The Routine

If you hear about someone being comfortable in a relationship, the implication is that they’d otherwise leave but have gotten used to whatever is wrong. Or they’re too lazy to work on themselves to find someone better. Or they prefer the devil they know to the risk of the unknown. It’s never comfortable in a good way.

But being comfortable with each other is a big part of what makes my marriage as good as it is. Comfort is about safety, honesty, reliability, and trust. We can sit in comfortable silence sometimes for hours. I can safely voice my deepest, sometimes darkest or most controversial thoughts and questions without fear of judgment. I can ask dumb or ignorant questions and get a well reasoned, empathetic answer. I trust that he’ll rinse his mouth out after a beer and wash his hands after coming home because it makes me feel safe (and is actually safe). We can be alone together for days on a camping trip, barely talking to other humans and not looking at our phones and still want to spend time together when we get home. This is the ultimate comfort.

In the last couple of years we’ve taken this comfort to a new level: we have the same meals for dinner every week. It sounds boring. Uninspired. Like we’re stuck in a rut.

But this routine has benefits. After years (and years) of complaining about the other never knowing what to do for dinner, and a higher percentage of our words to each other being about food than I’d like to admit, our food routine catapulted us into a new level of understanding. I know what’s in the fridge after husband does the grocery shopping. We both know all the recipes by heart so either of us can make dinner if the other is busy. We have a delicious meal we look forward to every night of the week and bypassed the “eat whatever’s in the fridge even if it doesn’t sound good” meals. Grocery shopping can be planned ahead without a discussion. There aren’t usually leftovers so we haven’t gotten bored with eating the same thing again for lunch.

It started in the pandemic when we started watching Downton Abbey. I’d found a new recipe I wanted to try and was surprised when husband loved it so much he started requesting it weekly until it became part of the regular rotation. Somehow, it got associated with Monday, which was when we watched Downton Abbey. Also around the same time, we’d started doing weekly face masks, naturally on Monday, and capped off our ultra relaxing start to the work week with a glass of wine and a gummy. 

But we’d still been in a bit of a rut the rest of the week. Most Tuesdays meant tacos, but we made the lazy version of mushroom tacos often enough to get bored, and by the time Thursday came around we were scrounging in the fridge and just trying to get to Friday. We needed a larger roster of meal ideas that we both liked, that weren’t involved enough to take up a whole night, and that we wouldn’t get bored of for a while.

And we got it:

• Monday: Spinach avocado pasta with roasted tomatoes and bell peppers and sautéed mushrooms and chickpeas. Pair with red wine, a gummy, and a face mask. Recently I’ve also been rowing and showering at night to feel extra relaxed, and husband has a shave and sometimes also an evening shower.
• Tuesday: Fish tacos with a chipotle Greek yogurt sauce (recipe from a cookbook my friend gave me forever ago). This is my weekly meat meal to maintain my protein variety and levels.
• Wednesday: This night is our variety night. Sometimes it’s nacho night, my favorite. But we can’t do that every week anymore, so sometimes we have a rice bowl or try something new.
• Thursday: Stir fry with tofu, a mountain of veggies, and a spicy tahini peanut butter sauce. We started making this around the time we were watching The Pitt on Thursdays.
• Friday: Thai takeout and a movie has been a thing since we moved in together. Used to be Thai food and beer, now it’s a glass of wine and a gummy (although we’ve discovered the gluten free Goth Girlfriend and can bring back beer!).

We genuinely love all of these meals and look forward to them each week.

If a holiday falls on a Wednesday, we have nachos. The rodents used to get little bowls of our dinners.

Weekends are still a bit of a wildcard. Pre-pandemic, we’d walk up the hill to my favorite restaurant where I’d get a 20 ounce mocha and a potato mountain (one time an older man at the next table asked how I was going to finish it all and I genuinely hope he watched me polish that bowl). But that restaurant non longer exists and breakfast food has become shockingly expensive. Eating out for four meals every weekend plus coffee has become cost prohibitive. Plus, now that everything has to be gluten free, my options are a lot more limited.

So usually one weekend morning we make our own potato bowls and walk to get a coffee. The other day we’ll have an early lunch instead of breakfast. The goal is to cook half our meals on weekends. We’re still working on a greater variety of restaurants that I can safely eat at and being OK with putting in a bit more effort to eat on weekends or having leftovers, but I’m confident that our weekends will eventually be part of our weekly routine.

If a holiday falls on a Friday, we have Thai food.

