I had always assumed fantasy wasn’t for me.

Then, I was in Target with my fifteen-year-old and they had a 50% off all books sale, and I noticed A Court of Thorns and Roses sitting on the shelf with its red cover. I’d kept seeing it mentioned on Instagram as people’s top ten right now. So, since I’d only just started reading again after about two decades away, I hadn’t developed my own instincts for what to read next. Those same lists had brought me Lonesome Dove, Demon Copperhead, James, The Book Thief, and The God of Small Things.

I had no idea what A Court of Thorns and Roses was about or what genre it fell under. I couldn’t have told you whether it was fantasy or romance or mystery or historical fiction. I liked the title and the cover, and it was 50% off.

Right after I grabbed it, my teen asked, “Isn’t that like a romance?” She chuckled and acted like it was an inside joke.

She was totally judging me.

“I dunno,” I said. Because I didn’t. I didn’t even know it was the first in a series.

I bought it, and let it sit on the shelf for several weeks while I read a few other books. I think I was reading The Nightingale at the time. It had all of my attention, and it wrecked me.

Once I finally grabbed it, I quickly realized it was a fantasy novel. There were magical faeries who ruled over the land of Prythian while humans lived in fear and separated by an invisible wall.

Which should have settled it, because I knew I didn’t enjoy fantasy. Dustin gave me the first book in the Wheel of Time series a long time ago. Those books are forever long, and somehow he’s read through the whole series more than once. I don’t think I made it thirty pages. I never had the tolerance for learning all the weird names, the lands, the histories behind them. I didn’t finish, and I took that as information about myself and filed it away, along with Erewhon smoothies, sports talk radio, and Botox.

And it wasn’t that I only read realism. I read and loved the entire Harry Potter series while I was pregnant for the first time. Then there was Circe, The Song of Achilles, Piranesi, Babel, The Handmaid’s Tale.

But these are more of an acceptable kind of unreal. Dystopia. Myth. Dark academia. Books with a point to make about being a person. Nothing with faeries in it.

I’m also not sure where it all came from. Nobody ever told me fantasy was silly or uninteresting or too long. I just thought it was, on my own, with no evidence. I mostly enjoyed the Lord of the Rings movies, yet never opened the books.

But with A Court of Thorns and Roses, I was hooked by chapter one.

It had all the same machinery: courts and names and lands and histories, all the things I’d said I didn’t have the patience for. But they stopped bothering me, and I got caught in a great story.

I knew I liked the narrator right away as well. The first sentence drops you in the action, and there are stakes before you know who anyone is. And underneath it: proving yourself, owning your own power, loss, not believing in yourself, love.

Those are my themes! The ones I write essays about here, even.

Though I had decided it wasn’t for me, it turned out to be about me.

Some of it felt forced, or repetitive in places. I want to be honest about that, because I can’t not be anymore.

But it didn’t matter. The story had me. The world had me. The romance had me. I kept reaching for it, despite myself.

I knew I’d be buying the second one before I finished the first.

I’m on the fifth of the series now, and I’ve bought several more of hers (Sarah J. Maas) that I haven’t started. And some, like Fourth Wing and Quicksilver, lack too much in the writing and the storytelling so I won’t be reading more.

After my daughter saw I had finished, she asked me what I thought. I told her I enjoyed them, a lot.

I don’t now read romantasy exclusively. I’d still rather have the prose in The Book Thief, or Hamnet.

I notice I wanted you to know that.

It wasn’t what I expected from a romance, either. There’s a build. There are complicated emotions under it. Confusion. Nobody’s morality is clean, and the woman at the center gets more complicated and more powerful with every book. They’re addictive. They’re obviously sexy.

There’s a whole world of this. Romantasy, fantasy romance, subgenres I didn’t know existed five months ago. It came with its own language, too. I didn’t know what a spice level was, or what smut meant, or that readers rate books in peppers.

Given that I’m writing a novel, I’ve been thinking about how much explicitness to show in it, not because sex sells, but because the connection between two people lands harder when you don’t look away from it.

There’s a different feeling to reading Lonesome Dove in public. Or East of Eden. Or Pachinko. You feel smart. Well-read.

Romantasy, on the other hand, gets reduced to a joke of itself. There’s so much more story in it than that, though. Otherwise, I’d just be picking up romance novels.

I’d read sex before. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Normal People. The Bell Jar. I never once looked over my shoylder while I read those.

But, then, The Canterbury Tales or Madame Bovary wouldn’t cause a scene, either.

Romantasy takes it to a different level.

I still get self-conscious reading them in public. I look around to see if anyone can see the explicit words on the page. I don’t want a stranger deciding I’m obsessed with sex.

And then, I sink my teeth back in.

But nobody has ever even said an unkind word to me about it or given me a second look. Women come up to me — strangers — to tell me it’s a really great book. If you know, you know, I suppose.

The only person who’s ever judged me for it reads classics and lives in my house. She’s fifteen and she reads Marcus Aurelius for fun.

Though she’s also read I Who Have Never Known Men, Giovanni’s Room, and Norwegian Wood. Those have their own parts, and I know some of them landed hard on her.

So yes, I’d hand her my copy, but I’d warn her it gets graphic. She’d probably put it back.

Is that a romance.

Yes, it is, damn it.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. It would mean so much if you left a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

This time, I read The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and I was completely in awe of the beautiful prose.

The whole time I was reading this book, I kept wanting to interrupt Dustin to tell him about a beautifully written sentence. I didn’t often, but some were too good not to share. There was one at every corner.

I haven’t felt that way about a book since East of Eden. This one might have been stronger.

What it’s about

The Book Thief is a war novel set on an ordinary German street, inside the country that started it. It is a book about what words can do, both the ones that talked a country into devastation, and the ones a girl steals back.

Death narrates the whole book, and he tells you so on page one.

It opens in 1939 with a nine-year-old girl named Liesel who is handed over to foster parents in a small town outside Munich. She arrives with one book she can’t read, stolen off the ground at her brother’s graveside. That is the beginning of the book thief.

Her friendly foster father, Hans, teaches Liesel to read and write in the basement in the middle of the night. Though he doesn’t know much himself, anything is enough for Liesel. The war continued, as we all know it did, and then a young Jewish man arrived at their door.

The people

Death

Death isn’t the Death we’ve been sold or imagined. In The Book Thief, he’s working a job, which he admits he does very well. He tenderly carries souls, notices the color of the sky on good days and bad, and is tired the way anyone is tired at the end of a long shift.

“Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

He’s also the best thing about the book. I was in by the first page, and it was Death’s voice that did it. He’s playful and intriguing, mysterious and mundane, mostly kind and still heartbreaking.

He shares his learnings of humans throughout the book.

“I am haunted by humans.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

He also addresses the misconceptions humans have about Death.

A SMALL PIECE OF TRUTH

I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’s cold. And I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I’ll help you out. Find yourself a mirror while I continue.

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

He is not what kills you, but what comes after, and he would like that on the record. More deaths just mean more work for him, and he was working overtime in 1942.

He also tells you what’s coming, over and over, long before it arrives…because he’s Death, so of course he would know. He has no interest in surprising you. He doesn’t care about saving the ending. He cares about the two hundred pages you spend with people you already know you’re going to lose.

Liesel

Liesel is a bright and thoughtful 9-year-old who steals her first book before she can read a word of it. She needed something to be hers, something she knew had power, even if she couldn’t yet unpack it, use it, sing it.

She wakes up screaming most nights, dreaming about her brother. Hans comes in and sits with her every time, and that is how the reading starts, not as a lesson, but as something to do at two in the morning when neither of them is sleeping anyway.

“The words were on their way, and when they arrived, she would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like the rain.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Hans

Hans is giving and sweet, an unexpected soft place for Liesel to land when she needs it most. He is the one who teaches Liesel her letters, turning something ugly into something beautiful. In doing so, he arms Liesel with the power of words.

“Sometimes I think my papa is an accordion. When he looks at me and smiles and breathes, I hear the notes.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

He paints for a living and he plays the accordion badly and constantly, and Liesel can’t get enough.

“It’s hard to not like a man who not only notices the colors, but speaks them.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Death describes Hans’s soul as something built out of the music and the comfort he gave people:

“It was a soft out-of-the-way soul. It was made of lightly stepped-on snow. It was a cartography of his own guitar-string scars and the raw skin on the hands that played the accordion. It was the color of quiet.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Max

Max is a young Jewish man hiding in their basement. He makes Liesel a book by painting over the pages of his copy of Mein Kampf and writing his own story on top of them. In doing so, he shows Liesel she can rewrite stories and make them her own, that words aren’t forever, and they can be changed.

Max brings what’s happening elsewhere in Germany to Liesel’s front door. He shows the cruelty and absurdity of the Holocaust, and he becomes a true, unlikely friend to Liesel.

“If they killed him tonight, at least he would die alive.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Rudy

Rudy is quite literally the boy next door. He has lemon-colored hair, and he asks Liesel for a kiss roughly every day of his life.

“The only thing worse than a boy who hates you: a boy that loves you.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

He is always hungry, the way every child in Molching is hungry, and that is where the stealing starts. From apples to potatoes, and eventually: books. Liesel is the book thief, but she almost never steals alone. Rudy is right there with her.

Rudy is in the Hitler Youth because every boy is, and he fights being told what to do. He just can’t do the obedient part, and he gets singled out for it.

When a bully throws Liesel’s book into the river in winter, it is Rudy who goes in after it. He comes up holding it, soaked through, and asks her for a kiss.

Lines that have stuck with me

In the Appendix at the end of The Book Thief, Zusak says he likes to play with words, combining and mixing, like toys in a sandbox. In addition to beautiful descriptions and diction, he picks up the words, turns them over, and puts them somewhere they don’t belong.

Just like he does with Death, Zusak gives bodies to things that aren’t people throughout the book. This visual had me stop for a minute:

“There’s a Jew in my basement.”

As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It crossed its legs.

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Side note: This was one of the sentences I had to share with Dustin.

I loved the depth of personification Zusak gives the secret. Not only does the secret make itself comfortable, it even crosses its legs. And the quote starts with a book that quivers, which is its own image. Ah, so good!

Here are just a few more:

“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Knowing the happiness was only apparent adds weight to everything that comes after it. It made me suspicious of every good moment that came after.

“So much good, so much evil. Just add water.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

Either one can grow.

“His eyes staggered, and it was so simple. The words were given across from the girl to the Jew. They climbed on to him...”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

The words climbed on to him?? Are you kidding me? The power of words, and now they’re actually taking action in one of the most desperate scenes of the book (though there are many).

“…sometimes the truth arrives on you and you can’t get it off.”

— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

I read this one twice. This sentence makes truth sound unwanted and dirty, like it ruins something.

Who should read it

This book does a lot of things very well. There is humor and heartbreak, life and death, beauty and ugliness, hope and despair. The storytelling is engaging, and the prose stops you in the middle of the page, repeatedly. It also holds a view of death that is comforting and relaxed, which I did not expect and did not know I needed.

I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a narrator with a personality, who’s grieving and would be relieved by a death that’s gentle and tired rather than terrifying, who loves a beautiful sentence.

