Amanda Stern, Fort Greene, NY (2026)

09/20/2026

Before we have children, we often imagine them as versions of ourselves, albeit improved and corrected, but still recognizably us.

Most of what we call "family values" is the assumption that our children will inherit our identity along with our genes.

In his remarkable book Far From the Tree, author and psychologist Andrew Solomon, calls the traits we inherit and share with our parents "vertical identities." They include sexual orientation, ethnicity, language and religion.

A "horizontal identity" is different. It's a trait that shows up in a child with no precedent in the family: deafness, dwarfism, genius, autism, being gay when your parents are straight.

Nobody teaches parents how to raise a horizontally identified child, because no parent anticipates these differences.

But what happens when the most basic facts of your child's experience are outside the realm of your own experience and existence?

Often, our discomfort with our child's difference leads us to search for a fix, and it's here that the line between an identity and an illness gets drawn.

Andrew Solomon wonders aloud in Far From the Tree whether our search to correct children who aren't broken is more damaging than accepting them for who and how they are.

I wrote about this idea, my parents attempt to fix what they considered broken about me, and this book for the How to Live Newsletter.

The link to the full piece is here: https://bit.ly/4xwZrQT

09/15/2026

You're scrolling a comment thread and someone says something wrong. Not just wrong, but stupid. How do they not see what you see?

The anger arrives before you can even articulate why you're mad.

Most of us mistake our perspective for fact. We push back against anything that counters our view, certain that the problem is the other person. And we do this while believing, genuinely, that we are open-minded people.

The psychologist Carol Dweck found there are essentially two kinds of people: those whose thinking stays fixed, and those who keep stretching. The difference isn't intelligence. It's not even circumstance.

It's whether they're willing to ask hard questions and sit with what comes back.

I've come up with 4 questions that help challenge a mind bent on fixity.

And they're deceptively simple:

What am I avoiding, and why?
Whose expectations am I actually living by?
If fear weren't holding me back, what would I do?
What does freedom look like to me?

Most of us don't ask because we already sense the answers. And the answers would require us to move. To repaint the walls. To stop having the same fight. To admit that the life we're living was handed to us rather than chosen.

A man got sent to prison for a minor offense. Eight months inside, he read more, wrote more, and thought more than he ever had on the outside. Through circumstances most of us would experience as crushing, he found something he hadn't been able to find free.

The circumstances making you feel least free might be the very ones that could show you the way in.

I wrote about each question for the How to Live Newsletter.

It's behind the paywall, but I'm offering you a gift link.

https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/4questions?gift_content=aa30a031-e82e-4a4b-941e-0983cdf0600c

09/14/2026

When a marriage ends, you sign the papers and call a friend.

Maybe you go to lunch. Maybe you sit in your living room and wonder what living will look like now.

No one brings flowers. No one marks the occasion by standing up to announce: "Something meaningful happened, and now it's over."

In 2009, a Tokyo entrepreneur named Hiroki Terai noticed that while marriage gets a ceremony, divorce gets nothing. He decided to organize what he called a rikonshiki: a divorce ceremony.

At this formal ceremony, where friends are expected to make speeches, the couple joins hands and together, smash the rings.

Hiroki Terai was not a therapist. He was just someone paying attention to what we fail to give each other. While we know how to celebrate, we have never been equipped at handling hardship that often mark endings.

Americans are fluent in loud, bright occasions. We show up with gifts for weddings and babies and new houses. But for the moments where words are hard to come by: the miscarriage, the divorce, cancer, we tend to disappear and wait for it to pass.

Many cultures are far ahead of us when it comes to addressing life's most unbearable moments. Some of them solved it centuries ago.

Read about some of the most useful ceremonies from other cultures in the How to Live Newsletter.

Maybe it's time to bring them to America.

https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/rituals

09/10/2026

Imagine a person whose home is their sanctuary. They've decorated it to suit their style, comfort and design sensibility. They have everything they need at hand: their favorite music, books, a place to lie down and sleep, to sit and read, a dog they never want to be without. They have their food delivered, and perhaps even grow vegetables on their window sills.

This is the place they're most content. So long as they're home, nothing will upset the balance.

