I’m a journalist and an editor. I also host a show called *Your Favorite Auntie*. I’m an Aries with a Virgo moon, so I’m a fireball and I’m also hypercritical. 

Now I consider myself a New Yorker, but I grew up in Dallas. Everyone always tells me they went through the airport there and I’m like, “Okay, great.”

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I’m the youngest of three. Growing up, my family was like the Huxtables. I’m not lying: my dad was an OB-GYN, and my mom was an English professor. I had my two older brothers, and I was like little Rudy. 

We were the only Black family on the block. We lived in the suburbs and I went to mostly white schools. Racially, it was pretty siloed. But then I would go to church on Sunday, or I’d hang out with my family, and that’s when I was around my Black community. 

The environment was pretty closed off. I definitely wanted to leave when I was 18 because I just felt like it didn’t affirm me in a lot of ways. Now when I go back, Dallas is hopping. It’s the fastest growing Democratic county in the country. It’s super diverse and open. But that wasn’t my experience at all when I was growing up.

[[1]]
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My family was very open with each other about the kinds of obstacles we were up against. My mother would come home and tell me about her co-workers who were racist, or who were prejudiced. My father would too. So, we never felt like we couldn’t tell our parents, “This happened to me.”

My parents wanted the best for their kids, and I don’t think that they knew what the impact of sending us to all-white schools would be. I don’t begrudge them at all for that. They are of their generation. They saw so much shit. My mom would always say to me, “I’m from Mississippi, like Jim Crow Mississippi. I saw everything. And I still would go to school, and I’d get my lesson. I would get my degree, and I would get a job.” 

That was their philosophy: “Yes. It fucking sucks, but we still have to work really, really hard.” I hear that and I respect it. But I’m also still working through the generational trauma of that, because I don’t think that’s something they were allowed or able to do. For the Naomi Osakas of the world to say, “This doesn’t work for me”—that’s a big generational shift. I have to recalibrate my brain that way, too.

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I didn’t smoke a lot of weed growing up or in college—only every six months or something. It was more something that I would have at the end of the night, to take all the drinking to another place. Not a bad place; it would just kind of slow everything down before I went nuts. That’s how I thought about it. It was so I could digest things at the end of the night. It’s interesting because I go hard on liquor. I don’t know where it would lead me if I went too hard on cannabis.

I definitely also saw weed as a political moment. My good friend and roommate was really political and active in [Students for a Sensible Drug Policy](https://ssdp.org/). She was the one who educated me on the bias around it, and why it was necessary for us to get beyond the stigmas, and the taboos, and the propaganda.

I looked at weed as a device that was used to continue to disenfranchise and marginalize people. Even to this day, when we talk about police violence, victimhood, and people who have been victims of police violence, people will be like, “Oh, the victim smoked weed” and therefore they deserved it. I don’t understand how those connections are made. I think this is a large part of why my relationship with weed was an occasional party moment for me. And still is. 

I’m happy to see that it’s been legalized, of course, but then everybody who was brought up on a trumped up drug charge needs to be released. They need to have their records expunged and given another day. And I think Black and brown people need to be at the forefront of all of these money making opportunities. It would be sad to see if we are left with very little of that pie after generations and communities were ripped apart again and again.

[[3]]

After college, I floated around New York for a couple of years. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was working in fashion, but I was working retail, so I wasn’t working *in* it. Fashion has been a lifelong fascination of mine. I studied it, I followed it, I had an encyclopedic knowledge of it. The ins and outs of every *Vogue* magazine—I knew them. I knew the people, the designers, the models, all the shit. I knew I wanted to work there, but I didn’t know how. It felt very “you got to be the daughter of somebody.”

So while I was working in retail, I decided to go back to school. I wanted to study race and I wanted to study my own personal history—living in New York had a lot to do with that. I wound up at Columbia for African American studies. That really changed the way that I thought about myself as a thinker. It just changed my whole perspective on life. I wanted to figure out a way to combine my academic work, which really dealt with race and gender, with fashion. 

I wound up working at Net-a-Porter as a personal shopper. Then I was at Moda Operandi, then Saks. I was in these really high-end luxury retail spaces and working for really rich women, but I was kind of like, *fuck this system*. It was this weird dichotomy. I thought, *I don’t know where or if I’m ever going to fit in*. So I started writing about it.

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I didn’t know how to be a journalist. I didn’t go to J-school. I was intimidated. I felt like journalism was primarily made up of white men and not for someone like me. *Am I saying the right thing? Am I writing the right way?* Those are the things that kept me second guessing myself. But eventually I just was like, *Fuck it. I’m going to fake it till I make it*. I hustled. How do you get experience as a young journalist? You start doing shit and making opportunities for yourself.

I finally wound up at *Vogue*. After about a year of freelancing for them, they had me come in-house as a senior fashion writer. I took that opportunity and that platform to put a focus on cultural heroes and heroines that I felt were often overlooked in that space—specifically Black people. I brought Gucci Mane to *Vogue*. I wrote Cardi B’s first *Vogue* story. Now, you can’t think of anything but Cardi B and *Vogue*. But back when I pitched her, people were like, “No.” 

There was a lot of freedom to write about what interested me. But after a while, I was totally burnt out. I decided to go freelance, which was a really big struggle because I was known as a writer, but I didn’t want to work as a writer anymore. I had hit a wall.  I felt like I wasn’t good at it and that I wasn’t adding anything to the conversation. The pace was pretty relentless. It was back to back to back to back, and I wasn’t really given a lot of time to sit with the material. At the end of the week, I’d find myself in a daze, just like, *What did I just do? I don’t even really remember what I did. Did it stick? Did it even speak to my ideals?*

[[4]]

I had to work really hard to regain my confidence. But I dug my heels in and started writing again. Now things have ramped up a lot. I have found that doing features and cover stories is definitely a challenging but very invigorating creative process for me.

*Your Favorite Auntie* is a new kind of advice show from somebody you actually listen to. That’s the whole tagline. It was born out of quarantine. It was an opportunity to connect with people and build community in isolation. It’s also a natural evolution for who I am. I’m someone who always wants to be in the mix. I always want to give advice. I always want to help. I always want to talk and talk and talk. A lot of young women and men coming up in the fashion and beauty game want advice, and I’m happy to give it, because I’ve lived. I don’t have all the answers, but I certainly have seen a lot. So, I’m happy to share that.

