOLLOW ME BECAUSE U HATE EVERYTHING I LOVE AND U R EVIL. It wasn’t exactly that but you can imagine the horrendous vibes this gal must’ve published from her iPhone 5c:

My then-boyfriend woke me up the morning after the election, angry not at the results, but at me. He showed me his family group chat celebrating Trump’s win. One of his siblings wrote, “don’t look at Devin’s instagram stories” and a conversation about my “offensive” words ensued. My boyfriend expained that he woke me up so I could delete the instagram stories immediately. This wasn’t the first time he’d asked me to delete or change my posts. We met in a mutual community from which he drew a lot of clients for his business, and he often expressed concern that my online presence might reflect badly on him.

I would call out the hypocrisy in dating a 24-year-old and then complaining about having a partner with impulsive and often irrational social media habits, but the first time we hooked up was after a party he threw, for which the theme was “America”. It was not the fourth of July. In retrospect, we both chose each other despite our values.

After I broke up with this man, he wrote to me in a plea to get back together and apologized for not supporting my “passion for politics” and for taking a “bullshit middle ground approach”. He wrote, “I have already started to read about politics, feminism, travel and other things…just out of curiosity…and it is all very interesting…”

Indeed…it…is………

Three years and one and a half boyfriends later, I fell in love with a twitter influencer who built his following on condemning the cruelty of republicans and the hypocrisy of the political media landscape. He had progressive views and went to journalism school and won awards for writing about mass shootings and the spread of dangerous misinformation. We agreed on all the right policy points and I was never nervous about what he might say in conversation at a party, though, in retrospect, he often made cruel jokes at the expense of my friends, family, and (most often) me.

One night in 2020, he asked me how I could morally justify still talking to some of my family members who voted for Trump. He insisted that if any of his family members did, they would be cut out of his life. I tried to explain how it felt more complicated and nuanced than that, but he dismissed my opinion, claiming that Trump’s policies and beliefs did not directly impact me the way they did him, so I must not have a true understanding of the administration’s evil. I thought about watching the confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh a couple of years prior to this conversation.

That night in my parents’ kitchen, in the height of the pandemic, arguing again about how politics should play into family relations, I felt the same activation of fight-or-flight defense mechanisms that arose in me with my other ex the morning after the election. In both relationships, there only seemed to be room for one point of view, and it was rarely my own. I’d chosen two very different men who both consistently reaffirmed my lack of self-confidence by using opposite language to convey that their love and respect was something I could earn, but didn’t inherently deserve.

The couple of years I spent involuntarily single in my early thirties are a haze of arrested development, eyelash extensions, and social gatherings spent staring down at my own instagram story views. I was on all the apps and I was on them a lot. I went on a date with an ethically non-monogomous couple in Clinton Hill who quoted Dan Savage at me. I paid for Hinge premium and constantly rewrote my answers to prompts about my dating goals and personality, intent on distinguishing myself from all the girls who “could be found petting the dog at the party”.

During those years, I read hundreds if not thousands of profiles written by Brooklyn’s millenial men. They had tiny tattoos and group photos at Jacob Riis beach with their platonic female friends and they told me to “keep swiping” if I wasn’t in therapy or educating myself on capitalism’s many evils. The most common political preference I came across on the apps at the time was not liberal or conservative, but “other”, which inferred some form of socialism or anarchism or combination of the two I hadn’t yet heard of.

The presence of the older men I dated in my twenties filled me with an urge to be in on the American Pie reference without questioning its inherent prejudices. Not laughing at the joke felt like a threat, like it would instantly position me outside the realm of desire, as a living reminder of the feelings they didn’t want to feel—vulnerability and accountability. In 2023, the men I met within a few mile radius of my Brooklyn apartment seemed equally intent on avoidance of self-reflection, but through the alternate mechanism of schooling me on the systems of oppression they’d read enough about to ensure they weren’t complicit in.

