Tag: shakespeare

Two American Girls of Cambridge

Love, work and other English heritage ailments

Autumn 2013 —

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire… on the river Cam…

I. A small test of inconvenience

“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.”
— The Clown, Twelfth Night
(Translation: Here, irony is oxygen and sincerity a choking hazard.)

Most mornings, I rode a white bicycle with a wicker basket and a D-lock — what we’d call a U-lock in the States — through a drizzle so gentle it felt like God had a lingering runny nose. Coming from Utah, where rain is a rare spectacle of thunder and repentance, I never quite adjusted to how punctual it is in England. In the mountain desert, rain happens about as often as people eat green Jell-O (practically never).

I cycled through the drizzle toward the libraries, down Hills Road toward the center — a punctuation mark in the grey paragraph of morning traffic, weaving close to cars without hitting their mirrors. The colleges would wake up: porters unlocking centuries-old doors, someone eating a “cheeky” sausage roll at a bus stop. I’d loved Cambridge long before I got there, but in England you can’t just say something like that. You have to start by complaining about the weather. It’s as though affection must first pass a small test of inconvenience.

II. Three places, one God complex

When I told people where I was from, they nodded with that English politeness that means mild confusion. “Utah?” Someone would usually ask, “Near Las Vegas?” — meaning the place British men flock to for stag weekends, armed with inflatable anatomy and the promise of bad decisions.

In reality, the two cities are six hours apart by car, a straight shot down I-15. Salt City mirroring Sin City across the motorway — the two of them glaring at each other like a separated couple in a bad marriage still sharing a bank account.

Cambridge has Old World charm — so neatly named it borders on self-parody. There’s a river called the Cam and, of course, a number of bridges. Locals, ever self-aware, like to joke that the name proves genius is in the water. For some, Cambridge was still a finishing school for the world’s most polished: chauffeured to formals, brunching in AirBnB’d castles, posting filtered group pictures under a Hellenistic sculpture on the relatively new app, Instagram, (founded in 2010, acquired by Facebook in 2012).

Days blurred into drafts and deadlines, the slow rhythm of library lamps and late-night tea. Ambition was its own religion here, quiet but consuming. We scrawled the motto over our doorways: Silent Desperation is the English Way.

III. Shine on, you Cantabrigian diamond

Syd Barrett and Roger Waters were rumored to have played their first set here when they were fourteen or fifteen at the Anchor Pub. Barrett grew up (and died) in Cambridge. I met coursemates and friends who came to visit at the pub; sometimes I came during lunch, watching the punters on the river. Sometimes I sat by myself in the corner downstairs — listened to music, spent a little time with Syd’s spirit.

I felt at home, haunting the town as a cultural-anthropologist-to-be with a black wool coat and a funny last name. British people still think Macbeth is unlucky. Sometimes I felt it. Maybe I was living in a fever dream or an Earl Grey delirium… regardless, I was there.

IV. The other American girl

“If I had my mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty,
I would do my liking: in the meantime let me be that I am
and seek not to alter me.”
— Don John, Much Ado About Nothing
(Translation: If you can’t beat the algorithm, don’t join it?)

“Marry, sir, they have committed false report;
moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondarily,
they are slanders; sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady;
thirdly, they have verified unjust things; and, to conclude,
they are lying knaves.”
— Dogberry, Much Ado About Nothing
(Translation: Someone on Instagram is lying again.)

In 2013, her posts reached us like contraband, circulating among the unconcerned nerd girls. She was studying across town, photographing candlelit formals and sun-washed courtyards; her posts slipped into our common rooms like dispatches from a parallel university. She made Cambridge look effortless, like a romantic comedy. Something both brass and totally American, but novel in the brave new world of Instagram filters. Enter Valencia Rock ’n’ Roll from N.Y.C.

