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Joan Mitchell, Row Row, 1982

Did you know that there's two types of shame? Appropriate shame is what you feel when you are scolded as a child before doing something dangerous in order to keep you safe and teach you a lesson; this shame is useful because it imparts a lesson. The key to this kind of shame is that there is supposed to be an immediate repair where the parent attunes to the child and reinforces that they are loved and safe and didn't do anything wrong. Core shame includes the first part of appropriate shame without the repair—more than that, it's the repetition of that first part even when it's not called for. There's no attunement, no repair, no gentleness, nothing but the shame instilling that the child is bad, that they are the problem. It becomes a brain's operating system, running the same program over and over in every situation: "This is your fault. You're not good enough. There's something wrong with you. The way you feel is wrong." There's no uninstall on this program but there are patches. There's awareness, there's repair, there's reexperiencing that can be done with a safe other. You can work to override what you were shipped out into the world with; you don't need to annihilate yourself just because someone fucked up your install.

And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

*This contains spoilers for the first season of Yellowjackets, reader beware*

Are you one of the many people obsessed with Showtime's Yellowjackets? Were you a teenage girl at some point in your life? Are you now years removed from that time in your life and still processing the liminal existence of those years? Welcome.

cw: blood

No really, what year is it? It feels like we've been in an extra long 2020 but then before it felt like we were in a mega length 2017 and I honestly don't know. No clue! I had big plans to come back in 2022 with A Plan™ or a better sense of what to do with this space and that's still unclear. You can blame the holidays or the arrival of Omicron but I feel pushed back into a place with bare walls and no direction. I was going to write about mental health more exclusively because we all have mental health stuff to deal with whether we have a diagnosis or not. I was going to revive the YE instagram account! I was going to make memes and shit posts. I still might, who's to say, but the thing is that I started thinking of this as not just a project but a product. I don't blame myself for that because that's the way of the Western world under capitalism but that's not what I'm trying to do as a psychotherapist in training and honestly especially as a writer. I think YE in its many iterations has been best when it's been wavy and unconstrained and sort of organic, like drawing a shape with a soft charcoal and no pencil markings to guide you. YE is a separate entity but it's also me and my thoughts and my stories, nothing more, nothing less—here to connect with as opposed to consume. Basically I'm going to do this and I'm not going to overthink every single newsletter I send out; they will not all be essays, they will not all have some overarching theme, they will be stories and thoughts as they come. I'm less concerned about trying to get you to subscribe (although I have no job so I won't stop you, you know?) and more about thinking authentically and sending you notes that may resonate during these very very very unprecedented times. Anyways, here's Wonderwall.

I was talking to my friend Jamie yesterday and we were saying how tired we feel which honestly makes sense. It's winter, the planet's on fire, the pandemic rages on, companies and governments are trying to force people to work and school, telling us everything is fine even though we know, we know, that nothing is fine. I think our bodies are hibernating due to the state of the world as much as the season. Neither he nor I are working right now and yet we still feel this deep almost biological need to rest. We aren't the only people I've heard this from lately and it feels bad. I'm focusing on school and am ok right now but he's having to start thinking about looking for work. Things are hard and they feel like they've been hard for a while; at what point do we ask ourselves why we keep living like this? When do we break down the systems in place? It bums me out that there doesn’t seem to be much if any space to take the time to be gentle with ourselves. It feels incredibly messed up right now that we have to work in order to have food, shelter, healthcare. It feels bleak. As a kid, I understood the world wasn't great but it felt infinitely more hopeful than it does right now. There's a strange sense that the field I'm training in is multifaceted. It feels like even though the work is literally connecting with one person at a time face to face, it still involves these larger systems:

It is 2022. 2022! Things still feel weird and bad due to Omicron and it turns out deja vu can feel a lot like nausea in this kind of circumstance. I'm still getting a hold of myself so we will reconvene for something more substantial next week. Until then, do you want to know my favorites (not necessarily from 2021) from 2021? Of course you do.

Favorite Books I Read

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Elizabeth Lennie, Dream State, 2013

You know when things are going the way you expected and then something blows it off course but you try to steady the ship and keep going as if everything’s the same? I most definitely do. I’ve had many feelings since my layoff from the high energy almost mania of disbelief to just a complete exhaustion I can feel in my bones. Added to this is the feeling of stretching and growing in sometimes huge ways due to my training program. Do you remember the feeling when you were 13 or 14 and you could feel the ache in your body as you literally grew? That’s how everything right down to my soul feels these days.

