Leandra Medine's Blog, page 37

4 New York City-Based Experts on How to Make Your Clothes Last Much, Much Longer

I started working on this story a few weeks ago, when the stakes of the world felt quite different, and the hours I spent interviewing these experts constituted the bright part of my day. Listening to their stories, I learned about pockets of New York where Chris, Vincent, Miriam and Wayne focus on maintenance, repair and problem-solving on a daily basis, serving as local heroes on a small physical scale and a vast emotional scale. During our conversations, I mentally sifted through my closet—a catalogue of imperfections—and thought about new ways to approach untreated problems, like the blotch of red gouache I got on a white dress while painting a few summers ago, or my favorite Trademark dress which, it turns out, is in need of an at-home hand-wash. Read on to learn about their solutions-oriented wizardry.

Chris Moore of Artbag

Artbag is a handbag repair and cleaning facility on New York’s Upper East Side. They also repair shoes.

On working with his father in the family business

I was trained by my father. I started learning about handbags at an early age, and I started professionally in 1993. We’re on Madison Avenue and 84th Street. The store’s been in this location since 2001, but it’s been on Madison since 1960.

My father and I came to a conclusion when I first started that everything we do at Artbag, stays at Artbag. Once you leave the store, there are no more conversations about Artbag. Whether you need to come in early and have a discussion, or stay late and have a discussion about the business itself, we don’t discuss business outside the door. Compartmentalizing has been wonderful.

Protecting suede

Issues with suede arise because customers don’t protect the bags before they wear them. When you do that, you’re asking for trouble. Anytime a suede bag is purchased, it should be sprayed with a protectant before it’s actually used. That helps prevent any issues that can’t be rectified in the future. We like Fiebing’s protectant product best—it’s a water and stain protectant.

When it comes to suede bags, customers should also take into consideration that they shouldn’t wear light-color suede bags with denim, because a denim transfer can occur. Once the denim transfer occurs, even if it’s sprayed, it’s fairly difficult to remove. That also holds true for linen and canvas bags.

Tips for making your bags last a long while

The first thing when it comes to zippers is to not overstuff your bag. Once you overstuff the bag, you are causing the zipper to do things it’s not supposed to do. Quite often if you’re overstuffing your bag, you’ll actually zip something into the zipper itself. The teeth won’t match up any longer, and that’s when the zipper will start to separate.

One other thing customers should be cognizant of—and I always tell them this—is to keep your bags on rotation. Don’t continuously wear one bag every day.

When it comes to leather bags, we use a neutral, colorless shoe polish. You always try a polish on the bottom of the bag first, to make sure you get the desired effect. Then you can continue with the rest of the bag. And if you follow the directions on the jar, you shouldn’t have any problems.

On saving the day for Russell Brand

Russell Brand was hosting the MTV awards quite a few moons ago, and he had a belt that he had custom-made in England. The snap actually broke on the day that he was supposed to film the awards (which were in New York that year). He needed to have the snap replaced in a short period of time, and we were able to do it for him.

Jackie O. was a client here when she was around. I don’t care to give out the client’s name, but one of the most interesting requests we’ve had was a steamer trunk that we totally refurbished. There were maybe 2,000 nails that had to be removed. So we went through and completed the job, which took about three weeks. The steamer trunk ended up in a museum!

New York foot traffic

The number of vacancies on Madison Avenue is actually scary. And I’m not even talking in respect to the buyers that come into my store—the foot traffic is absolutely abysmal. There was a time when you couldn’t get a parking spot. I’m looking outside as we’re talking, and you could get something out on either side of the street.

We’re increasingly getting sales from our online presence, where we have customers who send things in from around the world. This helps out tremendously.

Vincent Rao Jr. of Vince’s Village Cobbler

Vince’s Village Cobbler is a shoe, handbag and accessory maintenance provider in SoHo.

On finding his own place in the family business

About 10 years ago, my father decided to incorporate a shoe repair shop next to his already existing tailoring shop, Village Tailor, which has been there for 45 years. I was growing up, starting to get an interest in things, and he introduced me to this store. I started managing it when I was about 15 years old. We’ve always been on Sullivan Street in SoHo.

By the time I graduated from college, I was ready to make the business mine. I introduced my girlfriend to the business, and now we both manage it. We’re college-educated individuals managing a shoe repair shop, and we’re using our skills and ability to bring it to the next level.

There’s definitely demand for this industry. We recently started a mail order system. It’s fairly new, so by comparison there’s definitely a lot more foot traffic. But that’s just now, you know? I think eventually this industry will be online, with the modern shipping features we have.

We work with almost every material. We work with leather, we work with fabric, we work with suede, nubucks—anything really. Anything that a shoe or a bag or any accessory, like a belt, is made out of—we work with that. We even have hardware replacements, for little rivets, snaps and so on. There are so many little, tiny things that we have to carry in order to accommodate every single luxurious, expensive accessory that exists.

Taking care of suedes and fabrics, like satin

We work with satin up to a certain extent. Satin is more of a fabric: I would definitely consider satin as one of the more delicate materials, in the same category as suede or nubuck. Satin is very hard to clean and maintain. As soon as you put a brush or chemical to it, you risk damaging it.

My customers ask me, “How can I maintain a light pair of sneakers or a light suede bag?” In reality, if you don’t want to damage it, you’ve got to keep it in your closet and you can’t use it. People don’t like to hear that. If you want to use something that’s delicate and light-colored, no matter what you do, no matter what you spray on it, it’s always going to get dirty. That’s just the nature of the material.

For suede and fabrics, you can’t apply any cream or moisturizers or anything. You can only apply a cream or moisturizer to a skin, like a leather. A lot of these products contain waterproofing agents. They also contain moisturizing agents to keep the leather soft and supple, so it’ll prevent it from getting dry, cracking, and aging quickly. You could also use a wax or a shoe polish for any leather.

When caring for suedes, nubucks, and satins, we have waterproofing sprays, which are these chemicals that you’d spray on the accessory, the shoe, the bag, whatever it is, and it’s completely clear. It leaves no marks. It’ll leave a smell for a little bit, but that smell goes away. That’s really the only thing you could apply to material like a suede or a fabric.

The most common issues that we’re solving? We do a lot of sole protection. A lot of high-end manufacturers sell very expensive shoes with leather soles, and those leather soles are very susceptible to getting damaged. The soles absorb water like a sponge, and the water can spread and damage the upside of the shoe if the soles aren’t protected. I would always advise adding some sort of rubber grip protection at the bottom of any high-end shoe.

We do a lot of painting and a lot of restoration here. People buy $1,000 Chanel shoes and wear them out in the rain or the snow, and salt ends up destroying them. Then we have to resole them. We use a special de-salting chemical, and then we reapply a polish and repaint the sole. We do a lot of heel work, too: People break down the heels on their shoes and don’t even realize it.

Working miracles

We don’t know what the facts are, but we had one customer—we assume she might’ve cheated on somebody, because she brought us a couple of high-end bags that were all slashed up. We’re talking about $1,000-2,000 Louis Vuitton bags. Someone took a knife to them and just sliced them in half. We actually restored them.

View this post on Instagram

After a little bit of creative engineering and a whole lot of stitching, we are proud to say that we brought this @louisvuitton back to life

How to Thrive in a Small Space, According to 6 People Who Really Know

As grateful as I am that I can work from home during this period of social isolation, I didn’t realize it would be a fairly challenging adjustment. This misconception was reinforced by my “grass is always greener” mentality that it actually… might be kind of nice? I assumed I would be hyper-productive with work, now that I no longer would need to leave the house or step into a meeting or spend all day on set for a shoot. I assumed I would take advantage of the opportunity to get a little extra sleep. I assumed Austin and I would revel in each other’s company.

Instead, I’ve found it hard to approach my work as effectively as I did at the office, I’ve woken up earlier than usual every day because I’m anxious, and Austin has been working until 1:00 a.m.—so we haven’t exactly been spending quality time together, despite the irony that we haven’t been more than 10 feet apart. (Last night, I asked him if he, too, feels like the walls of our one-bedroom apartment appear to be contracting an inch every morning we’re confined here, like that scene in Star Wars with the trash compactor).

My inexperience with the whole “working and living in a small space with another person for an indefinite period” is definitely showing, so I turned to the Man Repeller community for advice. Below are some salient tips for how to handle an unexpected situation like this with grace, from people who’ve had a bit more practice.

1. Pick a Designated Work Space

Advice from Olivia, who lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle with her husband:

“When I first moved to Seattle, I worked as a freelance graphic designer for a year, which meant that 90% of my time was spent in my small apartment. Something that helped me so much then, and is helping me once again, is picking a chair or desk or area that is my designated ‘work space.’ When I’m in bed, in the kitchen, or anywhere else, I’m ‘home,’ and when I sit on my designated chair, it’s like I’m stepping into my ‘office.’ It helps me to focus on work when I need to, and relax and get my mind off work when I don’t.”

2. Maintain a Routine

Advice from Ella, who lives alone in a small New York City apartment:

“I’ve worked from home both as a remote employee and recently as a freelancer, going on over five years now. My advice is to try and stick to a schedule. Wake up, have breakfast, take a shower, and get dressed (you can wear comfy clothes, obviously, but get out of your pajamas from last night). Take an actual lunch break, and watch that episode of your favorite soap opera, or read a chapter in a book. Cut yourself off from email whenever the office would typically close up.”

