Dear beautiful reader,

Happy Samhain! AND happy one-year anniversary to this newsletter! I would’ve never believed, a year ago, how much joy and life this project would revive back into me. Thank you to all 500+ of you (even if you’re just reading the free emails) for helping make my dream come true, that dream simply being getting to write everyday. I start to cry just thinking about it!

I am ending the first year of my art-making with a bang, unintentionally, as it just so happens that Halloween is unfortunately the three-year anniversary of when I ended my last relationship. This time of the year, which I normally struggle with due to the holidays and such, is never a fun one. It always has me thinking of the past. Thus, once more, I come baring my soul to you... this is 35 pages of the story of my second love, making it officially my longest one yet.

You’ll have to forgive me as I’m incredibly depleted of words at this point… this one completely knocked the wind out of me. I laughed, I cried, I got angry as hell. But I am very, very proud of it!

If there’s a time to upgrade, this is it. Well worth the dollar hehe. It spans our two years together, a little before, and the three years of healing and reflections that followed it. I didn’t hold back (realistically, do I ever?).

This story includes:

• Daring to love again after an abusive relationship

• Both the beauty and the challenges that come with that

• The quirks and oddities of falling in love with someone completely different than anyone you’ve ever met before

• The residual pain and grief that come when a relationship, once a flower in bloom, turns wilted and sour

• The lessons I’ve learned and the cycles I’ve broken (hint: y’all, I’m finally running out of family members to date! Read the story, this isn’t literal, you freaks!!)

As always, my intention is that one person, just one motherfucker out there feels less alone. With that, I hope you enjoy.

Oh! And please email me, I’d love to hear from you. (Also it’s a PDF file again, so email me if that shit is broken.)

Tons & tons of gratitude,
Amy!!!!!

Word count: 24,561
Pages: 35

Glowin’ Reviews from Glowin’ Readers…

Elliot Smith by Amy Lee

I met Thom* at the end of a rocky summer in August of 2019. We were both 25 years old, his birthday coming in a couple of months, which would make him three months older than me. We had been chatting on Hinge, a dating app “designed to be deleted,” for a couple of weeks, interspersedly— with my one foot in, then one foot out, as I was coming off of a taxing year-long situationship with a boy named Joon*.

Joon was a handsome 27-year-old Korean American boy who worked in corporate America as a finance analyst, or something like that. He wore Air Force Ones on all our dates and loved the musician, 6LACK. He also loved sports, so despite having absolute no interest in sports, I tried to learn everything I could about fantasy football. We never even so much as kissed, but we went on many dates, where he would give me his jacket when I was cold and make sure I’d stand on the inner part of the sidewalk for safety. He was the first person to arrive to my 25th birthday party and also, as reserved and shy as he was, once even sent me a sexting-like photo of him and his Calvin Klein boxers! That was weird, especially because our relationship was like two awkward high schoolers who had never even been on a first date. 

He was also heavily depressed. 

And so was I. But I wouldn’t know that until I’d step into Dr. Kim’s office for the first time, almost a year later. 

Known to be a runner and to be the first person to cut off things when I saw any sign of an even yellow-ish flag, I was turning over a new leaf. I was also coming off a year of hooking up and getting chlamydia, so I made a pact to myself to start only dating— like, with emotional intimacy and no sex (at least until I knew things were getting serious). I was also so accustomed to boys putting their hands all over on me on the first date and being quick to move things physically, so when I met Joon, his reservedness made him instantly stand out to me. In fact, he was actually quite intimidated by me and always gave us a 2-foot distance. 

But I liked it. I felt safe, and I liked that he wasn’t sexualizing me. Stiff as beans and having conversations about music and life, we were two kids chatting on the bus again.

One thing I liked about him, most of all, was that up until this point, all the boys I had dated previously were emotionally unavailable but had no clue they freakin’ even were, but Joon was self-aware. After three months of dating, I noticed he would be enthusiastic to talk to me and then slowly just disappear, but not in a ghosting way. More of in a somber, hermit-like way, his answers becoming more curt and dull. When I confronted him about it, he openly admitted that he was heavily depressed, he hated his job, and he was dealing with “tons of other stuff” and that he was ultimately sorry for not being there for me. He said he was open to dating me and seeing me, but at a slow pace similar to that of a budding friendship, as he knew he couldn’t offer something more because he just “wasn’t in the right head space.”

Normally, this type of honesty would have me running for the hills, but as I was moving away from my trauma response of avoidance, his vulnerability was both alarming and endearing to me. I agreed, that we could just be friends, and see how things would pan out. I didn’t realize how during our friendship, I would always secretly be hoping and trying to “fix” him of his depression. I would spend time with him, knowing my feelings were growing more romantically, then get angry or sad that he wasn’t able to reciprocate, and bottle up my feelings until I’d eventually— cut him off. I’d internalize everything because he wasn’t to be at fault— he had told me, after all, that he was depressed and had no capacity to give more, so I was the dummy for wanting more.