Every week, I field questions from my community around a particular topic. I answer the best ones on air. We’ve talked about everything from interracial dating during BLM, body image, pop culture, hair, cooking. And I’ve had some really great guests—Jenna Lyons, Patia Borja, Sean Garrett, Devonn Francis, Donte Colley. I would love to turn *Your Favorite Auntie* into a television show. A real show, with a real set. *Between Two Ferns* is definitely my reference for a lot of it.

[[5]]
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I’m kind of a shy person. But when you get me talking, you won’t be able to shut me the fuck up. I think it’s a way of being disarming. For a lot of people, just asking a follow up question is crazy. We often gloss over what other people say to us. But if you’re just like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Why do you say that?”—that in and of itself can make someone feel seen and heard when they haven’t been. There’s a lot of power to just going deeper on something and not glossing over shit.

I struggle with celebrating my accomplishments sometimes. As writers, especially as female writers, we’re often taught to be very humble. And I respect people who are humble about their writing or their career pursuits. But I also feel that, especially as a Black woman, no one else is going to give you the attention and the credit. You have to go grab it. That is something I’ve really learned in the last year or two, as a personal adage. I read something that was like, “Are you going to be discovered or are you going to introduce yourself?” So, I just have to coach myself sometimes, tell myself, “It’s okay. You can tell people that you wrote this, and be proud of it, and outwardly excited about it.” 

One thing that I come back to a lot is, “What’s for you is for you.” I truly believe that, and then when sometimes I don’t believe that, I force myself to believe it again. We live in a world full of comparison. There are a lot of distractions, and you have to be able to believe that what’s for you is going to happen. I also try to tell myself—and others—to be the person that your 18-year old self needed. Because I remember being a totally out of place little black girl in the suburbs of Texas, and escaping through magazines and music videos and pop culture. Now I get to work at those magazines and write those stories. I want to hug that little girl and tell her to keep her chin up, because she’ll get there.

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***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Marjon Carlos](https://www.instagram.com/marjon_carlos/?hl=en) photographed by [Meredith Jenks](https://www.instagram.com/meredithjenks/) at her home 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).*

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The writer and *Your Favorite Auntie* host on winding down with weed, the evolution of Dallas, and the art of the interview.

Marjon Carlos

  I love being surrounded by a community and by people, which is most likely why I opened a brick and mortar store and not just an e-commerce platform.

  I basically live at [t.a.](https://shop-ta.com/) It’s our mission and our goal to bring contemporary designers to the forefront of retail. That’s something that I had yet to see on a grand scale, especially in terms of a Black-owned business. I wanted to create a space that was not only inviting in terms of who works here, but also in the clothing that we provide, and the designers and the artists that we hold space for.

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  Before opening the store, I did social media for *Food & Wine*, Hypebeast, and Atlantic Records, where I was consulting on the side for one of their up-and-coming artists. Then I went into influencer management at a fashion PR firm for eight months, which was as treacherous as it was fun. And I just got my master’s in brand management from NYU. I like to learn, but I can’t always spell, which is hilarious.

>   Knowledge is so important—not only about what you’re smoking, but what it’ll do to you, how you ingest it, will you feel like.

  My parents know everything so I’ll tell you: I smoked a lot in college. But it all went south my senior year, because I didn’t have enough knowledge. I didn’t know anything. I was smoking whatever I could get—both good and bad. And my body ended up just rejecting it. I got hives from the top of my head to my feet every single time. It was incredibly disheartening because you want to be able to not only participate, but to get what you need to get from weed. I eventually went to a doctor and learned that the THC level was too high for me to tolerate on top of the tobacco that I was ingesting. I was young and dumb. 

 Knowledge is so important—not only about what you’re smoking, but what it’ll do to you, how you ingest it, will you feel like. I don’t think there’s enough education out there. Actually, my capstone project for my master’s program was modeling out a dispensary, which I would love to eventually open. Something in New York or L.A. that has a similar aesthetic to t.a. 

  30% of our revenue would be donated to helping men and women after they’ve been released from prison for low-possession crimes, and partnering specifically with pro bono lawyers in that city to help them get released. We’d also give them stipends to help with their families, to help them live, eat, get a shower. To help them get housing so that they can then get the life that they deserve. That’s what I want to offer with a dispensary some day. And I want to be able to teach people and use my story as an example. You can’t just put everything in your body. You cannot do that.

  [[1]]

  Growing up, I wanted to be a fashion buyer so badly, which is why I studied retail management in undergrad. But the program was heavily numbers-driven to the point where it took a lot of the creativity out of it. It’s all about what shirt is selling the best, in *this* size, in *this* color, in *this* stitching. That’s what they taught us. I thought I’d work for a Net-a-Porter or a Moda Operandi—or even a Macy’s, honestly. But when I graduated, there were no programs, jobs, or internships that were available—especially for an African-American woman.

  I got really discouraged. I graduated thinking I’d be photographed going to Paris fashion shows, I thought that would be my life. But those opportunities didn’t exist for me at the time. I said, “Eff it,” and decided that if it was for me, it would find me. Instead, I looked for something that would allow me to live in the city—it didn’t matter what it was. So I got a job selling national park guides. 

  [[2]]

  When I first started working in the city, Opening Ceremony was *it*. They had two locations, one in SoHo and then one that was right next to Penn Station. So I would take the longest walk home from work, which was in Union Square. I’d go all the way up to 29th Street just so that I could “accidentally” stop by. The way they curated the store was incredible. I was in there a few years ago when I had this realization: *I can do this. There’s no reason why I cannot do this. There’s absolutely no reason why I cannot have a store*. But I wasn’t even working in the industry at the time, so it seemed impossible and crazy. 

  But once I said that to myself, I started pulling images of stores and editorials I loved. I compiled a list of brands, and began building the business plan. There are so many nitty-gritty steps that nobody talks about. No one teaches you how to start your own business, not even in school, which still irritates me. I’m paying all this money and I don’t even know how to start my own business. That’s ridiculous. 

>   Even if I had years of experience, there’d still be things I do not know how to do. But not knowing something is never a reason to not do it.

  So I googled business plans and templates and tried to figure out where to start. I found this place called [SCORE](https://www.score.org/business-plans-startup-assistance-resources). It’s a resource center where you can go and have your business plan or whatever you’re working on reviewed by a retired professional in that industry. I remember bringing my plan to the mentor I was working with. And he was just like, “Okay, cool. So when are you going to start this?” That encouragement from a stranger, plus my determination, is what made this happen. But there are still so many things I don’t know.

