What’s remarkable about Trump Administration officials is how confidently they assert their religiously illiterate views.

Over the last week or so, we saw an incredible sequence of events unfold: a sitting president posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ, a vice president warned the pope to be more careful about theology, and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, read a prayer lifted nearly verbatim from Pulp Fiction at a Pentagon worship service.

Trump claimed not to know it was a picture of Jesus, saying the depiction of him draped in a white robe with a halo of sunlight behind him was merely showing Trump as a doctor. While many people think Trump is lying, I am in the minority that thinks it’s entirely possible that Trump isn’t familiar with depictions of Jesus. Either way, Trump did something he almost never does: he deleted the post after a backlash from evangelical supporters who found the post blasphemous.

There was no such backlash from Trump supporters when the Secretary of Defense read a “prayer” lifted from the movie Pulp Fiction. It seems unconstitutional for a Cabinet member to hold Christian worship services, but that’s a separate issue. But what is also problematic is that the prayer he chose to read directly contradicts what the verse he was allegedly reading asserts.

Hegseth repeatedly puts himself and American soldiers in the position of seeking vengeance against Iranians, when any Sunday School student knows that central to Christianity is the idea that Christians should never seek vengeance.1

The “prayer,” which Hegseth noted was based on Ezekiel 25:17, ends with these lines:

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One, when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.

But the actual verse says this:

I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.2

Share

This is not a minor difference. Hegseth puts soldiers in the place of God. Yes, I understand that Hegseth was reading a “prayer” directed at a particular audience, and yes, one can write prayers paraphrasing Scripture, so long as it stays true to the original meaning.

What the Secretary of Defense should not be doing is representing that Christianity endorses Christians acting out of personal vengeance, especially when that person oversees people at war, where vengeance could take on some horrific shapes. It also seems obvious that, as a moral matter, no American soldier should ever be taking any kind of action out of “vengeance.”

What Hegseth is suggesting American soldiers do is essentially a war crime. And he’s using Christianity to justify it, which is extremely dangerous behavior.

Hegseth is not the only one inverting Christian theology to justify unjust behavior. Vice President Vance, a Catholic himself, decided that correcting the pope on Catholic theology would be a good idea.

“If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful,” Vance said in his criticism of Pope Leo’s comments condemning the Iran War as unjust in the eyes of God.3 “You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”

Catholics across the political spectrum weighed in to blast the Vice President for his lack of understanding of Just War Theory,4 a core doctrine of Catholicism, as well as his impertinence in correcting the pope while demonstrating his own lack of understanding of a Catholic doctrine that applies to a war his administration is waging.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) released a statement from their Chairman on Doctrine Issues backing up Pope Leo, noting, in part, that:

For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war. A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2308). That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.5

Pope Leo responded to the brouhaha, speaking to journalists aboard the papal plane en route to Algeria. “The message of the Gospel is very clear: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” the Pope said.

“I don’t want to get into a debate with him,” Leo said when asked about Trump’s attacks against him. “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing. And I will continue to speak out loudly against war.”

It’s important to remember that when those in power weaponize Scripture they don't understand to justify wars and vengeance, the danger isn't just theological — it has a body count.

We’ve all been there: lying awake in the middle of the night, catastrophizing over things that hadn’t even occurred to us in the light of day.

We become convinced a mole on our arm is inoperable skin cancer or that our boss is contemplating firing us because we missed a single meeting. In no time, we are experiencing vivid images of our future: penniless, alone, and eating out of a garbage can.

A few hours later, the sun comes up, and we start our day.

The prior scenarios that had us terrified a few hours earlier fade into the background, and our middle-of-the-night promise to ourselves to schedule an appointment with the dermatologist to have the mole checked is quickly forgotten.

What’s going on?

I had occasion to really ponder this topic as I battled insomnia for four months, starting in November of last year. Thankfully, I am back to my typical sleep schedule, and if I wake up, I can easily fall back asleep on most nights. But for those four months, the middle of the night became a time of terror for me.

It was made worse because for the first month or so, I was only getting about four or five hours of sleep, with sleep medication that normally would have knocked me out for 12 hours. If I didn’t take medication to sleep, I’d wake up every few hours. So in addition to being awake in the quiet and dark for hours on end, I was sleep-deprived, which makes everything seem worse.

But I did notice that, sleep-deprived or not, once the sun was up, that middle-of-the-night panic subsided. I began to tell myself as I lay in bed mid-panic, “This isn’t real. In 3 or 4 hours, you will not care about this.”

This tactic helped a lot. But learning the “why” was a game changer.

One morning, in utter frustration, I put the question to my Instagram community: Why does everything seem so terrible at 3am?

You might wonder why I didn’t just research the topic, which in hindsight would have made sense. But I think I believed that I was the only one having this experience, because I had never heard anyone else talk about it before. So I was surprised at how quickly I received answers from friends, who it turns out also struggle with sleep. I can see now that the reason I hadn’t heard any of this before is that I’m normally a sound sleeper and never had cause to delve deeply into the ‘how’ of sleep.

Read more

I’ve become that person who cries all the time.

I was just reading a post from my friend about her moving back to England from D.C., and I started sobbing. Never mind that she will be closer to me in Italy. Right now, I’m in DC, and I don’t want her to go.

Cue the tears.

