Jennifer Vargas

About

The person who usually finds me is highly capable and completely unmoored. They are running a household, holding down demanding work, appearing entirely normal to colleagues, and privately unable to think about anything else for more than four minutes at a time. That combination is what an affair does to capable people. The competence keeps functioning while everything underneath it comes apart, and the gap between those two things is itself draining to maintain. We start by giving you one place where the performance can stop, which for most people is an immediate relief. I was raised around caregiving and have a long-standing suspicion of people who seem to be coping beautifully. Usually they are not. Nothing here has to be presentable. If you have been holding it together impeccably in public, you can stop doing that for an hour a week. Holding those two states apart costs more than either one does alone.