Tag: Essay

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10985 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:15:56 [post_content] =>

For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa.

I credit much of how I live my life to the wisdom of the women in my family. From my grandmother’s tip to drink chamomile tea after dinner ahead of an early morning, to my mother’s insistence on cleaning chicken with vinegar and lemon juice; from learning to grow aloe vera at home to heal wounds in an emergency, to knowing that blowing air into an infant’s face will stop them from choking. All this is part of my inheritance.

While the benefits of chamomile are easily found on the internet, in my family, such knowledge was passed by word of mouth. In some ways, that’s still common today: For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool that is sharpened, exercised, and passed down through generations. Encompassing stories, songs, beliefs, and customs that preserve history, memory, and cultural practices, this tradition influences the choices we make and how we navigate the world.

In Jamaica, where my family comes from, oral tradition was as much an old practice taken from enslaved Africans as it was an act of survival, because they were forbidden from reading and writing. “During slavery, enslaved people were denied literacy and formal education, so oral tradition became the most crucial tool,” says Mickayla Whyte, a library assistant at the African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica in Kingston. “Oral tradition is the oldest form of traditional preservation, and it allows communities to remember who they are, where they come from, and even where they're going."

These traditions from West and Central African nations blended over time with Indigenous Arawak practices on the island. The survival of folklore like Anansi the Spider—about a mischievous spider who creates and escapes trouble with his wit—alongside the use of herbal remedies, like cerasee tea to lower blood pressure, exemplify the intergenerational strength of oral tradition and the syncretism found across diasporas. Across the diaspora, as in my own family, this tradition is largely sustained by matrifocality.

“In its most simplistic form, matrifocality means mother-focused,” Dr. Leighan Renaud, University of Bristol lecturer and author of Mothering and Matrifocality in Contemporary Caribbean Literature, tells me. “What that means is that women in their roles as mothers—not necessarily biological mothers—are central to the organization of families and therefore the organization of communities.”

Unlike patriarchy, matrifocality subverts modern ideas of familial and cultural hierarchy. Dr. Renaud notes that women are not so much at the top of a structure, but are instead the nucleus around which society operates.

In my family, this tradition was led by my late great-aunt Nerissa. She was witty, generous, and supportive, with a deep passion for sharing her faith with friends, family, and strangers. Born the fourth of 14 children and a mother to six of her own, Great-Aunt Nerissa was as beloved for her caretaking as she was for passing on family and cultural lore, like knowing not to whistle after dark for fear of attracting ghosts. Before she passed away this spring at 76, she took pride in knowing and sharing our history, and would always wrangle our large family together to tell us stories during holidays. She did this with little complaint, but now, in her absence, I recognize the enormous responsibility she held in carrying our family’s legacy for as long as she did.

Because of her, I learned how much my family sacrificed when they journeyed to the United States. I attended her naturalization ceremony when I was in middle school and remember hearing about all the preparation and studying she did in order to pass the interview and test. She was asked questions about American presidents, laws, and wars that I admittedly still don't know the answers to. As a first-generation American citizen, it left me with a profound understanding of the legal and cultural challenges so many immigrant families face as they attempt to embrace a country that doesn't always return the sentiment.

In the aftermath of grieving her, I also realize the important task of preserving tradition and passing on memory has now fallen to my mother, myself, and the rest of the younger women in my family. This is not a role that I take lightly: In the Caribbean, women like my great-aunt Nerissa are simultaneously regarded as family, community, and cultural pillars.

While they are revered as leaders inside the home, however, women and girls across the Caribbean still experience objectification in both pop culture and daily life, as well as violence, fewer leadership roles, and unequal power relations. Still, misogynistic and sexist ideals often clash with the values taught in many Caribbean homes, where maternal figures are respected for nurturing families. Through her research on child socialization in the region, Dr. Renaud found this paradox exists because “girls are socialized to become mothers, and boys are socialized to stay boys.”

“Even though there is this patriarchal ideology that's kind of pervasive everywhere, girls are being raised to parent,” Dr. Renaud says. “Not just to parent children, but also to parent everybody.”