At first I tried to go with the flow and stay busy and just keep pushing through how I was feeling and ignore what everything in my body was saying; it led to some moments I’m not proud of. I dropped the care I had gotten better at providing myself and I felt myself become dysregulated in a way I haven’t been in a while. For a bit, I’ve wondered what would happen if I reverted back to the way I lived my life before learning how to take care of myself and this brief moment gave me the answer: it’s not great! Self care isn’t pedicures and bubble baths for me (and many of us I’d wager), it’s chopping vegetables ahead of time so dinner doesn’t feel overwhelming, it’s getting 8 hours of sleep, it’s stretching and taking a walk in the morning, it’s listening to the ridiculous app that checks whether I’m drinking water throughout the day, it’s setting boundaries so I don’t doom scroll myself into anxiety and dissociation. Honestly, it’s such basic stuff but it gives me a sense of being on steady ground; I’m more important than what I produce. I won’t set myself on fire to keep anyone or anything else warm.

I’m actively trying to track how I’m feeling these days because that’s something you need to be able to do as a therapist. To sit with someone else and create the container to hold them and everything they’re feeling. You can’t be checked out and you can’t not be in your body so I’m learning how to trust and stay in my body and the self care is a huge part of that. It’s the foundation of all that, really. All of that to say that I’m listening to my body and listening to the environment; it’s getting darker and we are turning inwards, we are trying to rest. We live in a culture that tries to keep going despite the natural world and for maybe the first time in my life, I’m trying to not resist the urge to rest and care for myself. The right instinct is there even if we’ve been told to fight against it.

In many ways, this layoff feels like a blessing. I am about to have time and space to not just rest but to really nurture myself and get much better at tracking how I feel. I’m going to be able to focus on myself and my program and my writing and how it’s changing and evolving. I’ll be honest, for the past few months I thought You’ve Escaped was coming to an end. I felt myself changing, I felt my life changing, and I just didn’t know where it was going which made me very uncomfortable. I was right in a way: it is coming to an end but I think it’s just the end of a season. You’ve Escaped will return but it’ll change because I’m changing—we’re all changing, I hope. I’m in the nesting and resting and creating stage and I’m excited again about the work I do here and to share it with you all in the new year. Until then, I’m going to listen to the light and the air and take a much needed break; hibernation, if you will. You’ve Escaped, in what will be another of its forms, will return on Wednesday January 5th, 2022. If you are a paid subscriber, your subscription will be extended by 6 weeks to honor this needed break in content. I appreciate the support from all of you who can contribute financially (now more than ever) and I want to make sure you’re getting your full year of content. Book club will still be meeting in December and I’ll be spending more time in the Slack with you all in the coming weeks to give you a sneak peak about changes that are coming.

Until then, I’ll leave you with my favorite essays from 2021 which have all been made available publicly and not just for paid subscribers, including C.R.E.A.M., my series of essays on money and class and all it brings with it. In no particular order:

• In Cars

• Midsommartime Sadness: Grieving in the Time of COVID

• Travels With My Aunt

• anthems for a teenage girl

• A spectre is haunting my body; on pride & queerness

• Lost Futures

• Nightswimming

• C.R.E.A.M. (part one)

• C.R.E.A.M. (part two)

• C.R.E.A.M. (part three)

• C.R.E.A.M. (part four)

• C.R.E.A.M. (part five)

As always, thank you for reading and see you very soon.

I took Latin for four years in high school ("it's perfect for law school or medical school!!" —my mom) and I did well but very little has stuck in my brain for some reason. The three semesters of French I took in university have stuck around more in my brain and even that one ill-fated semester of Russian made more of an impression. Maybe it's because I never really had opportunity to use it conversationally, you know? Regardless, I spent a lot of time translating the poetry of Catullus for four years in my teens and all I have to show for it really is the knowledge that the Latin word for "sheath" is vagina. The more you know.

I always used to confuse novum and novem, the former "new" and the latter "nine". I insisted they must be connected having almost the exact same letters but my Latin teachers and later on in university my linguistics professor shut that down again. The most they would ever give me was that the ancestors of the Indo-Europeans counted on the four fingers (not including the thumb) of one hand, considering the four fingers one span. Oktō meant eight and technically meaning “two spans”. The word for “nine” introduces a “new” set of four. It's barely there and it always felt like more of an out loud exercise than factual but nine and new became forever linked for me.

