- Published on
20 Years of Me and the Word
This month it's twenty years since I heard the word.
August 2006. There's no way to mark an anniversary like that without it sounding like something, and I've noticed the shape people expect from it, the gratitude and the little bit of hard-won wisdom and the photograph where you look well, because the story has an approved ending and the approved ending is that you lived.
I did live. The word was cancer, and I'm not being coy about it, and I'm not going to pretend the number is anything other than remarkable, because my doctors have told me plainly that I've outlived every statistic that exists for my disease. Twenty years isn't something I was ever given odds on, it's just something that happened, and I've spent two decades trying to work out what it cost. But this isn't an essay about surviving, it's about what happens when your survival becomes a story and the story stops being yours.
Every few months my phone starts behaving strangely.
It starts with the DMs, four or five strangers in an hour and then more, and they're from everywhere...a woman in Nairobi whose brother has six weeks, a man in Surrey asking for the name of the doctor, someone in Hyderabad who has already booked the flight and just wants to know where to land. They come in faster than I can read them and they all carry the same tone, which isn't curiosity, it's the tone of somebody who has run out of options and been handed one.
By the time a friend forwards me the link I already know what it is, because it's always the same article, it ran in August 2015, and it's the worst thing anyone has ever written about me. I've made peace with almost everything that happened to me but I've never made peace with that piece, and I've stopped pretending that's a character flaw.
I never set out to be written about, I set out to write.
Before any of this I was working in fiction and in scripts, which is to say I spent my twenties inventing people and putting them through things, and if you'd asked me then how I imagined attention arriving I'd have described a byline. Something I made, my name under it, a reader on the other side who never needed to know a single thing about me. That's the deal writers think they're signing, that you get to be the one holding the pen. I never really considered the other way in.
Holy Cancer: How A Cow Saved My Life came out in July 2015, a memoir about two rounds of cancer, the second at stage IV, and about the months in India that followed. The title isn't a metaphor, and the circumstances behind it are ones I've never once claimed could be repeated, and the book is careful about that to the point of being almost annoying, because I knew even then what happens to a story like mine once it leaves the room.
It found its readers quickly, the way books occasionally do when they land at the exact moment a culture is hungry for what's inside them, and within weeks I understood that the attention wasn't landing on the writing at all, it was landing on the body the writing described. Nobody was calling to talk about structure, they were calling because I hadn't died. That's the moment worth marking, and it isn't the success, it's the redirection, because I'd spent years learning to be the author of stories and I'd just become the subject of one.
She was given a copy of the book, which matters, because it means what followed wasn't a failure of access.
The piece was written from the meeting, and it was written to a shape. The book was careful while the article was loud, the book refused to make a claim and the article implied one, and the frame she chose was precisely the one I'd spent two years of writing steering away from, the frame that turns a body into an argument about something other than a body. Comments of mine turned up without the sentences that had surrounded them, which is a technique and not an accident. The newspaper's website went down the day it ran, which is the part people still repeat back to me like it's good news.
I called her, and I wasn't aggressive about it and I wasn't naive enough to expect a correction, I just explained what the framing had done and what the missing context did to my meaning and what it was going to cause. She told me that was her job.
She was right, and that's the sentence I couldn't say out loud for years and it's the reason this is an essay instead of a complaint. She was doing her job, and the job includes the right to decide what the story is, and the subject doesn't have that right and never has had it. I'd simply never been the subject before, so I'd never noticed which side of the table I was sitting on, and I found out in a single afternoon that a byline is authorship and a story about your own life is raw material for somebody else's.
Nobody warns you that a piece like that doesn't end.
It's been eleven years, and the article has no news value and no currency and no relationship to anything happening anywhere, and every few months it detaches from its date and starts moving again through WhatsApp groups, forwarded from someone to someone in countries I've never worked in. I have friends around the world who've received it from strangers without realizing it was about somebody they actually know. It circulates without me and it'll outlive my ability to correct it.
What comes with it is the part I've never fully described. Desperation first, which I understood immediately and have never once resented, and then the follow-up when I couldn't provide what the article implied I could provide, which is anger, and the insistence that I owed them a phone call or a name or a protocol. And then, from a small number of people, wishes that it would come back, explicit ones, death threats from people who were themselves dying or whose mothers were, which is a category of correspondence I wouldn't wish on anybody and have never known how to file.
I tried for years to meet it. I answered, I made introductions I had no business making, I gave people hours I didn't have, because the alternative was ignoring a message from someone with six weeks and I couldn't do that and also be a person I recognized. It was never enough and it was never going to be, because the thing they were reaching for didn't exist. Somebody sold them a cure and it wasn't me...I wrote an entire book explaining why what happened to me couldn't be handed to anybody else, and none of that survived the translation into a headline.
Then there's the other correspondence, the kind that arrives on letterhead.
Industry titans, entertainment names you'd recognize, chief executives, and it's their wife or their father or their business partner and could I find twenty minutes. I found the twenty minutes and then the hour after it and then the follow-up calls, because a frightened person is a frightened person no matter what they're worth. I was running a nonprofit through all of this and not one of them ever wrote it a check, and it's taken me a long time to sit with that, because these are people whose entire professional lives are organized around the principle that time has a price. They knew exactly what my hours were worth, they just didn't file what I was doing under work.
What they did file under work was the other thing. The blue tick arrived, the influencer label attached itself, and with it came an entirely different inbox...wellness brands, spas, resorts, would I come and stay, would I be seen there, would I say something about it afterward. Medical groups wanting a keynote. More than one proposition to put my name on a hospital or a clinic or a line of products.
I want to be exact about the arithmetic here because it's critical. The people who wanted my expertise took it for free, and the people who wanted my image paid for it, and paid well, in the currency of things you can photograph. I've never once been compensated for the thing I'm actually qualified to do, and I've been compensated repeatedly in massages.
The other cost of a few minutes of fame is that you can't put them down.
People see you the way they decided to see you and they decided fast, and what they don't see is anything on either side of that decision, not the career before it and the writing and the scripts and the years of craft that produced a book good enough to be misread on that scale, and not the capacity after it either, the work I could be doing now, the ideas I've spent a decade building. You become a fixed point, and people aren't being cruel about it, they're being efficient, because a person is easier to handle as one thing.
At first I didn't fight it. I wrote for The Speaking Tree and for HuffPost and the work sat comfortably inside the same narrative because that's honestly where I was, and then the bylines started to widen...fashion, travel, luxury, music, film, hotels, rooms I had no business being in and got very good at being in, across continents, under my own name, for years. None of it moved the label an inch, and I was still the cancer guy, filing a piece about a hotel.
Some of that is structural and I own it, because I haven't had a job in twenty years, not one, no tenure and no department and no colleagues I've sat beside since we were all young, none of the slow institutional scaffolding that gives a person an identity sturdy enough to argue with a headline. Working for myself was never a lifestyle choice, it was a medical one, it's the only shape of work my body has ever been able to hold, and it was the right call and I'd make it again...and it also, quietly, kept me tethered to the word for two decades, because I never got to build anything else large enough to stand in front of it. Which is why coming back to academic work has been harder than the academic work. The ideas are fine, the ideas were always fine, what I don't have is the twenty years of institutional biography that lets people take the ideas seriously without checking on me first.
And in the years since, an entire industry has made money out of being that one thing on my behalf. Healers, retreats, supplement companies, practitioners, some of them using the book and more of them using the article, because the article already made the claim they needed. They sell the protocol and the product and the replication, which is the precise thing my book spends its entire length refusing to sell. My story generates revenue, almost none of it mine, and the people earning it are under no obligation to be accurate because accuracy was never the asset. The asset is a man who didn't die, and a version of why.
I built a framework for measuring the economic value of fame and it has four terms, Base Visibility Score, Cultural Momentum, Value Longevity Factor and Legacy Control. People ask me about the first three, they ask about the math, and in all this time nobody has ever asked why the fourth one is in there.
Legacy Control is in the model because I lost mine in August 2015 and never got it back, and it's a separate variable because it behaves differently from the others, since visibility can be earned and momentum can be manufactured and longevity can be estimated, and control is the only one that can be taken off you in a single afternoon by a professional doing her job correctly.
Value Longevity Factor is in there because I can watch an eleven-year-old article generate measurable activity in real time and I know it's happening before I ever see the link, because the messages arrive first, which isn't a theory about persistence, it's a notification pattern. And Base Visibility Score is in there because visibility isn't a compliment, it's a quantity, and other people can spend it.
Every entity I've ever scored, every athlete and studio and franchise and brand, I've scored from the position of somebody who was once, briefly and unwillingly, a small unit of the same currency. I'm not analyzing fame from the outside, I was handed a low-grade dose of it and watched what it did to how I was seen and valued and paid, and then spent years building the instrument I wish somebody had shown me first.
Run the model on me and it isn't flattering. Base Visibility is low and always was, Cultural Momentum is real but narrow and spikes on a schedule I don't set, Value Longevity is genuinely strong which is the cruelest of the four findings because the thing with staying power isn't the book, and Legacy Control is close to nothing, and I didn't lose it slowly, I handed a stranger a copy of my life and she chose the story.
And here's where I've arrived on that, twenty years in. Whatever else I turn out to be, I know a meaningful share of my legacy is going to be Cow Man, not the framework and not the criticism and not the bylines, the cow, and I stopped fighting that a while ago and I'm genuinely okay with it, because there are far worse things to be remembered as and at least that one is true.
None of which is a complaint about journalism, it's a description of a transaction I entered without understanding the terms, and it's the same transaction almost everyone I've ever scored entered too. The difference is that most of them had representation.
But here's the thing about that article, and about the book, and about every version of me that circulates without my involvement...they all end in 2015.
When you write a book about recovery, readers assume the recovery is the last chapter, because that's what a last chapter is for, and the people forwarding that link are forwarding a man who got better. They're not wrong about him, he existed, he just hasn't been the current version for a very long time.
