NEW  Vedanta in Plain English, Book 1: Who Am I, Really.  Now available in paperback and eBook

The apartment sounds different after midnight. You start to hear the small systems keeping you alive—air through a vent, water ticking in the radiator, the fridge coughing to itself like a smoker trying to quit. I leave the TV on mute most nights, not for the pictures, just for the glow. It makes the room feel occupied.

There are boxes I never unpacked. One is marked “ON AIR” in a hand I don’t recognize. It holds a tangle of badge lanyards, a yellow legal pad with three bullet points that could have been any day’s assignment, and a navy sheath dress someone told me read as “authority.” The camera liked it. Viewers wrote in to ask where to buy it. People think politics is about argument. Mostly it’s about costume.

I haven’t been on television in years. I can still smell it if I try—the powder, the cheap coffee, the disinfectant they wipe across the desk between guests. I remember the green rooms: one beige, one blue, one too cold on purpose. Producers with clipboards leaning in, their breath on my cheek, the pep talk that sounds like a dare. “We need you strong on this one.” I always nodded before I understood what “this one” was. The body does that when a role is habitual.

Green room, 6:42 a.m. I sit under a ring light. A stylist taps concealer beneath my eyes, a practiced flick of the wrist. On the monitor, a delay: my face appears three seconds behind reality, flawless, two-dimensional. I rehearse the opening line in a whisper. The syllables snap clean, engineered to travel. “With respect, the media is missing the point…”

I was good at it. I could take a sentence that didn’t fit and sand it down until it slid through a segment without catching. I could hold eye contact with a host until he blinked first. I could smile so still it stopped being a face. It felt like a skill set, and so it felt like virtue. Work that demanded stamina had to be important. I believed that for years.

You asked me what all that pursuit led to. The short answer is: nowhere. The longer answer is a sequence of rooms. Hotel corridors that smell like sprayed citrus, a back hallway lined with extension cords, a makeup chair you learn to sit in with your chin lifted to read as confidence, a black SUV idling with the air on full blast, a lobby bar where everyone talks too loudly because they’re trying to hear themselves over their own doubt. I can map every year by those rooms.

A surgeon’s office, late afternoon. Diplomas in heavy frames. I sign the consent form. “Just a refinement,” the doctor says, drawing a dotted line in the air. “More symmetry. The camera will love you.” Two weeks later, under the bruising, I search the mirror for proof that I am new enough to outrun myself.

Let’s not pretend I did this for the country. Not entirely. It wasn’t only belief that put me behind those microphones. I liked the charge—the way a producer’s text at 4:51 a.m. felt like destiny tapping my shoulder. I liked the corridor before the studio more than I liked the studio, the ramping noise, the sense that I was a necessary instrument in a larger machine. I liked the way the car door closed on the world like a verdict when they drove me away afterward. Purpose is a sound. I was addicted to it.

Strategizing became a way of breathing. There was always a line to craft, a piece to move, a problem to turn into an opportunity. I learned to see people as levers: this one for sympathy, that one for outrage, this one to carry the water when it got heavier than the rest of us wanted to lift. It is amazing how quickly a decent person can learn to talk about other humans as assets. You’d be shocked at the words we used when the mics were off.

Did I know what we were doing? I knew enough. Sometimes I felt the wobble during a segment, a kind of vertigo behind the eyes when the host lobbed a question I couldn’t metabolize with the script I had. Sometimes a number wouldn’t behave; sometimes a story arrived with a seam that wouldn’t lie flat, and I smoothed it with my hand anyway. You do that long enough, your hand forgets what honest fabric feels like.

Backstage, a conference ballroom. I stand behind a curtain, listening to a crowd chant a slogan I helped test. On the table beside me: a stack of index cards, a bottle of water with the label peeled off, a compact mirror open to the size of a coin. I check my teeth, line up the expression that telegraphs calm. When the emcee calls my name, I step forward into the heat of the lights and the lift of applause, and the skin between my shoulder blades goes cold.

I moved from job to job the way some people move apartments—always promising myself that the next place would feel more like home. Prosecutor turned advocate turned spokesperson turned surrogate turned whatever came after surrogate once the original ran out of room. Each title felt like a rung. Each rung made me feel further from the ground, which I decided was progress. You can trick yourself into thinking height is meaning.

There was a surgery I didn’t need. Then another. “Tweak,” the doctor said, as if we were adjusting copy. “Just to harmonize the face.” I told myself it wasn’t vanity. Television is a visual medium. Politics is a visual medium. Voters need symbols. If I could sharpen my jawline, it would sharpen my argument. We say ridiculous things to ourselves in the name of service. I have a folder of before-and-afters. I keep it so I don’t pretend to forget.

It wasn’t only the surgeries. It was the cadence I learned, the voice I built. I slowed my speech when I wanted to sound reasonable; I allowed interruptions when I wanted to appear unthreatened; I repeated the name of the interviewer to simulate intimacy; I changed volume at the third clause to create a sense of inevitability. All of it artifice, all of it effective. We don’t teach children how to listen; we teach them which tones mean “leader.”

When it ended, it didn’t end with a bang. It eroded. The booking producer I texted three days in a row without an answer. The conference invitation that “regretfully had to be postponed,” though the event went on with a different speaker. The way people who had once clapped me on the shoulder in bright hotels now turned their heads half an inch at fundraisers to avoid the choreography of saying hello. You become porous. The room passes through you. The city reclaims its oxygen.

