The cabin was dark. I sat amidst sleeping strangers and a baby crying nonstop. Maybe it was because everything from my hair to the provided blankets smelled like stale coffee that I sat wide awake, staring at the in-flight travel monitor—the only source of light in my vicinity. On the screen, a small airplane hovered less than halfway across its route. Altitude: 40,324 feet. Temperature outside: -65 Fahrenheit. Origin location time: 3 a.m. Time to destination: 8 hours, 13 minutes.
As usual, I was restless. Every squeak and rattle of the cabin brought my heart to my throat—is that the sound of a screw in the plane coming loose? Was that normal turbulence or something else? Why does it keep making that noise? Does the flight attendant seem worried? It’s that squeak again. What was that? With my eyes locked on the little airplane on the screen, one hand clutched around the armrest, I felt a light wave of dizziness that might have been nausea.
Aerophobia is an extreme fear of flying. Those who experience aerophobia can feel anxious over various
Congratulations all, we’ve officially made it the postspring-break sprint! It’s time to spend the next three, two, one weeks casting away all responsibilities and forgetting all that we have learned about ignoring our impulses. I can’t wait to sit and sunbathe (in a uniquely northeastern sense) when the thermometer suprasses 60 degrees. I’m excited to listen to the voices and accept any and all physical activity that crosses my path. And right now, I’m especially enjoying reflecting on the past week of wild wooled creatures, spontaneous sweet treats, and brisk boundless frolicking through the streets. Unfortunately, these visions of spring whimsy are currently playing second fiddle to the three problem sets due tomorrow, and I fear the assignments don’t show any signs of stopping, only evolving into larger final projects. So is it a
aspects of flying: takeoff, landing, or the anticipation of their anxiety about flying. To me, aerophobia is the cold, hollow plane carpet, a constant reminder of the miles of free fall right beneath my feet.
No, no, can’t get sick on the plane. I’ll wake everyone up, make a fool out of myself, and the flight attendants will have to clean up after my mess. I can taste it in my throat. Stop it. Stop it. Not here. I was thousands of miles away from both my departure and destination, surrounded by rows and rows of sleeping strangers, fully detached and alone, spinning deeper and deeper into the spiral. The air in the cabin grew thicker. I needed to escape, go home, get out, but my next taste of fresh air wouldn’t be for over eight hours, a hopeless eternity.
For over ten years, I had to travel between China and the U.S. to attend school and visit family. I boarded endless flights with a throat tight with panic and exited the plane the same way. Rationally, I know that I am much more likely to die from a car ride to the airport than the flight itself, but as with most phobias, aerophobia is
sprint or marathon? Either way, I’ll definitely be choosing the long route to the finish line, taking my sweet time with these last few weeks of my junior year.
This week in post-, our writers are talking about some of the paths they’ve charted in their own lives, short and long. In Feature, our writer explores her fear of air travel and the journeys she has embarked upon between Providence and Beijing. In Narrative, one writer reflects on a car ride where she learned about her recently passed grandmother whom she never met, thinking about the paths that are destined to converge or just miss each other. Meanwhile, the other narrative writer discusses how Barbie dolls have shaped her idea of her own self-image and her journey of self-acceptance. In A&C, a writer reviews Bella Baxter’s monstrous development in Poor Things while the other writer looks back at her sixteenyear-old self as a reflection of her current growth. In
more emotional than rational. Even though my brain tells me not to worry, the dark, airless cabins still find their way into my dreams weeks before the departure date, waking me up with jolts of fear that my bedroom is about to plummet from the sky.
When I first started experiencing aerophobia, I looked up “how to get over fear of airplanes,” which took me to a few narratives of individual endurance and perseverance, stories of people who white-knuckled until their fears simply vanished one flight. It seemed that all I could do was rinse and repeat until my experience caught up to my rational mind, until one day some divine intervention would swoop down and rescue me from the anxious spirals.
Thinking back now, there is nothing wrong with these narratives of aerophobia that go something like, “I was panicking in one flight and totally fine the next,” but they didn’t show me the full picture. For me, my transformation happened not on one magical flight but in the little changes that accumulated in the moments
Lifestyle, our writers are thinking about their Brown identities as one discusses the way she changes with her friends and the other adopts a new Rhode Island motto to guide her worldview. Finally, our crossword is hitting the road on its own automobile journey.
In just a few short weeks, we’ll descend into the indiscriminate purgatory of the spring semester reading period. I’m struggling to prevent myself from planning my so-called spontaneous adventures that I will take as I try to bridge the gap between spring and summer break with more break. Rest assured that if you ever need a break of your own, there is no better one than taking an afternoon to read post-! So grab a copy, settle down for a bit, and enjoy!
between the flights. Over time, these little changes snowballed into something that felt like a true miracle.
