New York went into lockdown just as the city was blooming. Many of us are now familiar with the way one week smears into the next when you rarely leave your home, but I still find it alarming how muddy my memories of those early days in quarantine are. What I do remember, vividly, is taking anxious early-morning walks around my neighborhood in Brooklyn and feeling utterly disoriented by the magnolia trees that had blossomed along the sidewalk.

Magnolias are a parody of a flowering tree. They’re gorgeous and excessive, dripping large pink petals everywhere. They make me think of the girl who upstages everyone at a house party by bringing a homemade cake for the host even though it’s no one’s birthday. (You resent her for it, then you realize this means there’s cake.) Last spring, I was grateful for the blush-hued flowers on my block, but they seemed surreal against the backdrop of fear and loss gripping the city. Spring is a feeling as much as anything, and I couldn’t find it anywhere in my body.

A year later, things are different here. More and more people are getting vaccinated (though not enough, and not in all parts of the world) and socializing with friends and family is starting to be less fraught. When in March I came across a patch of snowdrops in Prospect Park — some of the first flowers of the year, fresh and green among the dead leaves and bare trees — it felt like we were moving in the same direction.

“I’m excited about getting vaccinated and inviting new energy into my life,” my cousin told me over the phone recently. She was out for a walk on the West Coast. “But there’s still a heaviness I’m feeling. This has been a year of death and violence. It feels bittersweet to be like, ‘Things are blooming,’ because there are so many people not with us.” After we hung up, she sent me a photo of a red rose she’d come across, retina-burning in the April sunshine.

I feel a little silly writing about flowers like this, as though they don’t always signal a kind of renewal. As though they’re a novelty and not a massive global business — as though human civilizations around the world haven’t attached deep symbolism to them for millennia, using them in rites of passage and linking them to love, death, wealth, piety. At the Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, New York, there’s a space dedicated to answering the question of why flowers “charm and amaze us.” The garden features flowers like roses, lilies, and tulips, with detailed information on their historical significance across cultures: daisies are depicted in paintings of the Madonna and child as a symbol of the infant Christ’s innocence, whereas in ancient Mesopotamia they stood for protection and good luck.

“Flowers are cyclical, so they’re life-affirming in a sense,” says Sarah Fiorello, interpretation coordinator at the Cornell Botanic Gardens. “But they’re also ephemeral, so they reflect the finite nature of all life.”

Flowers ask the big questions, which may be why they seem to have meant a little more this year. On a practical level, people tend to interact with flowers in three ways. There are the flowers we buy for ourselves as an act of self-love, just to brighten our own day. There are the flowers we exchange with others to express affection and support — to connect. And there are the living flowers we encounter in nature, parks, and planters, reminding us that we’re part of something bigger. At a time when many of us have struggled with our mental health, when we’ve been denied the nourishment of other people’s company, when our worlds have shrunk so dramatically, it’s no wonder flowers hold a particular appeal. They’re a counterweight to the forces that might otherwise drag us down. Maybe they don’t tip the scales completely — some of them are very small — but they do help.

The writer and cartoonist Jonny Sun is big on houseplants; they’re a major theme in his new book, Goodbye, Again. But it wasn’t until the pandemic that he and his wife started regularly buying cut flowers for their home, ultimately signing up for a monthly bouquet subscription with the LA-based floral design studio Bia Blooms. “Things have felt so purgatorial and endless,” Sun says. “Every day feels the same. I’ve really looked to flowers as a sign that time is indeed passing in some sort of regular way.” The cycle of buying a bouquet, watching the flowers fade, and purchasing another provided a strange sense of stability and comfort.

Faced with a world and a mess of feelings that often feel unpredictable and out of control, Sun also appreciates the way flowers establish a kind of emotional schedule for him. He knows that when they die, he’ll feel bummed out. “I’m buying this now, and I’m entering a contract with myself that I’ll feel sad in two weeks,” he says. “Knowing you’ll feel this emotion in a few weeks is kind of nice.”

