“And we don’t give them after 65. So that means this will be your last Pap smear.”1

Oh, cool.

Wait, what?

I had a hysterectomy at 41, but my cervix was not removed. So, even though I haven’t had ovaries or a uterus for 20 years, Pap smears have remained part of my gynecological life. For a long while, I had them yearly.

“Does it matter that I once tested positive for HPV, back in college?” I ask. (Thanks, promiscuous boyfriend. Thanks a lot.)

“No,” she says. “Not after all this time. Because you’ve had regular screenings that have all been negative, you’re not considered at risk for cervical cancer.”

“Oh,” I say.

She says nothing, just looks kindly at me.

“I know I should be glad,” I say, “but it feels weird.”

“Yeah, I get that,” she says.

I know I should be glad because no one likes a Pap smear. The cold gel. The hard speculum. The hollow scraping. The feet up in stirrups while you’re on your back with your most intimate and vulnerable parts open to what feels like the world. I want to feel glad to leave this particular experience behind, but instead I feel unsettled.

Physically, I haven’t yet lost much to aging. After years of reproductive system dysfunction, my hysterectomy left me nearly giddy with delight. No more menstruation or pregnancy worries and woes. No more cramping, spotting, or bleeding. No more tampons or pads, and everything that came with them. Good riddance to all that, I’d thought.

This should feel the same way, I think. And yet, it doesn’t. It is one thing to lose something by choice, and another to lose it because you’ve aged out of it. Before today, I didn’t even know Pap smears were a thing a person aged out of, so I’m caught by surprise.

It’s not an ageist thing, my feelings, I don’t think. It’s more an identity thing. No more Pap smears means I’m moving out of a stage of womanhood I’ve been in for more than 40 years. Of course, there have been changes over those years, but I’ve been fundamentally the same. I’ve been in the category of women who need Pap smears, which is most women. Now I won’t be.

It’s also a mortality thing, something I’ve been gently nudging up against in different ways. I recently saw a condo for sale that looked appealing. It was in an over-55 complex, one that I’m now qualified to live in. When we needed a new roof a few years back, one bidder extolled its 30-year guarantee and I joked that we probably didn’t need one that would last that long. I remember when my grandparents began attending memorial services regularly; now my (only 20 years older than me) parents are at that stage of life, which means I’m next-up for the funeral-attending one (and there isn’t another one after the funeral-attending one).

This, the last Pap smear, is not a gentle nudge. It’s more like a shove to the shoulder that announces: You’re no longer in middle-age, honey. Not really.

OK, not at all.

The doctor is wonderful. Apparently, Pap smears aren’t what they once were. Before starting, she asks if I’d like to have someone else in the room during the procedure. She tells me what she is going to do before every single thing she does, including tearing the paper off one of her instruments. She asks permission before touching me anywhere, even placing a hand on my leg. She warms the speculum and the gel. I have a long history of vulvar pain issues, and she is so gentle that I experience no pain. It is quick, easy, and comfortable.

I remember the one doctor I had, not long after my children were born, and how his fingers brushed against my thigh in a way that didn’t feel right, and how I became aware that there was no nurse in the room. I remember how he’d quickly cranked the speculum open, then told me that it was unfair to my husband that my vulvar pain was keeping him from enjoying intercourse with me.

I cried in the parking lot after that Pap smear, not really understanding why and feeling that I was over-reacting. He’d later lose his practice and surrender his license because of sexual misconduct with patients. I’d wonder then if he’d been testing boundaries with me that day, or if he simply didn’t care about my feelings because my pain disqualified me from being someone he’d want to cross them with.

“Well,” I say as she scoots away from me and tells me I can sit up, “that was the best Pap smear I’ve ever had. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” she says. She smiles. “I suppose it’s good to end on a high note.”

It is, but I realize I am a little angry, too, that I’ve gone my whole life without the kind of care that she’s provided today. It didn’t take any extra resources for her to tell me what was happening, to ask permission before touching, to check on my comfort, to move just a bit more slowly. To show kindness.

There are so many things any of us do in which we have to accept what we are given. I stopped seeing that other doctor not long after the day I cried in the parking lot, but the kind of Pap smear I’ve just had wasn’t available (to me, anyway) until now. The last Pap smear has me wondering what things I can control, though. What are the things in my life that I have the power to experience differently than I have been? Where can I be more thoughtful and more caring, to myself or others? When can I ask for accommodations that would be easy to make? Where are the places that such shifts won’t really cost me or another person much, if anything?

