Author: Joan

I’ve stopped watching the news completely.

This isn’t like me. When I lived in Morocco, I made videos after the inauguration comparing what I saw with a VPN to what appeared on U.S. browsers, tracing how the algorithm trims reality for us without asking permission. But now I’m back in the states, and the gaping howl of a real Michigan winter has arrived for the first time in years, sucking the moisture out of my hands and lips as the soft grey sky stretches from horizon to flat horizon.

When I was in Ecuador, my sister told me she didn’t want to know what was going on in the world. I looked at her like she’d confessed to eating drywall. How could you not want to know? From abroad, America’s collapse is lit in neon. Up close, though? You just keep living. I skimmed The Guardian’s U.S. page today and it read like dispatches from a foreign country: apparently we’re bombing Venezuela for reasons that smell like oil.

I used to work in media; I used to work in politics. Now I have zero interest in the world outside my headphones and weighted blanket. That scares me a little — but not enough to turn the news back on.

Everything is going to hell. I don’t need the updates.

Six weeks in the U.S. and it’s like I never left. I knew it would happen — that the Andes would fade — but I didn’t expect the erasure to be this fast. I had a Title IX flare-up in a very questionable way at my first post, and I start the next one Monday. I’m going to Mexico in twelve days for the holidays, so I’ll get a break from whatever this weather is. And I need to stay in one place for a while, so it might as well be here.

Everything looks “fine.” Too much salt on the roads, strip malls with vacancies, kids fried from overstimulation and not enough adults in the building. My Toyota starts in the morning, my bed is soft, my heart echoes. My kids still live with their dad — who scares them — and everyone pretends that’s normal.

It’s a normal timeline running parallel to extraordinary times. The strange part is forgetting that I changed.

International school job fairs are revving up for next year, and I feel bone-tired. I don’t know if I can do another round of reinvention. I love kids. I’m good at teaching. But all I want to do is write. And statistically, writing is a terrible plan. The economy is pretending to be fine but rotting under the floorboards, and I’m lucky to have a job lined up for the year.

Still — the books won’t stop knocking on my cerebral cortex. I turn around and there’s another one waiting: the guide for homeschooling kids with special needs; the book about how men aren’t actually lonely, they’re just unmodeled; the sci-fi romance where a stay-at-home mom gets abducted by aliens and saves the world; the memoir that elbows me in my sleep; the book of metaphors about teaching.

I’m full of books, not IEP goals. They’re not going to get written in a classroom, and they’re definitely not going to get written when I fall asleep in my chair at 7 p.m. next to the unopened boxes that allegedly contain a couch.

Everything feels unreal. Anesthetized. Wrapped in seven layers of gauze.

Over Thanksgiving, Meijer had persimmons. I got excited — kaki in Morocco were the size of my fist, so juicy they ran down my wrist, sweet in a way that felt almost pharmaceutical. The ones from Meijer were small. Hard. Three weeks later they still haven’t softened. They taste like cardboard.

There’s something wrong here. My pattern recognition isn’t blaring sirens, but it’s humming. An itch under the snowpack. A shift in the air pressure. Things are off.

We’re not getting through this winter without a storm.

I’m calling it now.

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When the twins were small, I handled Thanksgiving and my ex, Lewis, did Christmas. The day after my feast, we’d go chop down the tree—the kids waddling in snowsuits so thick they could hardly bend, me half-asleep after cooking for 16 people the day before. The sky would spit snow while they ran ahead, and I trudged behind in a haze I didn’t know was exhaustion until much later.

Sometimes we would have people staying at the house with us as we got closer to the holiday itself. Most of the family was just a few hours drive away, so they came the day of, but sometimes we had people stay over. My sister would come from Wisconsin, or my brother would come from up north. My dad would come from Ohio. And one of those years, we were all hanging out, and Lewis made breakfast for dinner. It was his favorite thing to make: he’d scramble a dozen eggs and make a platter of bacon. He’d make a stack of toast and sometimes waffles, although it’s not the waffles I remember from this particular year. 

It wasn’t anything he’d made at all. It was an orange.

There were at least six people around the table. I can’t remember who all of them were, but I know that the kids were next to me on my right, and my brother and sister were across the table. Lewis put all of the food on the table, and we all were sitting down. Seating was tight in the dining room with the table expanded and all the people sitting around it. We all were thanking him for making all the food and spooning it onto our plates, passing around the dishes and having side conversations like you do at a big family dinner. I looked down at my plate, and I remember thinking it was so much grease. 

I looked over the kids’ small heads at Lewis. He was sitting right next to the sideboard with the fruit bowl on it. I raised my voice over the conversation and asked if he could please pass me an orange.

He picked one out of the bowl.

The next thing I knew, my glasses slammed into my cheekbone. A flash of pain. My sinus burned. My nose started dripping. My eyes watered, and before I could stop myself the words came out:

“Why did you do that to me?”

I reached up to my nose, and pulled my fingers away. They were covered in blood. There was a moment of perfect silence.

My sister laughed. My brother shot to his feet, ducked behind the crowded chairs, and disappeared into the kitchen. I sat frozen with blood on my hands, trying not to cry. He came back with a cool paper towel and wiped my nose. That small kindness steadied me.