This caretaking role has been thrust upon Caribbean women for centuries, persisting during slavery and beyond. As Dr. Renaud points out, for enslaved Africans, nuclear families couldn’t exist due to labor divisions that frequently separated men from their wives and children in the home. But the expectation that women should take on a more significant role in preserving and implementing cultural values and practices likely predates transatlantic enslavement altogether.

According to Dr. Renaud, some theories suggest that these truncated traditions derive from West Africa. “So much of who we were as Africans culturally was outlawed in slave plantations,” she says. “What that meant was that so much of the culture happened in the house, and if for whatever reason it's women who are in the house with the children, then it's the women who become responsible for making sure that the culture passes on.”

Whyte agrees, adding that historically, women’s sharing of a family’s oral traditions built community and combated oppression. Our ancestors persevered through stories, songs, and proverbs, using them to transmit lessons on survival, intelligence, and resistance. These practices have continued long after emancipation: When slavery was outlawed across the Caribbean by 1873, we still retained our oral traditions. Like other women across the region, my own foremothers bore the responsibility of remembering health needs, birthdates, and anniversaries, along with preserving skills like foraging, gardening, and cooking. All things necessary for remembrance and survival.

Take my mother’s mother, Grandma Carmen, Great-Aunt Nerissa’s immediate younger sister. Born in the south-central Manchester parish, she was raised in Kingston before emigrating to New York in the 80s at 30 years old. Like my great-aunt, Grandma Carmen has passed on adages like, “Make a friend before you need a friend,” instilling in me the importance of sustaining relationships. She also has shared stories about her childhood pet goat, inspiring me to imagine a slower, “country” life, which eventually led me to buy a pig that was raised on my grandfather's farm in Jamaica. Simultaneously, I’ve often noted her discomfort when telling stories about her childhood. Her life wasn’t an easy one: Grandma Carmen was raised apart from some of her siblings, and in addition to the oral traditions they inherited, they had to create their own form of play, teaching themselves most of the skills they needed to thrive despite limited resources and an unconventional upbringing.

After Great-Aunt Nerissa’s funeral earlier this year, I spent time with my grandmother and her sisters as they pieced together family stories I’d never heard of before, relying only on their memories to corroborate events. I was surprised to learn that some of my family members’ legal names were apparently misspelled on their registration documents when they were newborns. In a couple cases, the names I know them by turned out to be nicknames—my Great-Grandaunt Madgie is actually “Margarita” and my great-aunt Nerissa was legally “Norissia.” I also learned that my great-grandmother died of kidney failure and high-blood pressure around the age of 44 (though nobody seems to know how old she was for certain). It struck me how vital this information is to our family’s medical history, especially considering the ways we’ve combated illnesses since, often following tradition and our ancestors’ wisdom.

“When you live in the Caribbean, usually instead of going to the doctor most of the time, they just practice what they learn from their foreparents,” my grandmother Carmen says. She is 74 years old and lives in New York. “Each generation, they look at life from a different point of view. But then, because you, as a parent, know what works for you, you try to pass it on to your children.”

Oral tradition is a living tradition. As culture evolves alongside technology and other discoveries, so can the ways we document our memories, giving each new generation space to adjust according to our own experiences. I realize now that some advice passed onto me was not always given in the name of custom. In some cases, they were suggestions based on lived experiences that were not mine, leaving me with the choice to take what I needed for my own life and leave the rest to our family’s collective memory.

Still, new technology and methods of documentation could disrupt oral tradition and storytelling as we’ve known it for centuries, potentially causing it to become obsolete. Women’s roles in communities have also changed, as has women’s labor, altering traditional storytelling avenues and frameworks that were once central to family and community life. But Whyte argues we’re still engaging in oral tradition when we use technology, we’re just doing it differently.

“I think we're still sharing stories, because I think social media is still a form of preserving stories,” Whyte says. “If you're to create a video and put it out there, the internet is forever, it's everlasting. That video is going to always be out there, the story is still being preserved, so regardless of women having to work more, we're still connecting.”