It also has me thinking about last times. So often we do not know when a time for something is the last time. I wish I could remember the last time I sat in my great-grandmother’s kitchen. The last time I went sledding with all the kids in my neighborhood. The last time I soothed each of my children when they woke in the night. The last time I picked one of them up from a school activity and ran them through a drive-thru for a treat. The last Pap smear has me wondering if it felt so different from the others simply because I knew it was the last one. Perhaps I paid a different kind of attention than I’ve previously done.

I don’t want to try to live as if every day might be the last one. I know it might, but that kind of awareness is impossible to sustain, and probably for good reason. I think being constantly aware that every day could be the end of all days might actually get in the way of fully living in the present. I have enough issues with anxiety that I don’t need to be in a constant state of wondering if everything I’m doing will ever be done again.

And yet, I’m feeling grateful for this last Pap smear, and not just because it was such a great one (as Pap smears go). It’s giving me a new lens for looking at experiences through, is becoming a kind of short-hand for briefly stopping and noticing small ways I can make something better or appreciate it more. “It’s a last Pap smear kind of thing,” I’ve found myself thinking more than once since I had mine, most recently when I took an extra few minutes to stop at my produce market to buy local strawberries, which are in season for only a few short, glorious weeks each year.

Stopping and buying the strawberries as often as I can, and then letting myself eat them straight from the carton without saving them for something more special feels like a way of touching the thigh of my life with kindness, of warming the speculum of a world that so often roughly pushes us open with its cold, hard edges.

“Who knows how many more years I’ll get to enjoy these?” I thought as I popped one into my mouth in the car, wishing I hadn’t waited until the question feels more pragmatic than rhetorical to ask it.

Any metaphorical “last Pap smear” kinds of things in your life? Or actual Pap smear things that might be good to share? Or things you thought you’d welcome saying good-bye to, but then found yourself feeling things you didn’t expect? Feel free to leave a comment that goes wherever these words have taken you. Reading your responses is the best part of sharing my writing with you.

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Some people who put puzzles together like to put all of the pieces out on a table. I like to leave them in the box, where I can comb through them. I’ll choose a part of the image to focus on—the warm cozy den in the trunk of a tree surrounded by snow, the bricks on a house, a tablecloth—and then I’ll run my fingers through the box, looking for pieces that belong to the part I’m focusing on. I like gathering a small pile of possible pieces, and then piecing them together. Then, I’ll choose another part to focus on. Seek and join, seek and join, over and over and over again.

When Alice finally lands at the bottom of the rabbit hole, she finds herself in a long corridor of doors, all of them locked. On a table she finds a key, but it does not open any of the doors she can see. Finally, she finds a small door behind a curtain, and the key opens it. Through the door, Alice can see “the loveliest garden you ever saw.” Unfortunately, she is too big to get through the door. There follows a series of unsettling events, in which Alice drinks a potion that makes her small, then eats a cake that makes her large, then cools herself with a fan that makes her so small again she almost drowns in the tears she’s shed in frustration and disappointment at being unable to find a way into the garden.

For years, once I realized that I was an introvert with some autistic traits, I thought my choice to be an educator was a bad one. If I’d better understood myself, I’d say, I would not have chosen this career. I was good at many parts of teaching, and I often liked it, but try as I might (and I tried, a lot) I could not find a way to be OK in it. My favorite time of the day was early morning, before any students were in the building.

Still, I could never bring myself to leave it for something else. Before teaching, I’d worked a year-round job as an editor, and I couldn’t stand the idea of returning to that kind of tedium. I couldn’t stand the idea of spending every day at a desk and having only two weeks a year away from it.

Now that I know about the push-pull of AuDHD, I understand teaching’s appeal. It was both predictable (same kids, same schedule, same classes, every day) and not. Even though I often taught the same classes years in a row, I never taught them the same way twice. I had the freedom to change things up, satisfying what I now recognize as a need for novelty.

And of course, there was summer break. I needed it every year to recover from the months of teaching. I knew that no matter what I did to make money, I would need more than two weeks a year to recover from doing it.

I understand what it is like to grow small, then large, then small again. To keep trying to figure out how get everything to line up just right—size, key, door—so that you can finally get into a garden.

A friend asks: “Do you think a puzzle knows the places it has been sliced or just considers itself one big picture?” (You can see, I am sure, why we are friends.)