Nana Agyemang started buying herself flowers every week during the pandemic, too, because it lifted her spirits. “I didn’t have the finances to do so before Covid, but because I was saving money on not commuting to work and not going out as often to restaurants to eat, I repurposed that income to treat myself,” she says. Agyemang is the CEO and founder of EveryStylishGirl, an organization promoting the advancement of Black and Brown women in fashion and media. The pandemic forced Agyemang to make a “huge company pivot” away from in-person events, and buying bouquets was an act of appreciation for herself during that stressful transition. 

“Getting the flowers was like, ‘Hey, Nana, keep doing what you’re doing. You are excelling in every possible way you can, and these flowers are a reminder every day when you get up that you’re doing the damn thing,’” she says.

Here’s the thing: When you start buying flowers for yourself, you may very well want to give them to other people, too. Starting last summer, Agyemang partnered with florists to hold several flower arrangement giveaways, her way of expanding the circle of support and affirmation. “When someone does good work, you give them flowers,” she says. “This was a time of the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and I felt like a lot of Black women and Black-owned businesses weren’t getting the flowers they deserved.”

For many people, flowers became a poignant way of connecting with loved ones they couldn’t otherwise see. Before the pandemic, Chicago-based artist Hyun Jung Jun enjoyed making cakes for her friends, creating unequivocally charming landscapes out of flowers and other vegetal materials: lavender placed like birthday candles, fennel fronds used to evoke towering trees. When 2020 rolled around, though, the cakes became an excuse to pick up homegrown flowers from one friend and then treat them — or someone else — to the finished product. “They’d come pick up the cake, so at least I got to see them a little bit,” Jun says.

Sam Herzog, director of sales and marketing at the accessories brand Kara, was already in the habit of giving people flowers before the pandemic, but she’s ramped way up, sending them to her parents in California and to friends as housewarming gifts and breakup support. When she meets up with friends in the park, she likes to bring them a bouquet.

“I think it’s this really beautiful thing because it’s just a gesture of care,” Herzog says. “Flowers don’t have any functional purpose. They’re purchased purely for making someone feel appreciated or cared for. It’s like a hug.”

My friend James started sending flowers to his male friends a few months ago, in an effort to normalize it as an acceptable way of showing platonic affection for and among men. “I think I wanted someone to give me flowers,” he says. Unemployed for much of the pandemic, James had cut back on his habit of buying sunflowers for his own apartment, but on his 30th birthday, he gave himself permission to buy an arrangement. His parents wound up sending him a bunch too, transforming his apartment into a vibrant floral landscape for a few weeks.

When millennials talk about buying flowers for their loved ones, particularly their peers, a word that comes up a lot is “old-fashioned.” Handing someone a bouquet rings of courtship from a bygone era. Sending an arrangement has a certain formality and seriousness, not to mention an often significant price tag. But if you can’t show your appreciation for a friend by buying them a drink at the bar, flowers start to seem like a reasonable substitute, for any occasion or no occasion at all. They’re heartfelt and earnest. They speak to the romance of platonic friendships. And as my cousin Katie Lovins, a floral designer in Portland, Maine, pointed out to me, there’s a sense of theater when a bunch of flowers arrive on someone’s doorstep.

In some cases, flowers were a romantic gesture, full stop. My other cousin, the one who sent me the photo of that perfect rose, realized she was going to fall in love with someone when they sent her pressed flowers from their garden last summer. They had matched on Tinder before the pandemic, but only started seeing each other afterward — from opposite sides of the country, communicating incessantly via phone calls, FaceTimes, and selfies. “I think flowers are this universally romantic gesture, especially when you’ve grown them and picked them. It felt like, here is this small thing that’s beautiful, because you deserve it,” she says. “It was a level of connection and thoughtfulness that I was craving.”

The relationship didn’t work out, and in retrospect, my cousin wonders if she imbued those pressed flowers with a little too much meaning. (For whatever it’s worth, the Victorians were all about it.) Romantic that she is, she brought yellow mums to a subsequent first date, though she claims she merely pulled a few stems from a bouquet she’d already bought.

