MINNEAPOLIS, MN — 2001

I have lied to my parents about going to the tanning booth, and they seem oblivious to the fact that their pale, Irish Catholic daughter is the color of a roast carrot. I have used my employee discount at Dayton’s Southdale to procure a knockoff of Gwyneth Paltrow’s pale pink Ralph Lauren gown. My friend Tanysha’s mother has given me a full head of hair extensions several decades before that was a normal thing for a white girl to do, and the man at the MAC counter has given me the kind of face best suited for a drag brunch, which doesn’t yet exist.

I am going to prom with my on-again boyfriend and our closest friends, one of whom is wearing a scandalizing two-piece dress with a halter top (at Catholic School?!) that she bought for something like $34 on the clearance rack of the aforementioned Dayton’s, where we spend 10-15 hours a week earning and spending our money. After the dance, we will head to a block of hotel rooms rented by the parents of a terminally ill classmate, where I will maintain my chastity because nobody will try to have sex with me.

In the photos, we are wearing jewelry purchased to match our dresses, and carrying small (and invariably silk?) handbags that match the shoes we cannot walk in. We pose stiffly, our dates behind us with their sweaty hands on our virginal hips. It is adult cosplay, an approximation of what it will look like to be grown up, performed by those who believe they have one foot in both worlds but realistically are 5-7 years from any real kind of independence. A war will erupt, an economy will collapse, we will be maligned as whiners who spent their money on avocado toast instead of the houses that most of us cannot afford due to stagnant wages and crippling student loan debt.

I am not a person to glorify youth — there is not enough money in the world to convince me to relive my teens or 20s — but I do respect it.

We spend so much of our lives feeling like we are too young, and then too old. We are treated like avocados, ripe for a very short and unpredictable window of time, then suddenly too mushy to even spread on toast.

Adulthood has many privileges — voting, rental cars, eating cereal for whatever meal you please — but there are some experiences exclusively available to the young. And while I do believe that it’s never too late and you’re never too old, I have yet to meet someone in their 40s who has put on a ball gown or a tuxedo and meet their fiends — dressed in similar finery — for dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory.

Right now, all around this okayish nation, there are scores of young people slathering on self-tanner (please tell me you’re not going to the tanning booths!), slipping on heels they haven’t broken in and that might break their ankles, and teetering into fast casual restaurants to split the bill 12 ways, and I love them all.

PHOENIX, AZ 2026 —

It has been 25 years since I was (grudgingly) asked to prom, but I was asked to chaperone with a friend who works as an art teacher at a nearby public school and whose husband was not interested in going with her (your loss, pal).

We chose the early shift (to be home in bed by 9pm, with a gummy and Netflix), and met for an early dinner, where we stressed about the current war and the impending economic collapse. We wore sensible shoes and arrived at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix 10 minutes before our shift to get the lay of the land: what places to patrol, what to look out for, who to contact in case of underage drinking or sex or suspicion of either. All nooks and crannies needed to be monitored for any sign of impropriety, and I had my eagle eyes ready for nips from a flask or whatever the signs of teenage sex could be (literally wouldn’t know!).

The guests arrived — dressed in ballgowns and cocktail dresses, tuxedos and custom suits — looking every bit like the adults they hope to be one day. And then, one after the other, they climbed and crawled through the indoor playground they visited on weekends and hot summer days and field trips when they were little. Girls in skintight gowns and puffy cupcake dresses wiggled through the tunnels and pulled each other through. Boys in plastic dress shoes due back to the rental shop by 12pm the next day raced across the suspension bridge.

In 25 years, they will see what I did: that for all of the tuxes and ballgowns and tiaras, for all of the perfectly applied contour and elaborate updos, for all of the perfectly lit, angled and edited photos, they were all just kids.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

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⚡ Ziip heads: Right now, code NORAZIIP gets you 25% off gels (this is a huge deal!!!). That same code will always get you 10% off a Halo 2.

🥤Cann is my forever favorite THC/CBD bev. Squeeze a Roadie into a glass of sparkling water, and 10-15 minutes later you’re feeling goooood. Code NORA20 works sitewide!

💎 Everything at Baublebar is 20% off right now (this is rare I think? I only ever buy things there full price because I get fixated). This evil eye is even better in person, and I got so many compliments on these necklaces that the CPC (cost per compliment) is truly a bargain even full-price.

👓 To answer an FAQ: my glasses are Warby Parker (I kind of want them in green?), and these are my semi-CBK sunglasses. I was a major hater when Sophie picked these glasses, but they are very cute on her!

Come see me!

• I’ll be at the NAMI Northern Illinois Building Bridges to Understanding Event -- which is TOTALLY FREE! -- on May 14

• I’ll be at Mental Health America Houston the next day!

• You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!

• I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

Signs that I am Not Exactly Thriving include (but are not limited to): my self-manicured fingernails being chipped or unpolished, my bedside table disappearing under my piles of piles, following my worst thoughts until I feel like my heart will collapse or explode, and — this one is new — crying in my car to a video of Justin Bieber performing at Coachella.

I have never been to Coachella, and while I believe that anything can happen and you are never too old to stand amongst crowds of sweaty people to sort of hear and see your favorite artists, that experience is simply not for me. I don’t much like standing, let alone standing in lines or in groups. My days of prolonged sun exposure and binge drinking are behind me. I couldn’t possibly be expected to stay out that late.

ICYMI: What does it mean to be a “good mom?” | Bonus EP: An AI chatbot flirted with me? | Save The Date: Office Hours here on Substack on April 25 at 9am! | What I actually wore in Q1 | How you (really) are | My THC/CBD guide | Everything is Temporary | It’s Going to be OK is back! Spotify | Apple

Many people were annoyed/disappointed/opinionated about Justin Bieber’s performance at Coachella, but that is not something that I have any feelings about because I have seen one (1) video and it’s this one.

While my nails look just fine, it might not surprise you that I am in the process of clawing my way out of the Pit of Despair, a new version that I haven’t experienced before. It’s like my regular old depression joined forces with perimenopause and These Trying Times to create a new Superdespair, impervious to things like mindfulness, meditation, regular exercise, a loving family and a good career, a skilled therapist, friends who love me to my bones.

I have been wearing spiritual sunglasses and an emotional weighted vest1 for longer than I’d like to admit. I was struggling to reply to the simplest of emails, could not handle the task of setting an appointment, would spend hours staring at a blank document on my screen willing thoughts to appear in my brain that weren’t “wow you really have nothing interesting to say” or “what are you even doing? Nobody cares!”

When I got the results from a new sponsor that can screen for cancers with a blood test and found out I was fine, I cried. Because if there had been something physically wrong with me I could have an excuse to be so emotionally unwell. I could disappear into a hospital bed and convalesce and nobody could be mad at me for not doing that thing I said I would do2 and yes that kind of thinking is a sign to call your psychiatrist and your therapist and they are both aware of this!

I would never say this about your depression, or anyone else’s, but my depression is embarrassing. What do you mean you can’t write an email? What do you mean you have a beautiful, wonderful life and you sometimes feel nothing at all? What do you mean you just as easily feel as though every sad thing in the world is a small knife and all of those knives have been pulled by a magnetic force directly into your chest?

The Sertraline and birth control have joined forces somewhere inside of my body (the details are really none of my business), and are in the process of hoisting me out of the pit. The knives of the world are no longer aimed directly at my heart. The weighted vest is sliding off. I am not the dumbest, most worthless person in the world (and in fact I think I might not even be in the top five!).

But I am still going to cry to this song, because what a relief it is to feel something less than horrible. I am not a fan of gratitude being used to bludgeon people out of their dark feelings, but I am so grateful to feel something other than darkness. Nothing is too small to appreciate. Everything feels like a fragile and fleeting gift.

Brush my teeth, hallelujah
Take a swim, hallelujah
Everything hallelujah

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

Give a gift subscription

🥤 Code NORA20 works sitewide for my favorite THC/CBD drinks from Cann, but EVERYTHING IS 25% OFF RIGHT NOW. A starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water). The Yuzu Elderflower flavor is back!

❤️ The linen pants I lived in last summer are on sale! I also love these leggings (with pockets!) for yoga and these shorts for not being 2” long.

👸 Added the Medik8 Vitamin C serum (AM), Liquid Peptides (PM) and Collagen Peptide cream (PM) to my routine — not cheap, but my skin feels amazing (hallelujah).

Come see me!

• I’ll be at the NAMI Northern Illinois Building Bridges to Understanding Event -- which is TOTALLY FREE! -- on May 14

• I’ll be at Mental Health America Houston the next day!

• You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!

• I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

In my 20s, 3am was an hour I was familiar with. I could stumble out of a bar blackout drunk, grab a slice of pizza and rip a few cigs before deciding whether to pass out in the back of a cab or on the subway.

But I am not in my 20s anymore, and I haven’t been for…two decades? 3am is not an hour I want to see, it is an hour for which I want to be deep in a REM cycle, snuggled under a weighted blanket, slathered in my many potions.

