There’s something I often do, which I suspect you might recognize. After I talk to someone (a friend, a colleague, someone I’ve just met at a reading, the Pope) or have a conversation in any kind of group, I immediately go home and replay the conversation. Not once. Not twice. Many, many times. I sift through the words for the moment I said the crucial faux pas; surely, if I sift through the dialogue long enough, I’ll find the offhand remark that I’m now completely positive has permanently altered how people think of me.

Sometimes I call people to apologize.

Reader, are you surprised to know that I am apologizing for things that they don’t remember?

The apologies are always a little bewildering for the recipient. What? No. I didn’t even notice that. Are you okay?

I am okay. I am also, apparently, someone who carries conversations around in my body for days, worrying them like a scrap of cloth in the pocket, searching for the flaw that will end me forever.

I tell you this because I've been quiet here for a long time. And the silence has been its own kind of replaying. I wonder if you noticed. I wonder what you thought. I wonder whether the distance I put between us had changed something.

So I’m here now, and I want to explain.

I am closing The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy.

This is not a sudden or panicked decision. It is, in the way of most real and serious decisions, something I’ve known for longer than I’ve said out loud. The Academy has been the work of years—my curriculum, my teaching, the community we built there—and closing it is a real ending, not just a pivot.

But here is what I want you to know: one of the reasons I’m closing it is to come back to this.

To Reasons for Living. To you.

The Academy required so much of me in the best and most demanding sense. I spent more time working on the Academy than a typical nine-to-five would have asked of me. I was also never able to operate at a profit.

What it didn’t always leave room for was the novels and short stories and essays that my editors are waiting for. It didn’t leave room for this quieter, stranger, more meandering kind of writing in Reasons for Living. The kind where I tell you about calling people to apologize for things they don’t remember. The kind that doesn’t need to instruct or guide, but just needs to be as true as I can be.

I miss this. I’m choosing this.

Before the Academy closes, I’m doing one final thing.

I’m offering everything—the complete Academy, every class, every guest lecture—as a bundle, for $197.

If you’ve been in my orbit here on Reasons for Living and never found your way into the Academy, this is the door, and it is genuinely the last time it will be open.

Here’s what’s inside:

✦ The Pathway — the full memoir curriculum I built for writers whose lives require a different kind of map: non-linear, humane, designed for fluctuating energy and interrupted days. We go through Pre-Writing classes, Writing classes, and Publication classes.

✦ The Canopy — 12 guest lectures from writers I deeply admire: Hanif Abdurraqib, Leslie Jamison, Melissa Febos, Meghan O’Rourke, Stephanie Foo, Suleika Jaouad, and more. Real craft conversations, not inspiration for its own sake.

✦ The Compass — the “Dream Hunting with Limitations” process for building a writing practice that works with your life

At regular prices, this totals $4,116 at $147 a class.

The bundle is $197, and it closes on June 15th.

I want to be honest with you about why I’m telling you this here, on Reasons for Living. It’s because you are the people I think of when I think about why I made The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy in the first place. You’re the kind of writers who are asking hard questions about why we write, and especially about what it means to make art in the middle of a life that is complicated and sometimes very hard.

The Academy is for those of you who want the craft, the structure, and the instruction. It’s for those for you who desire the practical machinery of how to write memoir and send it into the world.

And Reasons for Living is for everything that surrounds the reasons we keep going when the writing is hard and the days are a mess and we’re lying awake replaying conversations that the other person has long forgotten.

Both of these things matter to me. I made them both for you.

The Academy sale closes June 15th. After that, it’s gone.

And then—I’ll see you here, more often. I promise.

With love,

P.S. If you have questions about the Academy before the 15th, just reply. I’ll write back.

content warning: child abuse

Subscribe to Reasons for Living for more of whatever this is—the honest, occasionally beautiful dispatches from a woman who is furnishing her basement and writing a novel about it.

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking a lot about basements.

This is partly because of the novel I’m revising—dear God, please let me finish this thing soon—which concerns itself with the sort of damage that rearranges the interior architecture of a person, sometimes for their entire life. And it is partly because I have a basement of my own, and have lived in it for a long time, and have been thinking about what it means to furnish a room you did not choose and cannot leave.

Here is how I understand it. I say “I” because I don’t want to presume how it works for everyone, though I suspect this will sound familiar to more people than I’d like: when childhood sexual abuse occurs, the survivor/victim is placed in a basement. Not literally—though sometimes literally, too. But metaphorically, structurally, in the way that matters for the rest of your life: something happens, and you go down into the dark. The stairs are not stairs you chose. The door closes behind you, and it locks with a terrible THUNK, and now you are in the basement.

My question is: are you there forever?

I used to think the answer might be no. That with enough therapy, enough time, enough of the right kind of love or the right pharmaceutical intervention or the right revelatory experience on a mountaintop in the company of people who understood and could reflect back to you that you are not alone—that eventually you’d be able to find the stairs. The door would open from the inside. You’d walk back up into the rest of the house, where other people live and would be happy to greet you, where the light comes in sheets and not in slivers. Where the floor is not concrete, and the ceiling does not press down like a hand.

I don’t think that anymore.

I think you get no refunds. I think the basement is where you live now. Not because healing is impossible—I rankle at that, and I want to be precise, too, because precision matters when you’re talking about The Thing That Shapes Everything—but because healing, in my experience, does not return you to the floor you were on before. It doesn’t undo the descent. What it does, if you’re lucky and stubborn and willing to keep going back to the people who can help, is change the room.

You can make a basement livable. You can make it beautiful, even. You can hang framed art on the walls—real art, not just motivational posters about resilience that involve cats hanging from branches, but things that make you stop and look and feel something other than cold concrete. You can bring in soft lighting—the kind that’s not for interrogation and is without fluorescent buzz. Rugs that are thick and quiet. Furniture that you chose, that makes you glad. You can string fairy lights across the ceiling and install a record player that only plays music that soothes your heart, and you can line the shelves with books you desperately want to read—books about other basements, books about houses with no basements at all, books that let you imagine, briefly, what it might be like to live on the ground floor.

But are you still in the basement? Yes.

This isn’t about despair. I want to be clear about that. This is not me telling you that nothing works, that survival is futile, and that the best you can hope for is a well-decorated cage. I’m telling you what I know at this point in my life, which is that the room is the room, and the room has always been the room. And the most honest, most useful thing I’ve learned—the thing I wish someone had told me twenty years ago instead of promising me nonexistent stairs—is that you can build a real life inside it; you can build a life with texture and pleasure and work you care about and people you love and days where you almost forget you’re underground.

Almost. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting. But almost is not nothing. Almost is quite a lot.

Here is the other thing I’ve been thinking about, and is also the thing that’s harder to say (are you serious, Es, you just said something that’s going to make a lot of people upset, what could you possibly say next).

There is a language that belongs to people who live in basements. It’s not a language anyone teaches you; you acquire it the way children acquire their mother tongue, which is to say involuntarily and through immersion. You learn it in your body before you learn it in your mind. You learn it in the way you flinch, or freeze instead of flinch, or have trained yourself not to flinch, somehow, in the company of people who’ve never had reason to. You learn it in the silence that follows certain things that you say and in your own, well-trained half-second delay before you answer how are you, during which your brain goes through a rapid, invisible flowchart: what does this person need me to say? what can they handle? what is safe?

Basement is a fluent language. When two people who speak it find each other, the recognition is almost cellular. You don’t have to explain certain things. You don’t have to perform the careful translation that you do with everyone else—the one where you take the raw, jagged thing that happened to you and sand it down carefully until you can recite it, usually in a monotone with no pauses and as though whatever you’re saying is not that bad, to someone with a ground-floor life.

I’ve wondered for a long time whether people who don’t have basements can learn the language. Whether empathy, however deep and genuine, can approximate fluency. Can a therapist who has studied trauma extensively but has never lived in a basement truly speak basement? Are they instead reading from a phrasebook that includes I like pasta and where is the bathroom? Totally competent! One might even say helpful! But not with the fluency that comes from having it in your marrow.

I have not found that they can. I want to be wrong about this. I have loved people who tried because they are some of the kindest people I know, who listened with such attention and such care that I wanted it to be enough. And it wasn’t. Not because they did a bad job. Not because they didn’t love me. But because the language lives in the body, not the mind, and you can’t learn a bodily language through study. You can only learn it by having the body.

Last year, I attended a retreat for women survivors of childhood sexual abuse. I expected—I don’t know what I expected. Communion? The relief of being in a room where everyone spoke basement, where no translation was necessary, where I could say the thing and watch it land in another body the way it lives in mine?

And that did happen. There were moments of such precise, wordless recognition. Someone said a sentence, and the room went still, and I understood that every woman there had heard it in the same place in her body—not in her ears, not in her intellect, but in the basement, where the sound waves travel differently.

But here is what I didn’t expect: fluency doesn’t necessarily equate fellowship. A room full of people who speak your language is not necessarily a room full of people you want to hang out in. Shared damage is not the same as shared values, or shared humor, or shared taste in 3 AM diner food, or any of the hundreds of other things that make you want to keep a person in your life.

This was a useful and somewhat humbling thing to learn. I had spent years looking for my people among other survivors, as though the basement were a neighborhood and everyone who lived there was a potential friend. Big nope! It’s a condition. And while the condition comes with a language, the language does not automatically create a community.

I said at the beginning that I’ve been thinking about basements because of the novel. This is true, but it is also a convenient deflection—the magician’s trick of rattling off enough patter that you don’t see them throw the rabbit into a hole onstage.

The truer answer is that I am thinking about basements because I have been spending a lot of time in the worse version of mine lately. Not in crisis, and not in the way that sends you to a special phone line in the middle of the night or a locked ward where you have to give up your shoelaces. In a chronic way. The way that is, I think, the actual texture of survivorship for most of us: the low, steady awareness of the room you’re in, the concrete under the rug, the ceiling that’s definitely my ceiling but is also someone else’s floor.