Importantly, we have alternates in case this food routine has to be broken. Rice bowl is good for any time we need to swap the usual for a quicker dinner if we have an evening event. In the winter, husband will make chili and I’ll make enchiladas. In the summer we’ll add in salad or pasta salad. A couple times a year he’ll make a lamb stew, my one exception to being pescatarian. I’ll make risotto or lasagna once or twice, and there’s soup and curry and some new recipe I’ll try on occasion.

It’s just enough to keep things interesting, reduces the friction of figuring out what to eat for the millionth time, and gives us something to look forward to: having a delicious meal on the couch with our favorite person at the end of a long day.

Dark Matter: My Reality and the Paths Not Taken

I just finished reading Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It’d been on my TBR list for a while and I picked it as a replacement book when someone in my book club announced that she would not be reading the book I originally picked due to its trigger warnings (Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter, which I still fully plan to read). It's officially our highest rated book so far, and this can be a tough crowd.

I read the book in like 3 days mainly due to a book club deadline but it was so fast paced and fascinating that I didn’t want to put it down. At so many points I wanted to stop and talk about it with husband. I love and hate when that happens, especially if I know there’s a TV or movie adaptation that I don’t want to spoil. Sometimes I’ll read a book that I think he’d enjoy and tell him about it, sometimes I read a book that I think he’d like the movie of but wouldn’t read and I tell him about it, sometimes I read a book and then we watch the adaptation and I tell him what’s different and why the book was so obviously better (because he loves that).

Husband, now’s your cue to go read something else until you either read the book or we finish the series.

For real. Go. Major spoilers.

The basic premise of the story is that the infinite multiverse is real and accessible through a mysterious drug and a Schrödinger-style box that another version of the protagonist created. Which is interesting, and of course it addresses the differences between branched realities and how our choices can play out, but that’s not what I loved. What I loved was that the book was, at its core, a love story about an ordinary man who gets separated from his wife and child and is desperate to get back to them. I already think about how my life would have turned out had I made different choices: if I chose a different college, if I studied a different major, if I stayed in a different city, if I had different jobs, if I stayed with any of my boyfriends. But this book got me thinking more specifically about this reality and what makes it totally and uniquely mine. Would I know if husband was swapped out for some other version that branched years ago, or while we were newly dating, or before we met? Would he know if some other version of me was swapped out?

More on that later.

Dark Matter Synopsis

The protagonist, Jason, a college physics professor, husband, and father, is abducted on his walk home after going to a celebration for an old college roommate who had just won a very prestigious award. The abductor knows a lot about Jason, personal details and habits that only those closest to him could know. He injects Jason with something, then himself, and they both pass out. When Jason wakes up, he’s strapped to a gurney in a bunker being greeted by strangers as if he’s an old friend. Desperate to get back to his family, Jason tries to play along until he can form a plan.

His terrible plan is escaping and running away. He goes right back to his house like an idiot, but it’s decorated more like a wealthy bachelor pad than a family home. In a display cabinet is the prestigious award his old roommate won, but it’s Jason’s name etched on it and is dated ten years earlier. The only sign of his wife is the expensive-looking art signed with her maiden name. Obviously the bunker people track him down, but he escapes again. He googles his wife’s maiden name and finds out that she’s opening an art show. So he goes. Like a desperate, desperate idiot.

Fortunately by now he’s started to catch on that this might not be his world. When he talks to his wife, he uncovers that, from her perspective, they did date but the pregnancy that led them to start a family was terminated. They broke up to pursue careers in art and science and have clearly been very successful. Now, she’s sort of dating his old college roommate, who seems to be pissed at Jason. Maybe jealous for winning that award years ago. The old roommate asks Jason “how the compound worked out” and, of course, Jason has no idea what he means, which the old roommate takes to mean that Jason used his compound uncredited.

All of this is so bizarre to Jason. He was on track to pursue something incredible, previously impossible, until the pregnancy early in his relationship with his wife. They decided to get married and be a family, even though they both knew that it would mean letting their promising careers in art and science fizzle. Which they did. Though there was some jealousy watching their friends and former colleagues achieve greatness and win awards, they never once regretted their choice. They were happy. It’s ordinary but it’s theirs and they love it.

What I love about this part of the book is that it doesn’t take the It’s A Wonderful Life approach to get the protagonist to realize how good of a life he has. He despairs the moment he understands what’s happened to him and realizes the challenge of returning to his own world. He would never have traded lives with this other version of himself, a version who broke up with his girlfriend to pursue his science, who somehow created a way to connect their worlds, who then abducted him in his own reality to take his place and live the life he didn’t choose, but only after obtaining the fame and glory, and only after skipping the hard work of making a relationship and raising a kid.