LaParis Phillips, the owner of Brooklyn Blooms, saw a marked uptick in people sending “just because” flowers to their loved ones throughout 2020. “People were really valuing their time and valuing being in the moment. Like, ‘I don’t care what day it is, it’s a special day. I’m living and I’m healthy, so it’s special,’” she said. “If I can sum up those flower orders that made us busy, gratitude is the word.”

Despite some people’s newfound enthusiasm for flowers, this was a difficult year for the floral industry as a whole. Canceled weddings, closed office buildings, and shuttered restaurants hit local retailers hard and disrupted the global supply chain, with some growers shredding or composting their unsold stems. Phillips says she was able to stay afloat because her business was already oriented toward daily orders from individuals, rather than corporate clients or events; Brooklyn Blooms also was included on a number of lists promoting Black-owned businesses during the protests following George Floyd’s death, and for several months, Phillips was working overtime filling orders.

It felt good, during a year of such turmoil, to be sending out those flowers and seeing the kind messages that people had for one another, Phillips says. It’s impossible to forget the grief that sparked those well-wishes, though. “I wish it didn’t take a pandemic and somebody dying for nine minutes for this to happen, but that’s what it takes for humans to move,” she says.

Finally, the third kind of floral experience — taking in a patch of buttercups growing on the side of the road, or happening upon a vibrant bed of tulips in someone’s yard — flourished this year for the same reason that other nature-related activities, like cultivating houseplants and birdwatching, did. Interacting with non-human living things eased feelings of isolation and provided a grounding alternative to staring at a screen for 18 hours straight. I know someone who took it upon herself to finally learn the names of the many wildflowers that grow near her house in Idaho, perhaps recognizing that, as Fiorello says, “even looking at plants around us gives us a boost of chemicals in our brains.” One unnamed individual started pilfering wild chives from a local park, eventually pulling up a bunch at the root to cultivate in a pot at home. He looks forward to the edible purple chive blossoms that should arrive this summer.

Over the last year, I spent a lot of time staring at plants in parks, too. It was easier than spending time with people. On one of the first truly gorgeous days of spring, a month or two ago, I took an afternoon walk through the park. I was feeling itchy and grouchy, overdressed in a heavy jacket and still reflexively shooting dirty looks at anyone not wearing a mask. Heading south, I emerged from a wooded path into an open field, where a lone dude was stretched out in the grass, wearing nothing but a Speedo and framed by a bunch of yellow daffodils. It was like something out of an oil painting.

They projected the same vibe, this stranger and the flowers: at ease in the world, simply enjoying the sun and breeze at 1 pm on a weekday. I couldn’t muster that energy for myself, but I liked the idea of it. Recognizing it as an idea at all felt like a kind of thawing.

In the summer of 2018, rocked by the Trump presidency, Alexandra Posen and Dahna Goldstein formed Resistance by Design, a project that would combine art and political activism. By September, they had released their first design: The “HERWAVE 2018” silk scarf, which bore an illustration of every Democratic woman running for Congress in the midterm elections, their portraits drawn in a bout of “creative fury” by Posen, an artist and the former creative director of her brother Zac Posen’s fashion brand. Sheer and painterly, with a blue-gray border, the scarf is detailed and delicate. You could spend a long time poring over it, identifying each candidate.

This April, Resistance by Design started selling another politically charged garment with a very different look: a face mask that said, in thick, uneven capital letters, “VOTE.” Posen drew the design a few weeks into stay-at-home orders in New York, where she lives. The mask’s stark, unsubtle message was an expression of her shock at the moment we were living through, and her despair over what she felt was an acute lack of leadership in a moment of crisis.

“The urgency and terrifyingness of Covid, I think, did not call for a heady expression,” says Posen. “It called for a yelp. It called for a mandate.”

Resistance by Design, which gives financial support to organizations like Emily’s List, She Should Run, and NARAL Pro-Choice America, put that face mask into production, and now people are wearing it all over the country, on the street and on social media. Goldstein and Posen wouldn’t share how many masks they’ve sold in total, but Goldstein noted that in the 24 hours after Hillary Clinton tweeted a photo of herself in the mask, they got 3,000 orders. (Kendall Jenner, Kerry Washington, and Megan Rapinoe have all worn the mask, too.) Resistance by Design now sells “vote” tank tops, totes, hats, and towels as well, and Goldstein and Posen created a purple version of their mask in collaboration with Stacey Abrams and her voting rights organization, Fair Fight.