***
I found the loveliest subreddit, r/fearofflying, where members cheer each other on and help anxious fliers track their flight routes. In long threads under each anxious post, the comments take turns to assure the flier: I know this is hard, but you are going to do amazing; this airplane model is incredibly safe; you’ll have a great view of the Rockies one hour into your flight; you are crushing it, and so many other planes are flying on the same route as you.
In the last week of a summer program, I found a doodle on my desk depicting my group of friends on a plane together and “No more flying alone!!!” scribbled at the bottom. They were the first group that I felt comfortable talking about my aerophobia with and I still keep the doodle in my journal to this day.
***
A day before the flight, I found myself on a mentor’s sun-speckled balcony that opened to meandering woods and fields. The birch trees dragged long shadows behind them, their leaves growing crisp in the early fall air. Standing at the edge of the terrace, with my palms pressed against the wooden railing still warm from the sinking sun, I stopped thinking about confined airplane cabins for a moment.
I ended up flying with some friends drawn in the “No more flying alone” doodle. For most of that flight, I stood chatting with them at the back of the cabin, exchanging the last bits of summer gossip and spotting sex scenes on in-flight entertainment systems. As we chuckled under the blue-tinted cabin light, my mind only occasionally wandered to the hollowness of the cabin floor, and when it did, I trusted that someone would catch me if I fell.
***
The cabin is dark. I am flying from Boston to Lisbon, then Hangzhou, and finally Beijing, an over 48-hour solo trip that would’ve been my worst nightmare just years ago. But here I am, breathing in and out with ease. Although I’m thousands of feet in midair and thousands of miles from both my departure and destination, I feel grounded. There is an invisible thread connecting me to the people I love and the places I have been. This is the kind of miracle moment that I had hoped for, only it isn’t a miracle; it is people. The threads that ground me did not come from any divine intervention; they came from countless hugs at airports and by car doors.
I still find it hard to trust airplanes, but I trust the people that these threads connect me to, and I trust the solid tugs I feel in the threads, like promises to never let loose. With my mind on a subreddit, a doodle, and a terrace in the open autumn air, I take in one more deep breath and let my feet sink to the airplane floor, fully trusting it with my weight.
I sit in the passenger seat. My mother holds the wheel with both hands, staring ahead at the gray road under a gray sky. I know, without looking up from the electricblue kickboxing wraps I twine around my knuckles, from the accelerations and decelerations of the car, which stoplight we’re approaching. We’ve just passed the strip with Round Table Pizza and Subway and we’re coming up on the freeway entrance. I weave a wrap between my pinky and ring finger, then over the back of my hand. Muscle memory has kicked in. I don’t have to wind and then unwind and then rewind the wrap like a few weeks ago. I affix the Velcro tail to its other end on my wrist.
The car rolls forward at the green light. A low hum from the engine insulates the air. When she begins to speak, my mother’s voice doesn’t distinguish itself from the static. When she says, “My mother died,” I almost
don’t notice. As though I’m twelve feet underwater, only made aware of a falling stone breaking the glassy surface from the ripples passing softly over me. I feel as though I ought to react, to find the stone and swim it back up to air.
“When?”
Her response passes somewhere close to my head. “Yesterday,” she maybe says, or perhaps, “Three days ago.
The car carries us up the freeway ramp. In ten minutes, I’ll be punching the body-sized bag suspended from the ceiling.
“How did it happen?”
“Stevie found her. Maybe she was drinking. Maybe her heart.”
As our metal canister shuttles us onward over flat gray pavement, we gaze in parallel toward the horizon. The lanes converge to a point somewhere far ahead, as
“They should make a grill called manic pixie dream grill.”
“I think dyslexia lets me see beyond the standard modes of communication.”
if all the cars in their obedient single-file lines will merge into one single atom. Inside my mouth is a thick, stuffy substance, and it expands down into my throat, lungs, stomach, toes. Maybe it’s my blood, turning to cotton. Or maybe it’s the accumulating volume of words too indistinct and nebulous to distill onto my tongue. My kickboxing bag shifts and thuds around on the car floor. A loose part of the windshield wiper rattles against the windshield.
I’ve let the stone sink. Its ripples are no more than fading imprints on my skin. My mother puts the car into park and says goodbye as I shut the door and round the corner into the kickboxing studio.
My parents leave for Maryland several days later. Their departure hardly ruffles the household: They pack quickly and lightly, and they speak minimally about airport logistics. My mother scrubs the counter and runs a laundry cycle to ensure relative cleanliness upon her return. My father wakes up early on the morning of the flight to go on a run. They double-check that I have a key and enough leftovers to last their absence. We slide in and out of embraces and then they wave and disappear into their ride to the airport.
