Elena: Forced out of the interpersonal stage

A life-or-death decision that catalyzed profound personal transformation.

Athena statue in the MIT Great Court. Photo (CC) Madcoverboy

Elena was a witch.

She was also an experimental physics graduate student, doing something important with the fractional quantum hall effect, which had just been discovered.

For my story, that she was a physicist doesn’t signify, except as evidence that she was smart and interesting.

For this story,¹ her being a witch matters mainly in that I was also a witch,² which is how I met her.

It was at a Neopagan May Day ritual held in the Great Court at MIT. Elena presided as High Priestess. We circle-danced around the three-story-tall statue of Athena, pagan goddess of wisdom, at the center of the Court. The ritual culminated in a symbolically sexual game of tag, during which she persistently pursued me.

We had extensive non-symbolic sex later that day. Twice. In her bedroom: rather than right there and then on the Great Court lawn, as she had seemed to intend.

Puzzled, I asked her when we were done: “Why did you pursue me so avidly in the ritual?”

“I am intensely physically attracted to you,” she said.

I must have looked shocked. This possibility was not part of my conceptual or emotional understanding of how the world works.

“Well, I do also like you, but that wasn’t the reason.”

Three days later, she told me she had fallen in love with me.

She also told me that a month earlier she had been hospitalized following an unsuccessful suicide attempt.

---

This post presents the first in a series of true stories illustrating ways romantic relationships can catalyze adult developmental stage transitions.

These are major psychological reorganizations that replace one overall way of thinking, feeling, and relating with a different one. The transitions are profoundly, pervasively confusing. Everything you had taken as most certain and important comes into question.

Eventually, you must subordinate your fundamental commitments in life to a completely different way of being. That requires new, alien ways of understanding, and quite different personal priorities. Transition is cognitively and emotionally difficult. It is often painful, and generally takes several years.

Because romantic relationships are so important for us, they may provide a container, an arena, or catalyst for these transitions. Ideally, romantic partners can support each other through the wrenching changes. We can provide insight, consolation, and encouragement.

All romantic relationships also include conflicts. Ideally, understanding interpersonal differences, and working together to resolve frictions, provides useful opportunities for reflection on one’s self and one’s way of being. That is the best source for the insights that enable growth into a more sophisticated way of being.

So a good relationship, a collaboration based on mutual respect, can smooth stage transitions. They may be confusing still, but relatively pain-free.

Alternatively, the distress of a dysfunctional relationship can force a stage transition. Feeling stuck in a relationship that makes you miserable, and isn’t improving despite your best efforts, shows that the way you are being doesn’t work. Superficial adjustments fail. Eventually you decide everything you are doing, everything you are, is wrong. But what would be right? That is still inconceivable. This may send you into a nihilistic depression. (Although that’s not always necessary.)

Eventually, you piece together glimpses of an alternative mode of being, of relating, of feeling, of organizing yourself and your commitments. You find the way forward. It is still painful, confusing, uncertain, but there is movement. And eventually triumph, when you recognize you have accomplished and stabilized the new you.

My understanding of developmental stage transitions has, at times, been tremendously helpful for me in making sense of my self and relationships and life in general. It has provided a framework guiding forward movement; growth. However, it was often difficult to see how to apply the theory in practice, in my own difficult situations.

A series of case studies

Case studies may be useful. My hope is that narrating several actual stage transitions, catalyzed by romantic relationships, may help you make connections between theory and practice. Many of the stories are from my own experience, because that’s what I know best. However, these are not autobiography for its own sake; and some are about other people’s relationships, not mine.

All the stories are mainly true, because true details make theoretical understanding vivid. However, I have changed names and some details to protect the participants’ privacy. And, any account of a long-term romantic relationship must omit much of what was important about it at the time. I’ve included only aspects relevant to understanding how they catalyzed stage transitions.

I’ve also fictionalized minor points to amuse myself, and you. For example, there is no colossal statue of Athena in MIT’s Great Court. However, I discovered while doing the background research for this post that the Court’s designer had intended to install one, but ran out of money. I think that’s a great pity, and it should be rectified now.

This post recounts how my relationship with Elena forced me forward out of stage 3, toward stage 4. In each post in the series, I’ll sketch just enough of the theoretical framework to show how it illuminates the event. In this case, that’s the basic meanings of “stage 3” and “stage 4.”