  Even if I had years of experience, there’d still be things I do not know how to do. But not knowing something is never a reason to not do it. I’m not sure why I feel that way. Probably because of my faith, honestly. Like, if it’s for me, it’s going to work out, and if it’s not, then God’s going to shut that door and it’s not going to work out. Being an entrepreneur is—I mean, it’s crazy, right? Why does anyone decide to do this? It’s psychopathic. But you say to yourself, *I can do this. If anyone’s going to be able to do this, it’s going to be me. And I’m going to do it well. And I’m going to laugh about it after even though I was crying every day leading up to it*. 

[[3]]

>  My father always told me, “Move with integrity. Act with integrity. Tell the truth.”

 The eight months I spent at that PR firm were crazy. I learned a lot, but the PR world is a different beast that I wouldn’t wish upon anybody, not even my worst enemy. Eventually I was like, *I don’t have to put up with this. I can go and work for myself*. I left a meeting, gave my notice, and the next week I signed the lease on this space. Two weeks after that, I was on a flight to Paris and Milan to do the buy. No one knew who I was. I sent 40 cold emails to showrooms. There was one woman I knew who had worked as a buyer for a small store and she told me all the showrooms I should know, because those are hard to find, too. She didn’t give me the key, but she was like, “Here’s the box, figure out a way to open it.” 

  I had no idea what I was doing. I had to learn so much on the fly. I remember reading somewhere that if they ask you what other brands you have confirmed, just lie—they can’t confirm it because they’re competitors. When I showed up at one of my first appointments and he asked who else I had confirmed, I had this little angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. The devil was like, “Lie.” And then my dad popped into my head. My father always told me, “Move with integrity. Act with integrity. Tell the truth.” And so I was honest. I said, “I don’t have anyone confirmed, this is one of my first appointments. Are you going to show me around or not?” The showroom manager was like, “I love your transparency, who do you want to see?” I confirmed three brands that day. Everything built from there.

[[4]]

  I was originally going to open in February during New York Fashion Week. Then construction delayed me a month. I started getting emails about COVID. Three brands had reached out to say that they were delayed because their production houses had shut down. And then the whole world shut down. I was so upset. I had all this inventory. I had a whole space. A lease that I had to start paying rent on. So I launched our website, where we would drop 10 items a week throughout COVID. 

  I initially didn’t want to have a website—I wanted to be really mysterious. But that wasn’t going to work because of the pandemic. So I used the experience I had from working in social media and influencer management. I reached out to some people I knew and loved and asked them to post about it. I did Instagram Lives. I started a newsletter. And then, of course, the #SupportBlackBusiness hashtag dropped because of George Floyd. 

  That was a tragedy. We were all mourning him, and mourning those we’ve lost who have been brutally killed by the police. But when that occurred, there was a surge of support. Genuine or not, the support was there. People wanted to talk to me, people wanted to learn about me, people wanted to shop for clothing. I went from zero to a thousand. Kourtney Kardashian put me on Poosh, tagged the store, tagged me. That blew up. Karlie Kloss, that blew up. 
>   People want to shop. The world could be burning, and somebody will be like, “Would you let me go to that store real quick so I can pick up that last shirt?” 

[[5]]

  We opened our doors on July 9th. It was insane. Everything was flying off the shelves, people were coming in with screenshots, “Do you have this? Do you have that?” 

  People want to shop. The world could be burning, and somebody will be like, “Would you let me go to that store real quick so I can pick up that last shirt?” It’s not only that we were Black-owned, but that we had a lot of contemporary designers that you cannot get anywhere else.

  [[6]]

They cannot mass produce. Things are hand-knit and hand-sewn by the designers themselves. Yes, some stuff is expensive, and yes, we all know that it might not cost that much to make it. But at the same time, it’s part of a system. I’m not charging these prices so that I can go out for a fancy dinner. When I work with a contemporary designer, a Black designer, a designer from Peru or Tblisi, Georgia, I’m supporting them. It’s a cycle. When it comes to having a store, especially a small boutique, whatever is bought here goes to cover my rent, the photo shoots we do, to pay for our air conditioning. 

  We just started [crowdfunding through IFundWomen](https://ifundwomen.com/projects/taste-future). The funds are going toward expanding my team and opening a pop up in L.A. in two years. About 75% of our online sales come from women in L.A. Eventually, I would love to consult for other major retailers and become the conduit between them and contemporary designers. And, of course, open that dispensary. But my biggest goal is just to be happy. And I’m very happy right now. So if I can maintain that, even if I don’t get anything else I just said, then I’m cool.

[[7]]

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Telsha Anderson](https://www.instagram.com/telshaanderson/?hl=en) photographed by [Meghan Marin](https://www.instagram.com/meghanmarin/?hl=en) at her [store in New York](https://shop-ta.com/shop). 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).*

Telsha Anderson, the owner of t.a. boutique, on opening a store in the middle of a pandemic, finding confidence through clothing, and dispensary designs.

Telsha Anderson Hero 2

My mother has amazing style. Cherry red is her favorite color. I would take in everything she wore, whether it was a necklace, a ring, her lipstick, or her bag. Fashion is something I always gravitated towards. My parents allowed my siblings and I to wear whatever we want and be whoever we wanted to be—even if it didn’t match, even if it didn’t make sense. That’s how I expressed myself because I wasn’t always this talkative. I was like, Let me show who I am through what I’m wearing, and they can figure it out. That was my vibe. That’s the feeling that I want to give to others through the store. You can be quiet, but then wear something that allows you to become this loud, confident person.

  There are so many brands I carry now that I’ve loved for years, and the only way to get them would be to buy directly or through another retailer in another continent. Pieces would arrive four weeks later and wouldn’t fit because I didn’t know my size and because I couldn’t touch it and try it on. That was a big driver for me. 

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We have brands from London, Paris, Milan, Toulouse, L.A., New York. t.a. is for people who are women-identifying, looking for something new, and looking for something fun. We’re not here to create your style, we’re here to add to it. We’re for people who know what they like, know what they want to wear, and know what works with what they already have. It’s really intentional. We carry a lot of one-of-a-kind pieces. I put my heart into every single season. That’s how I operate.

