| | | The singer goes makeup free, plus June horoscopes and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | May 31, 2016 | Letter No. 36 | | | | | | | | | | | | Hiya Lennys,
For a 34-year-old woman who has been marinating in American popular culture her entire life, I am at peace with the way I look as much as I probably can be. But that’s the private me, the person I see slathering on sunscreen in the morning before I leave the house because I suddenly care a lot more about wrinkles (hey, I didn’t say I was totally at peace). I am still deeply uncomfortable with my image being projected out into the universe for strangers to judge or praise, or even being associated merely with my writing. I was strongly encouraged to start a public Instagram account when I started editing Lenny, and I struggle to find anything I want to post.
Which is all to say that the image-heavy part of being a celebrity makes me want to crawl under my desk and hide, and it’s why I am so impressed with Alicia Keys, who writes a lovely essay this week about starting to go bare-faced in photographs and on the street. She was sick of hiding her real self in the service of being who she believed the public wanted her to be. The really revelatory part of it is that showing her makeup-free mug to the world inspired Alicia to be even more honest in her work, which is what every artist strives for.
Also in this week’s issue, Lena reintroduces us to the British playwright Andrea Dunbar as part of our recurring Out of Print series. Dunbar, who died at 29, wrote work that reflected her community: the housing projects in the north of England. Though Dunbar’s work did not shy away from exposing bleakness, she always did so with humor and humanity — which is why her work remains so vital decades after it was written.
Next we have historian and writer Alexis Coe, the genius behind Alice + Freda Forever, taking a close look at the way men and women writers praise their spouses in their acknowledgments. In particular, Alexis focuses on how women’s praise for their husbands can be used against them to fuel claims that they couldn’t possibly have done their own brilliant work. The title of her insightful essay says it all: “Thank You for Not Being Totally Worthless.”
Then there’s Jackie Snow’s illuminating interview with Margaret Moss, a Native American doctorate of nursing who has cowritten a textbook about the cultural needs specific to Native populations. And we have Melissa Broder’s existential horoscopes, which tell me that this will be a “beautiful month of love and support” for me. Huzzah!
Finally, I am so pleased to announce the launch of Lenny’s collaboration with Fab! We’ve partnered with them to create a line of prints, plus a few other goodies like mugs and tote bags, featuring some of the illustrations that have appeared in the newsletter. Click here to have one of your very own.
Maybe the promise of universe-love will encourage me to post a selfie on that public Instagram account in June. Not likely. But Melissa’s horoscopes make me feel like anything is possible.
xx
Jess, Lenny editor in chief | | | | | | | | | | | | Time to Uncover | | | | By Alicia Keys | | |
We all get to a point in our lives (especially girls) where we try to be perfect.
Does it start somewhere in second grade after picture day when you wear your frizzy hair out 'cause your mama says it's beautiful but all your "friends" laugh at you?
You grab the brush and gel and pull your beautiful big hair back into the tightest ponytail you possibly can to contain your unique hair in a bun — hiding a piece of who you are in order to fit into a picture of what others seem to see as perfection.
Yeah, that's one moment.
Or how about in junior high school? Where all the "pretty" girls are wearing lipstick and eyeliner and mascara. Some of them are so skilled they even look like those models in every magazine you ever read — the ones who made you feel slightly uncomfortable with yourself or misrepresented or just unseen.
It's another moment where some piece of you realizes that to fit in or be thought of as beautiful, you have to cover up to be a bit closer to perfect.
Yeah, that's another one.
Trust me, it didn't just end in junior high. I remember when I first started to be in the public eye. Oh my gawd! Everyone had something to say. "She's so hard, she acts like a boy, she must be gay, she should be more feminine!" But the truth is, I was just from New York, and everyone I knew acted like that.
In the streets of New York you had to be tough, you HAD to be hard, people needed to know that you weren't scared to fight!
But this wasn't the streets of New York. This was the harsh, judgmental world of entertainment and my biggest test yet. I started, more than ever, to become a chameleon. Never fully being who I was, but constantly changing so all the "they's" would accept me.