At some point, you may want to get a better understanding of the framework overall. I’ve written about it extensively elsewhere. You could start with my summary. I also recommend a short, clear, non-technical book, Philip M. Lewis’ The Discerning Heart, which I’ll quote in this post.

From 2 to 3

Before continuing the story of Elena, I’ll rewind a bit. To understand stage 3, it’s helpful to contrast it with the previous stage 2.

I arrived at university a year early, having skipped eighth grade. Partly for that reason, I had had zero romantic or sexual experience in high school. And partly for that reason, I was still at stage 2 on arrival at MIT. I was also “on the spectrum”: socially awkward, and often not recognizing my own feelings, much less those of others.

(There is also a cognitive aspect to stage development. Formal, technical rationality is stage 4. I had accomplished that, but lagged in the emotional and relational domains, as is common for STEM-ish people. I could do calculus, but I had never had a kiss.)

The stage 2 self centers on its personal desires, projects, and goals. In relationship, stage 2 is transactional. How can I satisfy my desires by trading for satisfaction of your desires? It is not necessarily selfish or unethical. It recognizes reciprocity and fairness, and so need not be exploitative, nor seek always to take advantage. It cannot, however, relate on the basis of shared feelings, of compassion, of valuing another person for their self, rather than for what they can do for me.

The story of Elena begins a year after the end of my first serious relationship. Amber was dramatically emotional. I couldn’t miss what her feelings were—even if, initially, I didn’t understand why she was having them. She also was a graduate student in clinical psychology, with extensive theoretical knowledge of how romantic relationships are supposed to work, plus personal experience in many of them. Over three years, she dragged me into stage 3.

Through relating with her, and through reading, and through reflection and observation and self-analysis, I developed what I believed were sophisticated skills and understanding of intimate relationships. Relative to stage 2, they were.

Stage 3 is the “interpersonal mode,” in which you are your relationships. You take on other people’s emotions, values, interests, and experiences without clearly identifying them as someone else’s. Your self-image is just how you are currently seen by other people. Relationships have no defined limits; you are potentially infinitely responsible to everyone you are in relationship with.

This is particularly true of romantic relationships, which tend toward fusion. It seems natural and good to eliminate any emotional separation, or difference in preferences, and to share all experiences and feelings. Or, to try to, at any rate!

An exceptionally bad idea

Neopagan Beltane ritual (CC0)

Having sex with Elena wasn’t my idea. However, May 1st was Beltane, when having sex with random people is one’s religious duty as a Neopagan. Also, I was twenty three and hadn’t had sex in a year.

When I learned three days later that she had serious mental health problems and had fallen in love with me, it was obvious that a relationship with her was an exceptionally bad idea.

On the other hand, she was a lot of fun, fascinating to talk to, and I was getting enough sex for the first time in my life.

And, my head was full of a dozen systematic ideologies of heterosexual relationship: various strands of psychotherapeutic theory, of Neopaganism, of pro-sex and anti-sex versions of feminism, spillover from libertine gay customs (in flux as AIDS was surging then), and the vague default attitudes of 1980s urban liberal culture. So I had both the idea that casual sex was morally dandy and a great growth opportunity, and that sex created a permanent, sacred bond which carries with it unbounded responsibility. I had both the idea that women are just as strong and independent as men, and that they have special emotional needs that men are morally obligated to fulfill.

I didn’t yet realize how confused these contradictions made me. This proliferation of sex and gender ideologies was pretty new then. I think it confused everyone, mainly subliminally. It made heterosexual pairing newly difficult. As a culture, we’ve never properly recovered. However, in going through this sequence of stories, you’ll hear more about my efforts to work out a coherent stance as an individual.

But apart from the ideology, at this time I was eager to put my new practical understanding of how relationships are supposed to work into action. By the time I’d gotten solidly into stage 3, my relationship with Amber had soured. There was more conflict than my new skills (or hers) could overcome. We’d continued a year or two past the time we should have split, out of genuine love for each other, plus inertia.

I understood, from that relationship, what emotional intimacy meant. I was able to sense my feelings, and those of the person I was relating with. I could communicate what I felt, and could hear the other’s communication. I was determined not to make the same mistakes I had made with Amber. I wanted a relationship of full intimacy, and thought I knew how to create that.

On the day Elena told me she had fallen in love, I wrote in my diary:

I fear that I have succeeded too well at this relating business. That by intense effort I have brought myself to a point where I can create an extremely intimate relationship out of thin air. Such a thing cannot, certainly, be sustained. When it collapses, one or both us may be hurt.