I’d want to kill him, too.

Jason spends a lot of time visiting other versions of Chicago, trying to get back to the one in which an impostor (he calls him Jason2) has taken his life, sleeps with his wife, and is father to his son. In an infinite multiverse, it’s like looking for a single grain of sand on planet Earth. Some of the worlds are grim: nuclear fallout, widespread disease, crime and poverty, climate disasters. Some of the worlds show a Chicago as if certain choices had been made differently: he and his wife terminated the pregnancy and broke up to pursue their fields, or they stayed together and had more kids. But some of the worlds are eerily similar: nearly everything is the same except for subtle clues, like he drives a different color car or the photo on the mantle when he peers inside the window of his house is from a different vacation.

Which makes him question in an infinite multiverse, what made his world his. In some of these eerily similar Chicagos, what makes his wife not really his wife? Or his son not really his son? Some of them are so close that he’s tempted to just live in one of them, but he knows that would mean giving up on ever finding his actual wife and son, and giving in to letting Jason2 imposter his way through the rest of his life.

The part I related to the most was the chapter from his wife’s perspective in which she notices the ways in which Jason2 is different (without, of course, knowing anything had happened). She noticed a difference immediately, as soon as he came home that night, and then each day after: the way he did the dishes, how he didn’t drink as much, his morning routine, the things he talked about, and, most telling, the way he looked at her and touched her and held her and fucked her was like he hadn’t spent the last 15 years doing it. All these little things that she’d noticed and known but probably never voiced or acknowledged about her husband were at the top of her mind, like they were newly dating again.

My Reality

Putting myself in the protagonist’s shoes (not that I’m a genius physicist or anything, just someone who’s pretty pleased to have ended up with their spouse), I wondered what it is that makes husband my husband? What makes him mine in an infinite multiverse full of infinite husbands who have made different major and minor choices? It’s an impossible question to ask but spouses know things about their partner that no one else could ever. This is the most vulnerable part of being in a relationship like that: they know things about you. Like, really know. I could use code words with my best friend without discussing beforehand and she’d know if I needed rescuing. Same with husband: if I called him and said my mom was in town and I’d be staying with her for a few days, he’d track me down. But more subtly, if he used phrases we haven’t used in a while, which actually happened twice this week, would I know it’s an alternate version of him?

I don't know what this is but it does sum up our relationship pretty well.

There are some things that feel like things only I know, or at least things that I probably notice more than others.

• How he gets into storytelling mode when he’s driving. He’ll sit behind a car going 10 MPH slower than the rest of traffic while chatting. I’m pretty sure this only happens when I’m in the passenger seat, not anyone else.
• The way he said “babe?” from the other room once, with a mix of concern and urgency and chastising. After I immediately went over to him he told me we would not be placing wine bottles on top of the rack where they could easily fall off.
• The other way we say “babe!” to each other. Even though lots of friends were around for the origin of that inflection, I’m pretty sure none of them picked up on it the way we did.
• Our many, many inside jokes and references (no surprise as we’ve been together 15 years). I keep saying that someday the only words we’ll speak to each other will be movie quotes. It would be real hard for an imposter to keep up.
• How we both liked the tin of Old Bay seasoning so much that we bought it just because it was in a nice, vintage-looking tin. And then we talked about how sad it is that tins aren’t a thing anymore.
• How if I give an answer in a certain way he’ll keep asking more questions to get the same answer. Like, “can I get you a glass of wine?” Sure. “Can I open the good bottle?” Sure. “Can you say any other words?” Sure.
• The way he taps his fingers on the steering wheel or shifter (back in the manual days) when he’s annoyed. And the way he insists he’s not annoyed.
• The way he performs for others, even people we know well, even sometimes his best friends. I wonder if they notice.
• How the first thing he does when he comes inside the house is check his phone.
• How we are very open about our bodily functions (as I type this he’s texting me about having pooped in a Beverly Hills Whole Foods bathroom).
• The way he looks at schnauzers now (and sometimes all dogs) compared to when Argo was still alive.
• How he talks about cats, rats, and rabbits now compared to even just a few years ago.
• The way he insists he's awake enough to watch a movie, falls asleep, then wakes back up if I pause it and insists again that he's awake, and then falls asleep again.
• How he does "sack of potatoes" with our friend's kid.

Husband found a dog on vacation.