Read it for any one of those, and you will be swept away by the weight of the words.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

The night before my wedding anniversary, I already knew.

There would be a hole tomorrow. An empty window where his text should be.

Grief let itself in and waited up with me. The next day, it followed me everywhere.

Twenty-two years married this August. Most of them, my dad remembered.

Sometimes, it was just the two words. A few times, it was a thoughtful comment on how much he enjoyed my wedding. Other times, it was a little note, in his silly way. He was almost always being silly, like a suit he never took off, so others could be happy.

I went looking for him in the only place he still talks, and found the gaps when he didn’t text. Years he forgot. Years he was busy. I’d bet he even thought of it, but just forgot to text me.

It didn’t matter. My memory worked on those years like sand on broken glass. Until nothing was sharp anymore.

My mom used to tell me I was just like my dad.

She meant the way I showed my emotions. In fits and bursts.

Hysterical, she called him.

He wasn’t simple to love back.

He always chose her. Choosing me would have meant choosing against her, and he couldn’t.

But he never turned on me. He was still friendly, still glad to see me. It was hard to stay mad at someone like that.

Somehow, that washed away the scars.

Saying goodbye in that hospital room, I held his hand and one thought.

Not him.

At the funeral, everyone who stood up talked about his devotion to his wife. To my mom.

Nobody talked about his kids.

Grief took the seat beside me. Hands folded. Not saying a word.

He couldn’t wash away the scars this time.

Without him, there was no one left to talk sense. No one to be silly. No one to listen. The distance grew into a valley.

He left me something else.

He spent his last years on a ranch in the middle of the mountains. Every chance he got, he told me how happy he was there. I could hear it in his voice.

He waited most of his life to live that simply.

I didn’t want to wait.

So I started setting things down. A business that was harder than it needed to be. The idea that writing was something I’d get to later.

Some of what I set down was people.

Hysteria, I think, is the fear of not being seen, turned outward.

He was so good at seeing people. And he was outgoing enough, giving enough, to say it to their face.

I struggle with that. I used to notice people. Their joy. Their pain. Them. I never said anything.

I say it now. Not always, but more.

It's been a year this month. October 1, 2025. On the short list of worst days of my life.

I see him everywhere. I stretch moments to make them fit him.

Leaning in for a story. Enjoying a piece of fruit with me. In the joke that sneaks into my head. In the love I feel for Dustin.

Grief keeps the calendar. Every birthday, mine or one of the kids’, it wakes me early to watch the phone.

I am like him. I didn't realize how thankful I'd be for that.

I wish I could tell him I see him. And thank him for his attention, even when it was mostly not on me.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

She’s not a dancer.

That’s what I would have told you on the drive over. She’s an actor. That’s her focus. The dancing is something she’s been catching up on, hours of it, trying to get it into her body the way the other kids in her program seem to already have it.

We already had tickets for Friday’s show. Then, Wednesday morning, she texted me. She had two free seats for the invited dress that night, and wanted to know if we wanted to see it twice. She was already giving me an out that she could return the tickets if we didn’t want them.

Her dad and I jumped at the chance, even though we already had plans. They could be rearranged.

So, when the ensemble came out, I was ready to be proud of her for trying.

I wasn’t ready for what happened.

Here’s what I didn’t know. I didn’t know the songs. I didn’t know the dances. I didn’t know how much stage time she would have, or even what the play was fully about.

I knew she had more dancing this time, and she’d told me her teachers said she was doing great. But I had nothing else to prepare myself with or for.

That used to be my job: preparing.

When she had a show or a monologue for class or an audition, we ran lines. I would clumsily read my lines. She always knew hers. She would have mastered them before asking me for help.

She so rarely asks for help. Even when she asks, she doesn’t really ask. When she does, I want to be there for her. I find it hard not to drop everything.

These days, she works on her lines at school. In the garage. In her room. With her siblings. Not usually with me any more.

I wonder why.

I wonder if she doesn’t want to bother me, or to ask one more thing of me. Or if she doesn’t trust me to help. Or if she’s embarrassed.

I’ve never asked.

I assume she’s doing it that way because she needs to.

Maybe running lines was never just for her. So I’d know what was coming. So I’d be in it with her, somehow, before she walked out there alone.

There is so much alone in acting. So much auditioning, and being judged.

This time, she didn’t need me. She got the part on her own. She learned it on her own. She exists completely without me at school, in a world I only see from a seat in the dark.

She came out and I was immediately thrilled.

She’s not a dancer, but she was a dancer.

Her moves were intentional, yet natural. There was so much emotion on her face, in her body.

She was loud, even when silent.

I knew she’d hurt her ankle in rehearsal that week. Before the show, backstage, she texted me that she could barely put pressure on it.

It didn’t show at all. I don’t know how she does that, but she always has.

And she was funny. She made the whole audience laugh out loud.

I learned later that she improvised one of those scenes. It was hilarious.

She'd tell you she's not creative, compared to her peers.

Sitting next to her father, I forgot for a while to be her mother. I was just in the audience. In awe. She was a pleasure to watch and experience, and easily one of the best dancers, in a program full of dancers.

Her dad and I loved every moment of her on that stage.

It was so clear how hard she had worked. And how she had done it all herself.

She always seems to be putting herself into difficult situations. And she always rises to the occasion.

I imagine she got that from her dad and me. Failing forward. Figuring things out as they came.

But she took it to a whole new level. And she keeps doing it.

My dad always told me it was better to be a big fish in a little pond. I used to think he was right. And maybe it was, for me.

She seeks out the big ponds, and then she rises to become the big fish.

She has dreams far bigger than anything I ever dreamed.

I know she’ll make it. Because she always does.

She is my oldest, and she is seventeen. My youngest is nine. Somewhere, between those two numbers, the house has been changing shape, and I’ve been trying not to think about it.

So has she. She doesn’t feel like she should be almost eighteen yet.

She is fiercely independent. And she desperately wants to be a child again. She's a walking contradiction, and I sometimes don't know how to best support her.

She spends so much of her time at school now, focused on her goals. After this show, it will be college applications. And then, she’ll go on to an even bigger pond.

I can’t believe we’re already here.

I’m sad to lose her to this world. And I’m so proud that she found what she was looking for.

Maybe she’s not the only walking contradiction.

After the show, she came to find us in the crowd. She looked worn out, but content.

She looked so beautiful. I didn’t say it. I knew it would make her uncomfortable. So, I hugged her and told her how well she did. How proud I was. How she danced so well.

The next morning, I texted her anyway. The long version. The one I didn’t want to say in front of everyone.

She wrote back a few words and a “love you.”

For a second, I wondered if she thought I was just being nice.

She kept texting. About the show. About the parts I’d missed. For a long time, she let me in.

Then, she had to go to class, and she was gone again.

But, I keep coming back to that night.

I looked around and realized I didn’t know many of the people around me.

She did.

This is her world. And she is grabbing it.

She’s not a dancer. But she was.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

Before you write a single word on Substack, it asks you how much you want to charge.

It isn’t pushy about it, but it’s one of the first setup steps, sitting immediately after you choose a publication name, add a description, and upload your logo.

Monthly. Yearly. Founding member. Or Free.

I filled in all three, unsure. I had zero subscribers, and I hadn’t yet published a single word. I was still deliberating on whether I liked my title and logo.

To learn how it's done on Substack, I followed several writers, and paid for a few select subscriptions to see what was behind the curtain. I found that nearly all of them charged for everything they wrote, or at least a large portion of it.

So, I started writing. And I paywalled almost everything.

I launched with four free articles, and then released one paid article every Monday.

Three months later, I had written fourteen articles, including essays, book reviews, writing about writing posts, and so on. I was pretty damn proud of the work I’d shared, and ecstatic to be acting more like a writer. Almost all of my writing was behind a paywall, for an audience of thirty-five people, one of whom was my husband.

I told myself it was a business decision. I’m pretty good at business decisions. I’ve made a lot of them.

It wasn’t one.

I wasn’t looking for paid subscribers. I was looking for permission.

I built a blog with thousands of clean eating recipes, millions of visitors a year. I shot hundreds of videos and kept shooting until four hundred and forty thousand people were watching. People still leave comments thanking me for them. I send a free newsletter that thirteen thousand people open every week.

I never charged anyone for a single piece of it.

Then, here I was, writing essays and asking for payment. I was writing about losing my father. About my own hiding. About a marriage I’ve been in since I was a kid. About shedding the performative skin that I built up for years, only to lose myself in the process. About finding myself again, and working on proving her wrong.

Essays about not hiding anymore, locked.

I needed proof this all counted.

Paid subscribers were the only kind of proof I understood.

So, I spent three months looking, hoping. I got lost in trying to grow this thing instead of focusing harder on finding my voice and enjoying the journey.

In August, four months into writing on Substack, I unlocked all of it. You can’t do that as a one-off button, by the way. That was a conscious choice that required going in and editing every single one of my articles to be free.

The whole archive, every essay, was now free. Not because I stopped wanting to be paid. I still want to be paid. But because I finally worked out the real goal of my Substack.

I wanted my writing to be out in the world, and valued.

I’m here to find a creative writing voice. To have somewhere to write that has nothing to do with health or wellness or food or weight loss. To document writing my first novel, out loud, while I’m still learning.

None of that needed a wall around it.

Then, I shared this Note:

Here’s what happened, almost immediately.

I went from thirty-five subscribers on August 20 to a hundred a few days later. My Note blew up. I reached so many writers who felt the exact same way: working to be validated, one subscriber at a time.

I woke the next morning after sharing that note to see forty emails from Substack telling me I had a new subscriber to Proving Her Wrong, only to get ten more when I refreshed.

That weekend, it continued.

I told Dustin I thought I was being spammed or hacked. That people don’t follow me that fast. That something had to be wrong with the numbers.

A few days later, after Dustin and I had finished grocery shopping, I checked my email, and saw I had fifteen more subscribers. Under my breath, I asked no one, “What is going on?”

He turned to me and asked, “Why is it when you see some real, actual success after working hard for it, you think you didn’t earn it and that you don’t deserve it?”

I had no answer.

I’m still thinking on that.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

Leave a comment

Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

He was so hot, he woke me up. The first thing I noticed was his soft, sweaty skin slippery against mine. He was like a radiator.

He wasn’t crying.

I came up out of sleep because something next to me was wrong in a way my body understood before my mind. Everything was so quiet, so dark.

In the blinding light, I took his temperature, knowing it would be high. It was 104 degrees.

Something was very wrong.

He was two weeks old. We were at the ER by 2:37 a.m. They confirmed his temperature was a high 104 degrees, and they’d need to run some tests.

They said meningitis. Well, they said it might be meningitis, but in the middle of the night, might has no meaning. Since they weren’t equipped to handle a newborn, they were transferring us to Dell Children’s by ambulance. I had never even been in an ambulance.

Dustin got his mom to watch the girls while they slept so he could follow us in the Suburban. The weather was almost snowy. They strapped my son to the stretcher in his car seat.

I have never been so afraid of anything in my life.

The drive took twenty-five minutes. It would have been over an hour at any other time of day. I kept my hand in his car seat the entire drive, loving on his little leg.

