*This Conversation is featured in Gossamer [Volume Seven—the Touch issue](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch). Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).
*

I am a queer, non-binary Latinx. I’m also a holistic trauma-informed sex and pleasure educator, activist, dancer, and sensual embodiment facilitator.

Through my offerings, I aim to bridge the gaps in the continuum of pleasure, accessibility, and sexual care so that under represented and marginalized beings can rebuild consensual and affirming relationships with themselves and with others. I mostly work with queer, gender non-conforming people of color. I am currently living on the unceded lands of the Cowlitz and Clackamas people that’s colonially acknowledged as Portland, Oregon.

> I aim to bridge the gaps in the continuum of pleasure, accessibility, and sexual care.

I grew up in Santa Barbara. My dad’s side of the family is Catholic and Mexican. My mom’s side is European. My dad has 11 siblings—a huge, huge family. So when I think about the family I was immersed in, it was really his side. My dad came from parents who were immigrants and a household that was very westernized and diluted as far as culture goes. When they moved to America, it was “We speak English now, we’re not going to speak Spanish in the house.”

![1Q5A9518](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/6jIQAvUOlLRV7L2tY7QgCm/df891ba89c416af559c6e06c6143a442/1Q5A9518.jpg)

It was really interesting to grow up with this disconnected experience of my Mexican culture. I could feel it, but it wasn’t at the forefront. It wasn’t being acknowledged and it wasn’t something that my family was proud of. Also with that side of my family being Catholic, it was scary to know that I was queer really young. I felt like I had to try to wish and pray that part of myself away. I was afraid of being abandoned and isolated from my family if they found out, so I spent a lot of time very much trying to uncouple from that part of me. This rippled into feeling disconnected from a lot of myself and my expression.

I also grew up as a gymnast. I can look back and see the ways that taught me about the power of somatic intelligence and how to express myself through my body. I was probably releasing so much stress and trauma through flipping around. The embodiment, the performance, the integration, the play, and the experiential learning that came from that sport was really important for me, and honestly saved my life. 	

[[1]]

Leaving home to go to college at UC Santa Cruz was a pivotal moment for me. I started to ask, *who am I out of this home? Who am I separate from my family?* I was raised with a lot of addiction in my family, as well as sexual trauma and toxic patterns that were being perpetuated. So, when I left that space, I felt like I was a blank canvas. I was able to see other queer people and have them as mirrors. I started to concentrate more on my training within dance. There was just so much learning in that period of my life. Lots of, *Oh, I am a sexual being* and, *Oh, I am queer* and, *Wow, I really locked this up inside of me somewhere to never look at it again*. What I began to unearth was really powerful.

It was a time when I was beginning to reflect on the amount of sexual trauma, repression, and lack of pleasure that I had experienced. I started tasting it, being like, *wow, I am so hungry for this. I am thirsty. I want to learn. I want to be a student. I want to know my body. I want to understand these parts of myself.* That was the catalyst for me to move toward the work that I’m doing now around pleasure and sex education, and also weaving in the ways that movement can help us tap into those parts of ourselves.

I am really grateful for my college experience and that I was able to explore and experiment with so many different substances, including cannabis. I can really see the way that cannabis was integral for me in that time in opening my mind and body to new possibilities. It was a helpful portal for me, especially since I had spent so much of my life up to that point disassociated and feeling withdrawn or shut down. It brought color to my life; it opened me. It showed me that there’s so much more possible in the way that I live, the way that I inhabit my body, and the way that I use my mind. New synapses were formed. The joy and the laughter and the pleasure that came from being able to access buoyancy and levity was really important, too.

![1Q5A9002](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/5iM7Jo36QymWFg6XSb87eM/cb3aa54af94805c1655b3974ac9249b5/1Q5A9002.jpg)

I smoked a lot from 18 to 25 or so. Cannabis was my substance of choice. Then I started therapy work where I dove deep into childhood wounds and family of origin stuff and navigating my PTSD. I noticed that cannabis started to exacerbate my trauma responses and anxiety. There was definitely grief in that—to have something that was such a resource for me change how it interacted with  my body. Also, being raised within the depths of addiction, I could feel the parts of myself that had a tendency to overuse substances and that I had a really hard time having a healthy relationship with them.

I want to give a disclaimer that I don’t believe that a sober lifestyle is the best choice for everyone. I’m a full supporter of the medicinal power of substances, including cannabis, and the ways that it can bring life changing healing. I am a huge supporter of harm reduction. It’s been a really interesting and nuanced journey for me. Ultimately, I’m five years sober. I can stand here really feeling the ways that sobriety has helped me create a life that I don’t want to run away from and how it’s opened me up to the freedom of having choice and having a consensual relationship with my body and mind. 

[[2]]

Growing up as someone who was queer, who didn’t fit into the gender binary, who didn’t fit into the relationship orientation of monogamy, who didn’t fit into white supremacist culture as a mixed person of color, I became very good at rebelling, and at challenging and questioning what is considered normative. That defiance became a default for me: How can I push boundaries? How can I shatter the limits that I’ve been taught because I already know that I don’t fit into them? That’s been a huge ally in my journey to reclaim pleasure, because I can separate and observe the ways in which capitalism and colonialism—so many -isms—have us unconsciously trapped in these patterns of struggle.

I realized that engaging with my pleasure is activism. It’s a way for me to consciously do the opposite of what the patriarchy would want me to do. There are definitely downsides to that default, and I’ve been examining those tendencies in myself because they can also box me in. So I’m trying to find more fluidity rather than rigidness in my approach.

I’m currently building something called [Sensual Self-Care Academy: 33 Days of Pleasure Practice](https://checheluna.com/sensual-self-care-academy/). It’s a self-guided online course—an invitation to move through a series of experiential prompts. I’m really excited about it. The intention is to be able to cultivate a defined and trusting relationship with pleasure-centered self-care. It looks at the ways that self-care is an ethical issue and how, in a pleasure-oppressed culture, it goes far beyond bubble baths and massages. It’s about developing an integrated understanding of how essential self-preservation is to thriving, and learning how to prioritize care for ourselves. It’s 33 days on purpose, which gives room for new habits to be formed.

> Nature is one way that I have been able to feel and connect with my ancestors.

I am also the creator of [inpleasure](https://che-che-luna.teachable.com/p/inpleasure), a virtual pre-recorded dance workshop for deepening self-intimacy and embodiment. It’s been so much fun to release into the world and hear people’s experiences, and to be able to bring other pleasure guides into that space, whether they’re educators, movers, or activists.

I was working one-on-one with people for three years nonstop. I’m excited to get back to it, but it’s also been really important for me to reinvent the ways that I can make pleasure education more accessible to more people.

I have had integral teachers and mentors in my life. Leslie Johnson was the director of [Flex](https://www.facebook.com/Flex-Dance-Company-355916171085056/), a contemporary dance company in the Bay Area. I was brought into the company not really fully understanding at the time that it was filled with embodied, sexually liberated, queer humans. I remember being like, *I feel so safe here. I feel so seen. I want to expand. I want to build intimacy through movement with these people.* That was a life changing gift for me. I danced with that group for over five years.

[[3]]

I’ve done so much learning within the space created by [Rosalyn Dischiavo](https://instituteforsexuality.com/about/faculty/roz-dischiavo/), the founder of ISEE, the Institute for Sexuality and Enlightenment and Education. [Ev’Yan Whitney](https://www.instagram.com/evyan.whitney/?hl=en), a sexuality doula, mentored me through a lot of my own sexual trauma healing and was a pivotal supporter when I began my own work as a sex educator. [Dr. Bianca Laureano](https://biancalaureano.com/) is one of my current supervisors and colleagues who continues to teach me so much about justice, diversity, and inclusion. She is a pioneer and someone I am incredibly blessed to learn from.

I also want to name my partner [Frankie Simone](https://www.instagram.com/iamfrankiesimone/?hl=en), whom I met while dancing with Flex, and who was this light beam of a person who saw me before I saw myself. We’ve been together nine years. Discovering [adrienne maree brown](https://www.gossamer.co/articles/adrienne-maree-brown) and their work, reading Pleasure Activism, reading *Emergent Strategy*, finding a language for these things that I had been viscerally feeling for so long was massive in my journey. Emily Nagoski and her book *[Come as You Are](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Come-As-You-Are-Revised-and-Updated/Emily-Nagoski/9781982165314)* has been huge for me. And I have to mention Audre Lorde. Reading *[The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50683.Uses_of_the_Erotic)* and being in tears, like, *this is the work my ancestors have been searching for and feeling and seeking.* It felt really intimate. I realized that I am an extension of them and I am here to continue the work that they have started.