What this book does is make the protagonist extremely aware of the paths not taken. [Spoilers here] He confronts them time after time in the search for his world and the impacts of having made other choices is thrown in his face. It’s not that other media about multiverses don’t do this, it’s that it’s not always this deeply personal. Most other media shows world-wide differences like an Earth that solved climate change or coexists with aliens, or they show the butterfly effect of one tiny decision having massive implications for the rest of humanity. The other worlds in Dark Matter show just one part of one city, focusing on one family in one house. He watches his wife die many times. Helps her die once, even. Sometimes his son was never born. Sometimes he had more kids.

My Roads Not Taken

What about my other paths not taken? I’ve long said that I’d watch the movie of my different life choices but I wouldn’t visit or live in those worlds. If I had to choose just one part of my life to be happy in, I’d choose to be happy with my partner. I would much rather be excited to go home and to connect with another person on such a deep level than to have a fulfilling or high influence career, or to travel to all the countries, or to have wealth and comfort. So anything that would jeopardize not meeting husband when I did is a hard no.

That said, I do often think about how my life would have turned out had I made different choices. Sometimes I do this just to remind myself how so many things had to happen exactly the way they did for my life to be what it is. Any tiny thing could have derailed my path. Like, if you think about all of the things that had to happen just so you could be born, it’s mind boggling. Even considering all the decisions I’ve made over just my life, or just my adult life, means an infinite number of branches. In some of my alternate realities, I don’t think it would have been impossible for husband and I to still find each other. If I’d chosen to go to Berkeley instead of San Diego I could have run into him when he was visiting family or through someone he went to high school with. Or he could have decided to move back after college for some job or some girl. Or I could have gone through the EATM program, then gotten a job at the Safari Park where we actually did meet (or SeaWorld, where he also worked). It would make me really happy to watch those movies and see us still end up together in these other worlds. In an infinite multiverse, these are realities for other versions of us. I love that.

Husband bet me he would stay awake for whatever we were watching.

And in yet other worlds, there are versions of me that stayed with the people I’d seriously dated. I doubt many of them would have been happy worlds. Marrying my high school boyfriend would most likely have ended in tragedy. I can’t decide if he would have stayed so enamored with me that he’d have willingly gone along with my plans (not have kids, move away from our hometown) or if we’d have ultimately broken up due to those differences. Maybe he would have avoided becoming an addict or maybe he was destined and we’d have broken up anyway, or he still would have died. Maybe he would have become a lawyer like he planned. Maybe we’d have had kids before I decided I didn’t want to. Maybe I’d have been happy or maybe I’d have always wondered what else was out there.

Marrying my college boyfriend would also likely have been a disaster. By the end of that relationship we had very little in common and it made me wonder what we’d had in common to begin with. Years after we broke up I realized that we both felt we should be together for external reasons, not because we actually wanted to be together (I was the girl you bring home but not the girl he wanted, and I thought I needed to stay with him because I'd slept with him). If that didn’t eventually cause a divorce, money and career ambitions might have. Or maybe he’d have been well off enough for me to have a low-paying job I enjoyed. Or maybe he’d have never learned to manage his finances and we’d have had money problems (and a keeping up with the Jones lifestyle). Maybe we’d have spent our entire relationship arguing over kids and me being sterilized. Maybe the final straw would have been my Celiac disease diagnosis.

Or what if I went to Berkeley instead of San Diego? Would I have stuck with writing? Navigated the recession better? Met some Berkley guy? What if I moved back home after graduation and got stuck? What if I didn’t and I never got Chloe? Would I have been a professional writer in whatever capacity and never gotten my masters or gone to Africa?

Or what if I went to EATM and didn’t pursue writing at all? Would I have been unemployed for a long time? Had a series of low paying jobs? Moved to Los Angeles and work in showbiz? Or would I have ended up in San Diego anyway? Would I have gotten my masters anyway?

Dark Matter illustrated that if you’re really happy with your life circumstances, or even just one really important part like your spouse and your kids, any other version of that reality won’t be enough, no matter how good it might seem otherwise. Jason couldn’t accept any other version of his wife and son that wasn’t uniquely his, no matter how close they were and no matter how fantastic his life could have been without them. Meanwhile, Jason2 was a famous, award-winning, wealthy physicist who did the impossible, but still yearned for the what if about making a family with his ex-girlfriend. I can’t say I don’t wish certain parts of my life were different (I’ve lamented about them here often enough), but I wouldn’t want to risk ending up with someone else. It’s impossible to imagine how someone else could feel like home more than husband does.

