Unquiet
Things

I am having a Hot Grandma Summer. I am no grandmother (I don’t even have kids let alone grandkids), and I mean Hot as in overheated and on the verge of a meltdown, not wildly attractive. Just so you know where I am coming from. But in trying to make myself as comfortable as possible over the next few months, I am taking a page from the books of grandmothers.

I am wearing capri pants, which I recall a friend making fun of a few years ago. Whatever! This hemp pair was an Instagram ad from a place called Toad & Co. and I was influenced because their models looked cool and comfortable and like their pants had air conditioning. I bought a pair for myself, and they really do feel like it! These dowdy clam diggers that end mid-calf can BREATHE. I wear them with an Iron Maiden tee shirt.

I’ve been braiding my hair back in a Princess Leia hairdo that gets it completely out of my face. Not the fancy ceremonial ones from the throne room, but the practical Hoth braids when she’s gotten down to business. My hair is long enough now that I can wrap it around itself and stick a few bobby pins in to hold everything in place. I could do a claw clip but that always looks sloppy. This is much tidier, and it is definitely a little Tasha Tudor old-fashioned (which I love), but most importantly, it keeps everything off my neck when it’s ninety-five degrees and humid, and I am sweaty and broiling and overstimulated by the feeling of hairs touching my face.

I schedule time to watch my programs. Not binge-watching or catching up on shows, but watching my programs with the gravity of someone who has made an appointment. I love the specificity of that phrase – it makes passive television consumption sound like a medical procedure or a civic duty. Currently, I’m working my way through old episodes of Midsomer Murders, which is perfect grandma viewing. Cozy English villages, murder by hedge trimmer, John Nettles looking concerned while standing next to a flower bed. It’s exactly the right pace for someone who is having an evening snack of prunes and Sleepytime tea. I’ve spent the last few years so busy reading (which I will never complain about, but) I haven’t been watching much of anything at all. Thinking about it this way makes it a little easier to step away from a book. Also, my eyes aren’t great, and I need to give them a break every once in a while!

I grow vegetables because I like to see a pile of colorful vegetables stacked high in a basket (see also spilling-over jewelry boxes and dragon’s hoards), and because there’s something deeply satisfying about eating a pepper that you watched grow from a tiny seedling into something substantial enough to stuff. This year I’ve got peppers and eggplant, which seem to handle the Florida heat better than most things. The kale proliferates with zero help from me, and I’ve got lots of herbs that I use approximately half of but I don’t feel guilty wasting them because I like to look at them and sniff them, too. Our squashes all got destroyed by vine borers, which was disappointing but not surprising. Florida heat kills a lot of stuff. Which is why next summer I think I might just try growing pretty flowers. A harvest of colorful blooms is almost as good as a pile of vegetables!

I pickle things, which sounds very industrious and domestic goddess-y until you realize it’s basically just shoving vegetables into jars with vinegar and waiting. I’m terrified of canning, so I’m not over here poorly sterilizing jars and giving people botulism – this is all refrigerator pickles that get eaten within a few weeks. Mostly cucumbers, onions, and carrots. I like sharp, sour, tangy things, and the more with which to give me a pinched and puckered face, the better.

My hands hurt nowadays but I’m still knitting, albeit very slowly, like a determined turtle with inflamed joints and a concerning click in their wrist. After 20+ years of knitting, I have discovered I like working on socks best – they’re portable, they don’t require too much thinking, and even knitting the same pattern a million times, they’re still interesting. First, you knit the cuff, which leads into the ankle, and before too long, you’re turning the heel and decreasing for the toe stitches, and you’re never really working on one part long enough for it to get tedious. For years, I knit complicated lace shawls, trying to one-up myself with each new project, but at this point, I know my skills and my limitations, and I am just here for a reliable, good time. (I think a reliable, good time is a common thread woven throughout grandma core.) Anyway, I’ve been working on the same pair for months because I only knit a few rows at a time while watching my programs. At this rate, John Nettles will solve several more murders before I finish the heel turn.

I spend a lot of time on the screened back porch these days, iced drink sweating in my hand, bare feet cool on the concrete while the ceiling fan spins lazily overhead. I listen to birds – not in any serious birdwatching way, I couldn’t tell you what half of them are, but their constant chatter is hypnotic, and I love imagining that they have very important business to attend to. When we can only hear the calls but can’t see the birds, I use the Cornell Merlin app to figure out what’s making all the noise. I always remember how I’d see old people sitting on their porches, looking for all the world like they are doing absolutely nothing. But, man, I get it now. Yvan and I sat out on the porch two weekends ago for four hours just talking and listening to birds and it’s a good time.

I take magnesium baths because I read somewhere that magnesium is good for sleep and joints and muscles. I don’t usually have trouble sleeping, but I don’t want to take any chances! I sink into hot water and let the day dissolve while I think about absolutely nothing, which is harder than it sounds but gets easier with practice. Sometimes though, I watch YouTube videos of single Japanese ladies making dinner, or ASMR head spas.

I do my strength exercises so if I fall down, I can get up. This seems like essential life skills at forty-nine. I do the NYT puzzles and I am getting very good at Wordle, which makes me feel smugly accomplished in a way that’s probably disproportionate to the actual achievement. I attack my hobbies with the enthusiasm of someone who has given up any illusion that they give a single shit about their job. My job has never been my passion and I’m not about to start now, which means I can throw myself into crosswords and knitting and pickling with complete abandon and zero guilt about spending three hours on a puzzle.

In 2016 I suddenly remembered the library existed and have been making up for lost time ever since. I read my library books with the devotion of someone who feels like they need to personally justify the entire public library system through sheer volume of usage. I’m currently holding for about 50 gazillion books and I am about to incite an old lady beatdown on whoever it is that’s taking so much time with the new Riley Sager novel. Seriously, how long does it take to read a cheesy thriller? There’s something both maddening and delightful about the digital library hold system – it’s like having a very slow, very unpredictable book fairy who sometimes delivers exactly what you want to your tablet and sometimes makes you wait four months for the privilege. I’ve been reading a lot of nature writers recently. I do love me some Robert MacFarlane, but his dense, poetic prose sometimes lends itself to spending three years on one book because you can only read a few paragraphs at a time, so I’ve been gravitating toward lighter nature writing – the kind where someone walks around looking at birds or trees and tells you about it without requiring a philosophy degree to follow along. Terry Tempest Williams, Annie Dillard when I’m feeling ambitious, Sy Montgomery when I want to read about octopuses being weird and wonderful. I like reading people who are paying attention to the world in ways I wish I was better at, especially when I refuse to leave the house for four months at a time. I am also on hold for something called The Bean Book. This feels like peak grandma energy to me.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Ella Fitzgerald and Alice Coltrane and bossa nova, plus some Khruangbin and Skinshape – atmospheric and expansive music that feels sophisticated, spacious, and contemplative. Ella is for Sunday mornings with coffee, when her voice feels like the perfect soundtrack to moving slowly through the house in my pajamas. Bossa nova is for when I’m cleaning or cooking – those gentle rhythms make chopping vegetables or folding laundry feel less like chores and more like meditation. Alice Coltrane, Khruangbin, and Skinshape are for lighting incense and reading at night, Alice’s harp and their ambient textures floating through the room while I sink into a book and let the day officially end.