3. Reward Yourself With Creative Bursts

Advice from Kay, a high school student who lives in a 300-square-foot studio apartment with her mom:

“Since my school is currently closed, I’m at home almost 24/7, and my mom (a nurse) is home three days out of the week. Something that has helped me spend so much time indoors is balancing out my schoolwork with creative activities. Every time I have to write something down or do a worksheet to scan and turn in for school, I draw or paint on the back of the paper. It’s not the most revolutionary tip, but letting myself do one creative task after every work task can be so incentivizing.”

4. Clearly Delineate “Work Life” From “Home Life”

Advice from Taylor, who works from home alongside her husband in a two-bedroom apartment in Delray Beach:

“For many people, the post-work commute provides an opportunity to transition mentally between work life and home life. I’ve found it beneficial to recreate the same effect by doing something every day to separate these two things. For example, I typically shower right after I finish work, which has the same therapeutic effect for me.”

5. Set Boundaries

Advice from Kendall, who lives with two other women in a 2.5-bedroom apartment in Sydney:

“It’s great if you’re super close with the people or person you live with, but that also makes emotional boundaries all the more important. My roommates and I try to avoid ‘brain dumping’ on each other at the end of a hard day without checking in first to see if the recipient is in a place to hear it, so no one feels overwhelmed or burdened. It’s easy to absorb everything that’s going on in each other’s lives by virtue of proximity, but sometimes you’re better off venting to someone you don’t live with.”

5. Don’t Ignore Your Desires

Advice from Avril, who lives and works from home with her partner in a one-bedroom apartment in Barcelona:

“I’m a sexologist, so my advice is to get in tune with your sense of desire. Most of the time, desiring a partner is precipitated by distance, but living in close quarters—especially during a situation like this—makes that difficult to come by. No matter how you’re feeling, positive sexual communication is key. I encourage people to use ‘I’ statements—for example, telling your partner, ‘With everything going on right now, I’m just not feeling very horny lately’ or if you’re experiencing rejection from your partner, you can lead with something like, ‘I feel undesirable when my advances are dismissed and want to have a conversation about that.’ I also think it’s important to keep in mind that even though events and concerts are cancelled and bars are closed, pleasure is not cancelled. Don’t underestimate the potential impact of scheduling time to connect with your partner, whether that means having sex or just holding hands on the couch.”

6. Celebrate Your Productivity

Advice from Gabriella, who works freelance out of a small apartment in Copenhagen where she lives with her boyfriend:

“I definitely recommend installing a time tracker on your browser. I use Clockify and have the extension in Chrome. It shows me how much I ACTUALLY work every day and on which projects. I love to look at the weekly and monthly reports, too, to see where my time goes. I even have a ‘project’ for self/professional development, so I can log my time spent working on this aspect of my career—applying for jobs, finding conferences, updating LinkedIn, online learning, etc. I feel very productive at the end of the day, seeing how much I accomplished.”

Anyone else have tips to share? Sound off in the comments.

Feature photos by Heidi’s Bridge.

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The post How to Thrive in a Small Space, According to 6 People Who Really Know appeared first on Man Repeller.

Inside Story No. 1: The Sunny California Wedding That Pivoted to a Zoom Meeting

As the coronavirus has developed over the course of the past months, weeks, and days, our plans have changed and so have our lives. And it appears this will be the norm for a while. In this series (duration: a few weeks to…not sure?), we’ll share the stories of people who have confronted the unexpected in interesting ways. First, we have the story of Ana Monroe, who married her now-husband Scott on Saturday, March 14th. Inside a storefront in L.A., but also on Zoom. —Mallory

I proposed to Scott. I knew I wanted to marry him if he would have me, so last June I started asking my friends—all the dudes—how they did it. Everyone was like, “Have a plan,” this and that. We were living in D.C. at the time, and I went down to my parents’ house in Georgia under the pretense that I wanted to miss all the D.C. 4th of July stuff because it can make the city quite crazy—but really, I was going down to get rings. I went down there and picked a ring and went back and abandoned my plan completely the next morning and just proposed to him in bed. I’d had this plan to go on a hike and get Chinese food, and then I was like, “No, I’m just going to do it right here.” It wasn’t a huge leap, you know? He was like, “I wanted to propose to you, but I didn’t know how.” And I was like, “Well, I did!”

I never dreamt of my wedding, ever. Like I said, I come from Georgia, and I come from a pretty rural part of it, and I left when I was 18 because I didn’t fit in. I remember very vividly as a little girl being told that I wouldn’t become a lady because of the way that I acted, and I remember saying “Well, I don’t want to be a lady.” So all the things associated with being a lady I never wanted to do—and that included a wedding. The only thing I knew I wanted when we started planning the wedding was that I didn’t want to do any of those things.

We planned the wedding for March because my brother is a college professor, and we essentially chose the first day of spring break because we needed him to be there. We planned it so that the ceremony was mostly about my husband’s family’s traditions, and the party was mostly about my family’s traditions.

We were like, “How can we make this really beautiful, visually and sensorially, for our guests?”

My husband and I both go to Quaker Meeting. There’s no leadership and no hierarchy. Even in the 1600s when the Quakers started, they allowed women to have a voice in the community, so it’s very much my vibe. [The plan was that] the ceremony would be a ceremony, the reception would be a party—there would be no cake, no white dress, certainly no garter throwing or first dances. None of that. There’s no officiant in the Quaker tradition and there would certainly be no one giving me away to anyone except myself. We’re both designers, so we were like, “How can we make this really beautiful, visually and sensorially, for our guests?”

We moved out to L.A. in November. We were supposed to have a beach brunch and a seagazing party on Friday. I told my friends that I just wanted to have all the bagels I can never have—I said, “Just gluten-free bagels and lox and I’ll be so happy!” (I have celiac disease, so I can never have bagels.) So we bought all this food, and we were going to go out to Malibu—but the other wrinkle was that Los Angeles was under a multi-day rain event. So that plan was ruined.

Everything about the wedding was outside, because it’s Los Angeles. The ceremony was going to be in Griffith Park in the Cedar Grove. Whenever you see movies filmed in L.A. and they’re running through a forest, it’s almost always filmed in the Cedar Grove. Scott and I had gone there and, like, gridded out the place like little designers, with numbers for where we’d put blankets down for our guests that we’d bought in Mexico City. All of that went out the window.

Ten days before the wedding, we decided we had to send an email to everyone who had RSVP’d. We knew the virus was spreading—the cases in Italy were snowballing, and one case had appeared in L.A. County. So we sent an email saying “Hey, we’re monitoring the situation, and we’ll make a decision by Friday evening Pacific Time.” We figured we needed to give people a week. We got a bunch of emails that were like, “Are you really thinking of canceling? What’s going on? This is so stressful.” We were like, “Yeah, it is stressful.”

Planning a wedding is a lot—even a non-traditional wedding that’s not going to have all the things. We had this colorful, huge idea—the clothing direction for the event was “Wear your brightest clothes, that lime-green dress you never get to take for a spin, now’s the time, purple suede shoes, yes! All the stripes, all the dots, all the plaids.” We wanted it to be super-bright and fun and happy—and the Coronavirus is the opposite of super-bright and fun and happy. By Friday, we decided to go through with it. It seemed like we might outrun it. Then the news kept getting worse and worse.

My parents arrived in L.A. from Georgia the Sunday before, and when your parents arrive for your wedding, you’re kind of like, “Okay, this wedding is totally happening.” My parents are great and super-strong and not at all people who scare easily, so we kept going forward. I think the hardest part was that we refused to make a decision for anyone. That’s something I’m proud of, but it was also really stressful. I had to tell a few people, “You know, I have access to the same information that you have. I don’t have more information than you have. This has to be your decision.” People would call or email us and we’d say, “We’re going to have the wedding, we don’t want to sway you either way, it’s your decision.” That was really hard because people wanted, I realized, to be given direction—and I just couldn’t make that decision. So, ultimately, at the last minute, we decided to have a Zoom link.

On the day of the wedding, we moved everything inside the space where we’d planned to have the party. It was raining buckets—it was as gray as London. I actually got into my wedding dress by myself—I had this really long, gold dress that my friend and I designed and made together—she’s a costume designer—and I got into my dress from the bottom by myself because there was no one else around. I did my eyeliner in the little bathroom mirror, and then my now-husband arrived with all of the AV equipment that he had figured out. He set up the Zoom link, and people arrived.

In the end, maybe 20 people attended in person and I think we had 34 people on the Zoom meeting. People really appreciated it! I was surprised. I was like, “Nobody’s going to want to join a Zoom meeting on their Saturday.” But I guess that’s because I’m always in Zoom meetings? So it was really sweet. In a Quaker wedding, you sit together for a term, and you’re invited to deliver messages. In [a regular] meeting, you deliver messages [to the group], which are kind of like notes from the universe, but in a wedding you deliver messages about the couple. People spoke—even my friends who don’t know what Quakerism is—and it was really, really moving.

I’m glad we went ahead and did it, but I seriously was almost crushed.

