You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

[00:00:00] You must be some kind of therapist?

I've been busier than ever with my ROGD parent coaching work. So busy that I haven't had time to schedule as many podcast guests as needed to keep up with the weekly schedule. So to fill in those gaps, I'm going to be doing a series of shorter solo episodes, each focused on a particular theme that comes up in my coaching work, which I do the rest of the week.

For each of these, I've scripted a draft that I'll be reading from. I hope it sounds good when I read it aloud. Please bear with me, as this isn't my usual style, but it is something I hope will be useful to a lot of people and manageable for me as I'm juggling maintaining a weekly podcast with a full schedule of coaching clients, plus running ROGD Repair and Repair Bot.

I know many of you are interested in my parent coaching work, and I hope you'll get a lot out of these episodes. So with that said, today I want to talk [00:01:00] about something that comes up early in the work I do with many parents, which is a recalibration of what they think they're trying to accomplish with their trans-identified child Most of the parents who come to me, especially the new ones, come in thinking that the main goal should be to convince their son or daughter to stop believing in gender ideology.

They've read the same books that you and I have. They've found heterodox voices like mine, and they're hoping that I will give them the script to land the moment that will end the belief. One of the first pieces of work I do with parents like this is to clarify that that's not actually a goal I'm going to help them with, at least not as a first step and not directly.

The belief is downstream. The actual goals are two different things, and neither of them is make her [00:02:00] stop believing this. The first goal, and the one parents should always put their primary attention on, is preventing medical harm, preserving bodily integrity, keeping your child intact and unaltered as much as you can for as long as you can while the rest of the work has time to unfold.

The medical interventions are the part of the story that is most permanently damaging. The cross-sex hormones change her voice and face and fertility, as well as her risk of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's in ways that are not reversible. Surgeries take pieces of a child's body that they will never get back.

So when I think about what we're here to actually help parents accomplish, step one is preserving bodily integrity. A kid who's not medicalized still has doors open to them. Some of those doors will permanently close with medicalization. So that's the first piece, [00:03:00] and one of the earliest steps in my work is to assess how far along the medical pipeline a given parent's child might be or is at risk of being in the near future.

Now, this doesn't mean that we will stop at anything to fight for bodily integrity if there are other competing needs. For example, sometimes parents engage in shady tactics like bribery to try to slow a decision, and this ultimately only strengthens a child's resolve to make that decision, as well as the resentment of the parent.

So sometimes we have to weigh carefully what tactics a parent is considering using toward this goal of preventing bodily injury. That being said, we're assessing severity, risk, timeline, we're triaging, and our first goal is always preserving bodily integrity, trying to do that without [00:04:00] harming the relationship or without increasing the chance that you're actually just kicking the can down the road and creating worse problems for a later date.

The second goal, alongside bodily preservation, of course, is creating the conditions to support this particular child's desistance In other words, what can we do to help her want on her own to step away from the trans identity and reclaim what is left of her adolescence or young adulthood, and start building a real identity that is actually hers or his and will hold up over time?

That's the long game goal. No matter what, if your child is in this, they have lost a portion of crucial developmental years to building up a false sense of self that is only delaying their coming to terms with reality and strengthening the identity of who they really are. So, for example, one way of thinking about this, let's say you have [00:05:00] a daughter named Samantha, and she's calling herself Ryan.

So Ryan is the alter ego. I would think of the actions that she's taking to reinforce her identity as Ryan, I would call that starving Samantha and feeding Ryan. So she does something well, Ryan gets credit. Everything's going toward the alter ego, right? No matter how much or how little time your child's been in this, all of that time and energy that's going into building up the alter ego is something that's lost that can't be gotten back.

So our second goal is to get as much of their adolescence or young adulthood back as possible and start feeding Samantha, start nourishing and building up that person who she really is, which is an unknown entity. Let's keep this in mind. Look, a lot of people talk about a child's self-esteem issues or body image issues, insecurity or social anxiety as if it [00:06:00] means there's something wrong.

They worry as if this is abnormal for an adolescent to lack confidence. And I reassure parents, that's a normal part of adolescence. Of course, she's insecure. She hasn't had time to develop the things that make for real confidence. So I don't even recommend reacting to a child's complaints of low self-esteem as if that's a signal that there's anything wrong.