Fifteen Years

 In August 2011 I'd kind of started seeing a friend.

We'd gone out on a couple of dates a year earlier but I wasn't interested in going further. I said I'd like to be friends and neither of us expected we'd talk much, or at all. But we did. I wish I could remember what those first few conversations were like. I know they were about food. We ended up texting late at night because we were both up: he was a night owl and I had a job that kept me up until nearly 3am some nights. He'd tell me about the carne asada fries he was eating and I probably told him about whatever happened with the students I was driving to and from the clubs.

Goofing on one of our zoo day adventures.

We graduated to getting sushi together, going to the zoo, taking his dog to the dog park, and sometimes just chilling at one of our places. He invited me to his birthday at his local bar (where I knew no one else and some total ass asked for my number). I invited him to a sort of anti-Valentine's party (with the guy I'd started seeing since). We went to Taco Tuesday at Fred's (RIP). Once I saw him there with his friend while I was with guy-I'd-started-seeing. I nearly fell over my chair to go say hi. Once I went with him and the woman he was kind of seeing (she gave me a ride back to my car).

Valentine's Day cookie decorating.

The next summer, things happened. Simultaneously, independently, and in a one thing led to another kind of way. At one point, annoyed with myself for the romantic choices I'd been making, I made a list of qualities I wanted in a partner. It was time to stop accepting mediocre and set some standards.

Weirdly, my friend checked a lot of the boxes. Like, a lot a lot. Only I didn't have the feelings.

A little while later it was like a switch had been flipped. The feelings were there! And then other things happened.

And so on August 7, 2011 I had a 13-day-old who-knows-what with this friend when he invited me hiking with his other friend and the friend's girlfriend. So I went.

"Hiking" selfie from that day.

The trail they'd planned was closed. We went somewhere nearby but it was a ridiculously short path. We started way later than I was used to (it was August in San Diego, who starts a hike after 10am?), we'd had two set backs, and no one wanted to try a third time. Someone suggested In-N-Out for lunch, so we drove back into town.

We took a table outside and chatted while waiting for our food. They were all theater people, I was nooooot. After we got our trays, my friend went back inside for ketchup for all of us, leaving me alone with his two friends. That was when the friend's girlfriend saw her moment.

I'll paraphrase but the tone and meaning is there.

Girlfriend: So you've been into him for a while, huh?

Me: Uh, not really? He was actually into me.

Girlfriend: Oh. Well I set him up with my friend who is a prestigious person in the theater world. I thought they'd be so good together. But then she moved to New York so, you know... [heavily implying that obviously the only reason they didn't date was because of geography]

Me: Oh. He didn't mention.

By that time, my friend had rescued me with his return to the table. But my hackles stayed up. Clearly, this girlfriend didn't approve of me. But who was she? Luckily, it didn't take long to finish our burgers and fries and leave. We went back to his place where we showered, then got into bed all fresh and clean and got a little less fresh and clean.

But her comments had stayed with me. I realized I didn't know if he was also seeing other people. He probably was, at least casually. I mean, we were seeing each other casually. We'd had no conversations about anything, just the implications that now going over to one another's houses meant sex when it didn't used to. It hadn't bothered me because I didn't even think about it. But now I was thinking about it.

I also realized I did like him in that way. I could see my feelings getting deeper. If this was surface level for him, it would be better to know and mentally prepare myself.

So while we still lay in his bed, I asked.

Me: So, are you seeing other people?

Him: No. Are you?

Me, shocked, stammering: No.

Him: Should we make this official, then?

Me: What? Official? What do you mean?

Him: I mean like do you want to be my girlfriend?

Me, still shocked: Yeah.

Him: OK then, it's official.

The main reason I was so surprised was because I hadn't planned on having the talk yet, and absolutely did not expect it to end in a commitment. I thought we'd both state our situations then go on behaving like we had been for a month or two or twelve. Now, I'm updating my Facebook relationship status and getting instant friend requests from people who wanted to snoop (mainly his best friend who did not get the best first impressions of me) and making plans to call my Facebook-less family so they don't hear from some relative (we are not the same race, it was going to be gossip).

Our first New Year's Eve together, when I thought this could be it.

Fifteen years later we are still in a relationship: married for 6.5 years! That girlfriend who wanted him to date some fancy New York theater person? She was the center of a cheating scandal that resulted in a broken engagement and a divorce, trust issues for the innocent bystanders, and a loss of good will among quite a few people.

