I didn’t know much about you before yesterday, when I watched in live-time horror your assassination on a college campus. For talking. You were just talking to college kids.

You were practically a kid yourself.

What happened to you is the scariest thing I have seen in my adult life. Even more than 9/11, which—coincidentally?— happened twenty-four years ago today. And today I feel a similar shift in the world’s frequency.

Six years ago, I would have detested you. I was a raging, angry, self-righteous NYC Democrat, who believed all the propaganda I was sold. I cried when Trump was elected in 2016. I would have seen you as a threat to my safety, my rights, and my kids’ future happiness. I would have mocked your Christianity and your flag emoji.

But thankfully, Covid woke me up. I watched in disbelief as the world I believed in fell away. The people I thought were smart and thoughtful gave up their rights and complied in what I think is justly described as tyranny. Many of the people I previously looked down upon became stalwart protectors of free speech and civil rights. It required questioning everything I believed in. And thank God.

I think your assassination is ultimately an example of how free speech is fully under attack. Anyone who thinks this is just about right vs left is deluded. The war is between free speech and totalitarian control, and both parties are equally guilty. Whoever murdered you does not want peaceful dialogue or speech they don’t agree with. Anyone applauding your murder is murdering their own right to free speech. To a free society where kids can gather face to face and hear other ideas. This is the very notion upon which this country was founded.

Covid helped me realize how insane the political party I was part of had become. I wasn’t like them anymore. It was incredibly uncomfortable, and indeed, it’s painful to change one’s mind. But I did not simply drift to the other side because I could no longer stomach the Left. I am not a conservative, either, because I also can also see the blatant hypocrisy of your party, too. I de-subscribed to the whole apparatus.

So I am politically homeless, and that’s perfectly okay with me. I’ve opted out. There are parts of the Left I agree with, and parts of the Right I agree with. But I won’t allow myself to be told what to think anymore. I wish more people would leave the two-party system and not let their political beliefs divide them from love and connection with others. I suspect there are more of us than we know.

And, I’m pretty sure that dividing us has been the entire point. There are too many interests that benefit when we are busy screaming at each other online. I think maybe you knew this, too.

So, even the people grotesquely applauding your death—I have to love them, too. I have to have compassion for them because I know I would think the same thing if I were believing what they are believing. I once was that person, too. That’s why, as you exemplified, it’s paramount to examine your beliefs. Test them out. Supercharge your life with your values. Dispense with stupid shit that doesn’t align with your values. If something or someone seeds hate or fear in your heart, it’s on you to understand and examine it.

Otherwise, we are useful idiots, parroting memes and talking points without any conviction or deep, critical thought. The more I examine my own beliefs, the less threatened I am when someone challenges me on them. (And I reserve the right to be wrong.)

This is what we also lost in you yesterday. We lost a powerful and vocal example of peaceful dialogue and disagreement. That you were killed, of all people, says something. And the message is terrifying.

I want us to stop identifying ourselves by our political affiliations. I don’t care that you were conservative; I care that you were a decent person; that you were a father and a husband. You inspired millions of people to engage in dialog, to debate tough decisions and realities. I may not have agreed with you on everything, or even most things. But man, did you challenge people to dig deeper into their belief systems. That’s a good thing. It benefits us all.

Yesterday and last night, I found myself praying. This is relatively new. I’m Christian—technically—and believe in God, but am tentative and twitchy around organized religion. I meditate. I love the woo and witchy. I believe we are more spirit than matter. I didn’t used to think this way, and I certainly didn’t have a strong spiritual connection in my early life. That all changed when my oldest brother committed suicide seven years ago. I know now that the idea that we are separate beings is an illusion. We are all connected to each other. All of us. This means that if we are hating someone, we are really hating ourselves.

I suspect the people that hate you are–deep down in the dark bile of it– jealous. Anyone I’ve hated in my life is because they had something that I wanted for myself, and didn’t believe myself capable or worthy of it. And I would never admit it then, but I know I was jealous of people of deep faith.

I’m still evolving in my spiritual life, whereas you were so confident and knowledgeable and dedicated to your belief in God and Jesus. I was jealous of that surrendering, that freedom, and the strength it gave you to find your purpose and trust it. But I had been poisoned against having true faith because I associated it with the political party I believed to be my enemy. Without knowing it, I was led away from God, and away from connection. Away from myself. This is the disconnection that the people who killed you want.

Many of us are envious of this faith, I suspect, though we may not say so. To give up our fear and victimhood, to surrender to God, and actually allow ourselves to find divine connection each and every day in our own private, internal world. Why is this scary to people? I think because when faith in God goes deep enough, you’re not scared anymore. The forces that killed you want us scared. Perhaps this is why your death happened so publicly.

Once, a few years ago, I had a vision. I was sitting in my office, and my whole body got unexplicably warm, and I saw myself, curled up like a baby, safe in the palm of God’s hand.

I don’t read the Bible, or quote scripture like you, but I go back to this image as much as possible. It brings me peace and comfort in a place no one can touch, and where there is no need for proof. I think this is a form of prayer, too.

When my brother took his own life, it was the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. But somehow, in the darkness I was able to find light. His death forced me to confront myself and my lack of faith, the lack of an anchoring belief in something larger than myself.

I am hopeful that we can, after the grieving, all find some light. We have a choice in who we want to be as a nation, but it starts with ourselves and our own hearts. It will take deep and honest dialogue. The kind that you practiced: fearless, open, and face-to-face. It will require tolerating discomfort.

Until then, I’m going to think of you curled up in God’s palm.

Thank you, Charlie.

