Sad Love E-Book

Carrie Jenkins

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 273

Beschreibung

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated. Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn't we be better off without it? No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls "Sad Love" offers no bogus "happy ever afters". Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love. It's time we liberated love.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Notes

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Notes

1 The Paradox of Happiness

As dreamers do

Happiness cannot be pursued

I give myself very good advice (but I very seldom follow it)

The taming of happiness

Notes

2 The Romantic Paradox

Mad love

The pursuit of happy ever after

Notes

3 Daimons

The ghosts of old meanings

Eudaimonia vs. the Paradox of Happiness

Eudaimonia vs. the Romantic Paradox

Job-crafting

Love-crafting

Notes

4 Know Thyself

Choice problems

Search for the hero inside yourself

If it makes you happy (why the hell are you so sad)?

If you’re eudaimonic and you know it

Notes

5 Eudaimonic Love

Love and “negative” emotions

Production and consumption

Buy or build

Now what?

Notes

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Begin Reading

End User License Agreement

Pages

iii

iv

vi

vii

viii

ix

x

xi

xii

xiii

xiv

xv

xvi

xvii

xviii

xix

xx

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

90

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

133

134

134

Sad Love

Romance and the Search for Meaning

Carrie Jenkins

polity

Copyright © Carrie Jenkins 2022

The right of Carrie Jenkins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3960-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951320

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Preface

When I set out to write a book about love in 2017, I was not happy. I was pretty sad. But I was still in love, or at least so I thought. All the messages from the culture around me were telling me what they had always told me: that being in love was about being happy. Being happy ever after. Happy with someone. Happy together.

I had some questions. What if I’m not happy? What if I’m sad – or worse, depressed? Does that mean I’m no longer in love? Am I now unloving? Unlovable?

I desperately hoped the answer to the last two was “no.” And I strongly suspected that was the answer. Even though I wasn’t happy, and didn’t know when, how, or even whether I would become happy in the future, I didn’t seriously doubt that I was in love with my partners. So instead, like any good logician, I questioned the other assumption: the one about how being in love means being happy.

Being a philosopher by tendency, as well as by academic training, I wanted to think this assumption through, so that I could talk back to it (in my own head, first of all) with some confidence and conviction. Why had I been associating romantic love with happiness? What is the point of that association? Where does it come from? What are its effects?

Of course we all know that “happy ever after” comes from fairy tales, and we know fairy tales for what they are: fictions and fantasies.1 Real love isn’t always happy. I knew that. But a fantasy is powerful, even when we know what it is. Our fantasies – our ideals – have a crucial part to play in shaping our lives. An ideal is something to strive for, something we can measure ourselves against and find ourselves wanting. Maybe I was still in love, but I was inclined to feel as if my sadness was a kind of failure condition for my relationships. Good love – ideal love – should be happy ever after, shouldn’t it? To say that the romantic “happy ever after” is unrealistic does nothing to diminish its status as an ideal, and hence its power to convince us we are falling short.

The way I think things through is by writing, so in 2017 I started writing this book. But, as I wrote, the world turned, and it is now a very different place compared to how it was when I started. This book goes to press in 2022, in the echo of authoritarian challenges to democracy in the world’s most powerful nation, after years of watching the COVID pandemic hammer away at everything from the global economy to our intimate relationships. It took me a lot longer to write this book than I had originally planned. And it exploded into something bigger than what it was originally supposed to be.

Sad Love turned out to be more than a theory of romance. It’s become a recipe for living in the world as it is now. To be sad, even heartbroken, does not mean one cannot love – one’s partner, one’s country, or even humanity. But to appreciate what love is under circumstances such as these, I needed a very different understanding of love from the one I had been taught. One that diverges radically from the stories and the stereotypes. Love that comes with no promise, and perhaps even no hope, of a “happy ever after,” but is not lessened or degraded by that. Love whose aim, and whose nature, is something other than happiness.

That changes everything.

But, before I get to that, let me take a step back. What did I have to be so sad about in 2017? That was when my first book2 on the philosophy of love came out. I did a lot of interviews. I mean a lot of interviews.3 People like to talk about love, I guess. Certainly there aren’t enough opportunities to talk about love – at least, not in public. I don’t mean opportunities to exchange clichés – there are plenty of those. I mean really talk about love. In my book, I was trying to open some space for all the “weird” questions that everyone has, the ones that we aren’t supposed to ask in polite company. So maybe that’s part of why I was suddenly in demand.