This was uncommonly lucid. Later, when the relationship did turn bad, Elena and I and friends who knew both us well discussed it often, and we all agreed that I had done this.

I had thought I was doing an exceptionally moral thing. And by stage 3 standards, I was! But it made both of us intensely miserable for a year. Yet, even at the end, I had no sense of moral fault, even when it was pointed out to me by friends.

After all, she had seduced me. And she had fallen in love with me. Neither of those was my idea! I was just being emotionally open and communicating feelings and fully accepting her for who she was. That’s good, right? You’re supposed to do that. Psychotherapeutic theory says so!

She had just wanted my body. I stole her soul.

Or, that’s how she explained it later. Her conception was bizarrely concrete. Her soul was a luminous, fuzzy object, about the size of a fist. I had sucked it out of her chest cavity. In the void that left behind, I had placed a malignant, gnawing shard of my own soul.

This was not some half-baked spiritual idea. She was a quantum physicist, not stupid. It was delusional, bordering on psychotic.

And, in fact, her mental health problems were severe, intermittently disabling. Any evidence that I was not totally devoted to our relationship would send her into black depression. In the most alarming cases, she would lapse into uncanny catatonia: “eventually becoming entirely motionless and unresponsive.” That’s a quote from my discussion of catatonia in Meaningness. I was thinking of Elena as I wrote that section.

Less often, she’d head into delusional psychosis. She was hospitalized for that both before and after our relationship. I did everything I could to head it off, successfully for our year together.

During that year, taking care of her took over my life. All my time other than the minimum necessary to continue as a graduate student. I dropped everything else out.

No actual self

During the year between Amber and Elena, and during the first few months I was with Elena, my diary entries include repeated, explicit proclamations that romantic relationship was the most important thing in my life. More, I said, than my research work in artificial intelligence, which had previously been most important. I was proud of this shift!

Centering my self on relationship (even when not in a relationship) was an accomplishment—a relatively new one. I understood that! I expected it would be true for the rest of my life.

And it seemed to imply putting my whole self into the relationship. Which meant doing everything possible to make Elena comfortable.

I came into the relationship excited to share feelings, to enjoy conversations about what was going on for each of us and between us, to be honest and open. And apparently that was how and why Elena fell in love with me—at first.

But quickly I learned that many things I felt, did, or believed were hurtful for her; and that mentioning them risked her always-fragile emotional state. I took full responsibility for how she experienced me, and even how she experienced other people and life in general. To avoid psychological emergencies, more and more topics became taboo, and soon we stopped talking about feelings or relationships entirely.

After a month, I admitted to myself that her neediness was boundless and unsatisfiable. And that, nevertheless, I was attempting to satisfy it, and that I was going to continue, and that I was trapped. I had become responsible for her care, and that was going to be my life for the indefinite future.

This gradual realization was horrifying, depressing, agonizing. I could see no way out.

It is characteristic of stage 3 that you have no actual self. You think you do, but what you have is an incoherent patchwork of relationships in which you try to be whatever the other person wants. Your sense of personal value depends on their affirmations that you are succeeding in that. It is characteristic of stage 3 that you do not realize this.

I was intensely miserable because I could not be what Elena wanted: a god-like rescuer who would set everything right for her. I would have, if I could have, but this was a task beyond any human’s capability. And I felt that trying was killing me.

I wrote:

Oh God. Oh God. Get me out of here!

I’m dying. I have turned into David-for-Elena rather than David-for-David. I’m always throwing away the present and consoling myself with a never-never future. I’m dying. It’s scary. I want to be me, whoever that is.

“I am dying” was literally true. My emotional agony motivated intense self-examination and reflection and discussions with trusted friends. Through that, “I,” the self I had had, eventually died. Or, rather, in fact: I killed it myself.

Over many months, I began to figure things out:

I measure myself by the way I am seen rather than by comparison to an ego-ideal.

I have not built a personality, because it seems that any such must be inconvenient to others. To have a personality is to act on your desires, to work toward goals, to follow policies, to treat people in ways. I am wishy-washy by design, to avoid upsetting anyone else. I do whatever will please the people around me. That, perhaps, is why I am so attractive to Elena: I am willing to adapt to terms that would make most men run for their lives.

