I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling.-Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again.-Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.

I think that what I knew as a teenager, and what I rediscovered in my mid-forties, was - aside from the primacy of sexual desire and how strongly it rules me - this idea that we are lucky to feel something. Even if that something is sadness.

Drinking and taking drugs. I think there was also a sort of druggie or trance-like nature to the way that I used sex as a child.

Drinking and drugging make it so your reality flies away from you. Your body and your mind are not present. I loved that feeling as a kid. For me, the strongest way to have that feeling was love and sex. Not only did I enjoy it - that feeling of being transported - but because I was so boy-identified, first as a tomboy and then as a girl who liked to sleep with boys.

When I was really sad, I would be like a little kid wiggling a loose tooth or touching a sore spot - there were things that I did to make myself sadder. It was almost as if I were luxuriant in my own melancholy. Looking at the diaries and thinking about my old self, thinking about my lost youth - that was part of that project of making myself totally miserable.

I've been asked several times since the book Love and Trouble came out, "Are you still sad?" And I'm not, not in the way I was before. I do feel like it was a season in hell that I passed through. But now I'm in despair and sad and confused every day because of our political situation. So the question is: Is it harder or easier to be sad with a reason?

I carefully lifted out of the pose and spoke up: Uh, Fran? When I'm doing the pose (camel), I have this feeling in my chest, kind of a scary, tight feeling.-Fran was adjusting someone across the room. She had a way of looking like a thoughtful seamstress when she made adjustments: an inch let out here, a seam straightened there, and everything would be just right. She might as well have had pins tucked between her lips and a tape measure around her neck. Without missing a beat or looking up she said, Oh, that's fear. Try the pose again.-Fear. I hadn't even known it was there.