I’ve also got very specific personal sayings I’m incorporating into my mental dialogue this summer: “Be grateful, not hateful!” and “Always choose the option with sprinkles!” These are my own little grandma mantras, though you probably get the context in which they might be used, and they may work for you, too. “Be grateful, not hateful” is for when I catch myself sliding into resentment or bitterness and need to redirect toward appreciation instead. “Always choose the option with sprinkles” is about picking joy and the more delightful choice when I have options, even if it seems silly or indulgent. It’s so easy for me to get sucked into feeling sorry for myself in the summertime, and I am trying to combat this in even the most cheesy ways. These cheerful little sayings are deliberately upbeat, slightly corny wisdom that feels very much in the Hot Grandma Summer spirit.

I am also taking a break from social media again this summer – 2.5 months this time instead of the one month I did last year – and so I have no idea what’s going on with anything or what’s hip or cool or which celebrity said what stupid thing this week. Where this once made me frantic with FOMO, now, it just feels like the most unimaginable sort of relief.

You might look at all of these things and think…Sarah…this is pretty much exactly what you’ve always done as long as I’ve known you! Ok, you got me. I have always worn shapeless, comfortable clothing and loved murder mysteries and dreamy music. I’ve been knitting since I was twenty-five and cooking since forever. Maybe calling it Hot Grandma Summer is just giving a name to what I was already doing, or maybe I just wanted an excuse to buy new pants. Either way, here we are.

Last week I wrote about my folk horror summer survival guide, and this week I’m talking about Hot Grandma Summer, which might seem like I’m all over the place, but hear me out. I am doing these in tandem. Both are ways of connecting to older rhythms – whether that’s ancient folklore or traditional domestic practices. Whether I’m lighting incense and reading about stone circles, or sitting on the porch with an iced drink, watching heat lightning, and listening to tinny jazz on Bluetooth speakers, it’s in service of creating time and space for myself that feel untroubled and mellow (yes, even the eldritch dread of the old gods, I am counting that, too.).  Both involve slowing down and being intentional about what I consume, creating comfort through specific, curated experiences.

The hemp capri pants work for both projects.

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I can feel it coming – that familiar dread that settles in my bones as the days stretch longer and more punishing.

The mosquitoes have already begun their ancient blood rituals, those vampiric sentinels of summer preparing their campaign of torment. Soon the very act of breathing will become an ordeal, each step outside a confrontation with air so thick and hostile it feels like drowning on dry land. The wall of soup will slam into you the moment you cross the threshold, coating your lungs with Florida’s particular murky brand of atmospheric malice.

Within moments your body betrays you, generating its own swampy ecosystem of butt and boob sweat, transforming you into a walking greenhouse of misery. The sun ceases to be a source of life and becomes instead a cosmic interrogator, beating down with the relentless rhythm of existential punishment. You begin to suspect this is what purgatory actually looks like – not fire and brimstone, but endless strip malls baking under merciless light.

My vegetables will surrender before the solstice, another year’s worth of hope incinerated by Florida’s hostility to anything green and growing. The ten-second summer rains will arrive like false prophets, promising salvation but delivering only Florida’s signature petrichor of hot asphalt and abandoned dreams. If the rest of humanity suffers seasonal depression when winter steals their light, I am cursed with reverse SAD, my soul withering as the days grow longer and feeling more like The End Of Days.

But there’s something almost instructive about this brutality – the way it cuts through the glossy veneer of recently built retirement communities and amusement park facades, coffee shops and kava bars, revealing something far more primal underneath. This heat doesn’t care about your manicured lawns or climate-controlled shopping centers. It reminds you that the land itself is older and more indifferent than all our attempts to tame it, that these forces were here long before the first concrete was poured and will be here long after it all crumbles back to sand.

With this terrible knowledge searing through my brain as I face another summer of elemental punishment, I find myself craving stories that understand these ancient, uncaring powers – a complete folk horror immersion.

I’m constructing this survival arsenal with one crucial rule: everything except the music has to be new to me. There’s no time in my short, brutish life to revisit familiar territory when I’m actively drowning in seasonal despair. I need fresh material that can cut through the heat-induced fog, stories, and images I haven’t already processed and catalogued. The music is different – I already know these artists will deliver exactly the emotional alchemy I need, whether that’s channeling rage or facilitating transcendence. But the films and books? Those are gambles. Calculated risks based on synopses and whispered recommendations, built on the hope that other people’s folk horror obsessions might save me from my own geographic curse.

Music

Some days the heat makes me want to burn everything down, and in that enraged mood, I need violent apocalyptic Americana that matches Florida’s hostility with equal fury. Murder by Death’s biblical doom, The Builders and the Butchers’ Pacific Northwest gothic, Amigo the Devil’s twisted folk narratives, Bridge City Sinners’ folk punk darkness, and Heathen Apostles‘ supernatural country – all of it designed to channel that bone-deep anger at being trapped in this swampy purgatory into something cathartic.

But other days require a different kind of escape – transcendence instead of rage. For when I need to dissassociate and float away from Florida’s oppressive reality entirely, I turn to the ethereal: the hypnotic Czechoslovakian folk horror of Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Thorsten Schmidt’s fictional TV soundtrack Hereford Wakes with its “curious folk miniatures and blurry electronic library music,” Klaus Morlock’s hauntological synth folk on Bethany’s Cradle, and The Hare and The Moon’s ghostly takes on traditional British standards. These create otherworldly soundscapes that make ordinary afternoons feel like wandering through a 1970s BBC children’s program about ancient burial mounds or late night public access educational programming about traditional crafts where the seamstress only stitches tiny burial shrouds and the woodcarver only whittles tuneless eerie bone whistles.

Still, other days require a third, secret path – when the heat has drained all fight from your bones, and transcendence feels too ambitious when you need music that understands the strange melancholy of existing between worlds.Alela Diane, Emily Jane White, Marissa Nadler, and Jolie Holland create haunted Americana that sounds like it’s drifting up from old graveyards, songs sung by women who commune with spirits and remember the names of forgotten places. Their voices carry the weight of ancestral grief and ancient knowing, perfect for those suspended afternoons when you’re too heat-drunk to rage but too restless to fully escape, when you need to feel like you’re channeling something deeper than just your own seasonal despair.