If you knew me, you would know how strange this is for me. For most of my life, I hardly ever cried. The first time I broke down with my current therapist, she practically gave me a standing ovation.

I could tell she wanted to shout “Bravo! Well done!”

She had complained before that she could never get a clear read on me. That when she would ask me what I was feeling after sharing about a particularly traumatic experience; my answer was always the same: nothing.

There’s a word for what I had done. It’s called repression.

I had just stuffed every fearful, anxious, or sad thought and moved on as if nothing had happened. It was a coping mechanism that worked well until my body started rebelling with chronic physical issues.

That’s the only reason I even went to therapy. I knew that my health issues were due to repressed emotions and wanted to bring them into the light. I wanted to feel things.

Be careful what you wish for.

The name of Clover’s Substack is “On the Way Life Feels,” and it fits Clover so well because she feels so deeply. When I first met her a few years ago, this kind of way of being was a mystery to me. Now, when I read that title, I think, yes!

The way life feels.

Now I get it. These days, life often feels overwhelming. It feels anxiety-provoking. It feels unstable. It feels like the people in charge are, at best, over their heads. It feels like everything has changed so fast and that there is no going back. I’m endlessly nostalgic for everything: the 80s, the 90s, the 2000’s, pre-COVID. It feels cruel.

A few years ago, I had a new friend who was going through a particularly bad year. She would frequently break down in tears, sobbing about the latest blow to blindside her. I would do everything I could to try to comfort her while feeling awestruck by her ability to express herself so freely and to engage in the extremely cathartic act of crying that so eluded me.

I would think, “I wish I could do that.”

Well, now I can. Yay.

When I first started crying all the time, I knew it was grief about my mother’s death, and because I was in a weakened state from lack of sleep. I had developed insomnia and was only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night.

But months into this, I realized it was no longer specific to my mom’s passing but was all the grief I never processed in my own life, suddenly overpowering my system. The floodgates had been opened.

Then, eventually, I realized I had moved on to something else, likely collective grief. I wouldn’t believe such a thing could happen except I have sat and cried for an hour without a single thought in my head. I have known, on some level, that what I am processing is not actually mine.

If you think this sounds nutty, I don’t care, because I’m a person who does far nuttier things than believe in collective grief.

Read more

In the world's richest country, people are reduced to begging strangers online to pay for life saving health care — and we've somehow normalized it.

Such a phenomenon is almost unheard of in the United States’ peer countries, where health care is often free, and if it’s not, it is rare that anyone is bankrupted trying to be treated for an illness. Yet, in the US, approximately 67 percent of U.S. bankruptcies are reportedly linked to medical expenses.1

Worse, the Americans who run these online campaigns often pay a pretty price for health insurance, but still can’t cover the jacked-up costs of the medical care they receive. They often have to turn to friends and family for loans or gifts of money, sell their homes to cover the costs and/or set up an online campaign to pay for something they can’t go without.

It wasn’t always this way.

When I was growing up, medical care was affordable and almost always covered by insurance. This was true for me well into adulthood. I never heard of people going bankrupt or accruing medical debt. Today, we hear about this tragedy befalling people all the time.

One such person was actor James Van Der Beek, who passed away recently from cancer. His family set up a GoFundMe campaign and has raised a few million dollars. There was a backlash because it was reported that before Van Der Beek’s death, he was able to secure money from friends for a down payment on the nearly $5 million Texas ranch he and his wife had been renting for their family of eight.

How accurate this is remains unclear; a friend went online to defend him, arguing that those condemning the family over the house don't know the full story.

Whatever the case, the fact is that an actor who was a household name didn’t have enough money to cover his medical care. It’s easy to write this off as poor financial planning, but the fact is that a third of Americans end up in debt for their medical treatments.

The Atlantic reported that patients are now often told by hospital administrators to use GoFundMe campaigns to clear their outstanding balances. This may be why these campaigns are on the rise. “One study found that, in 2020, the annual number of U.S. campaigns related to medical causes — about 200,000 — was 25 times the number of such campaigns on the site in 2011,” reported The Atlantic2

This is chilling.

Unfortunately, I could cite hundreds, if not thousands, of stories like this. Health care costs are a top reason my husband and I decided we could not continue living in the United States long term. You never know when an accident or health issue could leave you deep in debt or bankrupt.

I have interviewed dozens of people who left the US to live in other countries and they never fail to mention health care costs as a primary factor. What does that say about the US, that you have to flee what is often referred to as the best health care system in the world?

Read more

Housekeeping: I have handed in the manuscript for my book It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way, and will be publishing regularly again, so I’ve un-paused paid subscriptions.

Also there is still time to sign up for my workshop with , “Everything You Want to Know About Leaving the United States.”

If you watched the Super Bowl, you may have seen one of the “He Gets Us” commercials about Jesus.

These have been running every year since 2022. I wrote about the ad they ran in 2023, and how what appeared to be a positive message actually was problematic because it was leading with things that most people agree with, but ignoring the more conservative anti-gay, anti-women’s leadership beliefs of the churches the organization directed people to. These are not the views being promoted in the ads and likely would not be aligned with many of the people who respond to the ads.

The churches people are sent to are called “seeker’ churches and I have had some experience with this phenomenon, and I think it is misleading and can cause a lot of harm to people who don’t understand the difference between Christian denominations (this is how I was at the time I started attending the ‘seeker church.’)