My body has never stopped being the central negotiation of my life, and long-term survival isn't the back half of the same story, it's an entirely different discipline, and almost nothing gets written about it because it has no shape. There's no arc, nobody beats anything, you just keep going and the terms keep changing, and the further out you get the fewer people there are ahead of you on the road. There's a lot happening with me right now. The care that existed twenty years ago, the urgency and the team and the protocol, all of that thins out as the years pass, and nobody is following a plan for me because there's no plan to follow.
I've outlived every statistic that exists for my disease, which sounds like a triumph until you understand what it actually means, which is that the statistics stop where I kept going, and there's no map past the edge of the data, and I've been walking around out there for years.
And I can't really say any of that out loud, which is the last turn of the knife, because the moment I raise it I watch people's faces do the thing... cancer again... and it isn't, and somehow the fact that it isn't makes it harder to talk about, because there's no word that makes people sit up the way that one does. There are things as serious as cancer and as frightening as cancer that don't come with a ribbon or a month or a fundraising walk, they come with a shrug. So mostly I don't raise it, and the silence gets read as being fine, and being fine gets forwarded to a stranger in Nairobi as evidence.
The article will circulate again, probably before the year is out, and I'll know before anybody sends it to me because the messages always arrive ahead of the link and eleven years has taught me what the first four look like. Somebody's brother, somebody's mother, six weeks to live.
I still answer when I can, especially when drafted directly by a patient, not because I have anything to give them but because there's a real person on the other end and the least I can do is be a real person back. That's all I ever had, it was never a cure, and I never once said it was.
Twenty years since the word, eleven since the article, and the man in that piece has been out of date for over a decade and he'll keep being forwarded long after I've stopped being able to correct him. Only one of those stories did I get to write myself...and this is the other one.
- Published on
Me, Madonna and the kids who finally went outside
They could have named themselves anything at all, and what they chose to keep was the insult. They printed it, wore it as a mask, and walked it into the capital, because a cockroach is the organism that survives what kills everything else, and I don't believe for a second that was lost on any of them.
Anshuka Ruth Das spent two days getting ready, and when she left Gurugram early on a Monday morning she hid the placards inside a paper bag. She is eighteen, and she and her friends were headed for Jantar Mantar in the middle of Delhi, and when a reporter asked her why she had come she said she was there for the kids who died.
The test at the center of all this is the one that decides who gets into India's public medical colleges. Two million young people sit it every year for a fixed number of seats, and this year the papers leaked and the whole apparatus turned out to have been rotten before any of them opened a booklet. Twelve students have taken their own lives since. The ones still standing, who had spent months preparing, who had eaten and slept and dreamt inside that preparation, were told to come back and sit it again, as though a year of a person's life were a file you restore from backup.
The state answered the way states answer, with metro stations closed and roads barricaded and the internet throttled, and then with batons and tear gas and protesters dragged into vans, some of them pushing their heads out through the windows so the cameras could see their faces bleeding. A twenty-six-year-old management graduate from Bihar named Mohammad Anis said the gas took his breath away for a moment and his arm was hurt in the crush, and then said that staying quiet in the face of injustice is precisely how injustice continues. Sonam Wangchuk, fifty-nine, went twenty days into a hunger strike before police carried him out of the protest site and into a hospital.
Then, on a Saturday in late July, the education minister resigned. The core demands were met, the nationwide protests were called off, and a government not remotely in the habit of conceding conceded in a matter of weeks to something that had started as a joke about vermin.
I have spent the better part of two decades writing about attention and how it converts into value, so I want to be precise about what happened there, because it is not quite what the coverage is calling it. This was not the internet winning, given that the internet had been furious about that examination system for years and had changed exactly nothing. What changed is that a generation raised to believe posting is participation went and stood in a street and let itself be hit, and everything that followed, followed from the bodies.
I watched all of it from a room in New York, on a phone, refreshing.
Now hold that up against the thing people my age and older cannot stop saying about people that age, which is that they're soft, that they don't want to work, that somewhere between the last recession and the front-facing camera something went out of them, some appetite for hardship that we supposedly had and they supposedly lack.
Twelve of them are dead because they worked too hard for a test that had already been sold.
The accusation was never really about work, it was about the performance of work. My generation and the one above it built an entire moral system on visible exhaustion, on the sixty-hour week worn like a decoration, on answering email at midnight so that somebody would see the timestamp, and we mistook the theater for the labor so completely that we can no longer tell them apart. So when a twenty-four-year-old declines to perform the theater, what we hear is a refusal to work.
They will suffer, they are suffering, and they are simply no longer willing to do it for a rigged exam, or for a software job that evaporated in a quarterly restructuring, or for a ladder whose bottom three rungs were automated while they were still in school. What Delhi demonstrated, for anyone my age who cared to look, was a generation fighting for the right to compete inside a system that actually functions, which is not the absence of a work ethic but the most demanding version of one I have seen in years, and it cost twelve lives before it produced a resignation.
Which is where this gets strange, because I need to tell you about a dance floor.
The same summer those kids were being tear-gassed over the right to a fair examination, a sixty-seven-year-old woman released a song called "School."
It opens with her talking instead of singing, and what she says, roughly, is that the only thing she likes more than sharing what she knows is being taught something she doesn't. She is sixty-seven years old, four decades into being the most photographed, most litigated, most exhaustively documented woman in popular music, and she begins a song called "School" by asking to be a student.
I'm nearly twenty years younger and I haven't read a truer sentence all year.
The song is not about pedagogy, because school is in session, in her hands, is a line about sexual instruction, and the track runs on her own memories of the New York club years that made her. Its pivotal move is a refusal, because she declines the maternal role the culture reserves for women her age and claims the role of lover instead, and she does it in a single line that makes the substitution sound obvious rather than defiant. Which is, when you sit with it, the argument of everything that follows in this essay, made by somebody nineteen years ahead of me and on the other side of the gender line.
She has spent this summer doing something nobody her age is supposed to be able to do, which is fill rooms with people who were not alive for any of it. Confessions II landed in July with Stuart Price back at the board, and before that she had turned up at Coachella beside Sabrina Carpenter, four decades between them, first on the same stage and then on the same credit. Meanwhile there is a Madonna night every Friday at a club in Hollywood and it sells out. It isn't a nostalgia night, and it isn't an eighties night where she gets filed between Wham! and Cyndi Lauper, it's a Madonna night, four decades of one catalogue, and the room is full of people in their twenties.
They are not nostalgic and they cannot be, because nostalgia requires having been there and none of them were. What they're responding to is the only genuinely scarce commodity left, which is duration. Forty years of visible change, all of it on the record, every era time-stamped, including the ones that failed. You can follow the entire arc and watch a person move through time.
That is not what the culture currently supplies, which is an infinite quantity of surface with nothing underneath it, a feed that refreshes and forgets, artists with eighteen months of catalogue and a marketing plan. Set against that, a forty-year discography isn't old, it's deep, and it is the difference between a puddle and a well, and a generation that has been drowning in puddles its entire life has gone looking for a well.
And the people who cannot stand this are the ones who built her.
I wrote an essay a while back called The Dead Get Nostalgia, and the argument was that death cleans the record. We forgive the dead everything, because they can no longer complicate the story we've settled on, and so Michael and Prince and George and Whitney are fixed now, finished, safe to love. Madonna's actual crime, the one nobody will say out loud, is that she is still here, still changing, still refusing to hold the pose we assigned her in 1990.
I want to extend that now, because a year of watching this play out has shown me the part I missed.
The generation that made her has spent thirty years surgically deleting its own timeline. The same people who bought Like a Prayer, who lost their minds over the Sex book, who built a global institution around a woman whose entire method was transformation, decided somewhere around their fortieth birthdays that transformation had become a crime, and so they froze, and filled and lifted and tightened and resurfaced until they arrived at a face that is smooth and ageless and completely unreadable, and from behind that face they now scrutinize hers and pronounce it grotesque.
It isn't hypocrisy, or not only, it's projection with a scalpel. They are punishing in her the passage of time they paid a great deal of money to conceal in themselves, and in the process they destroyed the exact thing the young are now hunting for. They preserved the surface and deleted the story, and there is nothing left to read on those faces, no arc, no evidence, no record of having been anywhere at all. They optimized themselves into illegibility and then wondered why nobody under thirty finds them interesting.
The dead get nostalgia. The living get scrutiny. The smoothed get skipped.
Which brings me to the part of this I have been circling for months without knowing how to say it, because there is no version that doesn't risk sounding like a man congratulating himself.
I am forty-eight, and somewhere in the last two or three years, without any change in my circumstances that I can identify, I started getting approached by people in their twenties and early thirties, men and women both. Not politely and not ambiguously, but propositioned, flirted with, pursued with a directness I did not encounter once at twenty-five and would have given a great deal for. It isn't occasional, it is the current condition of my life, and I have found it disorienting enough to spend real time trying to understand it rather than simply enjoying it.
Let me put the obvious objections on the table first, because they're mine too. I am in young rooms, I have taught, I move through the entertainment world, I live out of a suitcase by choice and spend my days in art houses and cafes and small shops in cities where I know nobody, which are precisely the places young people are. I also have no mortgage and no children, which means I hold a quantity of free time and free attention that most men my age simply do not, and a man with two teenagers and a job he cannot walk away from has considerably less room to be interesting than I have. Some of this is circumstance and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
Except that it doesn't finish the job, because there are unattached men my age in every one of those rooms who are more accomplished, better connected and considerably better funded, and this is not happening to them. So here is what I have landed on.
I'm still curious.
That sounds like nothing, and I have come to think it is close to everything, because it turns out to be the one thing almost nobody keeps. I want to be accurate here, because what I said about Madonna's generation does not describe the men I actually know. Nobody has had himself sanded down, they are tired, and they are carrying money and ageing parents and children and bodies that have started sending them notices, and worrying about what they will leave behind and about how little of their own time belongs to them at all. Nothing was surgically removed from those men, it was spent.