With a few weeks until the 2020 presidential election, “vote” merchandise is everywhere. You can buy a “vote” tee from Madewell, a “vote” hoodie from Levi’s, or a pair of over-the-knee Stuart Weitzman boots with the word “vote” running down the calf in interlocking letters. Theoretically, you could get yourself a Christian Siriano “vote” gown or a Louis Vuitton “vote” sweater, both of which recently appeared on the runway for spring/summer 2021.

As far as messaging through fashion goes, the meaning of a “vote” mask or T-shirt is pretty self-evident. It means you should vote. And for many people, encouraging civic engagement is the most basic objective of putting the word “vote” on their body.

“It takes multiple pings, little reminders, to get through to people, so I kind of feel like me and other people wearing ‘vote’ masks, bandanas, and T-shirts are just one extra little ping,” says Justine Larbalestier, a novelist who lives in New York. “Maybe someone will look at it and say, ‘Oh fuck, have I registered?’ It’s just reiterating the message.”

Larbalestier is originally from Australia, and when she became a U.S. citizen 9 years ago, she tried to register and vote in two separate elections, in 2012 and 2014, and was told both times that she wasn’t on the rolls. She voted in a U.S. election for the first time in 2016. “It still shocks me to my core that voting is so hard here,” she says.

But while “vote” merchandise enjoyed a similar rush of popularity in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the Covid-19 pandemic has given it additional layers of meaning. At a time when in-person efforts to raise awareness about the election are limited by social distancing, it’s a way to safely express that message to the world at large beyond making phone calls, sending texts, or fundraising from home.

“We can’t knock on doors, which I’ve done every election cycle,” says Erin Allweiss, who has been wearing a Resistance by Design mask on the street in Brooklyn. “A ‘vote’ mask is a reminder that there’s an election coming up. It’s the yard sign on our faces, encouraging people to participate.”

Face masks, in particular, add a new pointedness to the message to vote.

“The fact that we have to wear face masks means that something is wrong, so it’s a great place to put a message about how to make things right,” says Adelle McElveen, who bought a purple Resistance by Design mask after discovering it on the Fair Fight website.

Wearing a “vote” mask on the streets of New York has been a “very interactive experience,” McElveen says. People often tell her they love her mask, ask where she got it, and give her a thumbs-up. One older man called out to her, “Yes, I’m voting!” That positivity feels great, she says.

“I want to normalize getting involved and caring and taking action,” says McElveen, who has run, staffed, and volunteered on a number of political campaigns. But, she clarifies, voting is just the beginning of that work — and wearing “Vote” merchandise isn’t enough.

“It’s not voting once every four years or every two years. We have to keep engaged with our elected officials, we have to educate ourselves, and we have to be active participants in democracy,” McElveen says. “If we don’t, budgets, policies, and priorities are going to be made that affect us and we won’t have had our say.”

“Vote” merchandise certainly runs the risk of coming off as slacktivism, an easy and vague way to signal responsible citizenship. It doesn’t help that during this election cycle, a stampede of corporations like Uber and Nike have been using encouragements to vote as a method of marketing their own businesses, largely without coming out for one candidate or another. “The messages end up mealymouthed — these companies are willing to gesture at the maintenance of a minimally functional democracy, but are not willing to say it with their chests,” writes the Atlantic’s Amanda Mull.

The question of whether “vote” merchandise is carefully neutral or inherently partisan depends on who’s making it and who you ask. Because Resistance by Design has been clear about its progressive political values, Goldstein and Posen feel that these views are embedded in their mask design: When they say “vote,” they do not mean for Trump. And in the sense that Trump has attacked the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and has not committed to a peaceful transition if he loses the election — in the face of voter suppression, particularly of Black voters — the word “vote” can read as full-throated defiance of a president actively seeking to undermine the democratic process.