I have a friend who’s very eloquent, so I guess that’s why I remember her note really well. We met on a film set and we’ve been friends for a very long time. This friend delivered a message from New York—this is embarrassing because it’s about me, so sorry if it sounds like I’m bragging—and she said that I was so creative that I was like an electric eel in a pond of goldfish. And that might be one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me. I never quite realized how weird I was until my wedding day. Nobody called me nice [laughs]. Nobody said “She’s the nicest person you’ll ever meet.” I knew I was slightly odd, but I didn’t know I was so odd.

We ended up getting so many wonderful notes from people saying how much they appreciated the Zoom link. I have a friend who emailed me and said, “After all the craziness of this week, I think that was really meaningful.” So I’m glad we went ahead and did it, but I seriously was almost crushed. I was so close to just being like, I can’t do this.

I don’t know what it would have been like, if we’d had the wedding we’d planned. There were supposed to be, like, 81 people in a wooded area of Griffith Park under the shining California sun—and instead there were about 20 people in a storefront in Boyle Heights under the sodden skies of L.A. But I think the Zoom meeting really made it feel like people were attending with intention.

I found the people who attended to be so exciting and the people who came by Zoom also to be exciting for completely opposite reasons. The people who attended in person had done their own risk calculation, and the people who attended via Zoom had also done their risk calculation—and came out with the opposite answer. But they all decided to attend. I can’t say anybody made a right or wrong decision—but I can say that having Zoom did really help people be present. I never thought I’d be sentimental about a Zoom meeting, but it’s meaningful to see a person’s face.

The post Inside Story No. 1: The Sunny California Wedding That Pivoted to a Zoom Meeting appeared first on Man Repeller.

Open Thread: How the Fuck Do You Work From Home?

I can curse in headlines now, right? The rules are out the window, there are no best practices, the protocol is to wing it as if a pigeon on wheels. I’ve spent the majority of today oscillating between my kids room and my bedroom where I have set up a home office on my side of the bed with a glass bottle of water on my night table and, like, six rings on my fingers—either proof that I care about my flourishes for a distinctly unilateral reason or that I am so used to decorating myself for public consumption that I can’t break character.

Laura (my daughter, twin B) has been acting out, which isn’t surprising because we’ve been home for five days—taking distancing and the quarantine pretty seriously in as cooperative a manner as is possible. I’m learning that she is an extrovert—that her energy is derived from interaction with others and through the lens of her current social circle (her mom, her sister, her dad, when he’s not locked in his room on conference calls and so forth). This energy is building, and building and building some more, but it can’t be dispensed, so she is acting out. As such, she has endured two time-outs in the past 24 hours—the first timeouts that I have disseminated as a young parent. In some ways retreating to a timeout makes me feel like I am surrendering, waving the white flag, giving up. I don’t know what to do to make her listen, so I do the easy, obvious thing.

That never worked.

On any of us.

I knew that having children was going to test my resilience—that ideally it would have been wonderful to commit to breathing through discomfort, but that in practice, it would be far more challenging. I did not know, however, that my children would, at a tender 2 years old, be so acutely aware of the fact that they were testing my resilience. And further that armed with the knowledge, they would proceed forward guns-a-blazing.

I am newly convinced that manipulation is a genetic mutation.

This morning, I asked Laura what she wanted for breakfast. She said “cereal,” so I gave it to her and you know what she did in response? She kicked her damn bowl off the table. I asked her to help me clean up and she hit me. So instead of taking a deep breath and wetting a dish towel and wiping the milk and cereal from the floor, I picked her up out of her high chair and put her in her room. And you know what I got when I took her out? A bounty of kisses. What is that? Emotional warfare?

After this, I was sure that timeouts work, but then, before lunch (I prepared lentils and baked sweet potato wedges), the same damn thing happened. So we washed, rinsed, repeated—I learned absolutely nothing—and during her two-minute timeout it occurred to me: She’s fucking two years old, and going stir crazy, and I’m looking at her, but not seeing her, or whatever. So I pretended the whole thing never happened, put on a white silk dress and initiated a dance party among thy fellow carriers of the same x chromosomes. I’ll take a tip if you have one, I’m pretty unclear on how today will go, but per that dance party–

I have discovered TikTok. I mean, not discovered it; it’s been downloaded on my phone for months. But following the lunch fiasco, I changed out of leggings and a t-shirt (fun socks notwithstanding) to put on a pretty dramatic white sequined dress and recorded my first TikTok video. It was good fun. A silver lining that actually also ushered in the sunshine following a very wet Tuesday morning.

The rest of the day was mostly spent grinding more chickpeas, forking squash into spaghetti and lathering the aforementioned in hot sauce between Google hangouts, slack conversations, my hair getting pulled out, mostly by Madeline (she was giving me “a braid”) and a curiously high volume of Google sheets and docs that are seemingly like the condition not even a novel pandemic can outperform. Per the food preparation, by the way, how do you, while trying to work from home and take care of your kids also make three meals and clean the pots/pans/dishes without watching the entire day pass you by feeling like you’ve run a marathon only to find you basically have not moved?

And to this point—if we are truly headed towards a ‘shelter in place’ (which means that we will not be permitted to leave our homes under any circumstance that is not essential), how do you move? Do you move? I have never been able to break character midday from work to attend a cycling class but I’m starting to think it will be crucial. On the upside, it’s as effortless as a browser tab switch from spreadsheet to YouTube. On the downside, it’s as effortless as a browser tab switch from spreadsheet to YouTube.

In regular life, leaving the office typically connotes the end of the day, and even if you’re freelance, there is some semblance of structure that separates working from home, from living from home but when there is no leaving, how do you demarcate? A bath? A glass of wine? A scheduled FaceTime dinner plan with a friend or distant family member? Reading a book? All of the above? What about when starting your day? Do you just charge in, or are you keeping to a morning routine that facilitates the preservation of normal as you know it?

I know the situation is escalating—that the circumstances are dire, that the projected number of American deaths, both direct and indirect results of the virus is staggering and painful, that we are lifting the lid on a broken healthcare system and governmental philosophy that runs counter to the principles of support and safety for all. And every time I sit down to write something, I freeze for a minute and ask myself what I could possibly have to say that’s worth being heard. When things make it past publish, that’s because I’ve put the doubt on mute, assuming that if I so badly desire not ignorance, but some sort of distraction, then perhaps you do, too? I know you know this, but these times are unprecedented, and it feels like an obligation of this platform to commit both the service of keeping you company, but also of absorbing and applying your feedback. So please, keep talking to us. Tell us how you’re feeling, what you’re doing, what you need.

Graphic by Lorenza Centi.

The post Open Thread: How the Fuck Do You Work From Home? appeared first on Man Repeller.

No Regrets: 15 Older Women on Their Wildest Life Choices

When I recount the scariest life decisions I’ve made to date—switching careers, living alone, allowing myself to fall in love—they feel inconsequential compared to some of the risks my loved ones have taken. How can I, a 20-something who lives in the same city she grew up in, meditate on taking chances when all mine have ultimately been low-stakes? Why would anyone care to listen to me rant about quitting my job or the cost of a monthly metrocard when they could read about my family fleeing Iran during the revolution?

But when I asked 15 women, aged 60 to 89, about the wildest decisions they ever made (and don’t regret), I realized what made their answers compelling was not the specific details—it was their conviction in the face of uncertainty. When Susie, 62, walked away from her first marriage, she moved to London with no guarantees that she’d be able to support herself. When Furaha, 70, gave up a comfortable life in pursuit of her greatest passion, she was given no assurances that she’d be successful. And when Barbara, 74, went back to school to study business, no one promised her she’d be able to make a name for herself in a male-dominated field. They leapt anyway. 

All 15 women took a risk by betting on themselves, and whether or not it paid off, they prove that any woman who’s chosen a life of uncertain fulfillment over complacent insatiability has a story worth telling, whether that means whispering three little words or booking a one-way ticket. Maybe they didn’t save the world, but in a way they saved themselves.

What’s your wildest decision you don’t regret?