It takes time to build character, confidence, and competence. We wanna help build that up for Samantha or whoever the real child, the real person is. We wanna help put those building blocks into place so that they're not losing valuable portions of their adolescence and young adulthood, feeding a false sense of self that will just have to be dismantled later, leaving them disoriented.

So let's spend a moment talking about what desistance actually looks [00:07:00] like in practice. I think parents often imagine it as a single dramatic moment, and that imagination tends to do parents a disservice. Desistance rarely looks like a kid sitting down with her parents and saying, "I was wrong. You were right.

I'm a girl. I am not trans." Please go ahead and call me by my real name. You know, all those things you long to hear, you're not gonna hear. If you're lucky, in five or 10 years, you'll be able to laugh about this together, maybe cry about it. Maybe she will thank you for what you did to ensure her long-term success.

But that fantasy moment is something that you might have to lay to rest or just hold out for and play the long game. More often, desistance is a gradual off-ramp, and the kid does not flip from belief to disbelief in gender ideology in a single moment. [00:08:00] She eases sideways and preserves as much as possible of her existing identity and worldview.

She wants to save face. She wants to have a cohesive sense of self and worldview and cohesive relationships at a time that's already unstable enough. And who can blame her? So for some of these kids, that sideways move is into what I call the ally identity. So instead of focusing on being trans herself, she becomes someone who supports trans people, who knows trans people, who is adjacent to that world without claiming it as her own.

This preserves her social standing in the in-group and her designation as a good person according to the beliefs of her peer tribe. She doesn't have to confess that she was wrong. She just gradually repositions herself. And before you roll your eyes at this, I want you to think about how big of a move that is [00:09:00] from her perspective.

For other kids, instead of leaning into the ally identity more and claiming the label trans less for themselves, they might step down the same way they came in, through the non-binary label or pansexual or one of these other labels, but choosing not to pursue medicalization and oftentimes having rationalizations rather than admitting that they were wrong.

So the rationalization can sound like, "Well, you don't have to medicalize to be trans." This lets them retain some of the benefits that come with that social identity in their current social environment while stepping off of the medical pathway. Deep down, they might feel afraid of the permanence of medicalization and might feel some relief about the guardrails that you put in place while not being able to admit that.

There are other intermediate steps along the way as well. Some [00:10:00] kids drift away from the identity as their friend group changes or a particular relationship ends or otherwise their social context shifts, or they're spending less time online, perhaps thanks to your interventions. Getting them off of screens and into the real world, into their bodies, into the place where they can build social capital, confidence, and character.

The point I'm trying to make here is that desistance is rarely a one-step move. It's a series of smaller moves, typically aimed at preserving social cohesion, narrative worldview, a consistent sense of self, and saving face, preventing embarrassment and disorientation. As a parent, it's your job to make those smaller moves available to her, to keep those off-ramps open and appealing without requiring her to fully recant in front of everybody she's told.

Another way that this shift [00:11:00] can look like, depending on the kid's emerging sexuality, is leaning more into their sexuality labels and less into gender labels, particularly if the kid is genuinely same-sex attracted. For instance, I once worked with a family where the kid claimed to be both gay and trans.

Now, if you've been in the gender critical movement for a while like I have, you know those things cannot be simultaneously true. In fact, you know that a person cannot simultaneously believe in things like trans or non-binary or gender as a spectrum. They can't believe any of these things and believe that there is such a thing as sexual orientation.

Because The whole idea of trans destroys sexual boundaries. That's part of why it's so dangerous. It seeks to erode consent and self-knowledge of one's own body and heart. That being said, these kids have a lot of cognitive dissonance and conflicting beliefs, and it's your job [00:12:00] as a parent to help surface them gently using the techniques that I teach in ROGD Repair.

So once you put these two goals in the right order, the question of how to work this whole situation comes into focus. Again, our first goal is bodily integrity. Our second goal is for your child to find their own pathway towards desistance, typically one that allows for as much cohesion as possible during an unstable time.

Ideological desistance, the wholes- the wholesale rejection of gender ideology, typically comes much later, if at all, and I would encourage you as a parent to be okay with that, to let them have their worldview that makes sense in their social order, and to get your priorities straight. Once your relationship is in a good place and much more robust and resilient, then there can be more room for debate over your ideological differences.

