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The Human Psyche Is Scarier Than Horror—and More Satisfying
‘Tis the season for watching scary movies with your loved one, but I refuse to watch those kind of films/ television shows. I do not like gore, the supernatural, or horror. I understand that the area of the brain involved in intense emotional bonds—love, attachment, desire—sits near (and sometimes overlaps with) the circuitry that processes fear and threat. The amygdala, in particular, tags experiences with emotional weight, whether that weight is the jolt of danger or the pull of connection. Some people lean into that proximity; the thrill of fear can feel adjacent to the thrill of intensity. I get the logic. I just do not want it in my living room, and I especially do not want it lingering after the credits.

A candlelit maze of red-curtained passages and towering book stacks spirals around a tiny central stage.

What I want is a movie in which I can lose myself—one that will not leave me with night terrors or a racing pulse at 2 a.m. I want something that lets me inspect the human psyche: how people use manipulation, charm, calculation, or subtle pressure to gain power, love, status, control, or simply the upper hand. These stories do not need monsters under the bed. The ordinary (and extraordinary) strategies people deploy against one another are already monster enough.

Horror often works by bypassing deliberation and going straight for the autonomic nervous system. Jump scares, visceral imagery, and the suggestion of malevolent forces outside human control can be effective precisely because they short-circuit the thinking mind. For many viewers that is the point: a safe, temporary surrender to fear. For me it is the opposite of what I want from a story. Once the body is activated in that way, it is hard to stay in an observational mode. I end up bracing rather than examining.

Psychological character studies and dramas about power keep me inside the thinking mind. They invite scrutiny. You watch someone read a room, withhold information, reframe a narrative, or offer affection with an agenda. You track the small calibrations of status and desire. The tension is real, but it is cognitive and social rather than purely visceral. You can stay immersed without the residual hangover that often results in frightening nightmares and daydreams. I prefer movies where the stakes feel high because they are recognizably human: reputation, intimacy, resources, belonging, revenge, ambition.

A shattered antique mirror overlooks a shadowy staircase in a decaying Gothic interior.

The best of them function as case studies. You see:
- How someone constructs a more desirable identity and then protects it at any cost (The Talented Mr. Ripley).
- How a person weaponizes narrative and public perception inside a relationship (Gone Girl).
- How ambition and isolation can warp a personality until dominance becomes the only remaining language (Mad Men)
- How a mentor or authority figure uses selective praise, humiliation, and the promise of excellence to control others (Whiplash).
- How class, need, and opportunity turn ordinary people into careful infiltrators (Bridgerton).
- How charm and strategic cruelty operate in social or romantic arenas (Dangerous Liaisons, Cruel Intentions).
These are not always gentle films. Some contain violence or cruelty. The difference is that the cruelty is usually the result of human motives rather than the point of the spectacle. The camera (and the script) keeps returning to intention, consequence, and the internal logic of the characters. You finish the film thinking about why someone did what they did, not about whether something is still under your bed.

Losing yourself in a story about power and manipulation is still immersion. You can spend two hours inside someone else’s strategic mind, noticing the tells, the justifications, the moments when calculation gives way to genuine feeling (or vice versa). You can also notice the cost. Most of these stories are not simple celebrations of cleverness; they show the damage that accumulates when people treat other people primarily as means. That damage is interesting. It is also useful. Everyday life is full of milder versions of the same dynamics—office politics, romantic mixed signals, social performance, institutional pressure.

There is also a pleasure in the absence of dread. After a well-made psychological drama I can turn off the light and go to sleep. The film has given me something to turn over in my mind, but it has not left my nervous system on high alert. That trade-off is worth it to me.

I am not arguing that horror is illegitimate or that people who enjoy it are wrong. As a little girl I loved “scary” experiences (heights etc), but the love part of my brain no longer overlaps with the fear part. I am simply describing a different preference: stories that let me study how humans pursue power and connection, rather than stories that try to make me feel haunted. Give me the long game of motives, the careful editing of self-presentation, the slow revelation of what someone will do when they want something badly enough. That is the territory in which I most enjoy getting lost.
October 30, 2026
Update…

October 30, 2026
Healthier Halloween Treats: My Type of Halloween

My household was never the kind that kept a package of candy in the pantry “just in case.” There was no stash of fun-size bars for movie nights, no bowl of leftover Halloween loot that lasted into November. Candy simply was not part of the everyday landscape. When I moved to America and discovered Snickers, it felt like a revelation—the perfect balance of nougat, caramel, peanuts, and chocolate. I loved them, but they remained a rare treat, something I might get once in a while if we happened to be somewhere that sold them. They were never something that lived in our house.