Nature is one way that I have been able to feel and connect with my ancestors—the queer Mexican ancestors whom I didn’t get to meet in this lifetime or dimension necessarily, but whom I can very much feel guiding me and cheering me on. It’s really special and sacred to know that they’re here with me.

I was at the [Northwest Magic Conference](https://www.nwmagicconference.com/) in Portland one year—it’s an annual conference that brings together a beautifully diverse group of people who identify in some way as being a bridge between the Earth and other dimensions. I was in a BIPOC meditation with about 50 other people. We were all standing around an altar in the center of the room and the facilitator was guiding us to send our roots down into the deepest layers of the Earth and then extend and reach up into the stars above us. While we were in that experience, the teacher invited us to call forward ancestors who wanted to come in, however they wanted to manifest. I have this vivid memory of being on indigenous land in Sonora, Mexico, where my dad’s lineage is from, and seeing these people who were medicine people, who were queer, and who were inviting me literally into their arms. It was a really profound experience for me to know that there are people within my ancestry who understand me in a way that my family in this lifetime doesn’t.

> The ways in which I share myself and my vulnerability publicly is a very political and intentional act.

People say that I have “big Leo energy” that is unabashed and takes up space and loves to be witnessed and celebrated. The ways in which I share myself and my vulnerability publicly is a very political and intentional act. It’s my way of holding up a mirror for people who haven’t gotten that representation, or haven’t been able to see themselves in specific ways. I’m all for the pleasure of being seen and the yumminess of being celebrated to be celebrated. But it’s also very important to who I am that I’m connected with something bigger, and that this is not limited by vanity.

I’m a very sensitive creature. I feel a bit alien in that way where I have to be really careful about what media I’m taking in. I can’t just sit down and watch reality TV. My people aren’t going to be like, “Hey, do you want to binge watch this show or go watch this movie?” It’ll be like,“Let’s have a limpia ceremony and cleanse our bodies and then soak in water and go on a hike.” I’m that friend who is going to be very intentional about how I spend my time and share my space. That’s no shame to any other ways of doing so.

Audre Lorde talks about referencing our “full body yes.” The yes that makes me feel so alive and expansive and turned on. That’s very much been my compass, like,“Where is my yes? Where is my yes? Where is my yes? Where is pleasure, not pressure?”

That practice almost started as more of a performance. Instagram was actually really instrumental. I was creating aesthetically beautiful moments in my day, whether by adorning myself, making a beautiful meal, or incorporating movement into my lunch break. I started to share those moments of performance and eventually my body started to believe them. It became real. It became integrated, embodied. And so it’s really cool to reflect back and realize that I’ve cultivated this practice over time to actually be the way that I am in my day to day. That’s part of what can be really beautiful about performance. Whether we’re teaching our body something or our body is teaching our mind something, new connections can happen.

[[4]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Che Che Luna](https://www.instagram.com/che.che.luna/) photographed by [Jules Davies](https://www.instagram.com/julesville_/) in Portland. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).
*

Sex educator Che Che Luna on pleasure as activism, learning through dance, and finding their fit.

1Q5A8554

> I was able to see other queer people and have them as mirrors.

![1Q5A8269](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/1XhJwzdjXB0QAEBdYxtxnC/29c5372e195371cea8b15e7d53b09190/1Q5A8269.jpg)

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> I realized that engaging with my pleasure is activism.

![1Q5A8372](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/1CtYRW1GeDiZ8GcgEEftMf/11af9f0acea8a30901f08723d563fae8/1Q5A8372.jpg)

1Q5A9601

![1Q5A8590](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/47wBOfbFCLAUUTRaPAbiRi/a01ec4637b8f75d8daef46c83fbd5ce1/1Q5A8590.jpg)

1Q5A8821

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The sex educator on pleasure as activism, learning through dance, and finding their fit.

Che Che Luna

*This article is featured in Gossamer Volume Seven: the Touch issue. Subscribe [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/annual-magazine-subscription).*

It’s a little known fact that a male octopus’s eighth leg is actually its penis. The very name—derived from the Greek word *októpus*, meaning “eight foot”— has led us down the garden path. I’ve lived my whole life believing an octagon has eight sides, my 83-year-old nanna is an octogenarian, and *an octopus has eight goddamn legs*—it’s basic linguistics.

But now, at the auspicious age of 33, I have to accept that I’ve been suckered. There’s nothing “octo” about the male octopus. They have seven tentacles and a specialized limb for transferring sperm. In other words, the eighth leg is a penis.

To put that in context, the name “octopus” is the species equivalent of referring to a human male as a triped. I simply refuse.

This deceptive appendage, called a hectocotylus, was first recorded by Aristotle around the year 347 BC in one of the earliest surviving scientific studies. The ancient Greek philosopher left Plato’s Academy following his mentor’s death, swapping the city of Athens for the island of Lesbos where he spent two years observing the marine life of a lagoon at the island’s center.

It was here that Aristotle, father of Western logic and apparent octopus voyeur, first surmised the use of the octo- pus’ eighth leg in the mysterious act of cephalopod sex. He was, of course, widely disbelieved. It wasn’t until 1827, some 2000-odd years later, that Aristotle was proven correct.

It’s not hard to see why it took so long for biologists to catch up. The hectocotylus looks and acts like a leg on a regular day. It can bend, it can stretch, it can exert suction. But at the sight of a slinky lady octopus, the hectocotylus can, in some species, stretch to twice its regular size. If we’re talking ratio to body length, it’s a crime against octopus everywhere that we hold the donkey as the gold standard of gonopodia.

But alas, we must collect our minds from the gutter. As one of the most antisocial creatures on earth, size for the octopus is about survival. While sex for humans certainly has its own set of challenges, sex for the octopus comes with a very real threat of cannibalization. 

The fear of being consumed—literally, not metaphor- ically—by the object of its affection is so great that some species of cephalopod have evolved a mating ritual so stealthy that they can avoid touching their partner at all.

The male argonaut octopus, for example, is so averse to physical intimacy that he instead tears off his penis-leg, sperm clenched tightly in his tentacled fist, and gives it to the object of his affection like some kind of macabre Valen- tine’s gift. In other words, an argonaut octopus would rather wrench off its own penis than touch another living creature. Is that not the saddest thing you’ve ever heard?

The more I think about it, the more I wonder—are these octopuses desperately lonely? Studies have long proven they have extraordinary minds, but it appears that evolution has dealt them a cruel hand: intelligence and vulnerability in equal measure.

Have their exposed, fleshy bodies made them so terrified of the world around them that they can’t, even for a fleeting second, indulge in the tender touch of their own kind? Do their suckered limbs and bulbous bodies long to be wrapped in the tentacles of another?

Unfortunately, we may never know the answer. More than two millennia after Aristotle’s observations in the lagoons of Lesbos, we still have so much to learn about this wildly intelligent, yet fiercely private creature.

For now, I choose an alternative narrative. One where octopuses are the ultimate romantics, sacrificing life, limb, and loneliness in the quest for love and lineage. In my 33 years of dating, I’ve yet to receive a Valentine's gift as memorable.

It’s a little known fact that a male octopus’s eighth leg, or tentacle, is actually its penis. 

V7 High Minded: Tentacles 2

High Minded: Tentacles

*This Conversation is featured in [Gossamer Volume Seven](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch)—the Touch issue— which starts shipping November 11. Pre-order your copy [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch).
*

One time when I was in high school, I heard someone pose the question, “If somebody shook you awake in the middle of the night and asked, ‘What are you?’ what would you say?” And I would probably say I’m a writer. That’s pretty all encompassing for me. I do other things. I do art. I’m a person, but at the end of the day, I’m a writer.

I went to a pretty rough high school. It had metal detectors. It had gang fights. It didn’t have enough textbooks. It didn’t have enough desks. The ceilings were falling apart. But it had a weirdly robust English department, of which my mom was a part. She was my freshman English teacher, actually. But we also had this teacher whom we called “Doc” because he had a PhD and that was extremely novel for us. Like, who has a PhD? That’s crazy.