Then, one day, the landlord comes and serves this person with an eviction notice. Soon, a marshal arrives and breaks down the door. Our friend has no idea what's happening. She's paid her rent on time, every month. She's lived here her entire life. She grabs her dog and holds on tight, but the marshal begins pulling her hands and the dog slips from her arms as she's violently forced out of her apartment, toward a different reality she cannot comprehend, or know, worrying she'll never return home or see her dog again.

The world outside burns her eyes with its blinding neon light, she's handled roughly, stripped, flipped over, smacked and assaulted by an arhythmic, discordant pressing, a painful weight filling up her ears. Nothing is soft anymore: it's cold, sterile, clinical, and she's passed from one stranger to another. She knows no one here, but they all seem to know her.

This happened to me.

It happened to you.

Birth is being evicted from the only home you've ever known.

This, according to the 20th century psychoanalyst, Otto Rank is the original human trauma.

That first separation is violent: we are moved from warmth into cold, from being merged inside another person to being separate and alone, from the known into the incomprehensible. Without warning, we are cast out and then spend the rest of our lives trying to get back home.

Despite spending nearly two decades Freud's most trusted disciple, Otto Rank's argument was that Freud had started in the wrong place. It wasn’t the Oedipal Complex that gave rise to the neurotic drive, it was birth itself.

While Freud was initially supportive, this disagreement would ultimately prove catastrophic for their relationship. By 1926, Rank's place in the movement was effectively gone. With the birth of his book, and his original, radical idea, Rank lost the institution that had given him his identity, the mentor who defined his intellectual life and his position in the psychoanalytic community.

I wrote about Rank's theories, what happened between him and Freud, and explore how fear of separation and fear of engulfment are often the two driving forces of a life.

Here's the link to the piece: https://bit.ly/4r5crvq

09/10/2026

You think you're hiding your insecurity, but many people can see it.

In 1955, two psychologists at UCLA kept watching the same problem destroy group after group: People were consistently misjudging how others perceived them.

Some believed they were coming across as confident when the group experienced them as defensive. Other people thought they successfully concealed their anxiety when it was obvious to everyone else they hadn’t. (I’m taking this one personally 🤣)

Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham realized the issue wasn't that people had blind spots—it was that telling someone about their blind spots made them so defensive they'd reject the feedback entirely.
So they created a model that could show you the gap between how you see yourself and how others see you, without triggering that defensive response.

They called it the Johari Window, and while it's largely used in management and organizational development settings, there's nothing stopping any of us from using it with our friends and loved ones.

It doesn't just reveal that you have gaps. It exposes our blind spots; the areas we're completely unaware of that everyone else can see.

I wrote about how the Johari Window actually works, how you can use it right now, and why it matters professionally, personally and interpersonally.

Find the link in the first comment.

09/09/2026

A surgeon cuts you open and looks inside.

Where is the "I" of you?

Not in your brain. Not your heart. Not your blood or bones or nervous system.

Nowhere.

The thing you've been calling "I" your entire life, the thing that wakes up in your body every morning, that watches your thoughts, that feels like you, doesn't exist anywhere.

You can't find it under a microscope. You can't point to it on an X-ray.

And yet.

You spend your whole life trying to fix it. Understand it. Protect it. Reclaim some "original" version of it you think got buried.
So what the hell are you taking care of? Where does the "I" of you actually live?

Your body isn't you, it's just the vehicle that transports your organs from place to place. Your emotions aren't you; feelings aren't facts, no matter how real they feel. Your achievements aren't you. Your memories aren't you.

So what are you? And where are you?

A Pulitzer Prize-winning mathematician thinks he's solved it. His answer is deeply strange, and changes everything about how you see yourself, other people, and what you're actually doing when you look in a mirror.

I wrote about this for the How to Live Newsletter. Please read the full piece, and then share your thoughts in the comments.

This is a paywalled piece, but here's a gift link if you want it: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/selfness?gift_content=34c7d16f-0e95-4699-89e3-b8a9de44c966

09/08/2026

Imagine confiding to your partner that you're unhappy in your marriage.

They respond: "Oh, you don't need to feel unhappy. I don't feel unhappy."

It's annihilating, right?

Yet we do this to our children constantly.

When your anxious child fixates on death, your death in particular, your impulse is to tell them not to worry; you're not going to die for a very long time.

But when you tell a worried child not to worry, you deny them their reality and replace it with a reality you wish were true. When you discount their real concerns, you teach them to second-guess their feelings.