This year’s ad was right up my alley—in a way a critique of late-stage capitalism and the consumerist, “more, more, more” ethos of the US and the impact that has on us individually and communally.

It was called “More” and raised awareness of how Americans are always pursuing “more” to fill the void inside them, when what they really need is something deeper, like knowing Jesus. I agree with the premise, though I’d say that developing some sort of spirituality or deeper meaning in life is the solution. It doesn’t have to be Christianity.

If you want to read more about this, I’ve included the essay I wrote in 2023 below.

Sign up for workshop below here.

This is actually a Rumi poem, but for me it’s a nearly daily prayer.

Leave the thinking to the one who gave intelligence. In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improves. — Rumi

Can anyone relate?

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

Share

And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give [God] the benefit of believing
that [God’s] hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ excerpted from Hearts on Fire

In case you haven’t noticed, the world has been changing and continues to do so at a rapid pace. It feels like chaos, because it is.

But while this chaos has caused enormous problems, it has also had an upside. It has made people seriously question what they have accepted, whether in their personal lives or what happens in public life.

I’ve noticed serious shedding of old ways of being for many people. I’m noticing many people starting to say they don’t want to live the same way anymore, whether it is personally or by accepting larger forces that shape our lives. They are realizing they can’t trust institutions for stable employment, for example, and are coming up with creative ways to build more stability by working for themselves.

My chief of staff is a great example of this. After being laid off, she started her own consulting practice and feels a greater sense of ownership over her future by having diversified income sources and working for herself. In her own words: “Stability and certainty do not inherently come from having a full-time job. Stability and certainty come from knowing that no matter what the situation, I will be able to figure it out.” She has been running her business for two years now. Within the last six months, she’s seen a significant uptick in people reaching out to ask how she built her business as an independent consultant, mentioning that they want to do something similar in the next six to twelve months. In the first year and a half of her striking out on her own, there were substantially fewer (if any) of these calls.

I hear from people of both parties that they are disgusted by the political party they always supported. I’ve lost count of my Democratic friends who are enraged by how feckless they find Democrats in the face of what is happening to the country. They aren’t becoming Republicans, they just simply don’t trust the people they used to trust to run the country in a way I’ve never heard them express before. I have Republican friends who find the party they belonged to and often worked for completely revolting.

They aren’t willing to be loyal soldiers anymore.

I’ve seen a lot of people let go of or lose things that were key to their identity, and who are now asking, “Who am I really? Who do I want to be? What kind of world do I want to live in?”

They aren’t looking to the old authorities to tell them what that should be. They are following their own guidance.

Different people pin the beginning of the chaos at various points. There was a major shift when Donald Trump was elected in 2016—a complete disruption of the political order. His re-election was an even more radical disruption because he came back into office untethered by any desire to have establishment figures in his orbit, which in the first term provided at least a few guardrails.

COVID was another obvious turning point that reshaped how we operate in society. Far too many people got used to being alone and stopped venturing out as much, even when it was safe to do so. But being used to something doesn’t make it healthy. We moved into an era where many people now feel it’s fine to bail on plans with friends or family last minute because they are engaging in “self-care” or whatever. Over the last few years, social media was awash with videos of people who planned a dinner party, or even a birthday party, had a swarm of RSVP’s and then found themselves sitting there with just a few people, or in the worst cases, no people.

Read more

Dear Mom,

A year ago today, you died. Even as I write this, I can’t quite believe that it’s true. A part of me thinks that if I dial your number, you will pick up. That you are still sitting in your comfy TV chair, binge-watching CNN.

I often go back and listen to saved messages on my voicemail from you, and I am beginning to wonder if this is healthy. Is it time to delete these? Or is it the opposite—they should be kept for all time?

I’ve been dreading this day for the last month, as much as I dreaded my first Christmas without you. You always loved the holidays so much, and they make up the bulk of my happiest childhood memories.

There is also something that makes what I already knew was real feel real: not getting a call from you on my birthday, December 14, or on Christmas. For five decades, I’ve wished you a Merry Christmas. For five decades, you have wished me a Happy Birthday.

I miss you. I miss your laugh. I miss your annoying calls about how you couldn’t get into Facebook again, usually eating up an hour of my time helping you fix it. I’d happily give you that hour right now. Even the contentious aspects of our relationship don’t make me miss you less.

My therapist tells me that there is something about the one-year mark of a death that has extra impact, and I’m here to confirm that. The type of pain I am in I would wish on no person.

You are the person I want to talk to about all this, and yet I can’t. I mean, I can, but I can’t actually hear what you are saying back. I can imagine what you would say: Honey, I don’t want you to suffer. It was my time to go as I was suffering. You have a wonderful life, and I want you to enjoy it. Go out and have some fun.

Fun doesn’t seem to be in the cards today. Even the thought of eating makes me nauseous. As you know, when I’m sad like this, my appetite disappears. It reminds me of the time I came home after a broken engagement, and after proffering various foods that I rejected, you walked out with a plate of bacon and said, “I know you will eat this.”

You were correct. I don’t know if I told my husband that story or if he thought of it on his own, but he presented me with a plate of bacon yesterday, and it’s sitting in the refrigerator now, and I have no appetite for it.