I'm not going to pretend I got here by being well, either. I look healthy, and I am one wrong medication away from carrying fifteen extra kilos and one dip in immunity away from a month of constant pain. My health is a yo-yo and I stopped hiding the string a long time ago. I wear the scars, I talk about the bad stretches, and in none of it have I ever found a reason to stop wanting things.
That's the part that reads, and it isn't the mileage on my face, which I promise you nobody is examining, but the fact that I am still interested. I still ask questions I could comfortably pretend to know the answers to. I have arrived at the age where a man is expected to convert his experience into wisdom and begin dispensing it, and I have no appetite whatsoever for the job. I don't share the wisdom of why. I still embrace the why nots.
Twenty-somethings clock that immediately, because it is their own default condition and they almost never see it in someone my age. It isn't that I remind them of being young, it's that I haven't yet done the thing adults do, which is to decide that the questions are closed. They have no shortage of polish and no shortage of surfaces, and what they're short of is evidence that a person can get this far and still be glad to be here.
And here is where the arithmetic stops being flattering, because I know exactly where the curiosity came from and it was not character. I was told twice that I might not get a long horizon, and a man without a long horizon cannot defer anything, so I stopped deferring. Everything my peers postponed until the mortgage cleared or the children grew, I took immediately, because I had been given excellent reasons not to wait. The appetite that reads as vitality is a side effect of having been made to understand that there might not be a later.
I wouldn't undo it, and I want to be clear about that, because the second life is the only one I would choose. But I'd be lying if I said the arithmetic sits easily, and there is something genuinely bleak in discovering that the most attractive thing about you was installed by the worst thing that ever happened to you.
Something else is shifting too, and I don't think my generation has noticed. The labels we used to police this with are losing their grip, because daddy and cougar were only ever containment devices, ways of taking desire that crossed an age line and filing it under comedy or pathology so that nobody had to sit with it. You were permitted to want, but only from inside the category, and the category arrived with a laugh track. The people approaching me don't reach for those words and don't appear to need them, so the attraction comes unlabeled, which means it comes as attraction, and I had genuinely forgotten that was available.
Which is, in the end, what those kids in Delhi were saying, in a register that costs a great deal more.
They had a screen, they had the internet's entire arsenal of outrage, they had been deploying it for years, and it had produced nothing but engagement. So they got up and walked into a street and let themselves be hit, because at some point a generation worked out that the digital version of a life is not a life but a rendering, and a rendering cannot be tear-gassed, which means it also cannot win.
The dance floor is the same instinct with better lighting, and so is who they want to sleep with. Every one of these is a body deciding to be somewhere, insisting on being real inside a culture that has quietly made it optional.
The generation that made her kept the face and lost the appetite, and still cannot work out why the young walked past.
So what have they taught me. I'm still working that out and I expect I always will be, which I suspect is the entire point of a woman with forty years of catalogue opening a song by asking somebody to tell her something she doesn't already know. You don't graduate, staying enrolled is the whole thing.
But there is one piece I can name, which is that I had quietly decided I was done, not dramatically, not in any way I would have admitted out loud, but somewhere in the years of scans and second opinions and learning to plan my life in six-month increments I filed love under things that had happened to a previous version of me. It wasn't grief, it was administration. I took everything else immediately and quietly wrote that one off.
And then people started looking at me with curiosity in their faces, not pity and not politeness and not the careful warmth that gets reserved for the formerly ill, but curiosity and depth and wanting. It's flattering and I won't pretend otherwise, but the flattery isn't what got me. What got me is that it reopened a question I had closed, and I hadn't understood until it swung back open how much it had cost me to shut it.
School is in session, and I'm the one taking notes.
Perhaps, maybe, I could be your lover, lover, lover, lover.
- Published on
How FIFA Made My Summer Work
I watched this World Cup from Mexico City, from New York twice, and from Los Angeles. I stood inside Estadio Azteca for the opening whistle. I was back in New York by way of a friend's living room for the final match where Spain defeated Argentina 1-0. In between: a country nearly setting a world record before its own tournament even started, a Nordic nation commandeering a subway car, a four-time champion packing up in June, and a host city that made me question whether Americans outside a stadium footprint actually noticed a World Cup was happening at all. Madonna, twenty-six years ago, sang that "music makes the people come together". This summer, a football tournament made a serious run at the same claim.
I should say up front that I have never been this guy. I've built a career on music and fame and the machinery underneath both, and if you'd told me at the start of the year that I'd spend my summer chasing a football tournament across a continent I'm about to leave, I'd have laughed and gone back to whatever essay I was arguing with. But I'm way into my second life, and one of the things that second life taught me is that you go where the aliveness is. This summer, it was here.
Mexico City: Fever Pitch Football
It started before it started. Days before the opening match, Mexico City tried to break the record for the largest human wave ever attempted on Paseo de la Reforma, timed to the fortieth anniversary of the wave's own debut in Mexico's stadiums during the 1986 World Cup. I wasn't there for a match yet but I was there for a country rehearsing joy in the street, thousands of people moving as one body just to prove they still could. That's when I understood what I'd actually flown into - this wasn't a nation hosting a tournament, they were reclaiming a memory.
The opening match itself, Mexico 2, South Africa 0 at the Azteca, ended up almost secondary to what surrounded it. Every block near the stadium had turned into a market for the same green jersey, the authentic Adidas version running close to two hundred dollars, the replica a half and sometimes a quarter of that, and for a country where those numbers represent real weeks of wages for a lot of people, the math simply doesn't work. So the street corrected it the way the street always does, with vendors selling bootleg kits stitched close enough to pass from a distance, laid out on folding tables that stretched entire sidewalks. I photographed every table I passed and bought from none of them, because that contradiction, a nation's own pride sold back to it at a markup most of the nation can't afford, is Celebnomics in its rawest form, and I've written that same sentence a dozen different ways about a dozen different celebrities without once thinking it would fit a football kit just as well.
CDMX was fever pitch from the moment I landed, with Reforma dressed for the tournament and every corner store beating every billboard to the memo. This is a city that has hosted this thing more times than any other on earth, doing it a record third time, and still treating it like the first.
NYC: Foreign Wave Of Friendliness
New York took the baton, and it took it loudly. Norway had already turned a soccer send-off into a subway performance by the time I landed. The "Viking row," arms pulling back in unison like a ship that wasn't there, moved out of the stadium and into Times Square, up escalators, into actual subway cars, days ahead of their group match against Senegal at MetLife. I stood in a car full of strangers, not one of them from Oslo, who joined in because refusing felt more embarrassing than rowing an invisible boat for thirty seconds. That kind of thing doesn't happen at a Super Bowl. New York got recruited, though it hardly took convincing, not with the Knicks having just ended fifty-three years of waiting and two million people already primed to lose their minds along Broadway.
Not every story in that stretch ended as well. I went to German House expecting the long, grinding run four-time champions are supposed to have, especially after they opened the tournament by putting seven goals on Curaçao, and instead I watched them go out in the round of 32 on penalties to Paraguay, Germany's first ever World Cup shootout loss. The room went from loud to silent in the time it takes a ball to sail over a crossbar. I know that silence from other rooms in my life, the kind where nobody wants to be the first one to speak because speaking makes it real, and I'll admit it landed harder than a group-stage exit has any business landing on a man who isn't German and had no stake in it. Watching a giant lose early and up close hits differently than reading about it the next morning. You feel the temperature of a room change in real time, and there's nothing else quite like it.
Somewhere in those New York weeks I also turned into an accidental geography teacher, or maybe the student. I lost count of the conversations that started with someone confidently confusing Cabo Verde, the tiny island nation making its first ever World Cup appearance, with Cabo, the vacation spot a few hours south of the US border. Meanwhile the opposite education was happening in real time, with fans arriving from every corner of the map discovering ranch dressing, marveling at how much food arrives on one diner plate, and quietly revising whatever version of America they'd packed in their suitcase. I heard some variation of "I thought you'd all be different" more times than I can count, and for the first time I also heard bartenders and waiters getting quizzed about tipping and living wages by visitors who couldn't work out why the math lands the way it does here, the questions asked with astonishment and answered with mild embarrassment.
A World Cup doesn't fix geopolitics. But it will put a Norwegian, a Cape Verdean, and a kid from Ohio in the same fan zone singing the same chant, and for a month, that's its own kind of diplomacy, one that no summit table has managed in years. New York was foreignness landing on friendly ground, a city that lets you in and lets you be loud about it, where the waves this time weren't records at all but people.
Los Angeles: Stadium Perfection, City Dullness
Then Los Angeles, for the stretch that should have felt like the crescendo and instead felt like a secret being kept from the city hosting it.
Inside SoFi, everything worked. Spain grinding past Belgium 2-1 in the quarterfinal, the kind of ugly, correct win that doesn't make highlight reels but wins tournaments, in a stadium that is a piece of engineering FIFA could not have designed better if they'd asked, with the sight lines and the sound and the movement all purring along like the whole apparatus had been waiting years for exactly this.
Outside SoFi? You'd almost never know a World Cup was happening in the city at all. A block off the stadium footprint and the tournament vanished, no bunting on Sunset, no flags off balconies in Los Feliz, none of those fan zones you stumbled into by accident the way you did in Mexico City or midtown Manhattan. LA had the least energy of any host city I set foot in this summer, and it wasn't close. It's the geography, mostly, because the city is too spread out for a single-thread cultural moment to hold together, and the entertainment complex here is so used to being the show that it doesn't quite know how to be the audience.