I am thinking about basements because I am trying to write characters who live in them, and to do this honestly I have to be honest about my own. Because the novel keeps asking me questions that I have been answering on the page but not, until now, out loud: What does it cost to make a basement beautiful? Who can you invite in? What happens when you meet someone who lives on the ground floor and loves you and cannot, no matter how hard they try, hear the dripping of the pipes?

You’ll have to wait for the book to get my full thoughts on these questions. But I’ll leave you with this: the room can be made beautiful. It won’t be the same as a ground-floor room with big windows and natural light. But it can be beautiful in the way that all hard-won, deliberately constructed spaces are beautiful: because someone who had every reason to stop trying decided to hang the art anyway. ❤️

If you’re a writer living in a basement—literal or otherwise—and you’re trying to turn that experience into a book, an essay, a body of work that matters, The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy was built for you. Not to get you out of the room, but to help you write from inside it.

Subscribe to Reasons for Living for more of whatever this is—the honest, occasionally beautiful dispatches from a woman who is furnishing her basement and writing a novel about it.

Subscribe now

The REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang Newsletter is a Substack Featured newsletter and community formed around the reasons that we have to live, both big and small, hosted by New York Times-bestselling and award-winning author Esmé Weijun Wang. Every other week, I send an inspiring newsletter containing guest essays, art, poetry, and journal prompts based on the titular concept. 10% of the proceeds from each newsletter is donated to a charitable organization of the guest essayist’s choice. In the weeks between, I send out a paywalled essay.

Subscribe now

For three weeks I lived somewhere else and worked on my book. That was the stated purpose of the residency—to write, to be diligent in the manner that home does not easily permit—and I did write, more consistently than I have in a long time, which is, for me, a tremendous triumph. But the writing is not the thing I brought back with me.

I was calmer there. Not in the way one is calm on vacation, where the stillness is borrowed and you know it, where you’re already half-dreading the return even as you settle into the unfamiliar sheets. This was different. For one, I was there to work, and I did more intently than I have at any other residency since 2014. What happened was that by the third day, after one night of ferocious dreaming created by my nervous system’s desire to scan for danger everywhere it goes, something in me leveled out. I could sit in silence, which I rarely do at home; at home, silence is a thing I rush to fill, as though quiet were a crack in a wall and my anxious thoughts the plaster. I needed my medication less. I slept through the night. My moods, which I have come to think of as weather—unpredictable, sometimes violent, always in motion—became a kind of long, clear afternoon.

This was, to put it plainly, not what I expected to learn at a residency about my book.

When I mentioned this to C—tentatively, because I understood how it sounded—he said something like, I’m sorry that you’re so much happier there than you are at home. And I kept telling him: that isn’t what this is. It isn’t the place. If I moved to Arkansas and stayed there a year, I believe I would eventually build the same elaborate architecture of worry that I maintain here at home; I would find new fragile things to monitor, new cracks in new walls. The anxiety is not geographic. It’s structural, and it lives in the proximity to the creatures and people I love—who are here, in this house, where I am reminded daily of their mortality and the terrible fragility of everything I cannot protect.

At a residency, I am one woman with a laptop. The people and animals I love are elsewhere, and because they are elsewhere, I am not running the quiet, ceaseless perimeter check that constitutes so much of my waking life at home. My body, unburdened of its sentry work, turns out to be capable of a calm I had begun to believe was simply not available to me—that the hum of dread was original equipment, part of the blueprint, something I was built with rather than something I was carrying.

It is a strange thing to learn, in middle life with a complex PTSD diagnosis, that you are not as broken as you thought. That some of what you attributed to permanent damage is, in fact, a response to load.

Read more

Whether you’re a free subscriber or a paid subscriber, sign up to get access to the newsletter via email and the Substack app. Never miss an update. 💌 Don’t want to miss out on my paywalled essays, occasional Fireside Chats, and library of resources? Make sure to upgrade to a paid subscription. I also offer comped subscriptions if you’re in financial need; just email info@esmewang.com with your preferred email address and a little bit about yourself (as much or as little as you want; I like to know who’s reading my work if possible). And if you can afford to sponsor a paid subscription for someone else, please consider doing so.

Alice Wong, a brilliant, fierce, and disabled activist, as well as a peer and friend, passed away in November, leaving behind an enormous hole where her determined spirit once sat.* She was 51 years old, a MacArthur “Genius” Award recipient, and the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. In her final message, shared by her friend Sandy Ho at the moment of her passing, she wrote: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

That was Alice. Right until the end.

I was surprised to learn that before she died, she had left behind a wish list of classes to be taught at the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center—a publicly funded building and organization to bolster and support disabled people in San Francisco, and that the list of requested classes included mine. This request, passed on to me by those designated to carry out her last wishes, has had me thinking about what it means to leave a legacy, and what it means when that legacy extends far beyond yourself.

Because I used to think a lot about legacy. Recently, the legacy part fell off because it seemed too egotistical. Ambition has become less of a focus of mine; legacy has too.

Legacy reminds me of stuffy museums full of artifacts commissioned by the rich, or artifacts from other cultures thieved by imperialistic ones, or art created by people who weren’t rich in their own right but were the right kind of people to be chosen for patronage. Because of that slippery shift in the word’s meaning, legacy carries a different weight than it did for me a decade ago.

But after receiving this request from Alice beyond the grave, I’ve been thinking about legacy again. Namely, the fact that legacy doesn’t have to do with just one of us. It has to do with the collective. Or at least, if you do it right—as Alice did—it means so much more than the one person and what the one person did.

One aspect of Alice that people know up top: she was recently awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant. I feel this to be an absolutely correct choice by the MacArthur Foundation. One of the aspects of her genius was to look forward—to use what my disabled therapist has taught me to think of as “cathedral thinking.”

Read more

I’ve been thinking about how we can see good in this world. And how we can make more good happen in this world. There’s a not-small difference between the two. One is about making goodness occur; the other is about making that goodness visible.

Like many, I’ve been thinking about Renée Nicole Good. I’ve been thinking about the impact of her death on the public perception of ICE and what’s being done not only in Minneapolis, but in other impacted cities and towns as well.

Subscribe now

Before she became a household name, Renée was a 37-year-old poet and writer and wife. She had three children. Her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” ends with lines that have been circulating since her death:

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

Life is merely / to ovum and sperm / and where those two meet / and how often and how well / and what dies there.

On January 7th, Renée had just dropped her son off at school. She was driving home through their south Minneapolis neighborhood when she encountered ICE agents. What happened next has been captured on video, disputed by officials, and witnessed by neighbors (as well as her own wife, Rebecca). What’s not disputed: an ICE agent shot her three times through the windshield of her maroon Honda Pilot.

In the video, you can hear her say to the agent: “I’m not mad at you, dude.”

She died less than a mile from where George Floyd was murdered in 2020.

As I’ve been thinking about the enormous response to Good’s death, I wonder: is it worth it to complain about the stories not told, or is it enough to be glad that people are galvanized in this moment?

I sit with this tension because Renée was a beautiful white woman, one whose now-famous image reminds me of Sarah Snook. Renée’s story has been taken up by major news outlets, by writers and poets sharing her work, and by vigils and marches of thousands. A (now closed) GoFundMe for her family has raised over a million dollars. The nation mourned her. Even her last name seemed to call for a kind of natural response—she was Good! In all senses of the word!

And I am glad. I am glad people are galvanized because to not be galvanized is worse. I am glad people know her name. I am glad her poetry is being read. I am glad that her death has illuminated what ICE has been doing to communities of color for as long as the agency has existed, an act committed by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003.

But I also think about the many people affected by ICE whose stories are not being told. In 2025, Silverio Villegas González was shot and killed in a Chicago suburb; Josué Castro Rivera, from Honduras, was run over by a pick-up truck during an ICE traffic stop. Somali Minnesotans have been the focus of a targeted deportation campaign since late November, even though the vast majority are citizens or legal residents. There are tremendous numbers of impacted families of the roughly 2500 people who’ve been arrested in Minneapolis since Operation Metro Surge began. Eight restaurants have closed “until further notice”—Casa Iberica, La Loma Tamales, Don Papi Chulo’s, and others—and other restaurants are limiting their hours for weeks to come, their owners too afraid to leave their homes.

According to The Guardian, 2025 was ICE’s deadliest year on record, with twenty-five people dying in ICE custody.

When I look online, I see the comments. (I inevitably look at the comments despite common wisdom.) People with red hats and American flags as their avatars repeat what our president has said—that Renée was a terrorist, someone who tried to run over an ICE officer. The witnesses and the video don’t seem to matter.

I saw a person on Substack Notes call George Floyd “a waste of skin.” To say that Good looks a whole lot better with “three more holes in her face.”

I tell myself these are bots. It’s terrible to think of them as real people. But some of them are real, and they say such vile, heartless things that I feel what I’ve long called the most dangerous feeling: despair. Despair is knocking on our windows. It wants to climb into bed with us, probing with long tentacles, trying to convince us that there isn’t anything to do now that things are and have gotten this bad.

And yet there is also so much good being done.

In Minneapolis, neighbors have formed watch groups, coordinating to track federal immigration officers, sharing license plate information and locations. They observe when agents try to detain people, arriving nearly immediately—honking horns, blowing whistles, filming. The system is both highly organized and decentralized, with no clear leaders. Just longer-time members helping newcomers learn.