Her question makes me think about the kinds of puzzles that are more a compilation of images than one seamless one. Working a puzzle with a picture that is a collection of book covers, or tea tins, or houses, where each one is distinct, feels like putting together a collection of small puzzles. Even though I tend to break a puzzle image into parts, I don’t like these kinds of puzzles. I prefer to work toward one big, unified image.

I know this isn’t what my friend meant. She was talking about the way a whole picture is literally cut into parts. Each individual puzzle piece is a kind of picture, though, if you think about it. If you think about Cubism, maybe.

In John Tenniel’s illustrations for Alice in Wonderland, there is one image that reminds me a bit of the modern artists who would emerge in the wake of the Victorian era:

Alice is not cut into planes, the way Picasso might have drawn her, but there’s something about the distortion of her neck that speaks to the modernity on Carroll’s and Tenniel’s horizon. It’s the way her head remains small while the rest of her grows large. With such a neck, it would be relatively easy to cut that little head off.

One of the children I helped raise used to stay home from high school at least one day each week. They’d stay in bed and remain there while the rest of us went out into the world.

They infuriated me. Wouldn’t I like to stay home, too?

They puzzled me. Could they really not get up, or was it a choice?

They intrigued me. How were they making this work for them?

I grudgingly admired them. Everything I’d been taught from the time I was their age told me that their refusal was evidence of something wrong or weak, but I could see the strength it took to do what they were doing, a different kind of strength than the one I’d always used to get myself out of bed on the days when doing so felt nearly impossible.

(I am so tempted now to go off on a tangent that would include Victorian ideas about hysteria, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and trad wives and MAGA women—but I won’t. Nevertheless, I want you to know that these are pieces in the puzzle, too.)

When the pandemic came, it was terrible. And it was also wonderful, a truth I am loathe to admit out loud in the aftermath of such widespread suffering, even now, six years later. I turned a small bedroom into my work-from-home office. It has a south-facing window, so it got natural light most of the day. I had a comfortable chair. It was blessedly quiet. When I needed a break, I could walk down the hall and change a load of laundry, or put something in a marinade, or unload the dishwasher. I was more productive in my work than I had been in years, and at the end of the day, I had a kind of energy for living that I hadn’t had in a very long time. That first, disorienting spring I had time at the end of the day to sit on my front porch in waning afternoon sun and sip something cold before making dinner. The work was different and bad, and there was fear about so many things, AND I felt a kind of calm I’d never known in my adult life.

It is so often true that we cannot feel the weight of a load we are carrying until the weight is lifted. We cannot afford to let ourselves know how heavy it is, especially when we feel it is a load we cannot possibly put down. It wasn’t the weight of the pandemic that broke something in me; it was feeling the weight I’d been carrying before the pandemic hit that did it.

I’ve never had any interest in solving three-dimensional puzzles. How do you even do that? I like my puzzles to lie flat on a table. I like them to feel manageable.

But after my session with my therapist, when she says, yes neurodiversity, but also trauma but also toxic systems, I feel as if that’s what she’s given me—a box of puzzle pieces that I have to fit together into a structure that can stand up on its own. And there’s no picture on the box. (Wait, is there even a box?) I have to discover the picture as I put the puzzle together.

This is more novelty than I ever wanted.

The first time Alice shrinks and begins to cry, she sharply scolds herself.

“‘Come, there’s no use in crying like that!’ said Alice to herself, rather sharply; ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’ She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,” thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’”

Ah, Alice. I feel ya.

Alice drinks and eats and fans herself to find a way out of the rabbit hole and into the beautiful garden. I have been trying to read my way there.

In the weeks since I fell into the AuDHD rabbit hole, I have read and read and read. I have read about neurodivergence. I have read about trauma. I have read about patriarchy and capitalism and misogyny and feminism. I have read about attachment theory. I have read about intellectual giftedness (another tangent not addressed here, but also part of the puzzle).

The most important thing I have seen: It is hard to know where certain behaviors and patterns of behaviors come from. Behaviors that stem from trauma can look just like behaviors that stem from neurodivergence and can look just like behaviors that stem from attachment injuries. (Let’s not call them attachment disorders. The language we use matters.)