I have known the pain of heartbreak. But I have never known the pain I am living through now. People keep saying to me that losing your mother is on a different level than other losses. She carried you inside her body for 9 months—the relationship is simply like no other. This is true even if your relationship with your mother was complicated or problematic, which, as you know, ours was.

As I told you on your deathbed, despite all the issues between us, I was glad you were my mother. Tears welled in your eyes, and you shook your head somewhat disbelievingly. I told you it was true: you had been my hero. I reminded you of all the women you helped as a professor and Dean, and what an important legacy you had left, that you were a badass: one of the first female archeologists in Alaska.

I always looked up to you and desperately wanted your approval and love. Much of what is good about me I learned from you. At the same time, a lot of the trauma I’ve had to work through came from you as well. I didn’t feel it was necessary to explain that to you as you lay dying. Plus, I knew you knew that already.

Your caregiver told me that you had told her that you wished you had been more patient with me when I was young and listened more, rather than sending me to live with my dad when I was ten. You felt that I held that against you.

As I told you that day, I never held that against you. You and I simply could not live under the same roof for more than the summers I then spent with you, and that was obvious even to me, a ten-year-old.

Still, I felt abandoned. And your death has stirred that in me again. I feel you have abandoned me, even though, of course, you had no control over your own death. But I just want you to come back for a little while longer. I thought I was ready for you to go because you had lost so many of your faculties, and life was too hard for you. But I wasn’t prepared.

Other friends have said to me that they thought they would be ready because their parents were in pain or they were ancient. But I tell them what others said to me: you are never prepared for your parents to die.

It feels a bit like God dying.

To children, parents are at a minimum demi-gods. Even if you intellectually know they will depart the earth one day, it feels incomprehensible when it happens.

I know you had no choice on the day that you died, but by moving on the day after Christmas, this anniversary has been even more gut-wrenching than it would have been had it not landed smack dab in the middle of the holiday season. I know that I’d be devastated regardless of the date of your anniversary, but at least my therapist would be working if it had happened in February. At least my friends wouldn’t be off on holiday or busy attending to their holiday duties in a way that makes asking for support seem extra selfish.

Many people have told me that now that you are in a different place, you can be the mother you were meant to be because where you are is pure love. I’ve chosen to believe this. I feel your presence. I ask you for help with things, and when I do those things, they seem to go more smoothly. I’ve chosen to believe that we now have the relationship that I think we both always wanted.

“The first half of life is about becoming who you needed to be to survive. The second half of life is about unraveling everything that no longer aligns with your soul’s purpose,” wrote in a post that caught my attention, for this kicker: “That’s not a midlife crisis—it’s a rebirth.”

This is a great way to frame moving into the second half of life in an intentional manner. It’s also true that while birth is a beautiful process, it is inherently painful and so it often is with a rebirth.

It’s not just painful because of how other people react to how you are changing. It’s painful to let go of big pieces of your ego/personality that gave you a false sense of identity.

When super-achievers go through this process they tend to slow down and their work output is noticeably lower. There are a lot of people who don’t like this.

I thought of this recently when I saw the writer address complaints that she wasn’t posting enough content on Substack.

She wrote to the disgruntled paid subscribers (I bolded the part that really jumped out at me):

I know, I know. Unsubscribe, of course, I get it. It’s not even that I’m too busy to be bothered (I wish!) – in fact usually I’m not posting because the satisfaction and relief that comes from putting something/anything out there and getting a response is too beguiling. So much more enticing than struggling with emptiness, with not knowing what to do, with my body, with the anxiety of no audience and no productivity. But I have to get lost like this, go into the awful unknown – not stay in constant + reassuring conversation with the public – in order to break new ground. It’s uncomfortable (for me) and I’m sure it’s boring as a subscriber.

Get 40% off for 1 year

Read more

A 2024 survey showed that 3 in 5 Americans feel their mental health is negatively impacted by the holidays due to high levels of stress.

Thirty-six percent report an increase in anxiety, and 28 percent report an increase in depression.

For those who are navigating complex family dynamics or celebrating a holiday without a recently passed loved one, it’s even more difficult.

Not exactly the most wonderful time of the year for many Americans.

I’m generally not that affected by the holiday seasons, but this year was different.

I shared last week about the grief over my mother’s death that assaulted me about a month ago, and is hanging on with a vengeance, made exponentially worse by the fact that we are deep in the holiday season, which brings up so many feelings of nostalgia for my mom. It doesn’t help that the anniversary of her death is December 26. (I so appreciated all the supportive and kind comments, as well as the commiserating over how difficult this time of year can be on that post. I was extremely touched by the stories of grief so many shared.)

As we know, these are the times when everyone is busy with their travel plans, shopping for presents or visiting friends and family. It’s not the time your friends are free to sit with you as they reassure you, especially since they often aren’t even in town or are hosting out-of-town friends and relatives. Traveling is what I would have been doing had I not been frozen in place with anxiety and grief. I had to cancel those plans when it was clear I was in no shape for an international trip.

In a cruel twist of fate, it’s also the time when your therapist (should you be so lucky to have one) is on vacation.

Read more

I’m keeping this outside of the paywall, as I imagine I am not the only one struggling with grief as we enter the holiday season.

Three weeks ago, I started having nearly nonstop panic attacks. As soon as one would end, I could feel the building wave of another one coming for me.

It’s been one of the most terrifying experiences of my life.