Growing up, my great-aunt Nerissa and Grandma Carmen did not foresee a reason to document their experiences beyond word-of-mouth in their small, tight-knit community in Manchester, where traditions were passed vertically. As the family grew and dispersed, my mother’s generation embraced analog recording methods, exchanging Polaroids with those who lived far away and making home videos on VHS tapes that were stored away for years at a time. My generation obsesses over documenting big and small moments with our smartphones and sharing them online instantaneously, with the hopes that others might relate or take interest. We may have a tendency to overshare, but I believe it is fueled by a desire to build community beyond physical limitations, giving more opportunity to spread oral traditions horizontally.

I may be living a vastly different life from the women who came before me, yet we are mirrors of each other. And as long as we keep finding ways to pass on tradition from one generation to the next, our memories and principles, and those of the many ancestors who came before us, will live on.

[post_title] => My Family's Wisdom Is My Inheritance [post_excerpt] => For many in the African and Caribbean diaspora, oral tradition is a survival tool passed down through generations. It is also largely sustained by women like my great-aunt Nerissa. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => oral-tradition-family-wisdom-matrifocality-african-caribbean-diaspora-storytelling-survival-tool-motherhood-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-09-04 01:30:50 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10985 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026

My Family’s Wisdom Is My Inheritance

by Amaya McDonald

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10817 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:02:07 [post_content] =>

Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back.

A mirror might be an innocuous part of your life, but for most of mine, it was filled with the unknown. Each accidental glance meant confronting abstract shapes that filled me with dread. I knew my real reflection was buried somewhere underneath. But I feared if I looked too closely I still wouldn't be able to comprehend what I saw; a fear equal to the tales of Lovecraft.

I wasn’t born afraid of my reflection, but instead, taught to bear witness to my incongruence by the world around me. As a child, my gender was irrelevant to me until people started telling me how it was supposed to be; how it was supposed to look. I’d never wanted to wear a dress, had never liked the color pink, and had never cared for unicorns. But I chafed at the obligation that I had to be something at all.

Growing up, I found an unconscious comfort in a digital social life, where I was freed from those gendered obligations. I recessed into this world, filling my days with hours-long voice calls while playing video games with strangers online. I felt safe from the abstract fear I’d always carried. In the digital world, it didn’t matter what I looked like, or what body I was born into. I had full agency over how others “saw” me. This is the reason so many young trans kids find comfort in communities online: a separation from the physical. But I wasn’t ready to look inward yet.

My connections became tethered to a screen. Even when I did get together with neighborhood friends to play video games or watch movies in their families’ basements, the chances that I'd catch myself reflected were limited. The screen acted as bait so we wouldn't have to look at one another. For a kid who would put a blanket over their bedroom mirror, this was a pretty nice situation to be in. It was only when the monitor shut down that I could see the unknown looking back at me again.

This abstract discomfort I’d always felt finally took shape as I entered an all-boys high school. Standing in a hallway amongst a jungle of teen boys for the first time, I had only one thought: I’m not like them. Maybe every mirror I'd encountered before that moment was unfocused, and this one epiphany corrected my vision, revealing what was always buried on the other side of the mirror: myself. And now, I could see that she was suffocating.

As realization and panic set in, I recessed further online. My only gasps of air came from my growing digital social life. Unlike the grand stage it often feels like today, the internet of my adolescence felt like a town square, where I could meet people I’d otherwise never would. Slowly, my digital circle expanded. Along with select friends from previous school years, I began building a community of trusted people across the country, picked up in different virtual lobbies. I’d spend hours on Skype calls with dozens of friends late into the night, talking about gaming and politics and movies. Much to the certain dismay of our parents, these strangers became some of my closest friends.

After I left the jungle, I was ripped away from the safety of that digital circle. College revealed that my digital life was just a band-aid on a much deeper wound. It was there I finally understood that I was trans, and that hiding this would not only leave my reflection suffocating, but leave me suffocating, too. This urgency forced me to find trusted people around me, and begin to transition socially—online and off. I changed my name to Allison across both worlds, and slightly altered how I dressed offline to feel more congruent with who I wanted to be. I became recognized at school and at work as myself.