Before I started my new album, I wrote a list of all the things that I was sick of. And one was how much women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect. One of the many things I was tired of was the constant judgment of women. The constant stereotyping through every medium that makes us feel like being a normal size is not normal, and heaven forbid if you're plus-size. Or the constant message that being sexy means being naked.
All of it is so frustrating and so freakin' impossible.
I realized that during this process, I wrote a lot of songs about masks filled with metaphors about hiding.
I needed these songs because I was really feeling those insecurities.
I was finally uncovering just how much I censored myself, and it scared me. Who was I anyway? Did I even know HOW to be brutally honest anymore? Who I wanted to be?
I didn't know the answers exactly, but I desperately wanted to.
In one song I wrote, called "When a Girl Can't Be Herself," it says,
In the morning from the minute that I wake up
What if I don't want to put on all that makeup
Who says I must conceal what I'm made of
Maybe all this Maybelline is covering my self-esteem
No disrespect to Maybelline, the word just worked after the maybe. But the truth is … I was really starting to feel like that — that, as I am, I was not good enough for the world to see.
This started manifesting on many levels, and it was not healthy.
Every time I left the house, I would be worried if I didn't put on makeup: What if someone wanted a picture?? What if they POSTED it??? These were the insecure, superficial, but honest thoughts I was thinking. And all of it, one way or another, was based too much on what other people thought of me.
I found my way to meditation, and I started focusing on clarity and a deeper knowing of myself. I focused on cultivating strength and conviction and put a practice in place to learn more about the real me.
And I promised I would approach things differently this time regarding my image and allow my real self, as is, to come through.
Time passed after I wrote "When a Girl Can't Be Herself," and I didn't think about it much. I guess I got busy and was too focused on creating the music to think about it so specifically.
It wasn't until I walked into one of my first shoots for my new album recently that the issue was front and center again. I'd just come from the gym, had a scarf under my baseball cap, and the beautiful photographer Paola (never met a Paola I didn't like) said, "I have to shoot you right now, like this! The music is raw and real, and these photos have to be too!"
I was shocked. Instantly, I became a bit nervous and slightly uncomfortable. My face was totally raw. I had on a sweatshirt! As far as I was concerned, this was my quick run-to-the-shoot-so-I-can-get-ready look, not the actual photo-shoot look. So I asked her, "Now?! Like right now? I want to be real, but this might be too real!!"
And that was it. She started to shoot me.
It was just a plain white background, me and the photographer intimately relating, me and that baseball hat and scarf and a bunch of invisible magic circulating. And I swear it is the strongest, most empowered, most free, and most honestly beautiful that I have ever felt.
I felt powerful because my initial intentions realized themselves. My desire to listen to myself, to tear down the walls I built over all those years, to be full of purpose, and to be myself! The universe was listening to those things I'd promised myself, or maybe I was just finally listening to the universe, but however it goes, that's how this whole #nomakeup thing began. Once the photo I took with Paola came out as the artwork for my new song "In Common," it was that truth that resonated with others who posted #nomakeup selfies in response to this real and raw me.
I hope to God it's a revolution.
'Cause I don't want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.
Alicia Keys is a 15-time Grammy® Award-winning singer/songwriter/producer, an accomplished actress, a New York Times best-selling author, an entrepreneur and a powerful force in the world of activism. | | | | | | | | | | | | Out of Print: Andrea Dunbar | | | | By Lena Dunham | | |
Andrea Dunbar’s 1977 The Arbor begins with this sparse but telling stage direction: “The GIRL was with her boyfriend. They were at his friend’s. She had known the BOY for ages but had only been going out with him for three months.”
Andrea doesn’t set the scene, or offer the usual specifics about costumes and sets. She doesn’t even give these characters names. It’s all about context, which is fitting considering who Andrea Dunbar was: a playwright of context, telling the story of her life as an impoverished young girl growing up in public housing in the north of England.