What fascinated me most about Caroline Calloway — with her literary name straight out of Fitzgerald — was the story behind the sparkling façade: the strange duet of authorship and illusion. I watched it all from the Anthropology & Archaeology Library (between fantasizing about Sylvia and Ted), the University Library, the Hughes Hall library. I didn’t feel envy exactly, more like the fascination of seeing someone animate their own myth in real time. She’d translated Cambridge in the 21st century into a vivid image. In many ways, my experience felt like endurance. But then, every myth has someone in the shadows — usually a woman — doing the invisible labor that keeps the illusion intact.

V. Caroline’s chorus: every drama needs its ghost

The story that broke in 2019 revived the Caroline Cambridge myth that began in 2013, when Caroline and I were students at Cambridge. The story focused on Natalie Beach: they had been best friends in college, collaborators turned co-conspirators in character invention. Natalie later alleged that she had not only helped write the early Instagram captions but had co-created the Caroline persona itself, an uncredited ghostwriter to the myth. Together they built the witty intimacy that made Caroline’s feed so addictive, while Caroline lived it in public: the gowns, the heartbreak, the fantasy of effortless belonging. (Very Gossip Girl; yes… I watched it all.)

That was twelve years ago. And still, in 2025, glossy stories keep appearing — Caroline posed in soft light, telling new versions of the same tale. The fascination endures. When the ghostwriting story broke, I didn’t feel vindicated. I mostly felt curious, and, if I’m honest, a little jealous… of the paid ghostwriter Natalie.*

My love of psychedelic theater like Dark Side of the Moon and secret Gossip Girl viewing proved I’d always been drawn to spectacle, but I dressed my artistic aspirations as coursework: poetic prose that made academic boards give me grants — or let me take out loans so I could learn more. Back then, I just worked. Didn’t question it.

*A friend who proofed this essay (male) believes that deep down I wish I were posing in my underwear next to a Beauty & the Beast costume for thousands and thousands of dollars. This repressed intimation of female jealousy, he reckons, is the most interesting idea in the essay.

VI. An honest day’s haunting

By then, I had started to notice that Cambridge had its share of quiet ghosts: people like me, living in libraries, alone or in company, absorbed enough in our work that we began to fade at the edges. We moved, in light or in darkness, in a kind of near-invisibility; kept vigil for old, tattered stories while others told prettier ones.

I worked at the Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology on exhibits about disappeared civilizations, and with visiting groups from South Africa, Australia, Nigeria, First Nations, and the Blackfeet Nation. As graduate students, we twenty-somethings met with representatives, listened to stories tied to identity and memory, and learned to care for the objects living at the museum.

I used to drink coffee from white china cups after lunch, thousand-yard staring out a window overlooking the cricket green. I told people I was agnostic when the Utah question came up, but I also spent hours each week in Cambridge’s churches crying.

In Turkish restaurants, Muslim-owned grocery stores and malls in the suburbs, where I rented a shared council house, I encountered many other people trying to become something or do something great. I felt privileged, but everyone could see the missing buttons on my coat, stumbling in for real-sugar chocolate at odd hours.

Sometimes I wondered if loving a place was just another form of study — an endless observation that never turned into certainty. I wrote about belonging as if naming it might make it real, but Cambridge resisted ownership in the way all beautiful things do. My research, interviews and writing addressed the question: How do we inhabit the places we’re from, those we adopt, those we — lovingly, even masochistically — serve? ’Til death do us part… or not, Dear Cambridge.

Coleridge might summarize: A Mormon fantasie of eternal love!

VII. Portrait of the artist, post-graduation

“I can call spirits from the vasty deep.”
“Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?”
— Glendower and Hotspur, Henry IV, Part I
(Translation: But can you get funding?)

On Orchard Street in Cambridge in 2018, I rented a small room with my long-time boyfriend, who I’d met years earlier as a master’s student. Outside, bicycles clicked past toward the river; inside, the Medieval rafters exhaled in little sighs and radiators creaked. The ceiling slanted, the air smelled faintly of rain and coffee and the small desk by the window became the site of my artistic evolution, a miraculous spurt of production after years visiting the altar of the Muse of Writing, waiting for a sign.