There's a frame I've written about in [00:13:00] an essay that many of you have read called "The Load-Bearing Delusion" that explains why the strategy parents typically arrive with, which is to argue their child out of believing in gender ideology, tends not only to fail, but to make both of the actual goals actually harder to reach.

I'll give you the short version of that essay here because it matters for what comes next. The gender identity isn't floating freely in your kid's head as a belief that you could argue her out of. It is propping something up. It is doing emotional work for her, holding something fragile in place. This could include, but is not limited to, discomfort with her body, avoidance of adulthood, refuge from social pain that she doesn't have other ways to manage, belonging with her peer group that requires this identity as the price of entry, internalized misogyny, and lots more.

The belief, the claim about her identity is the visible part. Underneath, there are emotional drivers, [00:14:00] and those drivers are what the belief is in service of. When parents come in trying to argue the belief away, they are pulling on the visible part of something with roots that they can't see. The kid understandably holds on tighter because the belief is doing work for her, and because this just so happens to coincide with the adolescent power struggle for independence.

So she can't drop it, and you pulling on it is likely to spark resistance. The thing underneath it all would have nowhere to go if you were, in fact, to break this down. Or she might feel like she's going back inside the womb by surrendering to what you want for her, rather than going forward through the birthing process into adulthood and individuating, but not needing the trans identity to serve as her source of individuality.

The work I do with parents is to address the [00:15:00] emotional drivers underneath the belief. Once you frame the goal correctly, the question of what's in your sphere of influence becomes important. So this is for the parent who's been pulling on the belief for a while and is exhausted, and this is also for the parent who is brand new to this and still in the phase of thinking that the right argument is going to fix things and turn your child into a gender-critical TERF warrior like me.

I want to give both of you a more accurate map of where your leverage actually lies. So I'll start by listing a few things that parents in this situation often try to control. Most people don't realize that they're doing it necessarily until we talk about it. So many of you have been trying to control your child's beliefs in the ways that I just described.

You might try to control what she does with her body. Whether that's through things that are more warranted, like preventing her from using a binder that can physically harm her body, or through things that are more of a gray area, like [00:16:00] affecting her ability to wear her hair or clothes a certain way.

You might also try to control her social environment, friends, partner, or online behavior. And those are not bad things to want, but the way that you go about trying to influence or control those areas of her life can be problematic for the relationship or for her ultimate willingness to receive the guidance and influence that you're trying to offer.

Of course, much of this depends on age, stage, temperament, and so on. Of course, it's good to set boundaries that encourage kids to spend more time on real hobbies and less time on screens, but your ability to control that at 15 is different from your ability when she's 20. And the way that you communicate those changes makes a big difference in how they're received.

So if these things aren't necessarily where your real leverage is, where is it? Let's go over a few things that [00:17:00] you can truly control. So the first thing is the climate in your home. Think... You can think of yourself as the thermostat in the room that she comes home to. You set the temperature. You decide what the emotional climate of your household feels like when she walks through the door.

Is it warm and steady and predictable with levity and humor? Or is it tense and conditional, fragile, ready for an argument? The emotional drivers underneath your kid's belief, including her bodily discomfort, social discomfort, loneliness, insecurity, all of these things are influenced by her climate at home.

If you're like many parents I've worked with, at this point, you're thinking, "Wait a minute, I don't control the climate, she does." And that thought right there is a red flag that should be sounding an alarm Because this means that the dynamic in the household has been flipped. If you feel that your child is emotionally in control of what happens in your [00:18:00] household, then you are already in an 11th hour desperate situation, and this is what I call a toddler at the steering wheel moment.

A toddler might want very much to grab ahold of the steering wheel of your car, but to cede control of the vehicle to her is a whole 'nother matter. It puts everyone in grave danger. And while a toddler who has grabbed ahold of the steering wheel might in fact be intent on maintaining that power, deep down she's terrified because she knows that she's not ready for it, she doesn't know what to do with it, and she's at risk of crash- ch- crashing the car and harming everyone.

This is how your child feels if he or she is emotionally in control of the atmosphere at home. So on that note, the next thing that you can control is your tone, the sound of your voice and your body language when you interact with your child, the look on your face when he or she walks into the room.

