| | | Jenni Konner calls b.s. on TV industry sexism, a poem by Sharon Olds and more. | | | | | | | | | |  | | | | October 4, 2016 | Letter No. 54 | | | | | | | | | | | | Dear Lennys,
I do about ten panels a year. I give about 25 to 30 interviews. I can't think of one in recent memory that didn't include some version of THIS question: "What is your experience of sexism in television and film?" Depending on my mood, I'll say, "It is better than it used to be"; "Insidious and still prevalent"; "Hidden, subtle, but a part of almost every interaction I have." Or I'll say, "We are proud to have a show run by women and one deeply feminist man, and our work culture is different." But this morning I woke with a new answer to the question. And it sickens me to have it.
Last night, after wrap on location, Lena and I and a few co-workers went into town to eat. We ran into a small portion of the crew of another TV show that shoots nearby and introduced ourselves. Within five minutes, a producer/director of that show had cornered Lena. Though the rest of us were are all in vaguely separate conversations, we were able to hear what was said.
Or shown in this case: an iPhone photo of a mutual friend with a cock next to her face, ostensibly a still from his TV show but shown at a completely inappropriate time. It saddens me to say this isn't the part of the story that even upset me. This is fairly common behavior with strangers and Lena. In my most generous moments, I can see their nervousness, their familiarity with her frank sexual work, and their desire to make a connection. Our Girls writer Sarah Heyward said to the director, "Of course, that's the only kind of picture you can show Lena Dunham."
From here things really started to devolve. The director asked Lena to have dinner alone the following night with an actress on the show he works on. Not because he thought they should meet, but because he wanted Lena to persuade the actress to "show her tits, or at least some vag" on TV. Surely Lena could make a compelling argument. After all, he continued, "You would show anything. Even your asshole."
This is something a man felt compelled to say to a Golden Globe–winning actor, showrunner, and best-selling author who just happens to be female. So it's easy to speculate what might be said to women working with him, under him, dependent on his approval. Despite Lena's obvious discomfort, he then went on to critique and crudely evaluate the bodies of all the women on his show.
Who knows, maybe this was an anomaly. But it happened. And it was witnessed.
And even some of the most loving and sensitive men in our tribe who heard the whole thing suggested afterward that the director seemed very drunk. Oh, phew, that explains everything.
When women get drunk, they are asking for it. When men get drunk, they don't mean it.
Together with Lena and Judd we run one of the filthiest writers' rooms. You could argue we run one of the filthiest shows. Let me tell you why this is different. Why this isn't about taking a joke. The writers' room is a space where creative people need to feel safe taking chances. Even if they are offensive. Even if they are repulsive. This man approached a woman at a social gathering and asked her to help convince an actor to show her tits. It's another planet.
I woke up this morning and I didn't want to wait for a panel to tell the story or a journalist to ask me the question. I was sick of protecting people from their own behavior, and I refuse to do it anymore.
It's not enough to be mad. It's not enough to know it's wrong. When we share, we unlock other women's stories, and suddenly secrets don't seem so necessary. The only thing standing between men and outdated, hideous behavior is their ability to get away with it. Even as an adult mother of two, it took a shocking moment while I was just trying to get a lobster roll to call bullshit. Why don't we all say it? Fear is what keeps us bound to situations that scare and antagonize us. Our voices are our superpower.
Xx
Jenni Konner | | | | | | | | | | | | Ode of Withered Cleavage | | | | By Sharon Olds | | |
When I saw it for the first time,
I was baffled that anyone would walk out her door
showing that—the vines, the snakes,
the ripples, the nest of nestlings' necks!
And to think that on an ancestor
of that—if withered cleavage is
a descendant of fresh, young breasts—
I had spent some early hours of my life,
learning to adore the curves of the creamy
moon. My mother's desire to be touched,
late in her life, was so intense I could
almost hear it, like a keening from the hundred little
purselets of each nipple, each like a
rose-red eraser come alive and starvacious.