Alas, my body is in a hot new phase called perimenopause, whose symptoms include (but are not limited to!) sudden and intense fits of rage, abject depression, and jolting awake in what is definitely still the middle of the night, your body ready to fight and flight.

That last one is new, and not great for a woman who needs a minimum of 8 hours of sleep a night to function, and while I wait for the HRT to do it’s thing, I’ve been looking for one of those rubber mallets from Looney Tunes and finding plenty to do in the three hours before my family wakes up. Mostly, I panic about the state of the world until I’m teetering on the edge of the Pit of Despair, so…

here’s what’s keeping me sane right now

Tryhard: A Cautionary Tale of Clocking In and Spinning Out by It’s not out until July, but I need you all to pre-order it so we can do a book club. I ate this up with a knife and a fork and wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. I laughed, I cringed, I almost cried but then she made me laugh again. If you are a tryhard burnout, read this. Bookshop | Amazon

Real Housewives of Rhode Island is exactly what I want out of a Bravo franchise: delusion, grandeur, delusions of grandeur and whatever this is.

Covering anything ordinary in rhinestones. If you need a break from hunching over a keyboard, why don’t you spend some time hunching over a table, gluing hundreds of tiny, sparkling gems to something that was previously not covered in tiny, sparkling gems? My kit | My picker-upper

Love Trapped. This podcast about a former Bachelor (as in the show I don’t watch) being dragged through the court system by a woman who faked being pregnant with twins (they didn’t even have sex!) will have your jaw DROPPING. It’s a salacious story but not told salaciously. Apple | Spotify

Morning Pages became a part of my life in 2024, thanks to of , and now I’m back at it because I have many many hours to my mornings and a brain that needs cleaning and quieting. It’s just three pages of automatic writing and I feel lighter and freer. More about Morning Pages here.

If you’re reading this at 3am, good morning! If you’re reading this at a normal time, wowwwww good for you.

I’ll leave you with this, the Comment of The Week, on a clip of this week’s podcast where a listener said she doesn’t love her job anymore.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

Save The Date: Office Hours here on Substack on April 25 at 9am! | What I actually wore in Q1 | Bonus ep: Arguing with AI about AI | How you (really) are | My THC/CBD guide | Everything is Temporary | If you want a podcast that reminds you of the OK things in life, It’s Going to be OK is back! Spotify | Apple

❤️ Code NORA20 works sitewide for my favorite THC/CBD drinks from Cann, but EVERYTHING IS 25% OFF RIGHT NOW. A starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water). The Yuzu Elderflower flavor is back!

❤️ If you’re more of a gummy girl, I like these for sleep, and these for anxiety. Code NORA = 15% off.

❤️ Pretty much everything at The Company Store is 25% off; it’s a great time to buy the only comforter you’ll need for the rest of your life, or a great set of sheets (what I gifted Sophie for her first big-girl apartment!) or towels.

Come see me!

• Attn female funeral directors (truly a dream demographic of mine)...I’ll be hanging out with you on May 8!

• I’ll be at the NAMI Northern Illinois Building Bridges to Understanding Event -- which is TOTALLY FREE! -- on May 14

• I’ll be at Mental Health America Houston the next day!

• You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!

• I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

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The wisest person I ever met would insist that he was not. My uncle Denny was a theologian and philosopher with three PhDs, a fact that would embarrass him to mention and that I only knew from reading his obituary. He wrote me letters by hand and postcards by typewriter, and though his friend Patrice eventually bought him a computer he lived all 89 of his years on this earth without the Internet. He was, as my cousin’s husband toasted the night of Denny’s funeral, “the smartest man who never made you feel stupid.” He cringed at praise, insisting that he was nothing special. He told me, the last time we had dinner, that while he thought many things, he knew nothing.

I am not being pretentious writing that, and neither was he. He spoke like a poet and a philosopher because he was one, he had nobody for whom to perform being a performative male.

After his funeral, his nephews and nieces gathered in his small apartment to perform the ancient midwestern ritual of Scavenging A Dead Person’s Belongings. I say Midwestern because my cousin’s son, a born New Yorker, trepidatiously placed a few mismatched pint glasses in a box and asked me if it was really okay to take them. Yes, I told him, Denny wouldn’t be using them anymore, and had he seen this 1970s windbreaker? It would look perfectly at home on the streets of Bushwick.

Denny died the best way I could imagine (and I imagine a lot of ways to die): in his reading chair, the Mississippi River outside his picture window. He left piles of books: philosophy, theology, foreign languages I didn’t know he spoke, a booklet on how to play the recorder from the 1950s and the recorder he must have had since then. He left short stories and essays of unknown origin in various forms of editing and with no apparent author. He left floppy disks, and rumors of an upcoming novel being published that nobody in the family seemed to know anything about.

I left with several pieces of Catholica (I cannot leave a statue of Mary behind!!!), his high school diploma and graduation announcement, and various books, some to keep and some to send to cousins who could not attend the funeral. I left with the ache that comes with knowing that you have had your last conversation, that you missed the opportunity to reply to that last letter.

I have thought of my uncle often since his death, glad that he is not here to see the state of this world and wanting him to reassure me in his quiet, humble way that we will get through it. I have revisited his letters -- decades of correspondence -- and tried (and failed, again) to read his most famous book.

This week, I published a conversation with the writer Charley Burlock about her piece in the Atlantic titled, The AI Companies Trying To Make Grief Obsolete. I have tried to fully process my thoughts on why this technology feels so wrong to me, so out of step with what makes us human. I have wondered what my philosopher uncle would say, and how many conversations it would take to fully explain the concept of a deadbot to a man who had never been on the Internet. Catholics believe in The Communion of Saints; that the dearly departed can pray for us as we pray for them, that we can ask them for guidance, for intercession. I have spoken with my dead husband through mediums and wind phones and out loud in my car while sobbing to a song he never got to hear by an artist he loved. I spent countless hours after his death scrolling through my phone, listening to old voicemails and looking at old photos.

You can listen to the new episode on Apple, Spotify or ad-free here.

The technocrats -- who already illegally ingested his intellectual property for their gain -- would be delighted for me to feed what I have left of my uncle (or my father or my husband) into the algorithm, to grind up his unique and sparkling intellect to create grist for the AI slop mill. Or, as they would say, connect with his legacy in a meaningful way.

The surest way for me to meet a deadline (even a self-imposed one, like this piece) is to do anything but write: pull all of my clothes out of the closet, spend hours trying to figure out the real identity of the woman we called “Scary Mary” in 1990s South Minneapolis, call my uncle’s friend whom I met at his funeral luncheon to tell her that the algorithm had informed me that his novel was real and available for pre-order.

She was missing him in the same way, wanting to run her ideas by him as she had for decades, and while I had interrupted her afternoon with my unexpected call, we talked for 40-odd minutes until it was time for her to be a grandmother and time for me to sit back down and try to write.

In Charley’s piece, the founder of You, Only Virtual compares grief to gangrene, something you’d certainly be smart to avoid if you could. And while I’ve never lost a limb to rot, I have more than once found myself hobbling through this world as though I had. He didn’t just miss his mom, he missed who he was when she was alive: he missed being her son.

My uncle’s friend -- who, again, I have met exactly once, at his funeral lunch -- gave me both her afternoon and the conversation I wanted to have with him.

I wrote down her words the way I wrote down my uncles, and gave them a place of (dubious) honor on my computer monitor:

To reject suffering is to reject life.

That is why this technology sounds an alarm bell inside of me: because what makes life meaningful is the temporary nature of our temporal existence. The ache we feel for the ones we love is the evidence that they were real. It is not inherently meaningful, but it shows us the meaning and value of life. The pain is not the point, but without the pain…what is the point?

Is the point -- like with so many technologies that promise to optimize our lives -- to make us more efficient for the sake of efficiency? To buff away all of the texture of life?

You are not who you were before loss, and you aren’t supposed to be. We are changed in large and in imperceptible ways by the people we love and by the ways they love us. My children sing the songs my grandfather taught me, a small piece of a man they never met that they might hand down to their kids. I have my uncle’s letters and lessons, his humble example of how to live, which I will never live up to because I am terribly vain and often annoying.

We are always in conversation: with the world, with our lives, and yes, with the dead. And we don’t need an algorithm to do it.

ICYMI: Talking about my Grandma with Kelly Corrigan | Kelly Corrigan on IGTBO! | The Dead Sibling Society | Wind Phone Part 3 | My THC/CBD guide | How to listen to the podcast on your podcast app!

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

🥤 Code NORA20 works sitewide for my favorite THC/CBD drinks. A starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water). The Yuzu Elderflower flavor is back!

🚨I’m using my CurrentBody LED Red Light Mask every day this year, and even without make up I get a lot of compliments on my skin (consistency works!). Code NORAM = 10% off.

Come see me!

• Attn female funeral directors (truly a dream demographic of mine)...I’ll be hanging out with you on May 8!