The titular arbor of Andrea’s play refers to Brafferton Arbor, a street on the Buttershaw council estates in West Bradford, Yorkshire. The Buttershaw estates were squat, dismal buildings erected between the 1940s and the 1960s. They were supposed to be a Utopian solution to the country’s public-housing crisis but instead segregated England’s poorest citizens into undesirable areas where urban blight, addiction, and violence could be easily ignored by their neighbors.
This is where Andrea Dunbar was born in 1961, and at age 15, after the stillbirth of her first child, she wrote The Arbor as a class assignment. The play is starkly realistic. It tells the story of a pregnant teenager and her abusive alcoholic father. What keeps it from being simple catharsis for a teenager in crisis is Andrea’s brutal but winking sense of humor, as well as her knack for dramatic structure.
An impressed teacher encouraged Andrea to submit her play to a drama contest, where it caught the attention of Max Stafford-Clark, then the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, and The Arbor premiered there three years later, in 1980. By that time Andrea had given birth to a daughter, Lorraine, whose father was Pakistani, which exposed both mother and child to the bald racism of the estates.
Despite her burgeoning life in the theater, which included significant media attention (in the Mail on Sunday, playwright Shelagh Delaney hailed Andrea as “a genius straight from the slums with black teeth and a brilliant smile”), Andrea chose to remain living in the Buttershaw estates, where she spent time in a battered women’s shelter before having two more children by two different men.
Instead of improving her quotidian life, Andrea’s minor celebrity seemed to enrage those around her, who felt her writing brought negative attention to the already demonized people of West Bradford. But Andrea would not move. How she managed to write during this time was a mystery to even her closest collaborator, Stafford-Clark, who received regular letters from Andrea bemoaning her lack of child care.
Still, she wrote two more plays: Rita, Sue and Bob Too was the story of two teenage girls both having an affair with the same married man. More resolutely a comedy than The Arbor, the play was turned into a film by director Alan Clarke (in true tortured-artist form, Andrea was said to have hated it). Andrea’s final play was a more mature character study called Shirley.
In 1990, at the age of 29, Andrea — a heavy drinker since her teens — had a brain hemorrhage in her local pub and died. She left a small inheritance to her three children, who remained at Buttershaw.
* * *
I first became familiar with Andrea Dunbar’s work through Clio Barnard’s remarkable 2010 film The Arbor. Far from a straight adaptation of Andrea’s first play, The Arbor is an experimental documentary that employs actors to lip-synch along to interviews with Andrea’s friends, family, and colleagues. The film also includes pieces of Andrea’s first play, staged on the streets of the Buttershaw estates, as well as the only existing footage of a 19-year-old Andrea, who has the bearing of a middle-aged postal worker and the face of a nine-year-old. What emerges is not just a portrait of Andrea — brilliant, stubborn, deeply flawed — but also of the estates themselves, a place that seemed to doom its residents to a life of small, everyday tragedies.
Actor and comedian Tracey Ullman, who was in the first production of Rita, Sue and Bob Too, offered me some insight into what stepping into the world of London theater must have felt like for Andrea. “She wasn’t around much and was very shy. She came to a few rehearsals and was not a theater person at all,” Tracey says. “The Royal Court was the only place that would have done something like that; that’s why I worked there. It was not a class-ridden, ‘Prithee, my Lord,’ RADA-trained-actors-running-around-in-codpieces sort of place.”
Still, Tracey adds, the bohemian environment would have mystified Andrea: “During rehearsals, someone had a small child who crapped on the floor one day when we were eating lunch. I was horrified, but before I could let out a cry, the woman put her hand over my mouth and said, ‘Stop! It’s free expression, don’t say anything, you’ll damage him for years to come!’ Then she said to the child, ‘Well done, Jack, you wanted to do a poo and you did a poo.’ Can’t imagine that Andrea’s kid would have got the same reaction.”
Tracey’s story (besides being a delightful example of liberal temperaments run amok) is a reminder of how trapped Andrea must have felt between the council estates and the London theater world. The people who understood her art didn’t understand her life, forcing her to perform her identity as an impoverished and unlikely genius. The people who understood her experiences, her Bradford community, would not, or could not, acknowledge her as an artist.