So I’d cut him off for a month, then eventually come crawling back because I missed him, and we’d do the whole thing again. Excited to have me back, even as “friends,” we were still dating, with him paying for every meal, or coming over to cook with me, talking about our past and feelings. I was so desperate to cure him I even made him do a guided meditation with me on the floor of my downtown Los Angeles apartment loft.  

At the end of it, he said, in a daze, “I think… I should do that more…”

I smiled. Yes.

Subconsciously, I made everything about why he wasn’t able to heal about my self-worth: maybe if I was prettier, he’d stop being depressed. Maybe if I was skinnier, he’d stop being depressed. Maybe if I knew everything about fantasy football and 6LACK, he’d stop being depressed!

It was a year-long dizzying tango. Date/be friends for a few weeks, then cut him off for a month or two, come back and date/be friends. By the end of the year, all my friends were spent from me talking about him, their analyses being:

“He doesn’t like you. Move on.”
“He does like you, he’s just really depressed.”
“He’s a nice guy, but he’s way too depressed.”
“You can’t change his job, Amy.”
“Amy, 6LACK’s music is so depressing and avoidant… are you sure about this?”

In between, during those months away, I’d begrudgingly go on dates with other Hinge boys, desperate to move on from the Joon spell I was under. But they’d always be lackluster, creepy, or just lame, and I’d find myself back knocking on Joon’s door, metaphorically, at least, because he was so avoidant he never even let me once come over to his place. Too scary for him. He did FaceTime me a tour, at my request, though.

To a fault, I like a challenge. I’m a hard worker, so I liked that I had to work hard for his affection. By the end of the summer in 2019, when I opened my phone’s calendar app to track when our first date had been, I was shocked and disappointed… in myself. What had I been doing? A year of this shit? It was the wake-up call I needed— I woefully blocked him for the last and final time and meanwhile, had been chatting to one final contender named Thom.

“Are you excited for your date on Friday with… Thom?” My friend Mandy* enthusiastically chirped, whilst driving us to lunch one afternoon. She was trying to cheer me up.

“No,” I sighed, looking wistfully out the moving window in the passenger seat, “Because this is what’s gonna happen: we’re going to go on a date, he’s going to end up liking me, but I’m not going to like him, because I don’t like anyone. And then he’s gonna keep badgering me to go out with him again and again. I’ll say no, but that we can be friends, and then he’s gonna get all mad, saying he has ‘enough friends’! And then he’ll block me.” I rolled my eyes, slumped over. “Because that’s what always ends up happening.”

“Jesus, not with that attitude!” Mandy exclaimed. “How about you could have a lot of fun and remember that there are more guys out there than just Joon?”

I looked over at her with a minor glare— girl, you crazy. “Mandy, if this date doesn’t work out, I’m done. I’m deleting all the apps, and if anyone asks me out, I’m saying no. I’m closed for maintenance.”

Looking back, our Hinge conversation was promising, with him asking tons of introspective questions and reciprocating in lengthy block-texts and sharing such similar interests to the point where he had to clarify, “I swear I’m not just copying your answers. I really do love podcasts and self-development too, haha.” 

But I was too jaded, on the cusp of being cynical, from Joon to acknowledge that. Still, there must’ve been something, because even though it was like pulling teeth, I agreed to meet Thom on a Friday night at Resident, a local beer garden and live music venue in Downtown Los Angeles’s Art District, only five minutes away from me. In the Uber drive over, I remember snapping a selfie in the backseat for my Instagram Stories. In it, I was side-eyeing, deadpan, totally over it, and captioned it with a tiny font in the corner: “going on another date, yay…”

Clearly, I was enthused. 

As it was still a balmy warm summer’s night, I wore a brown animal print cropped button-up as a light cover-up, a white ribbed white halter top underneath and denim high waisted shorts with Dr. Marten platform boots and my vintage brown Fendi bag. Long mint green crimped hair adorned my head. I walked up to the airstream serving alcoholic drinks, where I saw a 5’10” guy in a navy striped t-shirt, ripped denim dark capris, and tattered mustard yellow vans, with his hands in his pockets, quiet and shy, perusing the menu.

He looked over at me, and said, “Amy?”

“Thom?” I hesitated. His hair looked different than on the app. On the app, he had worn it shaved and buzzed, often donning a cap or beanie over it. He looked like Dominic Fike to me, who, at the time, who I had a big toxic crush on. Instead, in person, it looked like he had been growing his hair out from the shaved phase, as it was sprouting short and spiky in a very y2k boy band type of way. It was weird, but I liked it. I thought he was cute.

When we started dating seriously, he later confessed to me that he was very embarrassed of his hair that night. His best girl friend even telling him, “I can’t believe you’re going out with that hair on a date!” He said it would only be a weirdo like me, who happened to love y2k fashion trends, that would find him attractive.

And like a weirdo, or a dude experiencing immediate attraction, my cold jaded heart’s defense mechanism was to reduce things to a sexual level, and so I immediately thought, upon hugging him, “Eh, even if I don’t end up liking him, at least I’d fuck him. He’s cute,” I shrugged.

When I told Thom this after we were months-long into a relationship, he shouted, “Hey! That’s rude! You objectified me!” I cackled so hard.

…

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