Because of that, Halloween never quite clicked for me. The idea of kids (and adults) walking around with bags full of candy, then bringing it all home to be eaten whenever they wanted, struck me as almost absurd– how could they not go through the entire bag in one sitting? #FatGirll. In my world, sweets were occasional and deliberate (For tea with guests).. An entire plastic pumpkin overflowing with chocolate bars felt less like a holiday tradition and more like a kind of excess I could only relate to when I was being gluttonous and secretive. I understood the costumes and the pumpkins, but the sheer volume of candy always made me feel like an outsider looking in.

An abundant spread of Halloween candy, chocolate, pumpkins, and autumn leaves decorates a rustic wooden table.

Now that I am older (and, I like to think, a little wiser), I have mostly traded the classic candy aisle for versions that feel better for my body. I still really enjoy sweets—I just prefer ones made with ingredients I can actually recognize. My boyfriend has fully embraced this preference. Every weekend on our coffee date, he makes sure I have a Honey Mama’s bar waiting for me. Those bars are simple in the best way: nothing but cocoa nibs and honey, with a texture that is somehow both dense and creamy. There is no weird aftertaste or long ingredient list. It is just chocolate that tastes like chocolate.

Because it is spooky season, he is taken the mission a step further. Instead of only sticking with our usual healthier bars, he has been hunting for cleaner versions of the classic “normie” candy bars everyone grew up with—the ones that normally come loaded with oils, gums, artificial colors, and other things neither of us wants.

That is how we found Unreal. They make versions of M&Ms, Reese’s cups, and other familiar favorites without the usual junk. No artificial dyes, no weird emulsifiers, just better ingredients that still deliver the flavors people know. He recently bought their take on Mounds bars—the coconut ones, essentially Almond Joy without the almond.

The first bite was genuinely impressive. It is literally just shredded coconut enrobed in dark chocolate. The coconut is sweet and chewy, the chocolate is deep and not overly sweet, and the whole thing feels satisfying in a way that a regular candy bar rarely does for me anymore. There is no waxy coating or strange chemical aftertaste—just coconut and chocolate doing exactly what they are supposed to do. I polished off more than one in a single sitting.

The package had eight fun-size bars. I will not be saving any of them for Halloween.

A warm autumn still life pairs chocolate, pumpkin, fallen leaves, and candlelight.

Part of me still finds the traditional Halloween candy haul a little wild. But these days I am less interested in judging the excess and more interested in finding versions of the things I enjoy that actually make me feel good afterward. I do not need a giant bag of candy sitting around the house (I would probably eat it!), and I do not feel deprived without one. What I do need is the occasional real treat—something that tastes indulgent without requiring me to ignore half the ingredient list.

My boyfriend gets that. He does not try to talk me into regular Snickers or force the “just this once” conversation. He simply shows up with Honey Mama’s on ordinary weekends and goes looking for Unreal when the season calls for something more festive. It turns out that a bag of cleaner coconut bars eaten freely, without any Halloween deadline attached, is more than enough for me.

I still do not fully understand the impulse to collect a mountain of candy only to ration it for weeks. But I understand the desire for something sweet that feels special— I can usually get through my something sweet in a few hours. Brag. These days, that something just happens to be made with better ingredients—and I have no intention of waiting until October 31st to enjoy it.

October 27, 2026
What Halloween Should Be (Instead of the Plastic Dust-Pile We Have)

Halloween, as we currently practice it, is one of the most aesthetically defeated holidays on the calendar. It is not scary, not beautiful, not even particularly fun once you look past the sugar. It is mostly dusty. The entire visual language is cheap plastic left out in the weather: orange pumpkins that never decay, synthetic spiderwebs that never catch anything real, skeletons that look like they were extruded in a factory in 2003 and have been slowly yellowing ever since. Everything has that slightly greasy, light-absorbing sheen of mass-produced decoration. Walk through any suburban street in late October and the cumulative effect is not atmosphere. It is clutter that has already started to look tired.

Children carrying glowing lanterns walk past decorated homes on a leaf-covered street at dusk.