Still, some people who wear “Vote” merchandise like it precisely because it doesn’t state a preference for one candidate over another. Mayumi Escalante, a federal employee based in Maryland, has been wearing a “Vote” mask as a way to remind people to turn out on November 3 while complying with the Hatch Act’s rules against wearing a candidate’s clothing or expressing a partisan stance on social media while on duty.

“I happen to live in a Black community, so when I’m wearing my ‘Vote’ mask out, with the people who are able to see me, I’m encouraging them to vote,” says Escalante. “It’s not just a national election — we have our local and county elections. It’s personal. It’s about our home.”

Michelle Virshup, another federal employee in Virginia, has gone all out with her “Vote” gear: Birdies flats, Madewell T-shirt, Resistance by Design mask, and jewelry by Rachel Pfeffer, ByChari, and Luca & Danni. After Christian Siriano’s fashion week show, she ordered his $35 “Vote” print masks for herself, her mom, and her sister. Virshup calls herself a “most-important” issue voter, and for her that’s the Affordable Care Act, which meant she was covered by her father’s health insurance when, in 2013, she needed a bone marrow transplant due to an autoimmune disorder. When she wears her “Vote” merch out, she’s thinking about the uncertain future of the ACA, a challenge to which will go before the Supreme Court a week after the election.

Virshup has also found that posting photos of herself in neutral “Vote” merch creates a more open platform for having conversations about the election with members of her extended family who have different political views. It’s easy to dismiss someone who’s going all out for a candidate you already dislike; it’s much harder to wave away someone who is simply promoting voting.

Christina Diem Pham, a video game producer based in Los Angeles, is open about her hope that Trump will lose the election, but says that she prefers the candidate-free mask from Resistance by Design because she’s “not super jazzed” about Biden. (“I totally would have worn a Bernie mask,” she notes.) Besides, she says, she can recycle a “vote” mask for future elections.

Rebecca Lowman, an actor, audiobook narrator, and director, and Rebecca Asher, a director for TV shows like The Good Place and Grace and Frankie, started making “vote” T-shirts at their home in LA this summer. While Lowman has been able to continue working from her home studio during the pandemic, Asher’s work slowed to a dribble as productions halted. To fill her time, she started taking photography classes, which inspired Lowman to cut out a “vote” stencil and print it on a shirt using cyanotype processing.

They devised a simple operation, advertised on their Instagram pages: If people sent them a receipt for a donation to one of the seven voting accessibility organizations listed on their LinkTree, they would send them a T-shirt as a reward. Thus far, people have donated more than $13,000 — in increments as small as $1 and as large as $1,000 — and Lowman and Asher have produced nearly 370 shirts. (The project remains without an official name: “We just keep calling them ‘Cyanotype Vote Tees,’” explains Asher.) They’ve had a few repeat customers, some of whom worry that they’re breaking the rules by submitting a donation for a second shirt.

“All the people we’ve sent shirts to are sending the nicest emails,” says Asher. “I guess it’s a form of connection, too, at this time when you’re not really engaging with people as usual.”

Though Asher and Lowman aren’t shy about their political alignments — pointing out that many of the organizations in their LinkTree go through ActBlue, the Democratic and progressive fundraising platform — they’ve made shirts for Republicans as well as avowed Democrats. For a friend’s mother, who does voter outreach in her community, they made a custom “vote” shirt from a baseball tee with red sleeves.

“We clearly have a preference for who wins this election, but we also do want as many people to vote as possible,” says Asher. “Everybody should be voting.”

“There’s a legitimacy when everyone votes,” says Lowman.

Welcome to Noticed, The Goods’ design trend column. You know that thing you’ve been seeing all over the place? Allow us to explain it.

