| |  Illustration by Ariel Davis | My parents forced me to get braces at the tender and turbulent age of thirteen. I had no say in the matter. They didn’t care that the 32 (albeit very crooked) teeth resided in my mouth. If I wanted to get married, get a job, have any future at all, I had to fix my smile. I remember trying to reason with them on the way home from the orthodontist’s office: “I have personality. I don’t need to be beautiful!” “Why do I have to go to an Iranian orthodontist with bad breath?” “Death to America’s obsession with dental hygiene!” But they were unmoved. It was one of the rare instances in our relationship where my opinion was irrelevant. Eleven years prior, we’d escaped Tehran in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, but when it came to the subject of my teeth, my parents were as tyrannical as the Ayatollah. “You’ll thank us one day,” was all they said in response. I was too respectful (and afraid) to say that I hated my parents out loud, so instead, I repeated the words in my head like a teenage war cry. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. I’m fairly certain that the status of my dad’s teeth never crossed my mind on that drive home. But as a kid, I used to hang out in the bathroom and observe his strict dental regimen. He was religious about flossing, brushing, and swigging mouthwash, but you wouldn’t know it from looking at him. For starters, he’d been a smoker before I was born, and his crooked teeth never recovered from their exposure to nicotine. Braces hadn’t existed in Iran when he was growing up. In fact, it wasn’t until 1975 that a group of American-trained orthodontists would be invited to Tehran University to train Iranian students. Once advances were made in the field of orthodontics, demand for braces would still outweigh the supply of orthodontists. Straight teeth would become a luxury afforded only to the elite. Dental work was never an option for my dad. And yet, he kept flossing and brushing and swigging mouthwash. He had no intention of giving up on his teeth. My dad always had a gregarious personality. He’s cheerful and upbeat and the type of guy most people love instantly. He may have been self-conscious about smiling with his teeth showing, but it’s hard to stay tight-lipped when you’re regularly brimming with joy. I love his outgoing side. I love that he talks to the clerk at the grocery store or a stranger on the street like he’s known them his whole life. But as a teenager, I worried those same people might judge him at the sight of his stained and imperfect teeth. I worried his mouth was just another sign of our foreignness. I had frequent bouts of anxiety over how different we were from my American friends’ families. Anxiety that was compounded by a family secret I’d discovered: we were undocumented immigrants. It was my older sister who unceremoniously broke the news of our immigration status to me. Despite the fact that we’d lived in the Bay Area for over a decade, we didn’t have green cards. At the time, my sister and I didn’t even have Social Security numbers. We’d escaped Iran as refugees but entered the United States on visitor visas. When they expired, we applied for political asylum, but after two years, we were told there was no record of our application. Our only hope was getting green cards through my uncle, who was an American citizen. So we filed our applications and waited and waited and waited. Our undocumented status was the reason I had to go to the Iranian orthodontist with halitosis. He generously gave us his friends-and-family rate for my braces. This was a necessary savings for my parents. Being undocumented came with an array of financial burdens. It meant paying a lawyer to help get my sister and me Social Security numbers. It also meant not being able to apply for financial aid when my sister went off to college. My parents would have to pay for her education in full. For small-business owners, this was a behemoth expense. Braces were not exactly cost-prohibitive, but my teeth required a lot of work. I had to start with a palatal expander to widen my upper jaw. This is a metal contraption (or torture device) that’s secured to your top molars and sits below the roof of your mouth. It has a tiny screw that you turn with a small metal key each day to help move your teeth apart. If that wasn’t humiliating enough, it also made me speak with a lisp. After six months of properly widening my jaw, I was finally ready for braces. I was happy I could feel the roof of my mouth again, but I hated the layer of metal that masked my teeth. I dreaded the monthly appointments where I had to get my wires upgraded and tightened. The orthodontist’s office was a trek from our house, which gave me ample time to bitch and moan to my mom on the ride home. My teeth hurt. The edge of the wire was cutting into my cheeks. I was in agony. “Bemeeram barat,” my mom would say. “I’ll die for you.” It’s what Persian parents frequently say to their kids when they voice even the slightest discomfort. “I’m tired.” “I’ll die for you.” “I’m hungry.” “I’ll die for you.” “I’m bloated.” “I’ll die for you.” “Khoda nakoneh,” I’d mumble in reply. “God forbid.” My braces came off during my sophomore year of high school. By then, I was consumed with other insecurities: bad skin, a boyish physique, a stereotypically large Iranian nose. There wasn’t