While I microwave dinner at home, in Hagerstown, my mother crosses the threshold into her childhood home for the first time in 20 years. Hurrying about the living room are her brother, her sister, and her uncle and his partner. Open cardboard boxes litter the floor, filled to the brim with photographs and clothing and trinkets and art and letters and jewelry and kitchenware. Beside them are hulking, black trash bags out of which are spilling the same hoard, in duplicates, in astonishing excess. Pat, the uncle’s partner, sorts materials into boxes or bags with machine-like ferocity. She lifts, examines, stows, each step allocated the same fragment of attention before steamrolling onto the next. The sister and uncle linger more, placing hands gently on each object in the hopes that a texture might trigger a recollection. The brother lingers longest. Clings to things. Allows them to be pried from his clawing fingers.
My mother’s engine turns on. She mobilizes, mechanizes. She upturns couch cushions and unearths single dollar bills that add up to hundreds, maybe thousands. She fills a trash bag, ties it off. Presses the folds of cardboard over jutting edges of books and picture frames. Reaches into a coat pocket, pulls out fistfuls of cigarettes and receipts and gum wrappers and notes scribbled onto the torn-off corners of newspaper pages. Pulls paintings off of walls. Shines a flashlight under her childhood bed. And boxes and boxes and bags and bags grow pregnant with the house’s decaying intestines.
My mother goes to sleep. The next morning, she and my father dress in black. He makes a coffee, and she takes a hurried sip. They step onto the premises of Rest Haven Funeral Home and Cemetery. Her brother, sister, uncle, and uncle’s partner form a semicircle into which she slots. A casket lowers into a hole. They all depart from the grounds together and disperse to their respective hotels.
My father arrives home a few days before my mother. In Hagerstown, she and her siblings divide boxes between them and sign documents regarding the estate.
She touches down in Los Angeles, emerges from the airport doors, identifies my father and me in the car, and she comes to us. I feel the thickness in my mouth again, and I choose to distract myself from it; I offer to play music. A sound soft and nonintrusive, that might distill some of those words that I could not before and cannot still—that might distill them into something resembling a sentiment.
The song seeping from the car speakers is liquid. I swim, for a moment, in its lilts and undulations, its cool washes. When I turn to my mother, she seems to float away on its low, slow waves. Distant as a raft on the horizon.
Her eyes were a bright, beautiful blue, just like the sky.
Her hair was perfectly blonde, like the golden rays of sunshine.
Her skin was pale, a milky and pure complexion.
The plastic doll was propped up against my wall, her arms precisely positioned on her hips to highlight her slender waist. Her body was curvy, but not so curvy that she looked anything more than slender. She had long, lean legs and small, delicate arms, accentuated by her striped kneelength skirt and sleeveless top. Her smile was undeniably gorgeous—soft, genuine—and her gleaming white teeth contrasted nicely with the pastel pink lipstick on her lips. Her body language expressed a confidence untainted by others’ criticisms.
She wasn’t worried about what others thought of her, and she probably never would.
She stared at me with her plastic smile, but something about her seemed real to me. I stared back, trying to imitate the perfect “soft smile” my role model sported. I then carefully put one hand on my hip, paying special attention to exactly how her fingers looked. I was about to place my thumb so that it wrapped around my waist but quickly stopped myself, realizing that would be wrong. The position would push my shoulders back too much, making me seem over-confident.
No one likes over-confidence.
I tried again, noticing that her hand was placed flat against the outer edge of her hip flexor, and her shoulders were only slightly back—just far enough to show she had good posture. Placing my shoulders was the most difficult—even when I felt they were pushed back the perfect amount, in the mirror they were either the slightest bit too far forward or too far back. I moved on, attempting to imitate her stance, crossing my right foot neatly over the left with a slight gap between the two. She looked so natural in this position, but I felt like I was walking a tightrope, leaning left and right trying to keep my balance and not end up face down on the floor.
Her smile seemed almost condescending at
this point.
As though she was laughing at my attempts to be like her.
I wanted to impress her.
I ran to my closet and grabbed the nicest skirt, top, and shoes I could find. I loved my outfit, but when I placed myself in front of her, I realized I was no match for her.
I took her into my hands, feeling along her midline for any bumps that would give away her seemingly flat stomach, but I couldn’t find any. I compared my body to hers as I stood in front of the mirror, hoping that she was not too superior to me—that at least some part of me was identical. My arms were slightly bigger and more defined than hers. Her upper body curved in as it approached her small waist; mine had no curve because my waist was too big, my shoulders too wide.
My overly muscular, “bulky” thighs only stood out more as I held her next to me. Hers were long, lean, and beautiful, clearly not shaped by squats or weights, but rather toned with pilates or yoga.
Even her hands were better than mine. Her fingers were long and smooth, mine rough and battered—my imperfections easily noticeable.
I took one more look at her face, only to confirm that my nose was far too big and my pimples much too obvious compared to her clear, flawless complexion.