And now my own declivity is
arroyoing, and if I live long enough
my chest over my breastbone may look like
an internal organ, a heart trailing its
arteries and veins. I want to praise
what goes one way, what never recovers.
I want to live to an age when I look
hardly human, I want to love them
equally, birth and its daughter and
mother, death.
Excerpted from ODES by Sharon Olds. Copyright © 2016 by Sharon Olds. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. | | | | | | | | | | | | An Afternoon with Hettie Jones | | | | By Jeanne Hodesh | | |
| (All Images Courtesy Hettie Jones) |
At a party in 1960, Helene Dorn and Hettie Jones met, and a friendship was born. Their initial connection was through their husbands, the poets Edward Dorn and LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka. They all moved through the literary circles of the Black Mountain College poets and the avant-garde Beats. Hettie and Helene called themselves "Babes in Boyland" in the male-dominated scene. Soon after they met, Helene and her husband left for Europe, and a correspondence between the two women began.
Written in the moments after the kids had been put to bed, the letters let the reader in on daily scenes from the lives of two women as they sought employment, endured divorce, and raised their families. They also provide documentation of everything from the 1989 march on Washington for abortion rights to the days following 9/11. Hettie and Helene cheer each other on through sickness and eviction, offering endless encouragement to keep creating — Hettie's writing, and Helene's visual art. Each offers the other a relentlessly sympathetic ear as they endure the perils of aging and career disappointments, ever trying to make ends meet. The encouragement paid off: at 37 Hettie published her first book, and when she was 44, Helene had her first solo art show.
Hettie has now published their letters in the new book Love, H. The letters — which span 40 years — are an engrossing read and an important archive of the lives of two female artists. Helene went on to join the artistic community in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she produced glass mosaics and masks. This is Hettie's 24th book; she has written children's literature, volumes of poetry, and the critically acclaimed memoir How I Became Hettie Jones, along with founding the celebrated journal Yugen and co-founding the PEN Prison Writing program. She currently teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School, at 92Y, and at the Lower East Side Girls Club. Hettie's daughter, the art historian Kellie Jones, was just awarded a 2016 MacArthur "genius" grant for her work with contemporary art from the African diaspora.
This summer I sat at Hettie's kitchen table, where she wrote many of the letters. Bells in her window, a gift from Allen Ginsberg, jingled in the afternoon breeze as we spoke about her friendship with Helene (who died in 2004) and the correspondence chronicled in her new book.
Jeanne Hodesh: When the letters started, Helene was living in Europe, where Ed had a Fulbright, and you were in New York, recently divorced, with two kids, not really sure what you were going to do. Was there ever any jealousy between you two?
Hettie Jones: No. Because I was so happy for her! I felt I had to stay here, holding on to something. I would stand on the roof, feeling that I was holding down the fort in some way or another, and that I had been abandoned by everybody. I did feel like a widow, in a way, after my marriage ended. I was trying to cope with everything — and trying to figure out who I was, so I didn't have time to be jealous of her at all. I was happy for her.
JH: Helene was seven years older than you. Did that make a difference?
HJ: It wasn't so much that Helene was older, but that she knew what I was in for. She was more experienced because she had lived in that milieu longer than I. She had three children by two different men. She had lived in a lot of different places and knew so many people. They had lived in San Francisco, so she was acquainted with the West Coast Beats, but when she came to New York she already knew some of my friends. We had this common social, artistic scene, and there was just something so simpatico about us.
JH: How did your correspondence with Helene affect your own writing?
HJ: In my memoir I wrote, "It was only because of writing to Helene that I ever left the sewing machine and took up the pen." Our correspondence kept me writing and writing even before I started writing books. My correspondence with other women helped me too. When I was working at Partisan Review, Barbara Guest was the poetry editor. At one point she was in Italy, so we were in touch. When she came back, she said, "Are you writing? Your letters are so wonderful, you should really be writing." I took her compliment, but I thought, When am I going to do that? I have this job, and I have this magazine that I'm publishing, and I have a baby, and I'm going to have another baby. I was still young when I started to write, but I did all these things first — I had jobs, I had children — and then I felt ready to really start doing it. I'm glad that I waited. I had to wait until I felt secure that no one could change me.