much I liked about myself. But for once, I was giddy as my mom drove us home from my appointment. I kept gliding my tongue along my teeth, stunned by the sensation. And I couldn’t stop smiling at myself in the car visor mirror. My parents and all my friends agreed: my teeth were perfect. “Thank you,” I finally told my parents. But as my dad proudly smiled back at me, my joy was quickly replaced with guilt. One day, I told myself, I’ll be successful, I’ll have a lot of money, and I’ll return the favor. Three weeks later, I was in the throes of every teenager’s worst nightmare: I’d lost my retainer. I’d wrapped it in a paper towel during a meal and accidentally thrown it away. I frantically dug through the trash in our backyard, praying to the universe that I would find it. I never did. My parents would have to spend a few hundred dollars to replace it to keep my perfect teeth intact. I hated myself for being so irresponsible. This time, tears accompanied the guilt. For most children of immigrants, guilt is a familiar emotion. Hell, it’s more like a state of being. We don’t require verbal reminders of our parents’ sacrifices. We bear witness to them every day. We can see it on their tired faces when they come home from a job that pays the bills but wasn’t what they’d dreamed of doing with their lives. We can see it in the faraway look in their eyes when they wax nostalgic about a country they loved but had to leave. We can see it when they sheepishly ask us to proofread something they’ve written for grammatical or spelling errors, when they fumble or get embarrassed because the person on the other end of the phone can’t understand what they’re saying. All parenting requires some form of sacrifice, but not all parents choose a lifetime of feeling marginalized so their children can flourish and bask in the freedoms they were denied. It would take more than twenty grueling years for our family to become American citizens. My parents were relieved when our immigration ordeal was finally over, but that doesn’t mean they live in a country that makes them feel American. A few years ago, my mom and dad downsized their lives, sold their house in Silicon Valley, and purchased a condo in the less expensive town of Brisbane, California. They can’t afford to retire, but they’ve finally been able to put some money away. At 70 years old, my dad got his teeth fixed. I never did make good on the promise I had made to myself. He covered all his own dental bills. His smile is beautiful now, but it was beautiful then, too. It was, after all, the marker of my happy childhood. At 37, I still feel pangs of guilt when someone compliments my straight teeth. “I had braces,” I always explain. But there’s more to the story. My teeth, my smile, are evidence of immigrant parents, who would do anything for me. Sara Saedi is a novelist and TV writer living in Los Angeles. Her memoir, Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card, is out now from Knopf Books for Young Readers. | | | | |  Photo Illustration by Lisa Case. Photos copyright Library of Congress. | Fashion statements can be political. In January, it was vividly illustrated by the women wearing black at the Golden Globe awards ceremony, an organized effort to protest sexual harassment and women’s inequality in Hollywood. And even before haute-couture black gowns and power-white pantsuits worn by presidential candidates, there were “bloomers” worn by nineteenth-century women’s-rights activists to protest their subjugation, and, of course, white dresses with yellow sashes, the preferred uniform for suffragists marching together in protest. I didn’t expect to find this sort of fashion consciousness in the suffrage movement when I began archival research for my new book, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight for the Vote (Viking), a deep dive into the history of the activists behind the suffrage movement. After all: These women were freedom-fighters; I didn’t think they cared about what they wore to the revolution. But they did. Because perceptions hold power, and if women were going to be judged by their appearance — which they were then, just as they are now — then the “Suffs” wanted to shape their own image. Sartorial symbolism became a part of their strategy in the quest for the vote. They expressed themselves through their garments and costume jewelry, imbuing their fashion choices — and color palettes — with layers of meaning. In America, they wore white dresses, shoes, and hats in demonstrations and parades to symbolize their purity of purpose, accented by yellow to express enlightenment and the rays of the sun marking a new dawn for women. They adorned themselves with sashes and belts, pins, brooches, and necklaces in the suffrage colors of purple, white, gold/yellow, and green — signifying loyalty, high purpose, faith, and hope, respectively. In Britain, jewelers responded to the demand for suffrage ornaments by setting emeralds, amethysts, and pearls into gold to create wearable adornments.  Sue White (center), Betty Gram (far right), and the National Woman’s Party picketed the Republican National Convention in Chicago in June 1920, protesting the party’s lack of commitment to ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. © Library of Congress |