• I’ll be at the NAMI Northern Illinois Building Bridges to Understanding Event -- which is TOTALLY FREE! -- on May 14

• I’ll be at Mental Health America Houston the next day!

• You can join me for a Bad Vibes Only book club with the Society of Working Moms on June 14th!

• I looooove speaking about mental health, grief and other hilarious topics. You can email bkane@apbspeakers.org if you want to bring me to your event or organization.

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

Before I was an author and a podcaster, I was a blogger commanding downwards of $25 to bleed out on a website marketed to millennial women. Before that I was a blogger for an audience of 3: my mom, myself when I checked my blog from home and myself when I checked my blog at work.

Always, I was writing my way towards clarity. My shelves are filled with ratty notebooks that date back to my childhood, evidence that I have always been processing my experiences on the page. The thoughts and feelings of every girl I ever was are preserved in the amber of glitter gel pens and musty journals, accessible when I choose to crack them open but otherwise forgotten. It is hard to read them without cringing or crying or wanting to reach my hand back through the space-time continuum to offer that version of myself another, more informed perspective.

This week, my second memoir turned seven years old. It is insane to have published two memoirs by the age of 35, more insane to have published them within 3 years of one another, even more insane when I tell you that I wrote the first one in the six months after the deaths of my husband and father, both deaths having been preceded by a traumatic miscarriage (is there any other kind?).

Pssst — I have seven copies of this book to give away to anyone who wants one (in the US, sorry). Just raise your hand in the comments!

If I have one regret, it’s the title. No Happy Endings suggests that I’m writing about hand jobs and not, in fact, about blending a family after being widowed young. I did suggest other titles, all of which were rejected and all of which tried to convey the same message without the perverted undertones: happiness is not a destination, love is not a panacea for trauma, joy and hope do not cancel out sorrow and loss.

I was a young widow who had fallen in love with a divorcee: two traumas, both alike in dignity, in fair Minneapolis where we lay our scene. I had met Matthew months before my first book was published, and had hidden my (unexpected) pregnancy while on that first book tour, simultaneously ashamed of and overjoyed by this (very) unexpected development.

The Greek Chorus in my mind told me that the beginning of this relationship was the end of my other (that’s how it works when you’re monogamous), but — and this is NOT me riding off the Lindy West discourse of the week, I’ve been making this joke for years! — I was instead entering into a form of polyamory. A form that — and this is me riding off the Lindy West discourse of the week — is much easier when one person is dead.

ICYMI: I’m making TWO bonus episodes a month (I pinky swear) | The Dead Sibling Society | Wind Phone Part 3 | My THC/CBD guide | How to listen to the podcast on your podcast app!

All week I thought that I would look back on this book and have something significant to say about it, that the perspective I’ve gained in the past seven years would recolor the words I wrote and give them new meaning.

But I haven’t touched that book since the end of that book tour. Re-reading my published writing is as anguishing to me as reading my old journals: did I write that? Was that me?

I have no more clarity today than I did seven years ago when the book was published, or 8 years ago when I wrote it.

But the title — still not about handjobs! — and the gist of the book hold true:

A reminder that where you are today is not where you always will be.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

🥤 Code NORA20 works sitewide for my favorite THC/CBD drinks. A starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water).

🚨I’m using my CurrentBody LED Red Light Mask every day this year, and even without make up I get a lot of compliments on my skin (consistency works!). Code NORAM = 10% off.

🎧 We’re exploring the intricacies of grief on a new season of TTFA anthologies

🎧 It’s Going To Be OK is back! Listen on Apple, Spotify or ad-free right here

☎️ Questions I’m asking for future podcast episodes: what’s the most helpful thing someone did for you when you were struggling? What’s the worst thing someone said to you when you were grieving? What are the little treats and traditions that make your life feel special or that your parents did to make your life feel special (example: in our house I make a “half cake” for my kids’ half birthdays).

🗣️ I looove speaking about mental health, hard topics and how we can bring more emotional honesty to our lives. If your organization or conference is interested in booking me for a speaking engagement, reach out to bkane@apbspeakers.com

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

ICYMI: I’m making TWO bonus episodes a month (I pinky swear) | The Dead Sibling Society | Wind Phone Part 3 | My THC/CBD guide | How to listen to the podcast!

It feels like everyone is on the absolute brink right now. Not just because our maniacal, homicidal overlords are hell bent on lighting the world on fire before blasting off in rocket ships (though there is that) but…well, probably because of that.

You feel it everywhere, this unease, this frustration, cracking around us like emotional static.

All week I have fielded phone calls and texts from friends who feel like they are Wile E. Coyote, realizing too late that they’ve run out of cliff and are learning serious lessons about gravity (it goes down, I’m pretty sure).

I’ll tell you exactly what I told all of them:

Suck it up, loser. Some people have real problems.

I’m kidding! I only speak to myself like that.

You are far from the only person who feels like they are simultaneously in fight, flight and freeze, hanging on by one ragged little thread. There are countless other people whose overwhelm is sitting on their chest, slapping them across the face with their own hands and saying “why are you hitting yourself?” If that thought doesn’t comfort you, try this one: you do not have to have all of the solutions for problems that are largely out of your control.

You are not solely responsible for answering the most pressing questions of our time. Your feelings are not a defect that indicates your weakness, they are a feature that indicates you are operating exactly as you’re meant to. Sticks and stones do break your bones and words do hurt your feelings. Terror is terrifying and tragedy is tragic and the weight of the world is heavy.

The answer is not bangs, or a new notebook (sorry!), or paying a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills $179 a month to teach you how to manifest.

The answer is that you’re a person, and as Dr. Susan David says, your emotions are data. Listen up: they’re trying to tell you what’s important to you, what matters. And if you listen well enough, they’ll agree that you deserve a new notebook, as a treat.

(If you need me to give you a little pep talk about whatever is stressing you out right now, call or text 612.568.4441 because my feelings are telling me to podcast about this!)

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

💎 The BaubleBar 25% off sale ends today (3/22). Bright, fun jewelry that is fun to gift (if, like me, you’re already Christmas shopping) or get.

🥤 Code NORA20 works sitewide for my favorite THC/CBD drinks. A starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water). If you don’t want to feel high but want to feel better, these gummies are a micro-microdose (code is NORA).

🎧 We’re exploring the intricacies of grief on a new season of TTFA anthologies

🎧 It’s Going To Be OK is back! Listen on Apple, Spotify or ad-free right here

☎️ Questions I’m asking for future podcast episodes: what’s the most helpful thing someone did for you when you were struggling? What’s the worst thing someone said to you when you were grieving? What are the little treats and traditions that make your life feel special or that your parents did to make your life feel special (example: in our house I make a “half cake” for my kids’ half birthdays).

🗣️ I looove speaking about mental health, hard topics and how we can bring more emotional honesty to our lives. If your organization or conference is interested in booking me for a speaking engagement, reach out to bkane@apbspeakers.com

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on. I periodically write about these things here.

ICYMI: I’m making TWO bonus episodes a month (I pinky swear) | The Dead Sibling Society | Marcel’s caregiving story parts one and two | The thing that finally killed my social media addiction | Exploring the intricacies of grief on a new season of TTFA anthologies | It’s Going To Be OK is back! Listen on Apple, Spotify or ad-free right here |

If you are flexible with the definition of the word, I have been camping about 3 times in my life, and yes one of them was Burning Man and yeah, that was fully out of character for me even when I was trying to be a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (hard to do at 6 feet tall but can you blame me for trying?).

I love nature, and I am also a woman who enjoys the finer things in life like running water and a home with walls. It makes no sense that for a full week I have been able to watch and talk about nothing but a survivalist reality show from 2015, but here we are.

Alone is still being produced by The History Channel, but I just finished Season 1, which aired in 2025 and features 10 men who agree to be dropped onto the West coast of Vancouver Island with a backpack of pre-approved supplies (and camera equipment, lol) to live off the land for as long as they can bear it in hopes of winning a $500,000 prize.

There is no reason for me, a woman who uses a red light mask every day1 to like this show, let alone be fully enraptured by it, but I strongly feel that reality TV can be as powerful a vehicle for self-understanding as camping and bushcraft.

Episode by episode, we watch these men (and in Season 1 it is all men) battle the elements and their own humanity. They weep about mistakes they made out in the world, vaguely alluding to bad choices they wish they could take back. They seem utterly shocked by their loneliness, their desire to speak to someone other than themselves, their desperation to even see their pregnant wife who could give birth at any moment or their mother, who is dying of cancer but insisted her son pursue his dream of testing his survivalist skills on a first-season reality show on a channel my boomer Dad was obsessed with.

As days turn to weeks, they start to lose it.

For all of the skills they’ve honed and all of the knowledge they’ve acquired through their survival experiences, none of them seem realize that the one thing we need is the one they weren’t able to fit into a backpack: other people.