In her groundbreaking book The Drama of the Gifted Child, psychoanalyst Alice Miller describes how children develop a "false self", a version designed to meet their parents' needs. The child learns to hide their true feelings and present only what's expected.

This helps them survive childhood, but at a debilitating cost: they lose access to their own truth.

For a person without children, I'm asked for parenting advice more often than you'd think. By way of advice, I ask one question.

Just one.

It's a question most parents have never been asked. And answering it honestly might change everything.

I wrote about this question, and what it reveals, in the How to Live Newsletter.

Link to the piece is in the comments.

09/07/2026

The person who shaped how you love wasn't someone you chose. It was the first person you had no choice about: your primary caregiver.

In the 1960s and 70s, the psychologists John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth discovered something that explained an enormous amount of adult suffering: the way an infant learns to attach to a caregiver becomes the template for how they attach to everyone for the rest of their life, and that template: anxious, avoidant, or secure, is formed before language, before memory, before you had any agency over any of it.

An anxiously attached child becomes the adult who loves someone harder than they're loved back, who knows it, and who can't seem to stop no matter how much it costs them.

An avoidantly attached child becomes the adult who genuinely wants closeness but finds, every time it nears, that they've already started moving away from it.

This isn't personality or character or some fixed truth about who you are. It's the answer you formed, as an infant, to a single question: whether anyone was coming when you needed them.

I love them more than they love me.

Most people have felt this, but fewer have recognized it as something that was shaped in them before they had the words to describe it, or the tools to change it.

I wrote about it for the How to Live Newsletter. https://bit.ly/4xgSCUS

09/04/2026

The French conceptual artist Sophie Calle received a breakup letter.

The final line read: "Take care of yourself."

Most people would have cried, called a friend, or spent months trying to figure out what the sender meant.

Calle is not most people. Instead, she focused on the last line, and wondered, "Which self?"

The self who'd been left?
The self he'd imagined?
The self she'd become in the relationship?
The self that existed before him?

A breakup letter is an incomplete narration. One person gets to decide the terms, the tone, the ending, while the recipient is left alone to argue with it; to fill in the blanks.The receiver must do the heavy lifting, the emotional labor of interpreting what was said, and what was omitted.

Calle wasn't interested in accepting a single interpretation. No, she decided, the processing of this breakup would not end there.

Instead, she sent the letter to 107 women and asked them to interpret it through the specific lens of their professions.

A lawyer read it as a contract. A linguist mined it as rhetoric. A criminologist scanned for evidence. A singer translated it into a song. A proofreader corrected the grammar.

The same letter became 107 different objects depending on which process it went through.

What emerged was something far more interesting than a basic understanding of the letter itself.Every woman found a different meaning hidden inside it. Every woman was convincing. Every woman was, in some sense, right.

Which raises an interesting question: When something painful happens to us, are we suffering from the event itself, or from the interpretation we've chosen from among dozens of possible interpretations?

I wrote about this for the How to Live Newsletter.

Read the entire piece here: https://bit.ly/3Sozwfi

09/02/2026

When they were fourteen years old, Antoinette Faure handed her classmate, the future novelist Marcel Proust, her Confession Album (the Victorian version of Instagram) and asked him to fill it out.

The Confession Album was a keepsake with questionnaires meant for friends. The questions ranged from: "What is your idea of happiness?" to "What do you most fear?" The expected answers were charming, flirtatious, and designed to impress, but Proust, even at 14, was not prone to performance.

When asked to describe themselves, most people describe the person they want to be seen as. They produce a curated self---the version that holds up to public scrutiny. Our future writer, was, even then, awkward, asthmatic, and deeply authentic. Most teens (even Victorian ones) go out of their way to disguise their frailties; obscure their vulnerabilities and their dependence on their parents.

Not our Proust.

In response to his greatest fear, he wrote, "Being separated from maman." His main fault, he admitted, was not knowing how to want things. That his dream of happiness was too small to say out loud, because saying it might destroy it.

Two years after his death, those teenage answers leaked into a French literary magazine and spread. Vanity Fair picked up the format, asking celebrities to answer what they called "Proust's Questionnaire."

But what made Proust's answers remarkable was his refusal to perform. At just 14, he insisted on being his private self in public. Something most adults don't dare.

Although, this world would be much better off if we did.

The full piece is behind a paywall. Gift link below: https://bit.ly/48QcZ1k

Amanda Stern

09/20/2026

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