And then there’s the wildcard: Matt Berry’s Kill the Wolf for when Florida’s rabid broiling delirium has broken your brain so completely that you need something equally unhinged to match the absurdity of your predicament.

Films

This is where my gamble gets riskier – a collection of folk horror films drawing from familiar traditions but offering new stories I haven’t yet experienced, chosen based entirely on promises of landscapes that hold older memories than Florida’s tourist traps. I’m betting that Starve Acre’s creeping rural England dread and Enys Men’s eerie Cornish isolation can transport me somewhere the heat can’t follow, where ancient stones remember purposes that predate strip malls.

My tentative list spans continents and decades: Starve Acre for that English farmland horror where grief opens doorways to darker forces, Men for Alex Garland’s fever dream of genuinely threatening countryside, Children of the Stones for classic 70s British wrongness beneath quaint village life. Then deeper into international territory – Poison for the Fairies for Mexican childhood darkness, Exhuma for Korean ancestral grave disturbances, Celia for Australian political paranoia mixed with childhood terror, Luz: The Flower of Evil for Colombian religious community horror, The Reflecting Skin for that bleached-out American prairie nightmare, and The Severed Sun for isolated religious community horror where domestic violence unleashes forest beasts with shimmering white eyes.

Each one promises a different flavor of ancient power – whether it’s Celtic stone circles, Korean shamanic traditions, or vengeful forest creatures that understand how violence can tear open doorways between worlds. The hope is that these films will do what Florida summer prevents: remind me that there are places where seasons mean something, where the land itself participates in human stories instead of just trying to kill you with humidity – though I’m increasingly aware that many of these ‘ancient’ European folk traditions I’m drawn to are echoing something even older, the displaced stories of people who understood these landscapes long before colonization renamed and reshaped them.

What am I missing? I need more recommendations for folk horror that can transport me completely away from this godforsaken peninsula.

Books

When the films aren’t enough and I need complete submersion in worlds where crossing certain thresholds has consequences and the old gods haven’t been murdered by modernity, I’m banking on literature to provide the kind of deep, slow burn that can sustain me through months of elemental punishment. These are all uncharted waters for me – calculated gambles based on whispered recommendations and tantalizingly dark synopses, with Sadie Hartman of Motherhorror’s comprehensive Instagram posts being absolutely instrumental in building this folk horror bibliotheca of dread.

My literary arsenal spans centuries and landscapes: Brom’s Slewfoot for Colonial New England witchcraft and ancient spirits deciding between healing and destroying, Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day for Lancashire folk traditions and the sacrifices required to belong to the tribe, plus his Barrowbeck for Yorkshire-Lancashire border darkness where ancient forces demand payment as two thousand years of history comes to an end. . Kate Worsley’s Foxash promises gothic menace in 1930s Essex smallholdings, while Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog offers 1901 schoolmarm horror where something beastly lurks in the woods, matching a woman’s uncontainable rage.

Then there’s the water horror of Danielle Giles’ Mere, set in 990 AD Norfolk where holy sisters face something unholy in the fens, and Olivia Isaac-Henry’s Sorrow Spring for 1970s village worship of sacred waters with sinister truths flowing beneath. Gabrielle Griffiths’ Greater Sins brings 1915 Scottish bog body discoveries during wartime, while Tom Fletcher’s Witch Bottle explores repressed guilt through a milkman’s nightmares in remote northwest England.

For contemporary folk horror, there’s Monique Asher’s The Red Knot – isolated Alaskan island murders with cult leader daughters and missing girls, and Jodie Matthews’ Meet Me at the Surface for Bodmin moor secrets, night hunting, and folklore notebooks linked to dead ex-girlfriends. Benjamin Myers’ The Gallows Pole promises historical Cragg Vale Coiners with stag-headed visions, David Sodergren’s The Haar brings Scottish fishing village fog that delivers madness and death, and Lucy Rose’s The Lamb offers gothic mother-daughter cannibalism in the forest.

The goal is total immersion- books that can make me forget I’m sweating through another Florida afternoon and instead convince me I’m following foggy footpaths that lead to places that shouldn’t be named aloud. Stories that understand the hungry land keeps its own account, where trespassing on certain fields during certain lean months gets you invited to harvest festivals where you’re the guest of honor and the main course.

But again, I’m building this arsenal in real-time. What folk horror literature should I be adding to this survival strategy? Especially anything that can make me believe in places where the stones remember the ancient names, where the seasons still follow their proper rhythms, where the land itself holds stories that predate pavement and knows the difference between sacred and profane.

What Am I Missing?

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I’ve been thinking about green slime. Not in a weird way—well, maybe in a weird way. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about a particular moment from You Can’t Do That on Television, a low-budget Canadian sketch show that aired on Nickelodeon in the ’80s. For those too young to remember: if any character said “I don’t know,” they got a bucket of green slime dumped on their head. Peak television, truly!

This relationship we have with uncertainty and not knowing has been rattling around in my head for years—it shows up in so much of my writing and honestly feels more urgent now than ever. We’re drowning in information while starving for wisdom. Fake news spreads faster than actual news. Even real news comes at us so relentlessly that if you don’t know how to think critically, you’re basically defenseless against the chaos.

Here’s the good news: no one’s going to dump slime on your head for saying “I don’t know.” You’re allowed to not have an opinion on everything. You’re allowed to sit out conversations where you genuinely have nothing to contribute. You don’t have to fill every silence with words just because the silence makes you uncomfortable.

In a world that rewards hot takes and instant opinions, admitting ignorance has become a radical act. We weren’t always like this. Socrates built his entire reputation on “I know that I know nothing”—wisdom starts with recognizing what you don’t actually know. But we started treating uncertainty like a character flaw instead of a starting point.

I was just reading about “intellectual humility”—basically the willingness to admit when you don’t know something. There was a study with high school students where they asked kids to rate themselves on statements like “I am willing to admit it when I don’t know something.” The ones who scored higher? They were more motivated to learn, used better study strategies, and ended up with higher grades. Their teachers, who hadn’t seen the test results, independently rated these same students as more engaged.

So here we have kids who admit their limitations outperforming the ones who project certainty. Which makes me think we’ve been taught to value the wrong kind of confidence—the kind that performs knowledge rather than seeks it. By rewarding performance over curiosity, by making it easier to fake expertise than admit ignorance, we’ve created a culture that celebrates the wrongest and worst type of people—the ones who talk loudest instead of think deepest. (Yes, I know wrongest isn’t a word, and maybe I am wrong to use it, but I think in this context it might be perfect.)

