As a writer, a therapist, and a first-generation francophone immigrant, I’m fascinated by how human beings attempt to convey our experiences to one another, and how our technologies mediate and shape those attempts. Recent conversations with other people whose families arrived here when they were children have helped me to understand something essential about the young immigrant’s experience: in the midst of various cultural fundamentalisms we know there is another way. Another language. Another way of framing lived experience. Another way to eat, dress, and move around. We don’t know yet which is our way. We just know that anyone who tells us there’s only one way is either lying, or ignorant.

So I am a therapist who is also an artist who is also a former Buddhist nun who is also a writer whose immigrant soul knows none of these lenses can by itself describe the complexity of what it is to be alive in a field of meaning that wants us to wake up.

In the infancy of the pandemic,we all found ourselves sudden immigrants to a new land whose rules we knew weren’t the only way to live, whose shores we found it impossible to leave. The ensuing Mental Health Epidemic could also be described as "everyone is displaced, all at once." Calls for help built to a crescendo. Something I didn’t know when I signed up for a Google Voice account for my therapy communications: Google AI would be archiving, transcribing, and in many cases distorting the words of anyone who left me clinical voicemails, for posterity. Like so many new immigrants, these callers’ attempts to share their experiences were altered and encapsulated in unpredictable ways.

This book can be described as a series of dialogue-form visits to a pandemic-era archive at the threshold between the spoken world and the secrecy of the therapy room. It can also be described as a series of dialogues within one immigrant therapist’s soul, as she navigates a new world and her role in it.