One thing that I saw a lot when the #SupportBlackBusiness campaign happened was that people unfortunately associate anything Black-owned with being cheap. And that’s not life. That’s actually not true for any of the Black business owners that I know. So I got a lot of DMs—and I responded to every single one—that were like, “Hey, why is this top $500?”

Let's start there. Let’s go into how this clothing is not cheap to make, especially when you’re working with small contemporary designers.

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The entrepreneur and owner of t.a. on opening a store in the middle of a pandemic, finding confidence through clothing, and dispensary designs.

Telsha Anderson

*Due to COVID-related restrictions, this photoshoot happened entirely via FaceTime.*

I moved to Detroit on purpose over a decade ago. I always say that I moved here on purpose because I think a lot of people make the migration the other way, from Detroit to New York, or from Detroit to the Bay Area, both places I lived and worked in before coming here. 

I was first brought here to help a group called Detroit Summer to facilitate change work, and was immediately struck by the way movement was building here. It felt so woven into the community, and there was really brilliant post-apocalyptic thinking. By the time that I came, Detroit had already been through economic downfall. Half the city was a place that people would visit to take pictures of ruins. The population had dropped significantly. Capitalism had abandoned the city for a period of time.

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I got to meet and learn from incredible organizers including Grace Lee Boggs, a Chinese American activist whose life’s work was with the Black Power Movement and Black Labor Workers here in Detroit. She was 91 or 92 when we met. She lived to be 100 years old. I slowly got to know her and call her a friend and mentor those last eight years of her life. She taught me that we must transform ourselves to transform the world, and that this unfolding journey that’s happening in Detroit is what the rest of the country has to look forward to.

People call Detroit “Up South” because it has so many similarities with Southern communities. Anytime you have a majority Black city that’s happening outside of the South in the U.S., it means that it was a point of migration. A place that our ancestors thought would be safer than where they were in the South. Almost everyone you talk to in Detroit has their roots in the Carolinas, in Mississippi, in Georgia, in Alabama, in Louisiana. There are so many places that you walk into where it really feels like you’ve been transported south. That feels like home for me.

>There’s just this sensibility in my family that a lot of our hardest experiences and our most beautiful experiences are rooted in the South.

I was born in Texas. My parents fell in love as an interracial couple in South Carolina. I lived for a period of time in Texas, in Georgia, in Germany. I grew up in a military family where we traveled all the time, but my family’s roots are in the Carolinas. There’s just this sensibility in my family that a lot of our hardest experiences and our most beautiful experiences are rooted in the South.

My writing is about the ways that social justice movements can learn from nature, the ways we can connect with each other, and the ways we can find and reclaim joy and pleasure in the face of oppression and apocalypse. We’ve been through many apocalypses. Many, many communities that are on earth—probably all of us if you look back in the lineage far enough—have some ancestral experience of having reached forward and found life beyond what they were told were the constraints of their current conditions. We’re in one of those periods now where a lot of us recognize that the way that we are living is so deeply out of alignment with the Earth and so deeply out of alignment with being able to live with each other. It’s time to reveal all of those systems that are no longer serving us, and to commit ourselves to developing something else.

I find a great pleasure in the freedom of this and the idea that we could co-create something that actually works for the majority of us. It means an apocalypse of the current unfair conditions, but it is also an invitation to co-create conditions that would be just, fair, and lucrative. This shouldn’t be such a remarkable idea.

![AMB 44](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/56zO12mluSyyNQe1IP2VjA/4a8431b2f79cf4d8f621374b5afeed03/20210415_Marin_AMB_44.jpg)

Octavia Butler is one of the central inspirations for all of my work and a lot of my thinking. I started reading her work when I was in college and was really moved by the way she thought and wrote about community. She put young Black women as her protagonists, and told stories where change was a character. Change wasn’t something that we were a victim of, it was something that we could shape and an undeniable force that was going to shape us.

Octavia’s work was apocalyptic. She wrote that we have this incredible, beautiful, miraculous intelligence, but we mostly use it to enact these hierarchies over each other. She was really concerned with whether we would be able to unlearn that practice in time to actually stay here and get to be a part of life on earth. That question drives my work as well. We’ve been given this miraculous world specially designed for us, but will we actually commit ourselves to living with each other? What does it mean to pay attention to the conditions that we are in and that we are creating, so that we can understand the future we’re inviting towards us? Her work feels prophetic, but really she was just paying attention.

>You should never smoke a dollar bill for any reason. I’m probably still recovering.

The first time I attempted to smoke cannabis, a friend of mine gave me a little nugget of weed and assumed that my other friend and I knew what we were doing with it. We sat in my room and we rolled that nugget up in a dollar bill and tried to smoke it. We were mixing up everything we had seen in movies. If you are rolling up a dollar bill, it’s not for weed. You should never smoke a dollar bill for any reason. I’m probably still recovering.

When I first started to smoke, I was living in New York and it was distinctly illegal. There was this delicious edge to the process of going about getting cannabis. You couldn’t say it out loud, you had to whisper it, you had to have a contact. There was a lot of criminalization happening. I saw people who I knew and bought from get arrested.

In my thirties, I shifted to vaping, edibles, and salves, which is mostly what I do now. I often laugh that I would much rather be around people who are high than people who are drunk. I’m less interested in weed as something that impacts my mind, and more interested in it as something that impacts my body. My friend makes a cannabis salve that has THC, lalibela, goldenrod, and all these things that really feel good on the body and in the body. There’s a Black-owned brand called [Foy](https://simplyfoy.com/) that has a CBD lotion with menthol which is really cooling for my arthritis in my knees, hands and hips. I find that cannabis salves are one of the most effective ways to actually manage the pain that I experience from arthritis.

![AMB 36](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5CNPLYHEsg69FBQcn93qzG/c4f2d00c267e9a6641870d70a2806938/20210415_Marin_AMB_36.jpg)

This legalization trend has taken off, which I think in the long run is a really beautiful and necessary thing. It’s an acknowledgement that cannabis is a substance that can be navigated and can be very helpful for people. I’m a big fan of what is possible with cannabis, and of more people being educated about it.

On the personal side, it has been wonderful. There has been a huge expansion of the ways in which I can go and buy the kind of medicine I need in the form that works for me. I don’t have to try to figure out how to use a double boiling method at home to make some butter. But on a political level, it’s been upsetting to see how the legalization process has not been paired with a decriminalization process that allows for the release of those who are currently serving time for selling weed. 