Let’s take hypervigilance, for example. What it has looked like for me:

My immediate response to anyone being late (even just a little bit) and unreachable is to imagine them in some kind of catastrophic situation. They’ve been in a car accident or assaulted or abducted. In my family we have jokingly called this my “dead in a ditch syndrome.” I know my response is illogical, and when I catch myself going there, I talk to myself much as Alice does. (CBT for the win!) But there is a tiny, tiny thrum of anxiety running through me until I know they are safe and not dead in a ditch (literally or metaphorically).

I often know my husband’s emotions before he does, especially if something is wrong for him. I’m attuned to his slightest indicators of distress: a jiggling foot, a flatness in his eyes, a particular way of breathing.

I am constantly clocking the behaviors and body language of other people in public settings, particularly those of men. Are they looking at something a bit too long? Is something off about their dress, is there something that doesn’t add up correctly? Are they looking at me—and if so, how and why?

Where does my hypervigilance come from? Is it the result of growing up in a family with a volatile parent, where I learned early that safety required reading the room for the most subtle indicators of pending danger? Or is it the result of a neurology that has difficulty filtering out necessary from unnecessary sensory information, so that my brain is paying attention to everything, all the time? Or is it from living in a female body in a society in which violence against women is so pervasive that attunement to threat was established before I was even conscious of it? Or is it from living in a society so dysfunctional that we cannot seem to stem our horrific and seemingly random acts of mass violence, and working in institutions where we regularly anticipated and prepared for such acts?

I suppose the answer is Yes. I suppose the answer is, All of the Above.

To make matters trickier, neurodivergent people are more likely to suffer from trauma than neurotypical people are. They are more likely to be diagnosed with a personality disorder, or anxiety, or depression. Of course they are! Bad things happen to us because we don’t get a lot of things about how other people work and operate! We don’t always behave in ways that others deem acceptable, especially authority-type others. Knowing that you’re likely to be doing things “wrong” a lot of the time would make anyone anxious and/or depressed. But also: Our society has created conceptions of behavioral disorders and mental illnesses that pathologize difference. My hypervigilance might very well be a logical response to the intersections between my biology, my history, and the environments I have lived within.

Borders and boundaries between our various paradigms for explaining human behavior and feelings feel slippery and shifty, and perhaps the most important truth is that we don’t really know enough about any of these things to have clear understandings of them. Our ideas about so many different things that fall under the umbrella of psychology have undergone such radical changes in the course of relatively recent history that it seems foolish to believe that today’s “knowledge” is definitive.

Where does that leave us? As reader Kari so eloquently responded to the second part of this series, “WELL WHAT THE FUCK DO I DO WITH ALL OF THIS, EXACTLY?”

Alice never does line everything up so that she has they key to the garden door in hand while she is the right size to go through it. After she cries a pool of tears and encounters a bunch of birds and animals in the water (whom she manages to offend by saying the wrong things about her cat, Dinah), she sets out to find the door but “everything seemed to have changed since her swim in the pool, and the great hall, with the glass table and the little door, had vanished completely.”

When I was teaching narrative writing to middle and high school students, I taught against one ending in particular: “And then the alarm went off, and she realized it was all a dream.”

It was a lazy ending, I said. It was unsatisfying, I said. It was an easy way out of the narrative dilemmas you’ve created, I said.

Imagine my disappointment with the ending of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, when the story turns out to have been a dream. At the climax—when the whole pack of royal cards comes flying down upon Alice in the Queen’s court—Alice wakes up with her head in her older sister’s lap, dead leaves from an overhead tree fluttering down on her face.

After telling her sister all about her dream, Alice runs into the house for tea. Her sister then goes into some kind of reverie, where she can feel the grass moving as the White Rabbit hustles by, and she can hear the rattling tea cups from the Mad Hatter’s party and the Queen’s shrill voice and the Mock Turtle’s sobs. But then she realizes that if she opens her eyes, all would revert to “dull reality.” Alice’s vivid world is something the sister consigns to an idealized, childlike way of being, and she imagines that when Alice is a grown woman she will “gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago.” She imagines that adult Alice will “feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.”

What a lazy, easy, and unsatisfying ending.

While working on these words, I wake up one morning with Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” on repeat in my head. I have loved this song since I was a girl, especially the way it rises to its crescendo ending:

Remember what the dormouse said
Keep your head
Keep your head

I google the lyrics, wondering if there’s something more in them, something I need to see to bring this essay series to a satisfying ending (because I don’t have one). And that is how I learn that I have misheard the ending of this song for more than 50 years. It’s not “keep your head.” It’s “feed your head.”