JH: You and Helene were both avoiding constant threats of eviction, enduring an endless quest for employment, and also seeking recognition for your creative endeavors. What about the relationship with Helene in particular made it possible to face those challenges?
HJ: She was so supportive. She was always on my side. She looked after me in that respect and said, you know, things are going to work out. We both offered that. We were as close as sisters can be who are not blood.
JH: Occasionally you refer to your ex-husbands, but you didn't write about men often. Do you feel your correspondence took the place of those other relationships?
HJ: Yes. It sustained me. Even while I was married — especially then. LeRoi was always out in the bars. I had no desire to go out and get drunk. First of all, I can only have one drink — look at the size of me! I would go out to the Cedar Bar, and guys would hit on me. I remember spending time with this one guy and eventually I said, "OK, gotta go home." He turned to me and said, "You mean we're not going to make it?" And I just looked at him and said, "No." What I wanted was myself and my ambitions and writing to Helene — and that's what I did.
JH: I loved the reading recommendations you sent each other. When Edwidge Danticat's books started coming out, the two of you couldn't get enough! What other things did you discover?
HJ: She recommended her friend Lucia Berlin, who just received a bunch of attention posthumously for her book A Manual for Cleaning Women. She published three books of wonderful short stories before that, though, and I got to read them because of Helene, who knew her on the West Coast. I didn't know anything about the West Coast Beat world or any woman who had lived through that world, and Lucia's books were a revelation. I always turned Helene on to black writers, and she always read them. It was so important that I had somebody to share that with. Helene was way more intellectual than I. She was an autodidact. She would just go right to the library and get the book.
JH: The letters cover the minutiae of day-to-day existence as well as historic events, like when you went to Washington, DC, to march for abortion rights. And there are fantastic scenes of domestic life, like Helene making a chicken-and-garlic stew that was so good she ate the whole thing right there, then wrote to tell you about it.
HJ: Yes! The way she described the bowl of garlic. I always thought Helene should have been a writer. She was such a good writer.
JH: Over the decades, technology changed radically. How did it impact the correspondence?
HJ: When I started writing, I wrote my first books by hand. Labor intensive. Then suddenly you could type things! You could change things and print it out again! It was magic! It would come out of the printer, and you just put it in the mail! And then the fax machine! It was instant gratification. Phone calls were very expensive, and once we got on the telephone we would talk for an hour. We couldn't afford to do that! So, the fax machine was wonderful. And then email. We were going to pile all of our emails on top of the other and make a scroll — like Jack Kerouac.
JH: You looked for a home for this book of correspondence for many years. Why is it important to you to have it out there?
HJ: Well, it honors Helene. And it's women's history! When I was a kid I never knew women did anything. We didn't learn about the suffragists, not to any degree. I wanted women to know that women can have friendships that are intense.
JH: Did you two ever discuss publishing the correspondence?
HJ: We didn't think about that. But there is a scene in the book where she has them all spread out on the floor. She wrote, "It's such a story, our letters."
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Jeanne Hodesh writes and teaches in New York. | | | | | | | | | | | | The Abortion Provider Who Used to Be Pro-Life | | | | By Alex Ronan | | |
Abortion is one of our country's most polarizing issues. According to the most recent polls, 50 percent of Americans identify as pro-choice, while 44 percent consider themselves pro-life — and this split has been consistent for the past two decades. But for most Americans, abortion isn't as straightforward as those labels purport to be.