![ryanduffin gossamer jp 0043](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/2g5OWYZnkV4RM5D481frO3/0679f7f372f02c54f497fe06a729828d/ryanduffin_gossamer_jp_0043.jpg)

If you were one of his favorite students, he would enter you into local, statewide, or national essay contests—or poetry or speech contests. And I started winning a lot of those. I saw it as, *Oh, writing is a way for me to maybe get out of Oklahoma and maybe make some money. This is where my knack is. I should lean into it.*

The first time my writing took me out of Oklahoma, I won an essay contest where the prize was a flight with a parent to Washington, D.C. They really pulled out all the stops. They put you in a hotel, they take you to all the monuments, they get you food, et cetera. I took my dad. It was crazy as a sophomore to be able to provide a flight for your father, especially for someone like me who lived in a really small town in a flyover state. That was my first taste of the idea that words can pick you up and take you somewhere else. I got addicted to that feeling and I chased it the rest of my life. It was all just writing that got me from Oklahoma to the “big city.”

>I was in a place where if you expressed anything feminine and you weren’t a girl, it was very much taboo.

I think there is a time in your life when you are extremely impressionable, and when a tone gets set for a lot of things. For me, middle school was very much that time in my life. It’s a time when I think that, as an animal, your brain starts configuring things like: how do we behave? How do we survive? How do we deal with other people? How do we move through the world? What is smart? What is unwise? 

I was in a place where if you expressed anything feminine and you weren’t a girl, it was very much taboo. I remember the sort of policing that took place about what you could and couldn’t wear, what you could and couldn’t say—literally the moves you made with your body. Things were highly surveilled, and they were cracked down on. This is something that I definitely carry with me today. I’m hyper aware of things in my environment. 
I’m always sort of looking for things to edit, because I know how sensitive people can be when they are looking for something to pounce on.

I think that I am a very highly tuned machine when it comes to emotions, expression, and language. Hypersensitivity has its drawbacks, but it also has its strengths. When I think about what I went through in middle school, which I would classify as abuse, I learned quite a few lessons, which is one of the few silver linings that life gives us.

[[1]]

For college I went to a state school, the University of Oklahoma, which was kind of a mistake. I can’t pick out a whole lot of defining memories from that time. I was just going with the flow, going to my classes, doing what I needed to do because in my family—my Mexican family—college wasn’t even a question. It was seen as utterly paramount.

After I graduated, I immediately went to work on getting out of there. I had recently come out, and I recognized that it’s not that gay people don’t exist in Oklahoma or in rural environments, it’s just that mine is an appetite that is very much geared towards a need for an abundance of things. I need a lot of options. I need more and more and more. So that meant I had to move to a big city. And not a big city in Oklahoma, but somewhere else.	

I desperately started throwing myself at any writing opportunities that came up. I took a lot of odd jobs. I was tutoring. I was living at home with my parents. I had a good job at a bookstore in Oklahoma City. But all the while, I was just like, *How do I get out of here?*

![ryanduffin gossamer jp 0052](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/64eb4mZhWY8y3XCpwWU1RS/652d3342634fb92c3ba0ddd02a8c43b8/ryanduffin_gossamer_jp_0052.jpg)

I wrote a few unpaid articles for the Huffington Post, for their Latino and gay verticals. This happened to catch the attention of a startup in D.C., where I was able to get my first job. It was a really toxic, terrible mess, but it was my first taste of being in a place that wasn’t Oklahoma.

City life has this anonymizing energy to it where you’re constantly in this humming, buzzing thrum of people. You’re going from one place to another in a train, there are people all around you, you don’t know who they are, you don’t know their stories. You don’t know if they’re just passing through. It was my first time feeling truly anonymous. I was just a body among many bodies. And I really enjoyed it.

As a writer, it’s appealing because I like to be able to be invisible for a little bit, to just see things happen and watch people go about their days. And, of course, I was right about the options. I could try all these different foods, I could meet all these different people, I could get on dating apps and it wasn’t the same grid every single day like it was in Oklahoma. It was overwhelming.

> To make up for the fact that I obviously had no qualifications to give anyone advice, I thought, *What if I make it a parody of other advice columns?*

My column came about at a time when I was in the freelancer’s mode of doing absolutely everything. I was reporting for NBC Out, and writing Teen Vogue articles on the train into work. I was trying to make ends meet so that I wouldn’t have to move back to Oklahoma. 	

My friend Mathew Rodriguez was an editor at INTO, which was Grindr’s new media outlet at the time. They were doing the whole *Playboy* thing of, “I’m just here for the articles.” Mathew asked if I wanted to pitch a column and I was like, “Yes, of course, I do.” I needed as many checks as possible.	   

I knew that I was overworked. I didn’t have a lot of time. And that’s how I fell into the advice column format, because I felt like I didn’t have the time to think of a new thing every single week to write about. I needed a prompt.

To make up for the fact that I obviously had no qualifications to give anyone advice, I thought, *What if I make it a parody of other advice columns?* It can be a satire and the joke can be what if “Dear Abby” was a gay Mexican man on Grindr? I can make my little joke-y jokes and I don’t have to actually give anyone advice.

[[2]]

Then I started receiving the letters. First of all, I received a flood of them, which didn’t expect. I think the column hit a niche that maybe hadn’t been hit before, because a lot of people on Grindr who are gay or queer or something already tend to feel alienated from a lot of people in their lives. They have a lot of struggles. They have a lot of obstacles. They have a lot of feelings. Also, if you’re on Grindr in the first place, you’re probably looking for some kind of connection. The advice column was perfect for that environment.

A lot of the messages and the letters I was getting were very heavy and emotional. I struggled to make it funny because I was like, *I can’t just make fun of this person who lives in a country where homosexuality is punishable by law and they’re wondering if it’s safe for them to confess to their crush that they’re into them. This is not how this is going to work.* So “[¡Hola Papi!](https://holapapi.substack.com/)” came from me realizing I could make it funny, but heartfelt, too. I wanted to offer that meaningful connection that people were looking for, something a little bit more personal and a little bit more emotional than just cracking jokes.

> If you’re on Grindr in the first place, you’re probably looking for some kind of connection.

I didn’t realize this then, but it turns out “¡Hola Papi!” as a brand is very sticky. The reason it’s called “¡Hola Papi!” is because I’m Latino, and something I always get on Grindr is “HolaPapi” from guys who aren’t Latino. It’s a fetishistic term that I thought would be really fun to turn on its head a little bit. But it’s also a very brandable one. It works on a shirt—who doesn’t want “¡Hola Papi!” on their shirt?

My voice was important, but I also think it was an unwittingly savvy business move to name it that. I started getting recognized, which was new to me. I’ve been an anonymous person my whole life. Suddenly I had people messaging me on Grindr, like, “I love your writing.” I had people who I just met out and about saying, “Oh my god, you write that column, blah, blah, blah.” That happens more and more and it’s still wild. It’s still something I haven’t wrapped my head around. On Twitter and Instagram, it’s been a very slow burn. I’ve had time to adjust to the idea that there are a lot of people just looking at me.

[[3]]

I’m at quite a crossroads with my work right now because the book feels like the ultimate expression of what the brand could be. It’s not a bunch of my columns stapled together. It’s a new thing. It really represents the final union between ¡Hola Papi! the character and me as a person. And for it to have been received the way it has been feels really validating.

One thing they really don’t tell you about making a big project and having it out there is that it’s often followed by this really big wave of depression. I’ve dealt with clinical depression most of my life, but this is a different thing. It really puts you in an existential place afterwards. What am I doing now? What is the purpose of my life? For me, someone who’s always bent the narrative arc of my entire life towards being an author one day, to then have that, it’s like, oh my god.

I’m trying to take on projects that are a little bit easier, a little bit more completable. I’m just trying to get things done. I‘m doing a kid’s book right now. I’m working on some screenplays. I’m really excited and looking forward to an era of my life where I’m not just grinding all the time.

![ryanduffin gossamer jp 0005](//images.contentful.com/qal3w7tbm3rt/3J2oVmQPBv2kVjtFvwQDdM/df3afff55cfe7bf9fdc38aafbfd07975/ryanduffin_gossamer_jp_0005.jpg)

I’m getting back into weed now. When I was in college, it was all I did. What’s weird about rural Oklahoma culture, the one I experienced anyway, is that weed is very prevalent and it’s very prominent. I was smoking weed before I ever took my first drink. It felt way more accessible.

For some reason or another, a lot of my strongest memories are of me with my best friend from high school driving in his car. In the rural area where we were, there’s the little town, of course, but then there’s truly the wilderness. We would drive down these back country roads, very gravelly, and park off to the side at night, turn the caroff, and just hotbox. That was every night for us, basically. Then we would go to Taco Bell or Whataburger or whatever was open at 2 AM, and just gorge ourselves.