The real difference was in more obvious physical features. My dark skin, dark hair, and brown eyes were leaps and bounds away from her golden hair, sky blue eyes, and light skin. Regardless of how much white foundation or blonde hair dye I used, I would never look like her.
She was perfect in every single way. I only dreamed of being like her one day.
She started slowly sliding down my wall, her stance not supporting her well enough to stay upright. Her feet slipped forward, and her torso bent slightly allowing her body to begin sinking onto my desk, where she stood. I quickly reached toward her, not wanting her to lose the perfect stance that I had created for her.
She is my mirror.
I need her.
I frantically straightened her torso back to its original position and adjusted her head so her chin tilted slightly upward as if to commend me for not letting her—my dear role model—collapse in my sight.
I tried to fix her stance, placing one foot in front of the other as it was before, but every time, I failed to keep her torso from bending.
For so long, she was my mirror, the person I wanted to see in my reflection.
Now, she is slipping away from me.
My hands begin to tremble as I fidget with her arms, legs, and torso. It is a struggle I have never really encountered before. Completely flawless just minutes before, she now seems to resist my efforts to stand her upright.
Her perfect stance is gone, now just two feet side by side.
She has a bent-forward body where her elegant posture used to be.
Her head is tilted slightly downwards as if to accept defeat.
This isn’t the Barbie I know.
“It’s alright.” she seemed to say to me.
You Will Get There Someday.
I am going to England this summer. It will be my first time outside of the United States—my mom and I will fly out of Georgia over the Atlantic Ocean together, both giddy and terrified. She will grip my hand hard if there is turbulence, and I will comfort her while secretly losing it. In preparation, still about a month or two out, we are securing all the “TSA Pre-Check” programs under the sun, and I have an interview with the government in Boston next week. Over spring break, she hands me my passport, and I thumb through its pages to my photo. I am 16, wearing a bright orange sweater and sporting a deep side part. My hair is a darker brown than it is now, and I remember I had just dyed over the several blonde highlights I had rocked since 14, awkwardly caught between trying to blend with the Southern beauty queens and establishing my individuality. It was good riddance—I had never really liked being blonde. I had just started filling my eyebrows in; they are bold and uneven. There is a string of pearls around my neck—a 2020 microtrend. I remember watching Harry Styles' music videos with my friends at the time and liking the aesthetic of his pearls, though I looked more like a grandma in them. It feels humiliating to say these things now, with 2020 trends so freshly uncool, but I find myself struck by this image of teenage me, the roots of myself as I know her now just sprouting into the light. Lately, I have thought a lot about then and about being 16.
A few days after my sophomore year of high school essentially ended, when the pandemic began in full throttle, I stayed up until midnight and waited for Animal Crossing: New Horizons to drop. Having been raised on Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the 3DS version, I was at the front of that trend. During that first week of lockdown, I averaged around seven hours of Animal Crossing a day. It was madness, but I was ecstatic. I’d hop in the car, freshly licensed, scream my favorite song(s) on
the five-minute drive to the Mexican restaurant in my neighborhood, inhale two soft tacos, and then log onto the Animal Crossing turnip stock market on my computer. In the evenings, I would go on a two-hour bike ride and put on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, an album I had recently discovered—probably from some Rolling Stone “Best Albums of the Decade” list I saw on Twitter—and gleefully circle my empty high school to “Pink + White.” It was picturesque, and it was wonderful. In those moments, I was 16 and alone and without a care in the world.
I cut my hair short that summer and went to the beach. There, I discovered the song “Liability” by Lorde, which led to my discovery of the album Melodrama, which led to an obsession so intense and passionate that I now honor the album with a spot on my bedroom wall. I watched every YouTube video I could find of the Melodrama tour and decided I would be the next Jack Antonoff: the producer for Lorde, not to mention Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Clairo, and St. Vincent. I went cliffjumping with my friends and, after we accidentally passed through a Trump boat rally on the way there, thought about how I was pro-choice and hated Trump and felt disgusted by my hometown’s political attitude. I liked long drives and the way the Georgia golden hour light hit the summer leaves and the heat lightning flashing through the orange evening sky and the Mitski song about it. I wore sweaters and corduroys and T-shirts and my brand-new Doc Martens loafers. I jumped at the chance to go shopping in Atlanta and imagined myself as a city girl.
Driven by my newfound independence, I decided I wanted to go to a school called Brown because it sounded smart and far away, and I liked the idea of an “Open Curriculum.” I watched student vlogs on YouTube and felt my chest burn with excitement—the anxiety was yet to come. During my junior and senior years, I would have to close my laptop at any mention of Brown lest I feel sick. I took AP BC Calculus my junior year and studied manically for the exam to “Roman Holiday” by Nicki Minaj. I surprised myself by getting into a prestigious summer camp. On the way there, we stopped in Atlanta and stayed in a hotel across from a high-rise in midtown. I watched a small house party through the huge windows as I fell asleep and thought about how promising my future could be.