On a late summer sunday in 2023, I stood up and excused myself ten minutes into a coffee date with a tattoo-sleeved cartoonist in East Williamsburg. His response to my mention of attending The Eras Tour was a spoken manifesto on why he couldn’t personally justify listening to Taylor Swift. “She literally has the power to end the conflict between Israel and Palestine” he said into his oat milk cortado, “but she chooses not to.” I asked him who he listens to that meets his standard of political activism. He mumbled for a beat before uttering, “Bjork”. I cut the date short, not because I don’t like Bjork, but because I had finally been through enough therapy to prioritize self-respect over the fragile feelings of terrified men, regardless of whether they follow Barstool Sports or can quote Angela Davis.

CLICHÉ | noun [us /kliːˈʃeɪ/ uk /ˈkliː.ʃeɪ/] | something or someone that is not at all original, surprising, or interesting because it has very often been seen before. 1

I’m not a scientist, but I think it’s anthropologically fair to say that every forty year-old man who conducts an annual rewatch of The Sopranos wants to believe Tony’s combination of bravado and neuroses appeals specifically and uniquely to him. He sees, reflected back at him, the same themes that plague the life he has built, in his studio apartment lined with all the history books he reads to feel feelings he’ll never fully explore.

He makes self-deprecating jokes upon discovering an old birthday card used as a bookmark, signed by yet another ex-believer of the empty promises he made to sacrifice his ego, to open his heart, to change, to settle down like all his friends did years ago. But, of course, he can’t. Or won’t. He chooses to invest in a chain necklace instead, a fine line tattoo, and some vintage movie posters. His individuality is somehow bound to staying the same. Repeating patterns. He sees Tony, and therefore himself, as an antihero, rather than what’s blatantly depicted in every scene - just another grown man, childlike in his fear of self-reflection.

The desire to be unique is embedded in human nature, and is, therefore, not unique at all. We are all predestined to become unorginial, no matter how meticulously we curate our feeds.

I am a cliché. I am a cat lady and I live alone. I am Irish and I am an alcoholic. I am a privileged nepo adult and I constantly try to convince myself and others that I’m paving my own way. I am a millennial white woman and I love Taylor Swift songs and pumpkin spice flavoring and therapy and Real Housewives and switching my Hinge profile to “bisexual” for a few months before settling down with a man. 

And when I was twenty, I dated a thirty year old finance guy, and truly believed that I was not too young for him. I believed I was unique, because I was an “old soul”. 

At some point in my preteen years, I began manifesting true love for myself. I remember lying in bed under a Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone poster, extending my right hand and placing my left hand inside of it so I could imagine the hand belonged to someone else who wanted to be close to me.

Seventh grade would be my year for closeness. Okay, nevermind, eighth grade would be my year. I would get my first kiss. It would be perfect. He wouldn’t mind my braces or my big nose or my excessive sweating, because he would know the REAL me. We would teach each other how to go to second base. We would both enjoy spending weekends compiling lists of what we planned to name our future pets. Okay, nevermind. High school would be different. Okay, well maybe the boys in college would care less about looks and popularity. They would understand me better. Okay, turns out it’s hard for anyone to understand you when you’re getting blackout drunk on a daily basis. 

When I first got sober at age twenty, one of my main motivations was to find the love that had evaded me for so long. Things would REALLY be different now that I’d made the decision to stop actively harming myself and others with a dangerous addiction. I showed up to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings dressed for the club, wearing American Apparel crop tops and bodycon skirts and a full face of makeup, just waiting to be noticed.

Men already at rock bottom seemed like the perfect dating pool for me to find a willing contender. It annoyed me that so many of them were deterred by my “day count”. Only ten days sober. Twenty. Thirty. Come on, that was an eternity! Why didn’t anyone want to bring me home to their mother yet? I repeatedly told my AA sponsor that she could not understand what I was going through, because she had a boyfriend and I did not. I celebrated my first 90 days sober at a bar, using my fake ID to follow around an emotionally unavailable man. But I did not drink, and three months later, my boyfriend arrived. 

My first AA boyfriend and I were both considered “newcomers” among the AA community, with around six months of sobriety each. My sponsor inadvertently set us up by telling me this thirty year old man from our homegroup had a crush on me. The man’s sponsor “fired” him for violating some rule about not dating before achieving a year of sobriety. I truly don’t think I would have been able to stay sober if I had NOT dated in the first year. I certainly wasn’t going to stay sober for myself (someone I deeply hated at the time), so it helped to have someone else to stay sober for, and to meet up with at the Big Book study for date night, while most of my peers were graduating college, exploring open relationships and cocaine. 