And here’s the thing that makes this even more maddening: the people who know the least are often the most confident about what they’re saying. I just learned that this is called the Dunning-Kruger effect—the less you actually know about something, the more likely you are to overestimate your expertise. Meanwhile, real experts tend to be more cautious about making claims because they understand how complex things actually are.

We’ve all been there—trapped in conversations where someone’s obviously making stuff up as they go, but they keep talking because silence feels like defeat. You know the type: they’ll tell you to turn off the GPS because they’re convinced they know a shortcut, then you end up stuck in traffic headed the wrong way, fifteen minutes late. Or they barge into conversations they know nothing about because their need to contribute outweighs their self-awareness of how little they actually understand.

Somewhere between Google and ChatGPT, we lost sight of how not knowing is where discovery begins. Google made us lazy about looking things up, but AI might be making us worse—it generates answers with complete confidence even when it’s spectacularly wrong. Just last week, the Chicago Sun-Times had to issue corrections after ChatGPT generated a completely fabricated summer reading list complete with fake book descriptions and nonexistent titles. AI is basically the Dunning-Kruger effect in algorithm form, making things up and presenting fiction as fact.

I stumbled across a study where researchers had people read articles about either “the benefits of admitting what you don’t know” or “the benefits of being very certain.” Afterward, 85% of the humility group sought extra help when they needed it, compared to only 65% of the certainty group. Something about simply reading that it’s okay to not know made people more willing to actually learn.

The smartest people I know are the ones who say “I don’t know” the most. They ask better questions. They listen instead of just waiting for their turn to perform expertise they don’t actually have. Watch any naturally curious person and you’ll see the healthy human relationship with not knowing. “Why does that happen? How does this work? What if we tried something different?” Pure curiosity, no shame attached. Then somewhere along the way we get trained that not knowing equals failure, that questions without clear answers are somehow less valuable than memorized facts.

Scientists methodically chip away at uncertainty, philosophers debate it endlessly, but artists seem to have figured something out that the rest of us missed. They don’t just tolerate mystery; they relentlessly pursue it and alchemize it into paintings, sculptures, novels, songs. They make art from the very thing the rest of us try to avoid. David Lynch built an entire career exploring what can’t be explained—and never bothering to explain it. The Surrealists made the unconscious visible, exploring the inexplicable, enigmatic, and elusive.

What if mystery isn’t failure? What if it’s possibility? Medieval illuminators spent lifetimes trying to capture divine visions, knowing they’d never fully succeed but finding meaning in the attempt. Van Gogh painted swirling night skies that no astronomer would recognize but somehow captured something true about how the cosmos feels. Louise Bourgeois spent decades excavating trauma through her sculptures, not to solve it but to understand it differently.

(And if anyone’s been wondering about my next book, there’s a few hints for you.)

But here’s what puzzles me: if admitting ignorance helps us learn better, why does it feel so uncomfortable? Why do we keep pretending we know things we don’t?

Your brain actually hates uncertainty—neurologically, not knowing can trigger the same threat response as physical danger. We’re wired to fill gaps in knowledge, even with complete nonsense, just to make the discomfort stop. Social media turned this into a performance where you’re supposed to have takes, opinions, reactions—preferably hot ones that get engagement. God forbid you just… don’t know something.

I don’t particularly enjoy being wrong, but I’m genuinely excited when someone can convince me to change my mind about something. There’s something thrilling about discovering you were looking at something completely backward or that there’s a whole layer of complexity you never considered. Sometimes, “I have no idea” is the most honest and interesting thing you can possibly say. That’s where the good stuff starts.

I keep trying to wrap this up with some perfect slime metaphor, but nothing’s landing and I can’t figure out why I’m forcing it. Maybe because the point isn’t the slime. The point is I don’t know.

And maybe that’s exactly where I need to be right now—not knowing where this is all heading, fumbling clumsily around between the thing I’m trying to say and whatever it’s becoming. Between the book I think I’m writing and the one that’s actually emerging.

The ancients used to build shrines at crossroads—those in-between places where possibilities intersect. Maybe not knowing is just another kind of crossroads, a place where transformation becomes possible. Where old certainties go to die and new understanding might be born.

Do I need to build a little crossroads altar to the unknown? Light some candles for mystery, leave offerings for confusion, and make sacred space for productive perplexity and the beauty of bewilderment?

What mysteries are you sitting with lately? What questions are you learning to love instead of trying to solve? What’s on your current altar of the unknown?

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I heard a YouTuber quote Mel Robbins a few years ago: “If you want to change your life, just start acting like the person you want to become. I’m not kidding…it’s called ‘Behavioral Activation Therapy.’ The more you ACT like the person you want to become (even when you don’t feel like that person yet), the quicker you become them.” I still don’t know who Mel Robbins is, but I don’t know that I need to or that I care!

I was thinking about this in January when I had my annual reading with Sister Temperance Tarot, and I remember saying something like “I’d love to be the kind of person who…” and then following up with “I mean, all I have to do is just…be that person, right??” I continue thinking about it on a daily basis, and it feels like some kind of mental alchemy—the notion that embodying behaviors might transform us from the outside in, rather than requiring inner transformation first. Like a strange ritual where donning the mask eventually reshapes the face beneath it. That we become what we repeatedly do, not what we dream of becoming while scrolling through Instagram at 2am, bathed in the pale blue light of infinite possibilities.

The phrase “I’d like to be the kind of person who…” floats through my mind with alarming frequency. Sometimes while brushing my teeth, those little pre-threaded floss picks tucked under the sink muttering about me judgmentally. Sometimes, while pouring a Diet Coke over copious amounts of cracked ice, even as I imagine, instead a delicate cup of Earl Grey loose-leaf tea, hot. Sometimes, while canceling plans with a friend I genuinely want to see, not because I want to stay on the couch, but because I get caught up in all the anxiety that goes into seeing them. Is there parking where I’m going? What if I can’t hold up my end of the conversation? The effort suddenly seems insurmountable.