This is partly under your control. It's not [00:19:00] completely because you are human. You are likely emotionally exhausted. That being said, your kid is reading you constantly, and your tone is giving away valuable information about where she stands with you. Please bear in mind that if she's emotionally immature or he's emotionally immature, like most of these kids are, that they're often not aware of their impact on you and may see the way that you're interacting with them not as a reflection of the conditions they've created but as a reflection of how you feel about them.

Remember too that these kids have a spotlight effect bias, meaning that they overestimate the degree to which people are thinking about them and other people's actions are based on them. So they will also take personally things that you're giving off that might have nothing to do with them, which is why it can be quite helpful if there's something affecting you and the way that you're showing up, something [00:20:00] from work or from your other kids or from your health condition, to actually name that And it might sound like, "Sorry if I seem distracted today.

We had a really hard meeting at work." It could be that simple, but it's just a way of letting your kid know that whatever they're picking up on doesn't necessarily have to do with them. There also might be times when it does have to do with them, and where you need to find a way to assert that gently.

In ROGD Repair, I teach a lot of tools for doing this, such as parts language. More things you can control include the structure, household rules, sleep schedule, phone and technology policies, expectations and requirements about chores, mealtimes, and how people talk to each other in your home. Whether you're paying for college and under what conditions.

I'm gonna spend a moment talking about this. When I say whether you're paying for college and under what conditions, if you're raising a 15, 16, 17-year-old, I [00:21:00] really, really want you to think about this because I have talked to so many parents whose kids are going off to college or they're in college, and they have raised them since forever with the expectation that the parents will be paying for college, and it's sort of like a no matter what kind of thing.

And what I will say to these parents is, you know, when you raised them with this expectation, it was because you created this really stable upbringing for them. They were a good kid, a good student. Um, you know, you, you didn't have any reason that you thought you had to put qualifiers on that. It would've been another thing if you were dealing with the problems that 30 years ago parents of teenagers were dealing with or that you might have thought you would end up dealing with when you had kids 20 years ago, right?

If, if they were involved in illicit drugs, gangs, prostitution, any of these other extremely high-risk behaviors that no parent wants for their 20-year-old, then you would definitely reassess the financial support you're [00:22:00] giving to enable that lifestyle But where do you draw the line when that translates into a kid medicalizing?

How is that not harmful drug use? How does it not put their whole future at risk, and therefore call into question how they're spending their time now, and what the intention and purpose of college attendance is, and whether that is something you still support? So I'm not saying that you should be cavalier in how you change those policies.

It's something to be handled with great care, and this is something that I often spend many hours talking with parents about to really figure out where the boundaries need to lie in their particular family, and how to express those new boundaries. All right, back to the list of things you can control.

Whether the car is hers or yours, and under what conditions she can borrow it, whether her room gets to have a lock on it, whether you let his partner stay over and on what terms, whether you allow drug use in your [00:23:00] home, and what are the consequences for bringing drugs into your home, whether you allow a binder in your home, and what are the consequences for bringing a binder into your home.

These are things that are in your control. The structure does not depend on your child's agreement or even understanding of the policy. This is something important to clarify. Whenever a parent is setting a boundary or a rule, I tell them, "In this conversation, you have one job. It's to deliver the news, the news that we are not allowing this or that, for example.

It's not to get her to agree. It's not to get him to understand your reasoning and say, 'Okay, Dad, I accept that.'" That is an unrealistic goal, and if you are looking for that to happen as a signal that you've succeeded, then you will walk away feeling that you've failed, and your boundary will be meaningless because you were waiting for the kid to show that they agree.

What you need to do going into a conversation like this is lower your expectations. You have a [00:24:00] mission. Did you fulfill it? Did you deliver the information? Here's the boundary, and potentially, here's the consequence for crossing it. Did you deliver that information? You need to go into these conversations prepared for what the backlash might be depending on your particular child.

It's important to keep in mind that if you've ever behaved in the past in a way that leads your child to believe rightfully that they can get you to cave in, whatever they did to get you to cave in before will be tried again. This can get very dysfunctional. Obviously, if it's dysfunctional to the point of threatening self-harm, alleging abuse, or anything of the sort- That's a situation that warrants professional counsel.

But keep in mind that whatever you've done in the past to show your child how precisely to erode your boundaries will be something they try again until it stops working, and this will have to go through a phase of extinction where it gets worse before it gets better. So the structure does not depend on your [00:25:00] child's agreement.