In the process, something surprising happened: other people saw the woman in my reflection before I could. I began relishing in my newfound community, many of them other queer folk on their own identity journeys. It was healing to see, in living color, that I was not alone. They encouraged me to celebrate milestones; hormone anniversaries became an additional birthday worth celebrating. The thoughts and feelings I’d hidden my whole life became open conversations. Panic slowed, and the tightness in my chest and the weight on my shoulders began to ease.

To be accepted was like a breath of fresh air on the first warm day of spring. I wish it was simple enough to say this solved all my problems; I still feared my reflection and would flinch whenever I accidentally caught a glimpse. But occasionally, I’d recognize the woman looking back at me, and even be able to meet her eye.

What I previously thought impossible and out of reach was suddenly right in front of me. I wasn’t born loving myself, but I was taught how to. And the people who taught me this—the people who allowed me to be myself—are who I consider family now.

During the pandemic, I traveled across New York visiting state parks with two of these friends from college. We’d take long hikes together, and whenever we’d reach the top of a mountain, I’d finally feel untethered from a screen. On one of these hikes, I decided I didn’t want to make it to the peak. I let my friends go off as I clambered up a small boulder, two-thirds up the trail. For the very first time, I allowed myself to just sit and breathe. I was unburdened by the weight of my own fears, and my body relaxed, allowing me to take a nap on top of the comfiest boulder in central New York.

Those dear strangers online are now family, too. A year ago, we all traveled across the world to meet for the first time in Tokyo, Japan. It's a beautifully strange experience to finally meet people you’ve spoken to through a screen for around a decade in the streets of Asakusa. Yet it never felt like we were “meeting” for the first time; instead, we were celebrating our collective friendship. With roughly a dozen of us, we explored a new country together, visiting shrines and possibly every 7-Eleven in Tokyo. They even helped my now-wife plan her proposal to me on that very trip. (They were also the first to know about our engagement, almost a week before our blood families did.)

This community pulled me out from the other side of the mirror. Each person was a hand stretching out. Without them, I likely would not be here. I cherish my community so deeply, and even though life has taken its grip, we still find ways to talk and to see each other; we find ways to make time.

These days, I don’t cover the mirrors in my apartment. I’m not immune to the fears I once had, and will probably always harbor some form of self-reproach. But mostly, I am living with enthusiasm, despite how hellbent this country is on targeting people like me. With each new policy enacted, any moment of fear I have is quickly assuaged by a friend sending support or a loving message. At a time when I have less protections than ever, I somehow feel the most safe.

You don’t notice healing, you realize you’ve healed. Walking on the street used to require the mental anguish of shutting my peripherals off in fear of catching a distorted reflection of myself in a car or shop window. Sitting in a subway car meant closing my eyes to not see a blurry reflection in the glass on the other side. Until one day, it didn’t.

I wish I could go back in time and tell younger me to not look away. I know if she ever did look for long enough, she would’ve seen herself with a now common smile, surrounded by friends who love her. Just because she didn’t know who she was looking at didn’t mean it was some Lovecraftian horror. Sometimes, it’s just your reflection waiting to be recognized, waiting to be freed.

[post_title] => Befriending My Reflection [post_excerpt] => Growing up, I was afraid to look at myself in the mirror. Then my friends helped me recognize the woman looking back at me. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => befriending-my-reflection-adult-friendship-week-old-friends-identity-mirror-personal-essay [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-04 17:23:29 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10817 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026

Befriending My Reflection

by Allison Baker

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10823 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:25 [post_content] =>

Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.

A card arrived in the mail last week, my name written in a cursive I know well. It had been a couple of weeks since her last letter, and I eagerly sat down on my couch to read it. She told me how everyone at home, “both human and animal,” was doing well, how many cats she was currently fostering (thirteen), and yet, that she didn’t mind the label that came with it. “The Crazy Cat Lady is definitely somebody I identify with,” she wrote, and of course, that made me giggle. Her playful way with words paired with self-deprecation have always been uniquely hers. This I’ve known since long before we became friends.