 “I randomly took a course in Impressionism and absolutely went crazy about the teacher and his way of expressing the art historical context of Monet’s series. I went home, stayed up all night, and wrote to my parents (those days there was no email, cell phones, or direct phone calls between Iran and the United States). It told them I decided not to major in economics and finance, but in art history. That changed my life forever.” —Leila, 65

“When I was in searching-for-a-mate mode, there were three men I was considering. A friend recommended I pack my bags and move in for two weeks with each man to inform my inclinations. I showed up to each one (one at a time, of course), bag in hand, to sample the experience. It was fun and certainly informative. None of them made the cut and I met my husband three weeks later. The universe heard my intentions loud and clear!” —Susan, 65

“My wildest and wisest decision I’ve made that I have no regrets about was to walk away from an emotionally abusive and physically violent marriage. That takes absolute courage. I didn’t know where I wanted to go, but a friend encouraged me to travel to London, so I did, on my own and not knowing one single person. That was back in 1984. My world changed from that point on. I have never looked back.” —Susie, 62

“I traveled to Zimbabwe, fell in love with stone sculpture, and got so excited I decided to put on a show right here in New York City! So I read every book I could find and met every Zimbabwean artist I could meet, including the head of the Zimbabwe Tourist Office. Then I planned a month-long trip there to meet artists and buy sculpture. It was a huge risk—but the experience was extraordinary.” —Diana, 75

“My wildest decision that I don’t regret was giving up a great, cushy life in Atlanta to move to New York City to pursue an acting career. I owned a successful business, was paying a mortgage on my beautifully furnished two-bedroom condo, and was paying the note on my first car which just happened to be a Lexus. I was a successful businesswoman and well-respected in the arts community in Atlanta, but when it came down to it, I knew that the almost 30 years I’d put into my career paled miserably in comparison to the mystery that potentially lay ahead of me in New York City. Many acquaintances thought I’d lost my mind, but I was more afraid of not making the move for fear I would spend the rest of my life wondering what would’ve happened if I’d taken that leap. Life is very different for me in New York City, especially from an income standpoint. That said, I wouldn’t change a thing about being here (save more acting gigs). There’s far more to life than money and position. All in all, I’m quite clear I made the absolute right decision. Life is good and my dreams are coming true before my very eyes.” — Furaha, 70

“When I graduated from architecture school in 1980, at the time of the recession, I was hoping to walk into an office and get a great job offer. After all, I had studied for six years non-stop. To my surprise and disappointment, I learned quickly that no one hires you if you don’t have previous experience, important recommendations, and social connections. To find out my own voice and what architecture meant to me, I moved away from my family and friends and checked into a Zen Center, where I cleaned toilets to live among monks and study the art of meditation. It was one of the best decisions I have made in my life. I learned that Zen is a state of focus that incorporates a total togetherness of body and mind.” —Gisue, 65

“Too soon after I married my ‘beshert’, my too-good-to-be-true husband, he commenced an affair. After a year of suspicion, prevarication, agony for both of us, intermittent joy for him, and accusatory blasts from me, the affair was acknowledged and declared dead. I clearly stated that should it continue or restart, my first call would be to his eldest son. Eleven months later, I was true to my word. I have no regrets. After I confirmed the affair, I wanted to know for whom my husband had left me. I invited her for a drink. She told me that her kids thought of him simply as an old guy who was smitten with her. I did not regret confirming that her kids were right.” —Dale,* 70

“I’m pretty risk-free, except for investing in a marijuana company called Weed Women. And my divorce, but that was a moral decision. I had two little girls to whom I was a role model. I didn’t want them to think that is how a wife should be treated.” —Casey,* 64

“The wildest decision I ever made was choosing to poison my husband. He was an abusive alcoholic who loathed our children and I was done with being tortured. Conveniently, he was deathly allergic to nuts and had sealed our relationship the night we met by asking if I’d always carry his epi-pen, Benadryl, and albuterol. He loved me! Years later, I realized it would be much easier in countless ways if he died and I didn’t have to go through a ghastly divorce. I stirred a quarter cup of peanut butter into his chicken curry and served it. He wasn’t dead when I finished putting the kids to bed, so I gave him a 10 oz scotch and a second large dose of curry. Like Rasputin, he wouldn’t die. Turned out he wasn’t allergic to peanuts, which are legumes and not nuts. My only regret is that I didn’t use almond butter.” —Sally,* 71

“The wildest decision I ever made was to move to New York from Trinidad, with my cousins, Ken and Karl. But they were always there for me. They made me feel safe, every step of the way.” —Angie, 75 

“I’m not really the type to make wild decisions, but back in 1973, when women were beginning to move up the corporate ladder, there’s one decision that really changed my life: I resolved to go from being a 10-year, hard-working executive secretary with a high school degree to a professional businesswoman with a college degree. I quit my ‘working-girl’ job, got a student loan, and managed to live on my savings and graduate from NYU—Magna Cum Laude. I was crashing that ‘old boy network’ and succeeding. Best decision I ever made!” —Barbara, 74

“Moving from the city to the suburbs. The country scares me. The trees felt haunted, full of evil spirits. But it was better for my husband and my baby, so I do not regret my decision. Now, we have a nice life together.” —Celeste, 62

“I’ve never taken a real risk. Even fleeing my country wasn’t a risk. It would have been crazy to stay, not go! I guess the craziest decision I ever made was marrying my husband. Love is always a risk. But it pays off.” —Behjat, 89

“I traveled by myself to the legendary rainforest of Sumatra. During my visit, I was misled by locals into a sort of rainforest sultan’s pleasure dome—a warm, wood-paneled room with a carved canopy bed, private bath with hot and cold running water and shower. I took a shower and wrote in my diary. There was a knock at the door. Someone had left a huge platter of tropical fruit for me, but there was no one in sight.  I locked the door and went to sleep in the most luxurious, puffy, feather-bedded king-sized bed. In the morning I stepped out and found sweet coffee and rolls waiting. A young guy with a skinny mustache and curly hair who hadn’t been there the night before said in the Queen’s English, ‘I heard you were looking for the Hostel.’ I said that, yes, indeed, but wasn’t I at the hostel? He threw his head back and laughed. ‘No, they were having fun with you. This is the private compound of the Minister of Forestry, the hostel is just down that path.’ He pointed to a footpath in the woods. At the time, I did realize I had been foolish. But looking back now, I realize it was probably the most foolish and risky thing I’ve ever done—except maybe for the time I tried a snake blood cocktail in Yogyakarta…but that’s another story.” —Kathy, 60

“I walked away from someone I loved because I knew I’d be happier alone. I was right.” —Morgan,* 63

*names have been changed

Photos by Beth Sacca. 

The post No Regrets: 15 Older Women on Their Wildest Life Choices appeared first on Man Repeller.

This Is More Than Working From Home

It does not seem like an accident that on the precipice of Man Repeller’s 10th anniversary, it is beginning to feel like I, and therefore we, are back where we started. Yes, the place got fancier— the photos are higher touch, the frequency with which we post and the number (and caliber!) of byline names that decorate the strategically crafted headlines that populate our pages have increased. As such, the budgets to support these enhancements have risen, too, but fundamentally, it seems we’re back where we started because we never really left. What drives my desire to get the hell up and out every morning is exactly the same as it was ten years ago: find the story in what it means to be alive right now.

I just had a revelation that this is very different from what I—probably we—do for social media, which is more like broadcasting our lives. It’s different because to find the story in what it means to be alive, you have to more consciously assume the role of the narrator. You have to sit and think and feel your way through incredibly uncomfortable fire hoops of analysis to come to terms with the harrowing recognition that you have only successfully accomplished the task if you’re sure you feel like you just ran a marathon even though in the realm of physical space, you haven’t moved an inch. Or maybe you’ve moved an inch, I don’t really know, but here I am. Here we are. Trying to find the story in what it means to be alive right now.

I’ve been sitting here, stuck at this inflection point for exactly 56 minutes trying to detangle the wires of what is probably very simple.

And you know what it’s meant over the last 72 hours within the squiggly creases of my brain inside my head behind the wrinkles on my forehead (indentations of experience) on the pillow of my bed in the southernmost quadrant of my Soho apartment, stocked with four cans of chickpeas, three coffee-companion milk alternatives and a week’s worth of produce to put to work for the family of four that now seems like it accidentally became mine while I was pulling strings as if the Wizard of Oz behind a curtain with no domestic skill but tons and tons and shitloads of opinions? It means…

It means…

It means that I’ve been sitting here, stuck at this inflection point for exactly 56 minutes trying to detangle the wires of what is probably very simple. I have no fucking idea what happens next. I don’t know how my kids will achieve the stimulation and energy dispensing they require every day for the next… for the next… I don’t even know how long this will last! And honestly, I don’t even think I should scratch this surface yet—I have no fucking clue what the future of my personal life looks like. I’ve asked myself at what point Abie and I stop rooting for each other. High-fiving smart disciplinary calls, baton-passing laundry loads and full-sink duty. At what point we start fighting over who finished the Zicam, at what point we give up, at what point the callouses grow so hard that we’re simply enabling the existence of the other within these close quarters but I stopped myself short because that, I believe, is what they call an unproductive spiral and, fuck, how many of those have there been so far. I had this thought that when this was over we would all go outside, burst into the streets with glitter flying out of our asses, trailing us as if a drone, only to find that my kids are like, terribly adjusted teenagers.

Unproductive spiral.

It’s daunting to think that we’ve done such a good job creating lives and worlds and mentalities that have deluded us into believing we’ve earned certainty as if a rite of passage at the gates of adulthood, and further that until Sunday night, when coastal American cities started to formally close schools and table service at restaurants and bars, we had the reprieve of stepping outside and actually believing that maybe it wasn’t as bad as our newsfeeds were making it seem, that business would go on as usual IRL. But now, here I am. Here we are. Trying to find the story in what it means to be alive right now.

The thing about living in a city like New York is that our respective experiences of it are collections of the places we frequent. And without our places, the constellations of our experiences don’t point back to anything tangible. They’re just memories—and we have nowhere to go. But home. It’s just that in a city like New York, when home isn’t a house, those places are it for a lot of us. I read something like that in a tweet earlier and it almost made me sob. Those places are it for a lot of us. Those places and the people who run them. And the people who run the people. They become family. What happens to them?

The cloud—or opportunity, really—that hung over each conversation was a singular question: What are we going to make now?