Oklahoma’s a really weird state because cannabis used to be heavily penalized. People could get in a lot of trouble. But now if you go through Oklahoma, there are dispensaries everywhere. My hometown is basically one giant dispensary now. It’s always been such a big part of the culture there, and once it was sanctioned, it was like, okay, fine, you can do this. They just turned that whole place into a bunch of little CBD stores. It’s been really interesting to watch.

> My hometown is basically one giant dispensary now.

Eventually my anxiety took over. I became a pretty paranoid person in general. I remember one time I got high when I was living in D.C. I was like, *Oh, I can see rainbow waves. I think they’re coming from the government.* And then I thought, *okay, I should stop.*

I think a lot of my paranoia and anxiety came from the fact that it was so heavily policed in general. It adds a lot of psychodrama to your brain before you do it. But now that it’s become this mainstream, sort of chill thing, more of my friends are doing it, and I’m excited to dip back in.

I do little CBD treats here and there because I find that it eases my anxiety. I haven’t smoked in a while, but I want to. Again, because I enjoyed it. 

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Substances hit me very hard. Alcohol is the same way. I want to feel a little something, but not a whole lot. And weed scientists are so serious. They are coming up with technologies for getting you high out of your mind that I never would have expected to see in my lifetime. Some of the best and brightest are on the case.

I’ve never done acid or anything, but I can always tell when someone has, because we have this immediate kinship. It does something to someone’s brain that is very analogous to mine. We can talk for a long time about things that are really out there, like psychedelic, cosmic type stuff. I think I just naturally exist there, but some people have to have that induced.

I’m also interested in mushrooms. I came so close to trying them last summer. My friends and I were on a little cabin trip. One friend took some and was not having a great time. He was like, “The ground is breathing.” And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to maybe not.” The problem is that I feel like my brain is so wired to be psychedelic in the first place, what if I take them and I just lose my mind? Real recognizes real. When someone’s insane, I feel kindred.

[[4]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [John Paul Brammer](https://www.instagram.com/jpbrammer/?hl=en) photographed by [Ryan Duffin](https://www.instagram.com/ryanduffin/?hl=en) in Brooklyn. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

John Paul Brammer on advice columns, the need for options, and (maybe) seeing rainbow waves.

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> Hypersensitivity has its drawbacks, but it also has its strengths.

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The writer on advice columns, the need for options, and (maybe) seeing rainbow waves.

John Paul Brammer

*This Conversation is featured in Gossamer Volume Seven: the Touch issue, which you can pre-order [here](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-seven-touch).*

Officially, I am a psychotherapist, primarily a systemic couples and family therapist. I’m also an author, a speaker, and a podcaster.

But if I go to a second level, I would say I am a connector. I’m a relationship philosopher, or some people refer to me as such, and I’m deeply interested in the intersection between culture and mental health. I’m a traveler. I am voraciously curious. And I think that one of the pieces that really defines me is that I’m multilingual. The fact that I speak nine languages facilitates my curiosity, and my traveler spirit.

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We spoke five languages at home: French, Flemish, Yiddish, German, and Polish. Belgium in itself is a country with three national languages. We traveled for eight years to Italy every summer, so Italian was added, and we had family in Germany who would come and stay and visit. Nobody made a fuss of it. People just spoke the language in front of you and assumed you would pick it up. Even though he was basically illiterate, my own father spoke five languages. He could read the newspaper in every one of these languages, but he couldn’t write.

I added English later on in school, and then Spanish, because I got very interested in Spanish literature and political events of the ’70s and the music of South America. I arrived in Jerusalem in 1976 with students from Argentina and Uruguay who were fleeing military regimes. I lived with them and I started speaking Spanish by practicing with friends, and then I got into Brazil-ian music and that made me interested in Portuguese. That’s how one becomes multilingual: It’s travel, it’s family, and it’s personal interests.

> Like other people see the stars and they recognize a constellation, I could understand human constellations very quickly.

You can learn a language in school, but that doesn’t mean you can speak it. To live in it, to play in it as a child, to speak it, you need human interaction. There are too many people who have spent 10 years learning French in school and they still can barely have a conversation. I did two years of Spanish in school and I studied six years of Latin, which gave me the basis for the romance languages. But the actual experience of speaking comes from interaction with other people or with text or with music or with lyrics, not from sitting in the classroom.

I knew I was interested in psychology starting around age 13 or 14. First, because I hated my education system, I was interested in all the writers who wrote about alternative education. I read Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing and Bruno Bettelheim, before he was canceled. Then I got interested in Freud. I started reading about the psyche, the inner life. Why was I interested in psychology? Because I wanted to understand my own inner rumblings. I knew I had a good knack for understanding relationships. People would come to talk to me as a teenager. My friends would confide in me. I saw things. Like other people see the stars and they recognize a constellation, I could understand human constellations very quickly.

[[1]]

I also wanted to understand my family’s history, my community’s history, and things like that. So, studying psychology was an obvious thing. But, in my time, you didn’t necessarily study something because it’s what you wanted “to do.” You studied something because you were interested in it.

I was interested in the juncture between culture and mental health, the culture of psychology and relationships. Because I’m a child of immigrants, because I’m a child of refugees, because I’m a child of parents who survived the Holocaust and who lost their entire families, and because I was part of a community of people who had experienced that massive collective trauma, I was interested in cultural transition as it pertains to refugees and as it pertains to mixed marriages.

For the first 20 years, I really focused on cultural transition in terms of the expectations of modern love, particularly in mixed couples, interracial, intercultural, and interreligious families. Basically, what is romance? What is coupledom? What is marriage about at this point and how is it changing across history and cultures? That was what I wrote about, what I lectured about, and what I focused on—a little bit because I had the languages.

> Couples therapy has become more important as the survival of the family hinges on the happiness of the couple.

When I came to New York, I had no papers, no license, nothing. The only thing I had that others had less was languages. So I figured I’d create a practice where people came for the one thing I could offer. That’s really how this became my focus. At one point I was doing 60 workshops a year at the 92nd Street Y alone, working with mixed couples. I became a so-called expert on that subject. On how people negotiate their traditional cultures, values, mandates, and loyalties with the modern ideology of love, the freechoice enterprise.

Couples therapy has become more important as the survival of the family hinges on the happiness of the couple. At first it was kind of the stepchild of family therapy. People come in with their child, and then you realize that the child is bearing symptoms that are actually the expressions of tensions in the couple. People didn’t go to therapy for couples, per se. They went to communicate a little bit better. But couples therapy becomes fundamentally more central when the meaning of the couple becomes more central. And the meaning of the couple becomes more central when people could divorce. People can divorce, so now the quality of the relationship in the couple is basically the only thing that keeps you in the marriage. It’s not the fear of being excommunicated, it’s not even the children. I mean, the children are a major part of why people stay, but basically the quality of the relationship is what will determine if the marriage will continue or not.

Now it isn’t just about companionship or economic support or family life or social status, but about intimacy and sexual satisfaction and marital happiness and all those things. That’s what makes couples therapy a practice that is really at the core, at the center of the field, in terms of relationships.

[[2]]

In the ’70s, divorce became much more common. So, shall I stay or shall I go? What do you do with blended families? What do you do with step-parenting? What do you do with going back out and being single again? These all are new themes that arrive. Fifteen years later, suddenly people start to come in to talk about non-exclusivity, about non-monogamy. That’s a subject that did not exist in my practice 40 years ago. Women wanting to have an intimate sexual relationship that is based on desire and not on duty. Men who want a woman to want and not just to placate them and say, “Yes, I’ll do whatever you want.” Same-sex couples who can finally marry and have children and be official about it and talk about their intimate struggles.

I think the field changes constantly, as society evolves and as the expectations of our relationships evolve. As the boundaries around relationships change, so do the things that people bring to couples therapy. The recognition and the effect of trauma on intimacy and sexuality, and the permission to talk about sexual abuse and sexual trauma and how it affects the intimate life of the couples today, these were silent topics before.

If you look at friendship, it’s not a relationship that has fundamentally changed in the last 20 years. Same with siblings, parents, children. I think if there’s one relationship that’s had an extreme makeover, it is the couple and everything that goes with the expectations around marriage. We went from a production model of marriage—having children and having them be an asset—to a service model of belonging and intimacy, to now wanting an identity model of “you’re going to help me become the best version of myself.” That is an intense demand from one person.