I stayed in LA through the semifinal doubleheader, watching Spain shut out France 2-0 and then Argentina claw past England 2-1 the next day. Neither match was actually played anywhere near LA by then, Spain and France were in Arlington and Argentina and England in Atlanta, but I stayed because I had friends there who understood what I was after, and a couple of them had lived it more thoroughly than I had. They'd flown to a handful of host cities across this tournament, following matches, and they'd also gone to Qatar in 2022. To a person, they preferred Qatar, and it had nothing to do with the football being better because it wasn't. Qatar was one city, one footprint, one energy, where you could attend three matches in a week without needing three connecting flights and a rental car, where the stadiums were closer and cleaner and easier to move between, and where the vibe stayed concentrated the way a tournament vibe is supposed to. This one, they said, kept asking them to chase it. And LA, of the three cities I'd been in, was the one that made you feel that chase the most, because even standing inside the host city itself, the tournament wasn't quite there.
That's the honest version, and it isn't a flattering one: the stadiums this summer were perfect, and the countries that hosted them were, more often than they'd like to admit, distracted.
New York, Again: The Ending
I flew back to New York with just enough time to see how it ended, and I watched the final at a friend's place where the room was mostly leaning Spain but a few hardcore Argentina fans held the other half honest. That mix mattered, because you don't fully feel a 1-0 result unless there are people in the room who lost it too.
And it ended almost exactly where I'd started tracking it from a distance. Messi, 39, playing what's almost certainly his last World Cup match, against a Spanish side built around Lamine Yamal, a kid he once posed with as an infant nearly two decades ago. Football doesn't often hand you a symmetry that clean. Argentina went down to ten men late, Emiliano Martínez set a World Cup final save record with ten stops and it still wasn't enough, and Ferran Torres scored in the 106th minute off a Nico Williams assist to win Spain its second World Cup exactly the way it won its first, one goal in extra time from a team that finished the whole tournament unbeaten. Messi sat on the grass for a long moment before anyone came to get him up, and I don't think a single person left in that stadium, Spanish or Argentine, wanted to look away from it.
Before Torres scored, before the trophy came out, before extra time was even something anyone was thinking about, Tom Cruise stood at center field and opened the final with a speech about a game that "turns strangers into friends." Madonna followed him, hours later, with the first halftime show in a World Cup final's history. Neither one was there to be honored for what they'd already done, because Cruise is promoting a fall film called Digger that he's been trailer-dropping straight through the tournament, and Madonna is deep in the Confessions II rollout. Two active campaigns, on the same field, on the biggest stage of the summer. And here's the coincidence I still can't shake, that these are the exact two living figures whose careers first got me noticing that fame had begun to behave less like a byproduct of the work and more like the economy itself, the pair who quietly jump-started what I'd eventually build Celebnomics around more than two decades before I ever gave it a name. That both of them landed on this particular field, on this particular night, still building and still selling and still shifting the culture around them, is the kind of full-circle moment a younger version of me would have watched and missed entirely. This version had to sit down with it.
Madonna, in her set, told a packed stadium and however many hundred million watching around the world that music has always found a way to pull strangers into the same rhythm. She wasn't wrong. She just had no idea a football tournament had already spent five weeks proving her point on a bigger stage than the one she was standing on.
A Norwegian rowing chant took over a subway car that owed it nothing, a Mexican street vendor sold a country's pride back to itself at a discount rate, a German fanbase grieved together in a room in Manhattan, a kid from Ohio learned where Cape Verde is, and a living room in New York held both a Spanish celebration and an Argentine mourning without either side needing to leave. None of that required a single goal to matter, though plenty of goals happened anyway.
I've spent two decades watching fame and attention move through culture and calling it Celebnomics, and this tournament is the first time I watched an entire event become worth more than any single person inside it, more than Messi or Yamal or any marketing budget FIFA could have engineered on its own. Whether the next host country manages to hold that energy in one place the way Qatar did, or whether it scatters again the way this one did across three enormous nations, will be the tournament's real test.
I'm leaving for Asia soon, so this was my last American summer for a while (I think), and I didn't plan for it to be this one. I thought I was flying to three cities to focus on my work, and I ended up writing about a tournament instead, consistently, because the tournament turned out to hold everything I write about anyway, the fame and the money and the spectacle and that same machinery humming underneath all of it. What I got was the closing argument on a whole continent, delivered by a game I don't even follow, in front of strangers who kept turning out not to be strangers at all. Full time. Spain 1, Argentina 0. I'll take it.
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Confessions II is a stellar dance record with healing threaded through its spine.
It is also the case I have spent twenty-five years trying to make.
What moved me is where the attention went. When a legacy artist releases something new, the culture usually treats it as an excuse to revisit the old work. The single becomes a doorway back to the hits. Here the reverse happened. The conversation is about these songs, this record, right now. Not "Hung Up." Not "Vogue." The new material earned its own oxygen, and that almost never happens for an artist this deep into a career. Relevance was supposed to be behind her. Instead she reached out and took it back.
And she earned it, because the album is genuinely excellent. The production is immaculate, the atmosphere total, and you can hear the hours she and Stuart Price poured into every transition. Her vocals are supple and the vocal treatments are used with intention rather than as a mask. This is not a legend phoning in a victory lap. It is two obsessives who cared about getting it right, and as a piece of dance music it belongs in the same room as the album it answers to.
What I did not expect was the soul underneath the strobe. For all its dancefloor sheen, Confessions II is a spiritual record, and for once the spirituality steps off Madonna's usual Catholic altar. This is not guilt and iconography. This is a woman taking stock of a life. She buried her brother Christopher and her stepmother in the same year, and you can feel both losses in the record's back half. "Fragile" is an elegy for the brother she reconciled with as he was dying, written, she has said, the night of their last hard phone call. "The Test," her first duet with her daughter Lourdes, plays like a reckoning between a mother and the child who learned to survive her. That word matters here. For years the internet has crowned Madonna "Mother" as a wink. On this album she claims the word for real, the grief of it, the matriarchy of it, the accounting of it. I keep asking who else at the top of mainstream pop is scoring their own book of life this honestly, and I keep coming up empty. I do not want to play the ranking game. But it is fair to say no one has done more for the dance floor, and no one has been more willing to hand us the ledger of a life while still asking us to move.
I know that instinct in my body. I am living my second life, and I have learned that music is not an escape from the dark. It is how you carry it. Madonna has called songwriting "medicine for my soul." I would not put it any differently.
The album even loops back to the literal beginning. "Danceteria," its giddiest peak, is named for the downtown club where a broke girl from Michigan hauled a cassette demo of "Everybody" and talked her way toward a life. She spends the song naming the friends who were in the room before the world knew hers. An artist at the summit, reaching all the way back to the basement where she started. If you have read my work, you already know why that one detail made me sit up.
Because it brings me to the confession under my confession. I have been building a framework for how fame actually works for more than two decades, long enough that I now call it Celebnomics, and Madonna was the case that made the whole thing cohere. She was never a subject I dropped into the model. She was the reason the model took the shape it did. In my book I open her chapter plainly:
Madonna is the most deliberate self-author in modern celebrity culture. From the beginning, her value has come not from stability, but from controlled instability.
— Celebnomics (2026)
I wrote that before this album existed. Confessions II is simply the latest evidence.
The spine of my model is a single equation, the Economic Value (EV) Model, built from four forces: a Base Visibility Score, Cultural Momentum, a Value Longevity Factor, and Legacy Control. Run most careers through it and you get a rise and a fall, a clean arc with a beginning and an end. Madonna's refuses to behave that way. The book maps her decade by decade, from the meteor of the 1980s to the ageism of the 2010s, and the pattern never resolves into a line. It resolves into a loop. As I put it in the closing pages:
Celebrity does not move cleanly upward or downward. It loops.
— Celebnomics (2026)
The first Confessions on a Dance Floor already sits in that book as her 2000s restoration, the moment the loop swung back up. Confessions II is the loop closing again, in real time, twenty years later, while I watch the thesis prove itself on a Friday release. A number one across five decades is not nostalgia. It is value recalibrated rather than resisted, protected rather than sentimentalized, which is exactly what the model predicts of the rare artist who keeps authorship of her own story.
So no, this is not a comeback, and I would gently retire the word where she is concerned. A comeback assumes she left. What Confessions II documents is someone who never stopped shaping, only kept looping, grieving and dancing in the same breath because at a certain point you understand those are not opposites. I have spent a good part of one lifetime, and now a chunk of my second, reading Madonna as the clearest proof I have of how fame actually behaves. This week she filed a new chapter, set it to a beat, and dared the world to sit still. The world could not. Neither, if I am honest, could I.
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How GLP-1 broke music's most reliable story.
The voice in the dark
Press play on Land of the Living and for the first eleven seconds you are somewhere very late at night. A piano plays alone, working through something too sad to dance to, and a woman's voice comes in low and worn. There is a mirror, and it is cracked. There is a bottle, and it is empty. There is a pen that does not know where to begin. You can hear the years on her, and you can hear what she has survived. By the time she reaches the chorus you have already built her in your mind, and she is unmistakable. She is older, she is Black, and she is heavy in the way that reads as lived-in, as Sunday morning, as a woman who earned every ounce of that ache the long way. She is Gloria Gaynor with the lights down, a Martha Wash you feel in your chest before you feel it in your feet.
Then the beat drops. House piano, four on the floor, 1996 in full bloom, and now you are certain. This is a diva, a survivor turning her pain into a dancefloor, which is the oldest and holiest trick the music ever had.
Kristine W was a white woman in her thirties, a former Las Vegas showgirl, and blonde.
I used to play that song for my students with their eyes closed, and I would ask them to write down who they were hearing, including the race, the age, and the body behind the voice. They were always sure, and they were always wrong, and the wrongness was the entire lesson. Your ear does not hear a person, it builds one. It takes a timbre and a genre and a little ache, and it constructs a whole human being and a whole life, then hands all of it to you with total confidence. People Magazine heard that same intro and wrote that even at her gloomiest, you could tell things would get better. They heard a survivor too, the way everybody did, and she was a twenty-something who was only just getting started.