I also spent six hours in five Google Hangouts. I can’t even remember what most of them were about, but the cloud—or opportunity, really—that hung over each conversation was a singular question: What are we going to make now? Our executive and managing editors spent the majority of the end of last week stopping shoots and unscheduling stories and trying to predict, as we always do, what our audience—you—would need to hear from us, how we could support you and cater to you and most importantly, in my view, demonstrate that we’re here with you. I don’t mean that platitudinously, I’m not saying it in the tone of a Letter From The Leader. We are in the same damned boat, you and me. Directionlessly coasting around the same forlorn island. So in a very real, very un-cheesy but perhaps very cheezy way, we’re like actually in this together. And—silver lining!—isn’t it nice when the simple human circumstance of existing en masse unites us?

The more I think about it, the more clear it’s become that it feels like we’re where we started a decade ago, because every day back then offered a new adventure with the same ultimate question to answer: how are you going to make surviving a little more palatable?

I would wake up in the morning and make a coffee and get back under my covers in a bed that, honestly, my mom was still making for me and think to myself, What should I write today? So I’d begin my exploration of the wild west—an Internet pre-Instagram and regulation and frankly, a user-manual, when articles and videos still went viral (I know, I know) by seeming happenstance and at the end of the night, as I was dozing off, all I could think was how to take the feedback from that day the next day, then get up and try to do it better.

Now it seems we are being tasked to answer the same question from the vantage point of an attitude that has widened and matured over ten years, yes, sure, but especially over, like, 72 hours, where we find ourselves trying to navigate a new sort of wild west and cling to whatever ray of certainty or perspective or relief we can locate, but if I can promise anything it’s that we’re going to keep finding the story in what it means to be alive.

Then we will tell the story

Take the feedback

And think voraciously about how to do it better the next day.

The post This Is More Than Working From Home appeared first on Man Repeller.

6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Getting Engaged

A happy, long-term relationship is subject to a certain degree of inertia: It will keep moving forward in a straight line at a steady speed provided nothing significant sticks out a leg and trips it up. At its best, the consistency of this evolution can be a symptom of the relationship’s health, a gradual buildup of affirmative answers to the question “are we ready for this?” that conceivably culminate in spending forever together–whatever that happens to look like. At its worst, it can mean robotically sliding into each consecutive milestone instead of consciously and thoughtfully deciding to pursue them.

Where milestones are concerned, getting engaged is certainly one of the big kahunas–not only because it means you’re engaged (!!) but also because it is typically the precursor to an even bigger–not to mention legal–commitment. It also happens to be top of mind for me because I got engaged last August and I’m getting married in June (if anyone has a good song suggestion for my father-daughter dance, please share), and it was around this time last year that I really started thinking about the emotional and logistical realities of what getting engaged would mean–for our relationship, and for me personally.

I knew in my gut that I was ready to take this step, but I also found it helpful to drill down on why in a less amorphous sense. It’s impossible to detail the ways in which doing so has made the experience of being engaged feel more intentional and therefore special without sounding like a total sap, so I’ll spare you that and instead share some questions I asked myself while standing on this particular life precipice. (Everyone’s questions pertaining to this topic probably look a little different, though, so let’s discuss further in the comments).

1. Why do I want to get engaged?

There’s a lot of cultural momentum around the idea of getting engaged and married, which is why it’s useful to distinguish between doing these things just because you think you should and doing them because they actually make sense for you and your relationship. If you want to break it down further, start by asking yourself why engagement and marriage, as opposed to a long-term partnership, is meaningful to you. Bad reasons to get engaged might include: thinking it will “fix” your relationship; fear of being alone; social pressure (i.e. from familial guilt, or from the fact that a lot of your friends happen to be getting married); wanting a wedding (for what it’s worth, I don’t think wanting a wedding is bad in and of itself–it’s essentially a party in your honor, which is obviously not without its appeal! But I do think the fantasy of a wedding can be powerful enough to temporarily eclipse the realities of what comes after). Great reasons to get engaged might include: the desire to establish an integrated life together in every sense (emotionally, legally, financially); the pursuit of another significant medium for growing closer to each other; the opportunity to celebrate your long-term commitment in a very tangible way.

2. Why do I want to get engaged to this particular person?

The answer to this question might seem a bit obvious in theory, because if you’re thinking about getting engaged to this person in the first place then you probably love them and want to hang out forever and ever and getting married seems like a viable path to doing that, right? But here’s a related sub-question to examine that impulse a little more deeply: Regardless of whether or not you love this person and want to hang out forever and ever, do you also want to change them? And I don’t mean change as in evolution or growth–the latter two things will happen organically–I mean it in terms of harboring a hope that the person you are with will become different in some fundamental way. If the answer is yes, then getting engaged–i.e. making a substantial commitment to the person they are now instead of the person you hope they might be–is potentially jumping the gun. At the very least, it’s grounds for initiating a conversation about what your expectations are.

3. How do I want to get engaged?

Though the traditional engagement model in which one person picks out a ring and surprises the other on one knee can feel pretty ubiquitous, the reality is that there are infinite ways to get engaged, and the only “right” way is what works best for you and your partner. If you have strong feelings about the way you want to get engaged, it’s important to communicate them. Do you want to propose or do you want to be proposed to? Or do you not want a proposal “moment” at all? Are rings going to be involved? What about family members? Private or public? Dancing flamingos or no dancing flamingos? (Just kidding.) (Or am I?)

4. Have my partner and I had conversations about all the BIG STUFF (money, kids, religion, politics)?

If you and your partner have been in a relationship for awhile, you’ve probably had conversations about some of the “big stuff” by default as a result of spending lots of time together. Maybe some form of religion is already a significant part of one or both of your lives. Maybe you’ve worked out a system for splitting expenses that seems to be working well so far. Maybe you’ve gushed about how cute it would be to have a kid with their eyes and your toes. The reality of how these things actually play out in a marriage can look pretty different, though. Have you talked about whether or not you want to have a joint bank account? Or, if you have kids, how you want to raise them spiritually and/or politically? Is it important to you to have a partner who shares the same believes in these areas, or are you content to disagree? If you’re thinking about getting engaged but haven’t discussed the nitty gritty aspects of these topics yet, I recommend opening a few bags of chips (for sustenance) and diving right in, no-holds-barred.

5. Is my “vision” for the future compatible with my partner’s?

I chose the word compatible very deliberately here, because I don’t think your hopes, dreams, and expectations about the future need to be the exact same as your partner’s–they just have to fit together, coexisting harmoniously, like two pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. One way of getting clarity on this is asking yourself what you want your life to look like in 10 years. Then ask your partner the same question and talk through any glaring sticky points.

6. Will I still be me?

Approaching a big relationship milestone is a unique opportunity to check in with yourself and how you are being impacted by your identity as part of a couple. Pursuing another step in the relationship can either be a conduit for moving closer to what you want for yourself and your life, or it can be a yoke–an added weight that slows you down from getting where you need to go. Take a moment to imagine what the fullest, most expansive version of yourself looks like, and determine whether that version of you can still exist when you embark into engagement land. Ideally, making permanent room in your life for another human doesn’t mean shrinking yourself into its narrowest iteration, it means exploring new avenues for growth together.

Did I miss any other important Qs? Let me know in the comments.

Graphics by Lorenza Centi.

The post 6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Getting Engaged appeared first on Man Repeller.

The 5 Canned-Food Recipes I Recommend to Everyone I Know

While some people collect stamps, and others vintage t-shirts—I collect canned-food recipes. For what my kitchen cupboards consistently lack in the snack department, they make up for in canned goods—specifically, chickpeas. My (very healthy) obsession has grown to a point in which I essentially have a free-and-extremely-specific text alert for every new New York Times Cooking recipe that contains chickpeas, thanks to my friends who blow up the group chat every time they come across a recipe list that features a canned bean.

Below, you’ll find the five recipes I have on constant rotation, all of which include a variety of long-lasting, delicious, and (for the most part) nutritious canned ingredients.

Quick Pasta and Chickpeas, Smitten Kitchen

Featuring canned chickpeas and tomato paste.

Saying that a recipe changed your life may sound dramatic, but in the case of this chickpea pasta I can honestly say I’m not exaggerating. Since having this recipe recommended to me by my friend Rachel (who’s written a great post about it on her blog) over a year ago, I’ve made it almost weekly. This recipe is essentially a grown-up version of Spaghetti-Os that’s served with a garlicky rosemary olive oil drizzle, and is just as easy as it is delicious. I often double this recipe so I have enough for lunch the next day and highly suggest you do the same because, once you make this dish, you’re going to want to eat it again immediately.

Broccoli and Chickpea Salad, Martha Stewart

Featuring canned chickpeas.

Since making this salad to take to an office potluck, I’ve had multiple friends text me for the recipe and request I bring it to dinner parties—it’s just that good. Chickpeas and steamed broccoli are the base of this dish with scallions, parsley, and pine nuts added for bonus flavor/crunch. This recipe also means making a dressing from scratch, which is something I once thought I was incapable of doing, but now look forward to. It’s super simple (olive oil, minced garlic, lemon juice, Dijon mustard, salt, and pepper) and makes this salad feel worthy of being an entree, not just a side.

The Best Taco Soup You’ll Ever Have, Cup of Jo

Featuring canned green chiles, stewed tomatoes, pinto beans, and white hominy (or corn).