The costumes make it worse. I have never found a man dressed as a “greater man”—a superhero, a historical figure, a cartoon character—particularly appealing when the whole ensemble is held together by foam, hot glue, and polyester that reflects light the wrong way. The plastic quality is not a detail; it is the point. It turns the attempt at transformation into something faintly pathetic. There is a difference between play and costume-as-product. One can be charming. The other usually looks like the wearer has agreed to become temporary signage for a brand or a franchise. And while I have absolutely no objection to people dressing in ways that are deliberately sexual or revealing—sluttiness itself is not the problem—most of what currently passes for sexy Halloween is just the same plastic-and-polyester problem in a shorter hemline. Worn by the wrong types of people. The materials kill the effect before the body can do any of the work.

An inviting campfire surrounded by wooden chairs, wildflowers, herbs, and warm tea beneath a crescent moon.

What is missing is any real sense of occasion. Halloween began, in various forms, as a threshold festival: the end of harvest, the start of the darker half of the year, a moment when the boundary between ordinary life and something else was treated as thinner. That does not require fake cobwebs. It requires people deciding, collectively, that the night is different from other nights and acting accordingly. The closest living model I can think of is Midsummer. Not the commercial version, but the older practice of gathering outdoors, using what the season actually supplies (flowers, greenery, fire, food), dancing, processing, and treating the whole thing as an act of praise rather than an act of consumption.

Midsummer works because it is still legible as a celebration of something outside the participants. People move through the landscape. They use real materials that will not survive the week. They sing and circle and eat and stay up late because the light itself is the excuse. The result is not always elegant, but it is rarely dusty. There is a difference between temporary and cheap. Temporary can be lush. Cheap is usually just permanent-looking garbage that someone will eventually have to throw away.

A Halloween worth having would borrow that structure rather than the current one. Real produce and real branches instead of molded plastic. Processions instead of porch displays. Dancing that is allowed to be a little unruly rather than content that exists mainly to be photographed. Food that is seasonal and shared rather than individually packaged candy handed out under porch lights. Costumes, if they exist at all, made from cloth, paper, natural materials, or nothing much at all—things that can be worn and then discarded or burned without leaving a residue of synthetic fibers. The point would not be to look like a character from a movie. The point would be to mark the turn of the year with other people, using what is actually around, and treating the night as an interval rather than a retail event.

None of this requires purity or historical reenactment. It only requires refusing the version of the holiday that treats both the dead and the living as an opportunity to sell more orange-and-black polymer. Midsummer already shows that large groups of people will still gather, dance, and parade if the materials and the premise feel real enough. Halloween could do the same. It would just have to stop looking like everything in it was ordered in bulk and left outside until the color faded.

October 26, 2026
Happy Birthday to my mother.

I know I have caused you a lot of pain through the years. I see it sometimes in the way you look at me—careful and holding more than you say. There are moments when the weight of what I put you through still sits between us, whether the eating disorder or the disability, even when neither of us names it. I do not say that to reopen anything. I say it because I see it, and because pretending I do not would feel like another kind of distance. What I hope, more than anything today, is that you get to set some of that weight down. I hope this year gives you room to enjoy your own life—the ordinary, unburdened kind of happiness that does not have to orbit anyone else’s needs or worries. You deserve days that feel light. You deserve to be celebrated without the shadow of old worry following you into the room.

You retaught me how to be a lady. Eventually, a housewife. Not in the glossy, performative way the word sometimes gets used, but in the slower, more stubborn way that actually sticks. You showed me how to carry myself when the room is watching, how to speak with a little more care, how to put things back where they belong even when no one else will notice. And yes—sometimes the lesson was far less elegant. You taught me how to wipe properly, how to clean myself with the kind of thoroughness that does not leave anything half-done. I used to roll my eyes at that. I usually do. Now I understand it was never only about hygiene. It was about not being careless with myself. It was about finishing what I started. Those lessons did not always feel gentle, but they stayed. They still correct me when I get lazy with my own life.

I do not live for anyone else. I know that has been hard for you to watch. My stubbornness has carried me down roads that look nothing like the ones you hoped I would take—timelines that feel delayed, sideways, or simply wrong from where you stand. I have failed publicly and privately. I have chosen things that required you to explain me, defend me, or simply wait. I see the gap between the life you pictured and the one I am still building. I will not pretend the gap is not real. But I also know that the same stubbornness that frustrates you is the thing that keeps me moving when it would be easier to stop. I will get there eventually. I always do. It just takes the shape I choose, not the shape that was mapped out for me.