Elle Neubauer and her wife patrol their south Minneapolis neighborhood in the early mornings, looking for ICE vehicles to follow and observe. When agents came to their house and banged on the front door while Elle was out on patrol, her wife pretended she wasn’t home. The agents left after neighbors stepped out of their houses and started blowing whistles. (The whistle-blowing tactic has been ongoing, warning people of ICE in the area.)

Wrecktangle Pizza raised over $83,000 for nonprofits supporting affected families. When ICE agents tried to enter the restaurant, employees and community members chased them off.

The Black Immigrant Collective, a Black-led organization in Minnesota, is working at the intersection of Blackness and immigration—running legal clinics, providing mutual aid, and supporting undocumented Black immigrants. Unidos MN, a grassroots organization born from the DREAMER movement, is organizing for a Minnesota where everyone’s dignity is honored. The Immigrant Defense Network has brought together over 90 organizations to protect immigrant communities across the state.

Lyz Lenz, a friend who writes the newsletter Men Yell at Me, organized a team that ran 339 miles across Iowa to raise money for the Iowa Abortion Access Fund and Trans Mutual Aid. Her upcoming book, The Middle Kingdom, is about the Midwest’s culture of “mutual aid and stubborn care.” She models what it looks like to do good work in red-state America, to find community and build it where you are.

Pow Wow Grounds in Minneapolis is accepting donations to meet community needs. Joyce Uptown Foodshelf is hosting emergency food drives to meet skyrocketing demand for families who can’t leave their homes. Neighbors in southwest Minneapolis and Longfellow are fundraising to support rental assistance, food delivery, healthcare access, transportation, and legal services.

Thousands of people have signed up for legal observer trainings—so many that all sessions through January are at capacity, and I hope that they continue to sign up long after Good’s murder ceases to take up the front page.

But so much more is happening, too. And the “so much more” means so many things. What’s happening in Gaza. What’s happening in Venezuela. What’s happening to the Somali American population. What’s happening in Minneapolis.

This is not the story of one city undergoing Pulitzer-worthy photojournalism. This is the story of all the things that make despair crawl into our souls. And yet I return to Renée’s poem, where she wrote about being told by books like the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Bhagavad Gita—to make room for wonder. (I’d add many other books to that list, many of which are written by literary ancestors and by friends.)

We can’t control whose stories get told. I was told by a frustrated peer that their efforts to raise money for a non-white family targeted by ICE couldn’t make their goal of $15k, a fraction of the million-plus dollars donated to Good’s family. And we can still work to make good visible and most of all, to make good happen, showing up for our neighbors with whistles and food and translation services and legal observer training, and we can follow the work that’s already being done by organizations led by the communities most affected.

Renee’s wife Rebecca wrote: There is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow.

Let’s do that, please, for the sake of all that we love. ❤️

What You Can Do

Support the families directly affected:

• Mutual aid fundraisers for detained families in Minnesota (search “Minnesota immigrant mutual aid” for current campaigns)

Support the organizations doing this work:

• Black Immigrant Collective (blackimmigrantcollective.org) — Black-led organization providing legal clinics, mutual aid, and policy advocacy

• Unidos MN (unidos-mn.org) — Grassroots organization building power with working families for social, racial, and economic justice

• Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC) (miracmn.com) — All-volunteer grassroots organization led by BIPOC and immigrant community members

• Immigrant Defense Network (immigrantdefensenetwork.org) — Network of 90+ organizations protecting immigrant rights in Minnesota

• Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) (baji.org) — National organization at the intersection of immigration justice and anti-Black social structures

Support local mutual aid:

• Twin Cities Mutual Aid (twin-cities-mutual-aid.org)

• Pow Wow Grounds (accepting donations for community needs)

• Northern Coffeeworks (supporting weekly food deliveries to immigrant families)

Witness & tell stories.

• Share what you see. Document what is happening. Tell the stories of the people doing this work.

The index card method everyone asks about—now available alone

I’m genuinely excited to tell you this.

My most famous class, the one people ask me about constantly, the one that’s been locked inside The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy since 2021—Indexing as Creative Discovery is finally available as a standalone class again, to be taught live on January 30 (but available as a recording if you can’t make it). PLUS: office hours for any questions you might have.

This is the index card method. The one that changed how I write everything. The one that gets mentioned in interviews and writer group chats and “hey, I heard about this thing you do with notecards?” DMs (for real).

I haven’t offered it separately in over three years because it’s such a core part of the Academy. But I kept getting the same question: Can I just take the indexing class?

So: yes. Now you can—and after January 28, it’ll go back into the lockbox for Academy members only.

And if you’ve been sitting on fragments—notes app entries, voice memos, journal pages scattered across years—this is exactly where to start.

Can’t make the live class? We’ll be giving access to the recording to everyone who registers. See more details here: https://www.esmewang.com/indexing

“I just wanted to quickly say another big thank you for Saturday’s workshop. As it turns out, indexing is incredibly helpful for the ADHD brain because there’s just enough structure to help the ideas take shape, but not so many parameters that I’m like, ‘Wait…what am I doing?’ This method is such a lovely gift.”

Bevin D.

For more writing about living and creating within limitation, subscribe to Reasons for Living, my Substack where I share essays on chronic illness, creativity, and finding unexpected shapes for our lives. A free subscription will get you essays like this one—essays by me and essays by guest writers about reasons for living. A paid subscription will get you paywalled essays and access to a library of resources for journaling, writing, and living with limitations.

Subscribe now

Right now, Daphne is lying in the sage-colored doggy bed near mine, deaf now, and struggling with congestive heart failure. At times, her labored breathing comes in waves. Kidney disease complicates everything—the medications that might ease the congestive heart failure work against her kidneys, and vice versa. It’s a familiar calculus, the kind those of us with chronic illness know well: the calculation of treatments that cancel each other out, until the doctors begin to tell you that the cocktail they’ve helped create has reached a preposterous number of medications that they’ll want to pare down, and meanwhile, all you want is to maintain some kind of baseline.

C has enormous baskets filled with medications to treat his chronic graft vs. host disease, which developed after his bone marrow transplant; I have boxes full of medications to treat my fourteen diagnoses. And the entire time, I fail to understand why this is happening. I don’t understand or appreciate the math of borrowed time.

Daphne has joined us in the land of the sick. We adopted her thirteen years ago, a little white mutt with apricot markings who loved to play ball. She’s seen us through so much illness since then—my slow accumulation of diagnoses, Chris’s years of blood cancer, and the side effects of treatment and recovery that ripple through a household while the household attempts to live a good life. Through it all, Daphne remained puppyish and rambunctious, a small warm body that we didn’t need to explain illness to. She loved us anyway.

To watch Daphne slow down—to see her spend most of her time dozing in that sage bed, her once-bright eyes half-clouded with age—fills my heart with an oceanic ache. There’s something particular about this grief, a specific tone of sorrow that comes from watching a creature who’s seen you through the worst of things begin to fade. When C and I needed comfort, when we needed something other than each other, we would turn to Daphne. She’d let us pet her. She’d look up at us with her soulful eyes. When I awoke from PTSD nightmares, screaming, she’d run to me and lick the tears off my face. She never asked why I was crying. Unlike my disability insurance company, she never judged me for not getting out of bed, She simply was who she was, the sweet girl who asked for food and fun and our comforting presence, and we loved her for it.

The vet told us she has six to eight months to live. C and I know something about living with prognoses. They might be wildly generous or wildly scant: our sweet girl, the girl to whom we sang so many made-up songs. (I burst into tears when C texted me with, ‘What do you think was the last song Daphne heard us sing to her?”)

What I’ve whispered to her throughout her life—You’re going to live forever—was never meant to be an actual promise. It was the sort of thing we say to those we love because of the ferocious wish of it.

But I find myself wishing it could be true, that the little white mutt who has witnessed our worst days and our best could somehow stay with us for so long that we never have to feel the grief of letting her go.

She’d just had a vet appointment that seemed to bode well. All we learned from that appointment was that she was healthy—her heart murmur hadn’t gotten worse; she wasn’t going blind; she was doing well for a 13-year-old dog. The only thing we learned was that she’d become, as I’d suspected, completely deaf. She’d adapted so well that we didn’t know for sure that she’d had such extreme hearing loss. It was fine. I said what I always say, which is the thing that my BFF says is also a very Jewish thing to say: “It could always be worse.”

The next week, I took Daphne on a walk around the block, as I’ve been trying to do more often to help her lose those last two pounds that the vet has been recommending. But on the last leg of the walk, she slowed down. She was no longer prancing, but walking so slowly that I had to slow down, too. Still: she went up the stairs to our home in a way that seemed normal. I was watching.

But when we got inside and I began to take off my shoes, Daphne collapsed onto her side, her legs kicking wildly and her breathing becoming more labored than usual. This dog who we’d just been told was healthy seemed to be having a seizure.

I called C, who was on the way to my brother’s home. He rushed home while I called various emergency vets. I wrapped her in a blanket and we took her to the emergency vet. “I’m concerned about her oxygen levels,” said the person who reached for the bundle in my arms. “I’m going to get her some oxygen.”

And that was when we learned that the walls of her heart were slowly collapsing, liquid going into her lungs. She was in the emergency vet’s for three days and two nights. We visited her oxygen kennel and she seemed perky and beautiful, her angelic face the same as always, happy to see us. Maybe even as happy to see us as we were to see her.

I find myself taking more photographs of Daphne now, recording little videos of her soft snoring or trotting along on the beach, as if I could somehow preserve her in these small artifacts against the day when they’re all I have left of her.

I’m not ready to lose Daphne. I don’t know if anyone is ever ready to lose a creature they love—no matter how much we think we’ve emotionally prepared, I’m learning, as I’ve learned through every loss that illness has brought, that love and readiness don’t necessarily play well together. There is no bulwark against pain except for the willingness to stay even when staying hurts.

