FORMIDABLE MIXTURES

"Deserve" is a funny metric. Few concepts are referenced so righteously and defined so arbitrarily. After years of working in advertising, I am all too familiar with the insidious mechanics of a phrase as seemingly innocent as, "You deserve it!" The seedier implication is: If you don’t buy this, you are withholding something from yourself, and in doing so, withholding yourself from your full potential. In other words, you aren’t "living your best life" — another materialistic construct disguised as a fundamental human right. But some of us, as it turns out, simply can’t afford our best lives.

For Shondaland, I wrote about living above my means, consumerism as self-care, and growing up with a twisted, shame-ridden relationship to money.

1. Be patient. No matter what. 2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him. 3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you. 4. Expand your sense of the possible. 5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change. 6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself. 7. Tolerate ambiguity. 8. Laugh at yourself frequently. 9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right. 10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong. 11. Give up blood sports. 12. Remember that your life belongs to others as well. Don’t risk it frivolously. 13. Never lie to anyone for any reason. (Lies of omission are sometimes exempt.) 14. Learn the needs of those around you and respect them. 15. Avoid the pursuit of happiness. Seek to define your mission and pursue that. 16. Reduce your use of the first personal pronoun. 17. Praise at least as often as you disparage. 18. Admit your errors freely and soon. 19. Become less suspicious of joy. 20. Understand humility. 21. Remember that love forgives everything. 22. Foster dignity. 23. Live memorably. 24. Love yourself. 25. Endure.

If a signature scent represents the delineations of a person fully fleshed, perfume samples offer the liberty of a protean form—the same lack of definition that I used to lament. Today, it brings me a renewed sense of agency, a purposeful expansiveness. It’s the same species of joy as playing with makeup, or trying on other people’s clothes; extending ourselves beyond the decaying sacks of flesh we inhabit. Last year with it beloved misfits and iconoclasts who showed us the freedom of resisting definition, but it did leave a lingering sweetness: the celebration of a mercurial life.

Who says a sense of self has to exist in the singular? That the “I” in our self-imposed narratives has to come from a place of continuity? What I used to blame on weakness of character—a proclivity for inconsistencies and a magpie attention span—I am finally seeing as strength. With no hard or fast definitions, we are free to be: to absorb, to experiment, to turn towards our own suns. To be ourselves by not holding ourselves to it. It feels like an untapped superpower.

I wrote a defence of cheap perfume samples for Hazlitt.

Invisible Stories started as a project to bring scent back into the everyday vernacular. It was also, personally speaking, a deliberate pursuit of happiness. Scent was restorative for me, a mental tonic—a whiff of lilacs in the spring could lift a depressive episode instantly, while a spritz of a new perfume sample kept me giddy all day. For something so simple, its rewards are incommensurate. After all, smell is as close as we get to time travel—a familiar scent can transport us back to places long lost in the dusty crevices of our brains, while a new fragrance conjures up glittering futures and new realities we'd never dreamed of.

A child of, say, six knows you’re not the shape she’s learned to make by drawing half along a fold, cutting, then opening. Where do you open? Where do you carry your dead? There’s no locket for that—hinged, hanging on a chain that greens your throat. And the dead inside you, don’t you hear them breathing? You must have a hole they can press their gray lips to. If you open— when you open—will we find them folded inside? In what shape? I mean what cut shape is made whole by opening? I mean besides the heart.

Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it

I know it is—and that if once it hailed me it ever does—

and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction not as towards a place, but it was a tilting within myself,

as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so specifically myself I thought I’d die from being loved like that.