Another recommendation from my friend Rachel, via Cup of Jo, is this famous taco soup. This recipe only has eight ingredients (not including water) and four of those come in a can. I often find making soup annoyingly laborious, but this recipe only involves 30-minutes of actual cooking. Since discovering this soup I’ve made it for many weeknight dinners, friends going through hard times, and myself when stuck home with a cold.

Coconut Curry Chickpeas With Pumpkin and Lime, NYT Cooking

Featuring canned pumpkin purée, coconut milk, and chickpeas.

Perfect for fellow chickpea lovers, and those with a well stocked spice rack, this curry recipe is quick and easy—but tastes anything but. Before having this recipe recommended by a friend, I normally only cooked curries on Sunday nights, when I had over an hour to spare. This one comes together in just half an hour and is a great way to use that can of pumpkin puree you bought in October to make that pie you never quite got around to. It’s also pretty customizable, so feel free to throw in any extra veggies you have laying around—I’ve done that and it’s always turned out great.

Bodega Beans, Amateur Gourmet

Featuring canned butter beans or white beans.

I came across this recipe last January, when I read an essay titled, “Bodega Beans Are The Best Thing To Eat When You’re Broke.” I didn’t know it at the time, but a couple of days later I was to be laid-off from my job at the time. It’s always interesting to take note of the little things that help get you through tough times, and when I think back to being laid-off I can see a montage of me joking with my former colleagues: “At least we have bodega beans.” The initial recipe, posted in 2007, explains that they grew out of a need for a dinner that only used recipes purchasable at a bodega, but since then it’s gained a reputation for something more: a recipe that requires only the staples, but is nourishing, tasty, and—most importantly—comforting.

Do you, like me, have a go-to recipe that makes the most of canned ingredients? If so, please share it in the comments below.

Photos by Cody Guilfoyle. Prop styling by Sara Schipani.   Art Direction by Sabrina Santiago and Lorenza Centi.

The post The 5 Canned-Food Recipes I Recommend to Everyone I Know appeared first on Man Repeller.

The Ultimate Man Repeller Companion: 54 Reading Recommendations to Keep You Company

While Team MR is working from home for the foreseeable future, we’re cooking up stories for the days ahead (come with an appetite!), though as a starting point, I’ve been gleaning inspiration for how to give my days some shape from the archive I know best.

Enter the Man Repeller Companion: A compilation of MR stories I made to check a lot of those boxes that I am, and you might be, craving right now. It includes: the most impressive infographic of podcasts I’ve ever laid eyes on, a whole host of home and closet improvement projects, MR tested recipes, socializing strategies, longform stories to hunker down with, and funny little ditties that might coax a giggle out of you.

Below are some questions you may be asking the universe right now, and Man Repeller’s slate of answers, which I’ll be updating with more stories throughout the day. Let me know which ones I missed, and which tried and true MR links you forward to your friends, in the comments below.

What should I read? What should I watch? Which podcast should I listen to?

Might I suggest…

We Obsessively Categorized All the Podcasts You Recommended
Help Me Compile a List of the Most Addicting Book Series
Help Me Compile a List of Genuinely Addicting Books
Help Me Compile a List of the Best Movies You Can Stream
The Man Repeller Review of Books: New Recommendations from Rachel Comey, Aminatou Sow, and More
My Little Trick for Reading More Books
Read This Before You Waste Another Hour “Looking For A Show to Watch”

Hey, I want some long stories I can get lost in!?

Might I suggest…

How Bon Appétit Became a YouTube Sensation—and Why Claire Saffitz Is the Perfect Star 
At 30, Abigail Bruley Forgot Who She Was—Then She Became Someone New
Aidy Bryant Is You, But Famous
Shopping for (Obscene Amounts of) Candy With Carly Rae Jepsen

3 Women on What They’ve Learned in Their 70+ Years of Life


Everything I Witnessed During Rush Hour at One of New York’s Busiest Coffee Shops


What I’ve Learned From Months of Studying San Francisco Style


Does Anyone Have a ‘Personal Life’ Anymore?


Unpacking the (Fascinating) State of Style in Comedy



I Asked 1,000+ People About Crying at Work and the Answers Are… Emotional



Do you have any stories that feel like the equivalent of being tickled?

Might I suggest…

I Spent 24 Hours DMing Celebrities and You’ll Never Guess Who Responded
How to Spot the Ideal Partner
5 Nightgowns Tried, Tested, and Ranked by Sleepability
There Are 13 Types of Engagement Announcements on Instagram (I Counted) 
16 Un-Hinged Answers to Your Hinge Profile Prompts (You Can Thank Me Later)
I Let My Colleagues Dress Me for a Week and Things Got Weird
The Most Concise Milan Fashion Week Reviews on the Internet

Theory: All Good Outfits Go Bad at 3 p.m.

The Cult of iPhone Read Receipts is Real and Terrifying

I want to use my hands! What about some projects for my fine and gross motor skills?


Do You Know the Right Way to Sew a Button? Let’s Double Check


Yes, You Can Totally Fix a Hole Yourself. Here’s How


Skip Dry Cleaning and Wash Your Favorite Sweaters Yourself


Learning to Plan for Next Year, Right Now


I’m getting antsy. Can I move my body for my mind?

Might I suggest…

How to Do Anything: 5 Ways to Become More Flexible With Very Little Effort

How to Use a Foam Roller and Look Chic as Fuq



The Best Workout (Ever) in a Series of Gifs



Ratatouille inspired me. What should I make for dinner? Or for breakfast? Or for my hourly snack break?

Might I suggest…

200+ Weeknight Dinner Recipes, Vetted by the Man Repeller Community

This Is Exactly What MR Readers Have for Breakfast Every Day


How to Gracefully/Humbly Outdo Everyone at Your Friendsgiving Potluck


Spring cleaning sounds more fun than filing my taxes. How about some organizing hacks for home improvement projects?

Might I suggest…

How I Finally Decluttered My Tiny Apartment


How I Finally De-Cluttered My Tiny Bedroom


How to Organize a Tiny Bathroom, According to an Expert


5 Ways to Actually Solve Your Shoe Storage Situation, According to the Experts


The Secret Lives of New York Storage Units


I miss my friends. Any tips on socializing from a distance?

Might I suggest…

The Rules of Communicating With Friends, From Missed Texts to Unplanned FaceTimes


When the DM Slide Actually Works: 4 Couples Who Met on Instagram


The Only Acceptable V-Day Gift Is a Cameo Video From a Random Celebrity


How the hell do I work from home??? Any tips?

Might I suggest…

A Freelancer and a Full-Timer Debate Whether the Grass Is Actually Greener 

3 Couples Who Work Together Share What It’s Really Like


I want to send my brain to the spa. Is there something fun I can just, like, look at?

Might I suggest…

Man Repeller x Dior Present: Leandra Goes Jambon at 30 Montaigne


Ta-da! The Gucci Ring Bag Is the Magical Fall Accessory You Need


I Took 30 Days of Mirror Selfies and Processed a Lot of Feelings


Leandra and Cindy Crawford Talk “Finstas” and the Beauty of Getting Older


The Results Are In: Meet the Winner of Man Repeller’s 2019 Fleece Bracket

Fake Freckles Are Trending, Much to My Delight

Fall Style Win: Collarless Coats and Big-Ass Totes


Is Black the New Millennial Pink? I’m Only Kind of Kidding

The post The Ultimate Man Repeller Companion: 54 Reading Recommendations to Keep You Company appeared first on Man Repeller.

At 30, Abigail Bruley Forgot Who She Was—Then She Became Someone New

I first heard of Abigail Bruley’s story last fall, when she submitted a short, fascinating essay about memory loss to the Man Repeller Writers Club. Unsure whether it was fact or fiction, I got in touch and asked if she’d be willing to tell me more. Over the course of the next few months, she told me everything that happened to her, first via email, then phone call, and finally over a five-hour visit to her home in Philadelphia. Her story is unlike any I’ve heard before, but woven through it is something curiously universal—a flash of clarity in the chaos of the human condition. 

Abigail Bruley doesn’t remember her wedding day. She knows she was 24, that she married her boyfriend Ryan. She can say there was a mashed-potato bar and that she danced to the Beach Boys, but she knows these details like I know my mom got married in a cowboy hat—not because I was there, but because I want (and choose) to believe the story. Bruley’s husband has told her the day was a blur of playing host and managing logistics, which she imagines is partly to blame. “I guess I wasn’t that emotional on my wedding day,” she reasons with a shrug. “And the best way to access memories is through emotions.”

The human brain captivates Bruley. The way it processes new and old data, tracks patterns over time, tucks information away in mysterious places, like the nervous system or dark recesses of the mind, just out of our conscious reach. Her fascination is not borne of fear or even curiosity, but veneration for something she doesn’t fully understand. After losing “millions of memories” in a car crash, she’s been forced to form an unflinching relationship with the unknown. This is, among other things, one of the unlikely benefits of her traumatic brain injury.