I was in the US visiting my husband for a month, and the panic attacks started a week before I was to return to Italy. I was gripped with absolute terror and would wake up in the middle of the night shaking, something I had never experienced before. Then started the cycle that is familiar to all anxiety sufferers—my sleep became disrupted, and the anxiety got worse.

I hadn’t had a panic attack since my twenties, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

I was almost completely non-functional. In fact, this is the first time in weeks that I’ve been able to actually write or do anything other than just try to manage the waves of panic, terror, and sadness.

I had been experiencing low-level anxiety in Italy that seemed reasonable for having moved to a new country. It would come and go, and it felt manageable. Until the waves of panic struck me, I didn’t have any sense that I had pushed myself too far, too fast.

While I saw no obvious trigger to the panic attacks, my therapist explained that we all have an internal clock that tracks things like death anniversaries or when we should start dreading the holiday season. While I was not consciously thinking about the December 26 anniversary of my mother’s death, somewhere in my body an alarm went off and sent my body into flight or flight.

My therapist also explained that it’s common to not fully start grieving a death until you get to a year, as you tick off milestones you no longer share with your deceased loved one. The fact that I was facing down my first Thanksgiving, birthday, and Christmas without my mother tripped some wire.

Even though I had done plenty of grieving since she passed, the fact is, I hadn’t faced down the holiday season without her.

I think for many people, no matter how many years pass, it is still hard to be without loved ones during the holiday season.

My body’s extreme reaction had a lot to do with the fact that I had taken on way too much right after my mother’s death.

It’s not like there wasn’t anyone trying to get me to see this. My friend Grace Kelly () who hails from Northern Ireland but has lived in Puglia for the last 15 years, did her best to get me to see I was putting my nervous system in peril almost from the get-go.

In addition to being a wonderful, wise person, Grace is a successful coach who is terrific at diagnosing problems. Almost from the moment we became friends, she expressed concern about what I was taking on while loaded up with fresh grief.

“Darling, you moved to a country where you don’t speak the language, without your husband, two weeks after your mother passed, and have no grounding because you are hopping from one Airbnb to another,” Grace patiently explained and re-explained to me whenever I would experience anxiety.

On top of that, she would always note, “I was renovating a trullo (a hundred-year-old conical structure indigenous to Puglia),” which brought on unrelenting stress for myriad reasons.

I recognized she was right, but I also felt that these were inconveniences, and things I couldn’t do anything about. My therapist has since identified this kind of thinking as “gaslighting” myself. I was denying that I needed the most basic kind of stability after my mother died.

When I had booked my travel to move to Italy in January, I obviously had no idea my mother would pass away weeks before my departure. Once she did, I felt that going to Italy was actually a good idea because it would be a distraction, and I would be in beautiful, natural surroundings, which are very healing for me. I thought being alone would be good because I needed space to process all my complicated feelings about the death of this complicated relationship.

But what I realized is that what we need in these times is the presence of people.

Share

It’s not so much what these people say; it’s just the fact that they are there. It’s that they drop off food for you to eat, the way my friend Amanda did in the weeks after my mother died and before I went to Italy. It’s friends just sitting with you or inviting you to watch a movie or binge a show. It’s just being near my husband, even if we aren’t talking.

While I’ve made really lovely friends in Italy, we don’t have the familiarity that I have with my husband or my friends in the US. If I had been living here for years, settled into a home, and had some history with these friends, the experience almost definitely would have been very different.

For that matter, if I had even had a home at all in Italy (rather than one Airbnb after another), it likely would have been much easier to navigate.

When the panic attacks started, more than a few of my friends thought it was being in the US that was causing them. That was when I got back to Italy, that things would settle down. I was hopeful that was the case.

It was not.

My therapist (and others) noted that while the Trullo I moved into in July is in fact a magical little space, it is not a home. It is a 300-square-foot guest room that I thought I could live in until our house was built. This was a bad decision and that would be true even if my mother hadn’t passed. But now that I was truly grieving, living in this tiny space out in the country was not going to be very stabilizing for me.

Unfortunately, we sold our home in DC back in March because the market was cratering and we were worried about getting stuck in a neighborhood that had seen rising crime and had changed a lot since we moved there. We also knew we would need the money for the Italian house we planned to build.

So, we sold our home, and my husband moved into a tiny apartment that doesn’t feel like a home to me in any real way. Again, were I not entering the holiday season with the anniversary of my mother’s death, it wouldn’t be an issue.

I want to be clear that none of this takes away from the many wonderful experiences I’ve had in Italy, and I don’t think this represents the average expat experience. Many expats create stability as soon as they move there; I was unable to do this because the people I trusted with my project led me to believe repeatedly I’d be able to imminently move in, which in fact it took six months.

In fact, I know my experience isn’t representative because I’ve been interviewing dozens of expats and immigrants for my book about what we can learn from how people live outside the US. There are great communities in many places; it’s just hard to start building those relationships weeks after you lose your mother — at least for me.

So what now?

Working with my therapist, the panic attacks have come under control, but there is still a lot of anxiety. I feel deep sadness, grief, and fear as I face down the holiday season and the anniversary of my mother’s death. I’ve returned to the US for this period to be with my husband, rather than trying to white-knuckle it without him.

Not having our home has compounded the problem, but my friend Cherie, who is a literal angel on Earth, managed to find a beautiful house for my husband and me to house sit through the holiday season while the owners are away.