He’s twelve now. I’m telling you that here, early, because I didn’t get to know it then.

3:49 a.m. A room at Dell Children’s, waiting for the doctor to come and do a spinal tap on his little body.

I had seen a spinal tap happen once before, when I was volunteering at a hospital. It was a grown woman, and I almost fainted. It's a very long needle that goes into the spine to extract a clear liquid.

Sitting there, across from Dustin, as I held our newborn baby, things had never been more clear.

I wasn’t going back.

After our first baby arrived almost five years prior, I was a social worker at child welfare services. I left the job when she was born. I told myself I was going back, but I didn’t. I won’t pretend I was sad about it. That work involved working with all the abuses: substance, domestic, child, sexual. Every day, my heart grew a little colder. After I had been on leave for a few months, I knew I couldn’t go back. It was no longer possible.

I built something else. Out of necessity and pure will to stay home with her, I started a blog and began to earn a small income. Then, her sister came a couple of years later. We kept trying to make the blog work, but we kept reaching dead ends, and I got burned out.

The week of her first birthday, I went back to real work. Another social work job, in a different state.

I cried driving to my first day.

After being back in social work, I knew I needed to get out. I took my experience in account management, project management, and technology to a startup in Austin and made the case for why they needed me. I told them how to fix their processes. I drew on their whiteboard with slightly shaky hands.

I got hired as a project manager, making more than I had in social work. This was a whole new career, in a new city, and I could not have been more excited.

After I had been a project manager for about a year, Dustin and I started talking about having another baby. I didn’t want to leave work again, and I didn’t want to put the baby in daycare as an infant. Dustin made me see the reality of it, that we could have this baby and use daycare, or we could not have this baby. I agreed. I was never happy about it.

I told everyone I was coming back. And I completely believed it. I wanted this career, and this life.

My other two babies had been one or two weeks early, but he made me wait an extra thirteen days to be born. He arrived the day before my scheduled induction.

Back at the hospital, the night shift doctor performed the spinal tap. He couldn’t move or he might be injured, so he had to be almost folded in half, which he did not like. I held him the whole time. I told him it would be okay. I whispered sorry and kissed his soft head.

Dustin watched.

We knew almost immediately it wasn’t meningitis. But we still didn’t know what it was.

We wouldn’t know for another five days. Five days in a hospital, when we had only just come home from the hospital after he was born.

He was the patient, but I ate his meals so I could feed him.

I slept on the couch in his room while he slept next to me in his hospital crib, hooked up to monitors. His lullaby was the beep of his own pulse. I was recovering from giving birth myself, but that wasn't the focus.

So many blood draws. So many tests. So much screaming and squirming. And I couldn’t explain why to my little baby boy who looked so perfect.

Visitors would come: my daughters, and Dustin. The girls were eager to play with their new baby brother, and afraid they might break him. But then they had to leave. My heart would sink, and I would feel alone, then he would cry out for me.

It was a urinary tract infection and water on his kidney. They would need to follow it to make sure it was resolving.

I remember leaving, returning him to his car seat, and walking out into the brisk and bright February day with Dustin. I remember getting home to my bed, to his crib, to our room, to my shower, to my food, to my girls, to quiet. It was all going to be okay.

My mind was partly peaceful, and partly already working out how I could make it work to stay home.

They followed him for eight or nine years. More ultrasounds, more specialists, more appointments.

Then, they told us we were done. No more monitoring. Nothing to watch.

He’s twelve now. For all intents and purposes, a regular boy, in his own quirky and amazing way.

I never went back.

Not to that job, not to an office, not to real work, which is still the phrase I use for it.

It cost me the future I was building.

Instead, I built a business out of necessity: an online presence on YouTube, Instagram, and a thriving blog, all teaching about healthy eating and weight loss. I made my own startup.

It took stopping everything at 3:49 in the morning to admit it. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

This time, I read East of Eden, which had been on my TBR list for years. The title has always pulled at me, and I kept hearing it was Steinbeck’s finest. Six hundred pages later, I’m a fan.

What it’s about

The novel follows two families in the Salinas Valley across three generations. There are the Hamiltons, who are poor and happy, and the Trasks, who keep repeating the biblical story of Cain and Abel from Genesis 4 without meaning to. After Cain kills his brother, he's sent away to live east of Eden, which is where the book gets its name.

Knowing this doesn’t spoil the story or tell you where it’s going. Instead, it feels more like a generational dysfunction, just like any other that gets passed down, despite us trying to stop it.

Steinbeck has said he wrote East of Eden for his young sons, so they’d know where they came from. Samuel was Steinbeck’s grandfather, and one of the daughters, Olive, was his mother. He himself turns up in the book as a boy, narrating a few pages in first person before stepping back out.

According to him, he thought it was the only book he’d ever really written.

All of that said, the best parts of this novel are three very different men, none of them related, and their conversations: Samuel Hamilton, Adam Trask, and Lee. These scenes make the entire book.

The people

Most everyone in this book is either looking outward or aimed inward, and Steinbeck is not subtle about which is which. The inward ones ask what does this mean about me? The outward ones ask what is it like to be you? That singular difference decides everything else.

Adam and Cathy are aimed very much inward, and so are most of the Trasks. Samuel and Lee are the exceptions, and they’re also the reason the book is epic and thought-provoking.

And Liza is a different story altogether. She's not curious about anyone, but she's not self-absorbed, either.

Samuel & Liza

Samuel Hamilton is the character who has stuck with me the most since finishing East of Eden. He is the wisest man in the valley and the only one who behaves like he hasn’t finished learning. He farms land that gives nothing but dirt back, and everyone knows it, including him.

I don't think I've ever been a rich man, but I've never been poor either. I've had the love of a good woman, the respect of my neighbors, and more children than a sensible man knows what to do with.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

He reads everything. He invents things and patents them and never makes a dollar from any of it. He’s funny, warm, and he refuses to be solemn about anything just because it’s serious. He asks questions the way other people breathe.

When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Samuel reminded me a lot of my father, how he saw people for who they really were. He could name the thing you were carrying without making you feel caught.

And then there’s Samuel’s wife, Liza.

Samuel repeatedly jokes about Liza’s stern and pious nature, though he deeply respects her.

Liza is a good woman, but she has the Hamilton nose for sin. She can smell a drop of whiskey through a stone wall.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Liza Hamilton appears to enjoy nothing. She is small and rigid and disapproving of almost everything, and she has no use for humor, though her husband is made of it.

It was well known that Liza Hamilton and the Lord God held similar convictions on nearly every subject.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Yet Samuel adores her, not in spite of her, but because he sees her. He knows exactly what she is and finds it delightful, comforting. Their marriage is a quiet argument the book keeps making that understanding someone is not the same as approving of them. Understanding is the stronger of the two.

Lee

Lee is an incredibly interesting character. He is the servant in the Trask house, and he is the smartest person in the book.

He speaks pidgin (broken, simplified English), and Steinbeck lets you see how people treat him because of it. Then, early on, in a conversation with Samuel, the book turns your understanding of him inside out.

People like you to be something, preferably what they are.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

For him, being understood costs more than being underestimated.

He is the most honest person in the book, and he has to be careful where he shares it. When he does tell the truth, it isn't gentle and he doesn't soften it for anyone.

There's more beauty in truth, even if it is dreadful beauty.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Adam

Adam Trask does what he wants, and believes everything was done to him. Whatever he calls it — duty, love, grief — it always comes back to himself, and what he needs it to be. He’s the kind of man who can sit in a room and let two people talk to him for hours, yet come out the other side unchanged.

Throughout the book, he either chooses to be blind or is simply incapable of seeing outside of himself.

It seemed to Samuel that Adam might be pleasuring himself with sadness.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Though he is never the villain of his own story, that is not the same as being innocent.

Cathy

If Samuel is warmth and curiosity and humor, Cathy is emptiness, darkness, and treachery. Steinbeck introduces her by first asking whether a person can be born missing something the rest of us have, and then whether that person is as separate from us as we’d like to believe.

It doesn’t matter that Cathy was what I would have called a monster. Perhaps we can’t understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water? Maybe we all have in us a secret pond where evil and ugly things germinate and grow strong.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Steinbeck spends the rest of the book making you answer that question, and he doesn't make it easy. Every time you decide what she is, he shows you something that makes you reconsider.

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I believe Cathy is the reason this novel unsettles people, but finding out why is part of reading the book. Given that, I will share more here about her.

Lines that have stuck with me

There were so many great lines and painfully beautiful sentences in East of Eden. I found myself rereading passages over and over. Only two other books have had such an impact on me with words: Lonesome Dove, which I recently wrote about here, and The God of Small Things, which somehow made almost every sentence intensely rich with beauty.

Here are a few lines I loved.

A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Love and delusion in the same moment. It's beautiful, and Adam is the only one in the book who could have written it.

Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

This is the other side of timshel, the Hebrew word for “thou mayest,” which is discussed in the book. If you can choose, you can also be wrong, and no one gets to take that from you.

For most of my life — and maybe still — my family kept things from me they thought were too hard, whether it was a painful event, family trauma, or an uncomfortable discussion. Their doing so never taught me how to handle the difficulties. All it did was teach me they didn't think I could. I had a right to the pain.

All great and precious things are lonely.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I’ve thought about this line for a while. Neither the man who says it nor the man he says it to is lonely. And most of the people in the book who are lonely are neither great nor precious.

It would be easy to say that loneliness comes from other people, that they pull away from anyone who makes them feel mediocre. But I don’t think that is how the line works in the book.

In choosing greatness, a man chooses to set himself apart on his own path, to separate from the sins of his father, and to accept his beautiful and difficult freedom.

Who should read it

Honestly, I think everyone should read this book.

It covers generational pain, struggle, and growth. Angels and devils. What people need from the inside versus what they show on the outside. Love, hate, war, and peace. It's written in a way that made me slow down. It’s for anyone who wants to get lost in a conversation, or a single line.

Plus Netflix is adapting it into a seven-episode series, which is as good a reason as any to read it first. I’m very curious to see Florence Pugh in the role of Cathy.

Please don’t let the length stop you.

And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

A quick note before getting started. I created Proving Her Wrong as an outlet for me to embrace Lacey Baier, the author. My goal was to have a space where I could focus on telling my full story, practice my writing, and continue to build out my own voice as an author, after years of building a slightly different voice as an influencer, food blogger, and YouTuber.

I have very much enjoyed this opportunity to write in a different voice, about things I used to leave out. In addition to this Substack, I am also writing my first novel, which is based on following a single mom, Maren, who discovers her own powers amidst pain and family silence. Along the way, I figured short stories would be fun to try here, too, as a way to practice writing fictional characters and stories.

Now, there is some truth to the story I have written that follows, in that it’s based on my observations at a local coffee shop I frequent, but it is also an attempt at writing more fiction and taking myself mostly out of the story.

This story may continue, or I may try new ones as they come to me.

I hope you enjoy it.

It’s an early Tuesday morning at the coffee shop. The day is sunny, blue skies visible through the tall trees that surround the modest square of buildings in town. The coffee shop is nestled inside a small mountain town, and has been around since 2015 according to the hand-carved wooden sign on the front. A bell attached to the door announces every arrival. Just inside is the order station, where there is almost always a smiling barista waiting to take your order.