At 16, I was the happiest I had ever been, and again, at 20, I feel the happiest I have ever been. Maybe that is why I have been thinking about being 16 so much—a strange nostalgia for a blanket feeling you once felt and are now feeling again, like when you listen to an old song you loved and remember the past events with which it was associated. If I took my passport photo again today, I’d have dark hair, but with bangs now, and my eyebrows would be filled in better. No pearls, but I’d still probably be wearing a sweater. If 16 is hope, then 20 is its realization. Funny how those adolescent hopes and interests have hardly changed. I just declared my political science major and have taken several music theory and production classes at Brown. I still seize any chance for adventure, whether it be cliff-jumping at Clarks Hill Lake or snowboarding in Vermont. I take solo road trips to see my friends in college across the state. Funnily enough, I will even see Nicki Minaj in concert next Monday.
There’s a Lorde lyric (I would know)—“all the music you loved at sixteen, you'll grow out of”—and I wonder if it is true. I think about my Mom’s love for Tom Petty and The Outsiders and think maybe not. 16 is a special year of self-actualization that we struggle to fully let go of. It doesn’t matter if it has been four years or 41. I think about 20’s relation to 16 as two years carefully balanced on the center of a seesaw towards a concrete end—in my case, graduating high school and graduating college. I draw the comparison between 16 and 20 as times when I have both been happy in my reality and desperately hopeful for the future—and consequently as times when I have been most moldable by the media I consume. Yet 16, as the first time, will always be special.
On a spring break trip to Cape May, my friends and I cook dinner together and then gather on the couch. Somebody suggests we watch music videos. I take the remote and put on Lorde’s “Perfect Places,” a vibrant anthem about youth and self-exploration. Amidst spliced together shots of her at 19 wearing couture dresses on the beach, she dances alone with a lightbulb, swinging by a cord from the ceiling. I think about the first time I watched it, thinking she was so cool in my bedroom at 16, and now, suddenly older than her, at 20. When it's over, I tell my friends it's my favorite music video, and I think it might always be.
making a monster
because
sometimes a family is a mad scientist, his intern, and a woman reanimated as her own child
by AJ Wu Illustrated by Stella TsogtjargalI wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going to the Avo I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect going to the Avon to watch Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest revelation, Poor Things. For the uninitiated, Poor Things is an anachronistic, futuristic, Frankenstein-inspired tale of a physician, Godwin Baxter, who reanimates the body of a pregnant suicide victim with the brain of her unborn fetus and renames her Bella Baxter.
Poor Things is a mesmerizing exploration of the cruelty of creation and parenthood and it drips with so much humanity, it’s at times difficult to witness. My initial feelings of disgust gave way to wonder, electrifying fear, and anticipation for Bella’s future. Some have described Poor Things as a female—or even feminist—version of Frankenstein, even though Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein already has overtly feminist themes. I recently reread Frankenstein for a class I’m vagabonding this semester (shout-out ENGL511K Terrible Births: The Novel Out of Romanticism), so it was at the forefront of my mind as I reflected on Poor Things
Shelley herself was surrounded by the violence and tragedy of childbirth. She lost her daughter in infancy. Her own mother, influential feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died while giving birth to her. In Shelley’s text, the birth of Frankenstein’s creature is also a tragedy. Frankenstein is torn apart by his disgust over his unnatural parenthood, and his creature is rejected from the moment of his birth. However, Frankenstein’s creature manages to forge an identity for himself by reading prolifically from works like Paradise Lost and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Frankenstein has been characterized in many ways; most commonly as Gothic, sometimes Romantic, but I think bildungsroman (or coming-of-age) is one of the most accurate ways to describe both Frankenstein and Poor Things Poor Things builds upon the themes of unnatural births, adolescence, and the faces of monstrosity, and runs away adeptly with many more.
Mentally, Bella Baxter rapidly develops through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and womanhood in a fully adult body. She’s bright, eccentric, spontaneous, and hungry for the world. She takes some grotesqueries for granted, like the death and dismemberment that accompanies surgery, having known nothing different under Godwin’s care. Others, like poverty and the inhumane conditions of slums, are shocking and drive her wild with devastation. Her intellectual and moral development, like all of ours, is shaped by her environment, her caretakers, and the books she pores over to educate herself. The movie seems to ask unsubtly: “Don’t we all at some point in adolescence feel like a child in an adult’s body, learning about how cruel and sharp the world really is?” Bella’s coming-of-age is brilliant and human and real as she becomes a fiercely independent and free-thinking, autonomous woman of the world.
At the same time, it is viscerally uncomfortable and disturbing to watch various men take advantage of Bella’s naivety and sexual desires. This is particularly true for the womanizing Duncan Wedderburn, an attorney who persuades Bella—then with the mental age of perhaps a 12-year-old—to elope with him and travel the world, where they have rambunctious sex (or “furious jumping,” as Bella calls it) in every hotel, boat,
plane, train, and automobile they happen upon.