>Many of us believe the institution of slavery didn’t actually end, it transformed into the prison industrial complex.

In a lot of states, we have this massive and violent contradiction where there are people still behind bars, often Black and Latinx people, for selling something that is now legal in that state and currently sold by people who are white. A lot of those people behind bars could be out now and making good money doing what they do well and have done for years. I think all of that needs to be named and understood as a pattern we need to disrupt and abolish.

Abolition is this idea that we must end systems of oppression. For many of us, the first abolitionists we knew of were those fighting to end the institution of slavery. Many of us believe the institution of slavery didn’t actually end, it transformed into the prison industrial complex. We want to end that institution of prisons and policing.

My book, *[We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams Of Transformative Justice](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781849354226)*, is a booklet that emerged in the summer of 2020. I was away on sabbatical, which was supposed to be six months of rest and relaxation, but it got hijacked by the pandemic like everyone’s lives did. I had been off of social media and away from work. When I came back I saw that there was this pattern of people calling each other out in ways that felt unprincipled, in ways that weren’t aligned with a vision for abolition. Why does it feel like we are policing each other and being punitive with each other in the spirit of accountability? You could really see that we spent the last four years living under the domain of a bully and a troll. Social media has created a toxic environment for dialogue and for difference, but then it got ratcheted way up, so much so that it’s really moved all the way into the movement community spaces. 

![AMB 30 co](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/2Pxu88JjJR6Z2ieQocuxdK/1e169029f0b1f2808b5710df04d98658/20210415_Marin_AMB_30_copy.jpg)

One of the biggest things I’ve been sitting with is this line that Assata Shakur offered us, which is “we must love each other and support each other.” What does that actually look like in practice, and how do we love each other out loud and in public? How do we protect each other when we are still relatively small compared to what we’re up against? When it’s so easy to get swayed to move against each other, how do we remember to protect each other?

I started exploring these ideas in [an essay](http://adriennemareebrown.net/2020/07/17/unthinkable-thoughts-call-out-culture-in-the-age-of-covid-19/) called “Unthinkable Thoughts,” which led to the book. If we’re treating each other this way, does it mean we feel hopeless? Does it actually serve survivors? Does it actually serve those who are being harmed? Does it serve any of us? Can we bring more discernment to the ways that we call for accountability?

Call-outs have a long history that’s rooted in Black and brown communities, and that’s because it was a way to get attention across a massive gap in power. We’ve now been applying that strategy to people who are parallel to us, who are peers of ours, who sometimes have less power than we do.

>When it’s so easy to get swayed to move against each other, how do we remember to protect each other?

There was a lot of response to the initial essay, both positive and negative. I learned a lot from all of it. I learned that it wasn’t just me seeing this pattern, but that this really was prevalent. I had so many people reach out and say, “This is happening in our field, in our area, in our part of the world.” Both within movement and beyond movement.

I also heard from people who are like, “We need to really make clear that it’s not the job of survivors to protect those who cause them harm.” If they need to call someone out because that person has caused them harm, we need to really be able to hold the nuance of that. We need to make sure that we speak about this in ways that don’t increase the harm. For me, that meant I had to shift some of the metaphors I had originally used and really grow in my own understanding and my own way of speaking about these things. *We Will Not Cancel Us* includes an updated version of the essay to reflect these learnings.

A lot of people are using my little book to help intervene in instances of policing within their movement spaces and spark conversation. There’s a little list of resources in the back that points people toward the books *[Fumbling Towards Repair](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781939202321)* by Mariame Kaba and Shira Hassan, and *[Beyond Survival](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781849353625)* by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A new work has come out since called, *[We Do This ‘Til We Free Us](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781642595253)*, which is from Mariame Kaba. Patrisse Cullors is about to release a book called *[An Abolitionist’s Handbook](https://bookshop.org/a/16015/9781250272973)*. There’s just so much good material that helps guide us in this work.

As my visibility has grown, I have felt so protected by my community. My community will be in touch with me to let me know that they see me, that I’m not alone, and that my worth was still intact. Sometimes saying, “Even if you did mess up, we’re still here. We’re here for your learning.” I’m really committed to learning in public. Part of the reason I can do that is because I have such a solid community off the internet. I have people, in real life, who’ve known me for such a long time and hold me accountable, and help me grow because they love me not because they want to see me destroyed.

That helps immensely in being able to soften into the lessons that all of us need to learn. I say all the time: we’re not free yet. So we must also have something left to learn. The more we can do that in public, I think the more we can learn, and the faster we can learn.

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [adrienne maree rown](https://www.instagram.com/adriennemareebrown/?hl=en) photographed by [Meghan Marin](https://www.instagram.com/meghanmarin) via FaceTime. 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).*

adrienne maree brown on organizing in Detroit, how to combat in-fighting, and smoking dollar bills.

AMB 57

The writer on organizing in Detroit, how to combat in-fighting, and smoking dollar bills.

adrienne maree brown

*This article originally appeared in [Volume Six](https://shop.gossamer.co/products/volume-six-garbage “Volume Six - Garbage”) of our magazine.*

The first attack came out of nowhere.

I was sipping a latte at my local coffee shop one morning when suddenly I had to throw up. Slicked with sweat, I barely made it to the bathroom before projectile vomiting into the sink. Once the floodgates had opened, the vomiting wouldn’t cease.

Somehow I made it home, discreetly puking into potted plants along the way. I spent the rest of the day in the bathroom, evacuating the contents of my stomach into the toilet every few minutes with clockwork precision long after there was nothing left to retch but bile. It felt like dying or, less hyperbolically, like the worst stomach flu I could imagine. In between waves of nausea, I laid on the cold bathroom tile and cried.

![Top2](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/7uTNMRP6AkyPgZBjkyDHzT/53b1623adbc1626798b1fbb036e9a7c1/Top2.jpg)

Two months later, it happened again, sabotaging a trip for Thanksgiving. Then I got sick on New Year’s, and the symptoms lasted for several days, obliterating any possibility that I just had a particularly nasty hangover. I had a working theory that the episodes were related to my birth control, so I had my IUD replaced—and then removed—on the assumption that hormonal fluctuations were to blame, but no dice. I kept getting sick, again and again, seven times total in the span of a year.

