Hello friend! Welcome to Scrap Facts.
I’m a health care reporter, and a general maximal enthusiast. Each issue, I'll write to you about what I’ve learned through life and on the job.
We had a wedding!
It’s been three months to the day since me and my spouse, Ben, celebrated our commitment to each other in front of our friends and family.
That day in July was a dream — and it’s a stark contrast to today, where I write to you from my couch as I recover from some non-Covid viral infection. (Can you believe those still exist? Rude, I say!)
Going into our wedding, I thought a lot about love, and what it actually means over a lifetime. It’s one of those concepts that looks absolutely nothing like I thought it would in my younger years, and it reminds me that when we let go of our expectations, we make room to have them wildly exceeded.
So without further ado, I’m sharing an adaptation of part of my vows with you all today:
The idea of true love has never been appealing to me.
True love, as it’s often presented to us, is an inevitable and stagnant concept. Whenever I got to the end of books or movies and two characters got together after overcoming whatever obstacles were between them, I always wondered what happened next. They're together, they're happy…and then what? Is everyone just supposed to stay exactly as they are in that moment? Frankly, that sounds entirely unromantic to me.
The love that I want in my life instead is an active choice. It’s something dynamic that requires constant participation as the settings and recipients evolve over time. As much as we often resist change, it’s a consequence of time, and often precursor to growth.
My spouse and I started choosing each other from the first night we met nearly five years ago. Ben chose to ask if he could walk me home to the metro after a housewarming party from have mutual friends; I chose to accept and to stick with him — even as he walked in completely the wrong direction — because I was having fun. He chose to challenge me if darts (he lost, an important part of the story), and I chose to reach out to him after I eventually made it home in one piece.
Ben traveled a lot in the first months we were together, and he chose to buy me books and other gifts while abroad to close the distance between us. When he was back in town, I chose to invite him to come away with me on a weekend trip to the mountains, where we huddled cozy under blankets as an ice storm surged outside.
I blinked, it seems, and the choices we made graduated to hold more significance. We decided to live together. We adopted a cat, and we stood by one another through career shifts and athletic feats and injuries and illness. And we chose find joy and silliness in those moments where we could have otherwise withdrawn into ourselves as the grief of the first year of pandemic set in.
Through those choices, I learned that the love I had imagined for myself as a kid reading those books with happy endings was too small. I noticed that if I kept choosing my eventual spouse, the love available to me — and us — is better than anything I could have ever imagined.
We’ve never been passive. We’ve always been active participants in our story together. And frankly, that's far more romantic and empowering than any kind of inevitable true love could ever be.
What else have I been up to?
A selection of my work for POLITICO from the last few weeks:
Three questions on what a potential Alzheimer’s treatment would mean for Medicare
New head tobacco regulator shies away from taking unauthorized e-cigs off shelves
Listen on POLITICO Pulse Check: A primer on Omicron boosters, and part of my conversation with FDA’s director of the Center for Tobacco Products — his first major media appearance.
Watch on POLITICO’s IG: I discuss Juul’s latest settlement over the company’s advertising practices.
November Project, the running group I co-lead here in Washington, D.C., has taken me to Boulder, Colorado; Providence, Rhode Island and most recently Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for the group’s 10th summit. We estimate roughly 600 people from our 50+ communities are in this photo — but we’re so much more in real life! Highly recommend finding a group near you.
That’s all for now. Stay curious, friend! ❤️
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