We were married nine years ago today which seems impossible but I think we know by now that time isn't linear. It feels very recent and also very long ago; it mostly feels like nothing has been a straight line but moving in all directions at once, often at the same time. We are two separate people but we've created a life and a family where there wasn't one before. Our plans for what that looked like have changed over the years but there's still no future, no version of this life that I can picture without you in it. We've spent a lot of time over the pandemic together at home, making our home more ours than we ever did before but sitting here this morning while you're sleeping in the next room, looking at what a lovely place we live in, I realize that you're my home—literally anywhere that you are.

Hi everyone,

So you might have noticed that there was...no You've Escaped yesterday. I'm ok, truly, but also... imagine the upside down smiley face emoji right here.

I found out I was a part of company layoffs yesterday which I have many feelings about but that's also pretty much all I can say right now.

the author in NYC, c. 2010

Anna Marie Tendler, , 2021

Helen Frankenthaler, Flood, 1967

Cy Twombly, Untitled, 1970

actual footage of me 'landing' in Canada

How are you doing? Are you having a good week? Here's stuff I think you'll like as much as I do:

cw: bodies, weight, fertility, family stuff, wls, medical, diet culture

Russell Leng, New Nature Systems 3, 2011

cw: death, illness, 9/11, mental illness

cw: pet illness, pet death, grief, death, loss, bereavement

cw: pet death, pet illness, grief

Since Sunday, Nuggy hadn’t been her usual cuddly sunny self. By the time we began calling emergency vets in the Greater Toronto Area on Monday, every single one was at capacity. We finally got her into the emergency clinic this morning and we learned that Nuggy was much sicker than anyone expected. This morning, Ian and I decided that the kindest thing for our girl was to let her go peacefully while holding her even though today (and probably ever) we can’t imagine life without her. We are so so heartbroken but we know how loved she was by us and so many others. Thank you for loving Nuggy too, sweet readers; I know she felt that love in her life and in her passing.

Elizabeth McIntosh, Cloud Minder, 2015

(if you got this email multiple times, technology blows)

Ian is pretty easygoing about my jokes and bits but the one he absolutely loses it at is when he makes a reference to Harry and the Hendersons (1987) and I purposely misunderstand one key fact about the movie.

painting by Jessica Bartram who once perfectly described Nuggy’s eyes as “Halloween-coloured” and it’s stuck

cw: death, COVID, ableism, grief, vomit, fire, medical, panic attack

It was a Sunday one year ago when my dad called me. We aren’t especially close so I thought it was just his occasional check in with me, which to be fair had become a bit more frequent with the pandemic. He was doing that thing where I could sense that he’s stressed but trying to sound calm. He told me my abuela (my mom’s mom, his former mother in law but more of a mom to him than his own) had just been taken to the hospital from the nursing home she lived at. The pandemic had affected people around me for months at that point, the connections getting closer to me all the time—it was finally here, it had gotten to my family.

for teenage girls—past present & future, some of whom i got to know, some of whom i didn’t, some of whom i’ll still get to know—but especially delaney, eloise, araluen, ines lake and me, anaïs marie, once upon a time. especially the .

img by Alexey Kondakov

romy schneider in les choses de la vie, 1970

cw: lgbtq, HIV/AIDS, death, grief, medical, tattoos

People don’t become what they were brought up to be, people become themselves. —Sarah Schulman,

Sometimes you have later than expected vaccine side effects and feel pretty crummy and just can’t seem to write. Here’s a story from a few years ago that’s been on my mind lately as I think about all the parts of the city I miss so much. See you next Wednesday. —AEM

Thursday was my first day back at work after a week off and I was drained by early afternoon. I made it through the day but by the time it was time to go home, I was feeling my joints hurt and my head hurt and I just wished I didn’t have to commute. I got to the subway station only to find the leftovers of an eastbound delay and waited in a sea of people or the next train. I noticed it came in the opposite side that everyone was expecting so I slipped quickly to the opposite side of the platform and waited where one of the doors was to open. I waited for everyone to get off the train and slipped into a seat. I watched the train fill and I hoped no one would sit next to me; I was tired and cranky and I just didn’t want any kind of human contact. With the delays, there’s no such luck and a shaky elderly black man comes and sits next to me. He’s lovely and does nothing irritating at all but anything would have bugged me right then.