I looked down the table at my husband, the man who had stood before God and promised to love and care for me, the father of my children, and he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring at his plate and shovelling eggs into his mouth, muttering about how he was hungry. 

Someone else at the table, I don’t know who, started talking about poor Lewis, it wasn’t his fault. The story gelled quickly. What a random thing to have happen, to toss your wife an orange and she couldn’t catch it in time. She’s so clumsy sometimes, it wasn’t his fault it happened to hit her in the nose and then all that blood… the poor guy. And everything was okay. The blood stopped relatively quickly and we all got to eat our delicious dinner of scrambled eggs (that were slightly cold), perfectly done bacon (that had zero nutritional value), and white toast (that I never ate because I hate toast). And after a few minutes, someone mock-whined, “why did you do that to me?” and everyone laughed. It became a family joke. 

Years later, long after I left, I remembered something that made my stomach drop: he threw it overhand.

I was less than six feet away.

And today I realized he threw it inches from our children’s faces.

That asshole had everyone so well-trained.

But it isn’t one act that makes a thing abuse. Abuse is not the pain or the blood or the tears—I stayed another ten years after that dinner. Abuse is the moment you push down your own emotional response because you know there’s no point showing it. It’s knowing nothing you do will change anything, so you keep moving forward into a life that isn’t what you thought it would be. You adjust your reality until the unacceptable becomes normal and you become the problem. You up your antidepressants and getting something new to help you sleep.

I was lucky. I left. Most women don’t. Many are in marriages that resemble mine in some way. Not all were hit with oranges in front of their families, who then comforted the man who threw it. But many are lied to, minimized, or managed. Many have accepted a life that feels muted and inevitable because someone needs them to keep the machinery running. They don’t know their sepia-toned misery isn’t normal.

They don’t realize that our default is actually technicolor, just like we thought it was when we were kids.

I’m alone this Thanksgiving, but I know I’m not really alone. I can see in color now. Even if I’m the only one in my apartment tonight, I welcome the sisters who don’t yet know they’re my sisters. I’m laying the table. The meal is almost ready. Soon we can sit down together and say grace.

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It’s been a while. I’ve missed you.

I’m sitting in a chair from IKEA—with an ottoman, thank you very much—in a carpeted apartment looking out at a maple tree that’s already lost all its leaves. The only other furniture I have is a bed—memory foam, thank you very much—and four lamps, two of which I still haven’t figured out where to put. My end tables are a printer box and the box from one of the lamps. I have a snake plant in a bucket named George, a yoga mat, and today I broke down and bought a programmable coffee maker because I get up at 5:45 am for my job.

The wifi is fast, I have a RAV4 again, and I’m still trying to find a kind of bread that won’t make me sick.

And winter is coming fast.

If I sit in just the right spot, I can watch the sun set past one of the other buildings in this complex. My balcony faces west, and the pinks and oranges are outstanding. The problem is that the sun sets at 5:15 right now and I have to have my eyes closed by 9:45—U.S. high school start times are inhumane. Everything is very flat here, and the other day I passed a car with a sticker that said We Are All Charlie Kirk.

No, sir or madam, we are not.

There turns out to be a role called “travel special education teacher.” You make good money, the contract ends at the end of the school year, and they parachute you into places that are in deep shit and ask you to create structures and then leave. This is exactly the kind of work I love. I’ve never been the person who can settle into the same job for 20 years. I always imagined I could be that person if I tried hard enough, but the truth is I need an end date.

It doesn’t mean I don’t love the kids, the school, or the town—I do. But I’m built for repair work, not permanence. Hand me a stack of overdue IEPs and an impossible scheduling situation and I’ll vibrate with glee. Make me sit through parent-teacher conferences for the rest of eternity and… ugh.

I’ve always moved every two or three years, except when I was married, and the only reason I stayed then was for the stability of everyone around me. And I was good at it—really good. I threw myself into the community-building rituals of being a Midwestern mom. But it was very, very, very hard.

Lately I’ve started thinking of myself as having a border collie brain. It needs to herd things, and it needs to keep moving. You can’t make a border collie sit still unless they’re exhausted. And at the end of the day, I am very, very tired right now.

And weirdly happy.

I went to the Detroit Institute of Arts today. I wandered through the African art exhibit, and I didn’t see anything from Morocco. Morocco is part of Africa. There was some gorgeous work from Valencia in the Islamic art section, but the rest was mostly Iran and Turkey. They were beautiful, but not representative. If you’re going to call something Islamic art, then where’s Indonesia? And anyway—Islam is the religion, not the people. That’s like calling everything else Christian art.

But looking at the calligraphy, I heard the echo of the call to prayer in the deepest parts of my ears, and I was grinning like an idiot. And when I came home I wondered whether I should buy a couch or do a month in Bali.