VIII. Devotion and other British habits

“I have no other but a woman’s reason; I think him so,
because I think him so.”
— The Two Gentlemen of Verona
(Translation: Feeling is its own form of faith.)

“There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip.”
— Troilus and Cressida
(No translation necessary.)

A stone’s throw from Orchard Street was the Princess Diana Memorial Garden — a modest town park with practical flowerbeds, nothing exotic — somewhere I used to sit at all hours of the day, cross-legged. Children ran in circles around the benches while parents unwrapped sandwiches, the ordinary rhythm of British weekends. It wasn’t the sort of place anyone photographed, which was what I liked about it.

For anyone who grew up in the 1990s, her image was everywhere: the ocean-blue eyes, the head tilt, that quiet strength that seemed to glow from television screens and magazine covers alike. In Utah, that admiration had its own peculiar intensity — perhaps because so much of our culture still carried traces of old England, with hymns and hierarchy just a breath removed from High Anglicanism. Loving the Royal Family came easily; devotion to Lady D felt like a shared inheritance. My mom cried for a week when she died. It’s a vivid childhood memory. Blonde, magnetic and naturally elegant, my mom had what people used to call “a Diana-like way about her.” England never felt totally foreign to me: so much of our cultural heritage is close, intimate — even painful — like a family photograph.

However, different parts of me spared me from imposture syndrome or castigating myself too much in an environment where I was, more often than not, stepping on toes. Maybe it was the Celtic stubbornness or the frontier nostalgia, but I took a quiet pleasure in belonging somewhere I wasn’t supposed to. I was an Irish-Scottish-Swedish-Swiss-Welsh mix from the Wild West — a cultural collage that shouldn’t have blended with Gothic chapels and rowing clubs.

Yet, walking past King’s on foggy mornings, I felt more local than foreign, more student than visitor, grateful and a little defiant at once. I felt pride when I studied for finals in the Eagle pub, beneath the scorched signatures of RAF and American airmen who had burned their names into the ceiling during the Second World War: a small inheritance of audacity I could recognize in myself.

The cathedral of feedback

In the morning on Hills Road, I passed tech workers and tourists, each on a different kind of pilgrimage, convinced the next bright screen or cloistered courtyard held meaning. Celebrity, scholarship, capitalism: chapels in the cathedral of feedback. Some heard noise as progress; others were just trying to do good work, live decently and make sense of where they’d ended up.

Cambridge had a rhythm of its own — oftentimes made judgements about correct ambition and devotion, noise and truth. Some days I thought I understood it; other days it was all confusion. There was comfort in a shared definition of meaning in the midst of tradition, architectural beauty and tantalizing “No Entry” signs everywhere. (Might be my fetish…)

P.S.salm 46:5
To my Fourth Watch Love

April 19, 2026
Calumet: Layers in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining

I’ve always found that my strongest connection to Macbeth comes through horror—an angle that still feels somehow overlooked, given how often the play leans toward the campy, the uncanny, and the animated in its shifts of tone. Macbeth sits quietly at the foundation of the genre, yet many modern adaptations treat it as a straightforward story of political unraveling, closer to Henry VIII than to anything resembling proto-horror.

It was this elasticity of tone that drew me, years later, to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, a film that treats horror the way Shakespeare does—as an atmospheric logic rather than a genre, something woven through space, timing, and the emotional weather of a place.

Macbeth reaches toward a kind of supernatural tension and psychological disorientation that wouldn’t have a formal vocabulary for centuries. Shakespeare mixed genres, but film adaptations rarely capture the quick shifts of atmosphere that live theater makes possible—the in-and-out changes of set and mood that can feel like flipping channels on a strange television broadcast, or listening to a radio station mixed in real time by an unseen DJ.