I never feel like I have the right to say what I want. Because I try to be sensitive and fair, and because I am aware of my own psychological problems, and in order to expose my prejudices, biases, and repressions, I try hard to see my SO’s point of view and to accept it. Not just to look at it, but to take it on. This has often been very valuable, but has also led to my succeeding in believing blatantly false things from her psychopathology, which were damaging to me (e.g. because they made me question my simple sanity/ability to make straightforward truth judgments). I have to learn to hold onto the belief that I am basically a good and sane person, competent to evaluate if not people then at least the physical world.

I am the problem

In “Transitioning soft domains to stage 4,” I wrote:

The first step is to admit to yourself that you are the problem. When you are squarely in stage 3, its way of being seems obviously and unquestionably right. If you keep getting into fights at work, or keep getting into dead-end relationships or dumped by lovers, you may take that as their being wrong.

Initially, it seemed obvious that Elena was the problem. Her emotions were outsized, irrational, and often intensely painful. Practical aspects of her life were also a godawful mess, due to recurrent mental health crises. These were things I could help with, I thought.

Elena thought that I was the problem. The problem was that I was unwilling to marry her. This proved that I was crazy. If I was sane, I would see that marrying her would solve all my problems. My reluctance was delusional.

For a couple of months, I tried hard to believe that; and sort of did. This was unsustainable. When I snapped out of it, I wrote: “I see (my part of) the problem as my being too willing to play the game by her rules.”

A close friend of both of us tried to intervene. She spent a whole day trying to talk sense into me. This relationship was terrible for both of us, she said. She pointed out that I was not qualified to do for Elena what she needed. Elena needed professional help, and our friend strongly urged me to get her into intensive therapy asap, before she needed to be hospitalized again. She also urged me to end the relationship for my own sake.

I couldn’t hear either part of that. Elena refused to admit she had mental health problems, and refused to consider therapy, so what could I do? And as for me, I thought I was doing the right thing, as much as I could. It was insignificant that it was making me intensely unhappy.

I literally couldn’t understand what our friend was saying:

She put it an odd way: I’m being exploited by Elena. Emotionally, I suppose. Perhaps that is true. It’s like the woman who stays with her abusive husband because he needs her.

Toward a new morality

Lawrence Kohlberg’s research on ethical development was a major milestone in adult stage theory.

Stage 2 has an ethics of fairness: of equal exchange. In contrast, stage 3 ethics might be summed up in the communist slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to her needs.”

I began to have doubts.

Elena believes that if she would do something for me, then I am obligated to do the same for her, regardless of whether I would ask her to do the thing for me. Unfortunately, I too often give in to this. I can’t help feeling I’m an awfully good sport. And that I’m getting used as a result.

The developmental theorist Robert Kegan recognized that one’s way of understanding ethics is central to one’s way of constructing one’s self. Questioning my ethical stance started to shift my understanding of what I was.

I can’t face it. I’m sick of being responsible. I’m always the responsible one. I don’t even know that it’s the right thing.

Elena was unhappy in the relationship because I wouldn’t marry her. I hoped that eventually she’d give up and dump me. If it was her decision, then I could move on while feeling blameless. A few months in, I wrote:

I am just waiting patiently for this relationship to die a natural death. If I were the person I wish I were, I would kill it, but that won’t happen.

I’ve left a trail of broken hearts behind in all my relationships. I suppose I need to take responsibility now for not getting involved with anyone who will get hurt. Aargh. I don’t know what it always has to be me that is moral and responsible. If I knew how, I’d rather be an insensitive bastard and get what I want.

And finally, near the end:

Claims of “unfair advantage” are at the root of what I most need to get rid of: making other people comfortable, rather than doing what I want. “Not everyone is brilliant and nice and well-off; therefore you owe to anyone who asks it your time and mind and affection and money.” Wrong. Those are mine; I have an inherent right qua human to do as I will with them. I may have to tear up parts of myself that I value to get them back from other people. One reason for not exercising will is that it would destroy parts of myself I care about, especially the Amber-derived ethics. But now I am strong enough to throw people out of my psyche.

Exit stage 3

Increasingly explicitly, fervently, and frequently, Elena threatened to kill herself if I left her.

I thought it likely that she would, given her hospitalization after an attempt only a month before we got together. (I did not know yet that suicide “attempts” are often ploys to dramatize emotional distress and recruit support.)

I faced a life-or-death decision, and an unresolvable moral dilemma. If I dumped Elena, I might well be responsible for the death of a human being. That is the greatest possible moral fault. If I didn’t leave her, I might as well be dead, might as well have killed myself. But not actually, not physically. So did that not count for less?