While I really, really didn’t want to believe it, I eventually figured out that the culprit was weed. It wasn’t actually hard to deduce. When I finally mustered the courage to google “heavy marijuana use”and vomiting, the answer was right there: cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS), a rare illness that afflicts some stoners, wreaking havoc on our digestive systems and causing the violent, cyclical bouts of vomiting I’d been experiencing. 

Like plenty of anxious millennials who entered adulthood in the era of legalization, I became a bona fide weed smoker in my twenties. The emotional and creative release felt like a mental health revelation. In those early days, an eighth would last me ages. But gradually my tolerance increased, and by the time I was 30, I was smoking a lot.

I was a high-functioning stoner, though the weed seemed to take the edge off everyday anxiety and even helped me be more prolific in my day-to-day job as a writer. Other than worrying about my wallet and lungs from time to time, I felt no real impetus to cut back. That is, until I developed a chronic, debilitating illness from my habit.

Hyperemesis is just a fancy medical term for intense vomiting; morning sickness, for example, is technically called “hyperemesis gravidarum.” At the most basic level, we know CHS is caused by prolonged exposure to THC, and that there are three phases of the disease.

Before experiencing a full-blown puking attack, people with CHS go through an initial “prodromal” phase where they might feel a little nauseous in the morning but are otherwise fine. At this point, most people have no idea that they’re sick. In fact, lots of folks wind up ingesting more weed, thinking it’ll alleviate their symptoms. And that can work for a while—until it doesn’t.

It might take days, weeks, or months, but eventually, your body enters the hyperemetic phase. My puking episodes often came on midmorning. Like many CHS sufferers, I intuitively took hot baths to ease my nausea, but nothing I tried—Dramamine, PeptoBismol, a heating pad on my stomach—could stop the vomiting. It felt like my guts were scraping themselves clean from the inside and wouldn’t rest until the offending toxin had been purged.

![Middle](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/4cQl2HVsvKGKHjjl870VJ4/a516d2c1234c3ec716e52c82acae8a35/Middle.jpg)

My attacks lasted about 24 hours on average, but some people can’t stop throwing up for days or weeks, which is when CHS can easily turn deadly. In the CHS recovery groups on Facebook,you’ll find harrowing accounts of people who experienced kidney failure, seizures, and medically induced comas, mostly as a result of extreme dehydration. Hyperemesis can continue until you stop smoking weed, which is when the recovery phase starts and symptoms disappear. But if you fall back into your habits, the cycle is likely to start all over again. 

CHS is hard for people to wrap their heads around, especially because cannabis is widely celebrated as an anti nausea drug. It’s one of the main reasons Marieka DeVuono, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, started studying the disease in the first place. Her advisor, Dr. LindaParker, is one of the foremost experts on the link between weed and nausea. (Dr. Parker’s work focuses on therapeutic uses for chemotherapy patients.) CHS was first identified back in 2004, but as weed became both more potent and easily available, the number of cases exploded. People turned to Dr. Parker for answers, and she tasked her assistant, DeVuono, with investigating why cannabis was making some users gravely ill. 

As DeVuono patiently explained to me over Zoom, understanding the connection between our brains and our guts—and how THC interacts with both—goes a long way toward explaining what might be happening to people with CHS.

Basically, cannabis alters the normal functioning of the body’s endocannabinoid system, known as the ECS, which regulates things like mood, sleep, stress response, appetite, memory, digestion, and even fertility. While there’s a lot we still don’t know about the human endocannabinoid system and how it works—scientists only discovered it in the 1990s—experts hypothesize its job is keeping the body in homeostasis and thus running smoothly. 

> My attacks lasted about 24 hours on average, but some people can’t stop throwing up for days or weeks, which is when CHS can easily turn deadly.

To send messages throughout the ECS, your body naturally produces molecules called “endogenous cannabinoids” that mimic those found in the cannabis plant, like THC and CBD. (The compounds found in weed—and in the tinctures, edibles, topicals, and other products we now have on the market are called exogenous cannabinoids.) Both types of cannabinoids, endo and exo, bind with receptors found throughout your body to signal to the ECS that it needs to take action. THC specifically has an affinity for one particular receptor—known as CB1 and that interaction is essentially what makes you feel high.

As you might imagine, there are tons and tons of these endocannabinoid receptors in your brain, but DeVuono noted there are also scads of them in our guts. Humans have something called a vagus nerve, which connects your stomach, intestines, and esophagus to your brain. For some, when THC binds with the receptors in their guts, they stop digesting food properly, which over time can cause the gnarly digestive issues I’ve been talking about.

“One of the big questions is, why does this not affect all stoners? Because it doesn’t seem to be everyone, and we actually don’t know the percentage of cannabis users with hyperemesis. That still hasn’t been pieced apart,” DeVuono noted.

We do know that everyone’s distribution of endocannabinoid receptors is different. That’s one of the reasons “it’s kind of hard to know what kind of experience someone’s going to have when they take cannabis, depending on how their receptors are spread out,” DeVuono told me. In other words, this is the science behind why some people prefer certain strains over others it all comes down to how cannabis molecules are tickling your endocannabinoid receptors. DeVuono hypothesizes that CHS could be closely related to anxiety disorders, which tracks, personally.

The Facebook groups preach abstinence as the only “cure” for CHS, and they’re technically right. The only way to make sure you don’t trigger an attack is to abstain. After my latest bout of sickness, I gave up my stash and went cold turkey for a while.

The first few days were rough. I was weepy as hell, having vivid bad dreams and night sweats. Then, with thesage guidance of Brené Brown’s podcast, honestly, I pushed through it and started to feel much better. Things were in focus. I felt calm and present in a way I hadn’t for a while. I had lots more energy, too.

![Bottom](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5TLDNDM1ONsCjNUqDvmrcB/6cb20fc67ce64997da6a51573b87ebc9/Bottom.jpg)

To celebrate a sobriety milestone, I decided to smoke a single joint, pure and simple, on a Friday night while carving a pumpkin and listening to records. It was such bliss. I had so much fun being goofy and dancing around my apartment, terrorizing my dog with my antics. This is why I love weed: for the uninhibited, creative, childlike behavior it helps unleash in me.

I haven’t been perfect, but the path I’m pursuing is what I’ve taken to calling “mindful moderation.” I conscientiously consume on the weekends and holidays, mostly, andI’m buying a lot less from my guy than I used to.