What it is: Terrazzo, a speckled, durable style of flooring that originated in 15th century Venice. It consists of chips of marble, stone, or glass, the gaps filled by cement or a similar binding material; the surface is then buffed to a smooth finish. But we’re not actually talking about floors today, nor are we even necessarily talking about marble and cement. This is the terrazzo extended universe, which includes real terrazzo as well as flat, trompe l’oeil versions of the same: breezy Madewell dresses and leather luggage tags in terrazzo prints, terrazzo adhesive film available on Amazon, terrazzo Target throw blankets, terrazzo shower speakers from Asos, Make Beauty terrazzo eyeshadow and bronzer, and even a terrazzo Spalding basketball sold at Urban Outfitters. If it has a surface, it can and will be terrazzo-ed.

Where it is: At pretty much every home and lifestyle goods store you can think of. Plus the fashion department. And the beauty section.

Why you’re seeing it everywhere: First came the resurgence of terrazzo floors. As Jessica Furseth reported for Curbed last year, the style made its debut in Venetian palaces but enjoyed a long period of popularity in the US between 1930 and 1970. Terrazzo’s hard-wearing nature and unique ability to conceal dirt made it a fit for public spaces of all kinds, from those that evoke glamour and high culture (the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Guggenheim Museum in New York) to those that feel decidedly more pedestrian, like middle schools and subways. 

After a while, though, public interest dimmed, and terrazzo came to be seen as passé and kitschy. But the pendulum always swings back and, Furseth writes, “Over the past few years, terrazzo has staged an incredible comeback.” Now it lives in various temples of cultural capital: The Wing, The Ace, Soho House.

“After years of obsession with midcentury modern and restrained 1960s design darlings — Danish Modern, the Eames classics, corporate modernism — we’re now waking up to a renewed appreciation of texture, color, and tackiness, as perfectly embodied by terrazzo,” Furseth writes, noting that despite its retro vibes, terrazzo is also “undeniably elegant.”

It was a short leap from floors to every consumer product on the planet. The shift from restraint to ebullience that Furseth describes underpins many trends that have taken off recently: rainbow fashion, ’70s-inspired fonts, lime green makeup. The people want to have fun again! But not too much fun: Xenia Taler, a home goods designer who started making porcelain terrazzo-print coasters and plates in 2016 and 2017, respectively, sees terrazzo as a comfortable way to move forward from minimalism. It’s a reined-in version of the kooky Memphis design style, which emerged in the early 1980s and recently experienced its own revival.

“It’s almost like an exciting neutral,” Taler says of terrazzo — the perfect solution for when you want to add a bit of visual interest “but you don’t want to go crazy.”

Elana Berusch, a food scientist who moonlights as a baker, recently devised a colorful terrazzo cake decorated with shards of royal icing, which she spread on wax paper to harden before breaking it into irregularly sized pieces. She believes that terrazzo’s distinctive but easy-going look has contributed to its immense popularity on Instagram, where she posts her work.

“It’s a good way of incorporating color without it being overwhelming. You can have it as a backdrop or a countertop without it detracting too much [from the other elements of the image],” Berusch says. “It highlights rather than dominates.”

Chief among terrazzo’s virtues is its versatility. The chips can be large or small, sparse or crowded, in any color palette, allowing anyone to put their spin on it — though many of the available products come in the pleasing, well-trodden shades of blush pink, mustard yellow, and navy that spell millennial consumerism.

For some designers, terrazzo is a practical solution to production problems: John Meyers, who runs the soap and candle brand Wary Meyers with his wife Linda, started making speckled soaps in 2015 as a way of using up soap scraps left over at the end of the day. He didn’t set out to make terrazzo-inspired soaps, but after testing out the new method, he realized that the results looked a bit like the designer Shiro Kuramata’s terrazzo pieces. So John and Linda leaned into the reference. Today, the confetti-like bars are Wary Meyers’ bestselling soaps.

Taler was also thinking of waste reduction when she started making coasters with black-and-white terrazzo patterns. It was a way of hiding the small black flecks that occasionally appear on porcelain, because Taler felt compelled to discard flawed pieces. A tiny dot might not sound like a big deal, but in a retail environment, you want your product to look perfect, she says.

“I don’t think that’s what’s behind the [terrazzo] trend right now, but busy patterns do work in that way,” Taler says.

