Helen shifted in her chair, an amused expression on her face. I wondered if this meant she liked me or if she looked at all her clients this way. I realized I wanted her to like me very badly. She tapped her pen against the side of her face and crossed her legs.
“Do you want to talk about what happened last time you were here?”
“Not really,” I said.
“Alright,” said Helen. “Maybe a better question is, can you?”
Google Searches, April 4
how many eggs safe to eat one day
therapist reviews toronto helen yim
marijuana for pain, seniors
how to make weed butter
shakespeare smoked weed yes or no
what do newborn babies know
4L of water really
part-time jobs kingston
cool bars kingston
bernadette peters medley
time share but for cars
vagus nerve real thing
how to wear wide leg pants big ass
quotes about rest and resting
john donne, “nocturnal upon st lucy’s day”
john donne sexy ones
r/relationships
r/friendshipadvice
r/therapy
reddit = incel thing?
best pillows bad backs
alexander technique beginners free
modern resume templates
what is a cover letter
gemini cancer friend compatibility
sell collages etsy
“team player” synonym
single coffee delivery
how to win someone back
pube styles 2019
workout videos under ten minutes
mediterranean diet potatoes
how important is fiber
what is fiber
incognito mode twitter
safest places for solo travelers
eat pray love island
stream love island online free
home bleach kit
Chapter 18
The weather turned from hard wet （ice, hail） to soft wet （rain, mush）， and I was still living at my dad’s, a three-bedroom bungalow near Sydenham he had begun referring to as “Divorce Club.” I had planned to stay with my mother, historically the more tolerant parent, but things were getting serious between her and Jeff, so Divorce Club it was.
To my surprise, my father and I had settled easily into a cohabiting rhythm, sharing breakfast and then going our separate ways until dinner. On Wednesdays I would borrow his car and drive to Toronto, where I would teach and hold office hours, see Helen, and sleep on Lauren’s couch. On Thursdays I taught another class and took Merris to physio or to run other errands before driving back to my dad’s to pedal a stationary bike in the den and consider my credit card debt. On weekends I worked at a cheese store that smelled terrible.
The house had been purchased after I’d moved to Toronto, so it was not enormously familiar to me. I would occasionally open the linen closet door thinking it led to the bathroom, and I had no idea where pots and pans went in the cheerful, jumbled kitchen. I slept in a single bed in a room with wood-paneled walls that I worked hard to find pleasingly ascetic, if not aesthetic—hygge on a budget. My father was very understanding and gave me a great deal of space and privacy, but I was always on the lookout for the generational difference that would disrupt our fragile peace. On Twitter I followed a few millennials who lived with their parents and were constantly having to school them about how to be good and conscientious people. It seemed easier to live with children; they were always wandering into living rooms saying something accidentally profound—Mom, it’s so important when women vote, etc.—but I had a male boomer on my hands. Nightmare.
“Look at this,” he said one morning, gesturing to a physical newspaper he had somehow acquired. “A bunch of fast-food employees want to raise the minimum wage. Fifteen dollars an hour, to work in McDonald’s.”
He tutted and I cracked my knuckles, readying myself to make a speech. I did not relish the idea of yelling at my father, but he was being a small-minded classist, and I knew, as someone who had read more of the right articles, that I had a certain responsibility. “Dad—” I started, but he was not finished.
“It’s not really enough,” he said. “With inflation, I mean.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.” I looked down and saw I had adopted a kind of Power Rangers stance, my feet wide, my hands on my hips. “Well, they wouldn’t even have to worry about it if we had universal basic income.”
He took a long sip of coffee and looked at me with a placid expression. “I agree,” he said, and went back to his paper. To purge some of the righteousness I’d built up, I picked a fight about his belief that the property bubble would one day burst, allowing me to purchase a home.
I went back to my bedroom and deleted Twitter, Tinder, Hinge, Instagram, Bumble, TikTok, and Facebook from my phone, then redownloaded them a week later, plus an app that would limit the window during which I could access the internet. I downloaded another app to show me where the moon was in the sky, whether it was waxing or waning. I downloaded something called a “newsfeed eradicator” that promised to claw back my attention span by replacing the endless updates from friends, brands, and journalists deafened by silence with motivational quotes. The first one it showed me read, “Nothing is impossible. The word itself says, ‘I’m possible’！” attributed to the actress Audrey Hepburn.
I unfollowed the tiny Instagram women having picnics in the sun and started following a “radical softness”–themed account that was mostly shots of ecstatic fat women dancing around in their underwear. Sometimes their pets featured. I watched a girl in Korea fill in paintings of her friends’ gracefully sloping bodies. I listened to a livestream of a tulip field in the Netherlands. I visited a website that let you look out strangers’ windows. I cut and bleached my hair and resisted a near-physical yearning to share a photo of it online. As a compromise, I sent seven different Live Photos to the group chat, who all agreed they had been wrong, this was a great move, and I looked, in Lauren’s words, possibly damaged but definitely sexy, so: net positive.
I cut back heavily on posting, though the compulsion was still there—to have something to say or show for myself, to “share.” When I did say or show or share something （a tweet about my menstrual cycle, a photo of flowers by the lake with the caption ok spring!!）， I felt instantly and viscerally ashamed and often deleted what I’d posted. This did not help. In fact, the deleting felt, in many ways, just as white-hot humiliating as leaving the posts up, because it was the act of posting in the first place, the expression of the compulsion, that shamed me. No need to admit this publicly too.
I didn’t know where this aversion had come from. No one else in my life seemed to share it. Clive and Lauren had started “going live” on Friday nights, drinking and laughing and performing very loosely sketched out character comedy for six or seven people. Friends who seemed completely normal IRL were taking slow-motion videos of themselves weeping and putting them on TikTok with messages about how to respect but also push past one’s comfort zone. A guy I often saw in the department kitchen turned out to have a famous Twitter account where he tweeted not now babe to various world leaders.
Sometimes I thought: Why shouldn’t I post a little joke, or tell a pundit he’s being an asshole? Why shouldn’t I share some photos that make me feel beautiful? Why not document my life, my face, my moods? And sometimes I thought that setting up a self-timer in my bathroom, biting my lower lip over and over, then posting the one image I liked from the four hundred I’d taken was as vulgar and unnecessary as bending over and showing everyone my asshole.