1. Tretinoin is making me break out in a way I never did when I was an actual teenager. I lightly press a finger to my inflamed forehead twenty-six thousand feet in the air as the plane thrums around me. Sometimes plane rides feel jagged and threatening and sometimes they feel like floating through the air in a giant womb. Right now it’s the latter: everything is calm and I have the window half-open and the 6 PM light is aqueous. I’ve flown more than most people would choose to these past 6 months. The friends we visited this weekend were irritated when we left in the morning and I know I should have pressed for an explanation but I’ve been so obsessed with the way specific aspects of experience seem to urgently transcend the self that instead I spent the whole day thinking about an essay Kristin Dombek wrote for The Paris Review about threesomes.



2. I’m going through what you might call a conversion experience. The unsurprising result is that I have been obsessed with letting things go. This makes me hard to interface with: euphoria, it turns out, looks boring from the outside. I mostly want to bike miles uphill and write 3000 words a day. S says he’s never felt anything even mildly similar and if I talk too much about it he looks at me like I’m either a conspiracy theorist or an unmedicated manic-depressive. Euphoria, it turns out, looks heavily alarming from the outside. The best way to describe what’s going on is that I’ve accidentally inherited a spiritual life by way of a handful of psychedelics, a few books about Zen Buddhism, two years of yoga and one pristinely white hotel room. It was an unexpected inheritance and I was not in any way qualified for it. The girl-woman I was before was tactical, acquisitive. I coveted: moreover, I quite enjoyed coveting. But no matter: I’ve done some research and all sources converge on the fact that God loves sinners. 



3. This is not, by the way, a story about me converting to Mormonism, though I half-expect to catch it through the Utah tap water any day now. I understand that the word conversion naturally suggests a point of arrival, but I have arrived precisely nowhere on the map of organized religion. I know precisely nothing. Untethering might be a better term than conversion, but it’s also less broadly recognizable as a category of human experience. (At this very moment the plane is experiencing moderate turbulence and I am a wreck of fear-jelly, so rest assured that any act of God I’ve passed through has certainly not helped me transcend my fear of death via heights). The facts of the case are this: I used to be depressed and anxious, and now I am not. I used to care a great deal what other people thought of me, and now I do not. I used to be possessive and neurotic in relationships, and now I am not. I used to be fundamentally unsure of myself, and now I like and accept myself pretty much exactly as I am. I still look exactly the same and function similarly in the external world, but my internal experience seems to have swiftly executed an illegal U-Turn. 



4. As a kid I always felt that I was unable to attach to the world in a normative way. I was anxious, inward, desperate to please. I couldn’t mimic social competence until I was 13 or 14. I think it was participating in debate and Model UN that helped me figure it out. Or maybe my changing body as I went from a chubby kid to a normal teenage girl. From adolescence onwards I received pretty much all the validation anyone could dream of, but by then it didn't matter: I was hungry in a way that could never be satiated. Boys liked me, but their attention and adoration never felt like enough. I had loving friends, but something always felt missing or boring or off. I thought that it was a career thing: maybe if I founded a successful startup or got a prestigious job I would finally escape from that sense of unanchored seeking. Now I understand that I was trying to use achievement to cover up a lack of fulfillment: I valued myself solely for my ability to perform. If I wasn't doing something impressive I wasn't worth anything at all.



5. The mountains below me are dusty brown, veined with red, and surprisingly soft-looking. There’s something about the peaks and lines that remind me of a bed left languidly unmade. I wish I had more practice describing geologic formations. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do when you stumble into bliss without having earned it in any way. I didn’t meditate for 10 years while renouncing all earthly pleasures, but I’m happy now in a way that it seems like only young children and old monks are. I’ve spent most of my life thinking about men and money and literature, same as everyone else. Now there’s a new dimension of existence that’s materialized before me. It’s mystical. Frankly, I’m mystified.



6. This weekend I sat in the backseat while we drove through Oregon wine country with its neat infinity of grape plants and thought: life is rapture. I can’t believe I’ve spent all this time not noticing. Now I’m petrified gripping the armrest while watching the right wing of the plane wobble as we descend and life decidedly does not feel like rapture but I think maybe it still is. I feel porous, the world rushing in through my retinoid-wracked skin. I’m thinking about the mutability of language and beauty, the body I live in and the body I’ll never have. I think and feel. I know precisely nothing.



7. Now we’re landing. Euphoria, it turns out, looks like solid ground through the window.