Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 138 of 501 · 20 per page

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Mixed in with the crush-sickness, stiffening out the saccharine taste, floated a few drops of unease. Amy’s trust of Reese was shaky. Or rather, the fact that she didn’t fully trust Reese, that she couldn’t quite map squarely the Reese she knew onto the Reese about whom she’d heard stories. The expression “suite of personality disorders” had been said to her about Reese by two different people. Amy couldn’t say whether the expression had been repeated simply because it was a catchy queer-approved pseudo-psychological way to talk shit or whether the phrase arose independently each time because it apparently described Reese so well. But either way, the general consensus when Amy moved Reese into her apartment a week after meeting was: 1) Yes, that’s exactly how Reese operates and 2) Girl, be careful. The first person to use the expression about Reese had been a trans guy named Ricky, whom Reese had dumped cold when she took up and moved in with Stanley, the rich finance guy Reese had left for Amy. “T don’t know exactly what Reese’s diagnosis would be,” Ricky told Amy, when she volunteered to help him fix his motorcycle, which mostly consisted of handing him tools; Amy was ideal for the task because she knew enough about engines and tools to play assistant, but she also understood that ogling a trans guy while he fixed his motorcycle was gender-validation time for them both. “But it’s got to be a whole suite of personality disorders.” “Come on,” Amy chided, “just say you don’t like her, don’t play armchair psychiatrist.” Ricky hesitated. He’d propped his motorcycle, some sort of a 1970s-era Honda, on its center stand in the middle of the Bushwick sidewalk. Pedestrians stepped over the scattered paneling he’d removed. “Reese has a lot of amazing qualities,” Ricky said, “but ’'m probably the wrong person to enumerate them ’cause—and it hurts my pride to say this—I was stupid enough to let her casually break my heart. ’'m not going to say anything more if you’re too wrapped up with her to hear it.” “Please tell me.” “She’s so incredibly charming when she wants to be,” Ricky said, crouching by the chain, “but she has only a few close friends. That alcoholic, Iris, who I trust less than her, and otherwise, just whoever else is infatuated with her at any given moment. Sociopaths and pathological liars are charming like that. They'll read you, process you, figure out your insecurities, then tell you everything you want to hear because for as long as they desire you, they believe it too. But eventually, it falls apart, and you figure out it isn’t true—can you put an eight millimeter socket on the quarter-inch ratchet?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames sifts through the papers in the manila folder Katrina has brought. Beneath the printouts from her doctor are more printouts, from what look like Reddit forums. “What are these?” She drops her hand to her stomach. It’s flat, no baby bump, but she’s already holding herself like a pregnant woman. “Well, I know you said you were sterile now. I was looking it up, and vasectomies are like ninety-nine percent effective, but I found some message boards, from men who still got women pregnant—” He raises a hand. “Wait a sec. I never said I had a vasectomy.” His office, like all the offices in this row, has only a glass wall to separate it from the hallway. He’s at the end of the row, beside an alcove into which is tucked the copy machine, water cooler, coffee maker, and a little kitchenette stocked with—due to a recent human resources campaign—only healthy organic snacks. Coworker hallway traffic remains constant throughout the day. He would not consider his office to be an ideal location to come out as a former transsexual. “No? But we haven’t used condoms for months and this whole time I thought—what did you mean, then? Like low sperm count?” “IT had very low testosterone for a while.” He works to keep his voice casual, to resist the urge to lower it nervously. “And during that time, my testicles atrophied, and my doctor told me that none of my sperm would ever again be viable.” When Ames first went in for an estrogen prescription, he saw a gentle, elderly endocrinologist, who had taken on trans patients not because of any special interest in gender, but because trans patients were, in his words, “so happy to come see me for treatment.” The bulk of the doctor’s other patients suffered from hormonal disorders that made them emotionally volatile. After this endo discovered trans gratitude, he filled his appointments with as many transsexuals as he could find. Ames, who had no history with trans therapy, and none of the paperwork that the hormone gatekeepers tended to require, had spent weeks before the appointment fretting that the endo would declare him “not really trans” and deny him hormones. Upon hearing that the doctor appreciated appreciation, Ames therefore gushed with gratitude, and duly walked out with a prescription for injectable estrogen. At his next appointment, the endo confided, “Perhaps, last time, I prescribed somewhat hastily. I should have said more about sterility.” He told Ames that permanent sterility would set in within the first six months of a hormone replacement therapy regimen, and he gave Ames a recommendation for a sperm bank.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The screen saver on Amy’s computer was of crystallizing fractals. When on the phone, she had developed the mindless habit of following the formations as they appeared, bouncing her eyes off the slight irregularities in the pattern. “Yeah, okay, I understand. But listen. There’s an orientation tonight. Omar is going to tell his sister that we’re coming. A new director at the agency has been pushing for trans and genderqueer foster homes, because so many of the kids in the system are queer. If we move soon, Omar’s sister could introduce 9 us. “When’s the orientation?” “At seven at a Unitarian church. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I'll take the rest of the day off. We can get ready for it together.” “T can’t. I have work.” “What? Take off work! We’ve been talking about a chance like this for years!” “My work is just as important as yours, Amy.” Amy sighed. She had accidentally poked right at that sore spot, hadn’t she? “I never said it wasn’t. I’m suggesting that I take off work too.” “Well, how about we meet at home at like four?” What was going on? She had figured Reese would be rushing home already. Not this grudging response. Reese knew the situation as well as Amy did: Most of the private adoption agencies, the ones that procured babies from faraway countries, charged an adoption fee in excess of twenty thousand and up to forty thousand dollars. That was just the beginning of the costs. Amy calculated that if she and Reese went to the fanciest agencies and paid the fees, such a show of money might work like in expensive boutiques. As if their transness were merely an eccentric outcropping of a refined taste. But Amy hadn’t saved forty thousand dollars, and might not any time soon, especially not supporting Reese. She’d drain her bank account putting together half that, leaving nothing to raise the baby, much less the miscellaneous expenses and travel that two of her older coworkers had explained to her came with their own efforts to adopt. This left adoption through the foster care system. And while foster care certainly allowed for LGBTQ parents by law, in practice, the heavy oversight and rights of the natal parents in the foster system meant that fewer queers than straights made it to the adoption phase. And until today, Amy had never heard of a double-trans couple getting anywhere at all. But okay, whatever. Of course she could meet Reese at four.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  —I sealed the Ziploc bag around the last quarter of my sandwich, got up, and tossed it into an overfilled trash can. I heard a voice from behind me. “How concerned should I be that you haven’t said more than two words in a row all day?” “Thought spiral,” I mumbled in reply. Daisy had known me since we were six, long enough to get it. “I figured. Sorry, man. Let’s hang out today.” This girl Molly walked up to us, smiling, and said, “Uh, Daisy, just FYI, your Kool-Aid dye job is staining your shirt.” Daisy looked down at her shoulders, and indeed, her striped top had turned pink in spots. She flinched for a second, then straightened her spine. “Yeah, it’s part of the look, Molly. Stained shirts are huge in Paris right now.” She turned away from Molly and said, “Right, so we’ll go to your house and watch Star Wars: Rebels .” Daisy was really into Star Wars—and not just the movies, but also the books and the animated shows and the kids’ show where they’re all made out of Lego. Like, she wrote fan fiction about Chewbacca’s love life. “And we will improve your mood until you are able to say three or even four words in a row; sound good?” “Sounds good.” “And then you can take me to work. Sorry, but I need a ride.” “Okay.” I wanted to say more, but the thoughts kept coming, unbidden and unwanted. If I’d been the author, I would’ve stopped thinking about my microbiome. I would’ve told Daisy how much I liked her idea for Mychal’s art project, and I would’ve told her that I did remember Davis Pickett, that I remembered being eleven and carrying a vague but constant fear. I would’ve told her that I remembered once at camp lying next to Davis on the edge of a dock, our legs dangling over, our backs against the rough-hewn planks of wood, staring together up at a cloudless summer sky. I would’ve told her that Davis and I never talked much, or even looked at each other, but it didn’t matter, because we were looking at the same sky together, which is maybe more intimate than eye contact anyway. Anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see. [image file=Image00010.jpg] MARINA WATERS JOHN GREEN is the author of Looking for Alaska , An Abundance of Katherines , Paper Towns , The Fault in Our Stars , Turtles All the Way Down , and Will Grayson, Will Grayson (with David Levithan). His books have received many accolades, including a Printz Medal, a Printz Honor, and an Edgar Award. John has twice been a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize and was selected by TIME magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. With his brother, Hank, John has co-created many online video projects, including Vlogbrothers and the educational channel Crash Course.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “Has anyone seen Brother Terrell in the last hour or so?” After the altercation with the Klan and the threats and beatings, Dockery made sure someone stayed with Brother Terrell at all times when he was at the tent.Brother Cotton cleared his throat. “He left a little while ago.”“Where’d he go?”“He said he needed to take Sarah back to her room. Said he wouldn’t be gone long.”My mother’s lips pursed, then relaxed. She exhaled through her nostrils and they flared, the way they did when she was mad. Betty Ann sat stiff-backed, ankles crossed, hands folded in her lap. She placed her gaze someplace beyond us. Sarah, tall and thin with long soft hair that flipped on the ends. She worked in Brother Terrell’s office in Greenville, South Carolina, scheduling crusades, opening mail, and taking out checks and money orders to put them in the bank. She smiled at Pam and me like we were her special friends. When we played grown-ups, Pam always got to be Sarah. I picked up one of the stick ladies I had dropped when I fell asleep and twirled her between my fingers. Her Kleenex dress floated through the air. Pretty. “Mama, what is lust?” She whirled around from the kitchen sink. Soapsuds drooled from her hands onto the floor, but she didn’t seem to notice.“Where did you hear that word?”“I heard it in church. Brother Terrell talked about it the other night. You know, the night he took Sarah home.”She looked down at the puddle of suds on the floor. “I might have known you’d be paying attention at that moment.” She tossed a dish towel to me and turned back to the sink.“Wipe that up.”I wiped up the suds and handed the towel back to her. “Do men lust after you?”Her back stiffened. “Donna Marie, did anyone ever tell you that children are to be seen and not heard?“But . . .” I dropped the subject. “Do you think I’m pretty?”