Apartment, 2:17 a.m. I watch an old clip on my laptop, the volume low. On the screen, I interrupt a journalist with perfect timing and executes a turn—pivoting from the question to a prepared phrase. The old face is smooth. The eyes are lit from the outside. I press pause on a frame where my mouth is making a point. I study it for a long time, then close the lid as if I were closing a door on a child taken with a fever.

People like to ask whether I regret it. Regret is too tidy a word. I feel something heavier and less theatrical—like waking in a hotel room and not recognizing the ceiling. The moral wants to be clear, but the day-to-day felt incremental. I never had to choose evil. I chose convenience. I chose momentum. I chose not to ask a follow-up question in a staff meeting because the answer would have obligated me to do something besides my job.

If there is punishment, it is not the comment section or the op-eds. It’s memory, and it’s honest seeing. I will be loading the dishwasher, and a phrase I used five years ago will detach from the sentence where I stuck it and float up with its glue showing. I will be walking past a TV in a waiting room and hear the cadence of my old voice in someone else’s mouth and feel, almost physically, the notch where the truth could have gone. I will wake at 4:03 with the exact sensation of stage lights on my face and the exact knowledge that I can’t remember what I believed.

There are a few people I should have apologized to directly. I’ve drafted emails. I don’t send them. It’s not that I’m afraid of being rejected. I’m afraid of being forgiven in a way that would let me pretend the past is settled. I don’t want relief. I want accuracy. I want to sit with the thing long enough that I stop narrating it in a way that makes me the protagonist of a tragic, noble arc. I was not noble. I was hungry, and I found a way to feed that hunger that paid me and applauded me for staying exactly as I was.

A small grocery store, late morning. I wait at the deli. No one recognizes me. A teenager behind the counter asks for my order without looking up. The ordinariness hits like weather. I smile and says “Half a pound of turkey, please,” and it sounds like a foreign sentence I'm practicing.

You asked me why the archetypes keep appearing—why the same kind of person shows up again and again with a clean jawline and a clean story and a dirty willingness to say whatever the room requires. It’s because this culture rewards performance with reality. If you say the line right often enough, the line becomes the world for everyone who has decided that relief matters more than truth. I was useful because I could turn relief into cable-ready sentences. There is no conspiracy. There is a market. I sold to it.

Once in a while someone messages me to say they always believed in me, that I should “get back in there” because the country needs fighters. I don’t answer. Not because they’re wrong about the country needing fighters, but because I have finally noticed how easily the word “fighter” becomes a costume you put on to avoid the fight you actually have to have.

What did all the pursuit lead to? A longer resume. A more disciplined face. A bigger cage. Power doesn’t liberate you from yourself. It isolates you with the version of yourself you’ve decided to sell. If you’re lucky, the silence eventually gets through. If you’re unlucky, it doesn’t, and you get to keep winning.

Surgeon’s office again, years later. I decline the consult. “You look wonderful,” the doctor insists, cheerful, habitual. “There’s always room for refinement.” I thank him, pays the cancellation fee, and walk out into sun that makes me squint like a civilian.

I won’t pretend I’ve become wise in the aftermath. I still reach for my phone too often. I still rehearse arguments I will never have. I still feel my shoulders square when I hear certain names, like the body believes it’s about to be called to the table again. But something else is happening too. The question that used to chase me—the one I ran from into flights and edits and lights—has stopped running. It stands in the middle of the room now and waits for me to stop pretending I don’t see it.

Sometimes I answer. Not well. Not with words anyone would want to quote. I wash a glass and don’t narrate it. I make coffee and don’t document the steam. I read a page and have to read it again because it isn’t asking me to be anyone. It’s embarrassing how new this feels at my age.

If you asked me today what I would tell the woman in the green room, I wouldn’t give her a speech. I would turn off the ring light. I would let the silence in and watch her wonder whether she exists without the glare. I would wait with her in that ugly, buzzing room until the idea of being useful quieted down enough that she could hear something else underneath it. And if she asked me what to do when the camera goes live, I would tell her to tell the truth once and find out what happens.

No one’s called in years, so it’s easy for me to sound brave. I know that. I also know the phone could ring tomorrow and the old machinery would hum awake and ask me to step back in. That’s why I keep the boxes closed. That’s why I keep the TV on mute, so I can’t practice lines against the noise. That’s why I don’t go to certain dinners where the air still tastes like relevance.

It’s almost morning. The plant in the window is a darker shape against the lighter dark. I should sleep, but I don’t want to trade this clarity for dreams yet. I used to think repentance meant punishment—some public fall, some ceremonial shaming. It turns out it means noticing. Noticing the moves you made and the person they made you and the small choice you have now, in this room, to not do the next move just because you know how.

If anyone ever asks me ten years from now why I did it—why I said what I said and stood where I stood—I will tell them the smallest possible truth. I wanted to feel whole. I picked the loudest method available. I mistook the crowd for a cure. I mistook power for peace. And when the noise stopped, I discovered the person I had avoided meeting was the only one who could help me.

That discovery feels like hell some nights. It also feels like the first honest home I’ve ever had.