The vomit came suddenly and I lurched into a squat. It was bright blue as it hit the dirt between our tents. I’d taken methylene blue a few minutes earlier, trying to biohack the altitude. It didn’t work. The altitude sickness came on without warning. I’d been fine the first three days of our hike. We were at 14,500 feet and I woke up at three am with a headache so painful I immediately swallowed three ibuprofen and the prescription mountain sickness med I’d brought just in case. I naively–and perhaps smugly–didn’t think I would need it. 

Now it was six am, and I felt like I might die.

The sun was barely coming up. We were supposed to leave our camp soon to hike for six more hours. I could barely move, my arms leaden, my nausea so severe I was almost shaking. I sipped more water from my Nalgene, but it did not help. 

I knew when I signed up for Kilimanjaro ten months earlier that it would be a challenge. And so I trained, and I prepped. I had all the gear I needed. But it was more than just having the right socks and pack. The reality of this mountain was humbling me.

Paul, our fearless Tanzanian head guide, came over to me. He was calm and unbothered by my blue vomit in the middle of camp. He’d seen it all.

“It’s just your body adjusting to the lack of oxygen. It’s normal. It will pass. Sip lemon water,” he said. “Better now than on summit night.” He passed me my second Nalgene full of hot lemon water the cook had prepared. It was bitter but I liked it. 

I wiped my wet eyes and stumbled into the dining tent in my parka. I poured myself a coffee and dumped powdered milk and sugar–because fuck it–into it. My family and two new friends–now my teammates–huddled around the folding table, orange hued from the tent, their coffees steaming.

“I’m here,” I said. 

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My niece and nephew and their mother told me they were climbing Kilimanjaro ten months earlier over an epic meal in Manhattan on the sixth anniversary of my brother/their father’s death. My mouth moved faster than my brain. 

“I want to come!” I said. I’ve said foolish things before which never came to pass, but something told me that when my niece said “You’re definitely coming!” that it really was true. 

“How high is it again? 15,000 feet?” I asked. 

“It’s like 19,300,” my niece said. My feet went slightly numb. “It’s one of the seven summits.” I didn’t know what that meant.

As it turns out, Mt. Kilimanjaro is the tallest freestanding mountain in the world. 

For the record, I’m not a particularly outdoorsy or rugged person. I’m an artistic Pisces, a city dweller for most of my life, and I can do almost nothing practical except cook. 

But I said it out loud and now it was in the universe. Perhaps the idea would disintegrate in the light of day. 

I woke the next morning with a nervous buzz in the pit of my stomach, and my sister in law emailed me and the Alpenglow coordinator to book my trip. It was happening. 

And still, I wasn’t really sure why I wanted to do it. I’m not interested in climbing other big mountains, like my niece. I have no interest in it; it actually sounds horrible. Even as I started training for Kili, I knew it was an incredible once-in-a-lifetime adventure with my niece and nephew. But I wasn’t exactly sure what was at work in my psyche. 

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Mt. Kilimanjaro entered my consciousness in 1990 when my family went on safari in Kenya. I remember being in Amboseli National Park, staring at the mythic snow-covered mountain in the distance. Someone said You can climb it, you know. You have to get up at midnight for the summit. It sounded horrible and awesome and that’s when the seed must have been planted. 

I was fourteen years old. I had bangs and a full rack of braces and raging hormones. I was in feverish puppy love with Bill Winter, our guide, who was twenty-nine and had perfect teeth, brown hair, and kind eyes. He wore khaki and knew everything about wildlife. He had a perfect Kenyan-British accent. I was desperately in love with being in love and blasted Lady in Red on my walkman Sport. 

I could not have known that in climbing Kiliumanjaro, I was really revisiting that fourteen year old me. The one who blossomed early and hated her body almost immediately. The one who told herself she wasn’t athletic. The one who learned she had to be The Good Girl in order to survive. 

According to Simba, one of our Tanzanian guides. There are four rules when climbing Kilimanjaro: 

1. Go slow. Pole pole means slow in Swahili. GO SLOW. They aren’t being facetious or annoying when they say this. Take your time. You’re hiking fifty miles, and you will be too tired by summit day if you go too fast. The relative ease of the hike in the early part can fool you. It’s a really big mountain.

2. Get lots of rest and sleep well. (HAHAHAHAHA.)

3. Drink lots of water and eat lots of food. Yes, and yes, except there is no appetite above 14,000 feet.

4. Have a positive attitude. This is, as I came to discover, the most challenging and  important rule.

As it turns out, hiking was the easy part of Kilimanjaro. It was everything else–the sleeping, the altitude, the camping–that was hardest for me. The first two nights on the mountain I barely slept at all due a nasty combo of jet lag, altitude and disorientation. That third night, I realized I hadn’t pooped in days. I lay in my tent, finally remembering the earplugs to drown out the cheery laughter of the porters, and my eye mask to dim the flashlights. My headlamp lay at the ready to inevitably go pee in the toilet tent every few hours. Every ten minutes I would hear the zip of a tent or a cough. One night I heard my new friend Suzie screaming at someone in her sleep (she’s an attorney). I was sleeping on a blow up camping pad which was so narrow I kept rolling off all night. The altitude started to do funny things to my mind; was I sleeping? Was I awake? Was I dreaming? Once I woke up in a panic, convinced that my tent was being filled with protein bar wrappers. 

That third night, I had to forcibly allow my body to relax as much as possible. I was too tightly wound and exhausted. I was physically clenching against being away and being vulnerable. Not knowing what the fuck I was doing there. I missed my husband and kids, and the comfort of the known. I felt lost and untethered in my tiny tent. As soon as I relaxed my limbs, I felt hot tears. They streamed down my face, and I sobbed silently so as not to wake my niece who was sleeping a foot away. 