When you ask people to consider specific cases, a different picture emerges. A 2011 Gallup survey of 1,000 American adults found 83 percent of respondents agreed that abortion should be legal when a woman's life is endangered, 82 percent supported legal abortion when a woman's physical health is at risk, 75 percent supported legal abortion in cases of rape or incest, and 50 percent in cases where the fetus's health is impaired. These results suggest a lot of Americans feel uncomfortable with abortion but don't want to see it outlawed.
The anonymous abortion provider I spoke to in early September didn't start out uncertain. She was raised in a pro-life household, and her mother told her that abortion was "killing a baby." She was part of pro-life clubs and trained to persuade women not to get abortions. She was afraid to even say the word "abortion." But now, she's an OB-GYN in the Midwest and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health, and she provides abortions regularly.
We spent an hour on the phone chatting about her journey to pro-choicedom and providing abortions, what the pro-life movement gets wrong, and how motherhood changed the way she thinks about her work. We spoke anonymously to protect her safety and prevent protesters from showing up at her home.
Alex Ronan: When did you first learn about abortion?
Abortion Provider: I was probably eleven or so, and I must have heard the word "abortion" at school. That night I was on a walk with my mom, and I asked her what abortion was. She said that abortion was killing a baby that you didn't want, and did I think that killing babies was right? I said, "No." She said, "Then you're pro-life like me." That was my introduction to the topic.
AR: When did you begin to rethink abortion?
AP: In college. When I thought about the issue as a younger teenager, I was very self-focused. I imagined how difficult it would be to be pregnant, that it would be a big sacrifice, and that it might be fun to have a baby, which are very common things for teenagers to think. In college I started to meet women who were not pro-life and heard them talk about the variety of different reasons that women may choose abortion. I had never really thought of that before. I always thought about it in terms of, Well, if I can do it, then everyone else could do it. I don't see what the problem is.
AR: So in college were you flying under the radar as indecisive?
AP: No, I was in the pro-life club! The pro-life club at my college didn't protest at clinics. Instead we focused on how to counsel a woman who was thinking about abortion to change her mind. But then my friend got pregnant. It didn't feel right to try and convince her to change her mind. Plus, I was more concerned with her well-being and whether or not she was safe, and that whole preparation I'd learned just went out of my mind. I actually ended up offering to take her to the clinic myself, which is very anti-pro-life of me. [Laughs.]
AR: What happened after that turning point?
AP: I started reading up on abortion more. I looked at the pro-choice billboards, very secretly, and better educated myself.
AR: What surprised you most as you began to study?
AP: The safety statistics were really shocking. I can't remember the specifics that I looked up at the time, but we know that abortion, especially in the first trimester, is safer than getting a shot of penicillin. It's super, super safe, and it's certainly much safer than carrying a pregnancy to term. I also had no clue how common abortion is.
And then I was really surprised when I realized that 60 percent of women in the United States who have abortions already have children. The pro-life line is often that women seeking abortions are naïve about what a joy a child is to have in your life. When you start to think about abortion in terms of women who already have children, who are deciding that they need to take care of their families and they can't have more, it really changes the discourse. Then when you pile in the danger of pregnancy, it's really hard to argue with that. You're talking about women who not only want to take care of their kids, but they want to come home to their kids at the end of the day. All of a sudden I was thinking, Well, gosh. We need to have safer abortion clinics.
AR: Where were you on the pro-choice/pro-life binary when you went to med school?
AP: By the time I got to medical school, I was really confused, and I realized that if a woman asked me again about abortion, that I certainly wouldn't try to dissuade her, and that I would want to actually help her get the safest care that she could. That's when I actually started thinking about becoming an abortion provider.
In my first year of medical school I went to my first pro-choice meeting. I walked in sort of cringing, because I thought I was going to be struck down by God. I sat very quietly, and it happened to be a meeting where they were doing this thing called a value clarification. They had us go through this paper with the reasons why different women choose abortion and mark down the ones we felt conflicted about.