What I want most, on this birthday and the ones after it, is for the life I am building to eventually bring you something like relief. Not because I finally become the version of me you once expected, but because I become solid enough that you can stop bracing. I want you to look at me one day and feel, without having to work for it, that I am all right—and that some of what you gave me is still alive in how I move through the world. I cannot promise the path will ever match the one you wanted. I can promise I will keep walking it until it holds.

Happy birthday. I hope this year is kinder to you than the ones that taught us both how much we can endure. I hope you get to enjoy it.

October 25, 2026
The Delusion of Superstars (and Swollen Arms)

My football team lost again last night.

It was one of those competitive, “we were right there” losses that let you sleep, but also the kind that leaves you staring at the ceiling at 1 a.m., replaying the same red zone interception, the same missed tackle, the same rambunctious sideline. After a genuinely terrible start to the season, I told myself I would be patient. I would give it ten games before I started rewriting the narrative. Ten games felt like a respectable sample size—enough for a new system to settle, for young players to figure out the speed of the league, for the early-season noise to quiet down.

We are only at seven. And I am already antsy.

Rain glistens across the empty stadium seats and field beneath bright floodlights.

I went into this season convinced Drake Maye was about to look like the version of himself everyone saw flashes of last year—the version that made the deep ball look effortless, that moved through progressions with calm instead of panic, that turned broken plays into something resembling art. I told myself the early struggles were just the tax you pay for developing a young quarterback. The arm talent was still there. The athleticism was still there. The “it” factor people love to talk about was still there. All he needed was time, better protection, and a few more games to get comfortable. I was sure of it. And alas we beat the Buffalo Bills… a few games after that, I was certain that I was right.

Then last night happened, and the certainty cracked a little. Yes, he is great, but what about the rest of the team?

I do this thing where I compare my sports fandom to my own recovery. It sounds dramatic until you are sitting around with an arm that has decided to become an annoyance. A few days ago it was just sore. Now it is throbbing, swollen to two or three times its normal size, and refusing to bend the way I remember it bending. My own mother and my physical therapist said the right things about inflammation, rest, and timelines. The logical part of me understands that healing is not linear and that setbacks are part of the process. The other part of me—the part that still believes Drake Maye is one good game away from looking like a superstar again—looks at this arm and thinks the exact same delusional thought:

I’ll be back to my superstar self.

A lone ball rests at midfield as sunset illuminates the empty stadium.

It is funny how the language is identical. With the team, I keep saying “they just need to put it together.” With the arm, I keep saying “it just needs a few more days.” (Along with the rest of my recovery). Both statements are technically possible. Both are also convenient ways of avoiding the harder possibility: that the version I keep picturing might not show up on the schedule I want. Maye might not turn into the franchise savior this season. My arm might not return to full strength as quickly as my brain has already decided it should. The swelling might stick around longer than the optimistic timeline I made up while icing it at night.

The comparison is imperfect, of course. A football team is a collection of dozens of people, a coaching staff, a front office, and a whole ecosystem of variables I cannot control. An arm is just an arm. But the emotional pattern feels the same. I get attached to a particular version of how things are supposed to go. When reality does not match the version, I do not immediately adjust the version. I adjust the timeline. Ten games becomes twelve. A few days of rest becomes a week. The story stays the same; only the estimated arrival time changes.

Last night’s loss made the parallel harder to ignore. I watched Maye miss a couple of throws that he made last season and felt the familiar drop in my stomach. Then I looked down at my arm, still puffy and angry, and felt something adjacent. Both situations are asking me to sit with uncertainty longer than I want to. Both are testing whether my optimism is rooted in evidence or just in the fact that I am not ready to accept a different outcome yet.

I am not ready to declare the season over at seven games. I am also not ready to declare that my arm is going to cooperate just because I need it to. What I am ready to admit is that the delulu is doing some of the work right now. The belief that Maye can still become the player I pictured is keeping me from fully checking out. The belief that this arm will eventually calm down and function again is keeping me from spiraling about every little twinge. Maybe that is not pure delusion. Maybe it is just the thin layer of hope you need when the evidence is still incomplete.

Or maybe it is delusion, and the only difference between productive hope and stubborn denial is whether the next few weeks actually start matching the story I have been telling myself.

Either way, the arm is still swollen. The team still lost. And I am still here, icing both of them and waiting to see which version of the story shows up first.

October 23, 2026
The Things I Never Thought I Would Do

What’s something you’ve done that you never thought you could?