It’s not the whole story, though. What the interviewers really wanted to talk about was not my theories so much as my personal life. In the book, I mentioned having a husband and a boyfriend at the same time (with everyone’s knowledge and consent). I described some of the challenges of this – the stigma, the awkwardness, the social pressure – canvassing research as well as my own experiences. I talked a little bit about what life can be like as an openly non-monogamous woman with two partners. (The short version: relentless slut-shaming.)

Still, there are lots of books about the experience of being non-monogamous. What made mine worth an interview? Here’s one guess: it had something to do with who I am. There’s the fact that I’m a woman, of course, which might make me a more interesting spokesperson for non-monogamy than a man would be: we are, after all, strongly conditioned to think of monogamy as something women want and men get pressured into. But there are also quite a lot of books about non-monogamy written by women. (Because there are quite a lot of non-monogamous women.) There’s the fact that I am a professor at a university, and maybe people took that to mean that I had thought about these things or that I’d done my homework. That might have been part of it.

But, more than that, I think it was just that I’m a professional, middle-class, middle-aged white woman. I look “normal” and … well, respectable. I don’t look like a rebel, a rule-breaker, a defier of social norms. I look average. Kind of boring. Paradoxically, I think that’s why I was interesting.

Polyamory is a form of consensual non-monogamy. Non-monogamy because it involves being open to more than one loving partner/relationship and consensual because it’s intentionally chosen by all parties involved (as opposed to cheating, which is non-consensual non-monogamy).

I remember a profile piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was written by Moira Weigel, a journalist and author I admire. She came to meet me in Vancouver while researching the piece and we chatted on my front porch, went for sushi, then chatted some more. She wrote a strong profile, a little snapshot of me at a moment in time. When I read it, I saw my own reflection in her mind, an image both familiar and strange. A woman who smoked on her patio and wouldn’t talk about one particular topic. Whose dog still smelled of tomato juice after a close encounter with a skunk.

When it was decided that it would be the cover story for the Chronicle Review, the journal sent a photographer to my house to shoot me together with both of my then partners. Now, I am not a natural in front of a camera. Being looked at makes me awkward and self-conscious. It’s not just that I’m nervous about my appearance (although I am), there’s a moral component. Even a passing glance from a stranger makes me feel judged.

The house I lived in at the time was also not easy for a photographer to work with. It was small and dark. Built in the Edwardian era, houses like this are a rarity in Vancouver, but they can make a British export like myself feel homey and nostalgic. Eventually the Chronicle’s photographer settled on the best (or least worst) option – upstairs in the room I used for writing, where there’s a bit of natural light from the window. The photographer posed me by the window, in my writing chair, with my partners standing behind me. Then, to get the best angle, he crouched back inside of a cupboard full of my clothes.

I was intensely aware of my partners’ bodies, peripherally visible to me as I sat in my chair. Both of my partners, in their different ways, seemed so comfortable with being photographed. With being seen. One of Jonathan’s many talents is stage performance – he is an amateur operatic singer with a gorgeous, rich, warm baritone voice that I love hearing around our house. Ray has years of experience in front of a camera, and anyway their entire being constantly radiates a fierce, model-like grace, even when they’re just walking round Save On Foods.

In the photo, we look like a rag-tag team of superheroes. I love it. Ray and I are no longer partners, and so this image has come to bear even more weight, capturing as it does a phase in my experience of love that I once hoped would be permanent but feels strange and distant to me just a few years on.

And then there it was on the cover of the Chronicle Review, emblazoned with the headline: “Can Carrie Jenkins make polyamory respectable?” You know, no pressure.

Respectable. It’s such a double-edged word. Was I actually trying to make polyamory respectable? Did I even want that? I would love for polyamory and other “weird” relationship forms to be deemed worthy of respect, the way “normal” relationships are. But do I want them to become bourgeois, stuffy, conventional?

There’s an old-established journalistic rule that says: if the headline is a question, the answer is “no.” I think the rule applies here. Nobody does things like that – no individual person. What I am good at is starting conversations and nudging them in under-explored directions. That’s how I see my work as a philosopher.

Anyway, back to why I was sad. When What Love Is and What it Could Be came out, and I started doing all those interviews, well-meaning friends and colleagues would say, “It must be nice for you, with your book getting all that attention!” But it wasn’t nice.

I’m an introvert for one thing. For another, much bigger thing, a lot of the attention was pure hate. Shortly after publication, ABC Nightline made a short news segment on my life and work, broadcast on national US television. They also posted it to their Facebook page. The top comments were “Immoral,” “Odd balls,” “Fucked up,” “Sick,” “It’s stupid,” and “Interesting.” (Thank you, whoever you were, for swimming against the tide.)