I realized that I would probably help all of the women on the list, and then the leader of the group, not realizing how conflicted I was, said, "Oh, well it looks like you're considering becoming an abortion provider. Why don't you do this externship and work during the summer at this abortion clinic?" I knew it would be a great opportunity, but I was also terrified.
AR: It's a pretty bold move for someone who's so uncertain about abortion to work in a clinic. What was that like?
AP: I wasn't even comfortable saying the word "abortion." I walked into the clinic my first day, and the head of the clinic was so kind. She's giving me a tour, and she was saying the word "abortion," and she was saying the word "termination," and I just remember jumping every time she said it. I don't think that they had any idea how conflicted I was. It ended up turning out to be the most amazing experience. It really influenced my decision to become a provider myself.
AR: When we were emailing, you mentioned how you had this fear that your own pregnancy might change how you felt about the work that you do. I think it's really brave to acknowledge that fear and I wanted to know what that was like for you.
AP: When my baby was born, he was so small. I know this sounds weird, but I remember looking at his feet and thinking how tiny they were. Especially in cases of fetal anomaly, one of the things I offer patients is footprints after the abortion. I've always taken a lot of pride in getting really good footprints because of how important it is for my patients. When I was in those first couple of postpartum months, I felt like the clinical distance that I had from my patients had gone away. Doing the footprints especially was really difficult for me at the time, just because I would just become overwhelmed with emotion.
AR: Good emotions or bad emotions?
AP: Good! I was concerned that having a baby of my own would make the procedure distasteful for me. But, in a lot of ways, having a baby really just connected me to my patients more intensely. It supercharged all my previous feelings instead of changing them.
AR: What have your conversations with your mom been like? Are you able to talk to her about your work? Is she supportive?
AP: I'm not very good at keeping secrets. So when I was working at the abortion clinic in med school, I told her. She was very quiet. The next night, we talked about it again. She told me that her friend in high school had had an abortion, and that she stayed with her the night after her abortion. Her friend bled very heavily and didn't want to call an ambulance. My mom remembers how the whole bed was covered in blood and she thought that her friend was going to die. Her friend ended up being OK, but she remembers that experience, and she respects the fact that I'm making it safe for women to have that procedure.
Hearing that was a total shock for me, because it was a total reversal of everything that she had taught me before. I was like, "What the heck, Mom?" She told me that she taught us to be pro-life because she didn't want us to go to hell. She had kind of changed her own mind, but she didn't want to teach us the wrong thing. She's actually very supportive of my work now.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Alex Ronan is a writer living in Berlin, mostly. | | | | | | | | | | | | Beauty As an Oral Tradition | | | | By Teresa Mathew | | | |
| (All Images by Teresa Mathew) |
In the eyes of Sade Tyler, beauty is an inheritance that has been withheld from women of color — and black women in particular — for too long. Sade is the creator of Sade African Skincare & Cosmetics, and she has been selling her products in New York City for the past 30 years — in pushcarts and crowded Brooklyn malls, and in the sliver of a storefront she now runs in Harlem. Her business has three distinct lines: makeup, skin care, and service. All of Sade's makeup is tailored to women of color, with foundations that perfectly match any skin tone and lipsticks and eye shadows that will pop against it. Sade believes that no one can ever be too dark and no color can be too rich, and that much is evident in the deep, lush hues scattered around her store.
Everything in Sade's African skin-care line — the sugar scrubs, the oils, the shea butter — comes straight from Ado Ekiti, her family's village in Nigeria, and is made by an elderly woman who has been extracting oil from plants longer than Sade has been alive. Sade is keeping the power of her past in the present. Beauty, like stories and recipes, is a kind of heritage that must be passed on.
Sade's services — makeovers, facials, eyebrow brush-ups — are an integral component of her business. Her "sisters," as she calls her clients, run the gamut of shape and size, and Sade knows how best to highlight their features. She knows where to brush gingerbread-brown powder to mask hooded eyes, and why Cinderella-blue lipstick isn't the disaster one would assume. No matter what anyone comes in for, Sade pulls out her tools and deftly gets to work.