When it comes to doing something I never imagined I would do, I could go on and on. I could talk about meeting and falling in love with someone I first encountered online—someone who, against every practical expectation, became the person I want to build a life with. I could talk about graduating from college with what often felt like only half of a functioning brain, or about writing for others when, before, there were days I could barely string a clear thought together for myself. But the one that still catches me off guard, even now, is this: after many years had passed, I was told I would never walk again. I never believed it.

I remember the way the words landed. They were not delivered with cruelty, just with the flat certainty of medical experience. The scans, the history, the pattern of recovery up to that point—all of it pointed to a permanent limit. Walking, the doctors said, was no longer a realistic goal. I nodded. I asked the necessary questions. And then, somewhere quieter, I set the prognosis down. I was not in denial in the dramatic sense, but something in me refused to treat their words as the final sentence of the story. I had already lived long enough inside my own brain to know it could surprise me.

What followed was not a sudden miracle. It was slow, uneven, and often discouraging work. There were stretches where progress looked like nothing more than better balance on a single step, or the ability to stand a few seconds longer without the room tilting. There were setbacks that made the original prognosis feel less like a prediction and more like a prophecy. Yet the recovery I have made since then keeps returning me to the same two forces: the adaptability of the brain, and the stubborn influence of what a person chooses to believe is still possible.

I had already been given reasons to trust both. Graduating required navigating coursework and deadlines while managing a brain that sometimes processed information in fragments, that tired faster, that forgot or scrambled details other people took for granted. I finished anyway—not because the deficits disappeared, but because I learned, slowly, how to work around and through them. Writing became another version of the same practice. Putting thoughts into sentences for other people forced clarity I did not always feel internally. Each piece was a small negotiation with a mind that did not always cooperate, and yet the act of writing itself seemed to strengthen the pathways I was trying to use.

The relationship that began online carried a similar quality of the unexpected. Distance and screens can flatten people into profiles; they can also, when the timing and the honesty align, let two people meet without some of the usual distractions. What grew from those early conversations was ordinary in the best way—shared days, disagreements, loyalty, the gradual decision to keep choosing each other. None of it required me to walk. All of it required me to keep showing up as I was, which turned out to be its own form of recovery.

None of this erases the hard facts. The body still has limits. Some days the brain still feels incomplete. Belief is not a substitute for rehabilitation, therapy, rest, or medical care. What it does, in my experience, is keep the door from slamming shut on the possibility that more is still available. Neuroplasticity is real; the brain can reorganize, compensate, and sometimes reclaim functions that once seemed lost. Mindset is not magic, but it shapes how consistently a person returns to the work, how they interpret setbacks, and whether they treat a prognosis as information or as a verdict.

A woman pushes a wheelchair along a rugged mountain trail beneath a glowing sunset.

Years later, I still do not walk. But I walk better than before. Not perfectly, not always without thought or effort, but I walk. (With some help or assistance). That single fact still feels like proof of something larger than my own case. The brain is more resourceful than it is often given credit for. And what we decide to believe—repeatedly, even when the evidence is incomplete—can become part of the conditions that allow recovery to continue. I did not set out to prove anyone wrong. I simply refused to treat “never” as the end of the sentence. The rest has been a long, imperfect process of finding out what else might still be true.

October 22, 2026
Owie.

I fell out of my chair on Friday as I was leaving the downstairs bedroom and went down the ramp past the raised foyer. Something like a slow, inevitable slide (I even did a quick little stand up when I was tipping forward!) that ended with my full weight landing hard on the left side. It was the kind of fall that feels stupid the second it happens. I stayed down for a second, squinting each eye to make sure my vision was not impaired, stared at the ceiling, and then got up because I do not like to make excuses. I had to get out back and do my walk. I would rather just grin through it. Not be a pussy.

Now my left arm is all black. A terrible contusion has bloomed from the shoulder down past the elbow, the kind of deep purple-black that looks worse every morning. I have always said I have no use of that arm. It has been dead weight for years—something I accommodate around, joke about, and mostly ignore. But after crashing my entire body weight atop it, I feel an incredible, specific pain in the bicep area. Not the dull ache of a bruise. Something sharper and more insistent, like the muscle is protesting every attempt to do even the smallest thing.

My black bicep 💪

Putting on a top in the morning has become a production. I have to lead with the right arm, then carefully feed the left through the sleeve without letting the fabric drag across the bruise. Any stretch or twist sends a bright jolt through the upper arm. I end up sitting there half-dressed, muttering at myself, which is better than admitting how much it hurts.