I’d spent the last several decades of my life in therapy, learning how to feel–sometimes even admit to– my feelings. Not the feelings I thought I should have, the acceptable ones, but the actual ones I was having. The messy, raw truth of my body in that moment in my sleeping bag was that I was scared. 

I thought I knew this already, yet there it was again: I had to feel my feelings. I was away from my children and husband, far away. What if I couldn’t do it? What if my body failed me? What if I hated everything and ruined the trip for everyone? Rudderless and vulnerable, I let myself feel it all. 

And there she was in that tent with me. Fourteen year old me was learning she wasn’t a child anymore. On the border between girlhood and womanhood, she was rewarded by ignoring all the dark feelings and fear in her. She had everything and nothing. She knew she had to be happy to keep the peace, and so that’s what she did.

I grew up in a cliche WASPy family. Feelings weren’t really acknowledged much. The dysfunctional bumps of my family were smoothed over with white Burgundy and blithe aphorisms. That trip to Kenya was one of the last times I remember living in romantic childhood fantasy land. After that, the ugly, complicated truth of my alcohol-riddled family began to seep out.  

In the morning, after having a hard cry, I was able to poop again, which I knew wasn’t a coincidence. And once I allowed the difficult feelings, they all came; childlike wonder, delight, and joy moved in, too. I regularly burst into tears during the day while we walked because life was just so beautiful. How did I even get onto this mountain? Yes, I flew a long way to Ethiopia and then to Tanzania, but really: how did I get here? 

As we made our way through four distinct ecosystems, it occurred to me that I had a history of taking adventures in my life. In 1995, my brother Brooks was in Nepal studying for the year and I chose to go visit him for my senior minicourse project. My father, brother and I went over to Nepal for 10 days and trekked with Brooks. It was hard on my privileged and untested body, and I also got hit with altitude sickness. Brooks helped me cross the ravines on a rope bridge while I had panic attacks. 

When I was twenty six and an actor, I spent six weeks in Bali studying mask and dance. I got hit with amoebic dysentery and spent days weeping alone in my room, puking and shitting. I lost fifteen pounds. 

I’d done hard things before but for some reason—no doubt related to that fourteen year old—I undermined my own achievements. For goodness sake, I gave birth three times, twice with no pain meds. Walking up Kilimanjaro, I realized for the first time that I truly had a desire for epic adventures in my life. In each case, I’d listened to some non rational voice inside, beckoning me to take off even if it didn’t make sense. But rarely are our soul callings convenient.

Fourteen year old me learned to keep herself in check, especially the part of her that had deep desires. The part of her that demanded she be seen and go after what she wanted. She suffocated that part of her because it made others uncomfortable, and she couldn’t have that. 

The morning of the blue puke, we had our normal breakfast: coffee with powdered milk, fruit, sweetened cassava porridge, eggs, and cassava pancakes. I hadn’t eaten real sugar in years, preferring a low-carb or ketogenic diet. But mountain life was different. My body wanted carbs so badly at high altitude that I gleefully put sugar in my coffee. My niece and nephew were dumbfounded, having watched my carefully curated protein-heavy sugar-is-the-devil restrictive diet for years. Seeing their faces, I started laughing hysterically, which turned into crying at the same time.

“I’m Mountain Lilah!” I shrieked. “I don’t give a fuck!” I’d officially run out of fucks around 14,500 feet. Because what else was I going to do? Except listen to the guides and put one foot in front of the other? I put honey in my porridge and felt myself come back to life a bit. 

Perhaps that was why I was there. To meet Mountain Lilah, the Guide for my 14 year old. Mountain Lilah did what was necessary. She fueled her body with what was available. She threw out her controlling food rules and ate the seed oils and sugar and carbs that the wonderful cook prepared. She relished in nourishing her bad ass strong capable body. 

Fourteen year old me learned to fear food just as she needed and wanted it. She would close off to receiving help and guidance where Mountain Lilah relied on her guides and teammates. 

Mountain Lilah howled with laughter at the idea of an “ancestral” “primal” diet. I’m a well-to-do Connecticut mom who grew up in Pittsburgh. There is nothing primal about me, no matter how many times I sauna or cold plunge or how much raw beef liver I eat. I drive a BMW for the love of Christ. Who was I fooling? 

High altitude is a different world. Everything had to be slow, not just the walking. Moving around my tent made me breathless. I was gasping after going number two, which made me laugh on the toilet. Life had to be slow and purposeful. No wasteful movement, which meant loss of energy. Rest was important in a way it wasn’t back home. My red blood cells needed glucose, and so my body craved it. Honey, sugar, starch, this was what my body needed. I sucked down juice boxes of mango concentrate. Protein, eh, I ate a few meat sticks I’d brought, but I really wanted a Snickers. Red blood cells can’t use ketones, they need glucose. If I wasn’t eating it, my body was having to make it from my liver, and it’s a metabolically expensive process, especially when my body is already working overtime with less oxygen and hiking. 

By giving my body what it needed, I found a new love for it. It was doing everything just right. Even the altitude sickness was just right. All I had to do was trust it, surrender and respect my body’s needs. I realized how controlling I’d been of my body since I was a girl. How I was speaking to my body was creating the very issues I said I didn’t want. I’d been telling myself I was a sugar addict, that I couldn’t tolerate carbs, but now I suspected I’d been telling myself a story that wasn’t true. It was time to let go of the stories I’d created when Wilson Phillips was singing about holding on. 