For women of color, believing in one's own beauty can sometimes feel like a political act. Sade's customers speak about the "paper bag test" (if you're darker than a paper bag, the expression goes, you might as well wear it) and the difficulty in finding makeup that matches their skin tone. They — we — live in a world where beauty is cast in ivory, occasionally in ebony, and rarely in anything in between. I spoke to Sade about the business of beauty: what it has taught her, and what it has allowed her to pass on.
Teresa Mathew: How did you first get interested in skin care?
Sade Tyler: I started to think, There is so much natural ethnomedicine that people have been using forever. Why isn't that selling more in the West? And then I started thinking about thousands of years of culture and tradition from around the world [and thought,] I'm going to start selling African skin care! The thing is, what we want is to be more Europeanized. If you come from a country that's been colonized by the English or any other colony, you think what they do is best.
TM: What value do you think makeup holds?
ST: Makeup infuses you with pride in your beauty. Makeup is a very powerful vehicle. I realized, very quickly, the light that it brought into women's eyes. It makes you own your beauty, and if you feel you're beautiful, everyone else will believe it.
TM: Why is it so important for women of color to have access to products made for them?
ST: If you look, [white women] have much more of a support system. Society acknowledges them. Tells them they're real, they're soft, they're lovable. But try and do the same thing with the black woman. We are not seen as soft, approachable. All of these subliminal messages are telling us, No matter how long you're here, you will not be accepted. Voices like ours put the dent in.
TM: What does it take to run and maintain a black-owned beauty business?
ST: I have to say, it's super difficult. It's very hard to do it on your own — you need collaboration. When I was starting, I did have a lot of that; my ex-husband and I ran the business. We don't see that black dollar and how powerful it is. I remember in Africa reading about Montgomery and how they basically screeched [the city] to a halt — that was because there was solidarity, there was a purpose. There's still a purpose; it's still important to support black business.
TM: How does your business tie into your philosophy about makeup?
ST: My whole idea from the beginning was that knowledge is very powerful. As long as the awareness of our beauty and the knowledge of it is packaged by other people and then sold to us as something that isn't us, we'll always look to them for our ideas and our concept of what our beauty is. So when you look in the mirror you don't see yourself; you see yourself in respect to maybe Beyoncé or Nicki Minaj. It should be powerful enough for you to look in the mirror and see yourself as you are. I think I'm beautiful, so I use a little makeup to embellish that beauty. It's not the makeup that makes me beautiful.
TM: How do you see yourself in the greater community?
ST: You have to put your heart out there and people will respond. In my culture, if you're a queen or a princess, it's because you're in service to your community. A queen serves her people. You don't sit there eating bonbons, you're on the ground, you're helping. I want to be of service in my life. And that's what keeps me getting dressed and coming to work. I want to be a part of this community for as long as I have strength. And I want to serve my community, and obviously make a profit at it, because I gots the rent to pay.
TM: What aspects of your story do you think are the most powerful?
ST: I go around the obstacle and reinvent myself. That's one thing I want people to take from me. If you're a black woman or a woman in general, there are so many people against you. We — black women — they've tried so hard to put us down and subjugate us. They don't know how come we keep rising up. Like dandelions, we keep popping up. I just want black girls to understand, you don't need to listen to anybody's notion of you — just pop right back up.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Teresa Mathew is a freelance writer, illustrator, and photojournalist. | | | | | | | | | | | | October Horoscopes | | | | By Melissa Broder | | |
LIBRA
(September 23 to October 22)
You often feel so split between what you think some people want you to do and what you think others want you to do that it's hard to hear what your heart actually wants. I can't tell you what it wants, and I can't tell you what to do, but I do know if you don't center your intention on pleasing yourself, any action you take is going to feel like the wrong one.