I’m also realistic that, even if we were in our home that we sold, it would still be an incredibly difficult time. This is a time of year that is very hard for people—regardless of their living situation—as winter closes in and the long March of compulsory celebrating begins, no matter what may be going on in your own life.

If you are someone who feels dread, panic, fear, or deep sadness this time of year, please remember you are not alone. Ask for help; let your friends know you need extra support. For those who love the season and aren’t in mourning, please be sure to check in on your people who might be struggling.

The best gift you can give is your presence and witness to what has been lost.

Share

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says that over the years, he’s seen a striking shift in the responses he receives to columns in which he discusses his religious faith.

When Ross first became a Times columnist, it was during the heyday of the New Atheists like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Whenever he wrote about anything related to his own religious faith, he would be inundated with letters from devotees of these writers, quoting them and telling Ross what an idiot he was for being religious.

In recent years, he has noticed the kinds of letters he received changed in tone and substance. What he started to receive instead were people saying, “I’m not religious. In fact, I’ve always been an atheist, but I wish I could be religious—I just don’t know how.”

His new book Believe, is an attempt to help them do just that.

While Ross is a devout Catholic, he isn’t really making the case for Catholicism. He’s making a case for religion writ large.

I learned about this book on a podcast called Weird Studies that is sort of a metaphysical/philosophical podcast run by a Catholic and a Zen Buddhist who both agree with Ross’s premise. The Zen Buddhist host was previously a strong atheist and fan of the New Atheist genre. He now can see how the container of Zen Buddhism has been really beneficial to him. So it’s worth noting that when I say religion, it could be a non-deistic type of practice like Zen Buddhism.

It’s important to note that Ross and these hosts are not saying “become spiritual.” They are saying “become religious.”

I’m surprised to be saying this, but I think they’re onto something.

There is something very different between being spiritual and being religious. I know because I’ve been spiritual and religious and spiritual and not religious. I also have been an atheist/agnostic in my younger years, so I’ve seen this from various vantage points.

Because I had such a terrible experience when I became religious in my thirties, for the last eight years or so I’ve embraced a more of a “spiritual, not religious” sort of Christian-adjacent faith (since Christianity is my context due to my history in that tradition). My faith is one that is informed by mystics from all traditions, but has been nearly devoid of any kind of religious aspect other than going to the occasional Mass.

I think it served me well enough up until probably around the time it started shifting for lots of Ross’s readers.

I’m not against being “spiritual, not religious” per se. I just think it likely isn’t a strong enough container for the period of history we are living through.

Share

I also think that it may not be strong enough even in the best of times, and the reason for that is that it doesn’t generally do a good enough job of keeping our egos in check. When your ego is running amok, it just creates problems for you and everyone around you. It’s what makes everything seem terrible when some things are terrible and some things are wonderful. Your ego doesn’t like nuance, and it loves to blame all your problems and the problems of the world on other people. It loves to be hopeless because it knows there is no point in being otherwise.

Back in April I interviewed Richard Rohr and I asked him about something he said in his latest book, which is that if you’re going to be prophetic, you really need to be part of a religious tradition because you need the guardrails.

You need to be in some sort of context that says it’s not okay to demonize your enemies because, actually, you’re supposed to love your enemies. There really isn’t any religion that doesn’t teach this. You will be in a context that won’t affirm your judgment and rage and all these things that we humans like to do when we feel threatened.

This context ideally will funnel your anxieties and concerns into service and action that is healthy, and that looks nothing like raging on social media. (I'm aware there are many churches in the US that do stoke rage, and I don’t consider those places religious. I consider them ideological. Stay away from them at all costs.)

But the truth is, you really need these guardrails even if you aren’t going to be a prophetic person.

I asked Richard, on my behalf and on behalf of many of the listeners, how we can be part of these religions, particularly Christianity, that are so problematic?

His answer basically was, “That’s just your ego.” When he said it to me, I knew it was absolutely true. As he pointed out, your ego makes things all good or all bad—everything is black and white. It makes you the ultimate judge. His point was that the Catholic Church is not one thing. He pointed out that he has been a fierce critic of the Catholic Church, so being religious doesn’t mean you can’t confront problems within the institution.

Even though I knew it was true, I still have been having a hard time going back to church, all while feeling it would probably be good for me. But it was something in Ross’s book that wasn’t even the main point—and in fact, he sort of rejected it as a starting point—that actually has made me decide that I’m going to start going back to church.

He quoted from the ex-nun turned comparative religion historian Karen Armstrong’s 2009 book, The Case For God, where she rebutted the approach the New Atheists were taking in attacking religion. “It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth—or lack of it—only if you translate these doctrines into ritual, or ethical action.”

This was the first time I had read that quote, but it’s something that I believe and that I actually have said to other people in the past when they were struggling with their faith.

But, of course, as usual, I can never take my own advice.

While Ross makes the case that you really can reason your way into religion, I am more in the Karen Armstrong camp that it’s spiritual practices that will get you to where you probably want to go.1 Reason can help, but it’s not in my experience what leads to real spiritual transformation. So for Catholics the spiritual practices would include the sacraments or praying the rosary, and for Zen Buddhists it would be a serious meditation practice that is part of a lineage and community rooted in that lineage.