So here’s my running list of people I’d like to be…

The Everyday Aspirations. The kind of person who…

• “…flosses every day.” I have started doing this after a lifetime of not. I am 8 days in, and my gums no longer look like they’re auditioning for a horror film when I do it.
• “…wakes up at 5am to walk 4-5 times a week.” I do this 1-2 times, if at all. I love waking up early and I love walking, but somehow detest the act of putting on exercise clothes and actually leaving the house for this specific purpose.
• “…starts incorporating yoga into their routine for flexibility.” I don’t need to do a headstand or twist myself into a pretzel. I just want to be able to squat at all with my bad knees.
• “…cares enough about something to learn about it before diving in.” I write about perfumes and fashion based on feeling rather than facts. There’s something both liberating and terrifying about this approach—knowing I’m sharing pure impressions rather than expert analysis. But perhaps there’s a world between these extremes I haven’t explored yet.
• “…keeps better touch with friends and family.” I can spend three hours looking at strangers’ vacation photos, but I can’t manage a ten-minute phone call to someone I actually love.
• “…would prefer a cup of tea over a diet coke, a scone or some shit rather than Cheetos; something nice instead of something garbagey.” There’s a certain elegance in choosing the thing that asks more of you—the steeping, the waiting, the ritual of it. The Diet Coke is immediate, thoughtless. (But so delicious and caustic and crispy!) The tea suggests a life more deliberately lived, even if that deliberateness and mindfulness and what have you makes me roll my eyes at myself sometimes.

The Self-Growth Aspirations. The kind of person who…

• “…paints watercolor flowers and creates detailed still lifes of jewelry boxes.” I want to make visual art, but I’m terrified of being bad at it. I knit, but always from someone else’s pattern. I write constantly—for this blog and lots of other places—but writing doesn’t feel like art to me. It’s just something I can’t not do.
• “…can confidently belt out a karaoke tune.” Or be brave enough to do it at all. I don’t even set foot in karaoke places to begin with.
• “…speaks up in difficult conversations.” When moral toughness is required. When someone needs to be stood up to. When grief and condolences need to be expressed. I fear these moments of necessary confrontation and emotional honesty.
• “…watches Ingmar Bergman films.” And other directors that celebrities wax poetic about when visiting the Criterion Closet—Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Ozu. What kind of person watches these films? Someone more patient than me, certainly. Someone who doesn’t check their phone every seven minutes. Someone who appreciates the profound beauty of a static shot lasting longer than the time it takes to scroll past ten Instagram posts.
• “…enjoys the things they already own.” It’s not that I need to stop wanting more—I probably never will. But I have finite time and tons of stuff already. Books unread, perfumes unsprayed, clothes unworn. I need to savor what I already possess instead of constantly accumulating more.

The Wishful Aspirations. The kind of person who…

• “…who travels.” Without the anxiety about getting to the airport, through the airport, and all the logistics that seem to overwhelm me. The actual packing part is fine—carelessly done at the last minute.
• “…who is more clever and interesting in social situations.” Rather than barely opening my mouth, paralyzed by that fear that reminds me of the quote: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”
• “…who finally lives in Portland, in their own arts and crafts house.” With built-in bookshelves and those charming little reading nooks in the Pacific Northwest. This despite familial obligations tying us to this area—aging parents and siblings who would deliver guilt trips if we moved across the country.

What if, as Robbins suggests, we’ve been approaching transformation backward all this time? We treat motivation like some rare orchid that must bloom naturally before we can take action. We wait for that perfect crystalline moment of readiness, of feeling aligned with our aspirations, before we make a move.

Perhaps becoming the person we want to be isn’t about waiting for inner transformation. Maybe it’s about small, even mechanical actions, repeated until they form grooves in our lives, paths of least resistance that eventually feel natural. I read somewhere that you should remove the obstacles that make the thing you want to do harder. Perhaps I should literally sleep in my exercise clothes if I want to be the kind of person who walks at 5am.

These selves we aspire to—the daily flosser, the early riser, the brave conversationalist—they aren’t separate entities waiting to replace us. They’re already here, fragments and possibilities tucked within our contradictions. We contain multitudes—practical selves, aspirational selves, wishful selves—all shifting and reshaping as we reach toward what we might become.

All these aspirational selves feel like mirages on a horizon of possibility. When I reach for them and come up short, I wonder if it’s the reaching itself that matters. The tension between who I am and who I’d like to be creates a strange, electric space—a liminal territory where what might be and what cannot be somehow coexist. It’s a realm tingling with impossible probabilities, opportunities, eventualities, but also shimmering with its own wildly improbable magic. Maybe we are all just collections of attempted gestures toward some imagined ideal, forever falling short but beautiful in the attempt. Or maybe we’re just hopeful losers? But we keep trying? I hope?

What versions of yourself linger just beyond your reach? And what small, seemingly insignificant action might begin to call them into being?

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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Hello, dear readers of Unquiet Things!

I wanted to take a moment to clear up something that’s come to my attention recently. A thoughtful commenter clicked the “Subscribe” button here on the blog and wondered if that was the same as subscribing to my newsletter, Trinkets & Treasures.

They are completely different things!

When you click the “Subscribe” button on this site, you’ll receive notifications whenever I publish a new post here on Unquiet Things. It’s a great way to make sure you never miss a blog update about all the dark delights I explore here. Which is nice! But my newsletter is its own beast entirely.

Unquiet Things vs. Trinkets & Treasures: A Tale of Two Entirely Different Things

Unquiet Things serves as my little gallery/presentation space in this weird corner of the internet – it’s where I share my favorite gothic romance cover artists, avant-garden runway shows, or perfume reviews. Or all the other stuff I write about! While I don’t take it overly seriously, it’s a space very dear to my heart.

Trinkets & Treasures, on the other hand, is like stopping by my house for a cup of tea and random chatter. It’s where I share:

• Whatever books or music have grabbed me lately
• My current skincare/perfume/clothing obsessions
• That recipe I can’t shut up about
• Sometimes even my strange dreams or midnight revelations!

A Gentle Disclaimer

If you enjoy what I share here but haven’t subscribed to Trinkets & Treasures, you’re experiencing only one side of my creative world. But I also want to be clear: if you’re here for my blog posts about weird art and spooky stuff, please know that the newsletter is a completely different vibe. Don’t sign up expecting more of the same, only to feel bamboozled when you receive a recipe for sourdough biscuits and a link to my favorite Japanese giallo jazz fusion band of the moment. I’m sparing us both the inevitable unsubscribe, which would absolutely, 100% hurt my feelings.

Where to Find This Mysterious Newsletter

To subscribe to Trinkets & Treasures, you’ll need to visit its dedicated page, which is completely separate from this blog. You can find the link to Trinkets & Treasures in the menu that runs across the top of the page – clicking it will take you to a Flodesk signup page. See image above to help you find it! Or just click any of the links that I’ve peppered throughout this blog post.

If you’re curious about what you’ve been missing, here are a few past issues to give you a taste:

Trinkets & Treasures Volume 38  New music, nostalgic tee shirts, and a newly commissioned pendant
Trinkets & Treasures Volume 37  Super tasty sourdough biscuits and another good tee shirt 
Trinkets & Treasures Volume 36 The best, most cozy-chic lounge set and sheet pan grilled cheese sammies

And if you’re looking to subscribe to blog updates, you’ll find that option in the email field on the right-hand side of the page (see image above.) If you’re curious about the blog post featured in these screen caps, you can find it here: Nothing Weird Here: Max Frey’s Perfectly Normal Sea Creatures.