Daphne doesn’t know she’s dying. She only knows that I am here, that her bed is warm, that the hand stroking her fur is familiar and kind. Even though she can no longer hear me call her name, I hope that she recognizes my smell.

I still whisper to her: You’re going to live forever. And in the way that love outlasts the hearts that stop beating and the kidneys that stop working—perhaps, in some astonishing way, she will. ❤️

For more writing about living and creating within limitation, subscribe to Reasons for Living, my Substack where I share essays on chronic illness, creativity, and finding unexpected shapes for our lives. A free subscription will get you essays like this one—essays by me and essays by guest writers about reasons for living. A paid subscription will get you paywalled essays and access to a library of resources for journaling, writing, and living with limitations.

Subscribe now

Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month. Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.

If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

Subscribe now

Tominaga Shozo, one of the army officers in the Japanese Imperial Army and a war criminal for his actions in the Rape of Nanking and other brutalities, wrote: “We made them like this. Good sons, good daddies, good elder brothers at home were brought to the front to kill each other. Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months.”

Three months is so short a time frame—it’s about as long as Sea Monkeys live. It is so easy, I think, to become a demon.

My mother’s belief system includes a fundamental belief that some people are inherently good and some people are inherently bad; she even believes that she can tell by looking at someone’s face if they’re a “decent” person. However, there’s a loophole: people who have done terrible things, accordingly, can be inherently good. How? Because things like alcohol can turn good people into demons.

I didn’t learn about her position on booze until a few years back, when I’d just begun my early forties. I did know, growing up, that she was twitchy when it came to the stuff. She didn’t drink at all, and she didn’t want my father to drink, though he drank plenty regardless, and she was always sensitive to how much I drank at mealtime once I was in my 20s, which I found annoying. If I had more than one glass of wine, she’d want me to end it there. A second glass of wine made her edgy. She’d give me significant looks, or she’d say outright, “Aiya, stop drinking. Too much alcohol.”

I grew up believing that my father had a drinking problem because my mother always said that he had a drinking problem. I’m not sure that he’d be categorized as an alcoholic by the DSM-V, but I’d witnessed frightening behavior by him when he’d had too much to drink, and there was a bottle of wine on his side of the bed for as long as I was alive to notice it. Anything nasty he did throughout their marriage (a marriage that is still ongoing) was, according to my mother, due to alcohol. When I told my mother about this thing or that thing that he’d done to me, she’d ask, “Was he drinking?” Inevitably, he was.

Read more

I enter the theatre showing The Chronology of Water ten minutes into the film because I’d become so lost in attempting to navigate the Presidio and its winding not-roads through grass and hills. No one will move to let me sit, so one of the benevolent ushers puts me in an aisle seat that I don’t realize is marked for FILMMAKER GUESTS until halfway through. Kristen Stewart and Imogen Poots are somewhere in the building. There are, I learn, no FILMMAKER GUESTS.

Read more

On August 2, 2018, I drove my wife Katelyn to LAX for her flight to New Orleans. She had a black leather backpack and nothing else; after all, she was only supposed to be gone for the weekend, visiting her mother for Miss Bernadette’s seventieth.

At the Delta Departures she leaned into the open window and kissed me, with tongue. I laughed as I felt the wet poke and said, “Quit that,” which made her laugh, a lovely sound, and then she kissed me again with more decorum before she turned and went inside—the most ordinary thing, the most regular sort of parting between two lovers except when it becomes the last.

According to our Ford Fiesta, it was ninety-two degrees. I drove home in the hellish traffic with a mind on what my responsibilities were to be while Katelyn was gone. A different wife might have undertaken household responsibilities, or at least done the heaping laundry, but I was not of that sort. I worked in a company where the hours were awful but the pay was more than good. My work was to help assess the value of various companies so that they could be bought and sold. The plan, once I’d been hired, was for me to work there for ten years or so and then quit with more than enough money to retire happily alongside—and this, Katelyn happily called herself—my dirtbag wife. My peers at the company were buying Porsches and Teslas, thinking such extravagances made their ulcers worth the trouble, but I kept my head down and my stock portfolio growing. I hadn’t gone South with Katelyn that weekend because I was needed for a complex valuation of three interrelated biomedical companies, but to be fair, I was glad to be absent from the Giroirs’ family festivities. Katelyn’s family was loud, and grew steadily louder as the booze flowed more steadily apace, which made me want to hide in the bathroom with my phone and a book, the way I had with my own noisy family when I was a teen. Katelyn and I had grown accustomed to one another’s rhythms, but once home with her kin, her extraversion flourished; I easily lost her to a shouting match about this or that, and there was also the matter of her sister, Billie, with whom I’d never properly bonded.

So staying home was what I chose to do. I drove away from the airport and from Katelyn, fully expecting that I’d see her again. And due to fate, or hubris, or the random fucking dice-roll of the universe, she was struck by a car while venturing out to purchase butter for the birthday cake. In my mind, I can see the parabola of her body. I can see the passersby leaping into action, pointlessly, as my Katelyn collided onto the dark street, never saying a word, never making a sound.

I’d never fully grieved anyone prior to losing Katelyn, and the force of my devastation terrified me as I felt myself chopped off at the knees and then the neck, losing any sense of my surroundings and myself. I lost too much weight, which caused one of my biohacking coworkers to come to our apartment with five pallets of Soylent in the back of his hulking brother’s truck. The only flavor I liked was Chai Latte and as it turned out, it gave me the cramping runs, but I lacked the capacity to do anything but suck down a bottle for every meal.

I didn’t go to work. No one wanted to fire the miserable widow, “but if it were anyone else...” I deleted that particular email; I had enough money to survive. I exercised on a Pelaton bike that lived in the basement of the duplex, not knowing who it belonged to but assuming they’d kick up the proper fuss if I wasn’t supposed to ride it. Exercise, as it turned out, was the only thing that I could properly do. Neither Katelyn nor I had previously been interested in moving our bodies for no discernible purpose, but now I had one. A chirpy Brit named Brigette encouraged me to go up hills and through lush valleys. Brigette told me that I was doing spectacularly. I was grateful for Brigette, the only person who behaved as though everything was normal. Without Brigette, without Katelyn, there was no reason to move at all.

One-and-a-half months after Katelyn died, I took out the garbage in my bare feet and lo: there stood Katelyn on the sidewalk, with her dusty backpack on the ground.

Katelyn was the kind of girl—well, woman—who attracted looks regardless of how reckless she was with hygiene or attire, due to the privilege of her white body and its collapsible thinness. Her physical form, five-foot-eight, wielded power in Los Feliz even as she strutted by bona fide movie stars, insouciantly wearing a stringy ponytail pulled through a backwards baseball cap, her tortoiseshell glasses perched high on her tomboy, un-patrician face. She wore utilitarian black bras exposed beneath tattered muscle tees; she had a mole below her left armpit of the sort that we call identifying marks. By the time the car struck her, we’d been together for six years and I loved her more than anything or anyone. I couldn’t imagine living without her—living without my luminous sweetheart, my hilarious wife who could make me dampen just by peering through her lashes over a loosie as she licked the paper with a wry smile, swamp-green eyes on mine. And there she was—she wore the same backwards baseball cap she’d worn the day we parted, and the same black bra and ratty top.

Immediately I assumed I’d gone insane. It was bound to happen—perhaps this lunacy was a hallucination, brought on by scurvy. Yet when I stood there, the dumpster lid slamming shut, the vision of Katelyn, instead of disappearing, stared back at me with an expression of annoyance that I’d missed so much—her arm flinging out as if to say, What the fuck, June?

I stared. She started walking toward the car, which was parked curbside a few yards away, yammering: “I’m going to be late. Where have you been? You know it stresses me out when I don’t have enough time to get through security.” And then, in alarm: “Why are you crying? What’s wrong?”

But I couldn’t stop, as much as I tried. I’d never been a big crier—hadn’t been since I started taking Zoloft for anxiety—and she knew that I must be experiencing something catastrophic to be falling apart the way I was. I thought of the month that had just passed without her, and how she was here, now, though I also knew it was impossible for her to remain with me forever in her current state, whatever that was. Even if I were insane, or somehow asleep, our togetherness was bound to end soon, and this I couldn’t bear. And, too, I thought of telling her of our present circumstance. Katelyn, my love, you are dead, I’d say. But this seemed inadvisable.

“It’s nothing,” I said, walking toward the car, wiping my eyes. “Get in.”

Katelyn pulled open the door and got in, plopping her backpack in the rear seat. She put her sneakered feet up on the dashboard. All of these things that I would have once found annoying, I now found unbearably tender. I did notice that her feet left dirt marks on the plastic—if she was a ghost, which seemed to be the only explanation for our circumstance, Katelyn was a corporeal one. (Her ankles! Her beautiful, pink ankles.)

“I don’t think you should drive,” Katelyn said as I started the ignition. “You’re upset. You’re in no state to drive.”

“No,” I said. I drove down the street, still weeping—I wanted so badly to touch her; I was afraid to touch her. The last time I’d felt her skin on mine was in the Charbonnet-Labat-Glapion Funeral Home, when I brushed my fingers against her cold, waxen forehead and tried not to let my legs loosen completely beneath me. I was under the impression that I couldn’t let her drive the car. It seemed dangerous, somehow.

“Do you think I’ll make my flight?” she asked.

“Yes.” I didn’t bother looking at the clock. I didn’t know under what logic Katelyn’s apparition worked, but figured that Delta’s timetable didn’t have much to do with it. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know. Okay.” She gnawed on one of her cuticles. “Mom’s been excited about having me home. It’ll be good to see Billie, too. I think she needs to leave New Orleans.”

