​​The Cactus Myth

I celebrated my 40th birthday solo in saguaro country. The iconic cactus isn’t what we think it is. Neither are we.

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Until recently, the closest I’d come to seeing a saguaro cactus in person was via group chat. 

The cactus is a versatile emoji. You might text a cactus emoji to say that someone’s coworker is totally being prickly or that your friend is resilient AF. 

In real life, saguaros do come across as prickly and resilient. But when I flew to see them for my 40th birthday, that’s not what I noticed most. 

First, saguaros are very big. Almost 80 feet tall in some cases, standing like sentinels. Even among their peers, their hulking uniqueness is obvious in a way that oak trees’ are not. 

Real saguaros aren’t like the emoji blown up. No two look alike. Some have a dozen or more arms. Some have none. A forest of deciduous trees looks like a carpet, a single entity, acting as a unit. A saguaro forest does not seem like a single unit. They are one and one and one and one. 

Maybe this is why people get saguaros tattooed on their ankles and forearms when they want to mark their own independence and ability to thrive despite harsh circumstances. 

But my first night with the saguaros, a ranger at Saguaro National Park told me something interesting. She said that you can replant saguaros. But when you do, you have to position them just so. Saguaros have to be oriented exactly how they were originally — facing the sun precisely how they have been — or they will die. 
That didn’t seem like a fact that fit into a story of fierce independence and rugged resilience. It sounded like a more recognizable story, one about a creature that exists in a context. And depends on the world around them. 

We Americans love a story of a go-it-alone hero. I was there, with the saguaros, living out my own version of the tale. As I told anyone who asked, I was there in Tucson for a solo adventure to celebrate my 40th birthday. I had left my husband and our three kids back in Minnesota. I was an independent lady. 

But saying I was alone was also kind of untrue. When I got on the plane, I wasn’t alone at all. There were pilots who flew the plane and flight attendants who brought me soda water and a seatmate who lifted my bag into the overhead compartment. No one needed me to find the Bluey download or open their bag of Sun Chips, but I absolutely did not get to Arizona by myself. 

Of course, it did mean something to say I traveled solo. Someone observing me in Tucson would have seen a woman setting off at trailheads without a buddy and eating at tables for one. I experienced a different kind of company and support and responsibilities than if I had traveled with my family in tow. It is a fact to say that I left them behind, and my trip was shaped by that choice. I could pay attention to myself differently. 

There is a trend in pop psychology, and even evidence-based mental health treatment modalities, that likes to imagine emotionally healthy humans like the saguaro emoji: Rugged. Independent. Thriving no matter what life throws at you. Cognitive behavioral therapies, the spine of modern psychotherapy, are based on the idea that if you change your thoughts about what’s happening, you can achieve well-being regardless of your circumstances. 

That’s always seemed equal parts empowering and damning to me. I love the idea of cultivating a mind sharp enough to insulate me from whatever comes. 

But I’ve never been able to do it. 

Not completely. No matter how hard I try. I need people. I need affection and small talk. I get sad when sad things happen. I get angry when I encounter injustice. I used to think that meant there was something wrong with me. That, ideally, I should aim to be immune to my circumstances. I shouldn’t need anyone. But as I enter my fifth decade, I just can’t believe that’s true anymore. 

I once took a self-compassion class where the instructors invited us to imagine something we’d like whispered in our ear every day and practice saying it to ourselves. Other people tearfully reported on the power of giving themselves what they needed. But I could not get past the realization that who did the saying meant something to me. There are some things we can’t give ourselves. There are some things we can only receive.

One morning during my trip, I was on a hike in the Sonoran Desert. It was sunny and hot. At a certain point, about four hours and hundreds of cacti in, I began to feel shaky. I needed carbs that I hadn’t packed. So I decided to ask each person I passed. The first two pairs said they had nothing to spare. The third handed me a peanut butter Cliff Bar. As I ate in the the sun, I felt the sugars begin to reanimate me. I was a creature in the desert, connected to the sun and the hikers and everything around me.

I wonder if emotionally healthy humans aren’t more like actual saguaros than the cartoon kind: Creatures who exist in conversation with our environment. It doesn’t mean we’re not resilient. You can be fierce and strong and still need the light to hit you just so. 

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What I’ve Been Working On

Winning an award! As my husband drove us to dinner to celebrate my 40th birthday (this was the night before my trip), a work email came in from the American Society of Journalists and Authors with the subject “ASJA Awards.” I thought, well that’s interesting.

In the recesses of my memory I remembered noting that the awards ceremony would be on that date, and wondered…could this really be happening?!

It was.

Here’s the email:

I won an award! On my 40th birthday! It’s one of the big ones this organization bestows each year. Officially, it’s an ASJA 2026 June Roth Memorial Award for Outstanding Medical Journalism Honorable Mention for my article “What RFK Jr. Gets Wrong About Autism” in The Dispatch.

Here’s what the judges said:

“Emily P.G. Erickson’s article clearly makes the case for countering Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s claims about autism by using data and expert sources. The well-written article debunks myths by describing how researchers define autism spectrum disorder, consider its impact on people diagnosed with it and look at its likely cause.“

Yay!

As it may not surprise you given the essay above, I think it’s normal and healthy to need some degree of validation from your community, and I’m so grateful for this dose of it.

What the science says makes mental health conditions unique — and what doesn’t. It really bugs me when people act like mental health conditions make someone fundamentally different from the rest of humanity. At the same time, I acknowledge there really are particular considerations for individuals living with these conditions. So I always appreciate research that teases out what’s unique about them — and what’s not. In my latest column on bipolar disorder research for bpHope, I got to cover a study on sleep problems in kids whose parents have bipolar disorder. The upshot? It’s not a parent-with-bipolar-disorder thing to need to watch out for your kid’s sleep. It’s a good parent thing. Read more about that study and two more in my article: Bipolar Research & Insights: Lasting Symptoms, Early Trauma, and Tween Sleep | April 2026.

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Book Recommendation

In a Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive, by Leidy Klotz, PhD

When I tell people I double majored in psychology and geography, they usually raise their eyebrows and joke that the two have nothing in common. While I’ve come to anticipate this reaction, at first, it threw me off. I’ve never seen in that way. To me, it’s always felt natural that the space inside your head and the space outside your head intersect and influence each other. 

Leidy Klotz, PhD, professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, gets it too. His book In A Good Place: How the Spaces Where We Live, Work, and Play Can Help Us Thrive explores the premise the our physical spaces are constantly shaping how we think, feel, and interact with others. 

Our inner and outer worlds are inseparable, a case Klotz makes through science and story, framing the book around eight themes (like engage, decide, grow, and belong), with each chapter capped with practices to put the ideas to work. Even as someone who has thought a lot about this intersection, I still learned things. One example that stuck with me: To help kids grow and internalize important lessons, have those conversations somewhere new. Klotz has a talent for picking the just-right anecdote, and backs everything with 70 pages of endnotes. He’s also a dad, and this book is partly an homage to his daughter, who passed away at four-and-a-half-years old, infusing the book with a profound sweetness that gutted me as a parent of a four-and-a-half year old.

I’ve read psychology books, geography books, and design books, but never one quite like this. Out now.

*Thank you to Press Shop PR and Little, Brown for the advance review copy. See my disclosure statement for my policy on accepting books for review.

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