The real discovery came later. Transferring my weight over the left side is suddenly difficult. More difficult than I ever admitted. Extending my left arm and even the shoulder while lifting my right leg is apparently something I have been doing subconsciously this whole time. I never thought about it. I just did it—shifted, braced, adjusted. Now every one of those automatic corrections lights up the bicep and makes the whole maneuver feel clumsy and precarious. The arm I claimed was useless was deviously doing more work than I gave it credit for, and now that it cannot the rest of my body is noticing the gap.

I am still grinning through it. Still not interested in excuses. But the black arm and the bicep pain are forcing a small, annoying recalibration. The body keeps its own accounting, whether you want to look at the ledger or not. Friday’s fall just made the numbers harder to ignore.

October 19, 2026
I Lied… I Did Continue

I did not plan on still being here. When the first season of Bridgerton arrived, I treated it like a pretty, slightly silly costume piece I could dip in and out of while my boyfriend was away. The balls were gorgeous, the gossip was sharp, and the clothes were elegant. I expected to enjoy the surface and then move on. Instead, I kept pressing play. Then I pressed it again. Now the evenings arrive and I catch myself calculating how many episodes I can reasonably fit in before I have to be a functional girlfriend again

Part of it is simply that I love love. Not the practical kind that makes for solid marriages and shared grocery lists, but the kind that arrives unexpectedly. The kind that rearranges a person’s life without asking permission. Bridgerton specializes in that. The glances across a ballroom last half a second too long. The almost-touches in crowded rooms carry more charge than most shows manage in an entire season of explicit content. I know the plot beats are coming. I can usually predict the misunderstanding that will stretch across three episodes. I still lean forward. I still feel the small, ridiculous drop in my stomach when the music swells and someone finally says the thing they have been refusing to say. It is not particularly sophisticated of me. It is also not something I feel any particular urge to outgrow.

The “woke” elements—the color-blind casting, the occasional anachronistic social commentary, the way the show sometimes winks at its own modern audience—do not bother me nearly as much as i assumed they would. They exist. I notice them. Then the story drops me back into a drawing room or a garden or a carriage at night, and the noticing stops mattering. I am not watching Bridgerton for a rigorous seminar on social history. I am watching it because, for roughly fifty minutes at a time, the rest of the day gets to stand outside and wait. The intensity is allowed to take up all the available space. Passion is not required to be tasteful or restrained or especially realistic. It is allowed to be too much. I let it be too much. There is a particular relief in that permission.

What has surprised me most is the sex. I expected tasteful fades to black and a few artfully arranged limbs. What I got was considerably more direct. Bodies are shown learning each other. Hands map skin that has never been mapped that way before. Mouths figure out, in real time, what the other person likes. The show does not treat these moments as interruptions to the romance; it treats them as the place where the romance becomes legible. That has turned out to be more compelling than I anticipated.

Part of the fascination is historical, or at least historical-adjacent. The young women in these stories are not raised with any practical knowledge of sex. They are raised with a great deal of knowledge about propriety, reputation, and the precise distance one must keep between one’s body and the possibility of scandal. Desire is something they are expected to feel only after a ring is on the finger, and even then only in carefully managed amounts. When a man who has actually lived in the world begins to show one of them what her own body can do, the scene carries a particular charge. It is not just arousal. It is the sudden, disorienting arrival of information that was deliberately withheld. I find myself watching the women’s faces as much as the rest of the scene. The surprise. The concentration. The moment when embarrassment gives way to curiosity and curiosity gives way to something less polite. It feels, in its heightened way, like a kind of education that the period itself refused to provide.

My boyfriend finds this whole situation funny. We have our evening shows. We settle in and fade into whichever adventure he chooses and I will sit there half-listening while my mind drifts toward whatever Bridgerton episode is waiting. He has started narrating my restlessness in a dry voice. “You don’t even want to watch our show anymore.” Or, more recently, “You’re calculating whether you have time for one more before bed.” He is not wrong. I have tried to be normal about it. I have failed. There is something slightly embarrassing about looking forward to a show this much when you are an adult with a a perfectly good partner waiting on you. The embarrassment has not been enough to stop me.Plus he just loves to listen to the lofty recaps I give after each episode.