“Of course.”“Pam’s prettier.”“Pretty is as pretty does.”“What does that mean?”Mama dried her hands, turned around, and put her hands on my shoulders. “It means how you treat people matters more than how you look.” She cupped my chin, tried to run her fingers through my hair, and ran into a nest of tangles. I gritted my teeth.“You’re supposed to brush your hair occasionally.”“I do brush it, occasionally.”“When’s the last time you washed it?”I didn’t want to get caught lying. “A few days ago.”“Come on, let’s pretty you up a little.”“But . . . you said . . .” My arms and legs went heavy with dread.“This will be fun.”It was not fun. First Mama put me in the tub and tried to scrub the skin off my arms, legs, neck, and even my ears. “Why do you rub so hard?”“Because you don’t use soap when you bathe yourself. Now close your eyes and let’s wash your hair.”I looked up at the ceiling and shut my eyes tight.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  For a moment, Amy almost forgot to be miserable. A tip-off? What did this guy think this was? But then it occurred to Amy that if she could see Reese’s R, maybe Reese could see her A. Maybe Reese had been tracking Amy’s movement for months! Maybe that’s why she felt safe to cheat whenever she wanted! Amy had tagged herself like some sort of research dolphin! No. C’mon. That’s paranoid. Right? Totally paranoid. But... The R was moving too fast for Reese to be on foot. Was she on a bus? No! She was in his car! “They're gonna get away!” she cried. “We have to follow them.” “Okay,” said her driver. “But you have to update your destination in ‘location’ in the Uber app. I can’t just drive where you say.” “What?” “IT won't get paid except for the destination in the phone. Create a second destination.” “But I don’t know their destination!” Her driver shrugged. “I can’t go except for where you put in.” This was bullshit! In the movies, you get in a taxicab and shout “Follow that car!” Uber ruined everything. “Tl give you cash for the extra.” He shook his head sadly. “That’s not the way Uber works. I could get in trouble.” She didn’t know what to say. They'd had a rapport! Okay, no, she hadn’t really flirted with him when he gave her the chance, but... “Fine, how do I change destinations?” “Well, actually what would be best would be to add a second destination, since we are basically almost at yours.” “T don’t know how to do that!” Amy wailed. “Tll show you,” he said, and pulled over. “No! Don’t pull over, they'll get away!” “Tt’s faster than telling you!” he cried back. She shoved her phone to him, and absurdly, he began to explain, step by step how to add a second destination to the Uber route. Goddammit! she wanted to scream. My heart is breaking and there is no pathos in this world! Instead, as he went through the steps she said, “Okay, yes, thank you. Yes, I understand now. Yep. They were on the corner of Bedford and Metropolitan when I last looked. Let’s put that in as the second destination. Yes. That’s great. Perfect.” Of course, by the time he handed the phone back to her, and turned his attention back to the wheel, the R had crept farther north. The green flag waved and a race commenced: Amy’s smartphone typing skills as she updated the location on the fly against Reese’s indeterminate travel. “T think they’re going to the park,” Reese cried. “Which park!?” The driver had returned to her team, ready to fly ahead. “McCarren.” “Tll take Franklin north!” he shouted. “It’s faster, I promise!”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Katrina gets up to make some tea. The kettle boils, and she pours out three cups and returns with them. The three of them sip in silence as the clock ticks. They are together, and miles from each other, their thoughts turning to themselves, then turning to the baby, each in her own way contemplating how her tenuous rendition of womanhood has become dependent upon the existence of this little person, who is not yet, and yet may not be. To divorced cis women, who, like me, had to face starting their life over without either reinvesting in the illusions from the past, or growing bitter about the future. AcKNOWLEDGM ENTS THIS BOOK IS a story of trans feminine culture in the new millennium. As a result, I am indebted to the trans women everywhere who have changed their whole lives to create our cultures. I want to thank every trans girl I have met in the years that I wrote this book, but especially those who lived in New York, Seattle, the Bay Area, rural Tennessee, and Chicago. Thank you to the specific trans people who made this book possible: Theda Hammel, Harron Walker, January Hunt, T. Clutch Fleischmann, Cecilia Gentili (in a book about trans moms, she is trans mom to so many girls in NYC), Morgan M. Page, A.J. Lewis, Sophie Searcy, Crissy Bell (to whom goes credit for the “four funerals and a funeral” joke), Casey Plett, Sybil Lamb, Davey Davis, Aubrey Schuster, Jordy Rosenberg, Cyd Nova, Ambrose Stacey-Fleischmann, Ceyenne Doroshow, Gaines Blasdel, Dean Spade, Calvin, Hilt, Beau, Lex, and Sophie. May Emma, Bryn, and the other trans women lost during the writing of this book rest in power. There have been so many other women (especially moms!) who have taught me so much. Pike Long, Charlie Starr, Rebecca Novack, Julia Reagan, Florence Menard, Julia Moses, Courtney Lyons, Rachel Lewallen, Siobahn Flood, Allie Grump, Alice Eisenberg, Kendra Grant, Elan, Yvonne Woon, Sarah Schulman, and Katie Liederman all made a difference in the shape of this book. Thinking about the relationship of sex to sex work was also a part of my writing, and to that end, I want to thank the sex workers and sex work activists in NYC in general, but specifically Chloe Mercury, The Villainelle, and Mistress Blunt. I suppose the boys can get some love too: Dan Pacheco, Mike Casarella, Akiva Friedlin, Jon Philipsborn, and Jacob Brown.