The gap was the merchandise
Pop music has lived in that gap for as long as there has been pop music, in the space between the voice you imagine and the body that is actually making it. It is where the whole enterprise does its most interesting work, and occasionally its most dishonest. Bobby Caldwell sang soul so deep that Black radio played him for years before anyone circulated a photo of the white guy from Long Island who recorded it. Dusty Springfield, a white woman from London, made Memphis weep. Teena Marie was so convincingly herself that Motown declined to put her face on her first album, the better to let listeners assume. The gap was never an accident. It was the merchandise, and the mismatch was the thing being sold.
For women, the body has always been the most contested part of that transaction. The question was never how they sounded, but how they looked while sounding that way, and how that look was allowed to change.
A woman's weight, in pop, was never just a fact about her health. It was a story she could be made to perform whether she wanted to or not. There was the Adele who arrived sounding like heartbreak in a cardigan, and there was the Adele who walked a carpet a few years later and detonated the internet, and the culture consumed both with equal appetite, because the appetite was never really for the body. It was for the journey, for the struggle and the relapse and the triumph and the tearful confession on a daytime couch. Oprah ran that loop in public for thirty years and turned every swing of it into a magazine cover. Aretha did it more privately. Christina shape-shifted album to album and collected headlines for each silhouette. Karen Carpenter did not survive hers, and the culture still found a way to make her thinness a story it could tell.
The mystery that did the selling
What held all of it together was a mystery, because nobody could ever see how it happened. The how stayed murky enough to sell things, whether that thing was discipline, a program, or a powder. The fantasy underneath was that the body was a moral document, and that if yours was not behaving, you simply had not wanted it badly enough.
I know that fantasy from the inside. I have swung sixty kilos in both directions across two rounds of cancer, and I was the heaviest I had ever been while I was dying, bloated with steroids and inflammation, which is how I learned that a room trusts a thin body over a sick one even when the fat one is the one that is dying. Weight beat expertise, and it beat the truth sitting right in front of them. I am not writing this from above. I am writing it from somewhere in the middle of the same lie.
The struggle was the product, and the not-knowing was the point.
What the needle actually broke
The drug everyone is whispering about did not make anyone thinner than starvation already could. What it did was answer the question. The whole shimmering economy of the transformation ran on suspense, on a how that you could project onto, and now the how is an open secret with a clinical name. People still say Ozempic the way they once said Kleenex, but the truth is a whole class of these drugs, a GLP-1 injection that mostly comes down to a prescription and a pharmacy. The mystery is gone, and a body with no mystery left tells no story at all, the same way Kristine W stops being a survivor the instant you see the photograph.
You cannot sell the climb when everyone can see the elevator.
Watch what that did to the two women who built their whole names on the opposite promise.
Meghan Trainor was nineteen when she taught a generation of girls to sing that every inch of them was fine exactly as it was. All About That Bass was a thesis with a hook, and the hook did real good in real bedrooms. Then came two pregnancies, gestational diabetes, the Mounjaro she has been open about, sixty pounds, and a face the comments decided they no longer recognized. She put out a song this year called Still Don't Care, and she told anyone who would listen that she had never felt stronger. The culture genuinely did not know where to put her, because the anthem girl got healthy and the anthem curdled into a liability. There was no story to tell about her body anymore. There was just a body, a woman who liked it, and a public that had lost its script.
Lizzo is the one who saw the machine clearly enough to write it down. She had been the body-positivity movement made flesh, a Black woman daring a cruel room to look at her and call it beauty. Then she lost the weight, insisted on calling it a release rather than a loss, and got hunted by the very movement she had given wings to. On her Substack she said the thing out loud, which was that body positivity lifted her and then became big business, and that the moment a thing is for everyone it stops being for the people who built it. She pointed at the plus-size models who do not get booked now, and at the extended sizes disappearing off the racks. She named the era plainly and refused to apologize for moving through it, writing that there is nothing wrong with living in a bigger body and nothing wrong with a woman deciding to change it. The movement had no answer, because the movement had already been bought.
Neither the truth nor the lie pays now
Here is the part that should unsettle anyone who loved this music. The illusion used to pay in both directions. You could hide the surgery and the shot and sell the green smoothie and the willpower, or you could perform the struggle in full view and sell the relatability and build a kingdom on the promise that you are already enough. Both versions needed you not to see the machinery. Honesty was a product, the careful absence of it was a different product, and the same woman could be run through both and billed for the privilege twice.
Now neither one works. Tell the truth and the story dies of its own simplicity. Hide it and a phone camera and a comment thread will out you before the single drops. Kelly Clarkson said it as flatly as it can be said. She was prediabetic, her doctor chased her for two years, and the medication she landed on is not the one everyone assumes, which is the whole point now that there is more than one. The confession landed with a shrug, because the confession is the weather now. The truth buys nothing, the lie buys nothing, and the story is simply over.
What is left to hear
This sends me back to that classroom, and to a row of teenagers with their eyes shut, absolutely certain they were hearing a woman in her fifties who had been to hell and chosen to dance her way out. They were not wrong to feel it, because that is what the music was built to do. The voice reached into them and built a person, and the person it built was more true, in a way, than the blonde from Las Vegas ever could have been on a poster. For a hundred years pop ran on exactly that alchemy, with the body you imagine carrying more meaning than the body that is really there. The weight-loss story was the same spell, scaled up and sold back to women as a mirror, on the promise that if you looked hard enough you would fix what you saw.
The needle did not shrink women. It broke the spell. It took the last great mystery the industry had about the female body and gave the ending away for free, and a mystery with the ending given away is just a fact, and facts do not sell records.
I keep landing on the same question, and it is a question about listening rather than about weight. When the body stops telling a story, what is left to hear?
I think it is the thing my students always had and never trusted, which is the voice itself. The blonde kid from Vegas could make a room full of strangers believe she had lived three lives, because something in how she sang it was true even when everything they pictured was false. That was never about her size, and it was never even about her face. It was the sound, doing what only sound can do.
When the body stops telling a story, the story is the part that empties out, and the voice is the part that does not. Close your eyes and it still works. That is the part no drug can touch.
One last thing, before you go.
In 1990, a 24 year old white lady from Manchester with a boyish crop walked onto the stage of the Apollo, the most unforgiving room in American music, and sang a song called "All Around the World." It had just hit number one on the R&B chart. By the second chorus the entire room was on its feet, chanting "Go Lisa!" Nobody in that crowd had to see her to know what they were hearing. Close your eyes and you will know it too.
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An essay on who is really in charge of your healing
I have gone looking for healing in a lot of places. Some were expensive, the kind where the price is meant to reassure you. Some were the opposite, no money in the room at all, just a claim that they could cure what medicine could not. Both kinds tried to heal me. I left most of them feeling infected. Not sick in the body, but sick with the thing they had quietly put in me, the belief that I was not the one in charge of my own life, that someone else knew better, that the cure was theirs to give and mine only to receive.
That is the virus. It does not announce itself, it works by subtraction. You arrive as a person with a body you have lived in for decades, a person who knows things, and somewhere between the welcome tea and the consultation you are gently relieved of that authority. You stop being the driver. You become the passenger in your own healing, told to surrender, to release, to trust the process, and the process belongs to them. The most expensive thing they take from you is not in the invoice. It is the quiet conviction that you were managing fine before you walked in.
I should tell you who I do trust, because it explains everything. I have entrusted my recovery to cows. I mean that plainly, and anyone who has read me knows I am not being cute. I trust a cow more than I trust most wellness advisors, because the cow is not running a margin on me. It is not upselling the next package. It heals by being exactly what it is, and it asks for nothing back but care. I built my own roadmap out of the medical and the ancient and the animal and the absurd, a combination only I could have assembled because only I was living in this body. Had I shut my eyes and my ears and simply followed, surrendered the way they all tell you to surrender, I do not think I would have found what I needed. I would have found what they were selling, which is not the same thing.
Now look at the scale of what is being sold, because the numbers are not small and they are not slowing. The global wellness economy reached a new peak of $6.8 trillion in 2024, having doubled in size since 2013. To place that, it is now almost four times bigger than the pharmaceutical industry. It is forecast to approach $10 trillion by 2029. A machine that large does not run on healing. It runs on appetite, and appetite has to be fed, which is why there is always another summit, another forum, another founder on a stage in good lighting telling a room of believers that the future is prevention and the future has a price. The hype is not a side effect of the industry. The hype is the supply chain.
None of this began with the influencers. It began with the famous. When I think about how Eastern practice crossed into the Western mainstream, I do not think first of a guru. I think of Madonna. In 1998 she put a Sanskrit shloka on a pop record, "Shanti/Ashtangi" on Ray of Light, the invocation traditionally chanted to open an Ashtanga practice, adapted from Shankaracharya. She mispronounced it badly enough that the BBC arranged Sanskrit lessons for her, and it did not matter. A generation took up yoga and Kabbalah partly because she made them visible and desirable. I do not say that to mock her. She is one of the most studied cases in my own work on how fame moves culture, and this is exactly what fame does. Borrowed authority, passed hand to hand. It is the oldest version of the trick, and the most honest one, because at least she was clearly an artist and not pretending to be your doctor.
And it has a luxury tax, the same way organic did, the same way the word artisanal did. Wellness-focused homes at the middle and upper end of the market command a price premium of 10 to 25 percent, and in some markets the premium runs as high as 30 percent. Here is the part nobody at the forum mentions. That premium does not stay quarantined at the top. The same analysis finds that 31 percent of global markets face a limited supply of certified wellness-grade materials, raising construction lead times by 12 to 18 percent. Read that again. The supply of the actual stuff is finite. The experts are finite. The genuine therapies are finite. So when the luxury tier corners them and bids them up, the bare-bones place feels it too, and the cost climbs for everyone, including the people who came to wellness precisely because they could not afford medicine. The word that was supposed to democratize health is quietly pricing it back out of reach.