On Kilimanjaro—like in 1990!—I was completely off grid. There were a couple spots with cell service, so I was able to call my husband once. It made me miss him and the kids more. I used my nephew’s Garmin satellite device to text Jeff each day. I’m alive! I wrote. At 15,500 feet, base camp for the summit. I miss you! I missed him and the kids with a ferocity that bordered on physical pain. But lying in my tent at night, I felt how deeply connected I was to my husband and kids. They are my heart. The love that I craved back when I had braces? I’ve got it in spades. There was no need to doubt it anymore.

I didn’t have the internet, only a deck of cards, a trivia game and my Kindle. My phone was to take pictures and that was it. No news to make me angry, no X, no Instagram selling me on what I was supposed to be that day, no memes to inspire me or influencers to envy. Just me and the mountain, and the people I was with. As we progressed up the mountain, the pace slowed even more. The walks became quieter. I could feel my brain being reset. 

In many ways, the last six years have been about healing that fourteen year old girl who hates her body. And it’s worked. I love my body now. But Mountain Lilah wasn’t there to feel her sexy body, she was there to do something hard and taxing. To get to the summit. I found a gorgeous freedom in this. My appearance didn’t matter in the slightest. Was I warm? Was I blister-free? Was I hydrated? Those were the only questions that mattered. I was returning to the innocence of my pre-pubertal self, the one who knew her body’s capability for play and sport, exploring and having fun. 

Camping and climbing are about practicalities, not unearthing the decadence of my body. Each evening while it was still light enough, I would remove one piece of clothing, wipe my body down with a wet wipe and replace it with new clothing. The higher we got the colder it became. And the less clean stuff I had. 

I had no mirror or even a hairbrush. I realized how much I looked at my body at home, as if I were passing a test each day in front of the mirror. What if my body didn’t need to pass a test?

How could I really love my body when I was constantly judging it? When I was constantly evaluating it to see if it was good (thin) enough? I wasn’t thin, I was strong and meaty, and there on that mountain I was grateful for this. My muscles tethered me to the mountain. 

When summit night arrived, I was nervous. I was afraid I’d be unable to sleep before departure and be exhausted. When I went to the bathroom earlier that evening, a rainbow sat in the distance and I thought of my brother. I smiled. 

 At 6 pm, I donned my eye mask, put earplugs in, bundled in my 0 degree bag with a melatonin patch on my stomach and dozed to the laughter of the porters in the kitchen tent behind me. We rose at 11 pm, drank tea with milk and sugar, and put on our headlamps. It was freezing. I wore four layers, one puffer and my giant blue parka. My gloves were so big I couldn't do anything with my hands except hold my hiking poles. I put on my headphones and pumped my favorite music that got me energized. It was a clear, cold night full of stars. 

Off we went. We walked up the steep pitch and I tried to clear my mind of anything. To let go of time, altitude, of a need to arrive or even know what was in the blackness ahead of me. 

My niece checked in with me on a stop to pee, eat a snack and drink water. “How are you doing?” she called to me from beneath a large boulder we named Poop Rock due to the amount of human feces and toilet paper surrounding it. If you had to go, you had to go.

“I’m fucking great!” I shrieked. And the thing was: it was true. It was hard and steep climbing, but we went step by step. I just followed Paul’s steady rhythm in front of me. There was no talking. There was just one step after the next. I had trained for months for this and I felt my confidence. Any time my mind said this is hard I changed it to this is fucking amazing. I could just turn my thinking around instantly, and there is nothing more powerful than this.

With each step, I pictured crushing my self-doubt like I was stamping out a cigarette. Slowly it became clear to me why I needed to climb this mountain. It was for this. This use of my body and my own voice, a crystal kind of clarity in myself. I had a lot of support on the mountain with me, but in the end, it was between me and my fourteen year old self. She didn’t know her power, and she didn’t feel amazing. But I could and did.

Before long, it was 4 am. I was standing on the tallest mountain in Africa. God was good to me in so many ways, and I felt it coursing through my body. I breathed and felt my heart pumping madly, and sometimes I had to stop to just take in more air. My head began to ache at 18000 feet. The guides began chanting gorgeous Masai warrior songs when the darkness was overwhelming and the energy sagged. I let the stream of headlights above us show me how much was left. Not being able to see the top was actually helpful. I just had to stay present where I was at that exact moment. Gratitude was my fuel. 

Fourteen year old me convinced herself she wasn’t athletic. It was patently untrue; since I was little I’d been snow skiing, waterskiing, playing tennis, and riding horses. I rowed crew, played lacrosse, did pilates, spinning, running, weightlifting, hiking, barre, yoga, boxing, surfing, and swimming. I was an actor for years, and I had damn good kinetic awareness. 

I’d always been curvier and struggled with my weight, so I never thought of myself as athletic despite all evidence to the contrary. I wasn’t Elissa McCarthy or Stephanie Kalson, two of the best athletes in high school with their lithe sporty bodies. I thought of myself as “artistic” despite always making room in my life for movement and fitness, so my self image wasn’t that of an athlete. Working out had been more about not being fat (or punishing my body if I was) and being a Good Girl than athleticism. I didn’t realize at the time the power of my thoughts. That telling yourself something over and over can make it true.

Climbing Kilimanjaro crushed any doubt that I can achieve whatever goal I set my mind to. My body will follow. Minimizing myself doesn’t work for me anymore. Mountain Lilah taught me that.