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She was chewing on her bottom lip, and I asked whether she was nervous. “Well, yeah. Listen, just sit tight and don’t talk,” she told me. “You don’t need to be nervous. But this is the seventh time I’ve been caught smoking. I just don’t want — whatever. I don’t want to upset my dad.” “Does your mom smoke or something?” I asked. “Not anymore,” Alaska said. “It’s fine. You’ll be fine.” I didn’t start to worry until it got to be 4:50 and the Colonel and Takumi were still unaccounted for. The members of the Jury filed in one by one, walking past us without any eye contact, which made me feel worse. I counted all twelve by 4:56, plus the Eagle. At 4:58, the Colonel and Takumi rounded the corner toward the classrooms. I never saw anything like it. Takumi wore a starched white shirt with a red tie with a black paisley print; the Colonel wore his wrinkled pink button-down and flamingo tie. They walked in step, heads up and shoulders back, like some kind of action-movie heroes. I heard Alaska sigh. “The Colonel’s doing his Napoleon walk.” “It’s all good,” the Colonel told me. “Just don’t say anything.” We walked in—two of us wearing ties, and two of us wearing ratty T-shirts—and the Eagle banged an honest-to-God gavel against the podium in front of him. The Jury sat in a line behind a rectangular table. At the front of the room, by the blackboard, were four chairs. We sat down, and the Colonel explained exactly what happened. “Alaska and I were smoking down by the lake. We usually go off campus, but we forgot. We’re sorry. It won’t happen again.” I didn’t know what was going on. But I knew my job: sit tight and shut up. One of the kids looked at Takumi and asked, “What about you and Halter?” “We were keeping them company,” Takumi said calmly. The kid turned to the Eagle then and asked, “Did you see anyone smoking?” “I only saw Alaska, but Chip ran away, which struck me as cowardly, as does Miles and Takumi’s aw-shucks routine,” the Eagle said, giving me the Look of Doom. I didn’t want to look guilty, but I couldn’t hold his stare, so I just looked down at my hands. The Colonel gritted his teeth, like it pained him to lie. “It is the truth, sir.” The Eagle asked if any of us wanted to say anything, and then asked if there were any more questions, and then sent us outside. “What the hell was that?” I asked Takumi when we got outside. “Just sit tight, Pudge.” Why have Alaska confess when she’d already been in trouble so many times? Why the Colonel, who literally couldn’t afford to get in serious trouble? Why not me? I’d never been busted for anything. I had the least to lose. After a couple minutes, the Eagle came out and motioned for us to come back inside.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  There it was. The gate opened, and I saw Evelyn backlit on the top step, her face in shadow.As soon as she was within reach, I grabbed her hand. “I need to talk to you. Please. Right now. Hurry.”She stepped to the side and I told her everything, about the vomit and the crackers and how Sister Coleman said our mama had given us to her. She dropped into a nearby chair.“What do you mean, gave you to her?”“She said she was our new mama.” Gary and I both were crying.Evelyn sat down and pulled Gary into her lap. “Wait a minute. You threw up and she made you eat it? You’re not making this up?”She had to believe me. I talked faster and louder. “She feeds us this salty fish for breakfast, Evelyn. She does it to make us sick. She likes us to throw up, we can tell.”Gary nodded as I talked. People around us were staring. Evelyn’s mother joined us. “What’s going on here?”“I’ll tell you later, Mom.”Evelyn’s arm encircled me. “I am going to find your mama. It will be okay. I promise. Don’t say a word to Sister Coleman. Can you do that?”We nodded. Gary climbed out of her lap, and we turned to go.“Wait.” Evelyn opened her purse and handed the doll clothes to me. “Remember, not a word, even if she asks. I’ll handle this. Don’t worry.”I worried all the way home that evening, through a long night of tossing and turning, and during school the next day. Life could get harder, much harder, if Sister Coleman found out I had confided in Evelyn. And what if Evelyn could not find our mother? Or what if she did, and our mother did not want us back? What else could I have done?I walked home from school, noticing how the homes were so well cared for, no peeling paint, no dirt yards, gardens dark and empty, at least until next spring. I came to Sister Coleman’s house and looked up the driveway. Empty. She was still at work, so she must not know. When I started second grade, Sister Coleman had given me a key to wear around my neck and told me I was old enough to stay by myself after school some days until she could make it home. I pulled the key over my head and fitted it into the front-door lock. Inside, everything looked exactly as it did every other afternoon. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so I followed my routine. I made up the daybed and wandered through the kitchen into the wood-paneled den. A large white tablet stood on my easel, waiting for pictures and stories that had never come. Just beyond the easel, sliding glass doors framed a backyard made up of green on green. We should have been happy here, but things had gone wrong. I had helped them go wrong.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I felt as though we lived our lives on a tightrope and that at any moment the baby would cry unexpectedly or Gary would wet his pants or Pam or I would argue too loudly and everything, everyone, would fall to the ground. It didn’t take a divine revelation to figure out something had to change. We were in revival in some nameless town that was like every other town we passed through. The evening service was long over, and I lay half-asleep under the tent, stretched out across two or three folding chairs, head to toe with Pam. My mother and Betty Ann sat in the row in front of us, talking with a group of believers under the floodlights that hung from one of the center poles. Gary slept on a pallet with Baby Tina beside him. Randall had disappeared as usual, but no one worried about him; he always showed up before it was time to go home. The adults talked endlessly, and I was lulled by the rise and fall of familiar voices discussing topics that should have been harrowing but had become comforting in their familiarity.“You know Brother Terrell says communism is about to spread all over Central America and into Mexico.”“He had those visions of tanks rolling into the US from Mexico.”