Emily Villanueva is a writer and Books Editor for Hyphen. Previously, she worked as a literacy teacher and perfume maker. Her food writing has featured in Foodbeast and Locale Magazine, and her debut poetry collection “Quarantine Haikus” will be published in fall 2021. Visit her here.
This spring, I fell into the pit of a(nother) major depressive episode. Listless, numb and bored of this past year’s never-ending parade of despair, I felt that familiar instinct to run: to do something, go anywhere, be anyone but myself. Or as Larissa Pham puts it in her provocative new essay collection, Pop Song: “It doesn’t matter where I’m going, only that I’m going, and that, eventually, I hope to be gone — winked out of my troubles, my responsibilities, my everyday existence.”