My penpal and I met one morning more than three decades ago, when I walked to the end of a high school hallway full of lockers and into her classroom. I can only imagine how confused I looked to everyone on that first day of school: Shy and slightly awkward, I spoke no English and was dressed very differently from my peers. I’d only landed in that small New Jersey town a couple of weeks prior, from my home in Caracas, Venezuela. I was fourteen years old, and had attended the same school for most of my life. Suddenly, I was one of the “new kids,” and only one of three in the high school who spoke Spanish, who had the great luck of being assigned to Mrs. Boutin’s English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) class.

I don’t remember her being a Cat Lady in those years. In fact, in one of her many letters this year, she told me she used to be a dog person until she’d helped a neighbor trap, neuter, and return a bunch of feral cats, then decided to keep doing it. She found the work humbling. It made her feel useful. I guess it wasn’t much different than teaching English to a bunch of deer-in-the-headlights scared and somewhat feral adolescents who had come from all walks of life and many corners of the world, including Vietnam, Argentina, India, and China, in my class alone. Some of us had experienced trauma, others came from families seeking work, but no matter how we ended up in that New Jersey high school, every one of us took refuge in her classroom. I’d like to think we all needed it.

We all looked up to Mrs. Boutin because she was patient, laughing off our teenage drama and championing us as we uttered our very first English words, thick accents and all. Like many of my classmates, I’d often swing by after the school bell rang just to talk. She would ask me about my old life. Did I miss it? Would I get to visit home again, and if so, what would be on the top of my list of things to do? Who did I most want to see? She listened intently to my melancholy answers like few others did. It kept me emotionally present at a time in my life when it would have been much easier to push my complex feelings under the rug and simply do whatever I could to fit in (which I did anyway).

Within a year, I was able to defend myself in English; in another three years, I graduated and left for college. I discovered journalism, moved around—within the U.S. and abroad—got married, and, almost twenty years after leaving high school, had a kid. Now that I think about it, becoming a parent must have prompted my search for her: caring for a new life made me appreciate the old ones all the more. I found her through social media. When she responded a day or two later, she insisted that I call her by her first name: Juanita.

In Sister Outsider, poet and essayist Audre Lorde says that being a teacher means learning to talk to students to get “through to them” so that “their own processes would start.” She likens it to a fire, something you could “literally incite, like a riot." By the time I found Juanita again in 2014, I’d been teaching storytelling for a few years, trying my best to incite my students like she had me. Until then, I hadn’t realized how teaching could be political, both an act of kindness and of rebellion. How, beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship could be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is.

After a few email exchanges, we realized snail mail was much better for us both. Juanita would often finish her letters with an invitation to visit until, four years ago, I decided to accept and travel to Mississippi, where she lives with her husband, dog, and a rotating crew of at least a dozen former street cats she’s trying to find homes for. She was the same Juanita I remembered—with her Puerto Rican Spanglish, her hair short and her skirts long—except both she and I were a few decades older. She insisted I stay at their home and sleep in a hot pink guestroom she’d dubbed the “Pepto-Bismol.” That first night, I dreamt I was back in high school; it was a good dream.

Even though she’s long retired, Juanita still works most weekdays as a volunteer for local trap, neuter, and release efforts, which are few and far between in Mississippi. The morning after I arrived, I came along as she drove us around town to all the spots where she knew there were feral cat populations. I watched as she counted how many cats were in each, gave them food and water, and took note of any new litters or sick animals. Most of the cats scampered away as soon as they saw me. But they knew and trusted Juanita, just like the workers we ran into at the University of Mississippi campus, and the man at the gas station where she and I grabbed “the best fried chicken on a stick in all of Mississippi” after her volunteer shift. And just like me and my fellow classmates who used to seek her out after school.

I left Mississippi feeling grateful and whole. In just three days, we’d visited three art museums, ate obscene amounts of delicious fried food, went on long sightseeing drives, discussed religion and politics and race, and visited her friends who seemed delighted to hear that I, Juanita’s former high school student, was now her friend, too.