“If we’re gonna do something for God, we got to do it quick.”A hum of voices agreed. “Uh-huh. Yes, we do.”Several different conversations split off from the main one: talk of Brother Terrell’s fast, money, faith, the lack of faith. I sought out Mama’s low, reassuring voice. “We’re planning to go to Central America next year.” I was wide-awake.“Sister Johnson, my heart goes out to those people.”“Brother Terrell says he wants to start a Bible school down there.”“I heard an orphanage too.”“He cried the whole time he was in Guatemala last time, seein’ those babies wandering the streets hungry, half-naked with no one to take care of them.”The voices took on an urgent tone with everyone talking at once, excited about the prospect of starting a school and an orphanage where those poor kids who didn’t have anyone, not a soul, could live and be taken care of.I kept my eyes closed and listened again for my mother. “I wouldn’t mind spending my whole life there. I’ve always dreamed of living in a foreign country and doing missionary work.”“What about your kids?”I waited.“They could live . . . at the orphanage . . . while we traveled and preached . . . and helped the people.” Mama spoke slowly as if awed at how perfectly everything would work out. I sat up and looked around. I wanted to ask, “But wouldn’t that make us orphans too?”Someone said, “The Lord always makes a way, doesn’t he?” One of the women who sat close to me reached over and smoothed my hair out of my eyes. Mama smiled. Everyone looked sane.I didn’t tell Pam or Randall what I had overheard.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  He stops on the sidewalk. She stops with him, but doesn’t turn. She is holding herself very erect. “Katrina,” he asks, “are you okay?” “T couldn’t bear it,” she said. “The thought of hearing a heartbeat. The woman, she heard it in my voice, and, like, her entire demeanor changed. She clicked out of this whole happy welcome thing into, like, professional mode. Like counselor mode.” “Yeah,” says Ames. He’s heard a recording of a baby’s heartbeat before. The rabbit-fast whooshing of a tiny creature. Such a sound is happening right now, he realizes, inside Katrina—they just lack the ability to detect it. They are still linked at the elbow, and he feels too close to her, physically. But he makes himself hold on to her, and then after a moment, he wants to be closer again, so he takes his hand out of his jacket and puts it in her pocket, beside her hand. “T’ve been so afraid to call,” Katrina says. “Every day I tell myself to call my doctor, to ask about what’s happening inside my body. I can barely bring myself to search online for information. How late is too late, what an abortion entails. When I have to decide what. I’ve been paralyzed about it. And then, this woman called me. It was just because that’s her job and probably a calendar told her to, but it felt like it was meant to happen. She walked me through what happens in an abortion, told me that the sooner I did it, the easier it would be. She helped me schedule it, so all I had to do was call a number to confirm.” They are standing on the sidewalk facing each other, and other pedestrians are breaking around them, like water around a snag in a river. Ames puts his hand on her arm and they step under the awning of a Cajun restaurant. “Did you call that number?” “T can’t do this, Ames,” she says. “I need the stability of a partner who can promise that he’s more or less going to be the same person. I need the stability of someone who can help provide for a child. I want to know what my future will look like. I want to be able to do that for my family too. And you told me you can’t do that. So what choice do I really have?” Ames braces as the future crumbles before him, their own private earthquake. “You have no choice,” he sighs. “And yet, the choice is yours. My choices are the same way.” Katrina scheduled her procedure for four in the afternoon. It is now eleven A.M. and Reese, Katrina, and Ames sit in the living room of Katrina’s apartment. Yesterday, Ames begged Katrina to let him accompany her, and finally she acquiesced. To his surprise, Katrina responded that, if Reese wanted, Reese could come too. “That’s generous of you,” Ames had said carefully. “Are you sure?”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Ames had worked stupidly hard to set up the deal, which culminated in this trip. In his free time, to avoid getting lost in his own thoughts, he’d spent almost every waking minute digesting the intricacies of the pet insurance market, understanding the clients in the online pet arena, and charming his counterparts in the client’s marketing department—all for a chance to show Katrina that he was a reliable person who could protect her reputation and interests, which in turn, he hoped would create a situation in which he’d have an opportune moment to propose his plans for the pregnancy. At dinner with the clients, she surprises him by ordering two bottles of champagne. She commences to fill and empty her glass much more rapidly than he has ever seen her drink, chirping happily that progress on the deal needed celebrating. Two glasses down and Katrina’s cheeks and ears have flushed, her quick eyes taking on a shine. She’s talking to the clients—the pet insurer’s marketing strategist and the assistant chief of business development—with more animation than Ames has seen all week. The men, speaking almost in tandem, like a stage act, explain how they live in a suburb called Naperville. They live in the same neighborhood, with kids who go to the same school, and wives who were friends first—one of them even hired the other. “Oh, that’s cute,” Katrina says. “I bet you two carpool.” The men consider this, and Biz Dev tentatively agrees—yes, perhaps it is indeed cute. To Ames, Katrina’s out-of-character theatrical enthusiasm, like her champagne order, demonstrates an attempt to cover for emotional distress beyond what he’d expected—she seems on the edge of some wild action—but neither man notices. Instead they marvel at the fun side that this previously all-business lady has unlocked from her safe and brought to dinner. She avoids Ames’s eye contact, and when he manages to catch hers, the brown of her eyes shines back deep and glassy rather than with the customary shrewdness he expects from her glance. The appetizers arrive: various fried breaded things, and a plate of cheeses, on top of which sits a pile of fresh cheese curds. The waiter, with the same gravitas that he names the Norwegian brunost, announces the curds are “squeaky cheese,” clarifying that they will squeak when you bite them. Katrina pops a few curds of squeaky cheese into her mouth and chews with her mouth open, biting into the curds with her molars. “Oh, can you hear that?” she asks. Biz Dev leans close to her face to listen. “I can!” he says, with more amazement than Ames feels is required for listening to someone else chew food. “Can you hear it when I do it too?”