This morning, she is there again. She usually works the early morning shift, and is always smiling, always sweet.

Every time she calls out an order, when the customers thank her as they grab their perfectly created drink from the counter, she says, “You’re so welcome.”

She welcomes every guest the same way, and is equally pleasant and friendly. She knows the order immediately of the couple who shows up most mornings. Two hot americanos with steamed oat milk, for here. Then they go sit in the corner and work on their laptops, smiling at each other throughout the morning.

Next is the man in the business suit, too important to get off his phone. He’s a cliche of himself, but he somehow exists, nonetheless. He orders a latte, no flavor, to go. He doesn’t say thank you when he leaves quickly with his hot latte, but she still thanks him for stopping by and wishes him a good day today.

Next, a young mom enters, using her large stroller to hold the door open as she passes the businessman on his way out. She has a toddler on one hip, and a sleeping baby in the stroller. Her hair is frazzled, and she does her best to hold onto her toddler who tries to squirm out of her arms and onto the floor to explore.

The line of customers waxes and wanes like the tides of an ocean, the constant being that she is the sand, always ready to greet and be taken over by their orders.

Her dark curly brown hair is loosely pulled back to keep it out of her face, though she fights constantly with a few strands that make their way across her forehead throughout the day. When they do, she quickly pulls back the errant curls, and gently tucks them back behind her ear, thoughtlessly. It’s happened so many times, the act is now a regular movement done without thought.

Her hands are always moving. They go from taking down an order, starting the grinder for the americanos, steaming milk for a latte, cleaning the counter with the white kitchen towel with blue stripes, pushing her hair back away from her face, and tying and retying her light green apron.

The line of the customers has quieted for a moment, allowing her an opportunity to straighten the counter once again, preparing for the next wave.

When the door bell rings again, she walks back to the cash register to take a new order, her smile already appearing as she takes her first step. She is welcoming an older man with dark grey hair that is receding along his scalp. His voice is louder than most, either he is hard of hearing or he likes to be heard, or both. But it doesn’t matter. She takes his order, smiles sweetly, and is kind to him, just like everyone else.

He asks about the various types of drinks, and wants clarification on the difference between drip coffee and an americano. Her answer is thoughtful and patient. He repeats the word americano, thinking he sounds so fancy. She chuckles, her hands wiping the counter of spilled milk.

Then she turns her focus to his order, her hands orchestrating the symphony of shiny metal tools. As he carefully picks up his mug, he thanks her. She says, “You’re so welcome,” but he doesn’t walk away. He remains at the counter, standing in front of others who are also waiting, and he begins to start another conversation with her.

It’s clear she is busy with other orders, but she breaks her attention in two and continues to be kind to this man who wants to talk. He tells her he has passed this coffee shop 100 times, but decided to come in today and get a coffee, and how happy he is to have found such a great coffee and nice establishment. Her hands are busy as she moves, but she continues to listen.

He tells her a few stories, and she comments along. He says he lives alone now, and that he moved closer not long ago.

His voice wavers when he says he’s happy for the pleasant conversation.

She looks at him. Her hands keep wiping the counter.

The orders have been completed for the customers who had been waiting, they have all come and gone now, yet he remains standing at the counter, talking with her, at her. She never wavers from being so sweet to him.

Finally, after he has finished his drink, he thanks her for the conversation and starts to leave. The door bell rings as he steps towards the door, already another customer walking in. He turns to her, and says he’ll be back tomorrow. She will remember his order.

After the door closes, the sounds of the coffee shop return again. The vibrant hum of a keyboard being typed upon. A vague conversation between two customers about their plans for the day. The gentle acoustic music playing on repeat in the background, likely set to coffeehouse vibes. The grinding of beans for the next latte. Her welcoming the next customer, asking what she can get started for them.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

The floor was hard and I didn’t care.

We had been sitting on it for hours. Cross-legged, facing each other, knees almost touching. Somewhere behind us, a party had been happening and then stopped happening, and I don’t remember it ending. I remember the carpet. I remember my back starting to ache. I remember not moving anyway.

He was dating someone, and I was dating someone. We both knew, in the way you know before saying it out loud, that neither of those was going to work out. Neither of us were looking for each other that night.

We just kept talking.

I don’t remember what about, exactly. Twenty-eight years later and the whole transcript is gone. What I kept was how easy it was to talk to him. How comfortable I was.

We stayed awake until the house was silent and dark.

And somewhere in there, without either of us deciding it, we found in each other a friend.

Within a month, we had both ended things with our other relationships, though not for each other. We just knew what we had wasn’t right.

Our first date wasn’t a date. We went to see Saving Private Ryan as friends. Somewhere in the dark, I knew I wanted it to be a date. He knew it, too. Neither of us said so.

We decided later that it had been our first date.

Early on, we both knew this was going to be a real thing. We had no business knowing. We were too young to know it, yet we sensed it anyway.

I still can’t get over how we knew.

This morning, I woke up next to him, warm.

Sleep still in my eyes, the sun sneaking in through the blinds in thin bright lines. The mountains out there behind them, covered in fog.

He was already awake.

He had been watching me sleep.

His hair is longer now. It falls over his forehead into his eyes, and he pushes it back, gently. His beard is full, and there is grey scattered through the blond.

He is on his right side, head on his pillow, turned toward me. The daylight coming up behind him.

I watch the smile form before he says it. I know what’s coming.

Good morning, gorgeous. Soft. Quiet.

He pulls me closer and says I am his.

We hit snooze. And then, we hit it again.

Every morning, he holds me through all of it. My back against his chest, going from one moment we love to another.

I sink into him. All of it goes quiet, all the low static of being a person with things to do. With him, I am not performing anything. I am just there, warm, seen, and completely whole.

I drift back to sleep with him holding me.

I have loved this man since he was a boy.

And I have loved every change along the way. Every version of him that showed up and quietly replaced the one before it.

I have watched him give everything on a basketball court and pay for it with his body, pushing past the point where anyone else would have stopped.

I have watched him accomplished every single thing he set out to do.

I have watched him grow up needing a father who never showed up, and then become one who always does.

I know the risk of finding someone that early. I was betting on a stranger I hadn’t met yet.

What happened is that he kept becoming, and I kept wanting to know the next one.

I could not be more completely his. And he mine.

We’ve been together since we were kids when we thought we knew what love was.

I didn’t know it could get stronger than this.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

Maren’s been watching him over the past few weeks since she came into town. They met in a coffee shop, and he explained he was helping her late grandmother fix the porch. She told him he didn’t have to. He said he doesn’t like to leave things unfinished.

He’s come every day to finish a job he didn’t have to do. She watches him through the window, at first. His rough hands as he handles the hammer and table saw.

At first, it starts with bringing him some water when she can see his sweat run down his face, soak his tight white shirt. She can almost taste it.

In the early evenings, she finds herself sitting on the porch when he’s gone for the day, realizing this is her favorite part of the house she just moved into. She can feel him, smell his hard work, his care. She barely knows him. The porch will be finished soon.

…and that’s where I have currently left her: waiting and wanting more.

I’ve been deliberating on whether and, if so, how far I should take her romance in my story. At first, I figured I’d add it in here and there to further the plot, to use romance as a tool, a thing you deploy. That's where I was a month or so ago.

But then, I started to think on how much he shows up for her. He promises to finish a job her grandmother paid him for, though he didn't have to. He shows up on time, day after day. He's the first person who's believed in her. She's been beaten down, and he's steady.

And he’s damn sexy, too!

Once I got to that conclusion, the question of how far will it go arose. Now, I know how fragile Maren is, and how it would definitely go far at this point. But how much should I show of their relationship? How much of their passion should be visible to the reader?

This is where I stopped, and I’ve been stuck here ever since.

The longer I consider the question, How much should I show? the more I understand that I'm worried about the reader. And that the reader isn't a reader. It's Jordan. Or Savannah. Or Hunter.

Jordan is 17, and Savannah is 15. I know they have read and seen worse than what I could or would have Maren do.

But what they haven’t read or seen (thankfully!) are those scenes from me. That they would see a piece of who I really am, or what is really in my imagination.

That the sexual part of me might show through.

So, that brings me back again to the main question: How far does Maren go, and how much do I show of her doing it? Does it all fade to black, and happen behind closed doors? Do I share explicit details of the event(s)? Or, somewhere in the middle?

I like a book to dive deeper into it, most of the time. My worry is that it might detract from my story, somehow cheapen it. But it wouldn't be smut. It would transform the characters and move the plot along. If anything, it’s a win for Maren. It gives her something to hold onto. Her world is uncertain and unsafe, even hurtful.

Well, the way I see it is that Maren is emotionally fragile. She’s had some bad luck in love and life, and she has a chance at something better. I think she needs it, that she wants it, and, right now, I think the book needs it, too.

The act of letting go is, in itself, a plot point for the book. It enables her to silence the noise that is her past and, for a moment, feel pleasure.

But, I guess the issue still remains: how much of my imagination do I show, and not hide?

Maren opens the door to the porch to sit in her favorite spot, only this time she knows he’s still there, working.

Proving Her Wrong is a reader-supported publication. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

The shirt was almost neon.

Bright pink, three-quarter sleeves, tight-fitting. Nothing I would have ever worn, but I still loved it. In high school, I hid inside a navy blue Patagonia jacket, all day, every day, even when I was hot.

I’d bought the shirt a few days earlier, and that morning I held it, hesitating, deciding. Then, I put it on with my favorite jeans and went to my first day of college classes.

Walking the wide concrete path across campus, the sunlight splintering down through the trees, I understood something. No one was looking at me. No one was judging what I had chosen to wear. No one here knew me. Nobody could apply who I was before this day to who I was now.

I could be anyone.

That weekend, I bought a few more outfits.

It wasn’t the first time I had made a silent decision with myself. This is who I am now. And then I was.

The first time it happened, I was sixteen. I was home alone after volleyball practice, my hair matted with dried sweat in a tight ponytail, my cheeks still red from running laps around the court. I sat on the dark hardwood floor, cross-legged, my volleyball suspended in my lap, cold against my legs. I knew there was an important game the next day, and I was going to be starting. I had always struggled to be loud on the court, my nerves usually bested me.

But that afternoon, I knew what I had to do, so I pictured it. Me calling for the ball, loud, sure. The spike. The point. Over and over, until I wasn’t watching her anymore. I was her. And I knew that the next time I stood on that court, I would be her.

It kept working, so I kept doing it. I became someone who applied herself in high school, a good student. I became someone who let herself be smart in front of people. I became strong instead of skinny. Became healthy. Became a reader.

Some identities I didn’t decide. Blogger. YouTuber. Mom. Wife. Those arrived. They still feel a little vague to me now, no moment I can point to, no afternoon I pictured her first. I just looked up one day, and that's what I was.

One of my identities was a subtraction. I removed myself from my family’s dynamics. I stopped being the “Yeah Sure Girl,” the one who would do what you asked without a moment’s thought. The first time I did it, I was told I was wrong, that I’d imagined it. I had asked for help with being treated poorly, and instead I was spoken over. That decision cost me people, family, and it hurt.