Sometimes I think the term “friend” doesn’t quite do our relationship justice, though. Not because of our age difference or the deep respect I continue to feel for her as my former teacher. Juanita knows me like a parent; her gentle yet no-nonsense life advice has always reminded me of my late grandmother whose Spanish-language proverbs were just as funny and true. But she also continues to be a source of comfort, like she was many years ago. “Be at peace,” she texted recently, when I told her I needed to put our beloved cat to sleep. “You will know what to do as each moment arrives.” She was right.

Can a fairy godmother be a “friend”? Absolutely. We are lucky to find (and keep) even one such friend over the course of a life, and I believe Juanita is mine. Her letters arrive in the mail with printed out poems or books I haven’t yet read that seem to address my moods in ways that sometimes spook me. Like the Mary Oliver poem, “How Would You Live Then?,” which she’d cut down to a four-by-five piece of paper and slipped inside a card that arrived last week. “What if the mockingbird came into the house with you and became your advisor?” its third line read, which I happened to scan early one evening while I sat on my bed, listening to our resident mockingbird sing in the front yard.

I am still drafting my latest snail mail response to her, in our now-customary English mixed in with Spanish, following our thread, asking about summers in Mississippi, her garden, and her foster cats. I am also planning another visit, already knowing which room she’ll insist I stay in when she replies, in that playful way that’s uniquely hers, and never fails to make me laugh.

[post_title] => Friendship as a Second Language [post_excerpt] => Beyond the classroom and in real life, a teacher-student friendship can be one of the best and most enduring kinds there is. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => old-friends-adult-friendship-esl-english-second-language-teacher-student [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27 [post_modified_gmt] => 2026-08-03 15:56:27 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://conversationalist.org/?p=10823 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => post [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw )

August 3, 2026August 3, 2026

Friendship as a Second Language

by Ruxandra Guidi

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 5052 [post_author] => 15 [post_date] => 2022-09-08 14:56:20 [post_date_gmt] => 2022-09-08 14:56:20 [post_content] =>

I found my dead father's house on Airbnb. It looked nothing like it.

Recently, while looking for an Airbnb in my hometown for an upcoming visit, I found my dead father’s house.

Bewildered, I scanned the listing. Could this really be the same house where I’d scrambled eggs for him every morning and watched his favorite movies on TCM every night? The new owners had stripped the place of its shabbiness, though I wondered as I read whether they'd been able to do the same with its termites. Back when I’d lived there, an unusually ballsy mouse had ruled over the kitchen, where one side of the fridge stood on bricks because otherwise it tilted to the left from the warped tile floor. When the mouse startled me one day, calmly eating an English muffin on the countertop when I went to make coffee, my father had rolled his eyes at my scream. “That’s Mister Jingles,” he said with exasperation. “Be nice.”

The house was no “castle,” as the ad’s headline claimed. Each of its rooms was a quarter of the size that the wide-angled photos made them appear to be. Photos of the kitchen diligently cropped out the bottom left corner of the fridge, where the bricks held it up. Yet, brightened by a ring light and stuffed with the same West Elm bric-a-brac that furnishes every Airbnb, it did look like a plausible getaway. “Nobody lives here full time,” bragged the ad. “You can make yourself at home” for $145 a night.

“Nobody lives here full time”—that opposed the entire ethos of Airbnb as it once was, when it presented itself as a cheaper alternative to hotels and a win-win for everybody who used it. Founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky say the idea for Airbnb came to them when they were struggling to afford the rent on their San Francisco apartment in 2007—they crammed in a few air mattresses and charged guests $80 a night to sleep on them. A year later, they turned their “Air Bed and Breakfast” into a business.