How can I have not fully known something I’ve listened to (and loved) so many, many times? What other things do I not know that I think I know?

And how might our lives be different if we focused on feeding our heads rather than on trying to keep them, especially when we find ourselves in places like Wonderland, where what is said is not really how things are, and so many things don’t make the kind of sense we expect them to?

Don’t really make much sense at all, if we’re being honest.

How many times have some of us felt ruled by a Queen who wants to impose a sentence before a verdict has been reached, or a King who cannot decide whether what we don’t know is important or unimportant? How many times have we felt caught in a situation in which we are being held accountable to rules that are being made up on the spot, but we’re being told that they are the oldest rules in the book?

It’s never a dream we simply wake up from before skipping off to tea, is it?

Since we’re revising an understanding of a text, let’s reconsider the ending of Alice’s story.

Alice’s “dream” (nightmare?) ends when Alice, “having grown to her full size,” says to the Queen and her court, “‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’” It ends when Alice is neither a vulnerable, miniature version of herself nor a clumsy giant, but is her true size. It ends when she refuses the logic of Wonderland and starts speaking truth to a power who speaks nonsense. Alice, in a metaphorical sense, wakes up to and pushes back against the absurdity of Wonderland, which causes her return to consciousness in the “real” world.

Maybe the “waking up” to what Alice’s sister calls “dull reality” is a kind of going to sleep, a sleep that is necessary to be transformed into an adult who can function in the adult world. Maybe Alice’s sister is not a supporting character to the ending, a convenient resting place for Alice’s dreaming head, but is instead the one we are supposed to be paying attention to.

The ending turns in upon itself, as so many of the puzzles I’ve been trying to solve do.

The 3-Dness of the puzzle the therapist revealed puzzles me as much as the child who wouldn’t go to school once puzzled me. I have long believed that you cannot know how to respond to a difficulty if you don’t understand what is causing it. And there are neither clear causes nor clear answers to challenge of how to be OK in this world.

I’m also finding that the lack of sure answers frees me. I do not have to find the one right solution to the puzzle of living because there likely isn’t one. There is no picture on the box of the puzzle that is our existence. Who says that all the pieces even have to fit together? Isn’t it working the puzzle that is the point, rather than finishing it? (It always has been to me. Once the puzzle is done, I scoop up the pieces and put them back in the box for someone else to enjoy.)

The conclusions I’m reaching from my fall down the rabbit hole are these:

Living in this world is challenging, for all kinds of reasons. Each person has their own set. We can have multiple sources of challenge, and we can conceive of the challenges in multiple ways. The intersection of challenges can change or mask the nature of them, making them difficult to identify or understand.

Our responses to the world are neutral. They are not indicators of our character or our morality. Of strength or weakness. Of right or wrong. They just are. Regardless of what makes me a person who startles at sounds others barely register, I cannot control that response any more than I can control my height or the color of my hair.

Our biggest struggles come not from our differences, but from the world’s intolerance and misunderstanding of differences. They come from the way some people and systems use shame and a socially-acceptable rigidity to force some of us to deny what is true about ourselves. To justify not meeting our needs. To assert their hegemony over those who are not-them.

My answer to Kari’s “what the fuck do I do with all this?” question (for now, at least) is that the important thing is to feel the weight we carry and so often gaslight ourselves about. To see the absurdity and injustices and difficulties in the world and not try to put ourselves to sleep in order to tolerate them. To see and accept our own responses and their corresponding needs and do the best we can to craft a healthy existence that meets them, that allows us to carry both what we want to and what we must. And then feel OK about it.

Yes, and. That is the key that might get us through the garden door.

Keep your heads, friends. And feed them, too.

Whew, that was a long slog of a series! To be honest, I’m a little tired of Alice, puzzles, and this topic. (Of course I am!) I’m much more interested in what YOU have to say about any of this.

What does your metaphorical garden look and feel like? What do you do to make accommodations for yourself and feel OK in the world? Ever get song lyrics wrong in a major way? 🙂 Want to talk here about something only tangentially related? I’m here for any of it.

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As always, when you click on the heart, it warms mine.

The article my husband sent me about women with AuDHD was the entrance to a rabbit hole. After reading the first essay, I began clicking on links to others. When I got to, “You’re Not Half Autistic and Half ADHD: Understanding AuDHD as Distinct Neurology” it was like finally seeing where a slew of confounding puzzle pieces belong.