Some spend more time crafting their responses. “THIS WOMAN IS A DISGUSTING ANIMAL,” someone posted on one of my old YouTube videos:

A far far left-wing freak that desires to completely overthrow Western Christian Civilization. IT’S WAR ON your ethos Carrie! Every God-loving human on this planet needs to realize WE ARE AT WAR with these commies. End of Story. Oh forgot to add: PLEASE CHOKE YOURSELF CARRIE. Thanks and have a nice God-loving, mom, the flag and apple pie. God Bless America. Let Freedom Ring. Stand up and defend your 2nd Amendment rights. Have happy Christ-centered marriages with lost [sic] of Christian children who hug and feed the poor and …

This continued into several more posts, none of them reassuring.

My mental health took a nose dive. That wasn’t all about the book, to be fair. There was a lot going on in the world at the time. Between the time of writing and the little launch in my university’s bookstore in February 2017, the most powerful nation in the world had elected Donald Trump as its leader. Hate was on the rise everywhere, or so it seemed.

There’s an Islamic hadith (saying) that I like: “If the Day of Judgment erupts while you are planting a new tree, carry on and plant it.” I tried, I really did. But it was a complicated time to get people talking about the intricacies and subtleties of love.

For me personally, the hate just kept coming. Every time an interview or article appeared in a high-visibility venue, a stream of nasty feedback would follow in its wake. The public eye does not look kindly on women with ideas. (This is not a new phenomenon – women have not historically been welcomed with open arms to the pursuit of wisdom. The internet just offers us new ways of burning and drowning our witches.)

At the time it was a bit of a blur. But, in retrospect, the hate fell into three buckets. First there was a bucket of hate for feminists. One time, my Twitter account was drowned in hate after I wrote an opinion piece for the Spanish newspaper El País, the headline of which (possibly the only part many people read) was “Polyamory is a feminist issue.” The article was published in Spanish and most of the reactions were, likewise, in Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish, but I was surprised at how much I could understand.4

The second bucket is for slut-shaming hate. I am a woman who talks publicly about being polyamorous, so I have been called all the derogatory words you can think of for a promiscuous woman. There are no male equivalents for these words. This was predictable, although knowing something’s coming and knowing what it will be like are not the same thing.

I simply wasn’t ready for the third bucket: the racism. My husband Jonathan is half Asian, my then partner Ray is Asian, and I’m a white woman who has spent most of her life with the privilege of having racism largely hidden from me. “Ray and Jon [sic] look like brothers …,” declared one anonymous email. “Are they both Chinese? I bet they cook you nice spring rolls for breakfast but whose spring rolls are better …” One Facebook message – in its entirety – read, “gross! are asians the only men who will f u?”5

I know it’s tempting, but the solution to this problem doesn’t begin with the word “Just …” Just don’t read the comments; just don’t talk about polyamory; just remove yourself from Twitter and YouTube and email and the internet and public discourse. These are not solutions. If I stop talking and stop engaging, the game is up. In any case, these reactions to my work are among my source materials and my clues. They help me understand the social mechanics operative behind the scenes. This is work I care about, and I can’t simply look away without giving up on it.

What other strategies are there, then, besides silence? One option is talking more. I started admitting to my poor mental health in some of my talks and public appearances. I talked about how depression makes it harder for me to perform in all kinds of ways that once came easily. At first I intended to be making excuses for my impaired performance, but I found my audiences really appreciated these acknowledgements. It meant something to them that I was making the costs of the work visible.

I started admitting, too, where I had made mistakes in my own work rather than hiding them. That was painful. I felt ashamed. Then I started talking more about feeling ashamed, and the same rush of relief and recognition came back to me. In academic circles we are trained to see our mistakes as failures, and admitting them is regarded as a weakness. (Academia can be a heartless place. Ideas and ideologies can get quite stagnant and rotten in there. I don’t think this is a coincidence.)

The other strategy that sometimes works is not doing anything at all. A piece in the American Spectator, about me and a few other authors, said that now we feminists “even hate love.” It was high-visibility coverage, so it sent my way a lot of readers who would never have heard of me otherwise. Contemporary ideas about love are constantly swirling around me, and just by being here I can alter their course. Even (or perhaps especially) when I’m staying still.

A strategy that doesn’t work is retreating into academia. The problem with that strategy is that there is no retreat to be found in academy – or anywhere else, for that matter – from the ideas and culture that shape our lives. Academia is made of people, and people bring that baggage along with them wherever they go.