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  expected outcome of the trial. This prediction from the fourfold pattern was confirmed by experiments conducted with law students and practicing judges, and also by analyses of actual negotiations in the shadow of civil trials. Now consider “frivolous litigation,” when a plaintiff with a flimsy case files a large claim that is most likely to fail in court. Both sides are aware of the probabilities, and both know that in a negotiated settlement the plaintiff will get only a small fraction of the amount of the claim. The negotiation is conducted in the bottom row of the fourfold pattern. The plaintiff is in the left-hand cell, with a small chance to win a very large amount; the frivolous claim is a lottery ticket for a large prize. Overweighting the small chance of success is natural in this situation, leading the plaintiff to be bold and aggressive in the negotiation. For the defendant, the suit is a nuisance with a small risk of a very bad outcome. Overweighting the small chance of a large loss favors risk aversion, and settling for a modest amount is equivalent to purchasing insurance against the unlikely event of a bad verdict. The shoe is now on the other foot: the plaintiff is willing to gamble and the defendant wants to be safe. Plaintiffs with frivolous claims are likely to obtain a more generous settlement than the statistics of the situation justify. The decisions described by the fourfold pattern are not obviously unreasonable. You can empathize in each case with the feelings of the plaintiff and the defendant that lead them to adopt a combative or an accommodating posture. In the long run, however, deviations from expected value are likely to be costly. Consider a large organization, the City of New York, and suppose it faces 200 “frivolous” suits each year, each with a 5% chance to cost the city $1 million. Suppose further that in each case the city could settle the lawsuit for a payment of $100,000. The city considers two alternative policies that it will apply to all such cases: settle or go to trial. (For simplicity, I ignore legal costs.) If the city litigates all 200 cases, it will lose 10, for a total loss of $10 million. If the city settles every case for $100,000, its total loss will be $20 million. When you take the long view of many similar decisions, you can see that paying a premium to avoid a small risk of a large loss is costly. A similar analysis applies to each of the cells of the fourfold pattern: systematic deviations from expected value are costly in the long run—and this rule applies to both risk aversion and risk seeking. Consistent overweighting of improbable outcomes—a feature of intuitive decision making—eventually leads to inferior outcomes.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  “She never wants to wear anything anymore but pants.”I envisioned myself rolling in the sawdust with Brother Terrell trying to pin me down and cast the devil out of me. I was relieved to hear him tell my mother, “Look, we need to, uh, you know, I think, well, let’s pray about this, okay?”Before she could answer, he punched in his new eight-track tape and turned up the volume. I was not a Johnny Cash fan, but “Folsom Prison Blues” sure sounded good that night. Brother Terrell had decided that while rock and roll was blasphemous and rebellious, and he didn’t mean that in a good way, God actually liked country music. I was eleven, going on twelve, nearing the Age of Accountability, that time when a kid becomes an adult and God begins to record every sinful thought, word, and deed on a permanent spiritual record. Mama confirmed that holiness people considered twelve the cutoff point between childhood and adulthood. It depended on the individual. She raised her eyebrows and quoted from the New Testament: “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required.”I knew what she meant. All those years of hearing Brother Terrell preach the Word meant God had higher expectations of me. That did not seem fair. But neither did having the world end before I grew up. The end had been in sight for as long as I could remember. I took for granted that God, the devil, and the Communists had signed some sort of foreordained annihilation pact that was already unfolding. What I found more disturbing was that the more I learned of the outside world, the more it seemed to corroborate the apocalyptic visions on which I had been raised. At school they had us crouch under our desks, put our hands over our heads, and wait for the end. I read about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the issues of Time and Newsweek my mother brought home, and even between the ads in Seventeen magazine. I saw photos of boys who looked like high-school students fighting in Vietnam, pictures of other kids fighting in the streets with the police, pictures of blissedout teenagers, half-naked, listening to rock and roll. Proof we lived in the last days. And yet, I wanted to be in those pictures.It was a Saturday afternoon. I was walking along Highway 6, beating at the long grasses with a stick I had picked up. My destination: the cemetery located about a mile from our trailer, the only place close enough to reach by foot. I couldn’t ride my bike because there was no shoulder on the road and the burrs would flatten my tires. Horses were too moody a mode of transportation. The day had gone cold and gray. A pickup passed. An old car. An eighteen-wheeler. All going somewhere.