[[3]]

I’ve often talked about how we really ask one person to give us what an entire community should provide. I think this creates a level of expectation and weight on the couple that often will crumble it. For so long in our social life, many of the big decisions were made for us. Through religion, through hierarchy, through your parents. You didn’t choose who you want, who you’re with, what you’re going to do. And if you chose, you chose between two people in the village, and then you chose between 20 people in your school. Now you’re choosing between a thousand people on an app. So I think one of the biggest shifts is the burdens of the self.

We have way more freedom to decide if we like, if we don’t like, if we want to stay, if we want to go, if we like this one, if we want that one, but we are crippled with self-doubt and uncertainty.“ How do I know?” This is the question that every young person asks me. “How do I know?” We want this certainty, this 100%, this “I’m sure this is the one.” And the one among a thousand people is a really tough thing to know. At the moment when you have the most freedom, people are craving certainty. People have strong ideas about marriage, about what is okay, what is not okay, so I think that’s one of the things that we’re seeing today as a consequence of all the changes and the freedoms and the free choice that people have: it actually puts a lot of people in distress. Major distress, relational distress.

> Love and desire: they relate and they also conflict, and therein lies the mystery of eroticism.

I never thought I was going to become interested in sexuality as a professional subject. It was a pure accident. But it made a lot of sense because sexuality is a portal topic: once you enter the realm of human sexuality, it opens you to multiple other fields. It’s a topic that makes you think and read about religion, theology, culture, anthropology, sociology, and the body. I am very drawn to that. Sexuality is the way that you can look at a society where it is most entrenched, rooted, and archaic, and it’s a place where you can look at a society where it’s most progressive, changing, and radical. It’s all happening around sexuality.

There was a cultural perspective to what I was talking about. I really looked at the dilemmas of desire inside modern love, and why what is emotionally needed is not necessarily what is sexually exciting. Love and desire: they relate and they also conflict, and therein lies the mystery of eroticism. 	

I wasn’t new—there were people who were trying to integrate couples therapy and sex therapy. But I was putting words to something that many people were feeling. The generation of Boomers that had premarital sex as a given, contraception in hand, the permission to do what they want, and they didn’t feel like doing it, at least not at home. Couples who struggled with the sustainability of desire in the midst of actually good marriages. People had written about relationship problems leading to sexual problems, but I was talking about people who would come in and say, “We love each other very much. We have no sex.” And they wouldn’t know why. That dilemma, that paradox is what I began to explore.

[[4]]

After *[Mating In Captivity](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/mating-in-captivity-esther-perel?variant=32122437468194)* came out, I was interested in the dilemmas of desire on the outside, not just on the inside. What happens when desire goes looking elsewhere? Infidelity has existed since marriage was invented and there needs to be a better way to deal with it than the way we do. A way that embraces the complexity of this whole thing. Eighty percent of my audience have been affected by infidelity, be it the child of an unfaithful parent or the offspring of an illicit affair, the third in a triangle, the person who has the affair, or the person who is betrayed. That’s a lot of people, and it’s systemic and it’s intergenerational. It’s not just a few bad apples. I was asked to do a TED Talk about that, and it was a really tricky thing. I wanted to make everyone in the drama feel recognized and understood. Nobody had ever given aTED Talk on the subject of infidelity and made it, in a way, about ideas worth spreading, not just about lifestyle or gossip.

It was at that moment that I decided that I was no longer going to just talk to therapists or doctors. Instead, I am going to open up the walls and the door of my office. Therapy cannot just be the people in my room. I want to democratize it. So many people lie about their relationships and lie about their couple, especially with social media, and everybody’s hungry for truth and authenticity, but you don’t know where to find it. I want to change that. I never thought there was a way to “scale” this. But then came my podcast.

> Games offer you a wonderful balance between structure and spontaneity.

*[Where Should We Begin?](https://whereshouldwebegin.estherperel.com/)* is a first. Nobody’s ever recorded live couples therapy sessions for this purpose before. The experience of listening in on other people’s couples sessions when you are not a therapist is a first. And because they’re not my patients and they will never be my patients, I can actually, for the first time, talk about my work outside of clinical settings. Millions of people are listening to it worldwide and they feel that they have a therapist in their ear. It’s a continuation: I’m continuously thinking about how I help people reflect, act, and develop more confidence in their relationships. It’s the same with my game.

Games offer you a wonderful balance between structure and spontaneity. In my office, I often play with a ball with couples. I throw you the ball with a question, now you have to answer while you hold the ball, but you get to throw the ball back with a question, right? I do it in my group workshops, as well. The ball instantly becomes the mediator of the question, and if you don’t have an answer, then you just say, “Can I throw the ball back?” Rather than say,“I don’t know what to say.”

[[5]]

I have always used play in therapy. I have been a puppeteer. I use puppets in my practice, I use psychodrama in my practice. I use the body in my practice. So I am multilingual in that way in my practice as well. When play is safe, it allows you to take risks.

During the pandemic, I missed my dinner parties where we have conversations around topics and you really remember the stories people tell. I missed the intimacy, the playfulness, the curiosity. I missed new people. Everything was predictable, controlled, and constricted. I wanted to create something that’s going to make people engage with all the things I miss. So I decided I wanted to make a game called *[Where Should We Begin?](https://www.estherperel.com/where-should-we-begin-the-game)*

I found this wonderful designer, Steve Tam, and we embarked on this project together. It unlocks the storyteller within. We bond through stories; human beings have sat around the fire telling stories forever. We remember people through their stories and we reveal ourselves through our stories. But it also has game mechanics. I wanted a real game where people are playing with each other.

Patients learn from me, but I learn a lot from patients. Patients bring the world into the office. The new practices, the new substances, the new explorations, the new conversations, they come into the office through the patients.

> CBD, cannabis, ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin—all of them have a tremendous amount of cultural currency at this moment.

Had I been in training today, I probably would be much more knowledgeable about plants and substances. There’s a long history all over the world of using them for religious ceremonies, for psychological healing, for relating to the spirits—either to invite them in or to chase them away. We have always used mind-altering or heart-opening substances. Then we entered the world in which we went to psychotropic medications, a world that is more in the hands of pharma.

I think that all medications, especially psychotropic medications, that are meant to deal with our states of minds and our states of being often need to be examined in terms of the relationship and the cultural meaning of that very substance in the society, and to the person. The person who takes CBD to sleep may think differently than a person who takes Ativan. One says, “I’m sick. I have a problem.” The other one says, “I’m doing something to ease my pain or my restlessness.” It’s a different dialogue in one’s head.

We are in a fascinating moment where there is an active dialogue—sometimes a debate, sometimes a standoff—between traditional Western psychotropics and all the other plants that are now being brought back, mainstreamed, and redeemed rather than seen as deviant, dangerous, destructive, and countercultural. CBD, cannabis, ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin—all of them have a tremendous amount of cultural currency at this moment and I think that how we integrate these substances into our lives and our relationships is one of the most interesting things happening in my field.

[[6]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Esther Perel](https://www.instagram.com/estherperelofficial/) photographed by [Ryan Duffin](https://www.instagram.com/ryanduffin/) in New York. Paintings by [Jack Saul](https://jacksaulart.com/). If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).*

Therapist Esther Perel on the importance of language, the efficacy of play, and the role of plant medicine in relationships.

Esther HEro

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> At the moment when you have the most freedom, people are craving certainty.

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The famed psychotherapist on the importance of language, the efficacy of play, and the role of plant medicine in relationships.

Esther Perel

I am of the opinion that New Yorkers are born, and not necessarily in New York. You’re born a New Yorker and eventually, if you’re lucky, you get there. I was born in Philadelphia, grew up in Michigan and North Carolina, but moved to New York City to go to college. 

I have a lot of country in me. I always enjoyed the outdoors. I went to Montessori school and was a tomboy. When I lived in New York, I always took weekends to be in the country and embrace open air and grass, livestock and running around in muddy boots. These things were in stark contrast to my time in the city, where I was militant about being in very, very high heeled shoes. You always wear the good shoes, and you wear them all day.

I had a very unlikely education for any of the things that I'm doing. I had a fascination and an aptitude for art, much to the disappointment of my father. I ran off to the big city and put myself through art school because I thought I could do it. So I did.

[[1]]

I went to Parsons. Then I went to School of Visual Arts, which has a big old spot in my heart. I ended up teaching there for 10 years after I graduated. I did a big traditional stint in large creative jobs in advertising for quite some time. I worked at Sony Music, MTV, and Saatchi & Saatchi. 