Unsurprisingly, there’s criticism about the movie being “male-gazey” or a gross vision of male fantasy. One of many Letterboxd reviewers expressing a similar sentiment writes, “It’s not about mothers and daughters though, because it was directed by a man with a screenplay by a man that’s based on a book by a man.” Frankly, I think discourse over whether men are capable of creating compelling stories about women is uninteresting. That said, I don’t believe that the movie is particularly feminist or anti-feminist. There’s much evidence in Lanthimos’ body of work that he is less interested in improving his feminism and more so in treating his women—like all his characters—as tools used to poke and prod at both the grotesque and beautiful underpinnings of the human condition. Sometimes these portrayals can also be empowering, but it’s difficult to believe that it’s intentional. After we watched Poor Things, my friend, who also enjoyed the movie, remarked that despite Bella’s sexual liberation, the movie seems to miss the mark on female sexuality. Instead, she said, Bella discovers sex and understands it “like a man.”
Where Poor Things really shines is in exploring monstrosity, the cruelty of creation, the burdens and obligations of parent and child dynamics, and what we all owe to one another. There’s something captivatingly simple about this. Parents hurt and irreversibly shape their children in numerous ways—and frequently that coexists with the internal dissonance of loving one’s parents in spite of everything. Creating life is always violent; the mechanics of creation in Frankenstein and Poor Things are simply dialed up to the max. Frankenstein’s creature is an unnatural, tragic birth. So is Bella Baxter. That doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the nurturing and kindness any child deserves to receive from their creator.
Monstrosity in the film is also deliciously complex. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein had a loving home and family. He was a brilliant and beloved scientist driven by hubris to create a monstrous new life that he then promptly abandoned. The realization “Frankenstein actually is the monster” has been worn out from discussion in every high school English class. In Poor Things, Godwin is the carved-up brute while his creation is an ever-radiant Emma Stone. His father, a renowned and eccentric surgeon himself, experimented on Godwin throughout his youth. His father canonically pinned his thumbs in an experiment to slow bone growth and branded his genitals with hot irons in the name of science. At one point, Godwin explains that he has to make his own gastric juices because his father took out his oxyntic and pyloric glands. Max McCandles,
his protégé and Bella’s eventual husband, asks, “Why in God’s name would he do that?” Godwin responds drily, “To discover what no one knew. Turns out we need them. Ideally.”
Temperament-wise, Godwin is surprisingly gentle and paternal, even as he’s shunned by the world for his monstrosity and ashamed of his own ugliness. He has more in common with Frankenstein’s creature than with Victor Frankenstein himself. His loneliness and desperation for a companion (whether or not he recognizes it as his motivation for creating another terrible birth) parallels that of Frankenstein’s creature’s desperation for a female companion of his own kind to provide him the comradery the rest of the world refuses him. In many ways, Godwin and Bella’s relationship is a gutwrenching depiction of inherited trauma and hurt. As Godwin’s father experimented on him, Godwin experiments on Bella. The Baxter men are supposed to be calculating, emotionless, and brilliant. However, the difference is that as Godwin spends more time with Bella, he realizes that she is both like a daughter to him and her own independent person. He reads bedtime stories to her and sews emergency money into her dress. When Bella outgrows him and elopes with Duncan, Godwin—devastated—says to McCandles, “I…she is a being of free will.”
Bella sees the world, develops intellectually, and decides to become a surgeon herself. As Godwin dies of cancer, she returns home to visit him. She confronts him about all the lies she realized he told her about her origins to cover up his experimentations. In her absence, Godwin and McCandles have reanimated another woman with the brain of her baby because, well, they missed Bella. Bella is sickened and calls them both “monsters.” She eventually softens and forgives Godwin, and before he dies, she tells him, “I am finding being alive fascinating so I will forgive you the act, but always hate the lies and trapping that followed.” Godwin smiles, leaves her his surgical practice, and dies.
At this pivotal point in the movie, I was terrified that Bella would put Godwin’s brain inside a new body in order to give him a torturous version of immortality. She has all the surgical tools and expertise as well as the fresh dead body of her ex-husband (long story). It is the kind of experimentation that a younger Godwin would have done—and had done to Bella—with no hesitation, under the belief that giving life is always the best scientific course of action. She doesn’t do it. Instead, she lets him go. She disrupts the cycle of intergenerational trauma and, with the full capacity of her personhood, forges her own path forward.
If Punxsutawney Phil was right, as he always is, spring is well under way. That should mean that this return from Spring Break marks a period of rejuvenation. I left the bulk of my coats at home and switched them for garments that liberated my knees. Soon, the Main Green will be my go-to spot to sip my Blue Room iced coffee and play lawn games. To me, spring is a much more motivating time to refresh oneself than January’s New Year.