I called Dr. Alex Capano, the first person to earn a Ph.D.in cannabinoid studies, for a gut check about my continued use, since I’d been met with some judgement from family and figured that by putting my behavior in writing I’d be shunned by the Facebook groups. But Dr. Capano was extremely compassionate: “First of all, I’m sorry you’re dealing with that.You’ve found something that’s almost always safe, that was effective in helping you feel better and manage your anxiety. And then you’re one of the unlucky few who gets this side effect. So that sucks,” she said.

Dr. Capano was excited about my “mindful moderation” idea and thought it was a wise treatment plan for CHS provided I could stick to it. “I like that. I think that is appropriate and reasonable and probably going to be a successful solution if someone can, in fact, maintain mindful moderation,” she told me.

She added that research indicates you need chronic, high doses of THC to trigger CHS, so as long as I’m taking regular breaks, I should be okay. “You build a tolerance fast, and you lose it fast as well. So if you are conscientious of that and are really using in moderation mindfully, then I think that makes sense scientifically,” Dr. Capano said.

As they say, “knowledge is power,” and I’ve found everything I’ve learned about CHS and the science of weed to be both empowering and humbling. Understanding what THC does to my body on a molecular level has made it easier to push away cravings and “reset” every week. I want to live a long and healthy life. I also want to reap the benefits of the drug, understanding that it can have side effects.“People really want weed to be this miracle drug, but that’s not the case,” DeVuono told me. “They say you can’t die, so there’s no limit on use.” And so it’s adhering to limits—even if they are self imposed—that I am most hopeful will help me experience cannabis to the fullest.

Cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome (CHS) is a rare illness that afflicts some stoners, wreaking havoc on our digestive systems and causing violent, cyclical bouts of vomiting.  But what is it, and how can it be treated?

Bottom

Harshed Mellow

I’m a cannabis activist, choreographer, and creative director, but I’m best known as a female illusionist from *RuPaul’s Drag Race*.

I consider myself an artist first and foremost, but I like to wear many hats—or many shoes, if you will. Quarantine really pushed me to test my skills and I found out that I can run a light board and do my own set design, and that I really am a one-man band. I feel lucky that my art as a drag queen has been pretty much accepted by the masses and that I’ve been able to create a name and a brand for myself that way.

![UOS 9297](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/kp29jBGa3mL3SLJnJwodv/9746da2bcc78a3cc91afdac79341433d/UOS_9297.jpg)
>Since I was probably seven years old, as Lady Gaga says, I’ve been living for the applause.

I’m originally from Dallas, Texas, and I was very lucky to have extremely supportive parents. I grew up in musical theater and was touring professionally around the United States by the time I was 14. I took it very seriously from an early age, and I was so blessed to have parents that really encouraged this. Whether it was a dance shoe or being able to travel with a company, they made my dreams happen at such a young age. But in a way I was also cursed, I think. As I get older, I think my parents sometimes wished that I could find a normal job and settle down, but I just can’t because this is in my blood. This is what I believe in. Since I was probably seven years old, as Lady Gaga says, I’ve been living for the applause.

[[1]]
[[2]]

My cannabis use began when I was a senior in high school. I had a really great friend, Lauren, who wanted me to explore cannabis with her. She had smoked for several years, but I was always a good boy: I had straight As and parted my hair and wore colored t-shirts. I never broke the rules, but for some reason I really trusted Lauren. I knew that she wouldn’t expose me to something that was dangerous. Her way of introducing me to the plant was for us to go get stoned after school, before our rehearsal. While I didn’t use the term “medicinal,” from day one, cannabis was already in my eyes something that was used to elevate and propel you forward. I fell in love with the plant immediately. In fact, we choreographed a piece together that we ended up performing at the Kennedy Center in front of the president. I became what’s now called a [YoungArts](https://www.youngarts.org/our-alumni) member and a presidential scholar. 

Right away, it was like, *Okay, cannabis equals success*. I never saw it as a bad thing, but I didn’t really see it as what I see it as now. That exploration began in college, because in California, I was able to legally gain access to the medicine and to the knowledge. During a dance piece my junior year of college, I fell and hurt my back. A chiropractor suggested I get my medical license because at that point, I’ll be honest, I was just seeing dealers on campus. And while I knew dispensaries existed, I was still from Texas so that world just seemed like something I’d seen on the TV show *Weeds* and not a real possibility. But once I had a doctor, an actual person in the medical field, tell me that cannabis would really help with pain while getting realigned, I began to take it more seriously. As someone who grew up on antidepressants, things to help with sleep, and all kinds of pharmaceuticals, finding this natural plant that gave me not only the same benefits but more, it became crucial to me to spread this knowledge. 

![13](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/V2T8305fgkKZ0XKfs8WXN/eed18d8cfd00ef1612e05230736cc8a5/13.jpg)
>I prefer to dab because I view this as medicine and so I treat it like medicinal intake.

Growing up as a queer person in a small town with small-minded people was definitely difficult, but I can’t even imagine what it would have been like had I been exposed to cannabis earlier on. I didn’t have to come out of the green closet until I was here in California where most people accept what I do. But back home in Texas, when Laganja became a thing, it was an issue. For many years, I taught children in the dance world and some of the mothers just didn’t understand. I definitely did face conflict, but my activism didn’t really start until I had been on *Drag Race* and got my foot into the cannabis industry.

I would describe myself as most likely manic-depressive, though I’ve never been diagnosed that way. I assume if I were to see Western doctors, that’s what they would say. I find that cannabis really keeps me regulated, it keeps me level-headed. I prefer to dab because I view this as medicine and so I treat it like medicinal intake. I don’t really smoke joints anymore. I will occasionally, but prefer to get my medicine and go. This is not to say that I’m not consuming recreationally—I am. I’m surrounded by people who see me as Laganja and who want to get high with me. But I really do think of it as medicine. I take my dab in the morning, I take my dab in the evening, and I take my dab at night. Yes, I’ll smoke in between here and there, maybe I’ll vape pen a little bit, but it’s really about getting those three dabs throughout the day and utilizing it as medicine.