Billie was adopted. Equally stunning, as if whoever had delivered her unto the family had realized the sisters would need to be so. Billie was a Chinese adoptee, and I felt—as a Chinese-American, myself—that it couldn’t have been easy for her, though she’d never said so or hinted as much. I’d tried to stay in touch, but she had a fantastic social life and was difficult to get a hold of; when I was in town for the funeral, Billie had been busy on every day but the day of the burial itself. Looking over at Katelyn now, I wanted to tell her about how it had gone. Yet there was no good way to tell her stories about her own funeral.

The road unspooled. The traffic started and stopped, slowing us down at its usual infuriating rate. There were three things of which I was fairly sure. First: I didn’t know why or how Katelyn had come back to me, but I was sure that if I dropped her off at the airport, I’d never see her again. Second: she seemed not to know that she was dead. Third: she seemed determined to make the trip to her mother’s birthday celebration. So I evaluated my options. I could continue driving her in circles—I had half a tank of gas, which would get us pretty far even in L.A. traffic—but we couldn’t live in the car forever, and even with her awful sense of direction, she’d know that I was trying to pull one over on her, even if she wouldn’t know why.

“You’re quiet,” Katelyn said.

“I’m just thinking.”

“You gonna miss me?” she teased.

A hard lump formed in my throat; my eyes needled with tears. I nodded. I reached out and grabbed her cool left ankle, my tears flowing as I felt the skin and muscle and bone beneath my hand. And then I went momentarily insane; I suddenly turned the car off the road and into a strip mall parking lot. The car slammed to a stop. I put on the parking brake. Katelyn shrieked as I threw my body over the center console and kissed her, pawing at her collarbone. Everything in my mind was static.

She tried to wriggle out from underneath me. I think she loudly repeated my name. I stopped. Taking my wrists in her hands, she said, “Jesus, June! I need to go! I need to get to the airport.”

Mortified, I said, “I’m sorry,” and climbed back into the driver’s seat.

A few minutes later, she laughed. “I mean, I’ll be back after the weekend, okay? Two days without you; I’m really going to want you then.” She rolled down the window. “You sap.”

We drove and drove and I looked at how much gas we had, which was not much, and I didn’t want to fight. If Katelyn was only going to be around for a brief amount of time, I wanted it to be pleasant. I turned on the radio and over the speakers came a John Prine song that was halfway through. I didn’t know the words, but Katelyn softly sang along, and next came Patsy Cline with “Crazy,” which we sang in chorus though there was a burr prickling my throat. So many times we’d traveled various roads together as a way of getting from A to B. I was the urgent one between us, miserable in traffic—I’d rather take the long way rather than drag for ages behind another car, whereas Katelyn never minded the time in the passenger seat. Of course, now I regretted every moment I’d rushed through our time together—I should have savored it all.

I said, “I’m coming with you,” as I took the next freeway exit.

“You don’t have a ticket,” she said, but I could tell that she was pleased. A spangle of light zipped through the back of my skull: she’d wanted me to come to New Orleans all along.

“I’ll get a ticket.”

“You think you’ll be able to get one?”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to get one.”

She clapped her hands like a child. Alors.

The sun was red, drooping, and ready to pop as I pulled up to the curb in front of Terminal A, Departures. I got out of my side and opened the door for Katelyn as she leaned back to grab her backpack. I held her hand like I had a million times before, following her loping lead as we walked away from the car.

“What? You’re leaving the car?” she asked.

“I just want to make sure I can get a ticket,” I said.

“But someone’s going to tow the car.”

“No one’s going to tow the car.”

I was certain of this. I was certain, in part, because it wasn’t really Katelyn who was with me, but some kind of whimsical phantom. For example, I could tell that her black backpack, which in real life had heaved with her things, was empty. Or, for another, the real Katelyn, as silly as she was, would never let me leave our car at the curb of the airport to follow her into the Departures area of the Delta zone at LAX. But it was a gift to be near her, this thing, and I was grateful.

Right before we crossed into the airport, I kissed her, with tongue.

“Slut,” she laughed.

And then she was gone. I looked around, but she had disappeared into a million fragments and no one had noticed, or she had gotten lost in the crowd, or she had melted into the floor, or—

She was gone after that.

I didn’t understand what had come to pass on our last drive to the airport, no matter how many times I turned it over in my mind, and I did turn it over and over in my mind obsessively until it lost all of its color. All I cared about was that I’d gotten to be with Katelyn again, which felt like a holy miracle the likes of which I did not believe.

I never told Miss Bernadette about seeing her ghost. I didn’t tell Billie, though Billie did start to send me Christmas cards, and then the birth announcement of her first child. I eventually started dating an older Filipina-American woman who didn’t remind me of Katelyn at all, because I couldn’t bear it—to love someone like her, when Katelyn herself is gone forever. I met Maricel at work. She’s a numbers person, and I gravitated toward her immediately. It’s not easy to meet other women in that job, let alone other queer women. I often worry that Maricel will die, or leave me in some other way; it sounds like a pathology, but everyone will leave us eventually. We can be like starfish, regenerating lost arms.

Evening has a way of telling the truth.

Not loudly, not with pressure—just a quiet reckoning with what you’ve carried through the day, and what you can’t keep postponing.

If you’re reading this now, chances are your writing has been tugging at you again.

Not the guilt, not the comparison—just the deeper knowing that your work deserves a structure worthy of its weight.

The Complete Writer’s Ecosystem Bundle was built for exactly this moment.

It gathers every tool you need to create a sustainable, professional writing practice within your limitations:

🌱 3 months inside the Academy

🌱 Writing Through Brain Fog

🌱 The Cell Method

🌱 The Gentle Persistence Collection

🌱 A private Magic Session to tailor everything to your body, brain, and manuscript

The full value is $1,361.

Until midnight: $897 (save $464).

This exact configuration is new—but writers who’ve worked with these individual pieces have gone on to secure agents, publish widely, and finish manuscripts abandoned for years.

There’s power in gathering the right tools.

There’s even more power in gathering them at the right time.

Tonight is that time.

If you know your writing deserves a complete, coherent system—one that will still be standing on the days your energy won’t—this is your last window.

Get the Complete Writer’s Ecosystem Bundle before midnight.

Note: Not interested in our Black Friday sale? Thank you so much for your patience. In the meantime, watch Christy Anne Jones’s I tried Haruki Murakami’s 4 AM writing routine. ❤️

Hello friends,

I spent most of yesterday thinking about the quiet ways we try to keep going. (Why? You’ll hear about that in the next personal essay that comes out in Reasons for Living.)

Not in the triumphant sense—no declarations or color-coded plans—but the small, faithful attempts to return to the work that matters to us, even when our bodies, our minds, or our circumstances keep changing.

If you’re here, you understand this particular kind of persistence.

It’s not loud.

It’s not tidy.

It’s often stitched together from whatever hours, clarity, or courage the day will allow.

Yesterday, I shared something in my Black Friday sale that I realized I hadn’t offered to you—this community that reads every (often vulnerable) line I write, that cares about meaning, survival, and the shape of a life lived honestly. It didn’t feel right to let it pass without opening the door one more day.

So, for today only, I’m making the Gentle Persistence Complete Collection available again to Reasons for Living readers.

This isn’t a productivity system.

It’s a year-long companion for writers whose energy is limited, inconsistent, or tender in ways the world doesn’t always see.

Inside the collection, you’ll find two core frameworks many of you have asked me for:

• Writing Through Brain Fog — how to write when your mind feels unreliable, slow, or scattered

• The Cell Method — a modular, energy-responsive writing practice that expands and contracts with you

And because this was part of the Black Friday sale, I’m also including something new—something I created after watching too many brilliant writers drown in unfinished pages:

The Unfinished Project Audit

(coming early 2025)

Before you can write with gentle persistence, you need clarity about what deserves your limited energy.

This audit helps you honor what you’ve started, release what no longer serves you, and identify the one project that truly matters right now.

It’s the antidote to overwhelm.

It’s the beginning of a more honest writing life.

You’ll also receive six months of access to the Academy community forums—a space where complexity is normal, tenderness is respected, and support is simply part of the equation.

And because Substack didn’t get this yesterday, I’m opening one more door just for you:

Today only, you can secure full access to The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy for just $1.

This gives you a seven-day trial once the Academy reopens in early 2026.

If you choose to stay after the trial, you’ll continue at $97/month—an amazing discount (we aren’t 100% sure what the next tuition cost will be, but it’ll definitely be higher than that).

It’s the gentlest, lowest-pressure way to see if our adaptive approach to writing instruction is the right fit for your life.

Both of these invitations—the Gentle Persistence collection and the $1 Academy trial—are here for one day because I don’t want you to miss something that could genuinely support your writing life.

This collection isn’t about getting more done.

It’s about writing in a way that doesn’t cost you your well-being—about choosing one true thing and tending to it slowly, deliberately, with the kind of persistence that grows out of compassion rather than pressure.

If this is your moment to choose a softer, steadier way forward, I’d be honored to walk with you.

Access the Gentle Persistence Complete Collection (today only).

Or reserve your $1 Academy trial for 2026.

Your writing deserves a structure that meets you where you actually live.

And you deserve a way of working that doesn’t require you to abandon yourself to complete the work you love.

As a beautiful reader pointed out, the second link in this morning’s newsletter is INCORRECT. It is actually https://www.esmewang.com/black-friday.

And for your patience, here are some LINKS:

A Letter to All: Concerning This Year’s Past Episode
An Evening with Esme Weijun Wang (Trask Lecture, Princeton University)
NOTES ON CRAFT: WRITING IN THE HOUR OF GENOCIDE
A Queer Shoulder to the Wheel

xo

Hello friend,

I’ve been thinking about the word persistence.