My spring wardrobe and spikeball net are not the only things coming out of hibernation. Spring is a transitional season, the mental preparation for the heat to come. Therefore, I think everyone should adopt their own aphorism, a saying to guide them through the changes ahead. As a result, I am proud to launch my spring motto: Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer
Approximately a month ago, I was sitting in my VISA 0100 class learning about color theory when my professor said, “It’s like Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer.” They were referring to colors having hues that are cooler and warmer. For example, a grape purple is much cooler than a wine purple. However, the way they announced this to the class is what packed the punch. We have a relatively relaxed learning environment, but the studio was silent as my professor declared, “It’s like Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer.” The phrase has been helpful as I move through my acrylic paintings, sure, but the thing is, I have yet to go a single day without saying to myself, "Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer."
For some context, my professor did not come up with this saying: it was a part of a confusing marketing campaign released in 2016 by Rhode Island's Commerce Corporation. They sought to promote Rhode Island as a tourist destination and spur economic growth. They wanted to convey that Rhode Island has attractions that are “cooler,” as in the sunglasses-wearing emoji, while having a “warmer” welcoming atmosphere. So why does a failed media campaign from 2016 have such a grip on my brain? For a state promotional slogan, it is pretty terrible––many found it puzzling and incredibly silly (derogatory). The project became the source of inspiration for regional memes and the butt of many jokes. If I was aware of Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer when it
debuted, it probably would have been via a BuzzFeed compilation of tweets to which I inaudibly chuckled at, and never thought about again. However, for the spring, it’s all that’s been on my mind.
Being cooler and warmer is less of a lukewarmness, a combination, but more so a simultaneous ability to see both sides like Chanel. Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer is so vague, with no real substance, yet it is specific because it only applies to around 1,200 square miles. It’s one of those sayings where you can project everything onto it. Initially, I thought the phrase was purely a reference to Rhode Island’s coastal climate that’s milder than the rest of New England because I’m from a town that only wants to talk about its microclimate. However, as I mutter these five words to myself every day, I have come to realize why I am so drawn to it. Spoiler: it’s not about the microclimates.
The primary reason for my infatuation with Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer is that I love bromides with a burning passion, and Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer seems to encapsulate my favorites: Trust the Process, Teamwork Makes the Dream Work, and Capture the Dream. Together, they form a motivating cycle—if I trust the process, I can work collaboratively, which makes my dreams come true, which I then have attained because I trusted the process, and so on. I keep these sayings at the forefront of my mind because they help me maintain a balanced rhythm. Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer, because of its push and pull, is another grounding phrase. Again, it’s not a mottled mess, but a dual perspective. I also admit it's a bunch of baloney. However, its silliness (affirmative) lets me pause and not take myself too seriously.
There have been numerous times this semester when I was unsure of why I was where I was—and whether being at Brown was worth it or not. My discomfort came from a social standpoint because I feel like for the past two or so years, I’ve met people and then left before I ever really got to know them. This stems from taking a gap year after high school, where I only stuck around for a month or so in any given place, and then from transferring to Brown. I think I’ve met more people in the past two years than I had in the previous 18. While I feel fortunate to have had such opportunities, I often question why I would uproot myself so many times.
Over spring break, I visited my old campus. My ID still worked and I slept in my former bed. It was easy to feel comfortable slipping back into the routine of my previous life. My authentic smile and genuine laughs were a reminder that I have no inside jokes in Rhode Island yet, not in the way they existed in California. After transferring, it felt like I was getting cooler, farther away, from my supposed path in life by not sticking to any one location. I was socially content before, so in that respect there was no need to start from scratch. Then I remember that I’ve wanted to come here for as long as I knew what college was. I spent so many days at my old school walking away from a class frustrated because nothing happened. Everyone would joke about transferring, knowing they would never have the courage to actually do it. I feel warmer knowing that my dream has become a reality, and the reality met my expectations. I finally am proud of where I am. I have not settled for in-between—I have both perspectives, and by having both, they stabilize each other.
Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer would not fulfill its duties as my spring motto without completely opposite and unserious applications to counteract the gravity it holds. Small daily tasks like munching on a corn muffin get a Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer. Walking down George Street instead of Waterman to get to the RISD Museum? Sometimes Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer. Going to Andrews so that I can stockpile coffee milk cartons in my minifridge? Of course Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer It makes sense to me when I say it, but I would have trouble explaining all the seemingly random times I mutter it to myself.