Advocating for suffrage was a lonely business: these women faced contempt and condemnation in their communities, their churches, even their homes; those who had the nerve to speak or demonstrate in public endured barrages of rotten eggs, vicious insults, physical attack and even imprisonment. So wearing the suffrage colors became a unifying tool for the movement, providing comfort and a sense of community to those on the barricades. But at times, the women advocating for their own social and political freedom were punished for being just too fashion-forward. The earliest women’s-rights activists, in the 1850s, embraced “dress reform” as a way to escape the shackles of tight-laced, whalebone corsets, pounds of petticoats, long heavy skirts, and high-buttoned blouses that deliberately restricted their movements to keep them from entering the public sphere. Dress reformers railed against the dictates of women’s fashion as “a male conspiracy to make women subservient” by smothering them in cloth. But the brave women, including suffrage leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who adopted the costume of pantaloons under a short skirt, popularized by feminist editor Amelia Bloomer, soon found themselves to be the objects of such bitter ridicule (women wearing pants were deemed a threat to American men’s masculinity) that they gave up wearing “bloomers” altogether. They realized their radical dress choice was too easy a target and distracted attention from their fundamental arguments and goals.  From a boat bobbing in the Hudson River, Louisine Havemeyer (right) passes the Suffrage Torch to New Jersey colleagues during the 1915 woman suffrage referendum campaign in New York and New Jersey. Neither state approved the vote for women. © Bryn Mawr College Special Collections |
The Suffs learned their lesson. From then on, suffragists went in for traditional styles, heavy on lace bodices and petticoats, to prove their femininity and stave off the savage depiction of suffragists in the press as ugly, un-sexed, cigar-chomping “she-men.” Initially, Susan Anthony was depicted in coarse and masculine caricature, with her “dress hanging in uneven scallops, and carrying a large umbrella,” as one movement leader explained, while “other suffragists were made to look like escapers from the insane asylums.” The more conservative anti-suffragists, however, were drawn as “good looking, fashionably dressed, highly respectable women.” But, as the Votes for Women movement slowly gained traction and public acceptance in the late nineteenth century, the way in which the press described suffragists’ dress also changed. In the seven-decade span of the woman-suffrage crusade, clothes made “the cause” visible. Fashion journals like Vogue, which began publication in 1892 with a slightly ambivalent attitude toward the demand for the vote, soon sensed the popular Zeitgeist and adopted a surprisingly sympathetic pose toward the suffrage cause: many issues featured editorials vigorously supporting the movement and lavish photo-spreads of elegant suffrage leaders in chic outfits. Susan Anthony’s signature red-silk shawl became such a meme of the women’s movement that when she showed up on the podium of a suffrage convention without it draped around her shoulders, the reporters in the press box refused to write a word until she put it on: “No shawl, no story,” they insisted. Miss Anthony dispatched an assistant to fetch the shawl, and the convention received the news attention it deserved. Anthony’s protégé, twentieth-century suffrage leader Carrie Catt, adopted her own fashion totem: a bespoke, sapphire-blue “Ratification Dress,” which she wore while campaigning state to state in 1919 and 1920, stirring up enthusiasm for the approval of the Nineteenth Amendment. Perhaps the most creative use, or subversion, of fashion norms were the tailor-made “prison outfit” re-creations worn by Alice Paul’s National Woman’s Party suffragists — who’d been imprisoned, tortured, and force-fed for picketing the White House — on their 1919 “prison special” cross-country publicity tour. Decked out in their prison garb, they led rallies and parades in cities across the nation, simultaneously advertising the cause while embarrassing Woodrow Wilson’s administration.  Alice Paul lifts a glass — filled with a Prohibition-compliant beverage — next to the completed ratification banner outside Woman’s Party headquarters. © Library of Congress |
And then there’s the most prized — or despised — emblem of the suffrage movement: the “jail door pin” or “prison pin,” issued only to those suffragists who had served time for their acts of civil disobedience in the name of suffrage. A precise model of the cell doors in London’s Holloway Prison, complete with tiny bars and a little heart-shaped lock, this was one piece of jewelry that could not be bought; it had to be earned, at a dear personal price. Alice Paul, who earned her own pin during her time as a suffrage fighter in England, brought the pins home to the U.S. movement and bestowed them on her followers who had been “jailed for freedom.” Wearing the pin, in pride and defiance, signified a suffragist’s alliance with the more radical branch of the movement and also marked her for vilification by anti-suffragists, who would accuse her of being unpatriotic, even traitorous. In addition to the press, the fashion industry also took notice. Clothing stores — like Macy’s, Best & Co., Bonwit Teller in New York, and