We reached the summit just after 8 am. The last two hours were some of the hardest and best of my life. Reaching the top of Kilimanjaro was a proud moment, but it was a watershed moment in my own understanding of myself. After the summit, I would never again be able to treat my body as a problem, as not good enough. My fourteen year old self relished this; I gave her all the love, acceptance and confidence she still so desperately needed. 

Mountain Lilah knew she was never going to make up the mountain with doubt, fear and hatred. These needed to be left behind for good, they were too heavy to carry anymore. Love, trust and confidence got me up Kilimanjaro, hand in hand with that frightened girl.

This was why I said yes. This was why I needed to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. 

As a child of the eighties and nineties, my concept of love and sex was shaped—for better and worse—by John Hughes. A part of me is still waiting for Jake Ryan to pick me up from the wedding in his red Porsche. It’s not an exaggeration to say that my concept of married life was shaped in part by butter. Well, not butter exactly, or I can’t believe it’s not butter, but it’s even more down-home cousin, Shedd’s Spread Country Crock.

Full disclosure: I've never actually tasted Country Crock because my mother thankfully only used Land O’ Lakes. Margarine was verboten in our house. Thanks, mom! Alas, my daughter is now about to turn sixteen, seed oils are now a hotly debated mainstream topic, and my own 20th wedding anniversary is fast approaching.

The Country Crock commercials featuring a married couple penetrated my psyche. In my memory, the wife feeds her husband a freshly baked and Crocked muffin, but in reality we only ever saw their hands, their butter knives gesticulating over the brown plastic tub of trans fat. My mind completely made up what they looked like until the blessed internet reminded me that we never actually saw their faces or other body parts. In my mind, he wore pleated Dockers and had brown hair, she was blonde and pretty.

Their relationship—not to mention their seemingly unlimited ingestion of baked goods and starches—suggested a wholesome happiness I craved. The husband was always joking, making the wife laugh. She was always slightly chastising but laughing despite herself. The husband was a bit naughty, his butter knife a little wild. Sometimes the wife touched his hand, though rarely. The hand models buttered their biscuits and muffins in a certain unrealistic wavy pattern I would always try to emulate on my Thomas’ English muffin. But real butter always melted too quickly. It was the spreadability that mattered, the way Country Crock sat undeterred for a moment. I wanted that. I was in fifth grade when the commercials began, but by 1990 I ate my English muffin dry with grape jelly. The butter sat ignored in the butter dish. I was already afraid of fat. 

The couple—I will call them the Crockers—flirted with wholesome banter as they buttered each other’s muffin. The innuendo was lost on me at age eleven, but there was a trickle of erotic energy, just enough, that permeated the commercials. One could imagine what would happen later behind closed doors if they allowed themselves an extra glass of Ernest & Julio White Zin. The wife’s voice had a silky quality to it, a slightly throaty purr. The husband has a practicality to his voice—he definitely drove a wood paneled Dodge minivan—but one imagines his quirky sense of humor could turn raunchy once the lights were off. Besides, the Crockers must have been in decent shape; they took care of their bodies by eschewing butter for its low fat doppelganger, Country Crock, which contained even less fat and calories than margarine!

We watched as the wife announced her pregnancy to her husband, with the introduction of “trial size” Country Crock. We celebrated Christmas with them. His boss came for dinner. There was a bake sale. The Country Crock spread came in tubs, then sticks, then squeeze bottles, trial-sized tubs and giant tubs. It came with corn oil (ew). Then they added yogurt for a homey touch. They would add honey to their low-fat concoction to make it even worse. It was full of trans fats, which they removed in 2012 when science made it clear that trans fats caused disease. Now Country Crock is a mix of soybean, palm and palm kernel oils, which are also linked to a number of health issues.

I can’t help but imagine the Crockers now, in their late seventies, after decades of eating whole-grain muffins with low fat margarine; him obese and diabetic, and her fighting cancer. It’s a shame, after they eagerly heeded Jane Brody’s advice for all those years. I imagine the commercials now would be silent; they have already said all the words, and know each other’s thoughts. The easy choreography of their hand movements are earned from decades together. Their hands might shake slightly as they Crock their long-fermented sourdough; perhaps she has to crock his for him. Perhaps some old resentment creeps in. I hope they’re okay.

One commercial really pounded the word “country”, using it three or four times in only thirty seconds. Country Crock rode on butter’s long and sturdy coattails, its “creamy and buttery taste”. They cashed in on butter’s wholesome reputation, with images of red barns, picket fences and aproned mothers. You could practically see a pioneer woman churning it in the background. (Seed oils are actually made in large factories, using a process of deodorizing, bleaching and sanitizing to make them edible for humans. They are usually rancid by the time they are packaged. Their oxidation is part of what makes them uniquely dangerous to eat. For more, see Tucker Goodrich’s work.)

In contrast to the masculine undertones of red meat, butter has a soft femininity to it. It literally comes from the mammary glands of animals. Butter is ancient, the famed result of herders’ goat milk jostling and separating on long journeys. Yak butter was a staple of the Tibetan diet for millennia as they had little else to eat at their altitude. 

Butter became a prized way to add nutrients and flavor to food. Even the Mayflower carted over barrels of butter on the long journey to America. In the early 19th century, butter making became a side-hustle for rural American women, burgeoning into a stable income for farmers before the dairy industry developed. Hunting and farming the fields was the men’s dominion, while butter making belonged to the women. Americans loved butter and by the turn of the 20th century, we were eating almost a stick and a half per person per week. We had almost no heart disease or obesity.