It’s one of those words that gets thrown around in writing advice like it’s simple—like all you need is determination, discipline, and the willingness to keep showing up. And while there’s truth in that, it’s also incomplete. Because what happens when your body won’t cooperate with your determination? Or when your brain fog makes yesterday’s brilliant paragraph incomprehensible today? What about when the energy you need to “persist” simply isn’t available?

This is the question I’ve spent years trying to answer, both for myself and for the writers I work with. Not “how do I push through?” but “how do I build a practice that acknowledges what’s actually true about my capacity?”

Today’s offering is for writers who need persistence to look different.

For Day 2 of our 5 Day Sale, I’m opening up the Gentle Persistence Complete Collection with Extended Access at $247 (regularly $297).

This isn’t a bundle of inspirational platitudes. It’s a collection of actual frameworks—craft-focused, practical, tested—for building a writing practice that works with the reality of your brain and body.

Here’s what you’re getting:

Writing Through Brain Fog – Not tips for “overcoming” cognitive limitations, but adaptive methods for structuring your writing practice around fluctuating capacity. This addresses the real challenge: how do you maintain narrative coherence, develop complex ideas, and revise effectively when your ability to think clearly changes day to day?

The Cell Method – A system I developed for breaking writing work into sustainable units that create genuine momentum without requiring the four-to-six-hour sessions that traditional writing advice demands. This is about architecture: how to structure your practice so that fifteen minutes of focused work actually builds toward something meaningful.

Bonus Workshop: The Unfinished Project Audit – A deep exploration of which of your many projects to focus on and how during a live (and recorded) workshop that extends what you’ll learn in the core materials.

Six Months of Community Access – The private Academy forums, where you’ll find writers who understand that “I can only work from bed today” isn’t a complaint—it’s just information. Real feedback, genuine support, no explanations required.

What I want you to understand is this: these aren’t accommodations to help you write “despite” your limitations. They’re methods that recognize how making peace with your actual circumstances—rather than fighting them—often unlocks the writing you’ve been trying to force into being.

The deal is available until Day 3 begins tomorrow. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with what’s happening over here at The Unexpected Shape, we’re having a 5-day sale in which we’re selling a new thing every day that’s not available elsewhere and is also deeply discounted. Each item is only available from morning to night, and then it’s gone.

Grab the Gentle Persistence Collection →

With care,

You know that feeling when you sit down to write and it’s like trying to think through fog?

You had the idea five minutes ago. You knew exactly what you wanted to say. But now you’re staring at the screen and the thought has dissolved, or fractured into three different directions, or simply... left.

And you can’t remember what you were even trying to write about.

This isn’t writer’s block. This is your brain doing what brains with limitations do—moving slower, dropping threads, refusing to hold multiple pieces at once. It’s cognitive fog, and it makes writing feel impossible.

But here’s what I’ve learned after years of writing books while living with schizoaffective disorder, POTS, fibromyalgia and various other illnesses that come with brain fog: you don’t need a clear mind to write well. You need methods that work with the fog instead of demanding it lift first.

That’s what Writing Through Brain Fog and The Cell Method do.

• Writing Through Brain Fog teaches you how to write when your thoughts won’t stay linear. When you lose your place mid-sentence. When you read what you wrote yesterday and have no memory of writing it. It gives you concrete techniques for capturing ideas before they dissolve, for building writing sessions that don’t exhaust your cognitive budget, for working in the spaces between clarity.

• The Cell Method is your system for managing complex writing projects when you can’t hold the whole structure in your head. It breaks manuscripts into small, manageable cells you can work on independently. You can write scene 47 on Tuesday and scene 12 on Wednesday, and the method shows you how to keep everything coherent even when your brain can’t maintain the overview.

Together, they give you both the how of writing through cognitive fog and the structure for building something substantial even when you can only work in fragments.

Today only, they’re bundled together for $127 instead of $194.

Not because it’s Black Friday and everything must go. But because if you’re trying to write while your brain feels like it’s moving through mud, you need tools that actually work with your reality. And these two systems, together, give you a complete approach.

The bundle disappears at midnight PT tonight. I’m not bringing it back.

If you’ve been trying to write by sheer force of will, waiting for the fog to clear before you can really begin—this is the alternative. A way to write that doesn’t require a clear mind first.

Get the Brain Fog Writing Breakthrough Bundle here.

With care,

P.S. Four more daily sales coming—each one different, each one ending at midnight. Tomorrow’s will be completely separate from this one. If brain fog is your struggle right now, today is your day. (11/28/25 through 12/2/25.)

P.P.S. Not interested in writing? Enjoy this YouTube video—a BBC Radio 4 radio performance of the Harold Pinter play “Betrayal,” starring Andrew Scott and Olivia Colman. A truly wonderful play and performance; the performance is from 2012.

REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will immediately receive access to the Library of Resources, including journal prompts, a Notion dashboard for writers, and much more. Free subscribers still receive plenty of things to read. ❤️

Subscribe now

I am not the type of writer who likes to tell people that writer’s block doesn’t exist, even if I hadn’t, until recently, experienced the ghoul of that name. First off, who am I to invalidate another person’s experience, especially something happening in their mind? Secondly, I felt that if I denied that writer’s block existed, it would be like saying “Candyman” three times, immediately bringing the buzzing plight into my own home.

Read more

The last month-and-a-half have been mostly a blurry haze of Too Much, although I have a proclivity for minimizing what’s going on my life until I tell someone about exactly what’s been going on, and then they are often aghast. Someone in my life who has at times not exactly been generous about my oddities, although I find the oddities perfectly normal, recently said to me, “I have no idea how you made it through your childhood intact.” It’s a bit like when you talk to a therapist and their face gets tight, obviously trying to keep from saying, “Dear God.” Every week I update my therapist and a lot of the time she’ll say, “Well, that’s a lot.” I almost never think it’s a lot when I start telling her it’s a lot, but it’s also like being Wile E. Coyote—you’re doing all right until you look down.

As someone who’s made websites and Diarylands and LiveJournals and blogs since the mid-to-late 90s, one of the earliest rules instilled in us was this: never apologize about how long it’s been since you last posted. According to this rule of thumb, you’ll probably be late with a lot of your posts, and no one really notices that you’ve been gone anyhow.

I’m violating this rule by saying that it’s been a while since I’ve regularly posted one of these newsletters, and I’m grateful to you all who have given me grace and the benefit of the doubt. I’ve had an autoresponder up citing health issues for a few weeks now after realizing that I was dealing with health issues, and it was only stressing me out further to feel more and more behind with my email. And now that I’m writing this, all of that time that was swallowed up by crises and brain gremlins feels foggy.

I’ll tentatively say it began when the people around me began to point out that I was talking too fast, making wild claims about things that didn’t matter (that I do, in fact think matter), hypersexual, hyperfocusing on largely meaningless projects, and so forth. My cocktail of psychotropics has been consistently useful in keeping my manic-depressive episodes stable and my psychotic episodes at bay (KNOCK ON WOOD), but for some reason—stress, I think—I’d been depressed for almost half a year, was unexpectedly hypomanic for a few weeks, depressed again, and then borderline hypomanic. A few times, my therapist told me that I was coming close to needing to be hospitalized, but it also felt impossible to stop working because C has cut down on his hours due to his body still in the throes of cancer recovery, and I felt like I had to pull my weight.

Some of you might remember that it was around this time last year that I flew home from Taiwan because C’s white blood cell count mysteriously dropped to zero for no reason that his Stanford team, nor Sloan-Kettering, whom they consulted, nor Harvard, seemed to be able to figure out. I set up a GoFundMe (and thank you all so much to those of you so contributed) so that I could stay near Stanford Hospital with Daphne instead of schlepping from San Francisco to Palo Alto every day. I went to the hospital pretty much every day from November to January; we celebrated Thanksgiving together in the hospital; I brought a little Christmas tree to the hospital and decorated it; we celebrated New Year’s together. The doctors eventually figured out a bizarre treatment to help C—I’m still not totally sure how it works except that rabbits are involved. But that was only the beginning of the year, and C continued to have health issues throughout the year. I called 911 once or twice. He had surgery. He was in the ER and then the ICU. I went to the ER on a full moon when I had a burst ovarian cyst.

I’ve been slogging through the revisions for my current novel. It’s my most honest and difficult book, and I only have myself to blame for deciding to write something that is straining my mental resources. I kept running The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy. I did a few speaking engagements. (Please, please reach out to info@esmewang.com if you have a speaking engagement for which you’d like to consider me. I have a speakers reel at https://www.esmewang.com/speaking.) I’ve been doing an absurd amount of trauma processing, which doubled my therapy bills for a few months (definitely not sustainable) and included attending a retreat for women who’ve experienced child sexual abuse (CSA) and confronting people whom I believe were culprits. I am doing pelvic floor physical therapy (due to the aforementioned CSA), am continuing to try and manage my fourteen chronic illness diagnoses.. Other things happened too, I’m sure, but like I said—I can’t remember them all.

Which is all to say: I’m very sorry that I’ve fallen behind. I plan to get back on the horse starting now. I’m also going to have what I think is a very delightful five-day sale where I’ll be sharing one thing every day (and ONLY for that day) for five days. I hope that you’ll check it out, including being able to purchase both Writing Through Brain Fog, The Cell Method, and an Implementation Kit all together. To sign up to be notified about when this sale starts and what we’ll be offering every day, head on over to https://www.esmewang.com/bulletin.

Another way that you can receive notifications is if you sign up to grab the YOUR WRITING MATTERS desktop wallpaper below. I’m personally very fond of it.

To grab this free wallpaper, go to https://members.esmewang.com/wallpaper/

Onward,

Esmé

I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.

Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and my deepest gratitude, plus access to a sizable library of resources about writing, living with limitations, and journal-keeping.

Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.