Most of my days are spent alone in my workspace. I used to work from home – in a closet, at the dining table, in a den barely concealed from our living room by slatted sliding doors, in a spare bedroom that shared a wall with our family’s living room TV – a lifestyle that was budget-friendly and utterly incompatible with the way I work (in silence unless I have chosen the specific noise) and the way my family lives (like people who have a right to exist in their home…loudly).

Having a place to work has helped me in many ways: I leave my house, I am not angry with my family for talking in their own home when I am trying to record a podcast, I have a place to keep all of my books and papers in piles that make sense only to me.

But it has also put me on my own island, one where I am often alone too long with my own thoughts, lost in the wilderness of my mind or The Internet until I find myself in the Pit of Despair, a place I never choose to visit but that sometimes becomes my primary residence.

You could call this depression (and my therapist does!), but I like to imagine it as a location. In the Pit of Despair, I am as alone as a person could possibly be without being dropped onto a remote island. Nobody understands what I am going through (not even myself), and it would be pointless to try to explain it because I am alone, so who would I even explain it to?!

On Vancouver Island, these men are never more than a few miles from another contestant, never more than a Satellite Phone call away from rescue. At their very worst moments, all they have to do is strike a flare, pick up their Sat phone, and call for help.

Same.

How easy it is to forget that our human need is other people.

It’s especially easy in America, where we believe in rugged individualism and looking for the silver lining while we’re being picked up by a tornado, where our government and technocratic leaders have created and perpetuated a political environment that vilifies social welfare services and celebrates the individuals who have amassed wealth through, ironically, corporate welfare.

What gets me out of the Pit of Despair? Friends like and and and who can hear me out and remind me that my thoughts are not actually facts. A truly excellent therapist. A family who loves me. Walking through the airport and realizing the that woman who darted ahead of me in the TSA line like she was about to get a special prize might be in her own Pit of Despair (or extremely oblivious, and I myself have been both at once).

We need the people we love and the people who irritate us. We need people to chit chat with and people who can help us chop down trees (if you’re into that) and people to spill our guts to other than a game camera while we shiver in a lean-to we’ve fashioned out of tarps and felled trees.

We need each other.

As you go into this week, may you beware the ides of march and may you beware the idea that you must do it all alone and go it all alone.

There is no half-million dollar prize for being the person who never asked for help, or swallowed all their feelings.

There is just all of us, hacking our way through the wilderness, and our endless need for one another.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ Dozens of you have asked, and these are my daily glasses from Warby Parker. Nobody asked, but these is the pair that Sophie chose (generational differences?!)

❤️ Everything is 40% off at Gap, including the best sweatpants and a perfect, 100% cotton tee shirt (I wear size MT). Still bitter that these jeans don’t come in talls.

❤️ These bras are a favorite for Sophie, my SIL, my friends, and hundreds of you (the bundles are a great deal!). My SIL has told me it’s okay to tell everyone what bra she wears, btw.

❤️ My favorite THC/CBD drinks have a St. Patrick’s Day bundle for 20% off (is that a sale day now? I’ll take it!). If that flavor isn’t for you, you can always use code NORA20 for 20% off anything on the site, but a starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water).

I use affiliate links, which means I get a small commission from the seller if you buy something. I only promote companies I love and spend my own money on.

ICYMI: It’s Going To Be OK is back! Listen on Apple, Spotify or ad-free right here | Marcel’s caregiving story parts one and two | The thing that finally killed my social media addiction | BONUS Episode: What we hated in February | The Wind Phone is back | Ralph returns to IGTBO (funniest kid ever, yes I’m biased) | Panning for gold (yes, literally) | Exploring the intricacies of grief on a new season of TTFA anthologies |

The most embarrassing thing about being Bill Nagan’s granddaughter was not, in fact, the way his legs looked in a bathing suit (forgive me, Grandpa, I know that you didn’t get Rickets on purpose!). It was not the way he sang off key (and loudly), it was not even the way he read every sign he saw out loud. No, the most embarrassing thing about my grandfather was the way he talked to people. In public. Out loud.

He’d greet the person behind the counter at the gas station as though they were old friends, asking how their day was and how busy it had been before we walked through the doors. Only after my grandfather had received a full run-down of this stranger’s day thus far and commented on the cost of gas relative to other locations in the city and previous years would he slap down some cash and ask for $10 on pump 2. All the while, I prayed to melt into an Alex Mack puddle of goo and ooze out the automatic doors, sure that the person on the other side of the bullet-proof glass was thinking what I was thinking, “you can’t just talk to people you don’t know! It’s illegal, pursuant to some part of The Constitution that I’m sure we’ll cover in 9th grade!”

Like all of the best cosmic jokes, this one is on me. Because some decades after my own ears would burn tomato red at the sound of my grandfather talking about the weather with a person he had never seen before and likely would never see again, my own sons whispered through their gritted teeth to me, an angel on Earth and a person who has never been embarrassing in her life, “you can’t just talk to people, mom!”

I’d told a person at the checkout of the fancy grocery store than I liked their glasses, and they told me where they got them, and then I said I’d never heard of that website but would look it up, and they asked where I got mine, and I told them, and then we talked a little bit about our vision and now, thinking back, I can understand why my kids are hoping that I spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement in federal prison with The Worst of The Worst.

They want me to do what I wanted my grandpa to do: walk through the world exchanging the least amount of words with everyone around me, meeting the bare minimum of human interaction in order to not cause any secondhand embarrassment for a kid who looked like this:

Like my grandpa, I won’t do it.

I’m not going to force small talk on people who don’t want to participate (though I will try!) but if I am spending thirty minutes on the phone with customer service trying to figure out how I ended up with three subscriptions to the same service, why wouldn’t I end that call knowing that Janine’s job as a work-from-home customer service representative gives her the flexibility to be a caregiver for her aging mother?

If I’m spending ten minutes in a taxi from BWI airport to the Baltimore Waterfront Marriott, why wouldn’t I know that my driver immigrated from Liberia to Minneapolis to Phoenix to Baltimore, and where his favorite African groceries are in the valley?

If I’m forced to live on a planet ruled by evil men who worship money and power above all else, who perpetrate horror after horror and then sleep soundly on their mountains of gold and jewels like Smaug, why wouldn’t I take every opportunity I’m given to get to know -- even a little bit -- the good that exists in the people around me?

Why wouldn’t I get to talking? You gotta get to talking.

My friend is the same way: we met a woman by the pool in Mexico last year, and by the time she went back to her room we knew her mother’s name, where she went to high school and intricacies of her sibling dynamics.

On my worst days, when I am anxious and isolating and sure that I will always feel as terrible as I do, I do my best impression of Bill Nagan or Caroline Moss and treat everyone who crosses my path like they’re the most interesting person alive. Nothing gets you out of your head and your own anxieties like other people, all of whom are carrying around their own worries and tragedies and baggage and joys and quirks, just like you.

Not every bit of small talk is going to turn into big personal revelations and deep connections, but all of them make me feel so much happier, so much more connected to the world and the good people in it. People are not all monsters, most of them are actually kind of delightful in small and unexpected ways.

Wherever this week takes you, I hope that you get to talking.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ My favorite THC/CBD drinks have a St. Patrick’s Day bundle for 20% off (is that a sale day now? I’ll take it!). If that flavor isn’t for you, you can always use code NORA20 for 20% off anything on the site, but a starter pack let’s you try a bunch of flavors (I’m partial to any of the roadies in a glass of sparkling water).

❤️ The Tarte Cosmetics friends & family sale is here and it’s amazing (code FAM35 = 35% off!). Stocking up on Shape Tape (favorite of me, my daughter and my niece) and grabbing some Maracuja Juicy Lips for Sophie’s birthday. The travel eyeshadow palettes are also an incredible deal (I’ve worn mine down to the pan).

❤️ These bras are a favorite for Sophie, my SIL, my friends, and hundreds of you (the bundles are a great deal!) If you’re my SIL I’m sorry for telling everyone what’s under your shirt but I just got you two new bras so I hope you forgive me!

Question for the group:

Let’s say a woman named Cathy told you that she had an abandoned mine for sale in the Wickenburg Mountains, and that mine may or may not be safe to enter and could, conceivably, have treasures untold within it. Let’s say she told you this on a tour of her own formerly abandoned mine, from which she has removed several tons of dirt and debris and in which you are standing with your family while Cathy shines a black light on the many gemstones that are still shimmering within this mine of hers.

Okay, this isn’t a question so much as it is A Situation I Was In Yesterday.

My family is skeptical when I tell them I have a Fun Day planned for us, and rightly so. I rarely have a plan, and rarer still is that plan a fun one.

I am a Stay At Home Mom in that I am a Mom who prefers not to leave her house, and depending on whether or not I’ve taken my Adderrall I can spend an entire day starting several reorganization projects I will never finish and go to bed thinking, “wow, I had a blast today.”

So imagine their shock and surprise when I loaded them into the car on a Saturday morning and took them on a ~2 hour drive to do some manual labor.