The neuro-fatigue is less welcome—it creeps up on her every day around 3 p.m., a mental weariness that, if not carefully heeded, can make her behave as if she were black-out drunk. Ditto the expressive aphasia, which inhibits her word recall, or the fact that she can now only hover around the edges of parties rather than thrust herself into the milieu. Her processing speed isn’t ideal. Sometimes she’ll think of a witty remark hours after it ought to have been delivered, something “old Abigail” might have found embarrassing. But even these downsides have their upsides: motivation to use her energy and words wisely, a sense of self untethered to her social standing, a disinterest in the insincerity sarcasm demands.

Of course, to digest the facts of her life this way requires a kind of blunt optimism, but that she has in seemingly unlimited stores—a survivor’s response, no doubt, to an intimate brush with death.

A sharp left turn

On February 5, 2013, a then-30-year-old Bruley and her husband Ryan Kerrigan touched down in Costa Rica for vacation. Their hotel was a few hours from the airport, so they rented a car and proceeded down a narrow, winding road that was crowded with traffic. It was hot, they kept getting stuck behind trucks with heavy exhaust, and soon they grew impatient. Then they noticed other cars passing trucks in the left lane—the one reserved for traffic going the opposite direction—and decided to follow suit. They successfully passed trucks twice. On the third time, Kerrigan pulled into the left lane right as another truck came out of nowhere, heading straight toward them. To avoid a head-on collision, he yanked the wheel to the left, inadvertently exposing the side of the car containing Bruley to a near-fatal crash.

Bruley and Kerrigan were rushed to the hospital, where Kerrigan, who suffered minor cuts and bruises, proceeded to endure the worst 14-hour period of his life, one in which he did not possess enough Spanish to discern whether his wife was alive or dead. Eventually he learned she was in critical condition, that she had broken her femur, her hip, and some ribs, and dislocated vertebrae in her lower back. The most serious injury, though, was a contusion to her right frontal lobe—the part of the brain concerned with language, memory, and judgement—which caused shearing, or tearing, of brain tissue underneath. The head trauma was also axonal, meaning it reverberated in her skull, causing bruising in other areas, too. Initially this injury was not apparent, as her head appeared unharmed—the first challenge of what would become a lifelong invisible illness.

She had to relearn the rhythms of conversation, the days of the week, the meaning of expressions like “no strings attached.”

Three days later, when Bruley and Kerrigan’s insurance provider sent a small plane to bring them back home to Philadelphia, her behavior became erratic. She kept trying to tear the tubes from her arms, and was making lewd comments about the nurses. This is consistent with what doctors call “post-traumatic amnesia,” or PTA, a period of time after brain injury defined by bizarre, uncharacteristic behavior, and especially an inability by the injured to form memories or conceive of their situation. Soon after being admitted to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, she was put into a medically-induced coma and sent into a series of surgeries that involved outfitting her lower back with brackets and her femur with titanium rods. A month later she was transferred to Magee Rehabilitation Hospital, where she’d wake from her coma and begin the most treacherous months of her life.

“Your oldest brain wakes up first—your primitive brain,” Bruley tells me of coming out of a coma. She’s sitting on a velvet couch in her sunny Philadelphia loft, her two little dogs, Arnold and Potato, napping to her left. It’s been seven years. Her posture is a little stiff, and her words come slowly, methodically, as if she were reciting them from memory. “Your primitive brain… reproduces, eats, sleeps.” She pauses, looking for one more: “Prevents death.” It’s the part of the mind in control of base instincts like fight-or-flight, and she spent her first weeks at Magee like that, not understanding why she was there, dizzy with terror and confusion. She has no memories of this time, as the brain’s recording function is turned off during PTA, but it’s been recounted to her by her family and team of doctors.

How long a patient stays in PTA is said to be the best measure of the brain injury’s seriousness—under one hour is considered mild, anything over 24 is severe. Bruley’s lasted for three weeks, a period during which doctors were focused on reassuring her safety and repeating basic truths, like that she had been in an accident and was in the hospital. At some point, she started retaining small pieces of information, a sign that other parts of her brain were waking up. Her doctors called this “clearing.”

“I think they meant it as her clearing stages,” Kerrigan tells me over the phone. “They would always say, ‘She has cleared.’ And the next day, ‘She has cleared again.’ Eventually, she got over some kind of hurdle and she now knew who her sisters were.” But there was no single climactic return to mental form for Bruley, not like in the movies. Although she always remembered Kerrigan, something they both point out with quiet pride, most of her memories were gone. Tessa Hart, PhD, an expert in rehabilitation for traumatic brain injury, says this kind of loss is unusual, but that no two brain injuries are the same. Bruley had to relearn the rhythms of conversation, the days of the week, the meaning of expressions like “no strings attached” (one she’s finally nailed after much repetition). More than that, she had to reacquaint herself with her former life: her friends, her family, her apartment. A process of self-discovery brought to its physiological extreme.

Forget & forgive

Bruley was born in 1983 in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. She was a silly, energetic kid, riding bikes, playing basketball, trying to make her family laugh. Her early teens were a bit more turbulent. “I went through many phases—found punk rock, got kicked out of Catholic school, ran away, the whole deal,” she says. Things changed when she landed at a public high school, where she blossomed, made great friends, and played field hockey. At Drexel she studied Dramatic Writing, where she combined her love of words with a new passion for film. Her twenties hit a lot of familiar beats: She interned, worried about making the most of her career, got married, balanced her paid work with hobbies like comedy, art, thrifting, and exploring Philadelphia.

Then, at 30 years old, when cultural mythology says all that will coalesce into a sum greater than its parts, Bruley forgot who she was. When she arrived home from the hospital, everything was unfamiliar. What is the identity of this person with this name and this apartment? she remembers thinking. Who chose this haircut? Her apartment was filled with old records, her closet with vintage knits and dresses. From this, she gathered she liked old stuff—an affinity that, along with painting and storytelling, has become one of her strongest threads of continuity with her former self. Today she’s wearing camel cords and hi-top Converse, a cream sweater layered over a red-striped turtleneck, and her hair in a messy bun with thick bangs. “My sense of style, everyone will tell you, is exactly the same as before,” she says. It’s hard to imagine a more acute achievement of authenticity.

She shows me a photo album her family made for her to study those first months, a reference guide to her loved ones. It has an orange fabric cover gently scratched and stained from use. It’s filled with men and women and kids I don’t recognize; a perception I imagine Bruley once shared. On the first page are photos of her with her husband and dog. “Abigail & Ryan & Arnold,” the label reads. On the next are pictures of her with her mom and two older sisters, dressed up for a fancy event she doesn’t remember attending. A man with gray hair and glasses in a red sweater smiles warmly—“DAD.”

She shows me a note she wrote to herself early on, blue pen on an old Simpsons Post-It: “It takes a lot longer than you think,” it reads, and on the other side: “Keep starting over.” She doesn’t have much from this time—“I got rid of a lot of my stuff because I was like, I’m done being brain-injured,” she says. But what’s left tells an interesting story: A black weighted vest she had to wear to rebalance her center of gravity, which shifted in the accident (“It sounds poetic but it’s actually real”); a small printed-out photo of Mary Tyler Moore making a fist and a wince, saved by Bruley for its perfect embodiment of how she felt; a painting she made about brain injury. In the painting, a dark, ominous cloud fills the canvas, lightning striking from its center. A small woman watches motionlessly from a chimney below, a slingshot in her hand and a propeller attached to her back. “It’s the only painting I just can’t seem to sell,” Bruley says. “I think it’s because I’m supposed to hold onto it.”

I need all my energy to build this new life. I don’t want to waste energy trying to remember that old life.

Her pre-accident life isn’t a blank page. Some memories have returned to her over the years, especially those associated with intense emotions. She doesn’t remember her wedding, but she does remember being proposed to (“that feels more important”). She’s accessed these recollections through doing memory-recall work with her therapist, and through exposure to triggers like photos, stories, or either of those things in repetition. But she says there are an infinite number of memories she’ll never retrieve, and even if she did, they likely wouldn’t be enough to stitch together the narrative arc of her former life.

This doesn’t distress her nearly as much as it does me, a writer who hoards memories like infinitely shrinking nesting dolls. And as I try to tease out the specifics—does she remember graduating college? What about meeting her husband?—I struggle to conceal how devastating I think it all sounds. But over and over, she meets my questions with a gentle disinterest, forcing me to reckon with the idea that identity isn’t quite so linear. That losing your old stories could be neutral rather than catastrophic. It’s also difficult, I realize, to mourn something you cannot recall, and Bruley has no desire to think her way into melancholy. Her loss registers more like a mental hurdle. She does not listen to old songs, she does not wonder what she’s forgotten. She only looks ahead.

“Remembering your past is useful if it helps you recognize patterns within yourself,” she concedes. “But I need all my energy to build this new life. I don’t want to waste energy trying to remember that old life. That seems like heaviness I don’t really need to be concerning myself with.”

Heaviness would be medically inadvisable. “Once brain-injured,” she explains, “you don’t heal back to where you were before, it’s not like a broken leg. It’s a disability like any other.” This means the separation between “old Abigail” and “new Abigail” is more than one of differing data sets. How she thinks, talks, and processes have been permanently altered. By many estimations this makes her life more difficult—“old Abigail” was a freelance writer, “new Abigail” struggles to put complex ideas to words; “old Abigail” liked to go out, “new Abigail” can’t handle too much stimulation. Whether as a means of survival or through some miraculous force of personality, however, she sees these shifts as opportunities.

