Let's Complicate It

Welcome to the shallow end of Let’s Complicate It.Not every episode needs to interrogate society, deconstruct a dominant discourse, or send me spiraling into an existential question. Sometimes I just want to talk about what I'm eating, reading, watching, listening to, and enjoying right now.So this episode is a little snapshot of my life in September 2026, told through my current favorites.I'm talking about the “egg thing” Tyler made me approximately every night during my wildly overcommitted summer, my annual transition into pumpkin-spice coffee season, the restaurant that taught me I apparently do like dates, the music I can't stop singing in my car, and the podcasts that feel like hanging out with friends. Then we get into what I've been watching and reading: the movies that have stuck with me this year, my ongoing journey toward becoming an accidental Trekkie, why I'm revisiting The Walking Dead more than a decade later, the shows I'm willing to wait years for, the books I can't stop recommending, and my current reading lineup—which somehow includes both Taylor Jenkins Reid and Friedrich Nietzsche.And because apparently I am incapable of remaining completely in the shallow end, we accidentally brush up against attention spans, ambition, consumerism, pleasure, body image, and the strange ways our tastes change alongside us. I also talk about my newest obsession with pole dancing and how it's changing the way I experience my body—not just what it looks like, but what it can do. Oh, and I bought a lamp for my shower.It is completely unnecessary. I love it.This episode isn't trying to arrive at a grand conclusion. It's just a record of the things bringing me comfort, curiosity, pleasure, and a little bit of whimsy in this particular season of my life.We're making the frivolous deep—but this time, we're allowed to stay in the shallow end for a while.

Welcome to Judgment Call—a new recurring series where I take a moral dilemma from the internet, make a judgment...and then complicate the hell out of it.For the first Judgment Call, I'm reacting in real time to a post from Reddit's Am I the Asshole? A 24-year-old man describes a heated family conversation in which his father argues that wives should submit to their husbands—even in the context of mistreatment. His sister pushes back. He stays quiet. Later, he posts on social media about his father's "misogynistic remarks."His father finds the post and is furious.So...who's the asshole?In this episode, I unpack whether the father's comments are actually misogynistic, what it means to "respect" a parent whose beliefs you don't respect, whether posting about someone's behavior publicly is meaningfully different from processing it privately, and whether causing someone shame or discomfort necessarily means you've harmed them unfairly. But as I read through the comments, another question starts bothering me: Why was this man willing to call out his father's misogyny online when he wasn't willing to challenge it in the moment?Because when you're a man listening to another man make sexist or misogynistic remarks, your voice may carry power that the women being targeted by those beliefs don't have. And sometimes staying silent isn't quite as neutral as we'd like it to be. Maybe the most interesting thing about judgment isn't deciding who was right and who was wrong.Maybe it's figuring out what we're actually judging in the first place.This is Judgment Call #1.

How does someone actually become a therapist? In my case, apparently by taking the longest possible route there.In this episode of Let's Complicate It, I'm telling the story of how I became a marriage and family therapist—from the teenage version of me who thought psychology might be her future, through years of jobs that never quite became careers, an extremely brief attempt at becoming a Naval officer, a first attempt at graduate school, a detour into acting, and eventually a global pandemic that forced me to confront a question I'd been avoiding: What did I actually want to do with my life?When theater disappeared during the pandemic, I began realizing how much it had distracted me from my dissatisfaction with my job. And after one seemingly small incident at work became the catalyst for another job search, I caught myself repeating a familiar pattern: learn a job, get good at it, get bored, and make another lateral move. This time, I decided to do something different. That decision eventually led me back to something I'd been circling since I was a teenager: becoming a therapist.I talk about returning to graduate school, discovering during practicum that therapy felt surprisingly natural to me, navigating the long road from student therapist to associate to licensed marriage and family therapist, pursuing a PhD along the way, and eventually becoming a therapist, supervisor, mentor, and leader in community mental health. But underneath the career timeline is another story: why this work fits me.I know what it's like to believe you've done life wrong. To measure yourself against an ideal, find yourself deviating from it, and turn that difference into evidence that something is wrong with you. Therapy gave me a place to use that experience—and my capacity to sit with other people's pain—to help people question the rules they've been measuring themselves against, recognize the choices available to them, and maybe even celebrate some of the things that once made them feel like the "weirdo." This one is less theory and more story: no script, no outline, just the winding path that brought me here.

We’re often told that good people shouldn’t judge others. But what if judgment itself isn’t the problem?In this episode of Let’s Complicate It, I’m exploring judgment as something fundamentally human: a tool we use to recognize harm, clarify our values, make ethical decisions, and navigate relationships. The trouble begins when our judgments feel like objective truths rather than beliefs with histories—beliefs shaped by family, culture, institutions, social norms, and dominant discourses. I break down the difference between judgments that identify harm, judgments that express our values, and judgments that simply enforce ideas about what is “normal.” I also bring in Michel Foucault’s concepts of normalizing judgment and the panopticon to examine how social expectations become internalized until we start monitoring not only other people, but ourselves. Eventually, we become both the person being watched and the one doing the watching. Along the way, I ask questions like: Where did I learn that this behavior was wrong? Is someone actually being harmed, or are they simply living differently than I would? What value is underneath my judgment? Who benefits from the standard I’m enforcing? And am I judging someone else for breaking a rule I secretly resent having followed myself?Because sometimes judgment protects our ethics. Sometimes it protects us from envy, shame, fear, grief, or uncertainty. And sometimes it quietly reinforces a social rule we never consciously chose. Understanding context doesn’t mean abandoning accountability. We can understand how someone became who they are, acknowledge the systems that shaped their choices, and still name harm, maintain boundaries, or disagree with what they’ve done. Curiosity can complicate our certainty without requiring moral neutrality. So the goal isn’t to become someone who never judges.It’s to become someone who knows what their judgments are accountable to.Because judgment may be the call coming from inside the house—but just because the voice sounds like ours doesn’t mean it originated with us.

Why do we treat femininity like evidence that someone shouldn't be taken seriously?In this episode of Let's Complicate It, I'm unpacking my own complicated relationship with femininity—and the ways I've learned to associate being feminine with being frivolous, superficial, or less intellectually serious.From long sparkly nails and makeup to Taylor Swift, romance novels, Sailor Moon, and "girl talk," I explore why interests coded as feminine so often begin with the presumption that they're less meaningful than their masculine counterparts. Why is getting a manicure frivolous, while knowing everything about fantasy football is just a hobby? Why does a woman who loves fashion seem vapid, while a man who knows everything about his car seems knowledgeable? And why does a woman being both highly feminine and powerful still register as a contradiction?Along the way, I bring in Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray, reflections from my dissertation research on gender non-binary identity, the "pick me girl" phenomenon, and cultural examples ranging from Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift to Buffy Summers and Sailor Moon. I also look back at my own relationship with makeup, clothing, beauty rituals, and the subtle pride I've sometimes taken in distancing myself from femininity.Because maybe the answer isn't proving that feminine things aren't frivolous. Maybe we're allowed to be frivolous sometimes. Pleasure doesn't have to make us smarter, healthier, more productive, or more enlightened in order to be worthwhile. I'm not necessarily interested in becoming more feminine. I'm interested in having a better relationship with femininity—and making sure that when something feminine isn't for me, it's because I don't like it, not because I've learned to see it as lesser. That's the distinction you ultimately arrive at when you talk about your nails, clothing, and even the fact that you simply don't particularly like pink. Because femininity doesn't have to be redeemed.It was never the problem in the first place.