And, leaving her also meant killing my self—the morally pure and blameless person I had been.

It took months.

A week after the event, a mutual friend told me that Elena was not at all suicidal, but sounded quite serious about homicide. Specifically, she intended to poison me with a radioactive sample she’d stolen from the physics lab.

“She’s just crazy enough for this to be frightening,” I wrote. “It was really stupid to take her at her word about suicide. In any case, she intends to make life as unpleasant as possible for me. She’ll probably succeed to some extent. I am hurt that she should show such hatred, since I believe I have bent over backwards for a year to make her happy, and made the breakup as gentle as I knew how. Inevitable, I suppose.”

3.5 nihilism

When you exit a stage forward, you are no longer able to be the sort of thing that you were. Exiting stage 3, you are no longer a sackful of interpersonal roles, and can no longer act as that. And yet you cannot be the next thing. You have only glimpses of what that might be, and no idea how to be it. You are tossed in the storm-waters at the midpoint between one stage, one coherent way of being, and another.

Morality collapses. Only due to unexpected good fortune had I not murdered someone, by my previous standards. I had rejected those, but what did that leave me? With simple selfishness? I knew how to do stage 2 morality, centering self-interest—but I also knew its limitations and failings.

With the loss of a functioning self to make meaning, meaning drains out of the world. Or so it seems at the time! This is nihilism. With it come rage, incoherent intellectualization, and depression.

My diary in the months immediately after the breakup features cynical, twisted, blackly humorous, unhinged but intellectually brilliant ranting.

I thought I was stuck in deep, futile depression, but I can see now that in fact I was making rapid progress. I wrote a lot about ethical nihilism, but in fact I was working toward a new personal ethics of heterosexual relationship. I excoriated my amorality, while finding that I had consistently good intentions, and I had generally lived up to them.

More than most men, I loved, understood, and cared for women. And for themselves, not for what they could do for me. But this would need a new framing: a coherent structure with defined limits.

On towards 4

As I said at the beginning, this post is the first in a series about stage transitions catalyzed by romantic relationships. The project began a decade ago. I was puzzling over an enigmatic phrase in Robert Kegan’s The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development, a key text in adult developmental stage theory. I realized a particular past relationship of my own was an example of what he was pointing at. I drafted a post about that, and set it aside. The insight was too intellectually esoteric, and the relationship too intimate to make public.

I kept returning to it, though: it seemed important. And I found increasingly many connections between this odd insight and various other themes I write about. And as years went by, I realized that various other relationships I’d had, or which friends had had, illustrated particular stage transitions. A couple years ago, I decided to write them up. This has proved surprisingly difficult, both emotionally and as an explanatory project.

My memory of my relationship with Elena was quite vague. However, I thought it would probably more-or-less fit the theoretical explanation of the transition forward from stage 3 reasonably well. A few days ago, I re-read my diary from that period. Besides reliving a traumatic period of my life, it presented two expository problems.

First, my experience with Elena fits the theoretical framework too well. If you know the theory, you may have suspected that the whole story is fictional, designed point-by-point as a tidy fake example. It isn’t—but you can’t know that.

Here’s the theory, from Lewis’ The Discerning Heart:

At stage 3, close relationships are exciting and consuming in a way they never were at stage 2. They can also seem suffocating. If you are stage 3, then your experience of yourself is a function of how you think your partner, your friends, your co-workers, and your church are experiencing you. When that is negative, their displeasure becomes a psychological emergency. You are caught in the web of your own interpersonalism.

You lack a separate and distinct “self” to bring to your relationships. Who you are is someone who works hard to delight your partner, your boss, your friends, society, your deity, etc. You have pieced out your identity from these multiple mutualities. You begin feeling like everyone owns a piece of you, and you wonder where “you” is in all these shared contexts.

Stage 3 individuals spend far too much energy doing things to avoid hurting others’ feelings. In doing so, they take personal responsibility for how others experience them. This is a burden that can be put aside by individuals at stage 4. Learning to transcend this stage-3 embeddedness and become truly “oneself” is what the transition to stage 4 is all about.³

Did my story about Elena leave anything out? (Do you still believe it?)

The second technical problem is similar, but even more serious. A few months after I entered 3.5 nihilism, the diary starts explaining my then-self and its development explicitly in terms of stage theory. Before rereading, I had completely forgotten that I was thinking that way!

But, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. I had taken multiple courses in developmental psychology. I knew Kohlberg’s framework very well. Amber—she was a clinical psychology student, remember?—had recommended Kegan’s The Evolving Self years earlier, and I had read it.

So, maybe I haven’t faked the fit of events to theory now, but maybe I did then! Maybe what I found in my diary was an intellectual interpretation of interactions that could be better understood some entirely different way?

I think that, in the part of the story you’ve read so far, this was not the case. There’s no mention of stage theory during the time I was involved with Elena, and not until a few months into my period of nihilism. And, until then, I seem to have had zero insight that everything I was thinking, feeling, and doing perfectly fit the stage 3 template, and was failing in exactly the ways the theory says 3 does.

As far as I can tell, I did not at all connect my intellectual understanding of the theory with my actual life. This was a dramatic failure of circumrationality: the work needed to relate abstractions and actuality. It was also a fine example of developmental lag: intellectually, I was in stage 4, but emotionally and relationally at stage 3, and there was no communication between the two.

I got myself out of 3.5 nihilism in six months, which I think qualifies for some sort of land speed record. I used stage theory to understand what was going on, and what I needed to do to move forward.

I intended this series to illustrate what stage transitions are like, in hope that just knowing that would help some readers navigate them. But this part of the diary is evidence for a stronger recommendation: knowing the theory can accelerate progress, if you figure out how to connect it with actuality.

Stage 4 in relationship: finding another witch

Lewis writes:

Stage 4 is about decentering from a stage-3 embeddedness in shared experience and instead applying self-authored principles and personal standards to one’s connections.

If you are just starting down this path, truly becoming oneself can feel like emotional withdrawal. Happily, gaining a separate self turns out not to be as isolating as it first feels. As you become more and more distinctly your own person, you get others back as more distinctly themselves, people you can share yourself with, without the burden of believing that what you share has to directly affect the way they feel about themselves.⁴

At the end of the nihilistic period, I wrote:

I feel a belated wave of Kegan-stage-4-ish-ness coming on. Get these other people out of my head so I know who I am. I suddenly caught a glimpse of stage 5 beyond, too: a somewhat less abstract feel for what it would be to have a self and share it, rather than doing this damn merging.

I had transitioned to 4 in selfness, but was not yet capable of 4 in relationship. Intellectually, I understood more-or-less what that might mean and why I wanted it, but not yet how to get there.

I needed help from another witch.

The next post in this series is about how she pulled me up into an extraordinary stage 4 relationship. That is a much happier story than this one!

What about Elena?

Three days after first sleeping with Elena, my diary entry details my idealistic theory of romantic relationship. It included an explicit intention to support her in her own psychological development. This intention toward forward movement was soon swamped in the effort to keep her afloat, her head above water.

Near the end of our year together, she said she was making profound positive psychological progress. I discounted that at the time, but in retrospect, I can see she too was starting to emerge from stage 3. Indeed, many things she said and did, even earlier on, reflected that. But I wasn’t yet equipped to recognize those, nor to support her in the process.

In the years after we split up, I got occasional unasked-for reports from mutual friends. It was up and down.

Six months after we split up, friends told me that “She took LSD on the equinox, died, was reborn, initiated as a priestess, and learned to draw energy from the universe so she doesn’t need her soul back any more. They confirm a dramatic personality upgrade.”

Then she found a great new boyfriend and was very happy; she was hospitalized after a psychotic break; she finished her PhD, a triumph; she lost a postdoc job and was deeply depressed.

Life proceeds.

Mine did too.

Yesterday I googled her. I hadn’t heard anything in a decade. I learned that, for several years, she had been a leader in a long-term national-lab consortium that coordinates global research on quantum properties of esoteric materials. Funding for the project was cut to zero this summer, as part of the general drastic defunding of US scientific research.

I hope for the best for her. And for her consortium. And for science, and for the future of the United States.

1. That Elena was a witch will gain additional meaning when you’ve read my other stories…

2. There are many kinds of witches. Elena and I practiced an eclectic Neopagan Wiccan witchcraft, of a sort heavily influenced by feminism and by the 1970s counterculture. Key texts for us were Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America and Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess, both published in 1979, a few years before the events of this story. They both still seem brilliant, half a century later.

3. This is from The Discerning Heart, pp. 77–79. I’ve reorganized and simplified the quotation for clarity and concision.

4. The Discerning Heart, pp. 77 and 79, lightly edited.