You set it, and he lives within it. This structure introduces delays, which are your friends, because the medical clock keeps ticking, and any time that you can buy is time that can be spent on other things, such as the natural cognitive maturation process, evolutions in friend groups, a relationship ending, and so on.

So next, you can control money. Again, college tuition, the phone bill, the car, the therapist, medical insurance, clothing budget, travel, rent subsidy. If she is under your roof or your financial umbrella, the money is yours, and what you do with it is yours to decide. Now, of course, how you assert what you will and won't be doing with your money, how you communicate that may require expert guidance.

That's what ROGD Repair is for. If you need those communication tools and you're not already enrolled, enroll [00:26:00] today at rogdrepair.com. So here is where the money lever connects most directly to bodily preservation. The money is sometimes what stands between your son and a step that he would otherwise take, through a different therapist, a different clinic, a different insurance policy.

I'm not telling you to weaponize money. I'm also not telling you to keep the money flowing on autopilot, regardless of what it's funding or subsidizing. I'm telling you, though, the money is a lever you actually have, and the question of how to use it and when and with what conditions Those are decisions you get to make as a parent.

Often in coaching, I see parents operating as if this lever does not exist because pulling on it feels coercive or cruel, or as I mentioned earlier, it feels like it violates an agreement that the-- or an expectation that the parents have set forever ago that that will always be there without putting any stipulations on it.

But it's not necessarily [00:27:00] coercive or cruel to set limits with what you're willing to spend on when it's done with consequences in mind rather than punishment. That difference is worth thinking about. Again, the specifics as to how to communicate these boundaries and brace for impact are things that we can go over in one-on-one coaching and in ROGD repair.

Next, of course, you can control your own state. Now, this might not feel doable because a lot of parents feel very out of control by the time they get to see me. They're not sleeping, they're not eating well. But these are all things that you can regulate, and it's important to regulate your nervous system.

You can control whether you're following good sleep hygiene practices, whether you're eating properly, exercising, creating social support networks, whether you have a faith that you can lean on, whether you have a therapist that you can trust, whether you take a pause before responding to provocation from your child.

A [00:28:00] dysregulated parent cannot do any of the other things that we're talking about here. The relationship work, the boundaries, the emotional tone of the household, everything depends on you being someone who can regulate yourself. The last thing I want to mention that you do have control over is your vision of who your child can become in the future.

The relationship you're going to have with your son when he's 30 and you're 65 is something that you're building right now. Every time you don't take the bait, every time you don't crumble into despair, but keep your eyes on the prize, holding that vision of who your child is capable of becoming, that's a win.

I really want you to keep this in mind. This is one of the vital signs that I look for in a family. So some of the other vital signs include things like humor, which I consider a keystone species. If there's humor, playfulness, and spontaneity, the family has a good chance of making it, unless humor is relied on [00:29:00] excessively as a conflict avoidance mechanism.

But if there's playfulness and spontaneity combined with humor in a household, the family, their vital signs are looking good. They have a good chance of making it when they implement the techniques that I teach. So another vital sign that I look for is the parents' faith in who the child is becoming. So earlier I mentioned the idea of going back into the womb.

That's what it can feel to a child like you want for them when the trans identity serves an important role with their process of individuation. That child might now realize that individuation is a natural process that everyone goes through on the path from child to adult, and that so much of what they're going through with the trans identity is an attempt at individuation.

So for many, it's very wrapped up in that. A child might feel like they are at a crossroads, a push-pull between childhood and adulthood, where autonomy is linked with a trans identity. [00:30:00] And the idea of giving up the trans identity is linked with giving in to you and becoming that child again. And of course, they don't wanna go back there because that child, the associations they have with the child they once were, might include shame, fear, insecurity, awkwardness, the things they were made fun of for, the ways that they felt powerless and naive.

All of those things might be linked with their sense of their child self And whatever positive vision or hope for the future they might have is linked with the trans identity. This is a major obstacle and something you're gonna have to look at, because if you want them to become who they were before, that's not gonna happen.