We should get back to that. Butter is a healing nutrient-dense food, full of butyrate which is a short-chain fatty acid that can heal the gut. It contains stearic acid, another fatty acid that stimulates fat burning. (Perhaps it’s why the French can consume all-butter croissants and not gain weight?) Butter is a rich source of important essential vitamins: A, K2, B12, and D. Slathering butter on our vegetables helps us absorb their fat-soluble vitamins. Our grandmothers were right to butter the potatoes, peas, broccoli, and green beans. I now know more about how important healthy fat and cholesterol is for my cell membranes, brain health and especially, as a perimenopausal woman, my hormones.  

The 2024 Country Crock doubled-down on the farm appeal, in a colorful plastic tub. I still have no idea what “Shedd’s Spread” is, but it's reminiscent of the confusion surrounding Ruth’s Chris Steak House. (Who is Ruth, goddamn it, and why does she have a Chris?) Nevertheless, Shedd’s Spread boasts of “farm grown ingredients”. Yes, soybeans are grown on farms. It seems that too much of our farmland is used for growing soy, wheat and corn. These mono-crops are highly subsidized and, unless regeneratively managed, deplete healthy soil. To their credit, they have started a Cover Crop project to help heal the soil and help Kansan farmers. The Country Crock container says “Churned in Kansas” but I somehow doubt Dorothy herself is doing the churning. It’s more likely that vats of bleached and deodorized soybean oil never meant for the human food supply are mixed in large vats with natural flavors and whey.

They now also sell a dairy-free “plant butter” made with olive or avocado oil. The majority of the ingredients are still palm, soybean and canola (rapeseed) oils. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but “plant-based” does not equal healthier. It’s worth noting that Country Crock no longer advertises being lower in fat or cholesterol. In 2015, the Nutritional Guidelines quietly removed the limit on dietary cholesterol. There was never any good evidence for limiting cholesterol in the human diet, which kind of undermines the entire necessity of Country Crock. (There is still an absurd limit on saturated fat, but no good evidence points to any harm.) Notably, since we have been limiting saturated fat and replacing it with polyunsaturated fats, our nation’s health has only gotten worse. 

If the Shedd’s Spread couple returns for nostalgic Gen Xers, I can only imagine the marketing gurus insisting that the hands belong to a mixed-race couple considering ethical non monogamy to really spice up their organic gluten-free spelt pancakes. Maybe a third hand of indeterminate gender would appear in the background with a pumpkin-spice flavor. But given the mesmerizing fascination with influencer Hannah Neeleman and the seeming ease with which she makes her own butter from raw cream while raising eight children, butter might be back better than ever.

It doesn’t need a PR team. My husband and I buy ours from an Amish farm, but I also love salted Kerrygold. We keep it on the counter so we can spread it on everything easily. Rarely do our hands argue over who gets to butter their banana bread first because my husband prefers a 1-1 bread to butter ratio and I have learned to back away until he’s finished. We have occasionally clashed squares of dark chocolate while running them thru the softened butter for our nighttime snack as we review the day, but this has become a subtle kind of foreplay. Like Princess Buttercup, when my husband butters my steak without asking, I know he’s really saying I love you.

Perhaps we have become the Country Crock couple, just a lot healthier. 

I’ll take it.

Jake Ryan can wait.

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The body is a hard place to be because it doesn’t lie. Our bodies only know the truth. When we are divorced from our bodies, from what’s true and real about and for us, suffering occurs.

The body is a hard place to be because we are fallible, vulnerable humans. We are an open system—biological and electrical wonders. We affect each other; we give off energetic and magnetic fields to attract or repel each other, we exchange DNA. We communicate without words. We are separated from the outside world only by the lining of our gut, which is literally one cell thick. Our guts house 90% of our immune system and the gut-brain axis means our moods and states of mind– our very sense of ourselves– are governed by trillions of bacteria inside us. We have more bacteria in us than human cells. We are always interacting with viruses, bacteria—with nature—but we try to deny and control this “threat”—with masks or vaccines or “social distance”. We sanitize and cleanse. 

The body is a hard place to be when we separate from our animal nature. We need sun and meat and salt and skin. We need hugs and wet kisses and dirt. We need fire and water, sunlight, raindrops and darkness. Our bodies need to rip the meat off of bones, eat eggs cooked in butter, and taste our lovers’ cum. We need cold water when we are sweaty and warm drinks in the winter. We need to touch the just-picked lettuce with slugs on it, and bury our faces in our dog’s fur, and get pummeled by waves in the ocean. We need the juice of a mango dripping down our chins, and the butter melting into the sweet potato. We need to see the sunrise every morning and say hello to God. But what we settle for are pills and screens and blue light and manicured sidewalks and GMO soybeans and memes to explain it all. We look to studies on rats and mice to prove or disprove things we inherently know about ourselves and the universe. We let what we can’t explain scare the shit out of us.

The body is a hard place to be when we try to be machines optimized for productivity and consumption. We need to recognize our mundane, feral magic every day, the corporeal feast of wonder we forget and remember over and over again. The sun, the moon, the tides and the stars are as crucial to our wellbeing as our family of origin. 

The body is a hard place to be for women because we tend to divide from our bodies early; we poke, plumb and prod our bodies into whatever is considered attractive by the standards of the day. This is neither here nor there. It is simply biologically true. Men are designed to shape themselves into providers and protectors. Their value is expressed through work and brute strength, and this comes with its own brand of hardship. Boys are taught to fight, punch, kick, fuck, and build buildings, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Females are more physically vulnerable than males, but this does not mean we are inherently weaker. It’s just that the powers that be have decided what is of value the last couple thousand or so years, and it’s not emotional or intuitive strength or creative generation. We don’t pray to the divine goddesses humanity worshipped for millennia before the Church took over. We worship ownership and power over. This costs men and women both. I think this is changing. 