Selfridge’s in London — grasped the retail opportunities of “suffrage marching outfits” and “suffrage blouses” and stylish but comfortable shoes for long demonstrations, advertising their wares in newspapers and suffrage journals. Women’s magazines offered patterns to sew your own suffrage-event attire. Suffrage was good business. And in the very last battle, the fight for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in the summer of 1920, the opposing armies wore roses of different colors as their uniform insignia — yellow roses for the Suffs, red American Beauty roses for the Antis. The color of the rose on the bosom or buttonhole defined allegiance and created camaraderie — as well as conflict. Now we’ve entered a new period of political peril and divisive discourse, and color choices are once again emerging as symbolic statements. When Hillary Clinton wore a white pantsuit to accept her historic presidential-candidate nomination — in an obvious salute to the suffragists — we witnessed the latest resurgence of suffrage sartorial motifs. Several months later, we saw the Democratic Women’s Caucus express their political defiance by wearing white outfits to President Trump’s State of the Union address at the Capitol. Pantone chose violet as the color of the year for 2018 and justified the choice by pointing to the hue’s heritage as an official suffrage color, a color of women’s empowerment. Artisans on Etsy are creating stylish pieces with woman-power motifs, while the popularity of feminist slogan T-shirts and accessories has once again caught the attention of the fashion industry, making politically spiked apparel good business. We’re looking forward to another chapter in the historic saga of women’s raiment of resistance. Elaine Weiss’s new book on the suffragists, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight for the Vote (Viking), has just been published. | | | | |  Illustration by Hannah Perry | Anne Trubek started a publishing company on a lark. In 2012, Trubek, a writer, professor, and single mother, had been given a $20,000 artist fellowship by Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Country — paid for by cigarette taxes — and she wanted to show her appreciation to the community by creating something for it. She thought it would be interesting to publish a collection of essays about Cleveland, and when she put out a call for submissions, she received 80 pitches in the span of three weeks. “It was the right thing at the right time,” she says. She started Belt Publishing the very next year. It has gone from that first collection of essays — Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology — to a nationally recognized independent press and the parent company of a nonprofit online magazine, with a booklist of twenty titles and a staff of six. Trubek is giving people from the Rust Belt, a region that stretches roughly from Buffalo to Chicago and is named for its once-powerful industrial base, a platform on which to tell their stories — instead of having others, often from the coasts, control the narrative. Trubek tells me all this at Belt’s office, where we’re sitting at the table she uses as her desk. It’s shoved into a corner, near some windows, of a large warehouse room filled with piles and piles and piles of boxes of the Belt back catalog. Curly-haired and prone to busting out in a grin, Trubek seems very much at home in what is basically a storeroom. (That said, shortly after our interview, Trubek moved Belt to a new, more office-y space in Tremont, a neighborhood on Cleveland’s West Side that has gentrified while still managing to retain its working-class roots.) After Rust Belt Chic sold well, “People were like, ‘So, what are you guys going to do next?’ I was like, ‘Nothing,’” she says. “But there was this energy, so I said, ‘Why don’t we do a web version of this book, have it be essays about the Rust Belt?’” And thus Belt magazine was born. Although Trubek no longer oversees its day-to-day operation — that’s a job for the new editor-in-chief, hired last year after Trubek relaunched the magazine as a nonprofit enterprise — she still serves as its chair of the board. What she really focuses on, what she really loves, is publishing books. This all might seem exhausting — and Trubek admits that it is — but she has a long history of hustling. She’s originally from Madison, Wisconsin, and she came to Ohio permanently in 1998 with her then-husband. The couple had landed jobs as professors at Oberlin College, where they had both been undergrads. Their son was born in 1999. In 2001, her husband had an affair, and Trubek suddenly found herself a single mother whose joint custody arrangement meant she could never move anywhere else if she wanted to see her son. (Trubek left her job teaching writing at Oberlin in 2015; her ex-husband continues to work there.) Trubek picked up freelance writing to make extra money, and by 2012, she had noticed a trend in the way national publications covered Rust Belt cities, in particular Cleveland, which was undergoing something of a revival. “I would keep reading these things and think, Why didn’t they call me? Or why didn’t they ask someone from Cleveland to write this?” she says. Not that she would have presented the rosy view that so much of the writing of the time was calling for. “Cleveland boosters won’t ever admit there are any problems in this city. That drives me nuts. ‘We’re doing so great!’ I’m like, ‘Hey, have you looked at the actual Census figures lately? Have you noticed your houses aren’t worth any more [money]? Have you noticed that there are still no jobs?’” Trubek’s very real approach to the complexity of the Rust Belt is why Belt Publishing’s books are just as likely to find flaws in the region as they are to champion its successes. (It’s also why I could never have Trubek’s job: Unlike her, I’m originally from the Cleveland area, and I’m one of its annoying boosters. Remember the scene in Trainwreck where LeBron James lists everything that’s good about the city? One hundred percent me.) Trubek’s understanding that the region is one of nuance is reflected in the first Belt title, Rust Belt Chic, a term pulled from a 1992 interview with Joyce Brabner, a writer and the widow of Cleveland cartoonist/genius Harvey Pekar: “I’ll tell you the relationship between New York and Cleveland. We are the people that all those anorexic vampires with their little black miniskirts and their black leather jackets come to with their video cameras to document Rust Belt chic. MTV people knocking on our door, asking to get pictures of Harvey emptying the garbage, asking if they can shoot footage of us going bowling. But we don’t go bowling, we go to the library, but they don’t want to shoot that. So, that’s it. We’re just basically these little pulsating jugular veins waiting for you guys to leech off some of our nice, homey, backwards Cleveland stuff.” And so Belt’s titles include How to Speak Midwestern, How to Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass, and the new What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. The author of that last book, the historian Elizabeth Catte, is from the region and found J.D. Vance’s much-praised memoir Hillbilly Elegy so faulty that she wrote a rebuttal; it’s currently getting great press, much to Trubek’s delight. Belt Publishing has also released a city anthology series that includes books of essays about Cleveland, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Akron, Youngstown, Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, and Flint; additionally, there’s a new series called Belt Revivals, which features reissues of “influential works from the past that illuminate the present and inform our future,” according to Belt’s site. And a Belt book of a different kind is coming out in April: Voices From the Rust Belt, a collection of essays culled from Belt’s catalog and published by Picador USA in New York. A publisher at Picador read a review in the New York Times of How to Speak Midwestern and reached out to Trubek with the idea of putting something together that represented everything Belt had been doing. There’s a stunning essay about heroin addiction in Pittsburgh, and another about giving a child a bath in Flint. Full disclosure: I have an essay in the book, one about my decision to leave Cleveland. Steeped as it is in early-twenties heartbreak, it’s a comparatively breezy read. The light has shifted in the office — it’s January in Cleveland, and the shadows are long by mid-afternoon. As I get ready to leave, I ask Trubek if she sees herself doing this for the foreseeable future. “I’m in this,” she says. “I love book publishing. To be able to reach out to someone whose writing I really admire and say, ‘Hey, would you be interested in doing a book for us?’ and having them say yes — that is so cool. We’ve signed up people who could have gotten Big Five [publisher] book contracts. And they’re like, ‘No. I want to write for you.’” Sally Errico is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Independent, the Observer, and the Rumpus. | | | | |  Illustration by Vivian Shih | In the white gown my mother had worn for her own wedding, I stood before the altar in a Catholic church. I was not Catholic, and my fiancé, Jamie, certainly wasn’t, but the venue happened to be open and available. Our pastor held a tome that contained various ceremonies penned by L. Ron Hubbard, including the vows addressed to us, which included the idea that “girls” need frills — perhaps “a comb and a cat” — and that I was to remind Jamie that his “promise binds,” for “men forget.” I hardly listened to the folderol. The words didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was marrying the man I thought I loved. I see now that what I loved was Jamie’s certainty, a certainty that included his choice of religion: Scientology. About a year before I met Jamie, my charismatic, brilliant elder brother had fallen from a bridge and sustained a massive brain injury. This loss of mentor as well as brother was monumental. Without him to lead the way — without him to push against as I created my own way — I was in a chaotic, grief-stricken tailspin that, although I did not see it at the time, whirled me straight toward the certainty Jamie and his religion offered. Which is not how I thought of things on my wedding day, of course. *** When Jamie first invited me to tea, I was reluctant to accept precisely because he was a Scientologist. But I soon found his implacable assurance attractive, as well as enviable, especially in contrast to the existential anguish that after my brother’s accident suffused my days Jamie's certainty — which I soon realized was Hubbard's certainty — was deeply comforting. Hubbard