A Brief Note About Support

My blog and newsletter are free and will never be behind a paywall. This site is now and will always be ad-free because honestly, I don’t want a bunch of ads junking things up and making the site look all garbagey. What I am saying is: this site makes no money. I work full time in my very boring, non-writing job, and I spend my spare moments writing for the blog and the books I have published (which make very little money, and I definitely could not live off of them.)

If you’ve ever appreciated, thrilled to, resonated with, or found useful anything I have ever written, I do have a Kofi link if you’re feeling generous, and if you like my writings on perfume, you can certainly support me through my Midnight Stinks Patreon.

If you’d like to show your support in other ways, comments and shares always make my heart soar (as opposed to unsubscribing, which makes my heart SORE!)

And of course, if you’re already subscribed to both this blog and my newsletter- you’re a true friend indeed! Thanks for hanging out with me in both my public gallery and my more casual space. Thanks as always for being here, however you choose to connect with this frou-frou fantôme and weaver of the weird.

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The Serpent in the Carnations (Snake Oil-soaked carnation petals, spiked with a dash of clove and allspice.) Wait, haven’t I smelled this before? Flipping through last year’s reviews, I discover I’ve already waxed poetic about this scent. And yet here I am, astonished all over again, falling into the same serpentine trap. The enchantment is complete; I’ve forgotten I was already enchanted. This is the second time I’ve declared this my favorite from a collection, which tells you everything you need to know about its power. I stand by every word of my previous devotion – the art nouveau femme fatale, the mortuary spice of carnations, Snake Oil’s heavily sugared incense creating that wicked bohemian ghoulishness. The layers of decadence unfold like those Symbolist paintings themselves. The very pigments ground from these carnation petals and serpent scales, mixed with poisonous metals and the tears of corrupted saints. This fragrance emanates from Salome’s skin as she dances, each veil she drops releasing another layer of this scent into the room, until even the most virtuous observer feels their resolve melting away. It lingers on Klimt’s Judith as she approaches Holofernes, infusing her with terrible purpose and unwavering conviction.This is decadence crystallized into a new element on the periodic table – one that devours light, creates shadows where there should be none, and causes flowers to bloom backwards into the earth. I want to bathe in it not once but daily, create a religion around it, convert followers through scented whispers. The Serpent in the Carnations isn’t just corrupted by forbidden knowledge – it’s the reason knowledge became forbidden in the first place.

The Fourth Veil (ripples of sage-green silk covered in a mossy velvet-burnout pattern of wildflowers and slithering ivy) conjures a very specific, very private sanctuary of nostalgia for me. When I was very young, there was a moon-shaped waxen knick-knack… I think it was meant to be a room freshener of some sort, but it hung from a cord, and my mother was using it as a curtain pull. I used to hide behind the dusty, pleated fabric and drag my nails over it, scoring the smooth surface, collecting the sweet, powdery floral wax on my fingertips, which I would then run through my hair so that I could smell it all day. This scent echoes that pleasant waxiness and builds on it with something that smells like a wildflower and algae shampoo, sweet and brackish and slightly herbal, and a note that channels the olfactory version of arsenical wallpaper, verdant trompe-l’œil tendrils climbing over a musky base of translucent, chalky minerals that seem to trap light and transform it into something vaguely bioluminescent.

Pink Fuzzy Handcuffs (pink cotton candy, candied rose, and vanilla sugar) transforms what could be a cloying rose soliflore into something unexpectedly compelling – like stumbling across a street vendor in some fantastical night market who specializes in tanghulu made not from strawberries or cherries but from enormous, dewy rose petals. Each crystallized bloom catches the neon lights, creating jewel-toned fragments that shatter between your teeth with a satisfying crack. The sugar shell is a hyper-concentrated, almost electric pink that buzzes on your tongue and makes your fillings ache in a kaleidoscopic way. This is a gleeful, rosy, sugar-spun audacity.

The Pearl (a salt-encrusted cocoon overflowing with almond blossoms, sweet patchouli, and dried peony petals whipped into orris butter) opens with an unexpected fruity-tarty-sweetness, as if someone had sliced a perfectly ripe persimmon atop a bed of dried apricots. This initial surprise fades as the scent settles into something truer to its nature. It becomes the olfactory embodiment of iridescence – if the pearlescent interior of an abalone shell could release its shimmer as fragrance. There’s something mineral and organic happening simultaneously here, like salt crystals forming on driftwood at low tide. From there, the scent unfolds in luminous ripples, revealing the strange not-quite-colors that exist inside shells – those blues that aren’t blue, the pinks that aren’t quite pink, the greens that seem to flicker in and out of existence depending on how the light hits. It smells exactly how that color-shifting, mysterious inner world of abalone looks – ethereal, ancient, and somehow both oceanic and otherworldly at once.

Horreur Choco-Tique (dark chocolate, ruby cocoa, blood musk, golden honey, thick black wine, champagne grapes, tobacco flower, plum blossom, tonka bean, oakmoss, carnation, benzoin, opoponax, and sugar cane) Imagine licking a chocolate lollipop only to discover an impossibly tiny stained glass cathedral trapped inside it. Press your eye against the glossy cocoa surface and see microscopic nuns bathed in divine grape juice light, aubergine and amaranthine rays streaming through intricate amethyst-hued filigree whorls and whirls of the vitreous panes. Each lick dissolves another layer of bitter chocolate veneer, revealing more of this sugared sanctuary within. The chambers grow increasingly purple-stained as you reach the center, where fermented grape sweetness meets cocoa dust in an unlikely communion. Somewhere in the sticky core, a miniature priest made entirely of dark chocolate lifts a tiny candy chalice of Concord concentrate to lips that will never taste it, forever frozen in a moment of grape-stained reverence.

Plume of Incense (tendrils of sandalwood, agarwood, and cypress incense, moss silk, calla lilies, and yellow amber) Cypress leaps out first – almost tactile in its intensity, a lemony-green sharpness that feels like running your hand along a prickly branch. Then the scent shifts and settles, becoming a soft, languid incense drifting through empty rooms. It transforms into an indolent sphinx of a fragrance, stretched across sun-warmed stone, with delicate wisps of aromatic smoke curling from its enigmatic smile. The agarwood and sandalwood form the creature’s body, substantial yet somehow also ethereal, while the yellow amber creates its half-lidded eyes that watch with ancient, unhurried patience. This incense has all the time in the world to gradually enchant you into reverence, each tendril of smoke winding around your senses with the languorous confidence of something that knows eternity is on its side.

