What matters—what always matters—is not belonging. It is the interest itself. The fact that something turned me on. There was a spark. I was illuminated by the power of the subject, by the act of looking more closely, of investigating.

When I am interested, I step out of myself and out of the closed world of failure, and I am somewhere else. Sometimes the scope of that interest is wide; sometimes it is very small. At the moment, not much interests me except music—mainly Israeli music. Music videos. Concerts. And an article in The New York Times that I recognized myself in immediately.

Before I was accepted to school, I was deeply interested in a group of marginalized young people who called themselves party kids—strange young San Franciscans who dressed oddly, photographed constantly, performed drag, and years later wrote books about that time. I read and watched everything I could find about them.

I liked imagining them together. I liked imagining myself there with them—finding a place for people like me, people who don’t quite belong anywhere, who struggle to find a common language with the world.

I am not denying the war outside. The reality is horrifying.

But inside me, there is still hope. As long as something can still catch my attention—even briefly—pull me out of that space of collapse and back into a universe that invites me forward, that makes me want to read more, see more, hear more, imagine more of what might be possible.

Maybe one day the war will end.

Maybe one day the heart will calm.

Maybe one day something will loosen from the inside,

and space will be allowed.