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  36 Life as a Story Early in the days of my work on the measurement of experience, I saw Verdi’s opera La Traviata. Known for its gorgeous music, it is also a moving story of the love between a young aristocrat and Violetta, a woman of the demimonde. The young man’s father approaches Violetta and convinces her to give up her lover, to protect the honor of the family and the marriage prospects of the young man’s sister. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, Violetta pretends to reject the man she adores. She soon relapses into consumption (the nineteenth-century term for tuberculosis). In the final act, Violetta lies dying, surrounded by a few friends. Her beloved has been alerted and is rushing to Paris to see her. Hearing the news, she is transformed with hope and joy, but she is also deteriorating quickly. No matter how many times you have seen the opera, you are gripped by the tension and fear of the moment: Will the young lover arrive in time? There is a sense that it is immensely important for him to join his beloved before she dies. He does, of course, some marvelous love duets are sung, and after 10 minutes of glorious music Violetta dies. On my way home from the opera, I wondered: Why do we care so much about those last 10 minutes? I quickly realized that I did not care at all about the length of Violetta’s life. If I had been told that she died at age 27, not age 28 as I believed, the news that she had missed a year of happy life would not have moved me at all, but the possibility of missing the last 10 minutes mattered a great deal. Furthermore, the emotion I felt about the lovers’ reunion would not have changed if I had learned that they actually had a week together, rather than 10 minutes. If the lover had come too late, however, La Traviata would have been an altogether different story. A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing. Duration neglect is normal in a story, and the ending often defines its character. The same core features appear in the rules of narratives and in the memories of colonoscopies, vacations, and films. This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference. It is not only at the opera that we think of life as a story and wish it to end

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  A target who is strong and settled is hard to seduce. But even the strongest people can be made vulnerable if you can isolate them from their nests and safety nets. Block out their friends and family with your constant presence, alienate them from the world they are used to, and take them to places they do not know. Get them to spend time in your environment. Deliberately disturb their habits, get them to do things they have never done. They will grow emotional, making it easier to lead them astray. Disguise all this in the form of a pleasurable experience, and your targets will wake up one day distanced from everything that normally comforts them. Then they will turn to you for help, like a child crying out for its mother when the lights are turned out. In seduction, as in warfare, the isolated target is weak and vulnerable. In Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, written in 1748, the rake Lovelace is 316 • The Art of Seduction attempting to seduce the novel's beautiful heroine. Clarissa is young, virtuous, and very much protected by her family. But Lovelace is a conniving seducer. First he courts Clarissa's sister, Arabella. A match between them seems likely. Then he suddenly switches attention to Clarissa, playing on sibling rivalry to make Arabella furious. Their brother, James, is angered by Lovelace's change in sentiments; he fights with Lovelace and is wounded. The whole family is in an uproar, united against Lovelace, who, however, manages to smuggle letters to Clarissa, and to visit her when she is at the house of a friend. The family finds out, and accuses her of disloyalty. Clarissa is innocent; she has not encouraged Lovelace's letters or visits. But now her parents are determined to marry her off, to a rich older man. Alone in the world, about to be married to a man she finds repulsive, she turns to Lovelace as the only one who can save her from this mess. Eventually he rescues her by getting her to London, where she can escape this dreaded marriage, but where she is also hopelessly isolated. In these circumstances her feelings toward him soften. All of this has been masterfully orchestrated by Lovelace himself—the turmoil within the family, Clarissa's eventual alienation from them, the whole scenario. Your worst enemies in a seduction are often your targets' family and friends. They are outside your circle and immune to your charms; they may provide a voice of reason to the seduced. You must work silently and subtly to alienate the target from them. Insinuate that they are jealous of your target's good fortune in finding you, or that they are parental figures who have lost a taste for adventure. The latter argument is extremely effective with young people, whose identities are in flux and who are more than ready to rebel against any authority figure, particularly their parents. You represent excitement and life; the friends and parents represent habit and boredom.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The next day, Ames mustered great bravery and called the sperm bank. He did not want to think about fatherhood, that final plume in the cap of manhood, but he forced himself to call anyway. A receptionist on the other end of the line quoted annual prices for sperm storage akin to his cable subscription, which he supposed was a reasonable cost for preserving the viability of his future genetic line. The receptionist put him on hold to make an appointment and as Vivaldi played, Ames pondered whether he ought to cancel his subscription to HBO in order to afford this sperm bank. He couldn’t fully comprehend the enormous weight of fatherhood and generational lineage, but he could easily comprehend how much he did not want to cancel HBO. Without further consideration, he hung up. By the time his nipples began to ache that spring, he figured it was too late anyhow. The more his nipples hurt, the less he suffocated from the dread that came from thoughts of fatherhood. Now, with Katrina sitting in his office, for the first time in a long time, he had to think about the possibility of having sired a child. Shortly, very shortly, he was going to be called upon to make some decision, which would lead to other decisions, generations of decisions generated by this decision. “Your testicles atrophied?” Katrina asks, baffled. “But they felt normal to me!” “Yes,” he agrees. “I mean, they’re not huge or anything.” “No, not huge,” Katrina affirms, and then adds encouragingly, “but fine!” On the other side of his office’s glass wall, Karen from the art department pauses in the hallway to unwrap a granola bar. Ames becomes suddenly aware that Katrina and he are casually discussing his balls in the middle of a workday. Coworkers had shared the office gossip about Katrina almost immediately after Ames had joined the agency: bad divorce. She’d left her husband a few months before he’d interviewed. She cried in her office, the coworkers told him, then told her secretary not to put her husband’s calls through. He had cheated on her, said one. No, no, she’d had a miscarriage. Incorrect, said another, they'd had money problems. The speculation took on a tone both lurid and compulsory—to have a boss is so commonplace that one rarely remarks on its strangeness, yet its structure compels a cult of personality around even the most quotidian of managers. As an underling, one needs to furnish an epistemology of how it came to pass that she has sway over one’s precious autonomy. Basic comprehension of capitalism’s arbitrary mechanics doesn’t satisfy— the heart demands a human explanation. Or at least that’s what Ames said to justify his initial crush.