seemed to have imposed order on a disorderly world. He’d taken abstractions — concepts such as Communication, Survival, Ethics, Spirit — and, by naming and explaining their component parts, made them concrete. His “Dynamics,” for instance, separated the complicated mish-mash of self, family, environment, spirituality, and the physical world into discrete modules that could be addressed and improved. For Hubbard, Understanding comprises three essentials — Affinity, Reality, and Communication — and when a misunderstanding occurs, one can solve the issue by finding in which of those three areas the problem has arisen (a difference in Reality, say, about what time a meeting is set). He observes that Morals relate to cultural ideas, and Ethics personal ones. All this order, imposed on what I’d been viewing as nothing but meaningless chaos, was transformational. Yet even as I reveled in these and other of Scientology’s concepts (we have a body, we are a spirit), I found it disturbing that new recruits were known as “raw meat” and that someone critical of the church was considered “fair game”: did that mean that Scientologists might, say, smash the typewriters of those who wrote negatively about them? I wasn’t sure then, but I later came to believe that’s exactly the sort of thing it meant. Jamie managed to explain away these ideas, and, as our relationship deepened, I adopted a new tactic: trying to ignore his choice of religion. I’d been brought up outside of any particular faith, and I projected that carefree attitude onto our relationship. I’d recently attended a Jewish-Buddhist wedding. And Catholics didn’t always marry fellow Catholics, did they? My understanding of religion’s role in a life, much less a marriage, was monumentally blithe. Astonished, wary, I watched as Scientology simply became more and more a part of my life. Was this steady immersion how they “got” you? I worried about that all the time. And my own concerns were inflamed by those of my parents, who were virulently against my involvement. Jamie insisted that because my parents were against Scientology, that they were “Suppressive Persons” and that I must “disconnect” from them. “My parents are not SPs!” This was not the first time we’d had this conversation. “You’re a Potential Trouble Source!” Jamie said, then cleared his throat, and I knew he was going to quote, verbatim, from a Hubbard policy letter. He’d memorized chunks of such texts so that he would never be guilty of what was called “Verbal Tech”: interpreting Hubbard’s ideas for someone else. “A Potential Trouble Source,” he said, “‘is connected to an SP who is invalidating him, his beingness, his processing, his life.’” He’d explained this: someone who’s happy one moment and weeping the next — “rollercoastering” — is a PTS because she is connected to an SP. And I did seem to be on an emotional chute-the-chute. Sipping my morning tea, I’d be compelled by the idea that, with the help of Scientology, I’d be more effective in all areas of life; by afternoon, I’d be fretting, massively, that Scientology’s “Bridge to Total Freedom” was a hoax — although, how could so many people be hoaxed? I shook my head. “My parents are not ‘invalidating’ me! They are kind, supportive, wonderful people!” “They are invalidating your involvement with Scientology. That is you, isn’t it?” Jamie said, his voice softening. “Your choice of a spiritual path?” It isn’t my path! I wanted to say. But there was that kindness in his eyes. It didn’t seem to occur to me that my “rollercoastering” might have had something to do with the loss of my brother. Or with the careening uncertainty I felt about this man to whom I was in the process of hooking myself. I was reassured by the fact that Jamie was an artist and deeply intelligent — things I wanted in a husband. It also helped that he was rock-star handsome. Surely ours were the sorts of problems any couple starting out might have. And, for quite a while, anyway, any doubts were swept under the rug when we kissed. Above all, there was that massive certainty offered by Hubbard’s “religious technology.” And so I married Jamie. I see, now, that what I was marrying was his certainty — Scientology’s certainty. *** Nevertheless, I continued to grapple with deep misgivings. About six months into our marriage, Jamie — convinced my skepticism was connected to my disapproving parents — made an appointment with the Ethics Officer in Scientology’s Celebrity Center. (Celebrity Center was the “org” we used, as Jamie was a well-known bass player and I had an acting career.) The Ethics Officer reiterated what Jamie had been saying: If my parents were against my involvement in Scientology, they were Suppressive Persons; as a result, I was a Potential Trouble Source. He instructed me to enroll in a class that would illuminate these matters. Fuming, I made my way to the course room. The walls needed paint; in one corner, the ceiling drooped. Through windows that needed washing, sunlight streamed onto wooden tables at which people sat reading, writing, leafing through dictionaries — studying. An aura of contentment, of sacredness, emanated from that shabby room. I stared in stupefaction. Then I stepped across the threshold, as if I were walking into Narnia. And for a few years, I did feel that in the course rooms of Scientology I found a magic kingdom. Study was another area Hubbard