I founded MODCo in 1998, which stood for My Own Damn Company. In my hubris and youth, *I was like, I can do better than these amazingly talented, amazingly successful, multi-billion dollar companies.* I wanted to be able to control all of the strategic and creative consumer-facing points of a brand under one house so that we could speak in a consistent voice. We did really great work, and were responsible for creating work for some of the most lasting brands still in existence today, like Tory Burch, Vera Wang, COTY, Carolina Herrera, and Lane Bryant. I loved every minute of it.

I bought the farm before we got married, but my husband and I moved here fulltime in 2014. The farm was purchased as a weekend home, a place to get away from the city and be with our horses and our dogs. It wasn't supposed to be anything more than that. But as they say, if you want to make god laugh, make plans.

> I had often been diagnosed as an ambitious woman, and told by many talented doctors, “Don't worry about it, honey, just go take a vacation.” I knew that wasn't the problem.

Within about three weeks of moving to the farm, I was in the hospital in full-blown renal failure from severe Crohn's disease that had gone misdiagnosed for 10 years. I had often been diagnosed as an ambitious woman, and told by many talented doctors, “Don't worry about it, honey, just go take a vacation.” I knew that wasn't the problem. I certainly was working hard, but I loved working hard. I loved the job, I loved flying around the world. I loved the people that worked for me. I loved pitches, I loved winning, and I loved the lessons that losing taught me. I did not have an ounce of, “I don't want to be doing this” in me, so I couldn't understand why doctors kept telling me I was just too stressed out.

After a week and a half in the hospital on a lot of morphine and a lot of tests, the conclusion was, “Okay, you have severe Crohn's disease, you have eight 22-inch ulcers in your lower intestine, and you haven't really properly digested food in two years, which is why your body's going into renal failure.” That was the start of a very long odyssey of healing.

The thing is, they don't have a cure for Crohn's disease. Everything that they gave me made me sicker. Treatment was expensive, it caused my hair to fall out, my skin to get brittle, and put me in a crippling depression. In the end, it put me in liver failure.

[[2]]

I was always in debilitating pain. I didn't want to take the morphine because it made me comatose. So the options are debilitating pain or debilitating coma. How is this life? After I tried everything my doctor said “Sara, we have nothing more to help you. You have an incurable debilitating disease that will drastically reduce the quality of your life. We have nothing more to do for you.”

That was a Tuesday. I remember it so clearly. I was in Beverly Hills, and it was a gorgeous day, 72 and sunny. I walked out into the street and sat on the pavement like a child and cried in front of god and creation and everybody. I felt suicidal for the first time in my life. I did not care. I was in so much pain. I had just been told, “This is now your new life. You cannot work. You cannot eat. You cannot even drink water without being doubled over in pain. There's nothing we can do.”

Not everybody has that pinpoint moment in time you can look at and say *that's the day*. But that was the day.

> I like to say we healed the farm and the farm healed me. It was very symbiotic.

Our farm had been poorly treated by the previous owners. There was so much herbicide in the soil, we couldn't get a blade of grass to grow. I like to say we healed the farm and the farm healed me. It was very symbiotic.  Thank god my husband came from a farming family and background. He was also local and knew quite a lot.

Growing our own food was helping to some degree, but certainly wasn't taking away my pain or my inflammation. I had reduced it, but I was still too sick to work. On the day that I sat on my ass like a child in the middle of Beverly Hills, I called my husband and just said, “Look, I think I need to die. I can't do this.” He said that was unacceptable, and that he really wanted me to try cannabis, that we needed to add that to our repertoire. 

I'm very embarrassed to say I was never a cannabis person. I was a highly caffeinated, highly functioning New Yorker. I had no interest in anything that might slow me down. Get me more espresso. Don't give me anything that makes me sleepy. I just had never looked into it. I didn't even know that anything other than smoking existed. I was very ignorant.

[[3]]

But after that day, I was willing to try anything. We immediately got our cards. California was still only a medical market at that point. We went to this doctor in Venice who was literally wearing clown shoes and striped velour pants and got our prescriptions. My husband, God bless him, tested everything we could find at these dispensaries and tried it all first before I did.

We found some extremely potent concentrate, which basically looks like a syringe of ear wax and tastes similar. It's disgusting, but I will say that cannabis medicines, when correctly labeled and thoughtfully produced, did work. I remember feeling relief from a high CBD, low THC concentrate. It's not a light switch. A lot of people I speak to now are like, “When am I going to feel better?” It's going to take weeks. You have to keep doing it.

The problem back then was that you'd just get a handwritten label for whatever the farmer says is in that vial. There was no testing. There was no proof. Sometimes it was exactly what it was supposed to be. Most of the time it wasn't. I got arsenic poisoning from one batch. Another time I had taken my whole vial of that concentrate to fly back for a big meeting in NYC while I was still trying to work. The oil was supposed to be high CBD, no THC. My Crohn's disease is very exacerbated by flying. I’d forced myself to get to this meeting, and I’m in the cab with my shitty deli coffee. All of a sudden, the shitty deli coffee is like the best fucking coffee I ever my life. And I was like, *hold the phone, that's not right. This isn't good coffee. I know it's not. Oh my God, I’m high.* I couldn’t even read my driver's license to tell the fucking cab driver where I lived. I didn’t make it into the meeting. I was high for like three days.

It was so awful. I mean the arsenic poisoning was bad, but this was worse. So my husband and I decided, “Hey, we're already growing all of our own food, and we know that this medicine works. Why don't we just grow our own medicine? We live in California where we can start a collective and do it legally. And you know, how hard could it be?”

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> Illness strips you of all the tools you thought you had and forces you to learn your weaknesses and your strengths.

It's really, really hard. In 2015, we founded our collective. And that was the beginning of the farm that we have now, which is a 22-acre cultivation. We are considered the gold standard, not only in Santa Barbara, but around the state, for outdoor cultivation. I'm very proud of that. We work so hard on our compliance, community activism, our local and state-wide legislation, and advocacy. That's become such a major part of my everyday life now that it's hard to imagine a time when that wasn't the case.

Illness strips you of all the tools you thought you had and forces you to learn your weaknesses and your strengths. There were a lot of messy versions of myself that I was very displeased to meet. I was not always elegant, I was not always composed, and I was not always generous. I was grateful to have the sincere love of a few people who stood by me, and I was fortunate to learn that there were a great many that wouldn't, and would be worth dismissing. Your Rolodex gets very small when you get that sick, disappointingly so. But the people that remain are fucking fantastic.

[[4]]

I'm very grateful to say I'm finally well enough to get back to riding horses. Riding saves my life. I'm not at the level I used to be, but I finally got my ass back in the saddle. One of my favorite expressions that's translated from Arabic is “Horses lend us their freedom.” I will borrow a little bit of freedom from those lovely creatures every day I can. That's something that we could all use a bit more of.

Life on the farm is busy, and I love it. I'm in my element. First of all, being outside in the California sun is about the most healing thing you could possibly have. We start around 5:30 am. Usually my husband and I have a coffee together and we sit out back and look at our fields. We're always in observation mode. Even if I'm having my morning coffee or glass of wine at the end of the evening, we're always looking at our plants. Tiffany Garcia of Glasshouse Farms, a very talented grower, taught us early on in our cannabis careers that being a good cannabis grower or farmer is 90% observation. And I think that was something that translated really well for me from my career as a branding expert, which is all about observation and then applying it.

[[5]]

What we've learned in farming is that by the time you see a problem, you're kind of fucked. It's already run away from you. Learning how the plants are behaving and how happy or unhappy they are has been an important adaptation of my skill in observation.

[Wellfounded](https://wellfounded.com/our-products/) grew out of the therapies that we couldn't find. It’s about what things helped me get well and remain healthy with an aesthetic that is refined and pleasurable. To be able to create a brand that is as good as anything I've ever created for anyone else, but that meets all of my requirements for putting out products that really help people be well, feel good, feel recovery, feel pampered, feel loved—that’s the culmination of my passion points across my whole career.

We want people to feel the love that exists on this farm and have a little piece of that for themselves. [Our fragrance is such an amazing sensory experience.](https://wellfounded.scentbeauty.com/products/well-founded-large) It was born out of standing in the middle of our fields. We have beautiful sea salt air, eucalyptus, coastal sage, and white oak, and all of the herb from our 22 acres, and rosemary, and basil. If you close your eyes, you should be able to feel like you're here. We’re making a THC version, too.