“Come, Graymalkin!” — the line holds an eerie shimmer like the dark animated films from the late ’80s-90s. They’re threaded with folk magic, shadowy forests, grotesque little jokes, and a touch of menace too sophisticated for their intended audience. See The Black Cauldron (1985) promo image above.

At its core, Macbeth is a play of tonal whiplash: ragged prophecies delivered on a blasted heath, followed moments later by a drunken porter cracking bawdy jokes at the castle gate; flashes of supernatural spectacle punctuating long, politically anxious speeches; strange bursts of color — torches, blood, banners — interrupting Scotland’s fog. Shakespeare’s tragedy is not one clean descent but a jittery collage of horror, comedy, and moral vertigo. It behaves less like stately history and more like early camp horror, the kind that delights in theatricality while letting the uncanny slip in through the seams.

Living Inside a Haunted World

Kubrick understood that texture instinctively. Where Shakespeare used rhetorical shifts, Kubrick used décor, framing, and the rhythm of movement through space. His haunted world is not a set of plot devices but an environment you live inside. The Overlook behaves like a theatrical stage expanded to architectural scale: carpets in impossible colors, hallways that seem to inhale and exhale, sudden intrusions of grotesque comedy (the man in the dog suit, the relentless cheer of the bar), all arranged to make the viewer feel not that they are watching a haunted hotel, but that they have been quietly checked into one.

The rules of realism loosen and tighten at odd intervals—just as in Macbeth—and that playfulness with tone is what gives both works their durability. Horror becomes a lens, not a genre: a way of understanding mood, memory, and the fractures in our perception.

Maybe that’s why Room 237—Rodney Ascher’s documentary built from the voices of Kubrick theorists who never appear onscreen—has become my favorite documentary. I rewatched it last night, and it still carries the same strange, absorbing quality it had the first time. The film allows you to wander back through Kubrick’s environments, touching the walls, following the impossible geography, noticing small shifts in color and continuity the way a guest might sense a draft in a sealed room.

The disembodied commentators move through those spaces like resident spirits—guides who never quite manifest—letting their interpretations drift between the improbable and the unexpectedly revealing. Their voices echo over long, immaculate stretches of footage from The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut, and Kubrick’s earlier films, until the documentary begins to feel less like analysis and more like haunting. For anyone attuned to Kubrick’s sensibility, the film’s rhythm settles in quietly, as if it has been waiting for you to return.

The Rooms We Return To

Last month, I wrote about my mother’s attempt to buy a small business and acred property just outside the Black Canyon of the Gunnison — one of those rare corners of Colorado that feels both remote and instantly magnetic. I connected to the land far more quickly than I expected: the stillness, the open sky, the way the air cools as the canyon drops away. I had already begun imagining the winter there — skiing Telluride on weekends, learning the slower rhythms of the towns tucked into that landscape.

We were set to arrive on October 31st, Halloween. The timing gave the whole experience a kind of playful electricity—packing boxes, sketching out plans, and sensing that faint atmospheric tilt that comes right before entering a new story. It had the early-Shining quality of anticipation rather than dread, a sense of stepping into a place that felt both familiar and a little uncanny.

Then the government shutdown halted the federal paperwork the sale depended on, closing the door as abruptly as it had opened. When I watched Room 237 again last night, the footage from The Shining carried the kind of clarity that only arrives after you’ve witnessed something life-altering—like Rowling’s moment in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, when Harry suddenly sees the thestrals, creatures that had been there all along but invisible to him until he had witnessed death.

Symbolic Doorways and Ruptures

In Room 237, the documentary hinges on a small but important thematic arc: the shift from Danny’s innocence to his initiation. One narrator lingers on the Dopey Disney sticker on Danny’s bedroom door—“he’s ignorant, or a dope”—marking the before moment of a child who hasn’t yet been shown the world’s darker layers. Later, when Tony—Danny’s finger and his inner voice—reveals the vision of blood pouring from the Overlook’s elevator doors, everything changes. That image becomes the after: the moment when he is forcefully given knowledge, or a new reality, that he can’t return from.