Watch how the luxury tier justifies the markup, because the justification is never expertise. It is money and fame. The treatment is validated by a Silicon Valley round, by a founder who swears by it, by a celebrity whose face is on the wall. The rate is high because the names attached are high, and you are meant to read the names as proof. They are not proof. A venture check is not a clinical outcome. An endorsement is not a credential. Strip the names away and ask what is actually known in that room, by whom, to what standard, and the silence can be deafening. The marble was the argument. There was no other one.
And this is not a wellness problem. It is the whole marketplace now. The same trick that sells you a treatment sells you a destination, a diet, a workout, a watch, a way of life. We are being instructed by people who have no idea what they are talking about, and we believe them for one of two reasons. Either they look and sound the part, the right voice, the right body, the right calm, or they come holding the credential of someone we already trust, a brand, a celebrity, a platform that vouched for them so we would not have to check. That is the entire engine of the expert economy. The authority is passed hand to hand until it is so far from anyone who actually knows anything that no one can trace it back. The fitness coach who has never read a study. The diet guru whose only qualification is the body you are meant to envy. The wellness mogul whose monk years did not quite happen the way the brand says, whose certification school once listed university affiliations the universities had never heard of, and whose audience kept buying anyway because the story was good and the calm was convincing. The Guardian reported all of it, Rolling Stone India covered it, and the empire barely flinched. The travel curator selling you a version of a place they spent two nights in. They are not lying exactly. They believe themselves, which is worse, because conviction is the most contagious thing they are selling.
And almost none of it has aftercare. This is the part that gives the game away. You go, you are treated, you feel lighter for a few days, and then you are returned to your life with nothing for the morning the lightness wears off. No follow-up, no plan, no one accountable for whether you are actually better in a month. It is a bandaid sold as a cure. Maybe a bandaid is all most people want. Maybe the few good days are the entire product and everyone involved knows it. Fine. Then market it as what it is. Call it wellness today. Stop selling me tomorrow, and next year, and a transformed life, when what you actually offer expires by the weekend.
I want to be honest about my own complicity in how this works, because I learned it from the other side of the desk. I ran an NGO once. I wanted to give people something harder than a service. I wanted to hand them their own power back, to teach them to advocate for themselves, and I watched that organization die because that is not what people came to buy. They wanted tangible deliverables. They wanted a thing in a bag, a result they could hold, not a conversation about becoming more capable of saving themselves. The business of helping people punishes you for trying to make them independent. The wellness industry learned that lesson long before I did and built its entire model on it. Dependence is the recurring revenue. Empowerment does not scale.
So I am not romantic, and I am not naive, and I am also not done. Here is the part that will surprise the people who think this is only an attack. I hope I still get asked. I hope I am invited back, the expensive places and the bare ones both, because there is genuinely something to learn in many of them, something to practice, sometimes something to simply enjoy. I am not closing that door. I will walk through it again gladly. What I will never do again is walk through it convinced that any of it is for my good first.
First is always the business. That is not cynicism, it is just the order of operations, and pretending otherwise is the actual infection.
Because here is what I carry into every one of those rooms now, the antibody, the thing the virus cannot take. Everything I learned in the medical world to advocate for myself, I bring into the alternative one without exception. I ask what you can measure. I ask who is accountable. I ask what happens after I leave. I stay in the driver's seat in the salt room exactly as I do in the oncology ward, because a body that has been fought over twice does not hand the wheel to anyone, no matter how good the tea is or how soft the voice. The healing was never something they were going to do to me. At most it was something I might do with them, if they were honest about which of us was actually in charge.
I survived the virus the only way you survive any of them. I stopped letting it convince me I was helpless. Then I got up, and I drove myself home.
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Asha Bhosle at the inaugural ceremony of the 44th International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Panaji, Goa, November 2013. Photo: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
Asha Bhosle didn’t just sing for eight decades.
She rewrote what it means to last.
There’s a line people keep repeating today. “The end of an era.” I’ve seen it maybe two hundred times since this morning. And it’s not wrong. But it’s not enough either.
Asha Bhosle didn’t belong to an era. She outlasted all of them. The golden age of playback singing in the 1950s. The psychedelic rebellion of the 70s. The disco boom of the 80s. The A.R. Rahman reinvention of the 90s. And then, at 92 years old, a track on a Gorillaz album released six weeks ago. You don’t call that an era. You call that something else entirely.
She was born Asha Mangeshkar in 1933 in Sangli, Maharashtra, into a family where music wasn’t a choice. It was oxygen. Her father, Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar, was a classical singer and theater actor. Her older sister Lata would become the most revered voice in Indian history. And Asha, married at 16 to a man twice her age, separated by her early twenties with three children - would spend the first decade of her career being told she was the lesser one. The B-grade film singer. The other Mangeshkar.
She answered that not with words but with range. And then she never stopped answering.
The Songs That Proved It
If you want to understand what made Asha Bhosle different, don’t start with a greatest hits list. Start with how far apart the songs sit from each other. Because no artist in the history of Indian music, and very few anywhere in the world, covered this much ground with this much authority.
“Dum Maro Dum” from Hare Rama Hare Krishna in 1971 is where most people begin, and for good reason. R.D. Burman composed it. Asha made it a countercultural anthem. It sounded like nothing Bollywood had ever produced - hazy, defiant, more rock than playback and sixty years later it still hits the same way. That’s not nostalgia. That’s permanence.
The same year gave us “Piya Tu Ab To Aaja” from Caravan in 1971. Helen on screen. Asha in the speakers. R.D. Burman built the arrangement around a sample of the James Bond theme, East-West fusion before sampling even had a name. The cabaret era of Hindi cinema lived and died by this voice. Nobody before or since has made longing sound that dangerous. The song didn’t just serve the scene. It became the scene.
“Chura Liya Hai Tumne Jo Dil Ko” from Yaadon Ki Baaraat in 1973 is the ultimate Bollywood love duet. Asha and Mohammed Rafa. You’ve heard it a thousand times and you’ll stop whatever you’re doing to hear it again. A thousand covers exist. None of them come close.
Then there was “Dil Cheez Kya Hai” from Umrao Jaan in 1981. Rekha. Candlelight. A ghazal that became something physical. The kind of vocal performance where technique disappears and all you’re left with is feeling. I’d argue it’s possibily one of the single greatest vocal moment in Hindi cinema. I know that’s a bold claim. I’m comfortable making it.
Then jump forward to “Tanha Tanha” from Rangeela in 1995. A.R. Rahman was building the future of Indian film music and he needed a voice that could live inside it. She was 62 years old. She made it sound like she’d invented the genre yesterday. Urmila Matondkar owned the screen. Asha owned everything else. The fact that she could move from R.D. Burman’s analog warmth to Rahman’s digital architecture without losing a single ounce of identity tells you everything about the artist.
Five songs. Five completely different genres. Five different decades. One voice that somehow made all of them feel like the definitive version.
The Original Crossover
Here’s the part of the Asha Bhosle story that doesn’t get told enough, especially outside India. She was the original crossover artist. Not as a strategy. Not as a brand extension. But because her voice simply refused to recognize borders.
In the early 1990s, she recorded “Bow Down Mister” with Boy George. Think about that for a second. A Bollywood playback singer and the frontman of Culture Club on the same track. Not as a novelty. Not as a “world music” curiosity. As equals. Her voice didn’t bend to fit his world. It arrived fully formed and made the collaboration make sense.
In 1997, the British band Cornershop released “Brimful of Asha.” The entire song was a love letter to her and the culture of playback singing. Fatboy Slim remixed it to number one on the UK Singles Chart. For an entire generation of British Asian kids, it was the first time they saw their heritage reflected in the mainstream charts. The song wasn’t about Asha Bhosle in the way a biography is about its subject. It was about what she represented. She was the invisible engine behind an entire cinematic universe.
In 2002, she recorded “The Way You Dream” with Michael Stipe of R.E.M. for the 1 Giant Leap project. Two completely different musical galaxies. She walked into his like she’d always lived there.
In 2005, the Kronos Quartet, San Francisco’s premier avant-garde string ensemble released You’ve Stolen My Heart, an album of reimagined R.D. Burman compositions with Asha on vocals. Grammy-nominated. She was 72. The project also featured Zakir Hussain on tabla. It was a record that treated Bollywood music not as exotica but as serious composition. Because that’s what it always was.
The same year, the Black Eyed Peas sampled her voice on “Don’t Phunk with My Heart,” one of the biggest pop hits of the 2000s. Her voice, recorded decades earlier for a Hindi film most of the song’s audience had never heard of became part of the global pop bloodstream.
And then, in 2026, Gorillaz. Damon Albarn, a longtime devotee of R.D. Burman’s work, flew to Mumbai and recorded with Asha at her home. On Burman’s old harmonium. The track, “The Shadowy Light,” appears on The Mountain, Gorillaz’s ninth studio album, which was recorded across India and drew deeply from Indian classical instrumentation. She was 92 years old. It became her final recording.
From Boy George to Gorillaz. Spanning four decades of Western music. And in every single one of those collaborations, the dynamic was the same.
She didn’t adapt to fit. The music adapted to hold her.
That trajectory alone would be remarkable for any artist. But remember, these international collaborations were a side project. A footnote to a career of 12,500 songs in over 20 languages. The Guinness World Record for the most recorded artist in human history. That crossover resume wasn’t the main act. It was what she did on the weekends.
- Published on
Being seen and being remembered are not the same thing
I have written about music, travel, wellness, business, culture. I have had bylines in rooms most writers spend careers trying to enter, and I have walked away from some of those rooms deliberately.
I have also written a memoir about surviving something that had nothing to do with any of it and everything to do with what actually matters.
Many lives. That is the only way I know how to describe it.