As a person whose spent one hour on the activity and lives with chronic Dunning-Kruger Effect, panning for gold is meditative and maddening. You shovel some dirt, you swirl some water, you sift out rocks and you do it all over again until you have a small baggie of black sand that Cathy has promised you has gold in it and you believe her because 1) why would she lie to you, she’s so nice! and 2) you did a light Google and yeah, black sand and gold seem to go together and 3) you want it to be true, just like you want to believe that you, like Cathy, could have 187 acres of haunted desert to your name and spend your days teaching people how to pan for gold and your nights alone in the mine with your black light, looking at your gems1.

What’s life without a little magical thinking? I mean, what’s the point if you can’t look at a plastic pan filled with mostly dirt, hold it up to the light and say, “yeah! I see it! It’s shimmering!”

What’s it all about if you don’t even notice that the date is 2.22 and this bonus episode released at 2:22?!

How can we shovel through all of the dirt if there isn’t at least a chance that we might find some gold?

Tomorrow we all go back to the mines. May yours be structurally sound (and regularly inspected by the Mine Safety and Health Administration), well-lit, and shimmering with possible gems.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ It feels nuts to recommend LINEN PANTS when it’s FEBRUARY but I wore these all summer and they’re on sale now. These are both a great Plane Pant (not an official name) or Work Pant (I love Athleta for making pants in tall, regular and petite!) I CANNOT justify another coat in my life but if I buy it for Matthew and wear it, that doesn’t count, does it?

❤️ Usually I tell you to use code NORA20 for these THC/CBD drinks but right now everything is 25% off (25>20, I checked).

❤️ Same with Ruggable…but if there’s something you love that isn’t included in their sale, slap code NORA15 on it!

❤️ Speaking of shimmering with possibility, It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify or ad-free right here.

❤️ I was gifted a Tria Laser, which promises permanent laser hair removal for less than I’ve spent so far at a spa (which I guess didn’t work because I’m still shaving my armpits!). I’m only 2 treatments in (it takes 8) but so far, so good (I’m using the highest level and it doesn’t hurt!) and I’ll report back when I’m done. Code NORA = 10% off if you want to try it out!

I am not a girl who loves to travel. I bravely revealed this in Bad Vibes Only, so I won’t over explain myself. Yes I will: I like being home! I like my routines! I like my things! I have never once effectively packed a suitcase, and I know when I unzip it on the other side of that plane ride I will be missing something essential, like pants or shirts or underwear or a toothbrush.

But last week I was in Vegas with Sophie and the women of Aaron’s family, in Brooklyn with and — for about 19 hours — in Orlando with the fine folks of The Head Start: Embracing The Journey.

If you’re my accountant, the trip to Brooklyn was definitely a work trip and I got a lot of work done: I spent about 16 hours a day in the Epstein files (do not recommend) and fell into the Pit of Despair about What I Am Even Doing With My Life And Does Anything Even Matter (I do this about 5 times a year, give or take).

But really, the trip was built around one important cultural event: Whitney Leavitt starring as Roxie Hart in CHICAGO.

Whitney was the “villain” of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives for reasons and I could not quite understand, but she parlayed that into a truly mesmerizing stint on Dancing With The Stars (A show I hadn’t watched until this year, but I’ve watched this samba about a million times).

Whitney’s success on DWTS became yet another villain plotline on SLOMW because the rest of her castmates were insulted that unlike the vast majority of reality TV stars who are doing it for pure-hearted, philanthropic reasons, Whitney wanted to be famous.

A woman with ambition and talent is easy to hate when you’re a person with neither.

But God, I love a girl who wants something and goes after it, even if she’s got three kids and a husband that everyone says is gay just because he likes her and supports her (everyone knows the straightest thing you can do is despise your wife!).

I love a girl who can withstand the slings and arrows of reality TV and social media and ride that hate train all the way to Broadway, where she plays a role that mirrors almost exactly her own arc as a reality TV villain.

I love a girl (and I use that word in a gender-inclusive way that my dead father would hate) who tries.

Spoiler for a 50-year-old musical ahead:

Roxie eventually finds out that she’s as replaceable to the public as any other hot murderess, and aren’t we all? Life is very short and very fast, so you might as well at least try for the things you want. To paraphrase (who was sitting directly behind me, and ), nobody cares whether or not you write (or dance, or go back to school, or sell your belongings to RV across the country, or dye your hair blue).

The only person who is truly invested in your dreams is you, so you might as well try to live them.

It’s Sunday night and the coming week is going to be a weird one because tomorrow your kids don’t have school but you probably have to work, your to-do list is growing along with your anxiety and Pam Bondi exists. (The irony of her Burn Book is that she is actually a fugly slut and nobody trusts her!!!!).

But enough about all of that.

Because there is a counterweight to all of the insecurity and all of the evil, and that’s effort.

You are someone who tries, and I love that about you.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ Ruggable gave me a code (NORA15) but pretty much everything is 20% off for President’s Day (this one is so pretty).

❤️ and I are using our CurrentBody red light masks every day this year because the world is ugly but we are vain. Code NORAM = 10% off!

❤️ These microdose THC/CBD sodas are also keeping me sane-ish. You can squeeze these into a sparkling water (great for travel). Code NORA20 works site-wide.

Everyone is on edge right now, I know. I’m right there with you, holding on by one ragged fingernail. For that reason, I wouldn’t consider the following advice from an expert on emotional regulation, but something more like A Possible List of Alternatives to Losing Your Mind from A Woman Who Often Loses Hers (rolls off the tongue nicely).

This is a menu of options, a buffet from which you can choose your own adventure. Take what you might like and leave the rest (and if you take it and don’t like it, throw it away! I’m not enforcing the Clean Plate Club!)

🚨🚨IN CASE OF EMERGENCY🚨🚨

📞 Talk on the phone like its 1997 📞

If you give me your phone number, you run the risk of an unscheduled, impromptu phone call. I won’t even text you first to ask if it’s a good time, I’ll just dial that number and let it rip. Do people answer? Sometimes! Even if it’s just ten minutes of chatting with my mom, my niece, my daughter, my friends, a person I’ve only met online…there’s something about a phone call that makes me feel more connected and grounded and less like I want to scream myself to death.

😴 Go to sleep 😴

The first thing to go when I’m on the edge is my sleep, and I need sleep. One of these gummies (or this with warm milk if I don’t want THC), and this on my headphones and I am sailing away on a snooze cruise.

🕵️‍♀️ Solve A Mystery 🕵️‍♀️

My kids got very into whodunnits after seeing Knives Out, which triggered a vague memory of my father watching Hercule Poirot on Masterpiece Theatre and I found it on BritBox. No matter the mystery, it will be wrapped up by a dapper detective who notices everything, dresses to the nines, and is – importantly – not French. It’s cozy family entertainment (unlike half of the movies I’ve ever picked for movie night).

Brick Your Phone

For over a year, this little thing has been a much-needed obstacle between me and the endless scroll. There’s something in the friction of getting up, finding the Brick and tapping your phone to it that makes you think how badly do I really need to get on Instagram? And there’s something to seeing a number like this that reminds you that you have a whole life and a world outside of your phone.

🛟 Help In Real Life 🛟

Even in the reddest of states there are opportunities to serve and restore a sense of shared humanity through small and meaningful actions. You can’t do everything, but you can do something.

📖 Read 5 Elin Hilderbrand Books In a Month 📖

I don’t know how healthy this is, but spending time in the drama of fictional characters on an island you’ve never been to is one of my favorite things!

💌 Send Some Snail Mail 💌

Now more than ever, it’s important to back the blue (the USPS). Do you know how wonderful it feels to get something in the mail that isn’t a bill or a credit card offer? You know you can give that feeling to someone else, simply by sending them a card, a letter or a little surprise package? It’s true (and so fun). This is why I do a monthly book giveaway here!

📝 Do Morning Pages 📝

This is a practice I’ve kept (inconsistently) from The Artist’s Way: a brain-dump free-write on paper that clears the junk from your mind. I did The Artist’s Way on my own but friend and creative guide just opened Club Artist’s Way if you’re curious and want a community to do this alongside you!

🆗 Find The Okay 🆗

You can just call this a gratitude list, but I resent the way gratitude has been used to bludgeon people into toxic positivity and “okay” lowers the bar and gives me the chance to tell you that It’s Going To Be OK is back on Apple, Spotify and ad-free here. Hate to say that noticing the okay in life really does help you feel better, though it’s not as fun as just freaking out!

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ Ruggable gave me a code (NORA15) and their new collection is so cool.

❤️ and I are using our CurrentBody red light masks every day this year because the world is ugly but we are vain. Code NORAM = 10% off!

❤️ AYR makes elegant, quality basics (like my favorite button-up which Matty got me in white for Christmas and this long-sleeve tee that’s in heavy rotation year round) raaaarely does sales, but it’s 20% off sitewide through February 8 (which is today if you’re reading this on February 8)

❤️ If you like THC but not too much THC, code NORA20 works sitewide for Cann, including the Dry January bundles and the roadies!