“When autistic pattern-seeking meets ADHD novelty-seeking, you do not get pattern-seeking sometimes and novelty-seeking other times. You get a brain that simultaneously craves both and requires both and struggles when it has only one or the other. When autistic need for routine meets ADHD interest-based nervous system, you do not get routine that works half the time. You get routine that works until it stops working, that regulates you until it suffocates you, that helps until it hurts.

The experiences that emerge from this interaction are not described in autism literature or ADHD literature because they are AuDHD experiences. They are what happens at the intersection. They are what makes AuDHD a distinct neurology rather than simply the presence of two separate neurologies in one body.”

I have long been able to see what I have thought of as autistic or ADHD traits in myself and other non-diagnosed members of my family, but I haven’t thought of any of us as really neurodivergent. I saw autistic traits in myself, but there were other traits that seemed to negate autism. The more I read, the more I recognized those traits as masking behaviors or ADHD traits. Functionality was the other reason I didn’t think I was really neurodivergent.1 Clinical criteria for autism continues to include demonstrable impairment in functionality, so being really autistic, I thought, meant being unable to function in necessary ways. That wasn’t me. That was my brother, someone who is really autistic. If anything, I’d always been an over-achiever.

The description of what it feels like to be an AuDHD person wiped all the disqualifiers away. Suddenly, everything—and I mean everything—fit.

When Alice sees a rabbit run by carrying a pocket watch and muttering to itself about being late, she follows it into its hole “burning with curiosity” and “never once considering how in the world she was to get out of it again.”

I understand now that I am the rabbit. And I am also Alice.

The summer before I started 8th grade, I learned that other kids in my neighborhood called me The Hermit.

Sandy, a fun and friendly girl I’d known since kindergarten, knocked on my door one day and invited me to come and hang out with them. After that, for a few glorious weeks, I spent every day with Sandy, Becky, Todd, Kevin, and Susan. With them I experienced new music, the delicious tedium of mutually-shared summer boredom, vicarious romance, the thrill of sneaking out, tragic sorrow when Becky and her family moved away, and a comically disastrous first almost-kiss. I’d never been one of a gang before, but I suddenly was. I felt like I was living a story from one of my beloved books.

“How come you never used to come out?” Sandy asked me in late August, when she confessed the nickname they’d earlier used when talking about me.

I shrugged. I didn’t know. I wondered how they’d known how to find each other.

I thought the miraculous transformation of my social life would continue when we returned to school that fall, that these friendships would carry into the world of school. They did not, and I have long maintained—despite all kinds of trials in my adult life—that 8th grade was one of the hardest years I’ve lived through. It was certainly one of the loneliest.

So, I did what I always did to solve problems: I researched.

I studied the other kids and what they did (and didn’t) do. I read books and magazine articles to glean wisdom about how to be popular. I grew my hair out, wore my glasses as little as possible, and started drinking. (What a revelation and game-changer drinking was! Social events that had been tortuous suddenly became mostly manageable.)

By my senior year I had been Homecoming royalty, a class president, a cheerleader, and a girlfriend several times over—and I was deeply depressed and profoundly confused. I’d begun grinding my teeth, a habit that persists to this day. I struggled to manage chronic digestive issues, painful, irregular periods, and constant fatigue. I didn’t understand why I was so miserable when I seemed to have everything I was supposed to want. Everything that was supposed to make a person feel good. When my dad told me that he and my mom could pay for me to attend and live at our large state university, I abandoned ideas I’d had about going to a small liberal arts college. I didn’t know how to navigate all the applications and forms for scholarships and financial aid anyway, and the idea of becoming an anonymous number in a big crowd felt like relief. (8331227 was mine. Of course I still remember it, almost 40 years since I last needed to.)

I had a hysterectomy in my early 40’s. I wasn’t entirely sure that I needed one, but having it meant I was going to have days in the hospital, followed by weeks at home in which I would be physically incapable of doing my usual work as a teacher, parent, and wife. I didn’t tell anyone how much this appealed to me. How much it felt like some necessary kind of break. I knew my feelings were maybe an indicator that something in my life was wrong, so I kept them mostly to myself.