If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

Subscribe now

Before I write anything else, I want to let you know that I’m sure there are readers of this newsletter who play the guitar, play it well, and take it very seriously. If you are one of those people, you might grimace when I describe my tuning issues. You might be convinced that I chose a terrible beginner’s guitar when I should’ve bought xyz instead of zyx. If you want to shout about it, please hang your hat somewhere else and shout there.

And now we begin.

Recently, I purchased an acoustic guitar. I bought it as someone who claims not to have any hobbies, who has financial anxiety, and thus instinctively wants to monetize anything I can do well. This guitar, though, wasn’t purchased as something to be monetized; I’ve just wanted to play the guitar since I was a teenager. Back then, I didn’t have the discipline for a new musical instrument. I was a former competitive pianist, and my interest (and skill) in piano waned dramatically once I entered my torturous adolescent years. The guitar purchase wasn’t for becoming a competitive guitarist (apparently not a thing that exists) or to busk at the local farmers’ market. I just wanted to learn to play, and then play, the guitar in my home, the way one might pick up a language because of the increased ease of learning due to apps like Duolingo.

Before I made my big purchase, I browsed to see what was out there. My criteria were fairly simple: I wanted a guitar that was good for people with small hands, already restrung for lefties, and was considered a decent guitar for beginners. After browsing around and making a mental list of the ones that looked good to me, I researched guitar forums, blogs, and Reddit to see what people thought was a good beginner’s guitar. And the one that I’d had my eye on—a smaller and more lightweight guitar for lefties with small hands—kept coming up over and over again: the Baby Taylor, also known as the guitar that Taylor Swift helped to design and the one that she carried around for songwriting on tour when she was 16. She’d designed it for children/adolescents, but those very characteristics made it exactly what I wanted. There’s a remarkable kindness in finding tools that meet you where you are, particularly when you have a disabled body. So I found one on eBay and bought it.

When it finally arrived, I was both thrilled to receive it and stymied by my first task: tuning the guitar. Even the casual guitarists out there are probably laughing at me about this, but I could not seem to get the D and G strings to be in tune, according to the two tuning apps I tried; The D string would jump from one extreme of the tuning app (TOO HIGH) to the other extreme (TOO LOW), which I absolutely did not understand, and the G string kept sounding like the D string. At some point, I just gave up on the tuning apps and sang the six notes, trying to get the D (at this point, the last note that wouldn’t tune properly) to sound even vaguely like my voice. This turned out to be a foolish endeavor, as I don’t have perfect pitch and soon began to feel like I had no idea what I was hearing at all. I wondered if something was going on with the guitar—was it not standard? Had it been strung unconventionally?

The only thing I could surmise was that I was tuning the guitar to the point where one note was turning into the note above it or below it—not helpful when you’ve just gotten a guitar and just want the tune the heckin’ thing. But I kept trying—with the tuning app, of course, I’m not an animal—and eventually, it was tuned. After getting it tuned, I learned to play the E minor chord and immediately found that I was muting a note with my middle finger. Over and over, I tried to perfect my E minor until I got it to be “pretty good.” I finally understood why guitarists have calluses on their fingertips; repetition marks the body, much as how I have a permanent callus on my left middle finger from handwriting.

But why buy a guitar in the first place, beyond the desire to have a hobby?

I’ve had an autoresponder up for my email because of my mental health issues (my diagnosis is schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, which means that I experience the ups and downs of bipolar disorder, with psychotic episodes in between; this can often be well-managed by medication), including a depressive episode, a hypomanic episode, and a period in which I was (and still am) at high risk for becoming psychotic—it’s been a rough time. Add to this a heap of nervous system dysregulation, and you’ll have a trembling woman who is looking for something gentle to help calm everything down. I bought the guitar as nervous regulation, as gentleness.

I mean, I have my dreams. In the future, I’m in a band called The Revelries, and I’ve written lyrics for songs that don’t exist, sung into voice memos. In my dreams, I learn songwriting and can play guitar to accompany my lyrics. What’s key is that I’m not pressuring myself to do this. Learning the guitar will take time, and I’m going about it gently—not rushing, just learning one chord at a time. I have E Minor (sort of).

On my left hand’s middle finger is a solid, forever callus. It’s from writing, and I’ll have it all my life—a mark of my life as a writer. As I held down the strings on the fretboard, I realized why guitarists talk about playing until their fingers bleed and develop calluses; it takes a good deal of pressure and strength to press the strings all the way down. Keep going, it says. One day, you’ll have calluses too—markers of an endeavor you took up for fun. ❤️

Dust-Dipped

Play Audio

BY INUA ELLAMS

We were wild children / we moved through space / like blades
We were tame children / we fell to sleep / like gunpowder
We were poor children / we ran to showers / like harvests
We were rich children / we clutched our towels / like fences
We were loud children / we bit and bickered / like mice
We were quiet children / we meditated / like drill sergeants
We were pious children / we read Marvel comics / like scripture
We were godless children / we claimed Christ healed / like Wolverine
We were stupid children / we plucked hot coal / like fruit
We were smart children / we hoarded fruit / like fossil fuel
We were lazy children / we lifted toothpicks / like javelins
We were sporty children / we evaded tests / like hurdlers
We were humble children / we studied stars / like afronauts
We were proud children / we graduated / like thunder gods
We were hopeful children / we charged out / like lightning
We were hopeless children / we fell to earth / like dust

I write because it’s what I do best, and Reasons for Living is where I share my most personal, thoughtful work—the kind of essays that don’t fit anywhere else. If you enjoy what I write, I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber.

Paid subscribers get two exclusive essays per month and my deepest gratitude, plus access to a sizable library of resources about writing, living with limitations, and journal-keeping.

Your support doesn’t just help sustain this newsletter; it helps sustain me as a writer and artist who is physically and psychologically unable to work at a traditional job.

If Reasons for Living has moved you, challenged you, or given you something to hold onto, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. If a paid subscription isn’t possible, a free one is just as appreciated. Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

Subscribe now

As I rode in the ambulance yesterday with my husband, C, lying on a gurney and being given fentanyl for his pain, I felt myself go numb. In such situations, it is best to shut down emotionally; shutting down our feelings helps us from becoming someone else who needs care, and you are the one who made the executive decision to call 911 while your partner of twenty-four years tells you don’t call, don’t call them, but you have already called 911 for him before, and you know when a call is necessary.

I am ostensibly working on novel edits. Today is my first day of coming out of the hypomanic episode I was in for almost three weeks. If you’re familiar with hypomania, I’ll tell you that it’s fantastic, especially for a wretch like me who’s fatigued all the time, who needs to lie down for most of the day. Hypomania took a look at that and said, “Fuck it, I’m in charge now.” I continued to work on the novel (edits due when? Why am I taking so long?) I haven’t told my agent and editor that this book is at an Infinite Jest size based on the word count so far. It likely won’t be that long in the end of the process, but I do admire women who can write a doorstopper of a book. I’ve always wanted to be that woman.

So during the hypomania, I found myself joking more than I normally do; I was hypersexual; I could stay up late. I notified my psychiatrist after my therapist pointed out the hypomania. I was talking quickly and saying things that were the opposite of how I normally felt. I haven’t had an episode in a long time. I’d forgotten to consider the signs. So my psychiatrist eventually told me to push the Haldol dose higher, despite my ongoing fear of tardive dyskinesia. Over time, I felt myself slowing down.

But I had to slow down. Hypomania can turn into mania, and if that happens, you’re fucked. In my case, a few years ago, I blew tens of thousands of dollars on things that I absolutely did not need to buy. Your brain is going too fast. Words become too fast. There’s an urge in your brain that makes you rattle around in your skull.

In the ambulance, I watched C charming the paramedics. The fentanyl was working. He was talking to them as if we were all in a donut shop, eating crullers while C was drugged up on a drug that I hear a lot of awful things about. Most opioids don’t work on C. When he was in the hospital to get a bone marrow transplant, they gave him morphine through an IV, and it didn’t seem to touch the pain. We all have strange bodies, but in November 2024 to January 2025, C seemed to have reached a point where all of the doctors were flummoxed, and called Sloan-Kettering (they did not know why C had randomly become a person with zero white blood cells) and Harvard for advice. I admired their persistence in trying to help this person I love so deeply. I hoped that the puzzle wouldn’t defeat them. (It didn’t.)

I’ve been thinking so much about the story and the characters in my book and the language, THE LANGUAGE, but here’s the elevator pitch: my book is about hauntings.

There are so many ways to be haunted. My grandmothers, in particular. The little tree that I got so that we could have Christmas in the ward with some kind of festivity. The pureed food shaped into what they were supposed to be with molds: the corn, in particular, is always hovering, always asking when we will come back. 💌

ON SUBSCRIBING

This newsletter is for you if:

• You’re sensitive. Like, really darn sensitive (which doesn’t mean that you’re not tough as nails as well, when you need to be).

• …and you need reminders that your sensitivity is a strength, not a liability.

• The weight of the world often feels heavy (and you also work to make it better).

• Traditional “self-help” stuff makes you roll your eyes (or worse, feel irreparably broken).

• You crave depth when you see superficiality all around you.

• You love stories, creating boldly, and the occasional bout of silliness.

• You’re seeking genuine connection with others who understand.

If you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll receive access to subscriber-only posts every other week (personal essays and essays about living with limitations, written by me) in addition to the REASONS FOR LIVING newsletters that free subscribers get. Free subscribers get REASONS FOR LIVING newsletters every other week. Those missives share guest essays about the reasons that we have to live, as well as special features such as visual art, poetry, and journal prompts based on the theme and guest essay. Commenters also receive the opportunity to be mailed the Bird of the Day postcard in that edition of the newsletter.