> The family farm is not just a dying breed in cannabis, but in the United States writ large.

A thing that's top of mind for all of us in the cannabis industry is just how goddamn hard it is to be an independent farmer in this state. It is not simple, and I want to give other people both the reality and the hope that it is possible to do it. When my husband and I started this farm, I was unemployed. We were able to cobble this together without big investment or big backing. And I would love for more farmers to be able to do that. I think if I didn't have my relentless optimism, we would've curled up and died along with my body a long time ago.

That fight is something that shouldn't be so hard for people. I wish we could spend more time figuring out a way to make it possible for people to have a family farm that sustains and heals their community, because I think we're turning into a damned near extinct beast. The family farm is not just a dying breed in cannabis, but in the United States writ large. And that makes me sad. We're working very hard on our advocacy to try to prevent that from happening. That is a tragedy that I'd like to see solved.

[[6]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Sara Rotman](https://www.instagram.com/bossladycooks/?hl=en) of [Wellfounded Botanicals](https://www.instagram.com/wellfoundedbotanicals/?hl=en) photographed by [Maggie Shannon](https://www.instagram.com/maggiehshannon/?hl=en) in Santa Barbara. If you like this Conversation, please feel free to share it with friends or enemies. Subscribe to our newsletter [here](https://www.gossamer.co/subscribe).
*

Sara Rotman, the founder of Wellfounded Botanicals on cannabis fragrances, fighting Crohn's disease, and why the family farm is a dying breed.

MS SaraRotman 207

> The farm was purchased as a weekend home... It wasn't supposed to be anything more than that. But as they say, if you want to make god laugh, make plans.

![MS SaraRotman 170](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/29Z2Sm4WBpsz5cL0TuvqiT/635dfe33a5506acf39e5fa851d145894/MS_SaraRotman_170.jpg)

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MS SaraRotman 37

> Cannabis medicines, when correctly labeled and thoughtfully produced, did work.

![MS SaraRotman 111](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6iTezIvtnmkQy14wuY56Xt/e56fe80a485b6bb3d0af30ced3d7e479/MS_SaraRotman_111.jpg)

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![MS SaraRotman 95](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/OtsxA0CrhZUlRPUfFYsw5/38d7bb121ccfbf878c5ffada33addb40/MS_SaraRotman_95.jpg)

MS SaraRotman 101

MS SaraRotman 93

The founder of [Wellfounded Botanicals](https://wellfounded.com/) on cannabis fragrances, fighting Crohn's disease, and why the family farm is a dying breed.

Sara Rotman

Gossamer looks at the world—travel, design, art, culture, and food—through a green lens.

Open plan offices for new media companies, beautiful as they are, contain few physical pleasures.

There are no opaque phone rooms for naps or crying, just glass boxes with doors that don’t lock. No coffee pots, just a cumbersome robot that spits out diesel-scented “espresso,” and milk substitute. No room for a plant on your desk, which is more like designated space at a table.
 
The office I worked at in the summer of 2017, which was situated on two floors of the graveyard of Goldman Sachs, offered a few things worth having: narrow windows with views of the East River and the Stone Street meat restaurants, proximity to a neighbor’s helicopter pad, and an array of Fresh Direct-supplied snacks. La Croix in 10 flavors, single-serving discs of hummus and guacamole, pita chips of every stripe, slimey packages of hard-boiled eggs that came in pairs, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, hundreds of dollars worth of cashews and almonds, apples and oranges and one or two rock-hard green pears, and, most importantly, Babybel cheese. I ate it every day.

I spent that summer thinking about a crush, and complaining about my job, which was to pay attention to Tumblr and *Game of Thrones*. I thank god that we are not all bloggers, and that we have not all spent time in Manhattan’s Financial District, but I imagine you still know what I am talking about: each day is the same. An iced coffee drips condensation next to your laptop, an idle conversation about going to the beach this weekend ends with no one making a plan, and a music video or two breaks up the hours by giving you something to tweet about. Mercifully, the day will end when the sun is still out, the way it doesn’t for three-fourths of the year. It’s not all bad.
 
Plus, Babybel cheese. After breakfast, but before lunch, the same little red wax guy. Originated in France, manufactured at a factory in South Dakota, one of an estimated 1.5 million wheels per day. Driven to a 30-story office building in lower Manhattan at five in the morning. You can pop them like pieces of gum while you stew in the the languid but fizzy energy of waiting for a day to end.

It’s the perfect snack. For staring into space and dreaming of never returning another email. For doing something, anything, with your hands, while you recite a fraught iMessage conversation from memory to whomever sits next to you. For swallowing a low-calorie placeholder in two bites and, synched with the crouch to the trash can, subtly dipping your chin to find out if you remembered to put on deodorant.

 
The red cellophane wrapper makes the whole package look like a Valentine. The Valentine weighs exactly 20 grams every time, which according to some reliable-enough internet resources, is the same as a mouse and twice as much as a human eye. The wax shell looks like something that’s been hatched out of and discarded in a weird place, as chilling as a cicada husk dropping into an open pitcher of sangria. You can warm it in your hand and make a tight, shiny ball. But it’ll leave a pink film on your skin, so why would you?

The experience is sensual, like the slow drag of a zipper that you’re opening mostly for effect. The wax resists. It’s basically alive. Then there’s a two-centimeter gasp of bright white, appearing like a not-yet-tan belly peeking out from the narrow, moving gap between jean shorts and crop top. It is pretty much as close as you will get to a strip tease in a work environment.

The experience is also a little bit gross. Like peeling anything is a little bit gross. Like the word “peeling,” which is gross. Depending on your mood: a little bit like in *Black Swan*, when Natalie Portman peels back a frayed strip of the skin around her cuticle until there’s a bright red bloody line all the way down her finger.

And then there’s the cheese itself, which, bitten into, looks like an orthodontist’s upper jaw mold, and tastes like nothing.

***

*Kaitlyn Tiffany is a writer living in Brooklyn. She co-authors a [weekly newsletter](https://famouspeople.substack.com/) about terrible parties.  *

GreenBabybel

Babybel

The first time I fell in love, we bonded in the early stages through phone Scrabble. “Scrabble back,” he’d text me, if a few hours passed without my next move. This was pre-Tinder, and our matches got heated. We eventually spent enough years together to re-download the app for a burst of nostalgia in our long-distance monogamy.

As our relationship wore on, Newtoy’s then-wildly popular Words with Friends became available on my Android, like the Snapchat app we’d use to sext. Then came Scramble with Friends (renamed Word Streak), which really spiced things up.

To me, word games will always be kind of romantic: a throwback to simpler times. They’re nerdy, but nobody really cares that much if you underperform. There’s space to slack, to try too hard, or to embarrass yourself only in front of a bot.

On Wikipedia, a website predicated on people volunteering to write and edit words, “word games” [are categorized by type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_game). There’s letter arrangement (Scrabble), puzzle (crossword), structured (Mad Libs), or linguistic recreations (spelling bees).

These games predate artificial intelligence by eons, well before Siri had all the answers and Merriam-Webster Dictionary started dragging people [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster).

Words, one of the most basic forms of communication, can be primal. Like puzzles—or a budding relationship—they can leave us vulnerable or confused. Choosing the right word could win you millions of dollars, grant you acceptance to a prestigious school, or earn you 10 whole seconds of glory on a dimly lit stage before a crowd of boozing spectators.

We may be post-truth, but a word well-played still brings people together. On a recent Galentine’s Day, I watched a group of grown adults in a Manhattan speakeasy compete in a spelling bee. “French from Latin,” the moderator read. I sipped my beer. “Can you please define the word?” Plot twist! In line for the restroom, I learned one very good contestant spoke only English and Portuguese, the latter not much help here. More were eliminated. No mercy was spared. Only one speller—who asked to hear a word in a sentence—behaved as a “douche,” at least according to the moderators.

For the same reason I go to estate sales, word games have retro appeal. They’re a haven from the noise, and from a president who does not open books. They’re a cerebral flex in a society that keeps telling me how to fix my face, company for a “lonely generation.”

If we match in a Scrabble game, thanks to some algorithm that connects people all around the globe, your choices tell me something about you. Maybe you learned a word from reading The Hobbit as a kid, which totally changed your life. Maybe you’re really into Shakespeare, or you’re a jackass who keeps making two-letter combinations until one finally sticks.