They're not becoming a child again. They're not going back in the womb, and I use that hyperbolic language intentionally, 'cause of course they're not going back in the womb. But I want you to think about it figuratively. That is what your push for them to desist can feel like to them. So the vision that you have [00:31:00] of the person they're becoming, of course, is going to be incomplete and not fully accurate to the person they will actually become, but it's going to con- contain elements of the person you've always known, elements from their childhood, elements from adolescence, elements even from now of an identity.

What are those core common threads that seem like they've always been there? What will those things blossom into? What are the things that are just beginning to emerge within them? One of the reasons I teach alter casting in my course and coaching work is because I want parents to look for the seeds of potential, the little things that a kid says or does that indicate who they want to become, who they want to see themselves as.

Not every aspect of that is directly linked to the trans identity. They might think that it is. It might sound that way coming out of their mouth, but if you listen carefully, there are qualities, virtues, characteristics that the child indicates are important to them [00:32:00] that you can actually appeal to, that you can actually support and feed.

So your vision of who they're becoming, this is where your faith is put to the test, and I say that whether you're a religious person or not, because it's about your faith in them. Is there a way forward for them? Can you hold that vision in mind? Can you have faith in who they might become? If you can, that doesn't mean that your obligation in the present moment is to concede or to flatter them even, but it's to know a little something of what they're capable of and what they really want, and to know that they're unfinished in the process of becoming that person.

Sometimes it's only in the light of a strong, positive vision of who they could become that you have any credibility, any ground to stand on when you gently indicate that this isn't their best right now. So the kid that you are sitting across from today at 20 does not look [00:33:00] like the woman or man that she or he will be at 35.

And that is the person you're actually trying to stay in relationship with to help come about. So what you are doing now is not all about today. It's about laying the foundation for the relationship you will have in 15 years when he might be calling you for help with his own kid, she might be calling you for help with her own marriage, or they might be wanting your perspective on something confusing they did back when they were this age.

That future relationship is actually in your sphere of influence because it comes down to you and your faith and your vision and purpose, not because you can guarantee it or control the outcome, but because what you do today and how you perceive the problems of today Is one of the inputs to that future outcome.

And that future relationship matters here too, because it is one of the conditions that makes the off-ramp possible. So let me come back to the two [00:34:00] goals that we stated in the beginning, because I want to leave you with them held clearly. Body preservation first, conditions for desistance second. Only third, and not on a rushed timeline, is ideological desistance.

Only once she has let go of the identity do we care about influencing her worldview, and maybe one day helping her get to the place you and I are. Recalibrating makes these goals possible. You came in trying to change her belief. The work that actually moves things forward is underneath the belief on the emotional drivers the belief is resting on.

So your job essentially boils down to two things: protect her body however you can, especially through the windows where she might otherwise take a permanent step, and shape the conditions over time that affect the drivers of the identity. And I'll leave it there. I hope you like this experiment I'm doing [00:35:00] of essentially reading from a half-finished draft and modifying what I'm reading from as I go, uh, bringing together the work I'm doing on this podcast with the work I do the rest of the time, which is coaching ROGD parents and creating content for ROGD Repair.

If you like this kind of content and you're a parent navigating this, please get help sooner rather than later. Visit rogdrepair.com, and you can use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month. The number one piece of feedback I hear is, "I wish I'd started working with you sooner." Don't leave it till the 11th hour.

Get started today. Your trans-identified kid won't listen to reason, because reason isn't what they need right now. They need a parent who knows how to communicate in an empathic yet strategic manner. ROGD Repair gives you over 120 lessons in the psychology and communication [00:36:00] tools that actually work when normal parenting doesn't.

Plus RepairBot, your 24/7 AI coach trained on my entire body of work, ready to help you navigate tough moments in real time. Visit rogdrepair.com and use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take half off your first month.

Thank you for listening to

You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist. If you enjoyed this episode, kindly take a moment to rate, review, share, or comment on it using your platform of choice.

And of course, please remember, podcasts are not therapy and I'm not your therapist. Special thanks to Joey Pecoraro for this awesome theme song, Half Awake, and to Pods by Nick for production. For help navigating the impact of the gender craze on your family, be sure to check out my program for parents, ROGD Repair.

Any [00:37:00] resource you heard mentioned on this show, plus how to get in touch with me, can all be found in the notes and links below. Rain or shine, I hope you will step outside to breathe the air today. In the words of Max Ehrmann, "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."