And yet across all of them, I kept returning to the same uncomfortable question:
Was any of the visibility actually worth anything?
The gap nobody talks aboutThere is a difference between being known and mattering. Between the doors that open because of a masthead you appear on and the ones that stay open long after you have left.
I watched this pattern play out for years - in the careers I covered, in the institutions I worked within, and eventually in my own trajectory. Attention arrives. Attention moves on. What remains, if anything does, is something quieter and harder to name.
At some point I made a choice that many people in my position quietly make: I chose coherence over amplification. Independence over the comfort of institutional visibility. It cost something. It always does. But it also clarified something I had been circling for years without quite being able to articulate.
Popularity and value are not the same thing.
We treat them as if they are. We measure careers in followers, covers, chart positions, column inches - signals of attention. But attention is not influence. Visibility is not power. And being known is not the same as leaving something behind that lasts.
Fame as an economy
The more I sat with this, the more I realized we have been using the wrong language entirely.
Fame behaves less like magic and more like an economy. It accumulates unevenly. It fluctuates with context. It can be invested, protected, diluted, or squandered. Some people manage it deliberately and extend their influence across decades. Others burn through it quickly, mistaking noise for momentum.
If fame functions like a currency, then not all of it holds the same value.
Some forms of visibility spike and collapse almost immediately. Others accumulate slowly before solidifying into something durable. We confuse scale for strength, reach for resilience. We reward saturation more loudly than substance and then wonder why so many careers that seemed inevitable simply disappear.
This is what sent me down a rabbit hole I could not climb out of.
I began developing what I now call the Economic Value Model (EV Model). Not a ranking system. Not a way to reduce culture to numbers. A shared language for understanding how fame actually functions across time, platforms, and industries. How attention accumulates, how it moves, and under what conditions it endures.
Turning the lens on myself
After spending an entire book measuring other people's lives through this framework, it would have felt dishonest not to apply it to my own.
Not as a stunt. Not as a confession. But as a final act of honesty from someone who has lived inside the machinery this book describes.
I did not assign myself a numerical score. Applying a precise number to my own trajectory would have invited comparison rather than clarity. It would have flattened something that is still in motion.
What I looked at instead was the structure.
And the pattern was familiar.
Visibility rose early, spiked in certain rooms, softened in others. Momentum came in waves - sometimes attached to the work, sometimes to blue ticks and who's following me and sometimes attached to survival itself. Longevity was never about output volume alone, but about staying legible through change. And legacy control, slowly and deliberately, became the axis around which everything else turned.
The most important shift was not professional. It was psychological.
I will admit this plainly: there were moments when I played a version of myself. A version that was easier to package, more legible to an algorithm, more palatable to an audience that wanted something familiar. It sold. For a while. But a performed version of you has a short shelf life. It does not compound. It does not accrue. It just circulates and eventually gets replaced by someone performing a slightly newer version of the same thing.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth underneath all of this: we are all replaceable as figures. Every platform, every institution, every industry will find someone to fill the space you leave. What is not replaceable is a genuine point of view, built slowly, protected carefully, and expressed honestly. The fear of being forgotten drives most people toward presence. But presence without substance is just noise with a face on it. And noise, however loud, is not the same as being revered.
Some people are more comfortable with visibility and its financial rewards than they are with the slower, quieter work of building something that lasts. That is a legitimate choice. But it is worth naming it as a choice because our value is not determined by a single production cycle or a quarterly metric. It is determined by ever-evolving standards that only reveal themselves over time.
At some point I stopped chasing relevance and started protecting coherence. I chose to build archives rather than moments. I stepped back from systems that rewarded constant presence and toward ones that allowed continuity without noise.
That choice carries a cost. It always does.
But it also carries a different kind of value, one that compounds quietly, whether or not anyone is watching.
What I understand now that I didn't then
Content of value determines legacy. Saturation determines noise. And most of what passes for fame is closer to the second than the first.
This is the part that surprised me most when I reached the end of writing Celebnomics. I began the book trying to understand celebrity. I ended it understanding something quieter: that the same forces shaping public figures now shape all of us.
Personal brands. Online identities. Reputation economies. Algorithmic visibility. The question of how we are seen, remembered, and retrieved - not just in entertainment, but in every professional life lived even partially in public.
We all operate inside the attention economy now. We manage perception. We leave trails of data and fragments of narrative that will outlast individual posts, projects, even careers. The EV Model does not tell you how to become famous. It explains why certain people and certain bodies of work remain valuable long after the spotlight moves on.
And once you understand that architecture, you start seeing your own choices differently.
You stop mistaking noise for momentum. You recognize when reinvention is cosmetic and when it is structural. You begin to understand that value is not a reward.
It is a result.
Built through choices made when no one is watching. Through restraint as much as ambition. Through knowing when to speak, when to scale, and when to step back and let the work breathe.
I am still building. I am at peace with whatever is there. And I have learned, albeit slowly, across many lives, that the writers and artists and thinkers who last are rarely the ones who were loudest.
They are the ones who understood the difference between being seen and being remembered.
This piece draws on ideas I explore in depth in my essay on Medium - on attention, power, and the economics of modern celebrity.
- Published on
I smile and say thank you a lot.
Often more than the moment seems to require.
To an Uber driver when the ride ends. To a flight attendant handing me a glass of water. To a nurse doing something that is quite literally her job.
Lately, I have noticed that this basic choreography of politeness is no longer assumed. It is received with surprise. Sometimes even with gratitude in return.
That surprise is what interests me.
Somewhere along the way, what used to be normal behaviour began to register as a personality trait.
We have started treating likeability as a form of value.
Not just in everyday interactions, but in how we judge work, talent, and worth. Especially in moments of public recognition. Likeability has become a shorthand. A proxy. A way to feel confident in our judgments without having to sit too long with complexity.
It is easier to say someone feels deserving than to explain why their work mattered. Easier to praise humility than to examine excellence. Easier to reward those who make us comfortable than those who ask us to look more closely.
This becomes most visible during awards season.
Every year, the same language resurfaces. Who earned it. Who is finally getting their due. Who was humble. Who was awkward. Who seemed grateful enough. Who gave a good speech. Who smiled at the right moment. Who looked surprised, or moved, or appropriately overwhelmed by recognition.
The work itself often fades into the background. It becomes assumed, already settled. What we end up judging instead is how well someone performs relief, gratitude, and accessibility in public.
Likeability, in these moments, feels democratic. Anyone can assess it. Anyone can have an opinion. You do not need to understand the craft to decide whether you liked the person receiving the award.
That is what makes it so seductive. In a world where everyone has an opinion and every opinion competes for attention, narrative often replaces knowledge without us noticing.
Recognition feels like a verdict, when it is usually just a moment. Applause sounds like agreement, when it is often just relief. Awards, praise, virality create the impression of consensus without the burden of evaluation.
But recognition is not the same thing as durability.
Durability is what remains when the ceremony ends. When the coverage moves on. When the narrative stops being refreshed. It is not measured by how loudly something is celebrated, but by how long it continues to matter.
Awards season is structured around moments. Careers are structured around time. The two do not always align. Some work peaks brilliantly and vanishes. Other work moves quietly, resisting immediate consensus, only to deepen as years pass.
Likeability performs well in moments.
Value reveals itself over time.
Likeability itself is not the problem.
Most of the time, when we respond warmly to someone, it is because something real is happening. We like the work. We feel seen by it. We recognise effort, talent, discipline, or vulnerability. Liking the person often follows naturally.
Conflict tends to appear later, when the person steps outside the role we have quietly assigned them. When they break character. When their private choices interrupt the version of them we found easy to hold.
That discomfort is not always about hypocrisy. Often, it is about expectation. We confuse our response to the work with a claim on the individual.
And it is worth being honest about something else too. We do not just reward likeability. We reward narrative.
We like villains because they simplify the story. We like underdogs because they make effort legible. And sometimes we reward people we do not especially like because the arc feels complete. They have struggled enough. They have waited long enough.
They have earned the ending.
In those moments, losing does not feel like failure. The recognition has already been granted. The award becomes confirmation, not conversion.
Likeability works best when it is allowed to be what it is. A moment of connection, not a lifelong contract.
The trouble begins when we ask it to do more than it can carry. When we treat it as proof of worth, or as insurance against time.
Because time is less forgiving than applause.
What endures is rarely the thing that was easiest to like in the moment.
It is the thing that does not announce itself. The thank you. The decency. The work that holds.
- Published on
On identity and the quiet value of distance
By the time people started asking where the work would land, I already knew I didn’t want the answer to shape it.
That question has a way of arriving early, often dressed up as encouragement. Who’s publishing it. Who’s backing it. Where it will sit once it’s finished. The infrastructure shows up before the thinking has had time to settle, as if legitimacy needs to be secured in advance.
I’ve lived long enough inside systems to recognize that reflex. I’ve also lived long enough to know what it costs.
Twelve years ago, I published a book that came out of illness, Holy Cancer: How A Cow Saved My Life. I chose not to personally profit from it, and just as deliberately, I chose not to turn it into a series. There were easy paths available. A follow-up in the health space would have been legible, fundable, and warmly received. I didn’t take it.
Illness can become a lane very quickly. I wasn’t interested in mining something that had already taken enough.
In the years since, I’ve run an NGO, worked inside institutions, and watched how intention quietly shifts once visibility, funding, and affiliation enter the picture. I’ve seen good work sharpen under constraint, and I’ve seen it soften in the name of access. I’ve watched language change not because anyone demanded it, but because proximity made certain questions feel inconvenient.
None of this makes me allergic to systems. It just makes me attentive to how they edit you long before you realize you’re being edited.
So when I found myself deep into another long project, I noticed the same pattern reappearing. Questions about placement arrived before questions about clarity. Conversations tilted toward outcome before the thinking had finished. The frame began assembling itself around the work while the work was still unsettled.