The thing that’s amazing about spiritual practices is you don’t have to believe in anything for them to work. All you need is sincere intention.

In my experience, if you are sincerely seeking God or Source or whatever you want to call it, you will find it.

Read more

Among Gen Z, that figure jumps to a striking 63 percent.1

As someone who began this journey myself at the end of 2023, when my husband and I purchased land and a tiny structure to renovate in southern Italy, I believe these Americans are onto something.

What saddens me is that it’s come to this. Moving to another country is no small undertaking, and there’s no good reason why people in the world’s wealthiest nation should be struggling so profoundly that leaving feels like their only path to happiness.

And yet, here we are.

After traveling back and forth to the southern Italian region of Puglia throughout 2024, I made the full-time move in January once I’d secured my digital nomad visa, which allows me to live in Italy year-round.

My bottom line: moving was absolutely the right decision, and I’m madly in love with where I live.

I feel physically and mentally better. I sleep better. I worry less. When I read the news from the US now, it looks crazier and crazier. I don’t know if it’s getting worse or if it just looks worse from where I’m sitting. The mass shootings alone look utterly deranged, especially living in a country that has never had a single one.

I don’t worry about surprise medical expenses like the repeated root canals I endured in the US, with the last one costing $8,000. I spend zero minutes fighting with health insurance companies because these kinds of companies don’t stand between me and health care in Italy.2

Seeing my doctor costs 50 euros3—though he’s never let me pay, which is another story—and once I’m on the Italian healthcare system, it will be free after I pay about a thousand dollars a year to be in the system. I had a root canal that was practically free by US standards and the treatment was flawless. I pray that if I get seriously sick, it happens in Italy and not when I’m visiting the US, where a car accident or medical emergency could wipe out my savings or worse.

I live on six acres of stunning land in the countryside. I do my morning walks by the ocean and go for regular swims. There is nowhere in the US that looks like that that I could ever afford. I’m able to do the work I love—writing—because living here is affordable enough that I don’t have to take a soul-destroying job just to cover basic expenses, as I did in the US.

One reason it’s so affordable is that I’m in the south of Italy, which has experienced a population drain as people move to cities. Another reason is that I live in a truly tiny home of 300 square feet, which is all part of this experiment of trying to live in a simpler, less consumerist way.

Read more

Read more

Finnish writer left a comment on my post about the myth of celebrity authenticity that caught my attention.

It got me thinking about the difference between people who fail openly and people who fail secretly.

But specifically those who fail secretly while selling you a book, bootcamp or bottle of pills based on the premise that they've got something you want: happiness, a great marriage, financial abundance, spiritual connection or a life free of the health condition that plagues you.

Kati wrote:

A while back, I heard a story about three coaches who were chatting at a coaching conference (or something like that). The wellness coach had stage 4 breast cancer. The relationship coach had just filed for divorce. The financial coach had just gone bankrupt. When they realised they had all failed in things they were teaching others, they first got a bit confused, but then figured that even though they had failed, they still had learned valuable things to share with others. I actually like coaches and gurus who are not perfect and fail because to err is human.

Read more

I was genuinely puzzled.

"She's so real. She’s authentic," they said, trying to convince me to read her book. "She's a mom, a wife, and a successful businesswoman who somehow manages it all."

I tried to explain that this was almost certainly impossible. "You need to understand that celebrities are usually telling a story," I said. "It's a story they know will connect with people, leaving out the parts that won't. Sometimes these stories are completely fabricated, but more often, they're narratives the celebrities themselves have bought into."

They were outraged. How could I suggest their beloved Rachel wasn't genuine?

These women were not naifs. They had famous people sitting in their makeup chairs all day long. I pointed out how differently so many of these people were privately versus on television, or how their personalities shifted depending on the situation or who they were talking to. How so often they would espouse values or beliefs on television that were at odds with how they lived, and that they never pretended to believe in real life.

No, it's not the same, they insisted. They were sure Rachel was in a different category.

Sometime later, one of them texted me: "You were right." She was furious. She'd shelled out her hard-earned money for Rachel's marriage boot camp, only to have Rachel and her husband announce their divorce weeks later. The basic math was damning: they weren't just selling marriage advice while their relationship unraveled; they'd been building a brand on a fiction for years.

I felt no satisfaction in being right. I would have preferred to be wrong.

The sad irony is that many purveyors of life wisdom often are unable to practice what they preach.

Your favorite happiness guru is likely miserable. The relationship expert's marriage is probably a disaster. The internationally famous spiritual teacher holds grudges and has a vindictive streak. The person who preaches the slow life just cut you off in traffic.

I know this because I know (or have a close friend who knows) many of the people who are idolized in our culture and treated as gurus. If you spend any time with these people the first thing that strikes you is how they don’t even try to align their lives with their public image. The stories they tell publicly have a kernel of truth, but have been jacked up to fit whatever narrative they are selling in the name of authenticity.

There's a reason they say you should never meet your heroes.

Read more

Right after I sent the WhatsApp message, I realized my mistake.

I had asked my Italian dermatologist's office if I could schedule a facial for the 11th of August.

The response came quickly: Buonasera, ad agosto saremo in ferie.

They would not be working, because it's August.

Obviously.

I should have known better.

