Sweet Escapes
Lipstick, Nostalgia, and the Good Body Stuff
Maurice Carlos Ruffin often dispenses wisdom on social media that’s far too good for social media, and he recently mused, “The past always feels safer because you know you survived the past.” In the wake of this ongoing national collapse unfolding with simultaneously brutal speed and agonizing slowness, I’ve found myself thinking with fondness — even longing — upon periods of my life that I know for a fact I’m glad to be free from. But even with misery in the foreground, they just seemed so much easier.
Take junior high. I remember how miserable I was, how desperately I filled hardcover blank book after hardcover blank book with tears and fantasies and hopes, how inferior I felt to everyone around me, the hideousness of our school uniforms that seemed designed to wreck the body image of me in particular. But I also remember, more vividly than usual these days, that my dad was alive, that New Orleans hadn’t been catastrophically remade by Katrina, that New Orleans in the mid-1990’s was, on weekends, a paradise for a vampire-loving teenager like me. I remember, too, that in those days I wore makeup, normally Urban Decay lipstick that I loved in part because of its goth-amenable names like Bruise (a dark plum color) and Gash (deep red, naturally).
A few days ago I felt compelled to investigate whether Urban Decay still existed, and if so, does it still have those edgy shade-names, or has it cutesified? Well, the answer is that it cutsified with an adventurous-ish twist: they now offer color options like Conspiracy, Peyote, and Morning After. But the reddest they’ve got is called Bad Blood. That was close enough to Gash for 14-year-old me to take over and order it online. (Fourteen-year-old me, like all of us, deserves better than Comfort Through Capitalism, but sometimes we take what we’re given).
I also made the questionable decision of watching The Net, a 1995 Sandra Bullock vehicle that shows us, Hollywood thriller style, how dangerous the Internet can be. Except that in 1995 we had no idea how dangerous the internet could be, so that even when the film succeeds in being legitimately scary, it’s quaint. And what about the entirely normaized act of ordering pizza online, depicted in The Net as a heartwrending glimpse into dystopian despair? I can’t resist a longing for the assumption that community and connection is the default and this kind of loneliness remarkable.
I’ve even felt nostalgic for the more recent past: in November of 2022, I was freshly heartbroken and wildly, ferally lonely, but Chat GPT didn’t exist, Trump’s first term seemed to be a trial we had all survived never to be repeated, and so much had not — literally or figuratively — burned down. When I wasn’t furiously writing a cathartic, desperate manuscript, I divided my time between the gym and the all-too-luxurious multiplex, both of which I could walk to from home. When I reflect on those days now, I have to remind myself, sometimes even say out loud, “You were depressed,” because for much of 2025, nothing has sounded more truly soul-soothing than spending all my time at the gym and the multiplex.
I still escape into workouts as often as I can, but I’m sure I’ve already lamented here that it necessitates a half-hour walk to campus, a wait for the shuttle, and a 15-minute shuttle ride, hardly the jaunt a few blocks down that it was in San Francisco. My healthy coping mechanism, then, is physically inconvenient, making my less-than-healthy coping mechanisms all the more inviting. (I’ve discovered that nothing beats sesame oil and cayanne pepper on popcorn.)
I can, as of this moment, name one plus about living through this fraught uncertain era: every ecstatic sexual experience feels like altering the rotation of the planet itself, like breaking through to a different spacetime continuum. That wasn’t what I thought I’d be going off on when I first proposed this Substack dedicated to discussions of the body, but that’s where I am now: fully aware that our every exploration of all things genuinely erotic is defiant, potentially revolutionary, an act of righteous deviance.
Speaking of deviance! The aforementioned Maurice Ruffin will be joining Francesca Lia Block, Kayla Ancrum, and Sophia Babai at AWP next Saturday for a panel on Crafting Deviant Characters, moderated by Jessamyn Violet. I put together the proposal back when I thought I’d be attending the conference, and can promise a fulfilling afternoon for anyone who will be in Los Angeles for the event.
One last past-goes-present escape: Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction. At 14, I was an adament viewer of the then-new show and didn’t think I would ever reveal my teenage penchant for roleplaying online with likeminded nerds (I was once told that of all the Willow Rosenburg profiles out there, mine was the most convincing, a compliment that still rings in my head like an actual achievement). I’ve since wracked up some kudos on AO3, the dubious digital fanfiction trove. But working out some of my issues via my heart-favorite characters has proven beneficial for my sanity, a way of grasping onto something as the future becomes increasingly grasp-less. My sense of being in America right now is that we’re all trying to get a foothold on a mountain whose peak we can’t see. Sometimes it’s surprising what sharpens our ability to look up. And sometimes the view seems to frighteningly obscured that past down-times look a little like peaks.
Still. We’ve survived the past, and we’ll survive this too. What’s been helping you get a foothold on this slippery mountain?