In an interview with Forseth for Curbed, the architect Dan Brunn suggests that people are gravitating toward terrazzo flooring because it’s unmistakably handmade: “You can really see the love that’s gone into it.” It’s then perhaps ironic that the popularity of terrazzo has resulted in its digitization, mass production, and flattening into stick-on wallpaper, stationery, and phone cases. That said, the style’s simple, geometric look is easy to replicate in any number of color variations; of course it would go viral.

Madewell head of design Joyce Lee says that her team often looks to patterns and textures found in interior decor — vintage textiles, rugs, weavings, art — when cooking up new clothing collections. Terrazzo, which is all over Madewell’s summer 2019 collection, was a natural progression: Lee says they loved its “color and ease” and felt it would translate beautifully into an all-over print.

There is one major difference between brands’ current love affair with terrazzo and its extended popularity in the mid-20th century, and that is the lifespan of the objects to which it’s being applied. Concrete and marble floors can be torn up, but they’re built to last a good deal longer than a fluttering summer dress or a novelty phone case. By the time those items came along, the flecked floors of our public spaces had already withstood decades of use and scrutiny. When today’s trend blows over, when the porcelain plates break and the soaps disappear down the drain, we’ll still have the unassuming terrazzo under our feet.

The first time I devised a plan to stop fidgeting with my eyebrows, I went to Duane Reade for a box of Just For Men beard dye. It was 2015, I was writing about fashion, and the model Cara Delevingne had recently ignited a craze for bold, heavy eyebrows. It was a cool look, which was a helpful cover for routinely tinting my eyebrows — which are naturally blonde and visible like a ghost in daylight — a shade of light brown.

What I was really after was accountability. For years I’d been in the habit of compulsively rubbing my eyebrows as a self-soothing mechanism in situations where I was feeling stressed, bored, tired, or relaxed, which was most of the time. The constant friction had worn away patches of hair, and I thought that if I made the damage fully apparent to myself, using a $10 box of beard dye, maybe I’d find the motivation to stop. That if I groomed my eyebrows regularly and filled in the holes with brow pencil when I went out in public — treating them with respect, while also making smudges a liability — the impulse would fade for good.

It didn’t, and this is not an essay about beard dye. 

Today my left eyebrow gets most of my attention, but I’ll ruffle both at once when a personal or work problem starts to seem insurmountable and my anxiety swells, as though literally ballooning in my chest, pressing so tightly against my ribs that I think I might burst. At times this activity carries me from mid-morning right up until the moment I fall asleep, with breaks for exercise (physically impossible, though I’ve tried) and face-to-face time with other people (usually too engaging). It’s what psychologists call a body-focused repetitive behavior, similar to but not exactly the same as trichotillomania, the compulsion to pull out one’s hair.

I work my eyebrows to calm myself, but more often than not it has the opposite effect, because once I begin, I struggle to stop. Doing so is like prising apart two very strong magnets that snap back together when you release your grip. When I decided to start dyeing my eyebrows, my habit had me feeling deeply ashamed: unspeakably weird, unpresentable, unprofessional, and out of control. 

This was most distressing at work, and work was where I felt most compelled to pick. Everyday office tedium was one cause, and an as-yet-unfounded fear of disappointing my editors, which reared its head while I raced to hit deadlines, was another. Half of my brain would be thinking about the article I was writing while the other half managed what felt like a hostage negotiation over my eyebrow rubbing. It went something like this:

Stop. Stop now. Aaaand stop. This is the last time, and then you’re going to stop forever. Okay, just stop.

This bargaining played on a loop for hours. 

For a while, tinting and filling in my eyebrows did actually help. My face felt mostly, blessedly off-limits during the workday. But it’s easy to feel keen on a new self-improvement project. As its novelty gradually faded, so did my resolve. I let my eyebrows return to their natural color.

Following in the steps of countless millennials, I started going to an evening art class earlier this year in a desperate attempt at self-care. I’d recently gone freelance, and a combination of taking on too much work and not knowing how to mitigate the daily isolation of my new job threw me into a sad stress hole from which I was struggling to find an exit. I was into drawing as a teenager, so live figure sessions seemed like a good replacement for an evening that I would otherwise spend worrying about imminent failure.

