Every other Saturday morning, I leave my house at 7AM and start the one-hour commute to my writing group, which meets on the other side of the Chesapeake Bay. The most dreaded part of the drive is the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, aka “The HRBT,” notorious for its miles-long traffic jams and near-constant construction.

Last week, I came across a New York Times article about the filmmaker Jennifer Fox, who recently disclosed the identity of the high-profile coach who abused her as a girl. Fox had written and directed an Emmy-nominated film about the experience called The Tale, released in 2018, starring Laura Dern and Jason Ritter. At that point, her abuser was still unnamed…

I once worked with a surgeon who never washed his OR shoes. The old pair of sneakers were a deep shade of red, not because they came that way, but because they were covered in the dried blood of hundreds of patients. They were a gruesome good luck charm, a symbol of the life and death he’d literally walked through in his profession. He feared that if he washed them, he’d lose some part of his identity, his flow, his mojo.