In fact, the only time I’ve ever been without cannabis was while filming *RuPaul’s Drag Race*. I sent them my medical license under Prop 215 at the time, but due to the company’s laws, it was taken away from me. This ultimately resulted in me having my first and only—knock on wood—panic attack on national television. That’s why I’ve been vocal about it. But I am happy to say that even though it’s not written anywhere in black and white, I know that girls on the show are able to have access to cannabis now. I definitely think I had something to do with that.

[[3]]

I prefer sativas. My favorite brands right now are [Maven](https://www.mavenmvn.com/home), which sponsored my music video “Daddy” and [3C Farms](https://3cfarms.com/), which works with my incredible friend [Adam iLL](https://adamill.com/), who is an amazing straight ally. I like those companies not just because their cannabis is great, but because their morals and their staff all reflect things that are very important to me.

When I came into this, I really didn’t know a lot about the history of cannabis. But I did my research, because as someone who takes this very seriously, it’s important to me to be able to back it up. So, I will just go ahead and say, yes, the reason we have cannabis in California is because of the LGBTQAI+ community. That is a proven fact, it is known. West Hollywood was the first city to relax the laws on cannabis. I believe the Rainbow Bar and Grill was one of the first places that allowed smoking. The lineage of the queer community in cannabis is absolutely there. That’s always something that I try to remind people of because there is so much homophobia in the industry. It really shocks me because the industry wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the queers.

It’s been challenging. I’ve had people boo me off stage, I’ve had companies only hire me one time so that they can say, “Well, look, we did something for gay people.” But I feel very hopeful and very excited for the future. I work with a lot of women and people of color and I think together, their voices plus the queer voices, really are going to outweigh the people in power. 

[[4]]
>The reason we have cannabis in California is because of the LGBTQAI+ community.

What being an activist looks like now is so different from what it looked like in the beginning. It used to be just smoking pot publicly and talking about how it didn’t deter me from doing any activities, but in fact helped me get through my day. Whereas now, I think activism is much more about creating safe spaces. Visibility is one thing, but it’s about taking action and partnering with organizations like the [Last Prisoner Project](https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/) to free people who are in jail for cannabis. I’m trying to not just be a public figure, but to be someone who’s actually in the field doing the work. Obviously, as an entertainer, there’s only so much I can do while trying to keep my audience entertained on the daily, but I always try to infuse my work with my activism. That can be about cannabis, or breaking down sexual stigmas, like I did with a [recent song called “Daddy.”](https://www.lastprisonerproject.org/) I’m always trying to infuse a message into my glamour and my art.

I believe I’m political in just showing up in a room and being who I am, which I think is unusual for most activists. They have to get up on stage, they have to talk, they have to present, but me just showing up in full glam at a cannabis convention is saying a lot. I’ve always felt my strongest suit is my dance. I think I am pretty good with words—my parents are very educated and taught me to care about these things—but I’ve always known that my most powerful form of language is movement and showing up as myself. 

[[5]]

I feel very grateful to be a part of the *Drag Race* franchise. I think it has changed the landscape for queer people forever. Once upon a time, when it aired on Monday nights, it gave people a reason to go to the bar that night and to get together. I’ve always referred to it as gay church because there really is a sense of community that the show has built. I’m so grateful to be a part of that and to have made a lasting impression on the brand. I’m very, very proud.

Drag is incredible. I think it’s one of the hardest art forms out there because it combines not only performance, but also makeup, hair, wardrobe, and sometimes comedy. It’s very much like musical theater in that it is the culmination of so many forms of art. I think that’s why so many people, especially now that they have public access to it thanks to a show like *Drag Race*, have fallen in love with drag. It’s really about expressing your inner diva, and regardless of your gender identity, I think everyone has one. Drag allowed people to explore this. 

It’s been a very powerful thing for me, exploring my gender. Now I identify as non-binary, but who’s to know if that’s going to stay the same. I think the future of drag is non-binary and non-gender. It’s not about what you’re born as, it’s about what you feel and what you want to express. I would have never discovered these things about myself had I not taken on this art form.

![2](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/5kGj7UZBoRKpdeoppEYQFh/1dbdcd8f09452d91f65d80ce7c303886/2.jpg)

***

*This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. [Laganja Estranja](https://www.instagram.com/laganjaestranja/?hl=en) photographed by [Jasmine Durhal](https://www.instagram.com/jassieuo/) at her home in Los Angeles. 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).*

UOS 9316

UOS 9316 copy

UOS 9316 copy 2

I also began exploring drag at a very young age. Growing up in musical theater, I always gravitated towards the female leads. By the time I was 14, I’d been in one of my favorite musicals, Gypsy, maybe six or seven times, and I’d always dream of being Gypsy, the girl who was the stripper. So naturally, when I moved away from Texas to California to get my BFA in dance and choreography from the California Institute of the Arts, I started to explore drag much more seriously. I’d put on dresses and played in my sister’s clothing, but I took it more seriously when I moved to college and was given a landscape in which to explore my gender.

CalArts is one of the best art schools in the country. I’m so lucky that I got an education from that school and was able to not only learn about my art, but also about gender expression and myself. We had a weekly party—every Thursday night—where people would get together in the gallery to see the different art that had been made that week. It was during those parties that I started dressing up. In fact, I would host a *RuPaul’s Drag Race* party where everyone would come to my house in drag and we would view the show. At that point, it was still just a hobby and something that I did for fun. I don’t even think I had a drag name. But by the time I became a senior, I was taking it much more seriously. I entered my first amateur contest out here in Hollywood which kind of launched my career. So, by the time I was presenting myself in public, outside of CalArts, I had already created Laganja and the character of the Queen of Green.

UOS 9480

![Sonder](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/3SjbPRsSHsRbRtWNV1GVxO/4bedfee33075e5cb77b15273190c623e/Sonder.jpg)
>It’s really about expressing your inner diva, and regardless of your gender identity, I think everyone has one.

UOS 9417

![3](//images.ctfassets.net/qal3w7tbm3rt/6bFVXs2ZzVi2YqVr0oazwK/e0f8670ce3326c01c2caa791b2677bf3/3.jpg)

On the beauty of drag, dabbing, and the LGBTQAI+ influence on cannabis.

Laganja Estranja

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

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

Marjon Carlos

Telsha Anderson

adrienne maree brown

Harshed Mellow

Laganja Estranja

High Minded

Babybel

Word Games

Egg Slicers

High Praise

Go With The Stream

Street Appeal

You Can Never Eat Home Again

For people who also smoke weed.