That’s the difference. Deciding toward something only costs you effort. Deciding away from something costs you people who would rather you stayed the same.

Then there’s the writing, which didn’t work like any of them.

This time, the proof was already there. I had been writing for years by then. Two published cookbooks. A food and wellness blog with millions of visits per month. Thousands of words a week. Technically, I was already a “writer” when I decided to become one. I just didn’t identify as such.

Becoming something I already was broke the pattern, and I’ve been sitting with why. Every other time, the decision came first, and the evidence came after. I decided, I became, and the proof showed up in what happened next. This time, it was backwards.

Why was it backwards? Why didn’t I choose this one defiantly, the way I chose all the others? It’s the most important of them, and it was already true.

I don’t know yet.

So, it seems, it was never about whether I could. It was about whether the writing was allowed to be the thing itself.

I have always assumed “writers” write novels and short stories. They write eloquent opinion pieces in the New York Times and rich prose. That, and they identify as such. That they keep writing because, in the end, the writing is what they value most.

Mine was never that. Writing was a tool. It built a business. It taught, motivated, helped. It was how I reached everything else. No different from photography or infographics.

A million visits a day to my blog, and it still didn’t count. Because it was working, and things that work are instruments. Calling myself a writer meant letting the writing be the point.

It felt like stepping into my own shoes.

I’ve never been good with visions. I don’t plan the future well. When asked to do so, I usually see a blank white wall within my head. It goes nowhere. I’m far more comfortable in the present, in the thing in front of me, the next hour, the right now.

Then I saw it: me, in a cozy living room, with my computer on my lap. I’m alone on a brown leather couch in the far corner of the room. There are tall, green trees with leaves swaying gently through the tall windows, which are letting in the only light. I’m writing a book.

This truth I saw shook me.

The room I’m in now is closer than it’s ever been. There’s a space for me to write. There are trees outside the window. It isn’t quite the room yet.

Now, I'm just catching up to a room I've already seen.

Thank you for reading. If this one stayed with you, please leave a comment.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

This month, it was Lonesome Dove, and I did not expect to love it the way I did.

What it’s about

In the late 1800s, two retired Texas Rangers leave a dusty, dead-end town on the Rio Grande and drive a herd of cattle north to Montana, where no one has taken cattle before. They take a crew of hands with them, most of them young and none of them ready. Almost everything that happens to them happens on the way.

What it does

So much of this book is delivered through dialogue. Men on horses, talking, and somewhere in the middle of it you learn something that happened long before the book started. McMurtry weaves the history in so matter-of-factly that it feels like it’s happening in front of you. Then, you realize it already happened, that you’ve been inside a flashback without being told you’d gone anywhere.

Reading it, I realized that’s how it works in real life, too. Nobody sits you down and delivers their past. It comes out sideways, mid-conversation, while they’re telling you something else entirely. By the time you understand what you’ve been told, they’ve already moved on.

McMurtry does something similar with the men themselves. So many of them go through the same experiences, like crossing the same river, enduring the same harsh weather, the same wins and losses, and come out the other side entirely different. You’re inside one man’s head, and then another’s, and the same event has two shapes.

Something else that stayed with me is how rough life actually was. McMurtry doesn’t dramatize it, he just reports it. Death is constant, and nobody has time to process it. Oddly enough, I found the same thing was true in Hamnet, which I mentioned in Just Finished — Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell.

The people

I don't think I've read a book where I understood this many people this well. McMurtry expands not just on the two main characters, but on the hands, the people they run into, and even the ones who don't stick around long. You get their whole past and present, and it comes out sideways, the way everything else does in this book.

So, when something happens to them, it actually costs you something. You already knew who they were, and you feel their loss.

Gus

Gus was my favorite character in the book. He talks constantly, and loudly, about the weather, life, women, whether a man ought to do the thing he’s about to do. He is the loudest person in any room (or open pasture) he walks into, and isn’t afraid to tell people what he thinks…and I would never in my life be that person.

But, at the same time, his insights were mine, nearly every time. He sees what people are thinking before they say it, says it plainly, and then moves on. I have had those same thoughts, but I just never said them loud enough. That’s what got me about Gus, not that he was insightful, but that he was insightful out loud.

“It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living. I doubt it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.”

Gus, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

He doesn’t want much, either, which I think is the other half of it. In fact, he really only wants a few simple things, aside from fixing a past he wishes could have been different.

“If you want one thing too much it's likely to be a disappointment.”

Gus, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

He also enjoys himself, which sounds like nothing and isn’t. Gus wants the trip to be good, not just finished. He wants to eat well, to talk to somebody interesting, to sit down when there’s no reason left to keep standing. He is enjoying the journey.

Call

Then, there’s Call, who I did not expect to find myself in at all.

He’s uptight, socially awkward, a loner, and uncomfortable around, well, everyone. Where Gus wonders out loud, Call has already decided. He announces a principle and immediately breaks something over it, and he never notices the contradiction.

But he decides they are going to Montana and that is the end of the discussion. He just cannot see any way around not doing it. Everyone tells him it’s crazy, but he goes north anyway. I see a lot of my own stubborn self in Call, the person who forces things without fully considering the consequences. It has cost me. It has also built most of what I love about my life.

“I hate rude behavior in a man. I won’t tolerate it.”

Call, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Call and Gus seem like opposites, but I enjoyed how much the two of them have in common underneath. They are both carrying something they can’t fix, and they both spend the entire book trying anyway, each in his own way. Gus says his out loud, constantly, to anyone who will listen. Call never says his at all.

Lines that have stuck with me

For a book about cattle and dirt, there are a lot of sentences in here I had to stop and sit with. Here are a few:

“It’s been so long since I’ve done anything right…I can’t even remember it.”

July Johnson, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

July keeps trying so hard, and keeps missing, which is the loneliest thing in the book.

“Yesterday’s gone on down the river and you can’t get it back.”

Gus, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

This is the other half of what Gus says about living. If yesterday’s gone, the only place left to stand is here.

“It’s a fine world, though rich in hardships at times.”

Gus, from Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Nine words, and the most accurate thing anyone says about being alive.

Who should read it

Honestly, I didn’t expect to enjoy this book as much as I did. When Dustin first pulled it off the shelf months ago, I had zero interest. Then, I kept hearing how good it was, and I watched how much he enjoyed it. Almost nine hundred pages is a real undertaking. It’s easy to read, and simple, even. You move through the pages without effort, enjoying yourself, and then it’s done.

I was concerned it wouldn’t be worth it. It so was. The dialogue and the storytelling are so masterfully crafted that I’d put it alongside East of Eden in terms of how good I think it is. I found myself laughing out loud, sitting with a sentence, and also crying.

So: read it if you’ve been circling it and haven’t committed. Read it if you think you don’t like westerns, because this isn’t really one. Read it if you're willing to spend a long time with people you'll be sorry to leave.

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Lacey Baier is the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish, and the writer behind Proving Her Wrong — personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be.

I was twenty-seven. I held my six-week-old baby girl, Jordan, in a ball on my chest.

We were living in a two-bedroom apartment in Ventura, California, and things were finally starting to feel under control, as we learned to live as a family of three.

Out of the blue, Dustin offered to build us a blog. He’s a software developer. The internet was already his first language, but it wasn’t mine…yet. It would be somewhere to put her photos, he said. So our family could watch her grow. All in one place.

I got nervous, held Jordan a bit tighter.

A blog. The word sounded so silly.

“What’s a blog?” I asked him. And then the real question, underneath it.

“Wouldn’t everyone see it?”

Putting her out there, putting us out there, our faces, our small ordinary things, made something in me pull back hard. I wanted a wall. A lock. A password. A short list of exactly who got to come in.

Jordan is seventeen now.

So much changed.

I think Facebook was the gateway.

I found a life there. Built one, really. An avatar — a version of me who logged on a little braver than I actually was. Everyone was doing it. So, I did it, too. It felt safe because it wasn’t quite me. It was her.

I’ve never quite fit in with the crowd. I’ve always felt like an outsider…someone who was so hell-bent on fitting in and being accepted that she never let herself be.

I watched my friends and family share their stories, what they wanted everyone to see. What I learned rearranged my life. I noticed how, behind the vacation albums and the birthday posts, people were barely holding on. And no one was saying so.

But I could, somehow. How, I still don’t quite understand.

I could take the hard thing, the one nobody would name out loud, and put it into words. Hand it to someone who thought they were the only one. Make a stranger feel less alone. Connect.

That was the pull. Not the likes. That.

I remember sitting behind the camera, alone in my studio, telling a story from my life. Something true. My own pain, my own internal torment, put on display so someone out there might feel less alone.

It came out sounding like something I’d said before.

Rehearsed. Smooth. Not real, not even to me.

So, I sighed, reset, said it again, cleaner.

I knew it would help someone, even though it felt hollow to me. And that was enough. That was, I told myself, the whole point.

My pain on display, performed until it played well. And I couldn’t feel it anymore.

Seventeen years later.

At any given point nowadays, there are more photos of me in a sports bra, in my underwear, than I could count. On YouTube. On Facebook. On Instagram. In emails to tens of thousands of people who have never met me and never will.

I have handed over my innermost demons, the things I said to myself when no one else was in the room. Thoughts that were never meant to leave my own head. I typed them out and sent them to strangers before breakfast.

Somewhere in all that opening, I lost her.

The one who asked for the password. I moved past her so completely that she feels gone, buried.

Here is what no one tells you about becoming the open one.

It looks like bravery. From the outside, it always looks like bravery. The woman who says the hard thing. Who bleeds a little on the page so you don’t have to bleed alone.

But in real life, I am not, and have never been, an open person.

I’m closed. Careful. The kind of woman who wants a lock and a list. The openness is something I built — a skill, an avatar, a second nature I trained on top of the first one until you couldn’t find the seam. I got so good at opening that it passes for who I am.

It isn’t who I am. It’s what I learned to do for you.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the idea that the personal essay has to cost you something. That it isn’t real unless it bleeds. That a woman writing about her life had better hand over a wound. I don’t know where I learned it. I only know I never questioned it. I told myself this was honesty.

Maybe it’s just that’s all I am inside.

I have bled for seventeen years. Cheerfully. Fluently. So fluently, I forgot I was the one bleeding.

This essay was supposed to be defiant. I owe you no wound. And I don’t.

But that’s not the part that scares me.

The part that scares me is quieter. I got so used to bleeding for everyone else that I never once looked at the source of the wound. I opened, and opened, and stayed shut the whole time. Being the most vulnerable person in the room turned out to be the safest place to hide.

You can be seen by tens of thousands and known by no one.

My daughter is the one who caught it.

“You’re using your YouTube voice,” she’d say. Not intentionally cruel. Just judging, the way seventeen-year-olds can be. “You don’t sound like yourself.”

And she’d be right. She’d know before I did. She grew up watching me build the other one: the braver, opener, more-for-you one, and she could hear the exact place where I stopped and the avatar started. The seam I’d hidden from tens of thousands of strangers, she found across the kitchen.