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  On the way to the train, Reese kept laughing, giddy and nervous, her whole body coiled with impish energy, as if they were on their way to pull off a hilarious prank. Amy kept attempting to calm Reese down, but each attempt agitated Reese more. By the time they got to the Unitarian church, to the little room rented for the orientation, Amy couldn’t explain Reese’s comportment any other way: Reese was acting weird. As she sat in the back, examining the other prospective adopters, Amy had to admit that she and Reese did not turn out to be very skilled at mom cosplay. No one but Reese wore heels or pearls. Most of the couples occupying the rows of plastic folding chairs appeared to be straight couples. Back by the coffee machine, four men, who Amy read as two couples of bears, sat in a row, looking like the bench at a football game. Toward the side of the room a man with long thin hair and a Lemmy chop-stache sat, apparently, alone—a terrifying-looking prospective single father in Amy’s opinion. One half of a dyke couple smiled at her and Reese, and Amy grinned back sheepishly. She thought she might start giggling, in a church laughter kind of way. Maybe Reese’s nervousness was natural. A young woman in a polo shirt began the presentation. Mostly it covered things that Amy had already learned researching the foster system online. Most of it she felt qualified to provide: She met the age and income requirements, and she’d even be able to provide a foster child a separate bedroom with a window—apparently a lot of kids shared rooms, and that caused problems. Amy hadn’t before heard the figure that ninety-five percent of the babies in the foster system had been exposed to drugs. That seemed awfully high. But perhaps it was so. A man in a checked collared shirt raised his hand. “Do you have any data on the outcomes of the kids after they turn eighteen?” The young woman giving the presentation, whose name was Consuela, grimaced perceptibly at the question, then recovered. “What kind of data or outcomes do you mean?” “Like earning figures, college acceptance.” “You want to know how much money the kids grow up to earn?” Amy inadvertently caught the eye of the man’s wife. She gave a barely perceptible shrug: He’s like this. “T wouldn’t put it like that,” the man protested. “I just was wondering about the data.” “No,” Consuela said. “We don’t keep data on the kids after they turn eighteen.” She hesitated. “But when thinking about kids who come from a background of neglect, separation, or even trauma, I would suggest that we engage with a more, um, robust, idea of what makes for success.”

• From Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  13 Availability, Emotion, and Risk Students of risk were quick to see that the idea of availability was relevant to their concerns. Even before our work was published, the economist Howard Kunreuther, who was then in the early stages of a career that he has devoted to the study of risk and insurance, noticed that availability effects help explain the pattern of insurance purchase and protective action after disasters. Victims and near victims are very concerned after a disaster. After each significant earthquake, Californians are for a while diligent in purchasing insurance and adopting measures of protection and mitigation. They tie down their boiler to reduce quake damage, seal their basement doors against floods, and maintain emergency supplies in good order. However, the memories of the disaster dim over time, and so do worry and diligence. The dynamics of memory help explain the recurrent cycles of disaster, concern, and growing complacency that are familiar to students of large-scale emergencies. Kunreuther also observed that protective actions, whether by individuals or governments, are usually designed to be adequate to the worst disaster actually experienced. As long ago as pharaonic Egypt, societies have tracked the high- water mark of rivers that periodically flood—and have always prepared accordingly, apparently assuming that floods will not rise higher than the existing high-water mark. Images of a worse disaster do not come easily to mind. Availability and Affect The most influential studies of availability biases were carried out by our friends in Eugene, where Paul Slovic and his longtime collaborator Sarah Lichtenstein were joined by our former student Baruch Fischhoff. They carried out groundbreaking research on public perceptions of risks, including a survey that has become the standard example of an availability bias. They asked participants in their survey to consider pairs of causes of death: diabetes and asthma, or stroke and accidents. For each pair, the subjects indicated the more frequent

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  It is Monday when she approaches him again, by calling him into her office. The weekend of silence has been agony. She doesn’t sit behind her desk. Instead, she closes the door, and perches in a chair beside him. “Ames, I thought about it all and—” Katrina begins, but the solemnness of the moment, the sense of portent, is broken, because a strand of her hair has slipped and gotten to her lip gloss. “Ugh,” she says. “This is what I get for freshening my makeup before you came in. Backfire!” She’s visibly nervous, and picks the hair free and tucks it behind her ear. “Anyway, what I was going to say is that I told my mom.” “You told her everything?” “Yeah, I mean, I couldn’t tell my friends, and I couldn’t be alone with it anymore.” Ames nods. Then, in a way that even the pregnancy test or the conversation with Reese had not, the pregnancy becomes real to him. It is no longer their secret. It is no longer just theirs or with the people with whom he had shared it. It was one step further to being public. A known fact. Collective knowledge. He had fathered a child. “My mom is someone who I know for sure is on my side, even if I was really afraid of her judgment,” Katrina says. “I was expecting her to tell me to run away from you. I guess I even wanted that. Someone to make you the villain so I didn’t have to. But you know what? She wasn’t even that judgy. Who knew? Turns out Mom has some wisdom about mothering.” Ames hadn’t even considered that Katrina might tell her mother. Because he had gone so long without telling his own mother anything, he had forgotten such an act was possible, much less permissible. But of course Katrina had told her mother. Several times in the past, he had been on the couch, just out of view of her phone’s camera, when she chatted on video with her mother. And he had heard, firsthand, the conversation between two women on such familiar terms with each other’s lives that they spoke in near code: nicknames, allusions, inside jokes.