• 15 Dec, 2025 *

The youngest child did not want to eat pot roast on her brother’s birthday, and she was scrounging around for any excuse to get out of it.

"He didn’t eat spaghetti on my birthday," she finally managed. "It isn’t fair!"

The child’s mother fact-checked this. Then she sighed and turned to rummage through the fridge. She emerged with sliced deli turkey. "Are you making her a sandwich?" the child’s father asked in disbelief.

"She’s right, it isn’t fair," the child’s mother said lightly.

"She’s going to have to learn sometime," the father replied, "that life isn’t fair."

At this, one of my core memories jogged loose. When I was the same age as the child, my guardian had indeed told me that life wasn’t fair.

"We’re supposed to make it fair!" I’d snapped at her, with an immediate intensity and loudness that had visibly rattled her. My guardian would point to this event again and again as the pivotal moment that had—to use TikTok parlance—"rewired her brain."

But what does it mean for something to be "fair"? A child’s early working definition might be "sameness," a wicked, fallacious sort of reciprocity where one person is constantly giving something up in order to remain ‘equal’ to the other. Maybe this sounds fine in the abstract, but it’s a nightmare in the context of a Lois Lowry or Kurt Vonnegut book.

Anyway, "fair" is a very poor synonym for "just." Historically, "fair" means "fit": fit for, or to, its environment, "agreeable," no matter how stifling or toxic that environment’s standards (e.g. My Fair Lady).

One of my earliest memories, actually, is of attending a daycare that used "an eye for an eye" as its main doctrine (presumably as the punitive adjunct to the Golden Rule). Even as a kid who’d never heard of Jesus or the basic concept of grace, I knew something about this was off-key. In retrospect the daycare might’ve been a cult.

Still, I availed myself of the daycare’s "an eye for an eye" just once. A little boy sitting next to me had told me my drawing was stupid, and he was a real asshole about it. My hand shot up, an adult rushed over, and I invoked my right to bully him back. She said OK. I read that little twerp’s drawing to filth, critiquing the shit out of it. I went after every mistake, every jag of uncertainty in his crayon linework. The kid’s face turned red. His eyes welled up, his lips trembled. Good; I went after him even harder, mean as hell. The adult told me that was enough, so I got one last verbal potshot in before quietly turning back to my work.

I never could get a grip on when to quit; I also knew, very early on, that it wouldn’t be a fair fight if I ever got started.

A former work superior of mine, filled with shame and self-loathing, apologized for repeated, escalating barrages of verbal abuse, which I’d silently accepted. Once the venom got going, they explained, they didn’t know how to stop. I don’t remember how I responded, but I understood and I felt bad for them. Now, much too late, I am able to recognize that they were asking me for help—for me to call it out and stop them—but I guess I was too dissociated to read between the lines and go into problem-solving mode.

My quest for justice was very nearly derailed early on. As a child on the precipice of a possible villain arc, I’d supposed "fairness" meant making sure others were hurting as much as I was. I’d enthusiastically meted out "justice" at recess, punching kids who definitely deserved it. I grew out of it, but maybe others didn’t. I think a lot about people’s indignation at the idea of student loan forgiveness. I think a lot about Nemesis, the Greek goddess of retribution, blood-drunk on the battlefield. I compulsively think about my own capacity for destruction, which is the very definition of harm OCD. Instead of learning to leash it, I’ve just turned the impulse inward and indulged it. It’s like a version of the trolley problem, internalized, so that others won’t realize I’ve diverted the train barreling toward them. Well, it’s a better instinct than signing up for the police academy.

It’s occurred to me that everybody, while still young, needs one devastating lesson about consequences—about the terrible emotional cost of knowingly and willfully inflicting pain—to narrowly escape growing up into a ‘billionaire brain’ bully. After my own devastating lesson, I could understand that true justice had something to do with building others up, not knocking them down in the name of ‘equality’. (I’m not talking about billionaires. It is fine to knock them down.) Something about elevating the playing field, rather than just leveling it.

In high school government class, the teacher was attempting to explain the philosophy behind affirmative action, by comparing two illustrations of a racetrack. I think I blurted out that my adoptive mother was against affirmative action. The government teacher whipped around and stared at me. My adoptive mother was the school’s guidance counselor; I had carelessly generated a small scandal.

That teacher reeeeally disliked me, but I never forgot her analogy about the racetrack, about starting points and advantages, and some people having farther to run than others. I think it was also the first time I’d really contemplated invisible disadvantages, like poverty and illness or disability.

I knew that I’d been born with certain obstacles in place, along with more obvious advantages. But my adoptive mom sought to undo the obstacles, to erase them, to secure for me every possible advantage available—as she would’ve for any student, despite the government teacher now thinking the worst of her. Still, having any advantages felt shameful, unfair, so I deliberately ceded opportunities behind my adoptive mother’s back, starting in elementary school, because leveraging them seemed to me so shitty. I just didn’t know where to stop. Restorative justice for others; retributive justice for myself.

"Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!" my dad used to say to me, holding me by the forearm and using my own arm to smack me in the face. He laughed and laughed. I did not. I did scream and cry in rage, though, too small and weak to recover the use of my one arm, and too short to push him away with my other. Is this very common? What was the joke here? That if I’d just agree to punch my own self in the fucking face, he’d finally let my arm go?

A couple years ago, a famous sculptor said to me, "You are allowed to take up space!"

"OK!" I joked, and I playfully splayed both arms, not even to their full extension. Ohhhh, very dumb. We were all sitting at a park picnic table, gathered in a little group. Immediately—a proprioceptive issue, unpracticed at estimating how much space I actually take up—I accidentally smacked the face of the person sitting next to me. I reeled back in horror. There it was.

I think a lot, as others increasingly do, about the overuse of "Karen." At some point it stopped being a hyperspecific term for the white lady who calls the cops on people of color just for existing in public spaces—that is, the person who responds to her own uninterrogated discomfort by immediately blaming bystanders, escalating the stakes of her own discomfort to life-or-death—and "Karen" became weaponized, shaming white women of all ages out of leveraging certain advantages. And, also, into questioning every haircut.

Being complicit in your own disempowerment helps absolutely nobody. Besides, a shrill, grating voice is one of our sonic weapons against fascism: it’s pushing back against the status quo at a frequency everyone can hear. (I still haven’t read Venomous Tongues, but I recently pulled it off the shelf, just to confirm it’s still there.)

What is an equitable environment, where everyone’s voices are heard and everyone’s needs are met?

I have never been a mother, but I did, until lately, have three cats—four, if you count the small dog as another cat—all with differing dietary needs and restrictions. This could’ve been a logistical nightmare. For a while I used NFC-equipped food bowls, to keep each cat (and dog) out of the others’ dishes. The bowls were a big investment and, in practice, it was kind of a lot. Eventually, I separated them physically at mealtimes.

The youngest child was on a restrictive diet until very recently, so she’s gotten a little too used to eating separately from the rest of the family. The outcome, potentially, is a mother making four separate dinners each night: in practice, it’s kind of a lot.

On the one hand, we don’t all have to eat, or like, the same things. On the other, please all, and you will please none.

The child took a tentative bite of her sandwich.

"...I don’t like this bread," she said. I choked on my pot roast.

"Eat your dinner," her father said, ending negotiations.