We are living in a bifurcated reality. The second amendment gives Kyle Rittenhouse the right to walk through the streets with a giant gun, shoot people and live to become a public speaker. It does not, however, apply to a VA nurse with a conceal carry permit who will be executed on the streets of Minneapolis for the crime of documenting the federal government’s crimes against its people.

This was a helluva time to bring back It’s Going To Be OK (Apple | Spotify), to say the very least.

I’m not telling you that everything is going to be okay because that is statistically inaccurate and spiritually irresponsible. But the practice of finding the okay things is not silly, it is survival.

This week we lived in the dissonance. While the Federal government decided that the Constitution doesn’t exist, we tapped at our computers and tucked in the kids and baked a Gluten Free Funfetti cake for our new teenager and tied shoelaces and fed the dogs and watched Traitors and tried to understand why Travis Kelce’s mom is on a reality show.

There is more to this world than just it’s horrors, though it’s getting harder to believe that every day. But you must believe it. We must believe it. Living in fight or flight is not productive, and drinking from the information firehouse is not action. Figure out who you are and where you fit in this moment. You can’t do everything and you can’t be everything and you shouldn’t even try unless you want to burn out and break down and what good is that to anyone?

The world needs decent people, and you are one of many of those decent people.

The Catholic Bishops don’t have a perfect track record but they have had enough of this shit and my GOD are they good at video editing.

Attorney General Kris Mayes of Arizona (my adopted red state) said to ICE — and I’m paraphrasing here — there are laws here and I’m in charge of them.

David Schweikert is a sentient toe and my congressman and he is getting absolutely bodied for his take on Kris Mayes and ICE (I’m his #1 hater and I’m not alone!)

There is this poll from last week and I want you to focus only on the TOP BAR, okay? Just the top one! I know the bottom one is going to piss you off but we’re looking at the top to remind ourselves that MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT OKAY WITH THIS!

If you can, limit your scrolling and get into the world and do one small thing wherever and however you can. Most of the comments on Instagram are bots and yes, I fight with them to let off steam and I need to stop this dork behavior.

A trusted longtime organizer made this website if you want to support the people of Minnesota, there are 80 families sheltering in place whose school is rallying funds to pay their bills in this terrifying time, and alight needs volunteers to help support their Somalian refugee families.

Small miracles everywhere, everyday.

I’m going to leave you with this quote from independent journalist Hamilton Nolan whose work inspires and grounds me.

Okay, nope, I’m actually leaving you with this unintentional mantra from this week’s Real Housewives of Potomac.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ This and pretty much everything is on sale at Ruggable (clutch if you have kids, dogs or are yourself a person who has more than once dropped a cup of coffee for no reason).

❤️ The world is ugly and I am vain (using my ZIIP every day in 2026). Code NORAZIIP still gets you 10% off. The fancy gels are nice but I just use the basic one.

❤️ If you like THC but not too much THC, code NORA20 works sitewide for Cann, including the Dry January bundles and the roadies.

❤️ I wanted diamond studs but I don’t have that lifestyle or budget. These are the right look, the right price and they have a lifetime guarantee. If they tarnish or break, they get replaced.

My current husband calls me by the nickname Aaron coined1 and uses the vacuum Aaron bought. He is raising the son that I had with Aaron, and our three other children, who have no biological tie to Aaron, wear his old tee shirts and know his old jokes.

Aaron is everywhere and nowhere all at once, like every person we grieve.

Dreams, though, feel different, more like a visit from another realm than a memory. I see him across the room at a crowded party, laughing (always laughing), and try to make my way to him. He’ll catch my eye, smile, and wave me over, but no matter how quickly I push through the crowd I’m always two seconds too late, I’ve just missed him.

In one, I am seated at Sunday dinner with my family when Aaron takes the seat across from me at the center of the table. We must have been expecting him because the table is set for seven, but it still feels like a surprise. Everyone -- Matthew, Aaron, me, the kids -- is so happy, so excited to catch up, that it takes me a minute to realize what I’ve done. I’ve gotten married. I have four kids. I lean across the table to confess this to Aaron, that he died and this is my life now. He smiles. “Okay,” he says, unbothered. “I’m sure we’ll figure it out.” Someone passes him the potatoes, and I wake up.

Though the details change a bit, this dream has returned with the same key beats: the delight of seeing Aaron again, the fear I’ll have to choose between them, the assurance that I won’t have to.

And of course I won’t; husbands don’t come back from the dead (except when they fake it!). My psyche is working through the anxiety I’ve felt since I met Matthew in the depths of my grief for Aaron. How dare I be struck by lightning twice? How could I possibly love both of them? Honor both of them?

Who knows!

I am in love with two men, a kind of spiritual polyamory that (in my limited experience with this kind of thing) works best when one of them is dead.

This is confusing for some people. It would have been confusing for me before I experienced it. Love, to me, was a finite resource, clawed back from every relationship that ended. It was silly and immature of me, but I was silly and immature, believing that the proof of my love for one person was my denial that it had ever been given to another.

Love is not a finite resource and death is not a break-up and many things can be true at once but there are still people (online. Always online) who believe that my love for Aaron is in direct competition with my love for Matthew. Comments I’ve received include:

But who do you love more? I love them equally unless Matthew disagrees with me in any way, and then he’s #2.

But how would you feel if Matthew was widowed and loved his dead wife? I’d actually feel really weird if he didn’t love his imaginary dead wife.

But isn’t Matthew jealous of Aaron? Yes, he’d rather be dead than married to me!

Last week I sat in a movie theatre and watched the feelings I’ve had for the past 10 years play out on a big screen in Eternity, a comedy (I swear it’s a comedy it’s so funny I laughed so hard!) about a woman (Elizabeth Olsen, spiritually a widow, she is one of us, she belongs) who gets to the afterlife and has to decide whether she’ll be spending eternity with Larry, her husband of decades, or Luke, her first husband who died in the Korean war.

I had refused to see it for weeks on the grounds of me being personally envious that I hadn’t thought of this before, seeing as how I’ve literally been asked who I would pick if I got to heaven (a place I won’t end up) and had to choose between my husbands (not a canonical part of Catholic heaven as far as I know)2.

I laughed loud enough to annoy people around me, I left the theater twice to sob in the hallway, and Matthew and I stayed in our seats until the final credits to collect ourselves (and kiss a little).

Eternity isn’t asking the dumb questions I’ve been asked (to my face and online). The movie uses a silly (or in my case anxiety-inducing) premise to show us what we know in our hearts when we aren’t being insecure and self-centered: that love changes us.

The version of me that Matthew fell in love with is the version who loved and lost Aaron, who loved (or tried to, or claimed to) several other people before him. That love is indelible, it’s a kind of alchemy that has changed every cell in my body and every thought in my head. A thousand invisible strings connected me to Matthew, but Aaron is the thread that brought us together. Matthew has never met or loved a Nora who didn’t know Aaron, and he never will.

Matthew’s love is a kind of alchemy, too. I am not the same girl who spent our second (third?) date reading him Mary Oliver poetry and crying on my living room floor about my dead husband. I am grateful that he sat on that floor with me, and in the past ten years has helped pull me to my feet.

I have said that we don’t move on, we move forward. I’ve lived that, too. And while I have brought Aaron’s love with me everywhere I go, I cannot bring him. The last Nora that Aaron will ever know died with him in 2014. The two of them are preserved together in the amber of my memories and my iCloud. I love them: their innocence, their bravery, their beauty.

I don’t need to wonder what might have been because what I had and have is more than enough for one lifetime, for eternity.

And if by chance those dreams come true, and Aaron sits at my dinner table with Matthew and the kids and it’s not a dream? We’ll pass the potatoes and figure it out.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

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Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

But I am here for a man who defies these genres, a friend of mine whom I see approximately .75 times a year. He is in town to perform on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!, a fact I was informed of by a (very well) targeted Instagram ad.

He did not ask me to pick him up from the airport. In fact, he asked me not to. He didn’t want to put me out. The parent company he works for would cover an Uber. He was sure I had work to do, and it’s such a hassle picking someone up from the airport.

But is it? Is it really?

We’re not talking about LAX or LaGuardia here, people.

We’re talking about Phoenix Sky Harbor, America’s Friendliest Airport™️, ten minutes from my home with traffic, where short-term parking is free if you’re out of the ramp within 15 minutes. We’re talking about 10:10 am on a Thursday, a self-employed woman with a focus problem and a friend she rarely gets to see.

So he relented, and I found him at Baggage Claim 7 and deposited him safely at his hotel in time for him to record his daily podcast and get ready for his show. Yeah, he could have gotten there sooner with an Uber driver who paid attention to the map and didn’t take 2 or 3 wrong turns, but would he have had an ice cold can of Diet Coke waiting for him in the front seat?

Would he have had a special surprise guest for 20 minutes of his podcast who mostly talked about how bad the lighting was in the downtown Hyatt conference room?

If you’re in my family, please do not read this because there are GIFT SPOILERS HERE!