What keeps me going is the way the show lets intensity be the point instead of a problem to be solved. Real life requires proportion. It requires that I notice when I am being unreasonable, that I keep some part of myself available for ordinary tasks and ordinary people. Bridgerton does not. For the length of an episode I am allowed to be entirely occupied by whether two people who should not, by every rule of their world, want each other this badly are going to manage to be honest about it before the season ends. The wanting is allowed to be total. The consequences are allowed to feel enormous. I come back to it because that scale of feeling is rare, and because the show is unusually willing to stay inside it instead of apologizing for it.

I do not expect this to last forever. At some point the seasons will end, or the particular flavor of longing will stop working on me, or I will simply get tired of the same emotional notes played at the same volume. Until then, I am still here. In fact, I almost flew through all the seasons. I still feel the small, private lift when the opening credits begin and the world on the other side of the screen is once again allowed to be louder and more beautiful and more willing to risk everything than the one I actually live in. My boyfriend will keep laughing. I will keep watching. For now, that arrangement seems to be working well enough for both of us.

October 16, 2026
Columbus Day: Honoring an Extraordinary Navigational Feat and the World It Opened

I will forever refer to this day as Columbus Day. It is a great privilege to celebrate the remarkable accomplishment of a skilled navigator who crossed an unknown ocean and connected two hemispheres in a way that reshaped human history. The land we now call home—rich in resources, opportunity, and the institutions that grew from European settlement—owes its modern form in significant part to the chain of events that began on October 12, 1492. The achievement of setting sail into the unknown and succeeding stands as a testament to human courage, calculation, and persistence.

Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo), a Genoese mariner, convinced the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella to fund an expedition seeking a western route to Asia. On August 3, 1492, he departed with three ships—the Niña, Pinta, and Santa María—and roughly ninety men. After a stop in the Canary Islands, the fleet headed west across the open Atlantic. For weeks the crew faced uncertainty, mutiny risks, and the psychological strain of sailing beyond known limits. Columbus used dead reckoning, celestial observation, and prevailing winds skillfully. On October 12, land was sighted in the Bahamas. He explored the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola, claimed territories for Spain, and returned to Europe in March 1493 after demonstrating that a round-trip Atlantic crossing was possible.

Subsequent voyages expanded the knowledge: a larger second expedition established settlements, a third reached the South American mainland (Venezuela), and a fourth explored Central American coasts. Though Columbus died still believing he had reached the fringes of Asia, his voyages proved the Atlantic was navigable and initiated sustained European contact with the Americas. This was not the first human presence—indigenous peoples had inhabited the hemisphere for millennia, with estimates of pre-contact populations ranging widely (commonly tens of millions across the Americas)—nor the first European contact (Norse explorers had reached North America centuries earlier). Yet Columbus’s crossing marked the beginning of continuous, transformative exchange rather than isolated visits.

The Columbian Exchange that followed brought profound mutual transfers. Crops such as maize, potatoes, tomatoes, and cacao enriched European and global diets and supported population growth; horses, wheat, sugarcane, and other Old World species transformed landscapes and economies in the Americas. Precious metals and new trade routes fueled European expansion. Over generations, European settlement, technology, legal traditions, and agricultural systems built the foundations of the modern United States, Canada, and other nations—places of extraordinary prosperity, scientific advancement, and individual opportunity relative to much of human history. Celebrating the voyage recognizes the agency, risk, and ingenuity that opened these possibilities.

Yes, historical contact was not peaceful or equitable; I acknowledge that. Columbus and later Spaniards took captives, imposed labor systems, and engaged in violence; epidemic diseases (to which indigenous populations lacked immunity) caused catastrophic population declines across the hemisphere. These realities form part of the full record and are documented in contemporary accounts and later scholarship. One can acknowledge them without diminishing the navigational achievement itself or the long-term civilizational outcomes of European presence in the Americas. Perspective matters: many national holidays honor founders, explorers, or pivotal figures whose eras included conflict, conquest, or injustice by modern standards. Columbus Day, established in the United States partly to honor Italian-American contributions, can focus on exploration, maritime skill, and the opening of the Western Hemisphere to global interconnection.

The decision to sail west with limited knowledge of what lay beyond the horizon required exceptional resolve. Columbus’s success demonstrated that calculated risk and empirical navigation could rewrite maps and possibilities. The beautiful land we inhabit today—its cities, farms, institutions, and freedoms—developed on the trajectory his voyages helped set. That is worth remembering and celebrating on Columbus Day.

October 12, 2026