The baby I wanted to keep behind a password grew up and learned my real voice by heart. She never mistook the performance for me.

So, no. There’s nothing to confess here. There never was. The confessing was never the point — it was the toll. I'm learning that an essay doesn't have to open a vein to be worth reading. That it can be true without being a wound. That I don't have to hurt to be valuable.

I keep thinking about her. Twenty-seven, holding her baby tight, asking if the internet could be made safe first.

She wasn’t cold. She wasn’t behind. She knew something it took me seventeen years to unlearn.

Maybe I get to decide who sees it, after all.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please pass it on.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

She always shows up when my hands are full.

Driving, usually. Both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road, the one place I can’t stop to write her down. Or mid-sentence on something else entirely, thinking about the exit coming up, and then there she is. Quiet. Off to the side. Arriving exactly when I can’t hold her.

I thought I had her figured out.

I made her. I know the plan, her story. I know where she ends up, what breaks her, what she’s walking toward. I built the whole machine of her life and set her down inside it, unaware. That was the arrangement, as I understood it. I know everything. She knows what I let her know.

This is my first novel, and she is the first character I’ve ever made.

For years, I’ve written what was true. My own life, mostly. My struggles, my coming-out-the-other-side, my part where I tell you what I learned. I was the expert, the guide, the one who’d already been through it and came back with something useful. It was vulnerable in its way, but it was about things that had already happened. The worst was behind me. I was just reporting, teaching.

This is different. This is scary and thrilling at once, which I’m learning are closer together than I thought.

The tools were always mine. I just never had to make them sing.

What caught me off guard is how she feels things.

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We were somewhere between Sedona and home when I said it.

I think I could leave it all behind. I think I would be okay.

Dustin didn’t flinch. I imagine he was considering what I meant by “it.”

We had spent a month in the open mountains of northern Arizona, saying goodbye to my dad, and helping my mom get settled into a life that no longer had him in it. He’d been gone since October 1st.

We’d stopped in Sedona on the way home to Texas, for a week in one of our favorite places on earth to decompress, though I’m not sure that’s a thing you can do with grief. It really just changed the altitude and scenery.

I didn’t have a plan, and there wasn’t any real structure to it, but I pictured chickens and a coop.

We didn’t have chickens.

But there they were: pecking away inside my brain, something to build and feed. More than a new project: a new identity. I pictured deleting Instagram, never posting again. Walking away from the thing I’d built relentlessly for years, the thing I’d proudly called “my baby,” and meant it.

Gone. And I’d be okay. This was new…

I considered what I was giving up.

I was Cleanish. Not just the founder: it. It was born from me, part of me. The way I cooked, the way I fed my family, the way I dressed, the way I thought about my body as something to nourish instead of punish. I lived it before I had a word for it. The business was just the part you could see.

The strange thing about building something out of your own body is you can’t find the seam where you stop, and where it starts. For years, I didn’t look. It just was. For years, I contemplated posts on vacation, felt guilty for taking a break, treated my body as a prop, and never truly allowed myself to slip, to rest. I called it my baby because it felt like one. Needy, alive, mine, beautiful, impossible to set down.

And then, I’d just said I could set it down.

Months later, I’d almost stopped thinking about it.

I was scrolling on Instagram recently, and a post stopped me: Carl Jung’s face, black and white, pipe in his mouth.

Life really begins at 40, it said. Up until then, you’re just doing research.

I sat there longer than I meant to. Someone had put words to the chickens.

I looked further into this post. It turned out Jung probably never said the part about research. It has become one of those internet quotes that floats, unsourced, too clean to be real.

But the thing underneath was his. The persona, he called it. The self you build to move through the world. He thought there came a point where you stop growing outward and start turning in, back toward everything you set aside while you were busy proving yourself.

Here’s where he and I part ways, one small degree.

Jung’s persona was a mask. Something you wore. Cleanish wasn’t a mask. It wasn’t a lie I’d been telling. It was true. It was me.

At this point in my life, I see now how I am incapable of fully investing in something not true.

It’s easy to walk away from something false. That’s “growth.” It’s stranger to sit in the middle of the red rock desert and realize you could walk away from something real — something honest and fully you — and still be okay, better even.

I keep trying to describe how it left me, and the most honest thing I can say is that it just went away.

No ceremony. No breakdown. I didn’t wrestle it off. One day, I was holding it with both hands and, the next, I noticed my hands were open, free. I don’t think I decided. I think I just stopped needing it to be me.

It loosened, and it fell, the way skin does when you’re not looking.

I’d felt a persona leave before. That one came harder, on the cold tile floor of a shower, sobbing, the water washing the tears off my face as fast as they came. That was the day I understood I couldn't become who I wanted to be and stay where I was. I fought it. Clawed at it.

What I needed in Sedona was smaller. Simplicity. Quiet. A life that didn’t have to be witnessed to count. And chickens, apparently.

I think most of who we stop being leaves quietly. Not all of it — some of it fights. But most slips, the way this one did. We tend to narrate the loud ones, when we leave, burn something down, and miss the quiet sheddings underneath. The ones we only notice years later, looking at a photo, thinking, who was that?

The shedding started early for me, at least. Noticing it, maybe that’s the part that took 40 years.

That evening in Sedona, I just happened to catch one in the act.

I said I could leave it all behind, but I think I meant something gentler. That I already had. That the woman who couldn’t have survived losing it was gone, and the one left in her place wanted chickens and quiet and a body she wasn’t performing for.

We still don’t have chickens.

But I’m okay. I really am.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, please pass it on.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

The rain starts past the last gas station, where the road narrows, and the trees lean in overhead, like they’ve been waiting for us.

I take the first curve too fast. And the next one.

I know better. The road is slick, the forest close on both sides, the thick fog rolling down off the ridges in slow drifts of mist. But there’s something in me the rain has let loose, and I don’t want to rein it in.

The harder I press the gas, the harder it falls, like my foot and the sky are running on the same current, and I couldn’t slow one without slowing the other.

Somehow, I can see it. Every drop of rain. The trees are dark enough behind the rain that each one stands out, sharp and separate, caught for a moment. I have never seen rain like this. Or, maybe, I’ve never looked.

I want to feel the truck lean into the turn. I want the wipers going, the water coming down, the mountains gray-green and folding into each other. I don’t want it to end.

Home, something in me says. Not the house. This.

I left almost everything to get here.

I wasn’t always like this.

There was a version of me who was always on. Who photographed her food before she ate it. Who read every comment, answered every message, framed every ordinary moment by how it might be shared. My office with my certificates. My phone screen. My MyFitnessPal app, logging, tracking, always tracking. Always searching for the next thing. And whatever I found was never the thing.

I did it gladly. For years, I chose this, wanted this. It gave me things I wanted, needed: control over my time, my days, where I lived. A freedom. It let me be home with my children. I built this life on purpose, and it gave me almost everything I asked of it.

There was a lot of joy in it. I liked the connection. I liked helping people. I liked that people liked me, that I appeared like I had everything together.

But it wasn’t me. Not this version of me, anyway. And I tried. For so many years, I tried…to make it me.

I wasn’t looking for a diagnosis. I was looking for permission.

I’d taken a personality test…one of those long ones that asks you a hundred small questions and then tells you something about yourself. I wanted to know whether writing was a good fit for me. I had spent so many years exhausted by work I was good at, work that never quite fit, and I didn’t want to do that again.

The results came by email. I read them on my phone.

It was gentle about it. Soft, even. It said I showed many of the markers of someone with ADHD. That I appeared to be a high masker — someone who had spent a long time overcompensating for struggles no one could see. That I might want to look into this further.

I read it twice.

All those years, I thought I was succeeding: I was compensating. My over-preparing. My feeling of being on. The way I needed the people I loved to love me so much, so visibly, so I could be sure. My feeling like I was broken because I couldn’t just do what I needed to, what Dustin needed me to.

I could lose hours, whole days, breathless, to something I loved. But I could not fake it. Not for the marketing, not for the feed, not for the parts of the work that ran on performance. The same thing that let me disappear into what mattered made everything else impossible to sustain.

I learned this is called hyperfocus with ADHD.

I thought that was just me. My personality. My work ethic. My too-much.

It had a name. It had always had a name.

The work was never the hard part. Being me was the hard part — even if it also came with superpowers.

(I did go get the real diagnosis, later. Not to fix anything, but just to stop arguing with myself about whether it was allowed to be true.)

For most of my life, my next move would have been to find the flaw, build a system, manage it, and smooth it over until no one could see the seam. That’s what I did for years: always masking.

But something in me had already stopped. Somewhere on that road in the rain, taking the curves too fast, I think I’d already let go of the idea that I was a problem to be solved. I hadn’t really overthought that part.

Reading that email, I understood, almost immediately: There was no fixing me. There was only her: the one I’d been holding at arm’s length my whole life, and I reached back and took her hand. My hand.

What went away, mostly, was the guilt. Maybe the pain, too.

For years, I was furious at myself. Why couldn’t I just do the thing? Why was this part so hard when it was easy for everyone else? What was wrong with me? What did I need to fix, to understand, to finally get right? I lived at the bottom of that question.

Now, I leave my keys on the table where I’ll never think to look for them, and I catch myself laughing with me. Because I know why now. I finally know why.

It doesn’t fix the keys. I still lose them. But I don’t lose myself over it anymore.

That's what I felt, on that winding road in the rain, when I said I left almost everything to get here. I did. I left a whole life. But not everyone came with me.

One of my children is out in the world right now, chasing something of her own. Away from us. She has more will than I did at her age, more than I even have now. She has a clearer sense of the thing she’s running toward. And she is happiest, I’ve learned, when she is untethered. When she is not ours to hold, but her own.

I want that for her. I want it down to my bones.

Yet, there is a version of me who feels the distance like weather. Who knows this is the beginning of a longer leaving, that she is becoming herself somewhere I cannot follow, and that my job is to be glad.

I have made my peace with it, mostly.

The personality test never answered my question on whether writing might be a good fit for me. It did something stranger: It opened a hole.

Right along the seam I’d spent my whole life smoothing over. A dark little tear in the story I’d been telling about myself. I thought it would swallow me. Instead, I climbed through it.

That’s where I found the answer. In a coffee shop in the mountains, Dustin across the table, my Americano still warm in my hands, my laptop open, a post for Proving Her Wrong taking shape on the screen.

I get to write for me. I get to be me. I get me.

By the time we turned onto the gravel road, the rain had stopped.

Not slowed: stopped. As if it had only ever been there to bring us home, and now that we were, it could go. I cut the engine. The quiet came in — a mountain quiet, the kind I can’t get enough of now.

Nothing here is settled yet. We’re not all the way moved. There is still so much in Austin, a house not fully ours, rooms that don’t know me yet. Part of my heart is out in the world, becoming someone I’ll have to keep letting go of.

And still, I sat there in the truck, and I was whole.

Not fixed. Not finished. Not smoothed over until you couldn’t see the seam. Just whole. The way a thing is whole when all its pieces are finally in the same place, even the broken ones. Especially the broken ones.

I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere.

Even if I had to break everything to get here.