SCORPIO
(October 23 to November 21)
We frequently long for things not because they are actually missing, but because the state of longing gives us the illusion of movement — something always out of reach to strive for. This can be a romantic experience, poignant or full of feelings, which places us in the center of what we think it means to "really feel alive." If, however, the feelings should become too much, remember that there is also a romance in learning to want what we have.
SAGITTARIUS
(November 22 to December 21)
As we enter into the fourth quarter of the year, it's time to reflect on what made us truly feel good over the past nine months. I don't mean the quick highs that eventually gave way to lower lows, but the sustainable things: actions that generated a steady sense of contentment. Spend the next few months doing more of these things and you won't need to make any resolutions in December.
CAPRICORN
(December 22 to January 19)
The idea of loving yourself seems pretty elusive. What does that even mean? Likewise, the idea of trying to hate yourself less seems kind of depressing. But what about simply pleasing yourself? One way to act in self-love is to ask yourself, "Do I even like this?" If the answer is no, then you have my permission to find a way out.
AQUARIUS
(January 20 to February 18)
Technically you are as much a spiritual sign as you are scientific, but for someone who belongs in the sky, you tend to get stuck in the mud a lot. It isn't the nature of the mud, exactly, but your own stiffness that prevents you from escaping. This month it's important for you to chill the fuck out, and the only way to do that is to take contrary action. If you're tempted to plan things, don't. If you seek to defend your image, relinquish it. And if you're paddling like crazy, cease immediately and float.
PISCES
(February 19 to March 20)
It's annoying that the answer has to come from within us, but it does. And underneath all the glittery, shiny external things that you reach for in your quest for that elusive happiness, you already know this. This month, it's time to go within and focus on your interior so that you can actually enjoy the externals you are trying to pile high on your plate. Otherwise none of them will ever be enough.
ARIES
(March 21 to April 19)
The only way to get out of the habit of taking things too personally is to push the pendulum all the way in the other direction. This month it's time to pretend that nothing is about you. Every time you feel the instinct to take something personally (often), I want you to say, "Nope. It absolutely isn't about me," and free yourself of that suffering. Even if you're wrong and it is absolutely about you in a few cases, you've earned a few get-out-of-mental-jail-free cards.
TAURUS
(April 20 to May 20)
You know how sometimes you are nebulous about things (people, money, requests you say "maybe" to when you don't mean it, because you don't want to offend anyone or burn any bridges)? This month choose one of them to get clear on and have faith, just with this one element, that while clarity can feel scary at first, it's actually much safer in the long run than a fluffy cloud full of shit that can fall on your head.
GEMINI
(May 21 to June 20)
What is it about allowing yourself to just be content that feels so dangerous? Is it the fear of the other shoe dropping? Is it the feeling that worry will protect us from harm? Is it the idea that if we can decipher something potentially bad out before it happens, even if it never happens, then we are somehow more in control? Is it that contentment lacks the adrenaline of drama? Those are all my reasons. What are yours?
CANCER
(June 21 to July 22)
This month your task is very simple, but it isn't easy: go where it's warm. Don't try to woo the one person in the room who isn't as drawn to you as the other 39. I mean this metaphorically but also quite literally. Follow the ease this month. There is nothing more valuable in difficult things than there is in peaceful ones.
LEO
(July 23 to August 22)
Astrology is bullshit except when we believe, and then it's totally legit. Prayer is most effective when it is used to change the person praying and not the object of a prayer. In many forms of witchcraft you cannot cast a spell on anyone or force them to do something against their will, but spells still exist. Remember these things as you look to decipher what is real and unreal, true and untrue about the world.
VIRGO
(August 23 to September 22)
Sometimes when we feel emotional pain, we think that something is going very wrong. It's like: Call an ambulance! I felt a feeling. But painful feelings can be a marker of our humanity. I know that being human is not always your favorite thing. It's not mine either. Your first reaction to emotional pain may always be: oh no! But maybe your second reaction can be: I'm alive!
Melissa Broder is the author of four collections of poems, including 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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