As I write this in early February 2026, I'm not quite sure how I got to where I am. A year ago, I was a senior North Korea expert at the National Security Agency. Although I never made any career decisions with the intent to make a lot of money, I was somehow making a larger salary than I ever dreamed was possible. Now, I'm nearly a year into my post-government career search. I recently dropped out of law school after a very short stint for the second time in my life. I'm DoorDashing while try to figure it out. So that's GS-15 senior analyst to DoorDashing in a year.
It's already hard for me to retrace the steps that have led me here. I know I quit because I couldn't imagine working in a Hegseth-led Department of Defense, and I stand by that decision, whatever happens from here. (How could I work for a man who postures about being tough so much but who can't even do as many pullups as I can?) But since that one decision I know was right, it's been a cascading series of decisions that seemed sound at the time, like they might help me put my life back together, but which didn't pan out. This includes turning down some jobs because I thought I had a chance at a better one, and now I'm wondering what things would be like if I had just taken the bird in the hand.
Of course, if I'm really thinking about origins of things, I'd have to go back a lot further, back to joining the Marine Corps thirty-five years ago, or getting married twenty-five years ago, or even before that, to my unfortunate seven-year misadventure in evangelical Christianity, or even back to my relationship with my parents who have always supported me but whom I feel like I often disappoint.
I've often thought in my life that it's unfair that the me I was at any point in time was condemned to live with the prior decisions of a person who had my name but to whom I felt only a tenuous connection. This was especially true in the Marine Corps, when I had to finish out a full six-year enlistment because some idiot who wasn't me anymore signed my name to a piece of paper. I'm sure prisoners serving out a sentence feel something very similar. It's so hard to trace my own chain of decisions back in time through a tangled web, it feels like "I' just popped into existence yesterday, and I don't really have a causal connection to past versions of myself.
Journaling as a link between past and present selves
May from "Gray, Cotton, White Lace Edges" is similarly befuddled at how past versions of herself have put her where she is today. One earlier version of May decided, seemingly on a whim, to take up a boy at a college party on his offer to give her a hundred dollars for the panties she was wearing. This soon led to her selling her used panties online to guys who are into that stuff. Although she's a more mature version of herself now, she still has one customer, Bill.
She's hung onto Bill because he's the "easiest relationship in May's life." He's also, as May will later put it, "the longest working relationship she's ever had." Although their relationship began under circumstances under which it can never be more than it is--how could she ever enter into a long-term romantic relationship, for example, with a man who was okay buying panties from a woman as young as May was when she started (19)?
Nonetheless, there are aspects of the relationship that are good for May's psyche. The best thing about it is that when May sends her underwear to Bill, she writes down what she was doing when she was wearing them. When she first started doing this, the notes were elaborate, and once she even embellished by saying she masturbated in them. Bill caught the lie, and told her she didn't have to say things that weren't true, that he really just wanted to know what she'd been doing. Over time, the notes became simpler. For example: "Got new boss coffee (splash of oat, 1/2 Splenda packet)."
She had always suspected she'd be "a better person if she journaled," but she couldn't keep with it unless there was someone to keep her accountable, the way some people are about going to the gym. Bill was that someone. Over time, the "fake journal" aspect of logging her thoughts while wearing underwear became real: "He was a place to house all her confessions, like a real journal."
There are other journal-like recordings of daily events going on in the story. May works for the crew of a reality show, and the show has gone on location to film the meeting of John and Ally. Ally is John's 19-year-old Filipina mail order bride. (Okay, not quite a mail order bride, but it seems like the relationship is pretty similar.) In some ways, she's similar to what May was like when she was younger: willing to use the Asian woman fetish/young woman fetish of some men to make a buck, although Ally has taken it to a whole other level, using John's credit card to pay her rent and for her braces.