Tellingly, the Dopey sticker quietly disappears by the time his worried mother and the pediatrician sit discussing his strange behavior—its absence a small but unmistakable sign that the threshold has been crossed.

Something the Stephen King book captures better than the film is the Overlook as a wind-up mechanism of its own — part snowglobe, part labyrinth. Danny’s presence doesn’t just perceive the hotel; it activates it, winds it into motion. Kubrick gestures toward this in his opening aerial shot: a benevolent, almost angelic vantage point following the car through the mountains, as if some unseen witness is watching over Wendy and Danny as they approach a building already preparing itself.

Colorado’s Unquiet Ground

Environments and landscapes are living things. They hold competing interpretations, overlapping needs, and layers of history that rarely agree with each other. Kubrick understood this instinctively. In The Shining, he suggests the repressed and the grief-stricken without accusation—introducing the violence beneath the Overlook, including the history of Native genocide and displacement, not as a lesson but as an atmosphere. He allows the viewer to slip into the world as a local might: aware of something unsettled beneath the surface, but also aware of the beauty and strangeness that coexist alongside it. From what I’ve read, Kubrick learned things while researching in Colorado that stayed with him and haunted him—difficult histories that reframed the landscape in ways he didn’t expect.

I’ve only scratched the surface of that material myself, but I understand the feeling: how the trauma embedded in a place can be almost drowned out by the sweep of desert sky, the brightness of high-altitude light, the resilient life of the region. For Kubrick, the Overlook wasn’t just a set—it was a door to secret knowledge, and stepping through it was its own kind of initiation, as horrifying as it was illuminating.

Erasing the Image, Losing the Memory

I’ve long questioned the wisdom of removing Native American imagery—especially Native-produced brands and symbols—from public view, whether in sports or on packaging. Erasure solves nothing; it tears something vital away from cultural memory. We lose an opportunity for shadow work, for reckoning with dark heritage, when we strip away the images that remind us of the histories beneath our feet. Symbols need room to exist in a neutral space so they can be understood, not feared or hidden. Without that, we risk weakening our collective imagination—and our ability to remain mentally healthy in the face of the past.

Colorado has always complicated these questions for me. It is one of the few places where I feel the beauty of horror without flinching—where the land itself teaches you how to hold darkness and radiance at the same time. The high desert has a way of making even grief look illuminated: red rock catching fire at sunset, abandoned mining sites dissolving into wildflower meadows, old histories rising and fading in the same breath.

Each time I’ve lived near or traveled through Colorado, I’ve felt that double vision settle in—the sense that a place can be breathtaking and wounded at once, and that my role is not to sanitize that tension but to sit with it. Horror, in its best form, does the same thing: it lets the truth stand in its full shape, neither prettied up nor pushed away. Maybe that’s why I return to The Shining so often. Its terror is threaded with beauty, and its beauty refuses to hide the cost of what it remembers. Colorado feels like that too: a landscape that insists on being seen whole.

December 10, 2025
Born Into a Spoiler Alert: Notes from a Macbeth Descendant

Today is December 7th, 2025, the day after my mom’s and brother’s birthdays, and I’m back in one of my favorite places: the Marriott Library. I got my lucky spot, the exact one I used to sit in, like it had been waiting for me. In terms of lucky coincidences, things like this happen more than they should.

My mom used to say, “A golden cloud follows you around.” However, other sayings exist too, like: “She’d lose her head if it wasn’t attached to her body.” The combination captures the polar quality of my luck—weirdly good, and then a pendulum swing to weirdly bad.

Before I get too far into family legends, I keep thinking about a recent piece I wrote—“Fairytales We Tell Ourselves: The Utah Pantages Theater and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona”—and about my friend Michael Patton, who works under the name Michael Valentine. Michael is a direct descendant of General George S. Patton, a fact he acknowledges with a mix of irritation and resignation. He chose “Valentine” as a protest against war culture, a way of stepping sideways out of the mythology he inherited.