This spring, I am not necessarily encouraging everyone to whisper to themselves Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer on every staircase they climb in a day. Well, I kind of am, but the purpose is not to promote this phrase in particular. You need to find your own Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer—an incantation to cast as we embark on the last month of classes; a reminder that is maybe incoherent to others. As is with most things, it is about the mindset and approach. So go out, and Rhode Island: Cooler and Warmer
to grow with one another
Now that I'm in college, where it feels as if I meet new people in waves throughout the day, I worry I'm not choosing who I can be, but instead matching the personalities of others. It can be exciting to navigate the journey of being your most authentic and genuine self, but occasionally I stray into a different persona that matches the current language and composure of whomever I’m talking to. Sometimes, I do this to the point where I almost don’t recognize myself at all.
In the most broad sense, it feels like conforming yourself as you would for an interview. As someone just beginning to grow into their own—concentrating in what I’d like, experimenting with pink tights and flowy skirts, and becoming friends with people who make me endlessly double over laughing—it’s jolting and quite disorienting to be told to practice a script, plaster on a smile, and act as if this marketing internship in Ohio is predestined.
I put on my lightest face of makeup in the morning before my first interview, silently practicing my starting lines so my roommate doesn’t wake, desperately willing my hands to stop perspiring as if someone is chasing me. Deep down, this act of being tested blurs the vision of my own identity. Do I really like this area of study or is it the most convenient? Am I actually a college sellout?
So, when I step into the office, offer them my resume with my softest yet most assertive smile, and answer their interview questions perfectly (I spot a
smile emerging from the corners of their mouths), I feel satisfaction, but also overwhelming unease. Is this what the rest of my life will become? A facade in the real world where all I really feel is a lack of belonging?
But then again, what do I know? For now, I know how I fit in the outside world: I am meant to be soft and understanding, but forward when I feel like my opinions aren’t heard; I am to be hardworking and detail-oriented to the dot, but also to let other people help me in times of need; I am to be lovingkindmysteriousinnovativetallbeautifulfit so all of the corporations and friends will love me and I will love them back.
I’ve spent endless nights wondering how someone would really get to know me to the point of affection, desire, and maybe even love. The only romantic trope that would ever work for me is friends to lovers. Coming to college, with a sea of new people to meet and smile at and flirt with, none have gone farther than a few dates or a few dimly lit nights in my room. I’ve never felt enough chemistry, or I’ve felt consumed with too many nerves to be able to hold a nice conversation. Most times, our ideal relationships haven’t aligned.
I found myself (and others) trying to conform to what the other person wants, and because of this, my feelings have gotten hurt, more than once, to the point where I have deemed myself unlovable or not lovable enough to be worthy of a steady relationship.
But life, to my dismay, is the most unpredictable, turbulent, and startingly joyous journey to be a part of. So, when I realized that my best friend had feelings for me and I shared them too, so many pieces of my self-love and self-worth made sense. I realized that even if I wanted to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, I couldn’t anymore. I had revealed too much of my true self—with my over-the-top jokes and acting like a child when begging to go on a coffee run—to go back and
correct it. I found someone who not only likes me for all of my jokes and flaws, but whom I feel incredibly comfortable with, drastically different from my previous relationships.
The peace I feel with her now shouldn’t be so jarring, because when I lie with her—whether doing homework late at night, falling asleep at 9 p.m., or watching her wake up in the morning after insisting she wasn’t tired—I know that whenever I have felt lost, she had been waiting and learning about me. Not because she had to, but because she wanted to.
Even now, months later, I find myself shy around her, looking away whenever she gives me a heartfelt compliment or goes out of the way for an act of service, knowing it’s my favorite love language to receive. It makes my toes curl, my nose scrunch, and my cheeks turn red. She’s patient with me when I’m not sure what to say, always waiting for me to speak instead of talking over me. She’s good at letting me reveal more about myself—the hidden pieces I hadn’t dared to share with anyone else up until now with her. She makes me so indescribably upbeat and peaceful, and for that, I must thank her. With her, there is no conforming, only growing, learning to be more comfortable, confident, and strong enough to embrace myself without fail.
As I continue to grow, falling over at times but getting back up with a laugh, I’m learning to be my authentic self from the start—without the buildup of having to peel away layer by layer, month after month, to finally reveal who I am to people. But knowing myself and the speed at which I let people really get to know me, I remind myself to be happy with how far I’ve come and give myself some grace. I know that those who care for me will love me regardless, and slowly but surely, those uncanny parts of me I hold so close will be let go, and into their embrace.
“It is an indirect language that reduces and compresses large emotions into tangible pieces that can be contemplated and processed slowly, long after the event or people have moved through my life. It is often in this language that I can finally find understanding and expression for my slow, dimi-witted love.”
Joyce Gao, “The Peripheral View” 4.7.23“There’s something comforting in knowing another person, whether I know them or not, will read these words and understand me a bit better. Or perhaps they’ll read these words and not care, because honestly, why should I expect them to? There are just things, emotions, thoughts, glimpses, memories, feelings, images, tastes, smells, conversations, experiences that I need to write about. And they won’t leave me alone until they’re out. I can always breathe better afterward.”