* * *
In 2000, Max Stafford-Clark commissioned A State Affair, a documentary play composed of interviews with residents of the Buttershaw estates. The interviews were conducted and curated by Robin Soans, a playwright specializing in what he calls “verbatim plays” like this one. Stafford-Clark’s goal was to continue what Andrea started, chronicling and illuminating the lives of England’s “underclass.” A State Affair did little to create the impression that life on the arbor had improved.
One of the residents interviewed was Andrea’s now-grown daughter Lorraine Dunbar (who participated much to her siblings’ chagrin; the rest of the family had circled the wagons around Andrea’s legacy). Lorraine’s monologue closes the play: “If my mum wrote the play now, Rita and Sue would be smackheads … on crack as well … and working the red-light district, sleeping with everybody and anybody for money. Bob would probably be injecting heroin … taking loads of tablets as well.”
Lorraine goes on to describe the racism she was subjected to as a child, and the lack of protection her mother offered. “One night, when she thought I was asleep, I heard her say she wished she’d had an abortion with me … That’s why I went on heroin … to block out those feelings.”
This is how A State Affair ends, with Lorraine’s assessment of what Buttershaw does to its inhabitants:
“If I wrote a play, I’d do it about the Buttershaw estates. It’d show some people getting their lives together with a lot of courage and determination. But it would also show others going down a big steep hill, in a big black hole.”
In 2007, Lorraine was convicted of manslaughter for allowing her toddler son to ingest a lethal amount of methadone. The English press had a field day, with headlines such as “Playwright’s darkest visions return to consume her family.” The Andrea they described was a chronicler of England’s saddest and least redeemable people, a sort of modern-day Dickens minus the Christmas ghosts.
What they forgot to mention was her humor, her hope, and the humanity she lent to every word. Andrea Dunbar refused to relegate her characters to any predictable fate, even as she fell all too perfectly into her own.
Lena Dunham is very sad she wasn’t at the Royal Court in 1980. | | | | | | | | | | | | Thank You for Not Being Totally Worthless | | | | By Alexis Coe | | |
I never skip a book's acknowledgments section. It can be informative, touching, inspiring — or downright infuriating.
"Finally, without my wife, Rhoda, who served as editor, research assistant, and soul mate, this project could never have been finished." —Randall Bennett Woods, author of LBJ: Architect of American Ambition.
As a female historian, I have developed a Pavlovian response to older, white men who refer to their wives as "research assistants." As soon as I could see straight, I took to Twitter, where such "findings" thrive, and wrote "male historians often call wives research assistants while female historians say husbands were patient/encouraging."
It isn't the first time I've written about this issue. I made a similar observation in a long-form essay at the Atlantic, but when I looked at the comments section, I realized most postings focused on men — as did responses to my tweet. The idea of women supporting and sacrificing for male genius has certainly been explored, yet I can't explain why women would primarily thank their husbands for emotional labor ("patient/encouraging"). Don't husbands proofread their wives' work? Aren't wives understanding of their husbands' professional obligations?
My theory that husbands and wives recognize each other differently in public is correct, says Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown. It turns out the author of You Just Don't Understand shares my obsession with acknowledgments and remembers how differently she and a male colleague interpreted one long ago. Tannen saw a female author's recognition of her husband's contributory support (such as editing and research) as unremarkable, while her colleague pounced. He saw an admission in her gratitude; she could not have completed the project without her husband.
This is not uncommon. When aviatrix Beryl Markham thanked her third husband, Raoul Schumacher, in her memoir's acknowledgments "for his constant encouragement and his assistance in the preparations for [West with the Night]" in 1942, no one took issue. When her memoir enjoyed a second life in the late 1980s, however, critics were suddenly suspect. Schumacher never wrote anything on par with West with the Night, not that it mattered. The charge that Markham didn't entirely write the memoir herself follows the book wherever it goes, including No. 8 on National Geographic's 2001 list of the "100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time." The magazine didn't dismiss the allegation as unfounded or untrue, but irrelevant.