People separated by time or distance or language can play word games. True to form, most Americans are unwittingly more limited: notorious for only speaking English, and often afraid to look silly. It’s a humbling thing to admit that you can’t make a halfway decent play in a word game.  

Maybe you’re like my younger brother, who at age 10 won a round of Scattergories, the 30-year-old board game that includes pencils and paper in a box. For the category of “medicine” and the letter of “M,” he chose Midol, much to our mom’s and aunts’ delight. Obvious victor.

Maybe work is boring and unchallenging and you’ve been entertaining fantasies of quitting, but there’s some temporary spontaneity in the daily crossword—or whatever the frequency, depending your source.

In a culture that thrives on superficial connections, when your next lay can be only a few swipes away, word games can be intimate. An opponent’s assemblage of letters is suggestive, tells me something different than the 280-character tweet you spent an hour crafting and retooling.

On a recent early-morning bus ride to Manhattan from Philadelphia, I passed time by redownloading the word game apps I deleted forever ago. Delirious from little sleep, I felt slightly self-conscious and rusty playing against random players or bots. I remembered that I preferred Scrabble, because the virtual instructor would tell me if I chose the best possible word based on the tiles given. Uncertainty can be thrilling, until it’s not.

I drag the tiles: “F-I-R-E.”  Best word! “R-I-D-S.” Best word! An analog-looking, starry popup appears on my screen, a form of congratulations.

Is this as hard as it gets? Maybe I’m taking the easy way out. Or maybe, I still got it.

***

*[Natalie Daher](http://www.nataliedaher.com/) is a writer and journalist based in New York. She co-authors a newsletter, [Clipped](https://us16.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=469667a58e33374cf748297f7&id=4e1050af80), about women's media.*

Finding common ground one letter at a time.

scrabble

Word Games

In 2016, I moved into an apartment outfitted with a panini press, a clunky appliance I used exactly once and which then served as an ersatz modern art installation for the remaining 364 days of my lease. Its worthlessness was solidified when, on a camping trip with nary a press in sight, my roommates and I placed hunks of cheese-stuffed baguette on a grill and flattened them with large rocks. Me, dependent on a single-use appliance? I scoffed as I bit into my panini. Please. I was practically Bear Grylls.


My ambitions — at least when it came to eating sandwiches — may not have been lofty enough to capitalize on a panini press, but its existence served as a gateway gadget, paving the way for what I now consider to be the holy grail of single-use appliances. It sits in my kitchen. It is small. It is sharp. It cuts without hurting and slices without contrition. Friends: meet the egg slicer.

 
Invented in the early 1900s by a German man named Willy, the egg slicer was created for the sole purpose of — this isn’t hard, folks — cutting eggs. The device itself is composed of two parts: a slotted base and a hinged frame strung with taut metal wires. To wield this contraption, all one has to do is place a peeled, hard boiled egg on the base and lower the top, allowing the wires to cut through the membrane and separate the orb into equal segments. As Willy was clearly aware, no one wants to accidentally coat their egg with fingerprints or deal with buckled whites, two common hazards of holding an egg and cleaving it with a knife. Best yet, these slicers transform the yolk (which I’ve always found slightly repellant) into manageable, aesthetically appealing ribbons of chalky yellow fat.

 
There is something pleasingly democratic about an apparatus that elevates an egg from an inexpensive, ubiquitous form of protein to a delicacy with one quick sever. The devices are also widely accessible, with myriad brands, styles, and price points from which to choose. While I prefer the bare bones, 100% aluminum version that sells for [$2.81 online](https://www.tigerchef.com/tigerchef-round-aluminum-egg-slicer.html), egg-eaters with upscale taste can purchase fancier instruments. Williams Sonoma offers a [$14.95 BPA-free "Egg Slicer and Wedger](https://www.williams-sonoma.com/products/williams-sonoma-egg-slicer/),” which one online reviewer bought "on a lark" and then loved so much that she ordered another for the kitchen in her lake house.

 
The egg slicer may be my favorite, but a brief tour of my pint-sized Brooklyn apartment reveals that I now own a small army of single-use appliances, all honed to execute one task perfectly: there is a [milk frother](https://www.amazon.com/Bellemain-Stainless-Steel-Frother-capacity/dp/B010E1ZQVC/ref=sr_1_20?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576025&sr=1-20&keywords=milk+frother), which I use every morning and a [rice cooker](https://www.amazon.com/Panasonic-SR-G06FGL-1-Step-Automatic-Cooker/dp/B01DGQVX46/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575340&sr=8-3&keywords=panasonic+rice+cookers), whose services I employ on occasion; on the table sits a [small wedge](https://www.amazon.com/Bobino-LATOFTQ-Laptop-Foot-Turquoise/dp/B0758161RQ/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1529575443&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=bobino+laptop+foot&psc=1) that serves no purpose other than propping up my roommate’s laptop and which she claims stands between her and a lifetime of carpal tunnel; and in the back of my closet is a [sweater razor](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015RN9JN8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), which I drunk-ordered last winter after reading that it would slice the fuzz off all my sweaters and, thus, “change my life.” I still believe this although I have yet to prove it true — in my aforementioned state I forgot that I own only one sweater and zero of the batteries the device requires.

 
The beauty of single-use appliances is that, unlike Pokémon or sexual harassers, it doesn’t behoove anyone to catch ‘em all. Unless you happen to inhabit a mansion of Versailles-style proportions, collecting these contraptions forces one to prioritize. Would you rather be greeted every day with the dead-eyed stare of a [hot dog steamer](https://www.amazon.com/Nostalgia-HDS248RD-Extra-Large-Steamer/dp/B01LVWIIVR/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529576752&sr=1-1-spons&keywords=hot+dog+cooker&psc=1) or a [strawberry huller](https://www.amazon.com/Chefn-27466-StemGem-Strawberry-Huller/dp/B002XOHZWC/ref=sr_1_4?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529575061&sr=1-4&keywords=strawberry+huller)? Are you the sort of person who values flawlessly [spiralized zucchini](https://www.amazon.com/OXO-Grips-Handheld-Spiralizer-Green/dp/B013KAW5IQ/ref=sr_1_8?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1529682126&sr=1-8&keywords=zuchinni+spiral+noodle+maker) over a properly [scraped coconut](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07D59NVXH/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?psc=1&pd_rd_i=B07D59NVXH&pd_rd_wg=iz3Tv&pd_rd_r=SGF4GQ8K4JYKWNKRHBV0&pd_rd_w=PPENA)? At some point, the questions become nearly existential: in the vast scheme of things, do the rewards of a [banana bunker](https://www.vat19.com/item/banana-bunker-protects-bananas?adid=gshopping&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&adpos=1o2&scid=scplpbanana-bunker&sc_intid=banana-bunker&gclid=CjwKCAjwma3ZBRBwEiwA-CsblIot5ie4bOdhlrGp7z1XY6XwEvJyHjmvyPgJiWZMXMWQXpNZe5JBShoCsrcQAvD_BwE) trump the spoils of a [hamburger press](https://www.amazon.com/Weston-Express-Hamburger-Ejector-07-0310-W/dp/B000XB45DO/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1529576579&sr=8-3&keywords=hamburger+press)?

 
I was speaking with a friend recently who admitted that she has a rule against owning single-use kitchen appliances, her reasoning being that in most instances you could probably use a knife to accomplish the same task. Does she have a point? Sure.


But sometimes “good enough” just isn’t good enough. And if anyone needs me, I'll be in my own (slightly more crowded) kitchen, with my slicer, basking in that rare flavor of joy that accompanies placing a perfectly mathematically bisected egg atop an otherwise mundane salad.


***


*[Luna Adler](http://www.lunaadler.com/) likes to think of herself as an agreeable Scorpio. She lives in Brooklyn.*

Boiling appliances down to their essence.

Egg Slicer

Egg Slicers

Dawn Two

Stoned Fruit Hero Horizontal

Stoned Fruit Hero Box

Stoned Fruit Hero

V7 Cover Horizontal

Dusk Geray Mena

Gossamer Dusk 

boxstack2s

Gossamer Dusk CBD and CBN tincture is a unique formulation of cannabinoids and terpenes engineered to help you rest. 

Features

Che Che Luna

High Minded: Tentacles

John Paul Brammer

Esther Perel

Sara Rotman

High Minded

Babybel

Word Games

Egg Slicers

High Praise

Turn Your Table

Go With The Stream

Dressed To Drill

For people who also smoke weed.