That project eventually became Celebnomics: How Fame Became the Ultimate Currency, though the name came much later than the noticing.
What mattered more to me than where it would land was whether I could let the thinking finish without negotiating it first.
Whether I could write without preemptively smoothing edges or translating the work into something more comfortable for the systems it was examining.
Standing slightly outside the frame was a way of buying that space.
That distance comes with consequences. Fewer shortcuts. Less amplification. No insulation if the work lands awkwardly. Being read without borrowed authority. I’m not romantic about any of that. I just decided it was a trade I could live with.
There’s a long stretch of ground between selling out and opting out that doesn’t get talked about much, mostly because it isn’t impressive. It doesn’t announce itself as integrity. It doesn’t come with a ready narrative. It’s just a series of quiet decisions not to rush alignment before something has earned its own shape.
That’s the ground I’ve been standing on for a while now.
I saw it when I chose not to keep mining illness after Holy Cancer. I saw it when I resisted turning recovery into a lane. I saw it running an NGO, where good intentions collided daily with optics, funding language, and the subtle pressure to simplify what was actually complex.
Each time, the same question surfaced in different forms. How close do you want to stand to the thing you’re trying to understand.
Closer brings speed. Distance brings friction. It also brings clarity.
What I’ve learned is that systems don’t need to coerce you to shape your work. They just need to reward certain kinds of fluency. Over time, you start pre-editing. You start anticipating comfort. You start smoothing edges without being asked.
Standing slightly outside the frame is a way of interrupting that reflex.
This isn’t a position statement. It’s a working posture. One that accepts slower movement and uneven reception in exchange for being able to stand behind the work without footnotes or apologies.
If the work travels quietly, that’s fine. If it takes time to find its readers, that’s fine too.
I’ve learned, across health, institutions, and long stretches of lived experience, that speed and proximity are not the same as progress.
Sometimes the most honest way to see something clearly is to take a step back and let it finish becoming itself.
- Published on
On restraint, recovery, and the discipline of stepping back
While I was getting over a minor illness, I noticed something I wasn’t really supposed to say out loud.
Everyone around me was “fine.” Back at work. Back at dinners. Back to normal schedules and normal conversations. And yet
their coughs lingered. Their voices still sounded rough. Every few days, someone would admit, almost surprised, “I don’t know why this thing is still hanging on.”
Mine didn’t.
What made that awkward was that I hadn’t done anything impressive to earn it. I didn’t take antibiotics. I didn’t power through. I didn’t stay productive or brave or inspirational about being sick.
I just stopped interfering.
We like to say the body heals itself. That’s comforting and mostly true, but it leaves out the part where we spend a lot of time getting in its way. We keep eating things that irritate us. We keep adding stimulation. We keep testing whether we’re better yet.
We confuse time passing with resolution and assume that if we look normal enough, the system must have sorted itself out.
The body is polite. It doesn’t always escalate. Sometimes it just keeps whispering.
So instead of adding, I subtracted. No acidic food. No coffee, even though I wanted it badly and told myself a very convincing story about deserving it. No pushing through meals that didn’t sit right. No heat. No wellness theatrics. Mostly warm, soft food, rest, hydration, and an almost aggressive refusal to test my limits just to reassure other people.
From the outside, this probably looked unnecessary. I could feel it in the way people watched me eat, or didn’t watch me eat, which is its own form of watching.
“You’ll be fine,” they said, kindly. “Everyone gets over this.”
Which is true. But incomplete.
Most people do get over things eventually. They just don’t always finish the job.
What we normalize is the residue. The cough that stays. The fatigue we quietly schedule around. The low grade discomfort that becomes background noise. We accept it because it lets us get on with life, and getting on with life is treated like a virtue.
Doing less, on the other hand, looks suspicious. It looks like overthinking. It looks indulgent. It looks like you’re being precious about something everyone else is managing just fine.
Except they aren’t. Not really.
What I was actually doing was reducing variables. When something is irritated, adding complexity rarely helps. This is true of throats and stomachs, but it’s also true of systems, relationships, workplaces, and people who are quietly burned out but still answering emails.
We have a cultural bias toward intervention. Toward escalation. Toward visible action. Medication. Meetings. Conversations.
Coping strategies. Productivity hacks. None of these are bad. But timing matters. And attention matters more than we like to admit.
Sometimes intervention replaces listening. Sometimes it replaces patience. Sometimes it replaces the uncomfortable act of letting something settle before we decide what it needs.
I wasn’t trying to recover faster. I was trying to recover without leftovers.
And the ending wasn’t dramatic. The cough didn’t migrate or linger. It didn’t fade into legend. It just stopped. Food started tasting normal again. Sleep returned without negotiation. The body did what it does when it isn’t being poked constantly to perform.
That kind of discipline isn’t about restriction. It’s about cooperation.
Once you see this pattern, it’s hard to unsee it. Companies in trouble add meetings instead of removing confusion. Relationships under strain add explanations instead of space. Burned out people add self care routines on top of lives that are already too full.
Same reflex. Different arena.
We mistake action for effectiveness. We mistake intervention for care. We mistake looking fine for being well.
What this small, unglamorous health episode reminded me is something we rarely say because it sounds passive in a culture obsessed with fixing.
Healing isn’t automatic. But it also isn’t something you force.
Sometimes the most effective thing you can do is stop interrupting what’s already trying to resolve itself.
- Published on
Members Only, Open To All…Eventually
When my mother died, I’d like to believe that her passing enabled a reunion with my father who died a little under seven years prior to that. While still digesting the news of her death, I received numerous calls and emails providing support and an active ear. Many of those responses included a word I had not really thought about in all my preparedness for this moment — orphan.
The term is generally not used for adults. But technically with the death of both my parents and my relatively young age — early 30’s (given that our life expectancy has jumped significantly), perhaps that is the correct term. After all, I am a single man with no children. All the major events of my “adult life” are likely still ahead of me. I will not have my parents there at my wedding. They will not be there for the birth of my first child. They will not be there for that child’s 1st birthday. They will not be there for those important moments. Of course, I’ll also not have them for the tiny moments, the tragic moments, and the tough moments. I won’t have their voice, their name, or their presence to provide any kind of comfort. Without my parents, I’ve also lost my home.
My sister lives halfway around the world. Despite our six-year age difference, our lives couldn’t be more different. She’s had those major moments. She has been married for over 15 years, has 2 children and thankfully for their sake, they were both blessed by their grandparents. While their memory may fade, they will forever have photographs of their grandfather (some) and grandmother (many). While a picture may not mean the world, it is an everlasting reminder of what was. Despite the countless pictures I store, not one will ever be a shared moment between my wife, my kids and my parents.
I try to think about the future. My extended family and friends tell me that life will go on and I will survive. It’s true. I am lucky in a lot of ways. A friend of mine lost his parents in a tragic car accident a few years back. While he was lucky to have them for his wedding and the birth of his first child, he shared something with me the day after my Mom died. He welcomed me to the club — the orphan’s club.
At first I didn’t know what to think. The word took me to images of impoverished children in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the more I thought about the meaning of the word, I realized that perhaps I too now share something in common with those children. As my friend stated, whatever happens from now on — it’s my fate. I will never be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I will never carry guilt for what I am doing or not doing. I will have peace that I did absolutely everything I could for both of my parents until the day they died.
While it may not be a club that anyone wants to join or become associated with in his or her life, the reality is that we are all likely to become card-carrying members. With the loss of our parents, we lose a part of ourselves — our security, our past, our childhood — our identity. It’s a frightening prospect to think that I solely hold the key to who I am. While others may help shape the image, there’s nothing like a parent to set things straight and be there to remind you of who you are and who you’ve become. They are also the live-action living reminder of who you could become.
I feel cheated that my future is so wide open. My memories will be shaped by the good that I have to hold onto in order to keep me staying positive. But my memories will also be the glue that I’ll have to use to stick to every future relationship in order to ground me. It’s hard being in charge of who you are. From now on, my memory is my home.
I worry how my friendships will change with people around me. Most people my age are only now starting to see their parents’ age. While they bitch and complain, they also love and enjoy their company. I’ve already found it challenging when friends would whine about their fathers after losing mine — I always thought how ungrateful they were. Now, that becomes that much more difficult. I know it’s not their fault, as they are living, and any active relationship carries emotions. But it’s just hard to hear.
I also worry about being in a relationship. I’m likely to meet someone with a family of her own. While I’m sure that will be a silver lining for me, and hopefully the relationship will be one strengthened by my lack of one, but I wonder about the loss for my kids. Will I be cheating on my family if I only spend time with hers? There will never be a conflict about where to go for Christmas. My kids will never really hear about all the love they would have had from 2 sets of grandparents. For them, my family will be stories. Stories will be their home.
I guess the orphan’s club has no rules. It’s hard to live without order. They call that anarchy. There is a lot more self-regulation and discipline required for survival. While perhaps the judgment is gone, so too is the safety net. In a time when things become obsolete in 6 months, will my memory and stories last me? It seems the more we accumulate, the more filled up our past becomes with trivial things. Some would say that makes those stories or rare photos that much more important but with time, the interest in them decreases.
I don’t like being part of the orphan’s club. Even if it were to have come later in my life, I’m sure I would have felt the same way. I am angry that I can’t be angry with either one of my parent’s deaths. While I know it was premature in both of their cases, their deaths were peaceful and without pain. I hate that I have to hold onto the memory of their actual death in order justify the loss.
With time I know the membership will become easier. I know others will join me along the way. I also know that life and living alone are no guarantee that my parents would have given me all the things I expected from them for the future that I had envisioned with them in. I also know that because of my club status, perhaps I will try even harder to ensure that their legacy continues. With practice, I’ll be able to not question but just believe that when my mother closed her eyes forever — she reunited with my father. I was orphaned but I stand here as proof of who they were and who they wanted me to become in life.