When I asked him about that fancy New York theater person, he said he was never even interested in her*. He'd made it a rule to not date in the theater world. Some of it was good decision making: if things end badly you can screw up an audition, production, or even a career. But most of the time it was simply that a lot of the theater girls were a lot. And she'd been one of those types.

*Edit: Husband would like to clarify that it wasn't that he wasn't interested in her, but she seemed more into his dog than in him. Which, on the one hand, thanks, babe, glad she moved. But on the other hand, I get it, Argo kept me around when we had a rough patch while dating. He was the best.

Celiac Disease is Dumb

I’m in the 1% of the American population! Never thought this day would come.

Sadly, not that 1%. The 1% with celiac disease. Way less fun.

Though I have an immediate family member with it, I always assumed the gene skipped me. Not that I ate a lot of gluteny foods. In fact, I didn’t really like bread. Or most pastries. I only ate pizza on occasion and rarely ate the crust. I’d tear off large chunks of my tortilla when eating burritos. I ate pasta regularly but not that often, and bought brown rice pasta about half the time anyway. I preferred pho to ramen, limited my fried foods to tortilla chips and french fries (but only the really good ones), and hated bread crumbs and ice cream cones. After I was diagnosed, husband had a “told you so” look on his face and said that maybe these eating habits were evidence that my body knew. I still don’t really have a response to that.

Best husband in the world went shopping the day after I learned I had celiac disease.

Except that I did drink beer. For a while there I drank a lot of it. My favorites were the malty, extra-glutenous stouts and porters. I got married in a brewery. I had beer art. Getting a beer at one of the many walk-to breweries was the main way we saw some friends or spent a Saturday afternoon. There was one summer where we’d go to sushi with friends like every other Friday, get the big Sapporo bottles and a carafe of sake, finish both, and then walk over to a dive bar and order two Tecates for $5 (in my defense I did split the Tecates with husband). At some point in my mid-30s beer started sitting the wrong way in my stomach. First, the stouts and porters made me feel too bloated. I’d have one 10-ounce pour and be done. But some of those are high alcohol, so I figured that was the reason and I shouldn’t drink more of them anyway. A short time later, three low alcohol lagers made me feel the same. But again, no surprise, three beers is a lot, I should be cutting back anyway. When I found myself nursing a single 10-ounce pour of a 4% pilsner over a couple hours, subconsciously trying to avoid feeling bloated and tired and generally crappy, I thought I’m getting older and alcohol isn’t agreeing with me anymore.

Some breweries introduced wine. Bless.

This thought was reinforced one night when I finished a splash of wine left over in a bottle at home. It was probably two ounces, finished in a couple of sips. I had it with dinner and it was the only alcohol I had that night. Within a few minutes I had that feeling in my bowels that you know and fear and ran to the bathroom. Then again a half hour later. Then again once or twice more that night. I was exhausted and confused and decided to finally go to the doctor. I’d been putting it off because who goes to the doctor complaining that they can’t drink alcohol anymore? She’d give me a blank look, tell me to give up drinking, and assume I’m an alcoholic. Of all the problems, this wasn’t one a doctor would devote much time to solving when the answer was both obvious and something they’d like us to do anyway.

I didn’t drink until the appointment. We discussed the issue and she recommended testing for common food allergies. She also threw in a celiac disease test since I have a relative with it. I left with instructions to avoid alcohol for the time being, though until the test results came back she offered no other plan. Which is about what I expected. The labs came back quickly showing no allergies to milk, eggs, fish, shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans, or sesame. The celiac disease test also came back and, though it was harder to read than the allergen test, looked fine to me. My doctor provided no note, so I figured I’d lay off the alcohol a while longer and see if that helped things. I still wanted something besides water to drink in the evenings that wasn’t straight up sugar, so I got a bottle of zero proof wine, which was terrible, and some non-alcoholic beers, which were great.

Post-colonoscopy meal. Thankful that tacos are usually naturally gluten-free.

