“Cancel culture.” Members of the American right are outraged by it. Cries of “cancel culture” are pretty much guaranteed to rile the faithful. This is a complicated thing, in part because American conservatives have started throwing around accusations of “cancel culture” for ordinary free market activity and in part because “cancel culture” is a new name for a very old thing that goes back at least to Biblical times, and probably as far back as humans had language.
First, what cancel culture is not. Cancel culture is not someone choosing not to buy a product because they don’t like the…
I’m an optimist. I see the best in everything. I look at the world through rose-colored glasses.
As I’ve spent the last two years unpacking the wreckage of my last relationship, I’ve learned a difficult, damning lesson: When you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, red flags just look like flags.
Looking back over that relationship now, with the clarity of hindsight, I see a thousand red flags, a thousand warning signs that should have warned me—that might have warned someone more clear-eyed than I was—that this relationship was bound to be toxic.
Some of those red flags will…
As I write this, it’s been three years and sixteen days since I escaped my relationship with my former partner and co-author, the woman I thought I would be with for the rest of my life. It simultaneously feels like it happened a lifetime ago and just yesterday.
When I stepped into my therapist’s office for the first time, the very first thing I said to her, before we even did any paperwork or introduced ourselves, was “I’m not okay.” Months had gone by since I’d left, and I was slowly dragging myself, step by step, nightmare by nightmare, from…
My hands are shaking as I write this.
I still have nightmares, multiple times a week.
I’ve struggled to get these words out of my head for more than a year now. I thought I was ready a while back to talk about all this, but I guess I wasn’t. Maybe I’m still not. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever written, but I can’t stay silent anymore.
On one of my first dates with my ex and former co-author, as we walked down a road that would later inspire the name of our publishing company Thorntree Press…
