Jed Wolf

A few days ago, I posted an essay about painting wooden frogs for my neighbors—Guiro frogs that croak loudly when you scrape them with a stick.

The essay was about choosing presence over paralysis, making noise together instead of doomscrolling alone while the world burns. I wrote about how “knowing paralyzes” and how I’d rather hear neighbors croaking “we’re here” to each other than spend another hour reading about golden ballrooms and collapsing democracies.

I was also spiraling with paranoia about having just sent my memoir to my editor—100,000 words about storm drains, boarding school sex with a teacher, bathhouse addiction and every shameful thing I’ve ever done, now sitting in someone with authority’s inbox where I couldn’t take it back.

Most responses to the frog essay were kind. But one of my friends commented with a question that’s been working me ever since: Wasn’t I just advocating for ignoring the boiling point? Like the proverbial frog in slowly heating water, shouldn’t we jump out rather than croak at each other—an astute observation I wished I’d included in my essay. So here I am.

My first reaction was to be snarky. I wrote something about choosing to chop off and eat each other’s frog legs before we boiled—gallows humor that felt clever for about thirty seconds. Then I deleted it. My experienced adult self knew better than to start an argument on Facebook.

But my fourteen-year-old wanted to stick it to her.

Since sending my memoir to my editor, I’ve been depressed. Not the manageable kind where you push through, gardening, cleaning and attending to things. I spent a whole day in bed yesterday feeling the specific hollow dread of having exposed myself completely—waiting for the world to confirm I’m as fucked up as I felt at fourteen.

Unable to sleep last night, against every warning voice telling me I’d only hate myself more, I decided to listen to the first chapter of my memoir using text-to-speech. Something prodded me—curiosity, masochism, maybe just insomnia. Up ‘till then, I’d used Barrack Obama to give my memoir gravitas but last night, I scrolled through voice options without my glasses, picked an icon that looked male, and pressed play.

It sounded like Hayley Mills.

I might’ve switched—found something more appropriate, more adult, more masculine for heaven’s sake. But within the first sentence, something rang true. By the second paragraph, tears were streaming.

The voice was perfect.

Not because it sounded like me, but because it sounded like the fourteen-year-old boy who wrote about arriving at boarding school. And as I listened, the following chapters maintained that sprite-like British innocence—curious, observant, confused—not yet hardened by decades of self pity, therapy or retrospective wisdom.

Without the filter of adult understanding, that innocent voice noticed his teacher’s penny loafers under a bathroom stall, the way bulges look upside down, how dog slobber feels, what shameful bubbles smell like. I sounded like someone perpetually surprised by his own life, trying to figure it out in real time, naturally honest.

And far less terrified than I’d felt writing it.

Why had I been so depressed since sending it off? What was my adult self so scared of? It was as if I hadn’t been listening. My fourteen-year-old was proud of what we’d written and here I was acting more pathetic than ever in my life worrying about rejection.

I heard precocious Hayley Mills in “The Parent Trap” unable to process her parents’ divorce but doing something about it anyway.

And here’s where my friend’s comment led me:

Who doesn’t have a fourteen-year-old inside who needed compassion and got correction instead? The one who learned to perform, to hide, to fight, to freeze, to flee, to intellectualize—anything but be seen in their messy, confused innocence.

Trump building his golden ballroom? Putin annexing countries? Kennedy driving around with a dead bear? Scheming, plotting ways to feel? They’re the most dangerous kind of adults—unable to face being ostracized, needing to matter so desperately they’ll burn or build empires to outrun themselves.

I’m not excusing the corruption, the chaos, the cruelty. I’m saying when we try to understand them—analyze them, explain them, develop solutions, create systems to prevent future harm like some Netflix dystopian series—we’re just creating more distance. Making ourselves feel superior. Turning them into unsolvable demonic-scale problems.

The alternative isn’t pretending the water isn’t boiling or the world isn’t on fire.

The alternative is what Guiros are actually about: presence instead of paralysis. Not burying our heads in the sand while Rome burns but doing something other than “knowing” our worst instincts into inaction before we actually croak.

Here’s what I’ve learned from hearing my memoir narrated by a sprite-like fourteen-year-old British boy: The child who needed compassion sixty years ago is the same one who needs it now. And he’s not special.

We can’t fix our supposed leaders. We can’t understand them into behaving better. We can’t solve their inner child problems with more analysis, more knowing, more explaining, more hating, more preaching.

But we can croak at each other. Imperfectly. Ridiculously.

And if it takes off, maybe millions of us with recycled plastic frogs will descend on DC like a plague.