had disassembled and put back together in a tangible, applicable form. In spite of a BA in drama and a two-year theater immersion program, I’d never thought of myself as a scholar. (Perhaps ironically, this is a gift those years in the Church gave me.) As I fell in love with study, a sense of gratitude and, eventually, obligation arose. I felt bound — I bound myself — to the organization that conveyed this precious information. About a year after our wedding, Jamie and I decided to divorce. In the process, I spent hours in Celebrity Center, especially in its course room, weaving myself more deeply into the religion even as I cut ties with the man who’d introduced me to it. By this time, many of my friends were Scientologists. I found them thoughtful, ethical, and empathetic. We believed in Hubbard’s assertion that “man is basically good,” and we were devoted to the idea that we could help others — through Scientology. However, there’s a debilitating tautology at the heart of this: a desire to leave the organization that insists you are good implies that you must be bad. When you are tempted to leave (as I was, and indeed tried to do, a number of times), you must confront whatever icky thing in your nature caused you to doubt how “being good” equals remaining in Scientology. I could not seem to muster the necessary critical thinking skills to shake loose of this toxic circular logic. But gradually, my delight in study and other useful aspects of the Tech began to fade, replaced by a sense of myself as a fraud. Why did I stay in the Church when it was clear that so much about it was making me unhappy? Yet how could I leave if leaving meant I’d done something wrong? This insidious aspect of Hubbard’s religion would wind up keeping me attached to the Church for seven years. People often ask, “Why didn’t you just leave?” It’s hard to explain, certainly to justify, how Scientology manages to erode what you, yourself, believe, replacing it with a certainty that the answers to all of life’s problems can be found only in the Tech. I eventually managed to summon the will to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I was thrilled to be accepted, and the workshop’s distance from Los Angeles, and Scientology — geographically, culturally, intellectually — allowed me to finally slide away. *** I spent ten years of my life pretending that decade in Scientology hadn’t happened (seven years in the Church, and three more before I was certain I wouldn’t be persuaded to return). It took another decade to confront and start to write about it. All these years later, I still recall those days — those years — I spent afflicted by doubt. I often wondered if others felt that way. I often thought of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Who would be the little boy who pointed, who would finally say what needed to be said? When would that person be me? Sands Hall’s memoir, FLUNK. START. Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology, is out today from Counterpoint Press. | | | | |  Illustration by Jayde Perkin | I’m a registered dietitian in private practice, and I’m more or less a food therapist. The gig wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, coming out of my clinical-nutrition graduate program, but I’ve fully embraced the role. In grad school, I pored over organic chemistry with serious gusto. But after finishing my dietetic residency, I realized just how much the science takes a backseat to the emotional aspects in real life. Early on, I noticed a recurring complaint among my clients that’s still ongoing today: Most can immediately rattle off all the things they ought to be doing — limiting added sugar, exercising portion control, making more thoughtful food choices at restaurants, etc. The issue is that they’re not actually doing those things on a regular basis. There’s a gap between their intentions to get healthier and their day-to-day eating behaviors. So before we get to the actual meal planning, the crux of our initial work plays out more like a food therapy session, getting to the bottom of why they aren’t doing those things. Ironically, the “why” is never what people fear it must be — lack of willpower or ability — not even close. The reality is, it’s complicated. For most of us, what we choose to eat is loaded. Consider this: Beyond using food as a way to nurture and bond with people, we also see it as a pretty powerful symbol of security and comfort, good times, and even courtship and seduction. Plus, we are taught as kids that food is how we reward ourselves (getting pizza for good school marks) and how we self-soothe (ice cream after a shot at the doctor’s office). We take these lessons into adulthood and continue to use food as an expression of a whole lot of feelings: good, bad, and everything in between. The interesting thing, though, is that we don’t often do much introspection in this arena. Many of us tend to analyze our romantic relationships at length, but we don’t really spend time peeling back the layers when it comes to our relationship with food. Instead, we chalk up our intention-action gaps to unsavory character flaws and beat ourselves up for not being better at life. But the only real mistake here is not digging deeper. Because the more self-knowledge we have about our food hang-ups, the better we are at moving through them, rather than having them stand