Supposedly, the idea was always for the experience to be somewhat personal, on both hosts’ and travelers’ sides. Travelers could see a new place from a lived-in home base that lent the trip some local flavor; hosts could make money off their spare rooms while offering a little hospitality. But as Airbnb’s popularity exploded, so did its problems. Tourist-heavy neighborhoods became Airbnb hubs where long term residents could no longer afford to live. Landlords converted rental units into more-profitable Airbnbs and stopped renting them to tenants. Cities’ attempts to regulate the app’s presence have proven difficult and feeble. And, of course, as more homes became full-time Airbnbs, those Airbnbs got worse.

The average Airbnb used to be friendlier than a chain hotel room. The aggressively anodyne watercolors and unopenable windows of a hotel gave way to the warmth of a real person’s home. But a real home also comes with real hassles. Guests at a hotel can leave the room as messy as they want; guests at an Airbnb have to clean up after themselves and leave the place roughly as they found it, even though hosts collect a “cleaning fee” on each reservation. The hassles were only worth it for as long as Airbnb remained the cheaper option.

And while, in 2022, data suggests that Airbnbs are still cheaper, the gap is closing quickly, and not just in terms of cost. Anecdotally, Airbnbs have been losing all personality for years. My dead father’s house—correction, my dead father’s “castle”—looks just like the “artist’s studios” and “boutique lofts” that proliferate every city on the app. Add some moose antlers to one wall and it could be a “peaceful ski lodge”; throw in a hammock and it could be a “beach house paradise.” But such hifalutin terms fail to justify Airbnb’s skyrocketing prices. When guests pay $145 a night to stay in my father’s castle, do they coo over the brass-plated vases on every surface, or do they scream at the sight of its long term resident, Mister Jingles?

Alongside the spendy soullessness of these units, the annoyances have continued to mount. Because people really did live in most early Airbnbs, they came stocked with cookware and basic amenities. Hosts who actually lived in their units were also intimately familiar with them, and could answer questions about what to do with a sticky key or whether the cat was allowed on the fire escape. The increasingly impersonal nature of Airbnbs has turned them into hotels with none of a hotel’s conveniences and even more pointed surveillance. Paranoid about their liability for everything from accidents at their guests’ family barbecues to long-term guests’ ability to claim squatters’ rights, hosts have cut corners and set unreasonable limits. For example, I am presently writing this from an Airbnb with an in-unit washer/dryer that’s padlocked to keep guests from using it.

Airbnb is still the most plausible option for guests who will be staying somewhere for a while and need a place to cook, or people looking for a place where traditional accommodations aren’t possible. Even towns that are light on tourism and don’t have many hotels usually have at least a few Airbnbs available—like the one where my father once lived. His “castle” is one of about a dozen Airbnbs in his far-flung suburb, and it’s by far the priciest one. In more remote locations like this, Airbnb sometimes retains some of its old charm. But in the case of the castle, I scroll through photo after photo of beige furniture and wonder what’s lost when homes are turned into working sites of capital.

My father died in 2018, and I liked to visit his house on Google Earth in the months after his death. I’d drag the photo of the building in circles with my cursor, trying to peer into windows. Here was where he held my head in his lap after I left my husband, patting my hair until my mucous-inflected sobs dried up; here I botched our meatloaf dinner and he laughed, said we could go to Popeye’s instead. I would imagine that we were in the Google Earth photo, nestled into that sweet dilapidated cottage with our junk food and our mouse, watching a movie, out of sight of the camera but very much at home.

Google posted photos of the place in 2012 when he lived there, a month after he died in 2018, and in 2019. As time goes on, the little pink house looks less and less loved. The vivid azaleas and carefully pruned dogwoods that lined the front walk in 2013 gave way to hostile overgrowth in 2018, all to be abandoned to a completely bare lawn by 2019, when the house’s current owner took over. The dogwoods and azaleas are long gone now, seemingly not just cut down but obliterated by the roots from the earth. The grass is perfect. The house is no longer pale pink, but a whitish color that is no color at all. It has been transformed from a home into a rentable castle.

It could be an Airbnb in Vancouver, Woodstock, or Miami. It could be anywhere, could belong to anyone. Nobody lives there full time. You can make yourself at home.

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September 8, 2022August 4, 2026

What’s Lost When a Home Becomes a Working Site of Capital

by Rax King

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