Subscribe to Reasons for Living with Esmé Weijun Wang for weekly meditations on finding beauty where we might not expect it—small and large reasons, in these terrible times, to live. Every other edition is paywalled (I try to not paywall as soon as possible), but I am indeed trying to make at least some of an income from this endeavor. If you’re able to commit $7/month for a paid subscription, please do (many a gift awaits!), and if you’d like to simply subscribe, go right ahead.

Subscribe now

Whenever I open one of these blank pages with the intention of writing some kind of missive, I think: there's quite a bit of space here to say almost anything I'd like. It's a gift to have a space of my own, and I don't take that lightly.

I'm still working on my novel, which is taking up considerable real estate in my mind. I have so many notebooks filled with thoughts and scribblings about this particular project that you'd laugh if you saw them—or maybe you'd be impressed and ask to stack them up to see if they’d be taller than I am. I had a mighty bout of panic last week and emailed my agent, spilling out all my anxieties about having not yet made it to the copyediting stage (could some kind agent out there reassure me that hearing the neuroses of their authors is part of their job description)? I had been told a vague pub date ages ago that made me very freaked out that I wasn't going to meet my deadline—wholly my problem, & not my publisher's, who have been incredibly generous and supportive, considering that my spouse was diagnosed with cancer in 2023 and continues to suffer from complications. I have since been reassured that whatever pace I’m working on is fine, which is good because I am truly working as fast as I can while still writing the book that I want to write.

And yet I want to keep one hand on my Substack so that it doesn't float away. Sometimes the best thing to do is simply check in and share a few things, even when—especially when—it feels like I have nothing particularly profound to offer.

Like this: one of my nieces is obsessed with axolotls. So I found myself poking around the internet, looking to see what kinds of axolotl-related things might be out there—things with more educational value and staying power than your typical throwaway gifts. I was searching for something that builds in creativity and stability, designed for repeated bouts of joy.

As I was researching all this axolotl merchandise for my niece, I realized something that made me freeze in my bed. Dear Reader: I don't actually know what an axolotl is.

I mean, I know what they look like. I know they resemble little pink naked salamanders that appear to be smiling, their external gills waving like tiny underwater feathers. But beyond that basic likeness to a Pokémon? Um… I'll have to get back to you on that one.

I can't decide if this means I've been absolutely foolish, or if this is actually a sign of something closer to magic and wonder—because I've just accepted these creatures for what they appear to be, without needing to categorize or fully understand them. But I also worry that I'm falling into the world of anti-intellectualism, and I remember that it's worth looking things up sometimes.

An aside: I think it would be genuinely funny if I discovered they were completely mythical. Wasn't there a "This American Life" episode over a decade ago about someone who believed well into their 20s that unicorns were real animals? There's something both embarrassing and beautiful about that.

Read more

Last month at the Dairy Hollow writing residency in Arkansas, I spent most of my time horizontal on the bed, laptop closed beside me, flattened by chronic fatigue. (Likely the result of low Vitamin D, but we're still figuring it out.)

I'd gone there to write. Private space, dedicated time, no responsibilities except to create. The dream scenario, right?

Instead, by 10 AM each day, exhaustion would hit like a freight train. My brain felt wrapped in wet wool. And lying there, I kept thinking the same poisonous thought: Real writers don't do this. Real writers power through.

But here's what I discovered in those frustrating days: I was trying to build a memoir using the wrong blueprint entirely.

Every memoir guide tells you the same thing:

• Start at the beginning

• Write chronologically

• Maintain momentum

• Write every day or lose your thread

This advice assumes you have consistent energy, uninterrupted time, and a brain that works the same way every day. If you're living with chronic illness, disability, or caregiving responsibilities, you know that's a fantasy.

So I developed something different. The Cell Method.

Think of a honeycomb. Each hexagonal cell is complete on its own—it holds honey, has six perfect walls. But when cells connect, they create something larger, stronger, architectural.

Your memoir can work the same way. Each 15-minute writing session creates one complete "cell." That cell stands alone, but it's designed to connect with others when you're ready.

Here's why this changes everything:

• You never lose your place

• Each session has a complete beginning, middle, and end

• Missing days (or weeks) doesn't destroy your momentum

• Your book grows even when you can't see the whole

At that residency, exhausted and frustrated, I wrote exactly three cells in five days. Three fifteen-minute sessions. That's it.

Those three cells just became the opening of an essay accepted for publication.

In my upcoming class, The Cell Method: Building Your Memoir in 15-Minute Sessions, I'll teach you:

✨ The five types of cells (and which to write on low-energy days)

✨ My exact 15-minute framework that assumes interruption

✨ How 50 cells become a first draft without you ever outlining

✨ The "Fragment Protocol" for days when even 15 minutes is too much ✨ Why stopping mid-sentence is a feature, not a bug

You'll leave with two completed cells from our live writing sessions & much more.

(I've also received some emails asking whether this method would work for poetry or fiction. I've experimented with fiction, and I think the answer is yes for both; however, this is a class primarily meant for memoir writing. Give it a go if it's calling to you.)

Because here's what I know: Your limitations aren't preventing your memoir. Traditional methods are preventing your memoir.

September 20, 2025
11 AM PT/2 PM EST
Recording available

Your memoir isn't waiting for you to get better, have more energy, or find perfect writing conditions.

Your memoir is waiting for you to write the next cell. Fifteen minutes.

That's it.

See you in class?

LEARN MORE & REGISTER HERE

all the love,

(Sponsored by Headspace)

There's a particular kind of terror that comes with sitting alone with your thoughts when you have complex PTSD (or an unpleasant inner world to begin with). Silent meditation—that supposedly peaceful practice everyone recommends—becomes a trap door into memories you've carefully compartmentalized. This is why, despite trying Headspace back in 2010, I couldn't stick with it. The app's focus on mindfulness felt like being asked to sit in a room with everything I was trying to avoid. Each attempt was too difficult. Each attempt became too frightening to try.

But silence finds us anyway, doesn't it? In waiting rooms. During sleepless nights. In the pause between one task and another. Regardless of earbuds and earplugs, we can't outrun it forever.

When Headspace recently asked if I'd like to revisit their app, I almost said no. Then I remembered something my therapist once said: "The things that feel impossible at one point in your recovery might become possible later." Maybe I was ready to try again.

The Architecture of Avoidance

Let me be clear about what I mean by terror. When I first tried meditation, sitting in silence meant confronting the replay of traumas, the intrusive thoughts, the body memories that surface when there's nothing to distract from them. I'd built an elaborate architecture of avoidance—podcasts while showering, TV while eating, audiobooks while falling asleep. Anything to avoid that terrifying quiet.

The original Headspace, with Andy's cheerful voice guiding mindfulness exercises, asked me to dismantle that architecture. But (and I’m sorry, Andy) I wasn't ready.

A Different Landscape

Opening Headspace now, years later, I found something unexpected: options. It's no longer just a meditation app, but has grown into an entire mental health platform with guided meditations, binaural beats, sleep stories, and even certified mental health coaches trained in the evidence-based approach known as Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Headspace has also recently debuted a CBT-based Guided Program for mood and anxiety in the app. Co-led by a Headspace mindfulness meditation teacher and a Headspace psychiatrist, the program offers an accessible way to build emotional awareness and resilience.

This matters because it means not only can I choose how much silence to try, but I can also seek out skills that will help me deal with the anxious silence that plagues me, on and on.

The "Calming Everyday Anxiety" Collection became my entry point. The Collections, each with a topic, aren't treatments for disorders—Headspace is clear about that—but they offer something I needed: structured ways to exist in quiet spaces without drowning.

Three Minutes at a Time

The SOS meditations changed everything for me. "Panicking SOS" runs exactly three minutes. Three minutes is survivable. Three minutes is a contained experiment in being present. "Feeling Overwhelmed SOS" gives me something to do when the world feels too heavy—not fixing it, but just offering to sit with me until I calm down again.

Which is different from being ambushed by silence. It's choosing to enter it with a guide, with boundaries, and an end point, bringing me to mindfulness without the seemingly too-high threshold.

The Gradual Expansion

Each morning, Headspace offers three practices for the day. The first might be "Pause with 5 calming breaths"—one minute. One minute of chosen silence, versus the endless silence I used to fear. By afternoon, it suggests content for winding down.

I still need my scaffolding of sound most of the time. I still watch TV while eating, still need podcasts in the shower. But now there are small, deliberate windows where I practice being with myself. Not conquering the silence, just visiting it briefly, like checking in on a difficult relative, and someday, I might just be able to live in those places a little longer.

An Unexpected Mirror

The "Pride from the Inside Out" collection caught me off guard with its specificity—meditations for different LGBTQIA+ communities, and even one for allies. It reminded me that we all have our difficult spaces, our own architectures of avoidance. I love that I can listen to guided meditations about the emotions that arrive with coming out; I love that I can listen to others and feel good about who I am as a queer woman. Maybe learning to sit with ourselves is always an act of courage.

The Imperfect Practice

After weeks with the app, I'm not "cured" of my fear of silence. Some days I can't even do the one-minute practices. But having the option—having a structured way to approach what terrifies me—has shifted something.

I think about how I wrote my books: not in long, perfect stretches but in fragments, sometimes just sentences, written between symptoms, around hospitalizations, through brain fog. Progress doesn't have to look like what healthy people imagine. It can look like three minutes of guided breathing. It can look like choosing your silence instead of having it chosen for you.

If this idea of visiting silence on your own terms speaks to you, you can go to headspace.com/esmewwang for an exclusive 60-day free trial of Headspace, a longer offer than you’ll find on their site. It’s a chance to see if these guided moments might help you, as they’ve begun to help me, approach what once felt impossible. And maybe it’s worth remembering that getting a little help, whether through Headspace or any other mental health resource, is an act of kindness toward yourself, not a sign of weakness.

The silence is still there. It will always be there. But maybe we can learn to visit it on our own terms.