Proving Her Wrong is reader-supported, and you’re the reason it exists. If this one stayed with you, leave a comment. I read every one.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

It was the fourth time I heard them meekly say, “I’m sorry,” that I decided to step in. They had been walking closely behind my husband and me in the crowded grocery store, past so many strangers who seemed unaware — happy, even — to cut us off on their chaotic, more important path as we made our way to the cereal aisle.

The first time, I assumed they had accidentally cut someone off, and so I didn’t think much of it. The second time, I figured they were just being polite, so I let it go. The third time, I became concerned. My kids are nice and well-behaved, but that’s too nice.

The delicate line between meekness and politeness was laid bare and devoured by strangers who didn’t even notice.

The fourth time was too many.

Too many times, they took an apologetic tone. Too many times they apologized for someone else’s behavior and made themselves the wrongdoer instead of the person who had been wronged.

When we arrived in the cereal aisle, which was miraculously empty, I took a moment to explain to my 15-year-old daughter and my 12-year-old son that they didn't need to apologize to everyone along the way, especially if they weren’t the ones cutting others off. That I had seen them apologize for someone else’s poor choices on at least two occasions.

My kids tried to explain they were the ones at fault, that they had been cutting people off, though I had witnessed it and saw nothing of the sort.

There is a difference in wording, in semantics, I said. That saying “Sorry” versus “Excuse me” means a world of difference. That they are not to apologize for something they did not do. That they are to hold others accountable for their actions, even silently, and not to accept being forced to be the perpetrator. I looked to my husband, and understood that he agreed with me, with my lesson.

They nodded and said, “Ok,” though they didn’t look convinced. I’m not sure they believed me. Honestly, I’m not sure I fully believed myself. But I said it out loud anyway, to them, and to myself. Maybe that’s where it starts.

While saying sorry and being the "better person" allows one to take responsibility, it also becomes a quiet rule you set for yourself, that you are the one who apologizes, even when you didn't do anything wrong. Even when the careless, dismissive, and malicious ones walk away without a word.

It hurt my heart.

Your apology doesn’t mean much, I hear echoed in the vastness of my memory. A repeated moment from several conversations I’ve had with my husband over the past 20+ years of marriage. I, too, am quick to say sorry. When it comes to him, to my children. It feels so different, though. I trust them with their intentions and feel I have a good judgment of when to and when not to say sorry. It comes too easily to me, from what I’ve gathered. I hate to rock the boat, hate to argue, hate to tug at the thread of love.

But, in doing so, I diminish my own feelings. My own strength. My own position, even as it appears to my family. I make myself smaller, so no one else has to be uncomfortable. Because that would be worse. It cost me my own value. My own rightness. Every unnecessary apology was a small concession, a quiet agreement that maybe I was the problem after all. I'm still working out the difference between stepping aside so others are comfortable and stepping aside so I am. They feel the same from the inside. That's the dilemma.

It’s a technique I’ve used since I was a child. I've since learned this is also connected to ADHD. The reflexive apology, the constant monitoring of everyone else's comfort, the masking that becomes so automatic you stop knowing you're doing it. You apologize before anyone has even decided you've done something wrong. Just in case.

My mom even referred to me on many occasions as “The Yeah Sure Girl.” The girl who would do as you asked without a moment’s thought, who would put down her own feelings, goals, wants, needs for others.

I've thought about that label often. She saw it clearly enough to name it. I'm not sure she understood what she was seeing. Maybe that's the hardest part, being known just enough to be named, but not enough to be helped. Did it make her sad, that I would do anything for her without a second thought? I'm still not sure. I haven't asked.

I will not sit by and allow my children to do the same. I can’t.

For them, I will teach the difference between an apology for one’s actions and an apology for one’s self. There is an ocean of self-respect, self-love, and strength between.

As I’ve aged and looked inward and grown, I have come to understand the importance and weight of words and choices. I have worked so hard to stop saying sorry to strangers who don’t deserve it, even to my family when it is not warranted or earned.

I make an effort not to apologize when it is unwarranted. It has been hard work. Often, I see this older version of myself in other women. I see them apologize to me as we momentarily take up similar space. Maybe we’re walking through the same doorway, or she steps in line near me at the bathroom. She doesn’t need to apologize to me, and I tell her so, gently. “No worries.”

Ask yourself: Are you saying sorry for something you chose — something that was wrong, something that did warrant an apology? Or are you apologizing for simply existing? For taking up space? For being yourself in a world that didn’t make room for you?

There’s a difference. It took me forty years to learn it. I’m teaching my kids now, before it takes them that long, too.

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Lacey Baier is a writer of personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be. She’s the author of two cookbooks and the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish. She’s currently writing her first novel.

My fingers hover. The sentence is right there, waiting — all it needs is two little dashes. I type, pause, and then stop.

I shouldn’t add this. People will think it’s AI.

The thought is gone. Frustration and embarrassment set in.

I sit there for a moment, genuinely annoyed at a dash. Two of them, actually. Joined together. Minding their own business. Not hurting anyone. Just trying to connect two thoughts the way they’ve always connected two thoughts. And I erase them like a suspect.

Meanwhile, somewhere out there, someone is pasting three em-dashes in a row without a single second thought. Just dashes, everywhere, free and unbothered.

Must be nice.

It’s not even 9:45 am.

I choose to delete it. To rewrite the sentence. It just doesn’t work as well. But better off this way, so people will know it’s me — that it’s actually me and not some computer writing my words.

The irony is not lost on me. I’m erasing myself to prove I’m myself.

Maybe that’s why AI took it. It’s just smart.

It’s a tool I’ve used since middle school, before I wrote my papers on a computer. Before I could even access the internet. Turned into teachers on treasured lined papers, perfectly stapled to be as neat as possible. The written word.

I remember sitting on my parents’ bed, the smell of dust and down in the air of their small bedroom. Their bed always felt like a comfort, like them. I watched myself read his words through the sliding closet mirrors across from me — two me’s.

He had helped me rewrite a poem because I couldn’t quite get it right. My dad didn’t often help me with homework, but I knew he’d love to help rewrite a poem. He loved to write, though he would often take over and make it his, better. I knew what I was getting into.

I held his yellow legal notepad in my hands, along with his blue pen. He had added words, lines in the margins, at the bottom of the page, with arrows pointing to the back of the sheet. My dad knew how to take up space, and would use every inch, if allowed. And I allowed him. Flipping the page over, I remember the crackling noise — a thin sheet of paper weighted down with ink and words. Ridges and valleys of symbols pressed into the page, a landscape of thought. Changed.

I noticed in two places he had added a hyphen in his sentence: an em-dash. It caused a pause, but unlike a comma or a period. It made you stop. It took up space. I loved it. I’ve used it ever since.

I didn’t know then that it had a name. I just knew it was his, and then it was mine.

It’s called an “em-dash.” Named for the width of the letter “M.” It’s longer than a hyphen, longer than an “en-dash.” The hyphen connects words. The en-dash indicates ranges. The em-dash does something else entirely — it’s the dramatic one. The pause. The interruption. The connection that holds two thoughts together when a comma isn’t strong enough and a period would break them apart. My dad would have appreciated that.

My brain is always in more than one place at once. A perpetual em-dash. Two thoughts, always mid-collision, always needing to stay connected but not quite a comma, not quite a period. Something stronger. It comes out in my writing that way, too. It always has. Which is either a superpower or a liability, depending on the deadline.

Nowadays, thanks to AI and my persistent need to not be judged by others — despite desperately wanting to be loved and valued — I make sure to follow ratios. No em-dashes in consecutive paragraphs. No more than two in a single paragraph.

Does this look like too much?

I have given myself rules. Actual rules. For punctuation. Like bars on a self-imposed prison, cold dungeons with scaled dragons made of ones and zeros guarding the gates. All to protect two little dashes that just want to connect.

It’s hard. Because it’s the way my brain thinks — in pauses, taking up space, making two thoughts marry in a magical way.

So, forgive me. I’m sorry that I’m not sorry. If you see an em-dash in my writing, it isn’t AI. It’s me. It’s my dad. It’s a yellow legal pad and blue ink and a crackling page weighted down with words.

He knew how to take up space. I’m still learning to let myself.

Proving Her Wrong is a reader-supported publication. If this essay meant something to you, please consider sharing it with others.

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Lacey Baier is the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish, and the writer behind Proving Her Wrong — personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be.

My eyes start to water as I desperately hold back tears, fighting the tightening pinch in the back of my throat. I try not to make eye contact with Dustin. He is seated across from me at our favorite coffee shop — a small circular table between us, which suddenly feels like an ocean. He is right there. And I am completely alone.

No no no no.

This has happened before. It will happen again. This is bigger than one bathroom, one coffee shop, one day.

I desperately try to regain control over my emotions, knowing it’s a 50/50 chance, actually more like 70/30 since my dad died last year.

Today was his birthday. The first one since he died.

I just can’t.

I muster out that I’ll be right back, disgusting myself with my cracking voice as it betrays everything I've worked to conceal.

Dustin always says it’s okay. That I can cry if I need to. But I can’t. Don’t want to. Not here. Not in front of him.

As I see the bathroom is open, I quietly walk to it and let go. Cry. Bawl silently. Scream in silence. No one would ever know.

I allow the energy that built up like a volcano to run freely. Feel it. Thankful for the solitude. That no one sees how ugly I am when I cry. That no one sees me break, shatter into pieces.

I think about the power behind these emotions and how relentless they are. How I have to shed them just to get back out to the coffee shop. To being myself. Appearing put together.

After the tide recedes and calms, there is peace. A moment of true silence and calm. Control. I look in the mirror and see how much my eyes show the pain I just experienced. I check my makeup. Wash my hands. Take a deep breath and smile to see if I can hide it.

Then, I walk back out to Dustin and my lukewarm Americano, each waiting for me. He’s the only one who knows. He sees me for who I am and doesn’t flinch. But I do. I can’t not.

Loved that freely, unconditionally, for long enough, I’ve gotten better at letting him see it. Not all the way. But better. The walls are thinner than they used to be. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I just didn’t know it had a name.

Turns out, it’s also tied to ADHD. The emotional dysregulation, the overwhelm that hits out of nowhere, the masking you do so automatically, you stop knowing you’re doing it.

It stopped me cold.

I wasn’t alone. More women do this?

To realize this wasn’t just me being overly emotional, me being weird again…that others also cry silently, alone, and prefer it that way. That others hide their true selves, and have done so for years. That this is a sign of undiagnosed ADHD.

Society sees women as the more emotional ones and then punishes them for it. The eyeroll when a woman cries in a meeting. The “she’s too emotional” that ends a conversation before it starts. The way composure gets mistaken for competence, and feeling deeply gets coded as instability.

We learn early: contain it, or be reduced to it. A woman must appear happy. Calm. Composed. To expose the raw feelings underneath is to risk being labeled unstable, dramatic, crazy. So we perform the eye of the storm. Still and quiet on the outside. Spinning on the inside. And we get very, very good at it. As if being that alive is something to apologize for. But that capacity to feel, the thing we’ve spent our whole lives hiding, is not our weakness. It’s our power.