I’m happy here, and it’s home, but also it’s not home. I’m living in a part of the state where my mother’s and father’s bloodlines intersect within fifteen miles. Some of the people I work with know my cousins. I’m learning that little things I thought were family quirks are actually regional language tics, and somehow the highways here feel braided into my DNA. No one has any money, no one has any time, everything is too expensive, and I’m trying to uphold structures that may not even exist by the end of this school year. Michigan will be fine, but further south—I pray for those kids.

There’s a lot to write about. My Spanish is exceptional now, so Cuenca was worth it for that alone, but I’m not looking forward to the deep freeze of January and February, or the political weirdness that refuses to die. I try not to think about how Stalin starved Ukraine and instead focus on generalizing math skills for kids with IEPs and keeping them out of jail when they take a hit off a vape pen in the middle of gym class.

I missed this, sometimes. I can only handle so many rich kids at once. I’m traveling to two places for Thanksgiving, and I’m eyeing Mexico—not the beach, somewhere with good coffee and very little English—for Christmas break. I’m thinking bigger for Spring Break. Winter here is brutal, and I don’t want to be immobilized under a blanket staring at salt stains on my shoes for two months. I want to remember color and light.

But the hummingbirds by my window are distant now. So are the goats on Sunday mornings, their bells tinkling on the other side of the compound wall. I’m in the land of my people for the coming season, with a lease and a car loan and George.

I’m okay. At least for a while.

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I thought I was being a nice person. 

I knew that I was eventually going to have to say something to a particular person, and I didn’t want to because I thought that they would figure it out themselves. Well, they didn’t, so I had to say something, and I hate conflict.

On the other side of the hour of angry tears that followed, I realized that I have one hell of a resentment. It’s the kind of resentment that makes me hate being sober. I want to stay pissed. I love, love, LOVE this particular resentment, and want to hold on to it forever. But I can’t–and it sucks.

Men are fucking assholes. I have a goddamned resentment about men, especially men with substance abuse issues. I hate almost all of them. They have no idea how cruel the world can be, because no matter how far they fall there will always be someone to give them another chance. 

Women don’t get those chances. 

Last night, I received a message from someone who I thought was a friend that made me realize that they are DEEP in the shit right now. They are actively demolishing their life, and I’ve been feeling bad, and listening, and sending fun pictures of the Andes. I’ve been hanging on their messages to see if they’re okay. But I realized that, in all likelihood, they’re completely disassociated from reality right now.

Because they have a penis, they keep getting away with it. I don’t know how much is substance abuse and how much is a midlife crisis, but they’re in it deep and they still have a place to live, a job, and people who care about them deeply. No matter how many people tell them off, they’re probably going to have an inexhaustible supply of people who will prop them up and tell them that everything is going to be okay and invest their light in them. 

Women do not have it this easy. 

When I got sober–oh so many days ago–and I told my ex that I was going to go to meetings, he asked me if I had to go every day. He wondered out loud how long I would stick with it. I sat quietly with him at the kitchen table as he told me that he’d heard stories of people joining the group I joined and coming to their house and pouring all of the liquor down the sink. He started getting drunk in the basement three times a week: I would hear it, my hands shaking, as I put our kids to bed. 

My ex was more concerned about the liquor than the mother of his children. 

I was full of fucking rage this morning, that this guy I used to know still has a family and a job and gets to look like the cool guy. He had talked to me about getting sober, and I not only told him how I did it, I debated it with him. He seemed to come to some sort of resolution. 

But nothing seems to have changed. 

That was well over a year ago. How was he still winning? How did he get to keep floating by on the fact that he’s a fucking white man?

Men have everything in the goddamned world—the option to choose not to get sober, to choose not to do the right thing. Those bastards are allowed to be bastards, just because they want to be. And I had to schedule my meetings around the binges of the man who’d sworn in front of God that he loved me more than anything in the entire world.

This poor guy was lucky I didn’t get on a plane, drive up to his house, and kick down the door to give him a piece of my mind. He was lucky he was on another continent. 

But here is where he becomes the lesson. And let me say, I hate this fucking part.

It’s the option that pisses me off. It’s that he has the option. I’m not mad at this guy in particular, or all white men everywhere, I’m mad that I myself never had the option. It was only one of the world’s white men who spent a decade and a half narrowing my life to one bad option, and it wasn’t this guy. And I’m not really mad at that one white man. I’m mad at me, for not leaving before the bad option he chose for me was the only one left. 

And being mad at me is what makes me drink. So I took a walk, and got a Ritter Sport, and came home and ate a peanut butter and honey sandwich for dinner. I breathed, and opened my computer, and the wave of grace that washed over me prepared me for what I’m about to say. 

To the man to whom I sent a somewhat crispy message this morning: if you’re reading this, you know who you are. This, and all of the days I’m leaving you alone that follow, are my amends. I still don’t want you to contact me until you figure your shit out. But I want you to see how it works, imperfect as it is. It’s the classic “it’s not you, it’s me.” 

I tried to tell you this with love, but I believe I might have failed. We’re all just awkwardly fumbling our way toward being better people, no matter how many days we’ve strung together. We’re doing the best with what we have, and we’re trying to be kind without getting our asses kicked. That’s grace in motion.

But seriously, you’re lucky beyond your wildest dreams. Please don’t waste it.

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