But I wasn’t feeling better. I wasn’t making a mad dash to the toilet after every meal but my gut felt… off. I went from feeling like I had my diet dialed in based on my morning poops to wondering what the hell had happened. And why wasn’t being sober fixing it? I scrutinized every ingredient, nervous that a next step was an elimination diet and trying to do a soft version to figure things out on my own. I stopped and started eating different foods for a few months, trying to figure out what was making me feel this way. Eating was making me anxious. Husband thought it might be stress, which I couldn’t exactly refute but was annoyed that stress is the most common answer to women’s health questions, and this experience was causing the stress. Besides, I’d been way more stressed in the past without all the extra pooping. I’d worked through grad school and quit a job with nothing lined up and had to move unexpectedly and planned a wedding while our dog was dying. But now, there was a global pandemic, the absolute worst person we could have chosen was president and fucking things up, my job was taking a toll, the crickets infesting the apartment were driving husband up a wall, my cat had an incurable disease, my rabbit was also having diarrhea, and in 2024 we lost five pets. Oh, and one of my closest and oldest friends was getting married, but my mom was invited even though my friend knows our history, our other friend’s long term partner wasn’t invited, and there was some strife that I was in the middle of.

Little Bear Coffee in Albuquerque had the best gluten free apple cake.

Right before the wedding I got an email notifying me about my bill for the blood work and logged into the portal to pay it. I had a message from my doctor from a couple months back that I’d missed: your test results show you have celiac disease, stop eating gluten forever. I called husband into the room and showed him. We were both shocked for a minute. All this time? How did I misread the results? It turns out that I’d basically read the results backwards. The test was the Tissue Transglutaminase Ab, IgA, and the normal value is 0-4.99. My results were >250. Which is off the charts high. No wonder I didn’t understand how to read it, I’d probably assumed there was a misplaced decimal point. It can’t be that high, right? I learned later that you can’t be officially diagnosed on just a blood test. For insurance purposes, you need an endoscopy so that a gastroenterologist can biopsy your intestines. Only my results were so high that when I did see a gastroenterologist (I’ll write about that day of fun later), he was basically like that can’t be a false positive and you’ve probably had it for a while.

How, I asked? Because I have a parent with the disease and it’s genetic, I likely carried the marker my whole life. Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder, not an allergy, and the autoimmune disorder was “triggered” at some point. When I think back to what might have been going on in the months or even years leading up to my symptoms, it’s impossible to narrow it down to any one thing. It could have been getting Covid in 2022. It really could have been the overwhelming stress and anxiety I was feeling from 2020-2024. It could have been one of the other nasty respiratory illnesses I had around then (or those illnesses were so bad because of undiagnosed celiac disease?). It could have been a hormonal shift and starting perimenopause. Most people are diagnosed between 40 and 50. I was 38.

Blueberry lemon cake that was gluten-free and may have also been vegan.

Regardless, at least I had an answer and a plan. This whole process took a year: I started feeling sick enough to stop drinking in May 2024, saw my doctor in July, saw my test results and started a gluten-free diet in September, and had my endoscopy and colonoscopy in April 2025. Since then I’ve been as gluten-free as I possibly can, though I’ve also learned that other people’s homes are definitely not safe no matter what they say, some restaurants know what celiac disease is and some think that gluten is the same as vegan, and very few people and places think about cross contamination (I’ve been offered a shared dip with GF crackers, but everyone scooped their portions with their gluten crackers, like double dipping that gives you diarrhea). I’m still not 100% back to how I felt before all this started, but I am feeling better. I’m also better about refusing food from others even if they say it’s gluten-free. I should be getting a blood test every year and if the numbers go down I’m assumed to be responding well.

But this is a dumb disease. Not necessarily because it can be hard to avoid gluten, but because autoimmune diseases as a whole are dumb. Encounter something that exists in nature? Body attacks you. Dumb. Encounter something that exists within your own body? Body attacks you. So dumb. Body thinking your own immune response is something to attack? The dumbest. And it’s genetic and can appear out of nowhere? And other autoimmune diseases can appear after the first one? And exposure can lead to cancer? And women are far more likely to have celiac disease and other autoimmune disorders than men? And the incidence rate is increasing? Who designed this???

I made a lasagna without noodles. 4/10. Gluten-free lasagna noodles exist.

I admit that in terms of incurable diseases, the treatment for celiac is among the best. You don’t have to take expensive medications every day and don’t have to have invasive surgeries. If you accidentally are exposed, the symptoms can disappear within a day (though I’ve heard that some people have lingering symptoms for two weeks). A diet-based treatment can be limiting but it’s fully within my control. Most of the time I feel like I’m living a totally normal life. But there are some things that are a lot more challenging than they used to be: group outings and meals, new restaurants, and traveling. Fortunately, I’m very used to carefully reading menus and food packaging for other reasons, so now I just look for one more thing. And my friends have been so accommodating, doing their best to choose places with gluten-free options or activities that aren’t centered around eating or breweries or even asking for my input. I never ask others to do the researching (except husband: sorry, love, but this falls under the “in sickness” part) and I’ve always been the planner, but I still feel like a burden sometimes, especially because I’m still largely vegetarian, adding another layer of restrictiveness to eating and socializing outside the house. When we went to Hawaii I was pleased at how easy it was to find gluten-free items, even at places I didn’t research beforehand. But I know it’s only because of tourism. We saw husband’s godmother while we were there and even she said she wished that people would either eat the local Hawaiian food or not visit. I’d have loved to eat the local food. Food is a huge part of travel for me, and knowing I can’t partake in a lot of it anymore is a giant disappointment. It also makes me “that girl” now, which I really do hate.