A man's intellectual authorship would never be so easily dismissed. "Mr. Fitzgerald — I believe that is how he spells his name — seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home," teased Zelda Fitzgerald in her New York Tribune review of her husband's book The Beautiful and Damned, but it was no joke. F. Scott Fitzgerald was constantly and openly appropriating parts of Zelda's diary and private letters without permission, but few seem to care. It's just another part of the Great Gatsby author's extraordinary talent.
Why are women so easily questioned and men so quickly excused? In Second Sex (1949), French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir — the lifelong partner of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre — wrote that women have always been viewed in relation to men:
She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other.
Beauvoir et al. bummed me out, so I sought better examples of literary couples in hopes that they were somewhat egalitarian in acknowledging each other. Joan Didion was no help. She rarely wrote acknowledgments other than to thank publications that had previously published her essays; thus her husband, writer John Dunne, seldom appears until The Year of Magical Thinking, a book she wrote about mourning him. Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, and Virginia Woolf and Leonard Wood seemingly emerged unscathed from the gendered-acknowledgment trap, too.
Ignoring my historian's impulse to look toward the past, I turned to the present. I took a closer look at a couple I know: nonfiction writer Evan Hughes and novelist Adelle Waldman. In Literary Brooklyn (2011), Hughes thanked his "confidante, editor, companion, and great love, Adelle Waldman," for both contributory and emotional support in a sentence. In Waldman's novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013), she expressed similar sentiments in a short paragraph. Besides length, the only major difference was the insight the extra words offered. Hughes called Waldman a "confidante," while Waldman wrote that Hughes "endured endless conversations about Nate and company." In both instances, we understand that they are friends and advisers, but Waldman's detail allows us to better understand what that looks like.
According to Dr. Tannen, this point is significant. When women get home from work, they tell the men they live with whom they saw, what they experienced, and how it made them feel. Tannen calls this "rapport-talking." She dubbed the limited, impersonal responses men offer — their day was fine, average, uneventful — "report-talking." In meetings, however, men tend to speak more than women, a trend that begins in the classroom. For girls and women, intimate talk keeps relationships healthy. A woman might meet a female friend for a drink with the intention of sharing personal information, while a man is likely to meet a male friend for a drink and activity, like watching sports. It isn't necessarily a matter of how many words we use, but rather where, when, and how we use them.
"If anything, women are showing off [in acknowledgments]," Dr. Tannen explained. "They work hard to create closeness, and they're proud of what they've built." And why shouldn't they be? Insecure dimwits may use it to discredit women, but they'd likely find the fuel they need with or without it.
I wrote to a sociologist friend to find out what this meant on a day-to-day basis, outside a book's rarefied space, expecting a link to a research paper or book. Instead, she responded with an anecdote. In her home, she struggles to find the right words to recognize her husband's efforts. "I don't mean to say that I'm not grateful for you," she tells him, "but I really hate that I'm expected by society to be super-grateful for the fact that you're not totally worthless around the house."
I understood her resentment. A couple of years ago, I spent a month finishing the first draft of my book in a Wi-Fi-free apartment six hours from home. I was supposed to return the day before Christmas, which my then-partner celebrated. I needed to do no more than throw on a dress and head to his parent's house. Instead I discovered the exact scene I'd hoped to avoid: the apartment was messy, the kitchen was littered with takeout containers, and an unwrapped pile of presents for his family came up short. I kept hearing myself offering guilt-ridden apologies to his family while thanking him for his efforts, but in reality I was mad at both of us. I didn't want one of my primary roles to be savior, domestic or otherwise, any more than I wanted a savior for myself.
Acknowledgments can be fraught. Sometimes we praise because we're proud and thankful, and sometimes we do it out of expectation and obligation. My sociologist friend and I are certainly guilty of giving empty praise, and by doing so, we may have unwittingly perpetuated the very gendered expectations we're trying to dismantle. Worse, we let it get to us. "Anger, resentment, envy and self-pity are wasteful reactions," wrote Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. "They greatly drain one's time. They sap energy better devoted to productive endeavors."