My body was a hard place to be as the first girl in a family of boys. My father was one of four boys. There were three male cousins, and two older brothers before I arrived. I was swathed in pink and white eyelet. My developing body was treated as a mystery at best, and a problem at worst. When I was about thirteen, my father jokingly apologized to me for giving me his thick (and very strong) legs. I laughed at this to mask my shame. It was not the first time I would turn against my body. I believed it had already failed me in its primary job of looking attractive. This passing comment shaped my understanding of my worth for decades, and it wasn’t until well into my marriage that I began to crack open the vulnerable pain underneath. I spent years keeping my husband locked out of any conversation about my body when in reality he just wanted to share in what he already knew to be my pain points. 

As I traveled the porous border between girlhood and womanhood, I only knew myself through the eyes of the male gaze because nothing else was offered. I believed I was more valuable when I donned that belted hot pink dress and my brother’s eyes rose in surprised approval at my tiny waist. I rose in value when George Schnakenberg took me to the winter formal, we shared a delicate bud of a kiss, and he never left my side. My value dimmed when I stood in front of the mirror and my thick thighs rubbed against each other. I knew women were more attractive when their thighs didn’t touch. My brothers read Playboy and Penthouse, and had pinups of Paulina Porizkova and Elle Macpherson and Kate Moss. Their sexuality and vigor was praised and nurtured. My femininity was quiet lace and polite smiles and constant apologizing when I did nothing wrong. 

I went to an all girls’ school until college; avoiding pregnancy and combating eating disorders were the main fears. Schooling girls away from boys was supposed to create strong, fearless, confident women. And in some ways it did. Learning didn’t include the male voice, and this was lovely. But I always felt single-sex education, at least back then, undermined its own purpose. If girls were equal to boys, what advantage did separating them offer? But we know that women are different from men; our learning styles and our ability to use language differ. Our body clocks are different.

Being born female is its own super power. We don’t come with the same operating system as males. And in the societal framework of the masculine, women are still disembodied but can serve on the supreme court and talk about our abortions. Our actual power isn’t able to be recognized within the confines of the masculine so women are continually positioned as victims. In my view, this paradigm— including modern feminism—doesn’t allow for a true understanding of feminine power. I found myself stuck in this mentality for decades. And the body is definitely a hard place to be when it’s told it’s powerless and victimized for decades.

But things do happen to us, and our bodies remember what our minds block out, what we put away in cold storage. Our bodies express what we won’t. The inexplicable rash, the sudden weight gain, the thinning hair, the lack of a libido. The autoimmune disease which we are told is our body attacking itself (which of course means the body is our enemy and needs outside intervention/medication to be made normal). It all means something—clues we get to unravel. But we are separated from our bodies by a medical industry that wants to sell us a pill for our brain imbalances, or a lotion, or a wrinkle cream. A surgery or a diet shake to achieve aesthetic perfection. We are born—quite literally—into this system of fluorescent lights, ICM codes, and well-meaning health care professionals who tell us our symptoms are all in our heads, that we are anxious or depressed because of a ‘chemical imbalance’. That we are a problem that needs to be fixed. In many cases, the medical industry itself is the cause of trauma or illness, and we are on a roundabout loop between doctors and the local CVS and back again. Rarely are we invited to stop and examine whether this endless cycle benefits us. We don’t realize we can just step out of their paradigm.

The body is a hard place to be because most of us have been living off of rabbit food for years, depleting the amino acids in our brains. We’ve been eating Special K Red Berry with oat milk thinking we will lose weight and instead we are flabby and angry, and it’s all our fault for not being disciplined enough. The body is a hard place to be when we punish ourselves on the treadmill for the brownies and red wine. The body is a hard place to be when you take up space but believe you shouldn’t. The body is a hard place to be when we're encouraged to dress sexy, to enjoy our sexual freedom but it’s also our fault when our date tries to stick his dick inside us when we don’t want him to. 

The body is a hard place to be when you can’t feel anger about things you should be angry about. Our fascia stores our emotions away, tucks them into the crevices of our bodies, in our tissues, until it’s safe to feel them. The problem is we never feel safe enough because we are told we aren’t. And feeling shit is hard work. So the body becomes an even harder place to be: your gut is a mess, you hardly ever poop, you are exhausted and moody. You starve yourself of food, and then binge on the weekends after two margaritas. You’re told your hormones are out of whack, so you need to be on the pill, to regulate whatever is wrong. Then you try to have babies and can’t and no one knows why. Or then you do have babies, and you “fail to progress” or your hips are not the right shape. Then you breastfeed and you’re hungry as hell but trying to lose the baby weight to fit into the skinny jeans you wore before your body and life changed forever. Then your tits sag and your vagina dries up and you have to go back to work before you’re ready, so you’re then put on an antidepressant, which you stay on until you reach menopause. Then you are told that menopause is terrible, that your body betrays you and shuts down, you are a crazy bitch who will divorce her partner, while you carry all the emotional labor for summer camps, and shuttling the kids around, and buying birthday presents, and planning travel and grocery shopping and eating clean and exercising when you have time, and reading self-help books. The antidepressants don't work, but you can’t go off them without horrible symptoms so you take them. You will caretake for your aging parents and try to connect with your increasingly moody teen. Oh, and try to be a sexy dominatrix at night with glass pores. You fail at all of this and become exhausted, resentment filling your lungs. And then they will tell you you need more hormones because a perfectly normal and interesting stage of a woman’s life has been pathologized. And then you disappear because you are no longer of interest to the male gaze, and therefore, to yourself. 