I’m based in an academic philosophy department, and philosophy is (still) a notoriously male-dominated discipline. Women in philosophy are a challenge to its self-image as hyper-rational, hyper-logical, hyper-scientific – all male-coded qualities. The discipline represents its history as a procession of “great men”: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche. It might be able to accommodate the presence of the occasional woman displaying presumed markers of those male-coded qualities – a loud voice, an aggressive argumentative tone – but she is more tolerated than celebrated. As Samuel Johnson infamously said, “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”

Before I became a philosopher myself, I had pictured philosophy as something more humane. More compassionate and co-operative. Something that belongs everywhere and to everyone, not just to a few experts working within well-defined fiefdoms of prestige. I imagined philosophy as a perpetual conversation, a massive collaboration. But all this is antithetical to the mundane concerns of real academic institutions: concerns about rankings, and grant dollars, and prizes, and esteem indicators. The scholarly dreams of so many would-have-been philosophers are swallowed up by these things. Condemned to death by a thousand administrative paper cuts.

This contemporary model of a university functions like an addiction to video games or social media. Thoughts of “winning” and “status” motivate us to keep playing, keep scrolling, while the life we thought we wanted slips away.6 Constantly comparing oneself with others easily induces anxiety and paranoia, as we are invited to feel that we aren’t measuring up.7 We’re told we cannot step off the treadmill for a moment, or we’ll get left behind. It’s easy to see how all kinds of problems get swept under the rug by academic institutions eager to hang on to their high-prestige “stars,” to keep up appearances, to cling to position.

Looking back, I suppose I was one of Johnson’s dogs. I learned to walk on my hind legs, was promoted early, and had a great track record of publications and lots of international conference invitations. I really felt like a “winner” by all the metrics I’d internalized. It felt good to compare myself with other people and be pleased with the contrast. I’m not proud of this.

But it felt nice when I thought retreating into a small corner academia would be possible, and when I was content to rack up esteem indicators and grant funding. These days, when people say it “must be nice” that my work gets attention, I try to explain. Actually it’s difficult, and often kind of horrible. But I still think it’s worth doing. Trying to do this other kind of work is awkward and uncomfortable. I can’t coast on my achievements (such as they are), because they aren’t going to get me where I’m going. Not even close. As soon as I started working on love, and trying to communicate my ideas beyond the narrow walls of academic philosophy, I realized I needed all kinds of skills that I didn’t get any help with during the course of my ten years of academic training.

Most urgently, I needed to learn other ways of communicating. I had learned to write only for the others in my small corner of academia. Scholarly journal style, it turns out, isn’t the way to most people’s hearts and minds. (Who knew!) So I went back to school. This is not a metaphor. I enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at my university. I became a student again, part-time, alongside my day job.

All my academic training had been focused on rigorous argumentation – drawing clear, straight, black and white lines from point to point. Don’t get me wrong here: I am grateful for this skill, and it’s a privilege to have had the many years of education it took to hone it. It’s not only an academic skill that helps me write papers, it’s a life skill that helps me survive. But, as with any tool, it is limited, and there are certain kinds of philosophical work it cannot do. And I feel drawn to some of those kinds of work. So I’ve had to learn more skills, not to replace the skills I learned in my first forty years of life but to supplement them.

I’ve been learning to write and think more like a novelist or a poet or a journalist, or sometimes all three at once. It’s not that it’s wrong to proceed in straight, rigorous argumentative lines. In the same way, there are times when intricate black and white line drawings are the best way to illustrate something: when close technical details are of the essence and anything else would be a distraction. It’s just that, if you are trying to paint a whole scene, a complex landscape with diffuse ambient lighting and confusing shadows, you aren’t going to depict that subject very realistically if straight black and white lines are the only marks you know how to make.

I completed my MFA degree during the COVID pandemic and, along with the rest of the class of 2020, graduated online. But, for the previous few years, I’d been switching out my professor hat for my student hat as I walked between the philosophy corridor and the creative writing corridor.

Doing and being many things at once doesn’t feel weird to me. I prefer it to the kind of intensive focus and specialization I was trained to think was normal and appropriate for an academic. My mind works better (and feels more functional) when it can stabilize itself with a broad base.

In the same way, being in more than one relationship at the same time doesn’t feel weird to me. In fact, when I am struggling with my mental health, having more loving partners on hand is a good thing. The work of supporting me doesn’t all have to fall on one person.