August in Italy isn't just a month—it's a collective exhale that brings much of the country to a standstill. The concept of "Ferragosto" extends far beyond the official holiday on the 15th; it's a month-long declaration that life is meant to be lived, not just endured through endless work and obligations.

Sitting there with my phone in hand, I couldn't help but admire this cultural commitment to rest and connection. My dermatologist's office wasn't apologizing for being closed—they were simply stating a fact as natural as the sunrise. There would be no guilt, no frantic rescheduling, no promises to "squeeze me in."

A few weeks later, I received an email from the Italian-owned international law firm I have relied on during my immigration process:

Summer Slowdown Fast Approaching! As you may or may not know, August is the month when Italians usually take some amount of vacation, whether it's a week, the entire month or something in between. [W]hile we remain open, most Italian offices (including consulates) will be partially or totally closed or understaffed with little opportunity to make significant progress on a case. Which means work on your matter will be slowed, regardless of our staff's availability, because all the other institutions and businesses will be on break too.

I was struck by the pains they took to explain something that no doubt is hard to understand for their many English speaking clients.

In the same way, the workers finishing the renovations of my trullo were straightforward about the fact that they would vanish in mid-August and I wouldn't see them again until September.

The contrast struck me immediately—what many Italians consider a birthright still feels like an indulgence to me.

Read more

They look great.

Then you realize that this is a “before” picture.

The implication is that this perfectly fine-looking body needs an upgrade.

Suddenly, an “after” picture flashes on the screen, and about a third of this person’s body has disappeared. People get praise for this, for looking like they are starving themselves and/or enduring punishing workouts in pursuit of a vastly slimmed-down version of themselves, sometimes with ripped abs and other times looking frail.

After a brief period of “body positivity,” it seems that looking underweight is back in style.

Think Kate Moss in the early 1990s when the revoltingly named “heroin chic” reigned supreme.

From the Guardian, late last year:

In a recently published annual report that analyzed procedures done in 2023, the world’s largest plastic surgery organization noted that demand for an ideal “ballet body” is driving interest in liposuction and breast enhancement. Since ballet is notorious for eating disorders, one imagines it might also drive an increase in women starving themselves.

Looking emaciated became so trendy that it had a hashtag on TikTok called #SkinnyTok. It has now been banned thanks to European Union regulators, who were concerned about the extreme dieting that was being promoted to teens.

Still, the Instagram account “@very.skinny” has more than 200,000 followers for posting this kind of content, which is still available all over the platform.

I’ve written before about my struggle with body image, which led to disordered eating for much of my life. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been had I been exposed to the kind of content around body and dieting that younger people are exposed to today.

Read more

I am thrilled to announce that Harper One acquired my book, 'It Doesn't Have to Be This Way,' based on the viral essay, "How We Live in America is Not Normal."

I can't say why it's taken me so long to share this news about the book, since I signed the contract last summer. Perhaps I can blame it on my slower living in Italy. Things feel less urgent, but I have wanted to share this news because I know that essays and other posts about the plague of late-stage capitalism brought many of you here.

In this book I'll be examining the huge toll late-stage capitalism has taken on American life and the many lessons we can learn from other countries on how to live differently. I'll also delve into what we can learn from looking at the United States' not-so-distant past when capitalism existed within certain guardrails and our system looked more like our peer countries in terms of social support.

To be clear, this is not a call to arms to leave the United States. Most people can't do that, or don't want to do that. For those who do want to leave, they may find inspiration in my story and the stories of other people who have relocated to new countries.

However, the overarching point of sharing these stories is to demonstrate that the systems of countries have a direct impact on your basic quality of life. For example, many people who were suffering from chronic illness, depression, and anxiety found that those things disappeared when they moved to a place where they weren't required to work constantly just to afford the basics of life. They felt better because they were able to live near nature or had more time to connect with the community, for example.

But you give up a lot when you move away from your home, and the fact is none of us should have to do that considering the United States has more resources than any country in existence. No American should feel that the only way to have a balanced life it to move to another country.

Yet, many do.

This book is personal to me because I nearly destroyed my mental and physical health in the pursuit of professional success and financial security before I woke up to the fact that the US economic system has turned into what feels like a massive scam.

It demands you work constantly, not just for money, but also for your identity, and then, when your body can't handle it, sells you "solutions" that are band-aids at best. Whatever the problem is, the solution is always us buying something with money we don't have, rather than the system changing. Every problem is treated like an individual issue that can be solved with more discipline or a ‘life hack.’

The fact is, hyper-capitalism has destroyed quality of life for the vast majority of Americans, because affording the basic necessities of life has become an impossible burden to bear.

But what’s even worse it that this system has colonized our minds and made so many of us think that the entire purpose of life is to work, acquire, grow, and build and that if we aren’t doing that something is wrong with us.

It’s made us think that this is just the way life is and nothing can be done about it.

But we aren't the problem, and it doesn’t have to be this way.

While most industrialized countries manage to provide health care, education, regular working hours—you know, the basic things people need—to it's citizens, we are asked to believe that it just beyond the capacity of the United States of America to do this even though the government provided these things just a few generations ago.

It’s not just that there is basic support in many of the US’s peer countries. There is a vastly different understanding of what the purpose of life is and what is important. It actually isn’t that different than what I experienced terms of values when I was growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s.

But somewhere the US (and it seems, some other English speaking capitalist countries) diverged and went down a starkly different path.

Read more