For $10, you get to sit in a studio with a bunch of friendly strangers and sketch a nude model, to whom everyone is extra gracious. You can bring a beer if you’d like. There is no instruction, but a staffer occasionally calls out for pose changes and breaks over the course of two-and-a-half hours.

I discovered that this is precisely the amount of time I needed to shake off the hundred tiny work demons clinging to my clothes at the end of the day — the ones who say things like, “Let’s imagine what it would be like to get sued by that person you’re profiling!” and, “If you blow just one deadline, your career will be over!” 

A redirection of energy takes place. Each drawing session begins with irritation at myself (“Why aren’t my hands and brain cooperating?”), which fades into defeatism (“I am terrible at this”), and then apathy followed by good-humored resignation (“You are here for the next two hours, so you might as well make the most of it”). Then I can finally have fun. When my speaking mind chimes in again, it’s usually with some degree of delight (“I made a thing!”). Drawing is like lifting my brain out of my head and setting it down beside me to take a nap while I work. When I pop it back in at the end of class, it feels quieter and better. Some people say hobbies are a form of meditation, and they’re right.

For these sessions, I bought a few pencils, a notepad, and a kneaded eraser, the gummy gray kind that doesn’t leave behind pilled rubber when you use it. It cost less than $1.50. I’d used kneaded erasers before, and one day it struck me, as I was evaluating my eyebrow habit for perhaps the trillionth time in my life, that it might be a satisfactory alternative to scraping my fingernail across the prickly bald patch above my left eye. 

Fidget objects are a classic tactic for rerouting body-focused repetitive behaviors. Around the time that I experimented with eyebrow tinting — the height of my stress over my habit — I’d also seen a therapist. She was a nice woman with good suggestions, like playing with rubber bands instead, or applying lotion to my hands, or encasing them in tube socks when I got home from work. I shot down her ideas one by one: The rubber bands just didn’t do it for me, I find hand lotion repulsive, I wanted to text. When I ended my sessions with her a few months later, it wasn’t with the self-punishing frustration that had brought me to her in the first place, surprisingly. I discovered that I just didn’t want to try that hard. So I went to town on my eyebrows again, with slightly more fatalism than before.

I wasn’t expecting much from the eraser, but it turned out to be a solid distraction: good enough to keep me from touching my eyebrows for an hour or two at a time, sometimes more. You pull it apart, creating a bridge of soft, pale gray putty, and then you fold it back on itself, packing it down until it looks like a small stone. You repeat this motion over and over, heating up the rubber and your biceps in turn. I put the eraser in a plastic sandwich bag and started carrying it around with me, pulling it out when the first urges of the day struck. 

This is not a success story in the conventional sense. When you use an eraser, a shadow of your old work remains on the page. I still fidget with my eyebrows every day. I’m not sure this eraser would be the best $100 I ever spent, or even the best $20, because that was a ticket to “Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again!” But just like the drawing class it serves, it buys me pockets of time away from the furious commentary in my head, allowing me to bob up to the surface for a lungful of air. For $1.50, I think that’s incredible.

I don’t even mind that it’s a part-time solution. A few years ago, I was constantly putting pressure on myself to stop messing with my eyebrows, right this second and then forever. I’ve started seeing a new therapist who’s nudged me toward learning how to de-escalate, because admitting to myself that it’s okay if I never stop this habit makes it feel less overwhelming. I feel more in control.

Maybe a year after I stopped tinting my eyebrows, I got dinner with two close friends from college at a noodle spot in New York. We wound up talking about the things we do with our hair: One tugged at her ponytail, which I was aware of, and the other pulled out his facial hair, which I was not. As we got into the weird specifics of these habits we try to hide from others, including our friends, it started to seem very funny. We were all in the muck together, and the muck was fine.

Eliza Brooke is a freelance writer who covers design, style, and consumer culture. In her spare time, she goes for walks and watches Graham Norton clips on YouTube.