in our way, making us feel like crap. One of the most loaded topics is the way many of us think about indulging. As far as I’m concerned, indulging involves making a conscious choice that takes into consideration your long-term goals and your right-now wants. We all have both. Meaning: most of us want to look and feel our best three months … six months … a year from now, and at the same time, we want the intoxicating donut this minute. The big misconception is that being healthy is dependent on always choosing the long-term goal over the right-now want. Instead, it’s about having the ability to consider if having the donut is really worth it to you. If it is, put the donut on a plate and enjoy the absolute #$%& out of every morsel. Of course, depending on your big-picture goals, you have to be willing to forgo some of those right-now wants some of the time. But indulgences are a part of being human. The problem is, instead of owning our indulgences, enjoying them thoroughly, and then moving on with our lives, we often bring wonky logic and ethics into the equation. We use tactics like moral licensing and loopholes to rationalize acting on our right-now wants. Moral licensing is the idea that “good” behavior offsets or legitimizes “bad” behavior, as in “I’ve been so good, I deserve to be bad.” Similarly, loopholes are another common way we use flawed logic to explain why we should be excused to indulge. “This doesn’t count”; “It’s the weekend”; “It’s summer”; “I’m on vacation” — you name it, we use it. When it comes to eating, the issue with employing moral licensing is the fallacy that deciding whether to indulge is a matter of vice or virtue. It’s not. Unlike, say, debating whether to cheat on your partner or a test, deciding what to eat versus what not to eat isn’t a moral dilemma. You don’t need an external excuse or extenuating circumstance to eat what you’d like. It really doesn’t matter if you’ve attained inbox zero or you’ve had the worst week of your life. You’re welcome to act on that right-now want, regardless of those circumstances — as long as you do so consciously and take responsibility for the decision. One of the best examples of this is a former client; let’s call her Hope. Hope was an ambitious MBA student at the time who had struggled with her relationship with food for as long as she could remember. Her goal was to lose about 30 pounds and, just as importantly, to free herself from the vortex of food drama. After six months, Hope had lost 25 pounds, when something really remarkable happened. She came back from Europe and said, “I have to tell you something … I ate a CROISSANT!” I asked her how it tasted, and she described it in detail, how buttery and flaky it was. She said that she savored every last bite, and the next day she kept going with the plan we had outlined together. This was the best possible news and the definition of progress in my book. Six months prior, Hope would have rushed through the croissant too quickly to enjoy it (almost like it had never happened), and then eaten two more because she was so mad at herself, and suddenly all her progress would have been ruined. But without the stressful shame-spiral that typically followed, she was able to keep on keeping on. Just to be clear about this: Making healthy food choices is great, and I highly recommend it, but choosing a less-nutritious track isn’t somehow less ethical or more shameful. This shady logic carries us further away from our get-healthy goals without our even realizing it, and then we end up attributing that intention-action gap to lacking willpower and resolve. That’s not the case, but viewing it this way can lead you to throw your hands up in frustration — or, worse, sink into over-it apathy. I think we assume that being hyper-self-critical keeps us in check and that if we practice too much self-compassion around food or our bodies, we’ll lose our edge and let it all go. But this tactic backfires, because feelings of shame and inadequacy are common triggers for reward-seeking behavior (read: sugar-bingeing). This sets up the classic cycle: indulgence, then regret, followed by even greater indulgence and more regret, and so on. Instead of finishing a slice of pizza and closing the box for the night, a shame-ridden person might say, “I already ruined everything. I might as well polish off the whole pie.” My advice? When you unconsciously stray from the plan (this will happen), instead of trying to scold yourself into shape, get analytical. Remember: the more you understand about what makes you tick, the better you’ll get at moving through setbacks, rather than letting them kibosh your progress. So the next time you’re faced with a food decision, stop asking yourself “How good have I been?” or “How much do I deserve this?” or “What day is it?” Instead, check in with yourself, consider “How much do I want this particular food?,” and let your answer guide your behavior. And do yourself a favor and skip the shame-spiral. Shira Lenchewski, MS, RD, is a non-stuffy registered dietitian whose new book, The Food Therapist, is now available. Adapted from The Food Therapist, published on February 13, 2018, by Goop Press, an imprint of Grand Central Life & Style, a division of Hachette Book Group. Copyright © Shira Lenchewski, 2018. All rights reserved. | | | | | | | | |
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