It’s not the usual practice these days but this post is public as I think it may resonate in these times. —AEM

joan didion by julian wasser, 1968

Rafael Romero Barros, still life with oranges, 1863

We’ve lived in our apartment six years this year. It’s in downtown Toronto, our rent is extremely cheap by today’s and even six years ago’s standards, and our building is almost 100 years old; it’s actually the first apartment building in Toronto to have an electric buzzer! We love it here and over a year in quarantine has meant we’ve spent a lot of time in these walls and I’ve spent a lot of time doing home DIY for fun. All of those projects that got pushed back by weekend plans were suddenly the most exciting thing going on. Our entryway, bathroom, and living room (one to-be-reupholstered chair to go!) all got overhauled with paint, fabric, rugs, furniture, decluttering but the thing that remained was our kitchen—my albatross.

We sideeyed our apartment’s old kitchen floor and narrow layout when we moved in but we just kept trying to make it work by adding stuff. This just led to it feeling and actually becoming more cramped by the day. The built-in open shelves were overflowing without any sense of organization. We had doubles and triples of things because we would lose track of an item and replace it. We had too much and yet nothing we needed or wanted at all. Finally, we were home looking at it all the time and knew we had to start over.

My loneliness is killing me. — Britney Spears, “Baby One More Time”

Besides glimpses where I saw behind the curtain, I got pretty much everything I wanted when I was a kid. I was lucky but I also didn’t want a ton in the big picture; my favorite thing to ask for when I’d get good grades was more books which my family always said yes to. Our Christmas mornings were big with lots of gifts for everyone but so much of it wasn’t asked for as much as my mom thought this was the way to show love, to fit in and really be American. I was an only child with five American Girl dolls (with matching wardrobes and furniture, of course) because every year had to be outdone by the next one. I was just given stuff I didn’t need and sometimes didn’t even want. It created desires where there weren’t necessarily naturally any—created the idea that you needed stuff, specific stuff, to be valid.

You can’t learn from remembering. You can’t learn from guessing. You can learn only from moving forward at the rate you are moved, as brightness into brightness.

—Sarah Manguso,

‘I have seen this place before’. How can we do justice to this seemingly innocuous yet enigmatic statement, which exudes a strange intimacy, while simultaneously pushing at the threshold between memory and materiality? —Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

Admitting that the real is absent, that our lives can only be experienced in the past tense, and that the foundation of home is disrupted by the opposing fluctuation between the desire of the present & the perishing of the past, exile then emerges as the grounding mode of consciousness. —Dylan Trigg, The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of the Uncanny

Hi friends and comrades,

I am sick. Just with a cold thank goodness but it’s shocking to me that over a year in this pandemic and having my first vaccine dose doesn’t mean I get a break from the common cold. The audacity!

imathers: i just really want this to work out, whatever ‘this’ is and however long it takes.

Through no fault of my own besides falling in love with someone, I somehow ended up living in the Florida of Canada. You know how I know this? Because I was born and raised in Florida. It hasn’t been perfect there; spring break was observed in 2020 and 2021 and the governor is decidedly Not Good. It’s also where my abuela living in a long term care home contracted COVID and died just a few days later. But they’re getting people vaccinated faster than Ontario which is on its third lockdown with the slowest vaccine rollout known to mankind and surging cases and ICU beds filled and deaths and not prioritizing vaccinating essential workers and education staff. Shit’s bad, it’s really bad. I’ve gotten my first vaccine dose and won’t get the next until late July; even fully vaccinated, I’ll still have to be careful as I’m immunosuppressed so I’m expecting more time in my apartment.

cw: money, mental illness, addiction

my dad in Camagüey, Cuba, 1958

cw: money, abuse, corporal punishment, class

I was four years old the first time I really ever thought about money. My parents took me and my six-year-old cousin to Disney World for the weekend in my grandparents’ van. My cousin and I folded the back seats into a bed and laid on our stomachs looking out the back windshield as my dad flew up the turnpike. We spent the first day at Epcot, a night in a Days Inn, and the second and last day at Magic Kingdom. This second day became the stuff of family lore, something everyone told with a laugh, including me for most of my life.

derek jarman’s prospect cottage ie my dream home

Hi, I’m glad you’re here. I just wanted to send a quick note to check in with everyone since to .

my mom in red pants in Mexico, 1979

cw: death, grief, moms, complicated grief