TL;DR is a monthly digest summarizing the vital bits from the previous month's How to Live newsletter so you don't miss a thing.

Here’s everything from FEBRUARY—the free essays you might have missed and what paid subscribers got behind the paywall.

You're 10 years old, trying to show your father a self-portrait you made at school while he talks on the phone. He waves you away without looking. Later, at dinner, you try telling him about the fight you had at school with your best friend, but he's scrolling on his phone, nodding without hearing. Before you go to bed, you ask to call your mother, who's on a work trip. Your father tells you to "leave her alone."

That night, in bed, you feel a strange hollow emptiness that weighs more than your body. You worry you're disappearing, though you can see still yourself.

This is what it feels like to not matter.

Now, consider another child. When she enters the room, her father looks up. When she speaks, her father sets down his phone. When she is upset, he asks about her feelings. This child grows up with the assurance that she is seen, valued, and valid.

The key difference between these two children is not perfect parenting or constant attention, but something psychologists call "mattering."

Mattering may be our most basic human need. It's a core component of self-concept: our internal sense of who we are.

At the root of every disagreement, fight, and war is the need to matter. We react strongly to any suggestion that we might be erased. To live, we must matter. As infants, we thrive only if our parents care for us. As adults, to help others, we must first feel we are worth helping.

There's a specific feeling that comes with irrelevance: the realization that your presence or absence makes no measurable difference. That you could vanish, and the space where you stood would close seamlessly; a quicksand existence. 

It's a Valentine's Day tradition at The How to Live Newsletter to share this story the week of.

The story I want to tell you reflects the paradoxical nature of Valentine's Day and what it elicits: absence and presence, fact and fiction, love and a marriage that’s stood the test of time, even if it never happened.

When I was young, I began thinking that our society had a lot of things backward, and as I got older, I also wondered whether we'd gotten the timing of marriage wrong.

After all, it takes a long time to get to know someone, and if you're a person who wants to get married, sometimes the time it takes feels forbidding. It’s only after many years that you begin to know someone genuinely, and by then, you might realize they’re the last person you’d want to marry, so what—you have to start again?

Instead of spending years getting to know someone before deciding to spend your life with them, perhaps we should decide right away to spend our lives with our new partner and spend the rest of the time discovering whether we want to continue.

Before you marry a person you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are.

Will Ferrell

I've done many spontaneous and whimsical things in my life. Some excellent—like running away with the Cirque du Soleil for a year. Some were ill-advised and traumatic, like dating my literary agent.

But one has stood the test of time, not only as a story I've told at dinner parties but as an unbroken bond stretching across continents, time, language, and truth.

This is the true story of my fake ex-husband, Pablo.

She was a teacher, a scholar, an activist. She earned her bachelors and masters from Oberlin, her PhD from the Sorbonne at age 66, and wrote what's now recognized as the first book-length work of Black feminist theory.

And most people have never heard of her.

In 1892, Cooper published a book called A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman in the South. In it, she posed a question to make visible what most couldn't name.

Picture yourself standing on a train platform in North Carolina. There are two waiting rooms. One door reads: "FOR LADIES,” the other: "FOR COLOURED PEOPLE."

You're a Black woman. Which door is for you?

You're both a “lady” and a Black person, but the signs don't account for that. You must choose one identity, and in so doing abandon the other.

Cooper would describe this impossible choice as "like trying to liberate the body politic by means of a lawsuit, 'Eye vs. Foot.'" You can't sue your eye on behalf of your foot. They're parts of the same body. Severing one doesn't free the other; it just kills you both.

When Cooper chose the room she felt fit her—Ladies— railroad personnel threw her out despite having a first-class ticket in hand. They threw her out for being Black. Yet, was she not also a woman? The spaces themselves were designed to split you in half.

Nearly a century later, in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw would name what Cooper had already described: intersectionality.

Intersectionality means that different parts of your identity, like race and gender, don't exist separately. They overlap and interact to create experiences that can't be explained by looking at just one identity at a time.

At that train station: White women were recognized as “ladies” deserving protection and courtesy. Black women weren't seen as “ladies” at all; their womanhood didn't grant them the same status or treatment. A Black woman doesn't experience life as "Black" in some moments and "woman" in other moments. She's always both at once, and that combination creates specific forms of discrimination and specific barriers that are unique to her; different from what Black men face and different from what white women face.

It took 97 years for Cooper's thinking to get a name.

Why do we talk about intersectionality like Crenshaw invented it, with barely a mention of the Black woman who spent her whole life describing exactly this?

It’s because that’s how erasure works.

Before Ntozake Shange revolutionized theater, before she was even Ntozake, she was Paulette, the only Black girl in her class, and the only one who saw things others couldn't see.

Since childhood, she could reach areas of her unconscious that were inaccessible to most adults. She had visions; she saw “historical figures, artists, people I didn’t know dancing with me, taking me to salons in Paris or roadhouses in Alabama.” They felt no less real than her actual experiences, so she didn’t distinguish between them. She didn’t even consider them daydreams. They were as real as anything that happened in her waking world: as real as her classroom, the faces of her parents, her classmates who looked nothing like her, the paper she drew on, the countryside.

If you only experienced something in your dreams, did it actually happen? She was the only person in her life who seemed to think yes, it did. Yet, she began to realize that without proof, she couldn’t argue this sort of “truth” because it was simply hers alone, and not a collectively recognized reality.

Why, she wondered, did something have to be witnessed by others, to be considered real?

The only place anyone understood this distinction was in her psychiatrist's office.

Her parents were doctors. Her father was a surgeon and he excised what was malignant and out of tune with the body. Her mother helped people get in alignment with society, to make living “work for them instead of against them,” without, Shange noted with scorn, “necessarily challenging the world as we know it.”

Both of these approaches left her wanting.

What if what was wrong couldn’t be seen or couldn’t be excised? She wondered. What if life as some soul knew it wasn’t worth living without some violent catharsis?

In the 2000 anthology, Tales from the Couch: Writers on Talk Therapy, edited by Jason Shinder, Shange reflects on these questions, through her experience in therapy.

Shange's essay “The Dark Room” is the record of someone who spent decades asking not what is wrong with me but: who decided what counts as real? Who decided what language to take seriously and what to dismiss? Who decides which frameworks are palatable enough to create from?

These are the questions I have also spent my life inside too, and they’re largely what this newsletter is about. The questions that interest me most are the ones that flip the narrative—off the person being pathologized and onto the pathologizers.

Who has the power to decide who another person is? Who decided there is a right way to be human, and a wrong one?

📌 This essay is for paid subscribers.

Until next week, I will remain,