Indulging these emotions is a problem, but I realized in researching this piece that the sometimes wordy, effusive way women acknowledge their significant others really isn't. Women should thank men for whatever they damn well please. If the male perspective is treated as one opinion among many rather than the standard, it loses much of its power. Then the way women communicate, whether on the page or off it, isn't better or worse. It's just different.
Alexis Coe is the author of Alice + Freda Forever and co-host of the new Audible series Presidents Are People, Too! | | | | | | | | | | | | Rewriting the Book on Indian Health | | | | By Jackie Snow | | | |
When Margaret Moss was in nursing school in Portland in the 1980s, the only things she learned about American Indians were stereotypes: Indians don't look people in the eyes, and if their hair has to be cut, they want the trimmings returned. Moss, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation who grew up moving around the country with her family for her dad's Veterans Affairs job, knew that this was a gross simplification of Indians and their medical needs.
So Moss, who now has a doctorate in nursing and is a professor and assistant dean of diversity and inclusion at the University at Buffalo's School of Nursing, spearheaded American Indian Health and Nursing, the first nursing textbook focused on American Indians and Alaskan Natives.
Moss and 12 contributors, nine of whom are American Indian nurses, researched and wrote about the unique medical and cultural-based needs of the 567 federally recognized tribes and 66 state-recognized tribes in the United States. The textbook has chapters for nine geographic regions, plus a section focused on the 60 percent of Indians who live in urban areas off a reservation.
American Indians have pressing health issues. According to the Indian Health Service, the Pima Indians of Arizona have the highest diabetes rate in the world. One in three American Indian women are assaulted or raped in their lifetimes, and boys born today on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota aren't expected to live to their 50th birthday. It's the lowest life expectancy in the Western world.
"In our backyard, there are these horrible statistics," Moss said. "But people fly off to other places to try to save people."
Moss picked contributors from different parts of the country who could write about the culture and issues in each region. Marilynn Malerba, the first woman to be chief of the Mohegan Tribe in modern history and a registered nurse, wrote the Northeast chapter. Nicolle Gonzales, a member of the Navajo Nation and midwife who started the first American Indian birth center, wrote the Southwest chapter. Moss cowrote three chapters and said she learned new things as she edited the book, like the impact of segregation on American Indian populations in the South, where it was unsafe for them to admit they were Indian up through the Jim Crow era. And that Alaskan Natives, even without forced relocation and with a reservation system that was disbanded in 1971, still suffer the same social and health problems that affect those in the contiguous United States.
Besides usual health problems, there are unique cultural considerations for American Indians. Some members of the Plains tribes use sweat lodges, a potentially dangerous activity if they suffer from high blood pressure or diabetes, which many of them do.
"They are stuck between two worlds," Moss said. "They think, I need to do this for spiritual reasons, but my doctor would be horrified if they knew I was doing this." When nurses know about these clashing pulls, they can work to find compromises for their patients, like limiting the time spent in the sweat lodge.
Holistic nursing practices, with their focus on the relationship between a person, the environment in which she lives, and her health, have similarities with the way American Indians view their relationships to their homes. Nursing's four pillars of holistic care — spiritually, mentally, psychically, and emotionally — also match up with the medicine wheel and its four directions. The medicine wheel, which was a common symbol in some Plains tribes, and has been adopted by pan-Indian groups, often signifies four different aspects of life.
Beyond getting better care for the five million Indians living in the United States, Moss hopes this book inspires more American Indians to go into nursing. Moss was just the 13th American Indian to get a nursing doctorate in 2000, and only a dozen or so more have joined her ranks since then.
"How many people can say they never had someone from their culture teach them?" she said. "The book is a way to extend our reach."
Jackie Snow is a journalist based in Singapore attempting to try every nasi lemak the city-state has to offer. | | | | | | | | | | | | June Lennyscopes | | | | By Melissa Broder | | |
GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
Happy birthday, boo. Now, listen, the problem is not the problem at hand — it's your troubling narrative around it. In fact, without your narrative, the problem may not even be a problem but a situation, a temporary state or experience. This goes for depression, anxiety, your body, love, that person who is killing you, and/or the itch of being alive.
CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
It's time to do something you've felt thirsty for but haven't pursued, because, why bother? This month, take a vacation from "Why bother?" You don't need to answer the question to pursue delight. Sure, on the one hand it appears we live in a meaningless chasm and don't know what we are doing or why we are here. But actively pursuing something you desire doesn't mean you are any less punk or that the universe will definitely reject you.
LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Be more selective in your communications this month, not necessarily who you are telling but the way you are telling it. Speak like you want to be spoken to. Write what you would want to read. Do you really want to see people faking perfect lives on Instagram? Be the tweet you wish to see in the world.
VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
How addicted to boundary-setting are we getting? Like, so addicted omg. In every area of life the boundary-power is manifesting: less worrying about being called a bitch, not needing to be so graceful all the damn time, only saying yes to shit we want to do. Don't worry that you are becoming "bad" or "wrong" or "selfish" in genuinely doing you. You could still stand to be a little more bad.
LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
What would you be doing if an authoritative force — a god or artist or CEO you respect — said, "You don't have to manipulate anything to be OK. In fact, you will be more OK if you stop trying to make the universe conform to your will. You are going to be more creative, more surprised, more successful, and less ready to kill people"? Do that.
SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
No one cares if you're "cool" except the people obsessed with coolness, and they're losers. People who care about cool inevitably lose, because contrived coolness is contingent on a lot of fleeting, external factors (namely time). So now what? When you stop measuring things in terms of coolness, a well of existential sorrow opens up within. You no longer have that measuring stick with which to faux-organize the world. But you can open that well now, or it will open itself later. Maybe better to learn to live in it today on your own terms.
SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
It's never easy to write a horoscope for Sag, because you're good. You intuitively know how to maneuver through life and make yourself happy. And in terms of trying to control the universe's shape to make you happy, that's not what horoscopes are for imo. So, all I have to say to you this month is: Remember that people are different than you. Go easy on those who are lost but scared to wander.
CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
Yo, dude, it's time to take a break from judging others this month. You're starting to become a grumpy old person who you would judge. This might mean you need to take yourself out of certain situations (parents, Internet comments, the Internet itself) that compel you to judge. At first you'll probably find that you miss the adrenaline of being in the lion's den, taking everyone else's inventory. But then you'll find even better ways to get high.
AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
It's fine. Nobody is thinking about you as much as you fear they are. Everyone is thinking about themselves. In a way, that's sad. It's lonely when you aren't imagining all the shitty things people are thinking about you. Better for them to be thinking something than nothing at all? But it's also good to know the truth. Take a stroll around the nothing. This is the freedom you crave deep down. It's actually been there all along.
PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
If 30 people love you and one person is like "eh," you're going to obsess about the eh-person. I know how it is. But this month, which is actually a beautiful month of love and support for you, I don't want you to miss out on what you are getting while you focus on what you're not. I know it's hard. But perhaps, just for one day even, you can surrender the illusion that effortless love isn't as important, meaningful, or valid as the kind you have to chase.
ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
You might think that if you can just get enough knowledge about something, figure out all the data, that you'll have a handle on it. But the truth is that the only infallible mind is the beginner's mind: the mind that knows nothing and revels in it. This month, I want you to run an experiment in nothingness. Whenever the opportunity arises to know something — to know more than someone else — choose instead to know nothing.
TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
You've already declared the death of something that hasn't been born yet. You've already written a script for the future that hasn't happened. I know this gives you a feeling of control. If you predict doom, you think you won't be hurt or disappointed or look stupid. But what might also happen is you prevent a lot of miraculous shit from happening. Leave some room!
Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including the forthcoming Last Sext (Tin House 2016), as well as So Sad Today, a book of essays from Grand Central. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | The email newsletter where there's no such thing as too much information.
From Lena Dunham + Jenni Konner. | | | | | | | |  |  | | |
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