Mars and Venus (a stolen moment preserved for eternity in a gleaming amber jewel, entombed in malachite swirls of oakmoss and velvet) Forget enemies to lovers, this scent captures lovers to landscapes, passion transformed into geological wonder. A clean, crisp amber polished smooth by ocean tides holds the memory of ancient heat at its core. The fragrance shifts into mossy-musky dampness, like vegetation slowly reclaiming abandoned statues in a forgotten garden. When warmed against skin, it exhales a humid velvet aura, luxurious yet wild, as if cosmic bodies once pressed together have now cooled into mineral formations still somehow radiating their original warmth. Time has crystallized divine indiscretion into something that will outlast even the gods themselves, leaving only this aromatic evidence behind: a perfumed fossil of desire.

Discarded Weapons (toasted rice, almond cream, champaca resin, fig, and roasted coconut meat) The camera pans across perfectly toasted rice grains, each one glistening with a hint of savory oil. A steady hand sprinkles roasted nuts, arranging them in a mesmerizing pattern that took fourteen takes to perfect. The creator’s chopsticks move to the dessert compartment, revealing jammy Fig Bar Cookies topped with large flakes of sea salt that catch the light like tiny crystals and coconut shavings, their edges curled and caramelized from slow caramelization. A sweetness remains restrained, a mellow complexity. Our lunchbox artisan steps back, still filming, and watches the comments section explode with hearts and flame emojis. This fragrance hits that sweet spot between culinary art and comfort food – savory, sweet, and somehow both elaborate and profoundly satisfying at once.

Snake Skin (a sinuous leather variant of BPAL’s Snake Oil) Charting the void with phantom maps, new territories over familiar terrain. Leather emerges first, strangely mentholated and cool, running your hand against the grain of scales. Snake Oil’s incense weaves through the leather landscape, a compass that points to itself, creating landmarks that shift each time you attempt to find them. An unexpected almond whisper hides in the coils, sweet and slightly bitter, the pit left behind after devouring whole the fruit that was forbidden. Engulfing its own origin, repeatedly shedding and reforming as it warms on skin, leaving behind the undertow of the past while somehow still carrying it forward- the same beast viewed through different dimensions, simultaneously ancient and newborn, forever caught in the moment of transformation.

The Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab 2025 Lupercalia collection is currently live and available for purchase. As this is a limited edition series, sample sizes imps are not available.

Need more Lupercalia scents? Have a peep at my Lupers reviews from 2024 and 2023 and 2022 and 2021 and 2020. Looks like I skipped a few years but we’ve also got 2017 and 2016 reviews as well!

…PSSSST! Did you know I have collected all of my BPAL reviews into one spot? I’m about a year behind with adding new stuff to the document, but as it stands, there are over 60 PAGES of my thoughts and rambles on various limited-edition scents from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab over the years: BPAL REVIEWS BY S. ELIZABETH (PDF download)

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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There’s a particular kind of existential dread that blooms when small systems inexplicably fail – distinct from the larger dread that’s been hanging over us these past months as we watch our democracy strain and buckle.

When my blog’s email notifications stop working, it feels almost absurd to be rattled by such a privileged problem while our fundamental rights are under threat. And yet, these small failures still unsettle me deeply. I feel a familiar twist of anxiety when I need to reach out for help, knowing I’m asking someone to pause their day to untangle what is, for them, probably a simple fix. It’s not so much about the broken feature – it’s about feeling simultaneously grateful for and guilty about needing help with something I should perhaps understand better, but don’t.

The postal service triggers a similar feeling. Some days, maybe 2-3 times a month, our mail carrier simply doesn’t show up. My outgoing letters sit in the mailbox until dusk, like awkward guests at a party where the host never arrived. It happens frequently enough to be a pattern, but irregularly enough that I can never quite prepare for it. The anticipation builds throughout the day – surely they’re just running late? – until evening falls, and I have to accept that today just isn’t a mail day, for reasons I’ll never understand. Another tiny inconvenience that shouldn’t matter, not when there are people fighting for their very existence.

It starts small – an apologetic message to web support, again, or watching my outgoing Pango packages sit untouched hour after hour. But it spirals quickly into something darker. If I can’t trust email to email or mail to mail, what else might suddenly stop working? The silent agreements that keep society functioning? When massive systemic threats feel overwhelming and impossible to process, we often redirect our anxiety toward smaller, more manageable problems. The broken blog notifications become a proxy target for larger fears we can’t fully face. I find myself wondering if I’m already so on edge that it only takes a small thing like this to send me toppling into the void.

Maybe that’s why these small glitches hit so hard right now – they’re tangible, immediate problems I can laser focus and hyper fixate on, even if I can’t fix them. They’re safer to spiral about than the bigger terrors looming on the horizon. Every failed notification or missing mail day becomes a focal point for anxiety that’s really about something much larger and more frightening. It’s about the sudden, visceral reminder that everything I consider solid is actually balanced on an endless series of assumptions and dependencies. Every time my blog’s notifications fail, I’m confronted with how much of my world I take for granted until it stops working, how much I don’t understand about the systems I rely on every single day.

Maybe the weirdest part isn’t just carrying the knowledge that everything could break – it’s wondering when I’ll break, too. When these small systems fail, they become reminders of my own fragility. Am I just another system waiting to malfunction? Will I one day stop performing basic tasks, becoming as unknowable and unreliable as the services I depend on? There’s something darkly fitting about fixating on broken notifications while democracy crumbles – both feel like warnings about how easily systems can fail, from the smallest email service to the largest institutions to my own mind and body.

And yet, somehow, most of the time, it all works – through the quiet competence of others, through systems I don’t understand, through my own continued functioning. Until it doesn’t.

Tell me about the systems in your life – big or small – that become lightning rods for larger fears when they break.

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The following thoughts have absolutely nothing to do with each other. They’re mental marginalia – scribblings in the corners of my consciousness that I’ve been collecting like loose buttons in a drawer. If there’s a thread connecting them, I haven’t found it. I’m sharing them now partly to preserve them, and partly because my blog’s email notifications weren’t working for about a week and this seems like an appropriately random way to test if they’re fixed. So here are some thoughts I’ve been hoarding, presented in all their disconnected glory…

• There’s a scene in DowntonAbbey where Matthew Crawley is absolutely radiant with joy about becoming a father. We all know what happened next.

I find myself thinking about that scene with surprising frequency. It surfaces whenever I become aware of feeling particularly happy or content – this internal warning bell chiming softly: “Remember Matthew Crawley…” As if by tempering my joy, I might somehow slip beneath the notice of whatever cosmic force delights in upending peaceful moments.