But maybe you just need some carbs and saturated fat and some primal screaming. Maybe you need sunlight, a buttery ribeye, and to do nothing for a while. Maybe you just need to listen to your body instead of an MD or a health influencer or a dietician or the evening news. Maybe your own cells have the answer.

And then maybe—just maybe—you will start to feel a curious new sensation inside, a quiet freedom. I’m beginning to think, at age 47, that trading youth for wisdom is the best deal ever. 

What if our bodies are not failing us but are having a completely normal response to the wrong inputs? A shitty career or a troubled marriage? Or to living a life that isn’t really yours? Perhaps the body is only hard because we ignore our real needs, whether for love or God (which, for me, is one and the same). It makes perfect sense; we are trained to do this from when we are babies left to scream in a room alone and we give up on anyone holding us. Then we do it to our babies, too, and call it “self-soothing”. (If one wanted to create a society of hyper-productive robots who ignore their own need for safety and connection, I can’t think of a better way.)

The body is a hard place to be when the very nutrients that make us thrive are the ones we are told by Self magazine we should avoid. Cholesterol is known as the mother hormone; meaning it makes all the other hormones possible. Estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. Women have been told for over fifty years now to eat low fat diets, more plants, and less meat—a plainly nutrient-deficient diet. 78% of vegans and vegetarians are women and girls ages 13-35. We have an obsession with lowering cholesterol, even though this science is deeply flawed and cholesterol is essential to health. Is it any wonder that so many women in the West have horrible menopausal symptoms? We have been misled into robbing our bodies (and offspring) of critical nutrients in the name of being healthier (not to mention smaller) and it’s a disaster. I sat for years apologizing for my appetite with my girl friends. That was if any of us actually ate sinful, manly, fatty red meat. It was always fucking salad and lean chicken.

And sometimes a salad is lovely. Geneen Roth says “eat what the body wants” but I was not raised to understand what that means. Around puberty, my body became my enemy, to be controlled, mistrusted and cajoled into thinness through deprivation or sweating. My disconnection to my developing body was further cemented by my diet of fat-free fig newtons and Diet Coke and Lucky Charms. It’s one fucked up merry-go-round.

Our bodies have stored everything since we were born and they do not forget. Our bodies remember the sexual assaults, being grabbed on the train, being whistled at on the street, being disbelieved, being complemented for being thin even when we were sick, painting our faces until we don’t recognize ourselves, walking in heels we can’t actually walk in, sucking in our stomachs for every picture, pulling our neck skin back in the mirror, paying hundreds of dollars to have a toxin plunged into our foreheads, fucking when we don’t want to fuck, difficult labors and being ripped apart vulva to anus. 

If our bodies really listen to our thoughts about ourselves, then no wonder the body is a hard place to be.

All of us were an egg inside our mother’s ovaries inside our grandmother's bellies. We carry their sexual trauma, their meek smiles, their servitude, their swallowing of their pain. Ancestral trauma alters our DNA, and it is formed inside our cell membranes as we form. We feel the tears they cried and the sex they had and the opportunities they skipped or were denied. We carry around the ways our mothers and grandmothers ignored their bodies, the toxic make up they used, the cigarettes they smoked to keep themselves thin, the sugar they binged on secretly because they were not allowed to have a real appetite. Mother and babies literally have cells from each other inside them forever. 

The good news is that we also inherit our mothers’ and grandmothers’ recognition of themselves; their joy and sweet laughter, their recipes for nourishing foods, and their private courage in the face of hard shit. We inherit the ability to open our hearts and minds to encompass more in ourselves than the world sees of us. We can foster our deep intuition, and honor the sacred truths and wisdom of our bodies. It's all right there, always available. We can change the way our DNA is expressed and we change it for our children and all the generations after them.

But first we have to acknowledge what we have forgotten. 

The body is a hard place to be when we wake up to our periods and curse our own blood, our healthy flow–our first sign of health–we turn away from our own vitality. When we look in the mirror and grimace. When we eat when we aren’t hungry for food, when we deny ourselves a spiritual life, or meaning making. When we fall into despair and existential dread and forget to notice the miracle of our own making, the healthy pump of our heart, the tears we hold back that heal us. We ignore the daily platter of abundance that is our birthright.

The body is a hard place to be because we fart and poop and drool and stumble and stutter and cry and throw up and get blisters and diarrhea and have garlic breath and ripe vaginas and dirty butt cracks and hairy upper lips and stinky armpits. We have hairy moles and awkward teeth and lisps and double joints and hangnails and canker sores and blistering headaches and scars we don't want to explain and tattoos we regret. We are imperfect and evolving. We can only be in the present with what is, which is already enough. Our bodies are hard because we deafen ourselves to their cries and pleas for better food or more sleep or we mistake sex for love. When we scroll in shitty light all day, watching other women starve themselves and brag about it in our feed.

The body does not have to be a hard place. This is an idea the mind made up to quell the storms and raging fires within. The body is place of soft, sacred knowledge. Allow for it. Everything in the body exists for a reason and nothing is for naught, so listen and listen well.

And I am not a place anyway–I am a who, a being, a miracle, a mess up, a jokester, a temptress, a secret keeper, a throaty laugh, and a soul with divine purpose. 

One day I hope scientists will finally wake up and open their eyes and see that inside our cells, in our mitochondria, the inexplicable energy that we operate on is love. I don’t need a randomized controlled trial to know this. 

I am certain this is the truth.

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