It is what lets you feel wholly, love endlessly, be completely present in a moment. It is what moves you to protect your children at any cost, to love your partner without reservation, to grieve so deeply because you loved so completely. To feel this strongly is not a liability. It is the most alive you will ever be.

It is what makes you read a room before anyone else does, feel what others miss, connect in ways that can’t be taught. It is the fuel behind everything you create, every world you build for the people you love. It is why you push through — not despite the feeling, but because of it. And it is why, when you are present, you are really, truly present. Not half in a room. All the way in.

That doesn't mean emotions should run unchecked. There's a difference between feeling deeply and letting feeling be everything. But most of us aren't in danger of that. We're in danger of the opposite.

I’ve always looked at it as: I have to hide these strong feelings. Like a tornado waiting to touch down. Like my father’s storm, inherited and unnamed, looking for somewhere to go. Too much. Dangerous.

And ugly.

I spent years caging something that was never wild — it was just his, passed down without instruction.

My dad was an emotional tornado when I was young. Loud and boisterous, he presented as uncontained humor and silliness when happy, a storm of anger and hysteria when he was not. I learned no one liked this about him, not even his wife. They judged him for it, for being hysterical in an otherwise calm, quiet home.

When I lost control, my mom would say it plainly: Stop being so hysterical. You’re acting like your father.

Along the way, I decided to hide that part of myself. Not let anyone see the hysteria inside me. The tornado.

I decided I was quiet. In control. Calm. Normal. I could fake it.

I started to believe it myself…until times got too loud and I couldn’t hold it together any longer. Certain grains of sand were just too heavy for me to bear. They came without warning. One moment I was fine, and the next I wasn’t.

I see now — now that he’s gone — that tornado was just his emotions looking for a way out. Helplessness and chaos turned inward. That feeling of being trapped and not having an outlet is what hysteria is. That he and I were so similar. And I was trying to hide it. Hide that piece of him.

What I didn’t see then was that it was actually a gift. To feel that strongly. To care. To love.

The pain of losing him, of losing that bond, is sometimes too strong.

I’ve always thought I couldn’t control my emotions. But it’s actually the opposite. I am always in control of my emotions, until that fire lights so strong I can’t contain it.

If any of this sounds familiar, you already know.

I see you. And you’re okay. Even when you feel broken.

This is our secret. Our bond. The silent cry is our history, our present, our future — the mark of a woman who has learned to contain a power she was told was too much. Too loud. Too ugly.

You were never the eye. You were always the storm.

Naming it is the first step toward not hiding from it. You don’t have to let it all out at once. You don’t have to become the tornado. You just have to stop pretending it isn’t there.

The storm is not your flaw. It’s your inheritance. And it is the best of you.

Proving Her Wrong is a reader-supported publication. If this essay meant something to you, please consider sharing it with others.

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Lacey Baier is the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish, and the writer behind Proving Her Wrong — personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be.

I don’t sit still easily, I’m learning. Reading is me practicing that. I’m also 37 books in this year and not slowing down, which is funny because I had to slow down to get here. I share more of that story in She Handed Me a Book.

To that end, once a month, I’ll share what I'm reading. Not a review, more like a reckoning. The passages that hit, what they stirred up, and why I think you should read them, too. For paid subscribers.

Hamnet is where I’m starting because it’s been sitting in my chest since I closed it.

Also: I hate spoilers, so I won’t tell you anything the book doesn’t tell you first. Only what I would have wanted to know going in, and why I feel compelled to share.

What it’s about

In 1596, a boy named Hamnet dies of the plague in England. He is eleven years old. His father, who is never named in the novel and is only ever referred to as “the Latin tutor,” “the husband,” and “the father,” will later write a play with his son’s name. This book is not about that play. It’s about everything that happened before, and what it cost. But it's also about his mother, Agnes, and what it costs a woman to love that fiercely and still lose.

What it does

Throughout Hamnet, O’Farrell runs two timelines at once: the years before, and the week it happens. You know from page one where it’s going. That’s the point. She’s not trying to surprise you. She’s giving you time. Time to know these people, to love them, to understand exactly what is about to be lost. By the time you arrive at the end, you feel the full weight of it. O'Farrell writes Agnes from the inside, not describing her mind, but inhabiting it. You don't observe Agnes. You become her.

What makes it more remarkable is that O’Farrell built these lives from almost nothing. She had almost nothing to work with, just scant historical facts, a cause of death that was never recorded, and a wife whose own father called her Agnes while the rest of the world called her Anne. She built everything else from her imagination. O’Farrell gives them all a whole world.

If Song of Achilles did that for myth (took figures we thought we knew and made them devastatingly human), Hamnet does it for history. Both books take what feels like a footnote, a verse, a statistic, a name in a record, and make it so vivid, so specific, so alive that by the time you lose them, you understand exactly what the world lost. And then, you can't help but extrapolate. Multiply that across an entire plague, and the weight of it becomes almost unbearable. I’ll never look at the plague or any mass tragic event in history the same way.

What it opened up

The beautiful cruelty of knowing what happens from the beginning means you spend the whole book dreading what is coming, and — somehow — that makes it worse, Hamnet’s life even more precious. Because that's exactly what it is to be a parent. You know something terrible is possible. You just don't know when, or how, or which ordinary Tuesday it arrives on. You do everything right. You love hard. You pay attention. And, sometimes, it happens anyway.

Before reading Hamnet, I’d never thought much about the plague. Now, I see the randomness of it. One wrong turn, one ship, one flea, and everything changes. How many things had to go exactly wrong for one child to die in one house in one town in England in 1596. And, in this case, for what happened because of his death as well.

What struck me, reading this, wasn’t grief exactly, but the fullness of the lives within it. O’Farrell refuses to let tragedy flatten anyone. Every person who gets swept away had a whole story first. Agnes knew things, saw things, loved fiercely and specifically. The book made me sit with how much richness disappears when something goes wrong. And how little protection any of it offers. You can be a mother who sees clearly, who feels everything, who does everything, and still not be enough to stop what’s coming.

This is how O'Farrell plays with the dread. She pulls back, steps outside the moment, and shows you exactly what it will cost, all before it's even fully happened:

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns. This moment is the absent mother’s: the boy, the empty house, the deserted yard, the unheard cry. Him standing there, at the back of the house, calling for the people who had fed him, swaddled him, rocked him to sleep, held his hand as he took his first steps, taught him to use a spoon, to blow on broth before he ate it, to take care crossing the street, to let sleeping dogs lie, to swill out a cup before drinking, to stay away from deep water.

It will lie at her very core, for the rest of her life.”

— Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

This book named my fears out loud. The ones I carry quietly as a mother: that devastation doesn’t announce itself, that it waits in the most ordinary places.

“What is given may be taken away, at any time. Cruelty and devastation wait for you around corners, inside coffers, behind doors: they can leap out at you at any time, like a thief or brigand. The trick is never to let down your guard. Never think you are safe. Never take for granted that your children's hearts beat, that they sup milk, that they draw breath, that they walk and speak and smile and argue and play. Never for a moment forget they may be gone, snatched from you, in the blink of an eye, borne away from you like thistledown.”

— Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

This fear doesn’t only live in one direction. I lost my dad last October. I spent years prodding him about his diabetes, his diet, his key lime pies, and milk chocolate bars. None of it mattered in the end because what took him had nothing to do with any of that. I couldn’t have controlled it no matter what I did, despite my best intentions and knowledge. Hamnet put words to something I've been sitting with since: that we can’t outworry the outcome. And that a life worth living is still worth living, even knowing how it ends.

It reminds me of a saying I tell myself often, especially when I get overtaken by worry:

Agnes

Agnes is one of the most quietly extraordinary characters I've read in a long time. She has a gift, which is a deep, almost supernatural connection to the earth and to people. She heals. She knows things. She is who everyone comes to. O'Farrell never overplays it. It's just there, woven in, the way Agnes herself is: quietly present, easy to underestimate. The bees are the clearest example.

“No bee-keeper veil covers her face — she never wears one. If you came close enough, you would see that her lips are moving, murmuring small sounds and clicks to the insects that circle her head, alight on her sleeve, blunder into her face.”

— Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

Agnes knows where her children are at every moment. It is not worry exactly, but attunement. A mother’s mind that never fully rests. O’Farrell puts it beautifully.

“She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see. And Hamnet? Where is”

— Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

Every mother knows this feeling: the constant low hum of awareness, the invisible thread that connects you to your children wherever they are, even to what they are feeling.

And yet that same knowing fails her in the places that matter most. Her marriage. Her children. Hamnet. There is something devastating about a woman who can see so clearly into everything except the thing she most needs to see. That's the epic tragedy of being a mother: the belief that if you know enough, feel enough, give enough, you can hold it all together. Agnes couldn't. None of us can.

She gave freely to everyone who came to her door. She healed. She knew things people couldn't explain and feared in the same breath. She was not immune to how they saw her. Nobody is. And still, she will be measured by this one failure. Not by any of that. By this.

She is sought after, feared, needed, and still she carries the weight of the town’s judgment. All that power, and she is still susceptible to others' opinions. It's a paradox O'Farrell never explains or resolves. She just lets it sit there, the way it does in real life. The more capable we appear, the more we feel we have to maintain it.

Judith

Judith is left behind. A surviving twin who has to carry a loss the English language hasn’t even made room for. O’Farrell gives her just one line. It’s enough to break you.

“What is the word, Judith asks her mother, for someone who was a twin but is no longer a twin?”

— Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

The Father

O'Farrell doesn't let you stay with just one person's grief, because that’s not how life works. She puts you inside all of them, and breaks you open from every angle. The father's loss is quieter than Agnes's and Judith’s, but no less devastating.

“I find,' he says, his voice still muffled, 'that I am constantly wondering where he is. Where he has gone. It is like a wheel ceaselessly turning at the back of my mind. Whatever I am doing, wherever I am, I am thinking: Where is he, where is he? He can't have just vanished. He must be somewhere. All I have to do is find him. I look for him everywhere, in every street, in every crowd, in every audience. That's what I am doing, when I look out at them all: I try to find him, or a version of him.”

— Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet

You can feel it. The searching. The desperate, irrational belief that if you just look hard enough, in enough crowds, enough faces, you'll find them. Or some version of them.

Hamnet

Hamnet himself is not who you might expect to be at the center of this story, given the title. He is more absence than presence, a boy we glimpse rather than fully know. And, yet, O’Farrell makes that work. His very elusiveness is the point. He is the space everyone else organizes their grief around. The hole the story keeps returning to. You feel him most in what he leaves behind.

Who should read it

If anything in this essay landed, the book will hit harder. It’s for the mother who tracks her children like a sixth sense, the person sitting with a loss and searching for a face in the crowd, and the reader who appreciates a mid-page pause just to sit with a beautifully written sentence. It’s for anyone who has ever loved something they couldn’t protect and needs to be reminded that the story was still worth telling, no matter the outcome.

Proving Her Wrong is a reader-supported publication. If this essay meant something to you, please consider sharing it with others.

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Lacey Baier is the founder of Sweet Pea Chef and Cleanish, and the writer behind Proving Her Wrong — personal essays about the messy, unfiltered journey of becoming who you were always meant to be.