Which brings me back to that sadness I was talking about. It’s easy to imagine how some partners might react to their loved one deciding to pursue a line of work that was evidently making them miserable. Easy to imagine concern, or distress, followed by advice to quit and return to the comfortable old life. It’s easy to imagine, really, a partner simply not wanting to be with me if I insisted on making myself miserable like this. Isn’t love supposed to be all about the happy ever after?

Well, love is “supposed” to be monogamous too, and mine isn’t. When I was at my most depressed, not even the love of my partners could make me feel happy, but it did help to make me, and my work, feel possible.

Their recognition and support for who I chose to be, and what I chose to do, was an expression of love. Advising me to quit would not have been. Reflecting on that difference – between love that makes me feel happy and love that makes me feel possible – is what set me on the course towards the main conclusion of this book, which is a new theory of love. This new theory doesn’t compete with or replace my work in my first book, What Love Is, but it tackles a different part of the question. This book is about my theory of sad love. Or, more accurately, my theory of eudaimonic love, which has room for the full gamut of human experiences and emotions, positive and negative, happy and sad.

Eudaimonic love means literally “good-spirited” love. It’s going to take me a while to explain what the relevant “spirits” are, but along the way I’ll be able to explain what eudaimonia does (and doesn’t) have to do with romance, and happiness, and finding meaning in life. I have stopped asking the old question I was taught to prioritize – how to be “happy ever after.” This question doesn’t interest me anymore. It doesn’t look significant.

I just ambitiously promised a “new theory.” A new theory? Like a great new idea? A work of startling original genius?

The myth of the great idea works in much the same way as the myth of the “great man.” In fact, the two mythologies go hand in hand: we imagine our “great men,” such as Darwin or Newton, coming up with their “great ideas,” such as evolution or gravity, and we imagine them doing it all alone, as if they existed in an intellectual vacuum. We ignore the contributions of other people, especially “inconsequential” people, such as Darwin’s hairdresser, who chatted to Darwin about his experience with pedigree dogs.8 And we ignore the influence of existing ideas, especially ideas we don’t consider respectable, such as alchemy and the occult,9 which fascinated Newton and were hardly irrelevant to his willingness to theorize “unseen forces” at work in the universe.

In reality, great ideas grow, live, and die in, and as parts of, intellectual ecosystems. (So do terrible ideas, of course. And mediocre ideas.) When I promise you a new theory, what I’m promising to do is build you something out of bits and pieces I’ve found swirling around in my ecosystem. Some of them are very old, and some have only just appeared. I work like a magpie, gathering shiny ideas from my environment. A curator. Most of what I’m gathering is not rocket science (although it is, in some cases, science). But it’s what I’m trying to build from it that matters.

I’ll have a “new theory” if I find enough shiny pieces to build a mirror, and that mirror shows us something we need to see.

Notes

1.

Barbara Rosenwein provides an insightful commentary on some of love’s constitutive fantasies in her book

Love: A History in Five Fantasies

(Cambridge: Polity, 2021).

2.

What Love Is And What it Could Be

(New York: Basic Books, 2017).

3.

You can find a selection of them at

www.carriejenkins.net/magazines

and

www.carriejenkins.net/radioandpodcasts

.

4.

I got hate

from

feminists – or at least from people who thought of themselves as feminists – for challenging the prevailing norm that all relationships should be monogamous. I had the impression that this critique came from people who had heard only that I was personally non-monogamous, and who weren’t familiar with my critique of how the institution of compulsory monogamy sustains the patriarchal status quo.

5.

These intersections of sexualized and gendered racism were less surprising to my partners.

6.

Thi Nguyen offers an excellent description of this phenomenon in “Gamification and value capture,” chapter 9 of his new book

Games: Agency as Art

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

7.

Recent work on this phenomenon includes Jin Kyun Lee’s “The effects of social comparison orientation on psychological well-being in social networking sites: serial mediation of perceived social support and self-esteem,”

Current Psychology

(2020), pp. 1–13, and Schmuck et al.’s “Looking up and feeling down: the influence of mobile social networking site use on upward social comparison, self-esteem, and well-being of adult smartphone users,”

Telematics and Informatics

42 (2019), pp. 1–12.

8.

See e.g.

Charles Darwin: Voyaging

, by E. Janet Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

9.

See “Newton, The Man,” by John Maynard Keynes,

https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/

.

Acknowledgements

I am immensely grateful to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Tyler Nicol, Robin Roberts, Kupcha Keitlahmuxin, Mezzo, Drusilla, and Seven, and to all the good daimons in my support network of friends and family.