“I most likely think vastly differently [from before],” Bruley says. “But setting back to zero—fading back in from black—means a natural revealing of reality as it is, a close-up of truths.” “Old Abigail” never would have had the pleasure.

Still, her life these days is carefully organized around her brain: what it wants, what it needs, what it can and can’t handle. I imagine this is something like monitoring the temperature in the room, or how often you breathe. There are certain realities I’d rather accept and forget forever, like my ability to absorb new information until my brain burns to a crisp and sends me to bed. Bruley doesn’t have that luxury. Her mental capacity must remain a focus for the sake of her safety and ability to live a reasonably normal life, and that’s made her an expert in what you might call “cognitive self-care.”

Slowing down by design

Bruley and Kerrigan’s apartment is one big, industrial room. There are leafy plants everywhere, crowded book shelves, a velvet couch next to a leather couch next to a leather chair. Light pours in from five eight-pane windows. There are records, trinkets, little pieces of art nestled in corners. Their bedroom is tucked behind a curved pony wall, like something out of a TV show about friends living in New York City. Except we’re in Philly and here it doesn’t feel so unrealistic.

We sit in their living room on separate couches for hours, exchanging words carefully. Talking to her is pleasant. She’s kind, thoughtful, a bit chilled-out like a stoner. In many ways she resembles someone neurotypical, but the subtle differences amount to something significant. We meet at 11 a.m., when she’s mentally strongest. Barely audible classical music floats through her speakers because “it’s brain-injury-friendly.” When I fail to space out my heavier questions, we pump the breaks. Get a tea. Take a beat. Sometimes she’s exuberant and verbose, other times careful and unsure, pausing often to ask, “What’s the word?” She’s accepting of her wavering energy, doesn’t apologize, asks for what she needs. It’s around the one-hour mark, nestled into her vintage furniture, that I realize that there is a lot to learn from Bruley. That her modus operandi may be one of medical necessity, but broken down for parts, it isn’t so different from self-respect.

Consider her relationship with consumption. Due to her processing limitations, Bruley must be hypervigilant about what she takes in. Whereas most people budget time regardless of their energy, she does the opposite, safeguarding her energy like a precious resource. This means looking forward instead of back, committing only to things in which she finds purpose, dropping lines of thought that don’t serve her. Anything less is a threat to her wellbeing.

We went through my feed and unfollowed or unfriended anyone or anything that wasn’t interesting to me or beautiful to look at or helpful.

In her first year of recovery, a psychologist advised her to pare down her Facebook friends. “We went through my feed and unfollowed or unfriended anything or anyone that wasn’t interesting to me or beautiful to look at or helpful,” she says (would that I could). She’s unable to binge-watch TV, so she chooses episodes and movies carefully, watching them in short chunks, and not often. She doesn’t do well with the endless scroll of online shopping, or the aimless wandering of thrifting, so today she buys with intention: “The only way I can shop now is to get something in my mind that I want and search for that one thing.”

She requires a lot of quiet. While many of us internet-dwellers go to great, toilet-scrolling lengths to avoid being alone with our thoughts, Bruley needs to create that space for herself. The relaxed schedule and stretches of undistracted time have led her to meditation study. It helps her process her thoughts. Even her conversational training has had a zen-like effect on her worldview. “The steps to turning every human interaction into a connection is remembering the steps,” she says. “Pause, relax, open, trust emergence, listen deeply, speak the truth. Six steps.” Trust emergence is her favorite. It reminds her to enter conversations without expectation or assumption. If you shine Bruley’s coping mechanisms through a wellness prism, they look a lot like healthy habits.

But if her life is beginning to sound like a day at a Goop retreat, I’ve overstated it. Bruley’s days require an incredible amount of forethought. “If we are going to dinner with friends on a Saturday night,” Kerrigan tells me, “we’re not doing anything Saturday morning or afternoon. We may be taking a nap. We’re certainly not doing anything Friday night and we’re probably not doing anything all day Sunday. All of that just so we can go to dinner on Saturday night with a few friends for two hours.” This frustrates him only insofar as it’s hard for others to comprehend, especially when Bruley seems just fine. This is one of the challenges of invisible illness, and why Bruley carries a card in her wallet that says “I am a person with a brain injury,” with her name, address, and a list of symptoms on the back, including poor coordination, slurred speech, sensitivity to light and sound. (She says she’s never used it, but has been tempted when people are assholes.)

Kerrigan is otherwise unfazed. “She’s my best friend and I want to spend time with her and I want to be with our friends with her,” he says. “If this 20-point checklist needs to happen for us to do that, well, that’s what we’re going to do.”

Over the course of our phone call, Kerrigan’s indefatigable support of Bruley strikes me as more romantic than any mid-budget romcom about memory loss I’ve ever seen (Overboard, The Vow, 50 First Dates, to name three of literally dozens). “I still see that person that I met 15 years ago,” he tells me. “If she’s different now, I’m ignoring that in a way. From the moment all this happened our whole entire world fell to pieces. If it feels anything like it did 10 years ago that’s a massive compliment to the two of us. This is a person I deeply love and I’m going to find those things again in her.”

Still, weathering this kind of storm changes you as a couple, and last year they sought out counseling. “At first, he was my caretaker,” Bruley says. In fact, a whole team of people were tending to every aspect of her recovery, but Kerrigan’s life had been up-ended, too. “He was greatly ignored because I took the spotlight for so long, and then it wasn’t until last year, when one of my wounds kind of brushed up against one of his wounds and some conflicts started happening.” Talking to someone proved transformational, and Bruley’s since become a public advocate for couples counseling following traumatic brain injury—even before people may think they need it.

Moving on, in earnest

Before I head back to New York, Bruley and I walk to a cafe down the street from her apartment for lunch. “They have an exciting menu that is slightly disappointing when it actually arrives at the table, is my review,” she says (this turns out to be perfectly astute). The pop music here is loud and I worry it will bother her, but she seems okay.

Our conversation turns to writing. Bruley used to be a freelance writer and editor, covering fashion, culture, and music for various digital publications. But her expressive aphasia—which she describes as “knowing what I mean to say but not being able to say it with words”—sounds almost like a diagnosis for writer’s block. A year and a half after the accident she tried to return to her career and was fired from multiple jobs. This was heartbreaking. Ever since, she’s turned to more visual forms of storytelling, like film and painting, which are more in tune with her creative sensibility post-accident. In seven years, she’s written and directed three short films (all of which you can watch on her website).

There’s a humorous element to all of them, but she says she’s mostly parted ways with comedy. Whereas “old Abigail” was sarcastic, quick-witted, and in the middle of making a sketch comedy series with her friends, she’s since lost her taste for that kind of humor. “There’s a superiority attached to sarcasm,” she says. “Like a pretension.” At one point she uses finger quotes to explain something then immediately apologizes. She hates finger quotes. She thinks they’re patronizing.

Dr. Tessa Hart says this aversion isn’t unusual for someone with a brain injury of the right frontal lobe, where language pragmatics are stored. “Language pragmatics are things like your tone of voice in speaking and listening,” she says, “understanding and being able to express things using tone of voice, getting humor, getting subtleties, getting the social parts of language—not the actual words and phrases, but more their connotation.”

There’s a reason why you are how you are.

Bruley still can’t work full-time—her mental energy is incompatible with a 9-to-5—but she finds the freelance projects she does at home fulfilling. She’s also currently training to teach mindfulness, loves to cook and look after the house and dogs. Her life these days is one of calm precision. It’s also one of constant adjustment and renegotiation, not just of her time and energy, but of her life story. It can be hard to fathom the loss of one’s narrative arc, or the kind of self-mythologizing implicit to looking back. Early on though, she learned the challenges were not her enemy; her own resistance to them was. “Change is difficult for people, period,” she says. “But resistance is what stops people from embracing the strategies they need to make or build change.” Bruley no longer resists. Instead, she’s soft with herself, and she believes this is the difference between knowing one needs to grow and actually doing it.

That Bruley’s compensatory strategies for dealing with brain trauma feel so culturally and emotionally relevant to everyone may seem coincidental, but Dr. Hart isn’t surprised by the connection. She references the concept of “universal design,” a principle which asserts that things designed for people with limitations are better for everyone. It’s most often applied to products, like OXO kitchen gadgets that have big handles for arthritic hands that are actually easier for all hands. But she thinks it can be applied to the rehabilitative process for brain injury, too: “Things that help you calm down, reduce your anxiety, and give meaning to your life; the love, support, and patience of other people—those help everybody.”

It took time for Bruley to see her accident as an opportunity rather than as a deterrent, and the fact that she eventually did is a testament to the impact of working with rather than against oneself. “There’s a reason why you are how you are,” she says. “Don’t give yourself a hard time about anything. Because it all really leads back to something tangible.”

For her, it leads back to a left turn she hoped might save some time but that ultimately saved her life. This is why she is how she is, and maybe, if you change some of the details, it’s why I am how I am, or you are how you are. We could spend our time sifting through the particulars, assigning blame or regretting things didn’t turn out differently, but Bruley thinks we’d do better to look ahead. Be soft. Write new stories.

Photos by Alexa Quinn.

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