Letter from the Editorial Board

Recently, I was taken aback when an adolescent patient told me she was hopelessly nostalgic. At 16, I thought? But then I began to understand as she described a vanished world of pretend, in which she and her best friend had transformed themselves into ponies prancing in the woods that separated their two houses. And they had had a clubhouse too, and there they had plotted out their strategies to win the war against the witches and warlocks and other creatures that sought to subdue them. Now, she said with real bitterness, she no longer knew how to have fun (or more accurately, I thought to myself, she had lost her ability to play). Instead, she described how she spent her free time by herself, reading or doing Sudoku. On the weekends she worked for a florist. There she was always the first to volunteer to work in the back room, where she spent hours carefully removing thorns from the stems of roses destined for fancy bouquets. My patient's dearest wish, she told me, was to become invisible.

At this point in the hour, the patient recalled a memory. Last summer her best friend (and former partner in play) had begged her to dress in pink for their upcoming trip to see Barbie (Gerwig, 2023). Come on, she said — let's do it! At first reluctantly and then with more enthusiasm, my patient made a deep dive into her closet and came up with a dress from her middle-school days that still fit. It was pink, with ruffles, and as she put it on she had felt a sort of thrill, she confided.

Then she walked into the hall, where she ran into her older brother, who since leaving for college had become for her the final arbiter of cool, and who often teased her for being a bookworm who never went out. “Really,” he said with a smirk, “are you serious?” And with that, my patient wilted. She mustered all her resources to feign indifference, but inwardly she felt mortified. A few minutes later, she went back into her room and changed into a pair of jeans and an oversized T-shirt, the outfit t