You know how you have approximately 56,798 photos somewhere in the cloud, just floating out there, and you swear you’ll do something with it but you forget until your photo software says “remember this?” and serves you a screenshot of a hamster cage you bought in 2022?* Or how the last photo you framed of your niece was from her first day of school…15 years ago?2 That’s why Aura exists: to take all of your favorite memories and actually display them in a chic digital frame. Your Aura frame cycles through unlimited photos (including live photos!) and videos that you and your friends and family can all upload through the Aura app.

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Picking people up from the airport is one of my favorite things in the world, along with other freaky behaviors like going to the Post Office, walking into a coffee shop that has a drive-thru window, dropping off an iced tea at work for a friend and shopping in-person.

I want to be inconvenienced.

I don’t want to speed-run through this life seeking the most efficient route to my grave. I want to go to your child’s off-key and interminable piano recital and walk over with the cup of sugar you thought you had in your cupboard. I want to get to talking with the old lady buying two pieces of cooked bacon at the deli and I want to have the door held open for me by a teenager who calls me ma’am because I am in my 40s and she thinks I could die at any moment.

I don’t want a seamless experience. I don’t want a contactless life. I want to pick you up from the airport and drive you to your hotel, even if there’s an autonomous taxi idling outside of the airport right now. I want my day interrupted by the best thing about being a person: people.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ You can read the October Reading List here or watch it here.

❤️ This is how I’m done with Christmas shopping.

❤️ Can you dump someone if they’re dying?

❤️ The headhuggers are on sale!

❤️ It’s Going To Be OK is back! Apple | Spotify

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

1998.

I am being paid $5.15 an hour to ring up customers at a local consignment store, where everything smells like mildew and old perfume. Next door there is a pasta and pizza shop filled with cute boys who go to the public high school, and on our 15-minute breaks, my co-workers and I slip next door for free fountain Cokes. It’s an ongoing group flirtation, carried out over weeks while our boss rips cigs in the alley. We are high on caffeine and the thrill of speaking to boys whose lives are fully mysterious to us. We are, our manager tells us, breaking the law. There is no free refill policy at that restaurant, and our brazen thirst reflects poorly on this retail establishment where you can buy a used turtleneck with makeup on the collar for 20% off the MSRP.

1999-2003

I am a lifeguard at the public pool, high on the power of a chrome whistle and a red Speedo. You came to the pool for fun, but you got a reality check instead. At my pool, you’re not allowed to dive into the shallow end or double-bounce on the diving board. You couldn’t going down the water slide with a baby in your lap and you couldn’t run on the pool deck. You thought you’d enjoy a Diet Coke at your pool chair while you read a book? Absolutely not.

When the pool closes, the lifeguards stay late to rearrange the deck chairs, clean the locker rooms, race down the water slides. We are so young, so tan, so unaware of the sun damage we will be undoing in two decades with lasers and retinol. Changing into my street clothes in the women’s locker room, I see a pair of eyes in the vent. They belong to our co-worker, a short and annoying boy whose mother works for the city and who had to stand on a bench and his tippy-toes to see us naked.

We tell our manager. He is still there the next day, the next week, the next summer.

He was sorry, he didn’t mean anything by it.

2006

I work in Manhattan at a company who runs help wanted ads in newspapers (I found this job online). One of the managers is a short, red, angry man who lives in New Jersey with his wife but spends his lunches in a hotel room with my co-worker. He is storming through the cubicles, asking who took his papers from the printer. He is at my desk, rifling through paper. Mixed in with my own work is a sheet of paper he printed. This is obviously my fault, obviously intentional, obviously a federal offense. He calls me fucking stupid. I cry in the bathroom.

{redacted}

I work at one of the top advertising agencies in the upper midwest and that is not a joke. My boss hides her terror and anxiety under perpetual cheer and self-deprecating jokes. She teaches me to placate the male creatives by laughing at their jokes (not funny) and complimenting their taste (cargo pants and flannels). One of them has the name and face of a boy and the anger of a man. He throws a laptop at a female designer because he’s just so passionate about the work (a headline for a bottom shelf vodka company that sorority girls puke up in parking lots). She ducks. He gets promoted.

2014

My husband is going to die, but I am still going to work. I am calling into meetings from the hospital. I am at my desk before 8am but I do, and I know this is bad, sometimes leave the office at 5pm just to make sure I can get home and see if he’s alive. I turn down no assignments. I accept all meetings. A manager from another department asks if I’ll co-lecture at a local University with him, and I say, of course I will, and I do the presentation while he sits with the students. I don’t mind at all, of course, doing unpaid work after hours. My boss, though? He wants to know what kind of message that sends to other people. Don’t I think that might imply that I’m not focused on the work at hand? Doesn’t it sort of look like maybe my husband’s Stage IV brain cancer isn’t that serious? I hadn’t thought of it that way (I really am stupid).

{redacted}

I am being paid 30% of what a man doing less than me is being paid to do less work than I am doing and to do it less well. I have no benefits. The VP who allows me to speak with him tells me that he’s surprised to hear me ask about money like this. He thought I cared about the work. He thought I wanted to help people. Isn’t that payment enough, when you think about it?

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❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

Somehow, I’ve already lived many lives and built a rich trove of lore, much of which I’ve already forgotten.

I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, poet, a pirate, a pawn and a king. I’ve been up and down and over and out, and I tell my young adult children that life is long2 and often unpredictable, that they have not yet met all of the people who will love them and cannot yet imagine all of the people they will become.

I was an English major in college not because I was passionate about the subject (I’ve been speaking English my entire life!) but because I changed my major so often that it was the only major I could finish before taking a fifth year that my parents would have refused to pay for.

My closets and journals and search history are filled with ghosts of the lives I almost lived, and still might. And though I’m creeping closer to my father’s expiration date, I don’t feel the same pressure I did 10 years ago to Do It All and Be It All. Rather, I just find myself excited about the possibilities I will most likely never explore.

We have spent a lot of time here reminding ouselves that it is not too late and we are not too old, which is good, because I have a lot of big dreams, vague interests and wild hares.

I am, like many others, living with an affliction called Restless Life Syndrome.

There’s no cure, and there’s no way to manage it. There’s only living with a constant and evolving list of things you’d like to do, things you think about as often as you forget about them.

As a vulnerable share, I offer to you, in no particular order and with no particular sense of urgency or importance, the following list of things I want to do unless I lose interest or change my mind:

Whitney Leavitt’s Samba on Dancing With The Stars. Do I want to learn how to dance generally? Not really, no, I just want to be able to do this dance and look this cool and hot for 90 seconds of my God Damn life is that too much to ask?

@officialdwtsWhitney Leavitt and pro Mark Ballas perform a Samba to “Shake Ya Ass” (Radio Edit) by Mystikal. #TikTokNight #DWTS

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Be really good at baking. Oh, I’ve baked before. I’ll bake again. But I’m celiac and I want to join in on the sourdough train and I cannot bake a loaf of GF bread that doesn’t weigh 15 pounds and taste like sand.

Drive a stick shift. This was actually on a real-life list I made for my 40th birthday, and I didn’t make it happen because I don’t have a stick shift (should I go buy one? Maybe I should buy one!) and the only time I tried to learn it was in Italy, in an old pick-up truck. I cried and the man teaching me gave up (I have that effect on men).

Be really good at an instrument. Yeah, I took piano lessons for awhile but the teacher was kind of mean and I wasn’t good right away so okay, I did give up, and maybe this one is on me.

Live on a farm. Chickens. Two cows, max. Two donkeys (they get lonely if they’re alone!). Some kind of crop? Front porch swing, wood burning stove, the works. If I learn to drive stick, there’s a manual pick-up in the gravel driveway.

Live in New York City. I want to be near and live in a cramped little apartment with my husband and kids and ride the subway and be stopped by one of those TikTokkers who asks you how you met your husband (so I can ruin their day by saying “my first husband died.”

Draw really well. Do you know those people whose hands make something that looks exactly like what their eyes are seeing? That’s so cool to me. But it’s also cool to me when people draw things that look like cuter versions of what their eyes see. How do they do it?!

Learn Mah Jongg. And how to spell it. Looks fun, looks confusing, looks like something I could waste a lot of money on and never touch again. But everyone who plays it looks like they’re having a blast, and I want a regular meetup with my friends, none of whom play (yet!).

Have a vintage store. I love things! I want a whole store of them, but I also don’t want to part with anything, so maybe it’s just a museum and if I like your energy, I’ll give you something? God, I’m great at business.

Tame a raccoon. I like their energy, their little hands, their general vibe. I don’t want to take one from it’s family so I would have to find it organically and be the Daddy Warbucks to his Annie (this raccoon is plucky orphan who can sing!).

Model for Land’s End. I mean, how many turtlenecks does a girl have to buy before she’s asked to REPRESENT THE TURTLENECK ITSELF?!

Remodel something. You know those videos where a good-looking couple rips out their kitchen and rebuilds it themselves and it doesn’t end in divorce? I want to do that.