Gluten-free banana bread and a really good mocha from a very touristy coffee shop in Kauai.

Funny, while going back through my old posts searching for something else entirely, I rediscovered one I wrote in 2010 titled Gluten-Free is Silly. Forgetting how I used to title my posts, I was shocked that I’d have believed something like that and embarrassed that I now have to eat gluten-free. Karma is such a bitch! But rereading it, it’s clear I wrote it after my mom was first diagnosed with celiac disease, when I learned more about what it was and how it was different from the gluten-free celebrity fad (or maybe that was never even a fad, it’s not like celebrities are immune from autoimmune disease).

Now? I’m caught between still thinking that gluten-free for funzies is silly and grateful that so many people are gluten-freeish so the 1% of us with celiac disease can have an easier time eating in restaurants, traveling, and buying replacement products. I also now know that non-celiac gluten sensitivity is a real thing, which has probably got to be worse than having a genuine diagnosis because there’s no way to make it seem like a real problem to others without a “real diagnosis”. At the end of the day, if you don’t want to eat something because you feel weird when you do, by all means stop eating it. The quickness with which I dropped gluten is not at all surprising to anyone who has felt this way after eating. Even I used to say I’d eat cheese even if I became lactose intolerant, but I know I’d drop that real fucking fast (it may already be starting so that vegan cheese needs to get a lot better real soon).

Tofu musubi in Hawaii — I didn't even want to try what husband ordered!

However, I also wish that people would be more honest about their level of sensitivity. Picking and choosing which gluten-containing foods you eat contributes to the idea that it’s not medically necessary for a lot of people. There’s so much more awareness and advocacy now, including food and menu labeling laws and gluten being considered an allergen in some places. But there’s still a very long way to go. To share a personal example, ordering chilaquiles: they usually use corn tortillas, but some corn tortillas are secretly corn/wheat hybrids, the chips can be fried in fryers that also contain things coated in flour, red sauce often uses flour as a thickening agent, and the chefs can handle bread right before plating gluten-free chilaquiles without changing their gloves. I take a risk every time I eat out (except for the one entirely gluten-free restaurant near us).

I’m probably not going to make it to China (it wasn’t high on my list of travel destinations anyway), but Italy, Ireland, and Finland are now higher travel priorities due to their higher rates of celiac disease in the general population. I still want to go to Japan, but might have to have some really boring and unhealthy meals and be OK eating from grocery stores. There are clinical trials in the human testing phase (!!!) that aim to reduce symptoms and intestinal inflammation (which can lead to diabetes and cancer) as a result of accidental gluten exposure. My gastroenterologist said he expects something to be in market within a few years, which would be a game changer for traveling.

Brown butter and chilling the dough is the secret to great gluten-free cookies.

In March 2026 I finally had a beer again. I’d found a few single cans of different gluten-free beers at Total Wine (which weren’t gluten-removed or made with quinoa, which for some reason makes my stomach hurt) and enjoyed two at our housewarming party. Let me tell you, that made me so happy. I wasn’t the one person having wine for a change, I was having a real beer, indistinguishable in taste to the beers husband and our friends were drinking, and I’d really missed it. I’m still drinking way less than I used to, I don’t feel like trying to raise my tolerance, but I’m so excited to have options. I even tolerated a gluten-removed beer from a local brewery! Husband and I just got back from Total Wine, bringing home a gluten-free stout, a four pack of my new favorite lager, and a shockingly delicious pre-made mojito that Aisha Tyler made and was there to give out samples. We told her that her collaboration on the Woot Stout back in the day was our favorite and that she had helped me find it. She told us that she wanted to make something that she loved and that solved a problem she had, which is my approach to baking: I’m keeping my standards high and refuse to settle for mediocre cookies just because they’re gluten-free. After lots of trial and error, I cracked the code on a good cookie (cakes and brownies are easy) and can reliably make desserts that live up to my expectations. Now I just need to figure out burritos.