Good Luck / Bad Luck: Growing Up in the Shadow of “Greats”

It hit me while writing that earlier essay that both Michael and I grew up with blood-soaked ancestors—his, the general who carved his way through Europe; mine, the doomed Scottish king whose story ends in a battlefield death every time it’s told. There’s an odd magic to that, the kind that looks enviable from a distance but comes with expectations no one volunteers for. Patton and Macbeth: two figures shaped by violence, ambition, and myth—men who loom so large that their descendants end up negotiating not just lineage, but full-fledged Western narratives.

In the Pantages essay, I wrote about how spaces like that theater hold our personal myths in place—how they give people like Michael, and honestly people like me, a place to set down the stories we inherited and pick up new ones. The demolition of the Pantages in 2022 felt like a symbolic rupture: a place where stubborn idealists once found refuge was flattened, and with it went the kind of civic imagination that makes room for oddball lineages and myth-haunted people.

All of this is to say: some of us are born into stories much louder than we are. You spend your adult life deciding which parts you’re willing to keep.

Call Me Locks: Lady Macbeth Was My Grandmother!

All the relatives on my mom’s side are McBeth or MacBeth or some variant of the name. The eccentric streak runs deep enough that the spelling seems to shift with personality, era of life, or whatever the family mood was at the time. You can see the whole taxonomy laid out in the Payson, Utah graveyard where my ancestors are buried.

It’s always interested me that some cultures routinely give their kids names tied to frightening or controversial figures. Not because people secretly want a little villain in the family, but because naming a child something heavy forces them to reckon with it early. Kids will tease them, question them, make them explain it long before they’ve even learned the history behind their own name. Maybe that’s the point: you get all the shadow-work done in childhood. You learn early not to flinch at darkness, not to identify with it. Sometimes you even outgrow the propensity for villainy before you’ve had a chance to try it on.

Maybe because of that, I always had a low, reflexive cringe around the overbearing, over-ambitious persona of Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. When I lived in Cambridge, I’d occasionally end up in small Shakespeare chats with baristas or grocers, and some of them made truly awful faces when the play came up. I’d laugh and tell them I didn’t actually read it until college—and did end up liking it—but for a long time I avoided English literature altogether because it felt too on-the-nose; almost like declaring myself an English major would read as a horrible gimmick.

And yet, despite all my attempts to outrun the melodrama of the name, I somehow drifted straight into the territory I thought I’d avoid—history, archives, Scotland, the whole ecosystem of stories that orbit the Macbeth myth. It’s ridiculous, but also very “family legacy” in the mythic, Oedipus kind of way: the more you sidestep something, the more directly you walk into it.

Because of that, I have a deep sympathy for celebrity kids and for anyone saddled with a complicated or suddenly loaded name. Think of people named Isis, who now share their name with a terror organization, or girls named Katrina who were born before the hurricane. In the era of the internet, your name becomes a label that precedes you everywhere, a magnetic force field you never asked for. While I love memes and jokes and occasionally peeking into gossip culture, I have a complicated relationship with what it means to be defined—lightly or heavily—before you even arrive.

The Worst Cringe I’ve Ever Felt

Perfectionists learn to metabolize embarrassment early. You practice smoothing over mistakes, pretending nothing happened, moving on. Yet as you get older and more competent, the mistakes grow sharper teeth. They wait for you in the places you least expect, like tiny traps set by the universe just to keep you humble.

I loved ancient languages and museums, so I applied for a master’s with the full, naïve conviction of someone who has no backup plan. I didn’t scatter applications across a dozen programs; I chose one, gave it everything, and hoped. Getting accepted was one of the happiest moments of my life. Even with the bare-minimum funding, I packed up and moved to England in 2013 with a kind of reckless gratitude. I had arranged a student room, memorized the streets on Google Maps, and rehearsed my own arrival like it was a scene in a film.