Have a bookstore. Hear me out: it’s actually a bookmobile and I build it (with the skills I’ve acquired on my remodel) on one of these cute itty bitty trucks!!!

Have an ice cream truck. God, I guess I’m just really into trucks? What makes my ice cream truck different from the other ice cream trucks is I’ve painted it pink and white stripes and we ONLY serve soft-serve, twist ice cream and also if you don’t have any money, that’s fine, it’s on me (this is why Matthew is not on board with the idea, he fears how good I am at business).

Learn to use a straightening iron. Nobody curls my hair like a stylist with a straightening iron (straightening irony, isn’t it?). My wrists cannot figure out the motion, and I always end up with a weird crease.

Needlepoint personalized stockings for everyone in my family. It only costs several hundreds dollars and several hundred hours of time per stocking, what’s holding me back?!

Have a fancy cat (and not be allergic to her). God, cats are so cool. I just want an aloof animal lurking around my home, fully disinterested in me, pooping in a box somewhere. I’m not even joking, I’d love this but they make it hard for me to breathe (a small price to pay??).

Be fluent in Italian. 10-20 minutes a day on DuoLingo isn’t cutting it, so I think this is one of those “abandon your family and start a new life under the Tuscan sun” kind of situations.

This is what it’s like to life with Restless Life Syndrome. Just when you think you’re ready to relax, you get the itch. Maybe it will take you to the craft store for supplies, maybe it will pull you onto a real estate website to shop for land you can’t afford in a state you’ve never been to.

A lot of people will say that this list is “unrealistic” or “delusional” and that I “should just focus on my current commitments” and those people are haters and also my husband and they are missing the point.

This is not a to-do list, it’s a maybe-who-knows-could-happen-but-again-maybe-not list. People who are grounded in the present moment and their current reality don’t see what we, the RLS community,

Who knows what we’ll do or if we’ll even do it, and who even cares? Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s Sunday, and I have some daydreaming to do.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

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❤️ Everything I read in September is here! Video with bonus crashout about AI is here.

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You cannot critique Taylor Swift’s work without being accused of hating her, so let me say right now that I’ve been a fan for nearly 20 years, RED was the soundtrack of falling in love with my dead husband, who kept a signed photo of Taylor at his desk and who bought 1989 tour tickets on his deathbed using his mom’s American Express. Reputation was perfect, and I took my daughter to that tour as well. I was at nights one and two of The Eras Tour! I’ve always cringed at some lyrics and songs and have felt others strike a chord deep within my soul.

I’ve loved Taylor when she was a teenager waiting to be noticed by her crush, when she was a fake hermit writing songs about imaginary love triangles during the pandemic, through all of the eras, and — importantly — even despite lyrics like “don’t put me in the basement when I want the penthouse of your heart” and indications that she does not know how Christmas decor works (“we can leave the Christmas lights up ‘til January.”).

I have loved her happy work, her silly work, her heartbroken work. I love seeing her happy and in love with a big, broad doofus who says she’s the “smartest woman in the world” because she uses some SAT words.

And I hate this album.

Taylor is a lightning rod and a Rorschach Test.

Say the wrong thing and you’ll be struck down or asked to look at the ink blot again and reallllllly think about what you see in front of you.

Things I’ve seen people say online about this album:

• It’s supposed to just be fun!1

• Let people like what they like!

• Listen to it ten times and you’ll change your mind!

There are people addicted to criticizing her, who despise the artist so much they can’t see the art. There are people who cannot stand to see her critiqued, who love the artist so much they cannot see the art.

And here, somewhere in between, is us.

To talk about Taylor’s work, you have to talk about Taylor’s brand.

This album was announced on New Heights, the podcast that Taylor’s boyfriend shares with his brother (synergy!).

She said (and I’m paraphrasing) that before you choose to pay attention to someone’s opinions, you should regard your attention as a luxury item and consider whether the person has invested enough to earn your attention.

I found that sentiment about investment interesting as I listened to The Life of A Showgirl, an album that was released only after Taylor Swift Corp. pushed out 28 (and counting!) variants of CDs and vinyl and plastic cardigans to her fans, all available for a “limited time” to drive sales and a sense of scarcity. Oh! And don’t forget, a behind the scenes “movie” (series of lyric videos) released in AMC.

She is aware that her fans have and will invest in whatever her tells them to: they will buy all of those album variants, just to have access to the poems or photos that unlock the real, secret, deeper meaning that she will never confirm or deny.

Nobody is better at building and maintaining a parasocial bond than Taylor Swift, a perpetual victim of her circumstances, simultaneously a mastermind and a helpless girl that you cannot criticize without being called a misogynist.

“Would you criticize a man for doing this?”

Yeah, but I don’t know of any men, so that’s kind of a moot point.

The only man who can do anything close to what Taylor does is Donald Trump, and Taylor, too, could shoot someone in the middle of fifth avenue and have her fans say, “no, you don’t get it, it’s an Easter Egg!”

Read more

Oh, and another thing: Please do not give into despair and hopelessness.

Most people are not garbage. Most people want good things for other people. Most people know that our fates are connected and the 1% wants us at each other’s throats so we forget they are hoarding wealth, ransacking our planet and manipulating us into submission!!!

❤️ Bose makes my favorite headphones, and while i prefer a headhugger, many people like ear buds and these are on major sale (buy them for Christmas! It’s not too early!)

❤️ If you haven’t yet, please go check out our YouTube. We have good stuff over there, like the July Reading List and the August Reading List and episodes and other stuff !

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, I love it (this is all I’m wearing on camera, too!)

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device. I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off and NORAGEL gets you 20% off gels right now.

❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

Affiliate links mean that I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Not ready to commit to a paid subscription? You can leave a tip here. 👇

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Today, I’m *experimenting* with a new format for Sunday emails today, hence the paywall. I wanted to make something soothing that you could watch (or listen to in the background) while you try to unwind from the past week and gear up for the next one while also clearing out the junk drawer of my brain with this little video journal.

It’s a little bit of a recap of the past week, with diversions into:

• Opening a time capsule into 2010

• How many jobs do I have?

• Help! My kid is heartbroken!

• Forcing my children to eat a vegetable (like one single bite)

• K-Pop Demon Hunters

• Approximately 10,000 other topics I already forgot about

Maybe these extra episodes are just subscriber bonuses? Maybe I never do another one?

If you hate it, I’m sure you’ll let me know!

Here’s the link to the Glamorous Trash’s Viral Article Book Club where I rehash the Elizabeth Gilbert excerpt in the cut with of The Stacks. OF COURSE I CRIED!

❤️ Wow, you guys really loved this episode about an “avoidant” widower who ghosted a divorcee. Apparently MANY OF US HAVE BEEN IN SIMILAR SITUATIONS!

❤️ If you haven’t yet, please go check out our YouTube. We have good stuff over there, like the July Reading List and the August Reading List and episodes and other stuff !

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, I love it (this is all I’m wearing on camera, too!)

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device. I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off and NORAGEL gets you 20% off gels right now.

❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

Affiliate links mean that I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Doctors really need to update the depression screening questionnaire because I’ve never felt better and yet, of course I have felt hopeless many times over the past few weeks!!!! Every headline I read seems like it should be from The Onion and isn’t!!!

But I’m not hopeless. Not all the time, at least, and not right this second. Because despair is boring. 👇

I know from Susan David that feelings are not facts, they are data that point us towards what matters to us. I know as a deeply feeling person that not all of my feelings are worth sitting with. And I know that I can snap myself out of my negative thought spirals with a silly and simplistic rule for myself:

When I feel overlooked, I make someone else feel seen and appreciated.

When I feel broke or cheated, I do something generous for someone else.

When I feel helpless, I do something to help someone else.

It doesn’t fix everything, but it snaps me out of my own mind and reminds me that the world is held together by decent people doing whatever small good things they can in that moment.

You cannot do everything, and nobody expects you to.

Yesterday on Instagram we pooled resources to help Ashley raise money for 8 families in Gaza. Just a bunch of small donations that provide a small and crucial counterweight to a genocide funded by our tax dollars.

This week will have a million new horrors piled on top of the millions we haven’t even processed yet. Don’t despair, just do something.

Yours in earnestness and imperfection,

Nora

❤️ Wow, you guys really loved this episode.

❤️ Our YouTube also has the July Reading List and the August Reading List.

❤️ Here’s our Summer Trip Recap and What I Packed.

❤️ Simplified my makeup routine with the essentials from Merit, I love it.

❤️ I’m hooked on the ZIIP Halo microcurrent device. I don’t use the app, I just freestyle it on my jawline and my cheeks and I see such a difference. It ain’t cheap, but code NORAZIIP gets you 10% off and NORAGEL gets you 20% off gels right now.

❤️ I get 8+ hours of sleep a night because of these THC gummies. The DREAM ones conk me out for 8-9 hours, and the UPLIFT ones make me chill and fun. Code NORA gets you 15% off!

❤️ All of the shopping links I share are rounded up here.

Affiliate links mean that I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.