John, it turns out, has had one young bride from Southeast Asia before. That bride left him with five kids, whom he then raised, so he's not totally without empathy. Nonetheless, the reader feels much more sympathy for Ally, who is obviously making a terrible mistake with her life. The story doesn't treat male fixation on young women like it's an entirely unredeemable fault, but it is a fault.
It was John's idea to invite the reality show to film him and Ally. Reality shows, with their to-the-side confessionals, have a journal-like element to them. The show will, one day, be available to both John and Ally as a reminder of the decisions they made that led them to wherever they will be in the days to come after the story is over.
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| Not only one of the most famous journal keepers ever, but I have a suspicion he was also the kind of old man who would have been into collecting used underwear from young women. |
The efficacy of reminders of times past
Can we learn something from journaling about the mistakes we make that will help us to stop making them? John doesn't seem to be learning much; to the dismay of his friend, he seems to be running headlong into the same mistake he made before. May believes she's a wiser woman now than she was at Ally's age, although she still shows an adolescent penchant for being late and still is stunted emotionally by the grudge she bears against her father, yet another creepy old man in the story who liked his women young.
But maybe the point of journaling--or, as May does, keeping a memory box--isn't so we can go back later and put together a Power Point presentation of how to do better. Benjamin Franklin may have done that, but it's not the only purpose a journal can serve. We don't have to think that the goal in looking back at our pasts is to create the kind of "after action report" businesses seem to love to make, the ones that are either too obvious or too unhelpful to be of much use.
Rather, maybe the value in looking back on our past selves is simply to feel a connection to those earlier versions of us. The end of the story isn't May making resolutions to mend her ways and follow the straight and narrow path. Instead, she's lying in bed. "At the bottom of May's mind, a nineteen-year-old girl. If May got close enough, she could maybe feel the meat on her arms." That is, she's coming into contact with her younger self, enough to feel like she can touch herself (unlike the fake touching herself she told Bill about).
I said that the story isn't as tough on old men going after young women as it could be. That last line is one example, because it's a callback to when May saw John gripping Ally by the arms when they met. If John's relationship with Ally were only creepy and gross, instead of just mostly creepy and gross, May wouldn't have reflected it in her final thoughts.
A second way that the story isn't too tough on old men is that the person who gives May her final epiphany is Bill, the man who's been buying her underwear all these years. Bill seems to be the only person in the story who has reflected on his past and made a conscious decision to change. He's fallen in love and gotten married, and he knows this means he can't keep up his panty habit. He does two things for May that are actually very thoughtful. One is to buy her dinner at the same restaurant where her father once ruined a birthday for her, in what ended up being the final straw for her and her relationship with her dad. By doing so, he helped May to reclaim the part of herself that was lost to her damaging relationship with her father. The second kind thing he does is to return all of her panties and notes to her, thereby giving her a complete journal of all the years since she started sending him her underwear. It's this pile of laundry that enables May to finally connect with herself.
The main theme of the story seems to be something like, "In order to be whole, you must maintain some kind of meaningful connection to your younger selves." I'm honestly undecided on whether that's true, whether it's therapy speak, or whether it's just the kind of theme that sounds good in a literary short story, because literary short stories often deal with themes concerning how memory builds our sense of self. Part of me is skeptical and thinks I could probably be fine waking up every day and not thinking much at all about how I got to where I am now and cursing the past versions of myself who put me here. Part of me thinks that by doing this, I might be damaging my current self-esteem, because if I can hate my past selves this much, then certainly future me is also going to hate the me I am now, which means the me I am now must also be trash.
I'm a little more certain I agree with a secondary theme, which is that maybe we can be a little bit easy on some of the people who've been part of our bad decisions in the past. Yeah, maybe old men shouldn't be so quick to capitalize on the bad decisions of young women, but if an older, wiser woman is going to feel whole, it's going to mean having to come to some terms with the fact that those people with whom one made bad decisions were themselves making their own bad decisions, and also that by being part of our past choices, they've helped make us who we are now. That seems to be the source of some of the story's partial grace it gives to creepy old men.