For our first date, he invited me to The Guggenheim Museum. He had some sort of museum membership pass from the bank he used to work for (getting fired from there helped land him in AA, which I totally understood because I had recently been asked, officially, by my college, to leave campus and seek immediate medical attention). I showed up forty-five minutes late, didn’t understand anything he said about any of the paintings, and promptly asked him to buy me a brownie from the museum cafe. It might have occurred to him then that we were not both newcomers. He was an adult and I was a twenty year-old, and a twenty year-old is still a twenty year-old, with or without the booze. 

Nevertheless, the relationship progressed. We became exclusive. We said we loved each other and I had no reference for the feeling, but it seemed fine enough! He bought me a Swarovski ring. I got high on the idea of being in a relationship, proving to the world that someone finally wanted to hold my hand! I had value! I had someone to participate in constant instagram photo ops with and, yes, even Vines. We celebrated the birth of his best friend’s child. We celebrated my admission back into undergrad. On our one year anniversary, I wore a purple bandage dress and sat in his lap for a self-timed pic. Then, I downed a Monster energy drink and three or four Marlboro reds before dinner. I had really made it. 

Once I got a boyfriend, though, I kind of felt like… “Is this it?” After two decades? This was what I’d been manifesting? I couldn’t figure out how to have an orgasm and I couldn’t figure out how to tell him that without melting into the hardwood floor, never to return to his jumbo one bedroom with outdoor space again.

Tinder launched and my friends were making connections and making mistakes and trying threesomes. I was having dinner with my boyfriend’s middle aged step siblings on the Upper West Side, feeling slightly uncomfortable when his preteen niece said she liked my Hello Kitty backpack, because the compliment seemed to remind everyone that I was closer in age to her than to my “partner”. I was never totally comfortable around his friends and family. I could tell they didn’t respect me, and I couldn’t quite understand why. What made them so superior? So sure of themselves? So comfortable wearing colors like Camel and Charcoal? 

Somewhere along the way, maybe on that one car ride when he turned down the volume right in the middle of Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper” so he could explain to me how wind turbines work, I understood what I needed to do. I don’t remember if it was a few weeks or a few months later, but I asked my friend to come with me to break up with him (she waited downstairs). I cried and blew my nose all over my American Apparel crop top. He didn’t cry at all. He said something about not being surprised or having a feeling this would happen. Eventually he texted me that I was making a mistake. I knew that I wasn’t.

A few weeks later, I asked a friend what she thought my now ex-first-boyfriend might be telling his friends about the breakup. “Probably just that you’re too young and not ready for a relationship”, she said. Huh. I’d never thought of it that way. 

Years later, in getting to know a new roommate, I regaled her with the story of my second failed relationship, with my second AA boyfriend, who was not ten but eight years older than me. My roommate said, as if agreeing with me, “there’s something inherently wrong with men who date much younger women”. I had not, until then, understood my romantic history to be proof of a commonplace social construct. I felt my deeply complicated experiences suddenly condense into one, simple, trivial truth. I was just the younger woman. A cliché in a bandage dress, reeking of cigarettes and Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume, desparately trying to skip ahead to the next chapter of adulthood, as if I could somehow just BECOME thirty by osmosis, and avoid the pain of being too old to be considered a kid, but too young to be respected as an adult, deeply believing I knew everything about the way the world worked and not understanding why the world wouldn’t listen. 

Of course, it was not that simple. Nothing is that simple. I walked a completely unoriginal path in my own, original way, wearing Steve Madden sneaker wedges, and I was not alone. I love bonding with other women about all the cliché paths we’ve found ourselves on, and the ones we will likely stumble into again. About all the ways we have been the same, and completely original, all at once. I wonder if the older men of my past have been able to find similar comfort in cliché community, or if they’re still out there, somewhere, convincing themselves that the twenty something girl they’re bringing home for Thanksgiving is “different”, “an old soul”, “likes Scorcese movies and listens to Radiohead” and “somehow, coincidentally, doesn’t present any adult challenges or needs”.