Just recently, I was spending an afternoon with Ývan. Nothing extraordinary – running errands, driving around town, feeling productive and at ease. I noticed aloud how pleasant it all felt, then immediately wished I could snatch that observation back like a red balloon escaping skyward, stuff it back down my throat before the gods could hear and decide I was due for a reminder about hubris.

I can trace this tendency to one crystalline moment – driving to school on a familiar route, enjoying mild weather and an ordinary afternoon… until someone rear-ended me. That was the first time it really hit me -literally! – how everything I took for granted as normal and routine could vanish in a poof (or, more accurately, a crunch). Maybe the normalcy was always an illusion anyway. That collision shook more than my car; it permanently altered how I view those quiet, ordinary moments.

Or consider the evening fifteen years later I returned from an utterly unremarkable day at work, only to have my boyfriend sit me down and blindside me with the fact he was leaving me. I wouldn’t believe it in the immediate moment, but his leaving was the greatest gift he ever gave me. What an absolute piece of shit. I think he still reads my blog, unless he’s dead, but one can only hope. Anyway, that was for sure a stark reminder about the fragility of normalcy.

So yes, I’ve become rather vigilant. There’s a part of me that believes if I can just keep my contentment quiet enough, if I can avoid drawing attention to those moments of peace or joy, perhaps they’ll be allowed to linger a little longer. It’s absurd when written out like this – this attempt to outsmart fate by muting my own happiness. Yet here I am, still thinking of Matthew Crawley whenever my spirits rise too high.

• I was slicing pickled banana peppers for my salad today when I recalled my distress at seeing videos of people ordering “chop chiles” on their In-N-Out burgers. Just typing that makes me wince. “Chop chiles.” Not “chopped chiles.” The missing ‘-ed’ sets my teeth on edge in the same way “ice tea” does instead of “iced tea.”

But what bothers me more than the grammatical slip is my own reaction to it. The immediate internal flinch, the flash of judgment about the speaker’s education or attention to detail. It feels ugly and hateful, and I hate myself for it, but I can’t stop.

• And finally, sneezing. I don’t just sneeze – I SHRIEK. We’re talking full-volume, horror-movie-victim shrieking. It’s not for dramatic effect or attention. It’s because sneezing feels like my soul is attempting to violently exit my body, and my vocal cords are simply reporting the situation as they see it.

Years ago, a friend on social media (I don’t remember who) mentioned hearing their neighbor sneeze through the walls – described it as something like a “a full-body moan.” Presumably of existential distress. I’ve never met this neighbor, but I feel a kinship with them. There are probably dozens of us out there, involuntarily vocalizing our brief encounters with corporeal betrayal.

I wonder if the neighbor and I would recognize each other by our sneezes in a crowded space. A sort of acoustic solidarity among those of us for whom a sneeze is less a bodily function and more a moment of profound displacement, announced to the world via involuntary screaming.

Like Veronica Sawyer up there, frantically documenting her thoughts, I’ve just dumped some of my mental marginalia onto the page. Did you get an email notification for this diary entry? Let me know in the comments! And while you’re there, I’d love to hear some of the random thoughts rattling around in your own brain. What’s your Matthew Crawley moment? Do you have strong feelings about linguistic pet peeves? Are you perhaps my neighbor’s long-lost sneeze twin? Share your margin notes below…

Please note! Haven’t seen an email notification about a new blog post in a few weeks? Please check in! I typically share my musings and discoveries about once a week, so there’s no doubt something here waiting for you to explore. (Even when the emails are being finicky, the blog itself marches on!)

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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It hung on our basement door like a sentinel—a ragdoll caught in the merciless grip of an old-fashioned clothes wringer, accompanied by that unforgettable caption: “The truth will set you free but at first it will make you miserable.”

For years, I sat with my back against the cracked vinyl bench in our Milford, Ohio kitchen, watching that door’s decor change with the seasons: a rattling skeleton at Halloween, a jolly Santa during December. But the ragdoll always returned, resuming its position like a stubborn gargoyle, watching over our little trio as we grew: me advancing toward nine, my sister toward seven, the baby of us reaching five.

The kitchen was pure 1970s: mustard-yellow countertops that seemed to absorb every shadow, even in full daylight. I’d slouch at the table, pushing my mother’s Midwestern white lady interpretation of chicken chow mein around my plate, creating smaller and smaller piles until I could discreetly ball it into a napkin. Some nights, it was meatloaf; others, it was her chili spaghetti—a rotating cast of dishes I couldn’t stomach. “May I be excused?” I’d implore beseechingly, already half-risen from the bench. The ragdoll watched my every deception with its blank button eyes.

I never questioned its presence then. It was simply part of our small family home’s landscape, like the perpetual haze of Folgers coffee and Benson & Hedges cigarettes that hung in the air. But its message about truth and misery never quite stuck—I was already a practiced fibber by then, masking my own disgust at my mother’s cooking (sorry, mom) while instinctively developing the tools we’d need later for grander prevarications. By nine, these small acts of self-preservation at the dinner table were quietly preparing us for the years ahead, when truth-telling would become a more complicated matter of survival, when her struggles with alcohol addiction and mental illness became more apparent.

Looking back, I wonder if the poster knew what it was watching over: three little girls at a kitchen table, with me already adept at the art of selective truth-telling, my sisters no doubt soon to follow, if they hadn’t already surpassed me. The basement door might as well have been a stage curtain, with that tortured ragdoll as our silent audience, witnessing each small deception that was really just practice for the bigger ones to come. I wonder if it was appalled at its uselessness or if it found the little trio of budding dissemblers bleakly amusing. I also often wonder if our shared dark sense of humor began with the pained but resigned expression on this rag doll’s face. Most of all, I wonder… whatever happened to that poster?!

Yesterday, my middle sister texted me with barely contained-glee. This is the same sister who solved the JAW CRAZER mystery, by the way. She might be an even more persistent sleuth than me! She’d found it—the exact same freaky rag doll poster —listed for around $50 on a resale site. The photo brought an immediate rush of memories: the sticky give of vinyl against my back, the scrape of fork tines against plates, the strategic redistribution of unwanted dinners. She placed an offer immediately.

The offer was accepted, and that ragdoll will return to us after forty years—no longer a looming presence above our childhood meals but a cherished relic of the kitchen table where three little girls poked at questionable Chinese food and stodgy meatloaf, perfecting their poker faces, pretending to eat dinner.

P.S. I should note that I’m only speaking from my own experience with truth-telling and survival strategies—I shouldn’t presume to know my sisters’ relationships with honesty, then or now. (Though I suspect we all are all lying liars in our own ways, for our own reasons.)

If you enjoy posts like these or if you have ever enjoyed or been inspired by something I have written, and you would like to support this blog, consider buying the author a coffee?

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