Before I got there, the university assigned me my email and login credentials. Seeing the “@cam.ac.uk” address made everything feel both official and impossible. There I was: walking off the train dragging my 80lbs suitcase over the uneven pavement, unlocking the rented room I’d only ever seen on a screen, and feeling—briefly, miraculously—like the version of myself I’d always hoped I would become. Even the silence of the first night, sitting on the narrow bed with the radiator clanking to life, felt like prophecy coming true.

I glanced at the autogenerated email username; apparently, there were quite a few students with my initials who came before me—so many shoes to fill! I thought. The number embedded in my unique Cambridge identifier was the number 33. I like multiples of 11. November baby. Grew up near 3300 South and St. Mark’s Hospital (I almost got a winged lion tattoo; maybe I still will). This gemmatria-esque-hippie-numerology detail registered as a tiny wink from the universe; everything is sure going my way, I thought.

For weeks, I floated. I went to induction sessions, bought my first British groceries, tried not to look like an overwhelmed American. I signed emails automatically with my new Cambridge address, barely thinking about the random “33” tacked onto it. It was just another institutional quirk, like the fact that no one ever explained how the dining hall seating worked.

Then—months later, at the Hughes Hall bar, half-drunk with a pack of French classmates—the brakes hit. Someone asked a simple question about how Cambridge generates its usernames. I answered without thinking, rattling off mine and mentioning the “33” as casually as noting the weather. The reaction was immediate. A full-body groan from one side of the table. Explosive laughter from the other. Someone actually slid off their chair.

Only then did they manage to explain to me—between gasps—that “33” is used as a white supremacist code. And that “HH,” the abbreviation for Hughes Hall, is another one. I stared at them while they howled with the kind of laughter that makes strangers turn around. I was actually holding back tears of horror.

I replayed every email I had ever sent. Every form submitted. Every professor addressed. Me, earnestly signing off with a digital calling card that, out of context, looked like a secret handshake with the worst people alive. It was—without exaggeration—the purest cringe of my adult life. Thankfully, Cambridge changes your email when you graduate. I shed the cursed numerology and emerged simply as hannah.mcbeth. A clean slate; a merciful reset.

In one of my favorite films 500 Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character asks Summer (played by the immortal Zooey Deschanel) if she ever had a nickname in school. She deadpans: “They called me Anal Girl because I was so neat and tidy.” He spits out his drink.

I think “Hitler Girl” might even be worse.

On Luck, Names, and Everything We Don’t Choose

Sitting here today in my old lucky spot at the Marriott Library, I keep thinking about how wildly inconsistent luck can feel when you grow up inside a name, a story, a family mythology you never exactly signed up for. Some people inherit money or land or a family business; others inherit legends, curses, punchlines, or—if they’re especially unlucky—an email address that accidentally signals extremism. The older I get, the more I realize the shape of your inheritance matters less than the way you learn to carry it.

Some of us get the blood-soaked ancestors, the melodramatic surnames, the oddball reputations that precede us into rooms. Some of us get the tiny mortifications that knock the wind out of us in foreign bars. Some of us, if we’re really paying attention, also get the golden-cloud moments—the quiet return to a library desk that feels like a portal back to the versions of ourselves we’ve been building, fleeing, or reinventing for years.

Maybe that’s the real trick of growing up in the shadow of “greats,” whether real or imagined: eventually you stop trying to outpace the story and start editing it. You keep the parts that still feel alive, you leave behind the parts that were only ever projections, and you learn to laugh—properly, deeply—when life hands you the kind of cringe you’ll be telling forever.

Names, myths, coincidences, curses, blessings: they all get folded into the same narrative eventually. Somehow, here I am again, in December light, at the desk that always seems to be waiting for me—proof that sometimes the pendulum swings back toward the good, weirdly and without warning, just when you need it most.

December 7, 2025