When despair for the world grows in me, I try to Wendell Berry my way through it and find peace in wild things. I didn’t really find peace, but I did find seashells.

It was a hard winter. My mom was really unwell, and I spent more time in the trenches of eldercare than I expected. I got really into seashells, in kind of a weird way.

I was dissociating for far too long (my brain’s favorite and most useless trauma response), so I started going on long walks to try to ground myself back in my body. In Paris, that meant my local cemetery. In America, it meant walking the coastline once, sometimes twice a day, collecting the most perfect shells I could find as tiny but tangible reminders of all the beauty that still exists.

One day at the hospital, my sister picked up my coat and asked why it was so heavy. I replied without thinking, “my pockets are full of seashells.” She just said, “Right. Normal.”

No one really wanted to talk about my seashells, in the way no one really wants to touch someone else’s sadness. But I felt like, in the face of everything, we could all use a little whimsy so it feels important to share that there is a saltwater clam shell called a kitten paw because it does in fact look like a kitten’s paw.

I was going to a nature preserve in Rhode Island almost every day, usually early in the morning or just before dusk. One evening, I turned a corner on the beach and saw a man in full camouflage, holding a camo-covered rifle, half-hidden in the brush.

I froze, trying to understand if he was there to kill birds or humans.

Then I realized I was standing there with tears frozen to my cheeks, listening to Gracie Abrams on repeat, and thought, very calmly, that he probably couldn’t hurt me more than I was already hurting. So I kept walking.

He gave me a small, sheepish wave. I kept walking, quietly furious. Because who brings a gun to a public beach? Why do men have to ruin everything for everyone else? In fact, why are men?

At some point, I became aware that I am too European for this now. I am no longer accustomed to this particular American reality wherein you have the ever present possibility of man with a gun at any place, anytime.

Later, in the parking lot, I saw him again, studying a sign. When I got closer, I realized it was deer hunting season. And that I had been walking, every day, through a hunting preserve. At dusk. During peak feeding time.

So it turned out it was less that the men were ruining the landscape and more that I was misunderstanding it entirely. I was ruining the hunting preserve for the men.

Sadness has a way of making me self-absorbed, of narrowing down the world until it feels like everything is happening to you rather than around you.

Every day, I tried to Mary Oliver my way out of it. Mostly, I just wore red.