“Is This Thing On?” is a newsletter about life’s big questions, small victories, and why I still think I should’ve been “Dark Angel.” Welcome, I'm so glad you're here. XO, Sabrina
To listen to this post, click the play button in the audio player below.
I stand at the stovetop, feet anchored to the anti-fatigue mat, performing the same small gesture again and again: pinch, slip, drop. Repetitive motion is a summoning circle—peel long enough and the quiet monsters climb out to watch.
They’d soaked overnight, the chickpeas, their wrinkled skins now begging to be removed.
It’s a whole process: soak, pour out the water, fill the bowl again; clean water brings new swollen chickpeas to the surface.
Another soak.
Discard the water, again.
Pluck them one by one, pinch at just the right angle and with just enough force. The thin membrane surrenders, slipping off like a secret.
These skins seem impossible. To the naked eye, the peas look whole and smooth. My youngest watches, wide-eyed, as I reveal husks he never knew were there. I, too, am mesmerized by the membrane I didn’t know I was peeling—until it’s gone.
Peeling chickpeas took me a day and a half. Every skin removed felt like a confession unearthed, a truth that didn’t want to be touched. The labor—tedious, thankless—mirrors the invisible work of mothering: gently stripping away the stories we drape over our children so they can see clearly, breathe freely.
It’s OK for your kids to see you feel, mothers are told. I know that. But it’s hard—especially when one parent lies and the other is left to anchor.
When do they get to know that the family weekends they longed for were traded for flight to island getaway a full year before claims that they “reconnected?”
It is not my responsibility to patch over his lies—that’s his job, I remind myself again.
Pinch, slip, drop.
I sift through each chickpea, watching the skins float away. I think of the assumptions we carry, the narratives we rarely question because they’re nestled too deep to touch.
I imagine the chickpeas murmuring: “Skin? What skin? We are perfectly smooth.”
People do this more often than we’d like to admit, pretend to be one thing when they really are another—insist on a self that’s already been peeled back.
Chickpea Cognitive Dissonance, I think.
It’s too much of a mouthful. But I toy with it anyway:
Dissonance so cognitive,
It’s time to move on from it—
He threw me an eephus,
Then claimed it was Exodus.
It’s all I have time for now. My brain is tired from reading thesis feedback on my final draft waiting for me upstairs. My thoughts migrate to a letter I sent recently.
It was too soon. Too generous.
A promise of “a special place somewhere in my heart”—somewhere was the hinge word: roomy enough for the hope I once carried, vague enough to bury it.
Pinch, slip, drop.
I turn back to my hummus project. It all started with an Instagram reel. My oldest had lobbied hard for the gleaming new blender—the one that was used in the 40-second video. The food creator promised better-than-restaurant-quality hummus, the kind that your mom makes at home. The blender was pricey, but on sale, and the boys sweetly offered to chip in.
An hour later, the doorbell chimed. Two teenage girls stood at our door—ponytails high, cropped socks bright against worn sneakers—cradling the box between them like it held treasure.
Their side-hustle smiles hadn’t yet met the long work of soaking legumes, of peeling back the invisible, of finding out what it costs to shed a second skin.
My eldest sliced open the box, lifted the Styrofoam, read every insert like scripture. To a stranger, it might’ve looked like he’d done the work. But the blender could only hum to life because the chickpeas had been tended: soaked, rinsed, peeled. Loved by my time and hands.
The cast-off skins pile up like confetti after a party I’ve been trying to forget. They calcify into something that feels true, but unnecessary—they will only hinder the final product.
I know this. I’ve lived beside denial dressed as virtue. But time, like soaking water, draws the evidence to the surface.
When the blender’s hum settles, I scoop out the hummus. The boys gather. Their verdicts arrive like line edits:
“Pretty good.”
“Needs more lemon.”
“Still a little chunky.”
“I don’t really like it.”
I take my own fork and stir. The texture gleams: a testament to time, to the slow undoing. I tip the skins into the trash bin and watch them pile up like the lies he speaks even today.
How he must have rehearsed his stories until they sank into his bones like marrow. Truth worn thin by repetition, lies clinging to him like a second skin—an epidermis that refuses to quit its host.
Some days, the skins cling to me too and I cannot peel them away. They are the forgiveness I haven’t yet earned from myself for trusting someone I was once so sure of.
Now, a bikini-clad stranger sets up home where my children sleep; my son asks me why he’s never seen me in shorts.
His choices are not my fault, I remind myself.
I keep my foot on the pedal of the trash can and watch some skins vanish, while others migrate. Shapeless truths moving through the world, invisible but present.
Time unravels a new wisdom: Belief, like skin, is essential—until it isn’t.
The monsters quiet.
The blender hums.
The kitchen holds its new, honest heat.
If this writing resonated with you, please follow, share and subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. Thank you for reading. XO, Sabrina
Sucks actually makes it pretty easy too because there is an audio button it looks like headphones on the top of each draft page so you can upload saved audio or you can I believe voice over your own post directly through substack. I've only uploaded audio but I know there are two options when you click on the headphones icon. try it and see I will listen!
Wow, that was a great essay... and hearing you read it was even better!