My husband didn’t visit me while I was in the hospital. There were the kids to take care of, we lived an hour away, and he had “a thing about hospitals.” That was fine by me. It meant that I didn’t have to take care of his discomfort. I didn’t have to figure out the right things to say or manage my face. I didn’t have to do anything but lie in bed and sleep and eat food when it was brought to me.

When I developed a blood clot in my leg the morning I was supposed to go home, I was glad I got to stay an extra day.

For the last third of my career, I had two part-time jobs. I was an instructional coach serving my district’s three secondary schools, and I was the district librarian serving all eleven of our district’s schools, K-12. Both roles required me to travel almost daily and interact with large numbers of adults and students. I lived in constant fear of dropping something—forgetting a meeting, mixing up dates, missing a deadline, failing to follow through on something I’d promised. I kept a digital calendar, but I had to remember to consult it. (I did so compulsively. Most days.)

One of the worst parts for me was my “office,” which was a desk in a walkway between the high school’s library and textbook room. My desk faced a window that looked out into the library, which was usually filled with people, florescent lights, and noise. I was constantly interrupted by people walking past me to get to the textbook room, teachers who’d brought their classes to the library, and others who needed something from me.

When I had work that required intensive focus (my favorite kind), I sometimes got permission to work in other, quieter locations. I knew not to ask to do that too often, though. No one else I knew of needed such accommodations.

And then, somewhere in the mid-2010’s, I lost interest in my work, something I’d previously been passionate about.

I could no longer make myself work at home in the evenings or on weekends, something I had to limit myself from doing during the years when I found everything about teaching and learning endlessly fascinating. I could no longer make myself read professional literature, something I once found fun. In the kind of meetings I’d once found interesting and important, I felt increasingly bored, numb, zoned out, or impatient.

I’d always had trouble knowing what to say when and to whom, but that got worse. I grew increasingly unable to hold my tongue, to keep my true thoughts to myself, to remember to control my face when talking with colleagues.

Maybe it’s aging, I thought. Maybe this is just what happens after working for so long in one field. Maybe it was stress from my kids, or the crumbling public education system, or my health issues, or the destabilizing things happening in my country.

I knew that I was falling behind others at work, that I was not as good at it as I had once been, that I wasn’t contributing much of value, that I was losing both regard and something vital to who I’d always been. I began to have fears about how I would remain employed; I was too far from retirement to ride out the rest of my career this way, but no matter what kind of self-care/mindset shifting/talk therapy/time-management system I tried, I couldn’t get back to my previous ways of being. My migraines were increasing in frequency and duration, and I couldn’t function within the medication limits I’d been given. I didn’t know how I was going to keep keeping things together. I kept the depth of these fears entirely to myself.

“Despite the severity of burnout, it is often dismissed, minimized, or misunderstood by others and sometimes even by the person experiencing it. Burnout in AuDHD women is frequently attributed to mental health issues, poor self-care, or lack of resilience rather than recognized as a neurological injury caused by sustained environmental mismatch.

One reason burnout is dismissed is that it is invisible. An AuDHD woman in burnout may not look sick. She may still be able to perform some tasks, particularly those that are routine or urgent. From the outside, she may appear to be coping, even when she is barely surviving. Because the collapse is internal and because masking often continues in some form even during burnout, others may not recognize the severity of what is happening.”2

2012 was the year I became my school district’s librarian. I’d added a media specialist credential to my teaching certificate, but I’d never been a librarian of any kind; the learning curve was steep. I felt like an imposter, but in 2013, I was asked to be a board member for my state’s professional organization for school librarians, and in 2018 that organization named me the state’s district librarian of the year.

How could the person with this resume have a disabling condition?

And yet. I retired in 2021 at age 56, long before I once planned to or thought I should, because continuing felt impossible.

After learning about AuDHD and AuDHD burnout, I cannot wait to talk about it with my therapist. I finally have a framework that explains things that have confounded me for years—my whole life. I think this means there might be answers for how to fix it. How to fix me. How to fix everything. How to find a way to live that is less painful and more manageable. Retirement has made some things better, but I am still struggling. Life still seems to be a series of catastrophes I am increasingly unable to manage.

I just want to be OK. Finally. I want a story that makes sense.

My therapist is gentle in her response, which is “yes, and…”

Yes, she says, I see neurodiversity in you. Absolutely. And also: You have experienced a significant amount of trauma. And, you have been harmed by dysfunctional and toxic systems at work, in your family, and in society. I also suspect you are a highly sensitive person,3 with neurology that makes you feel and process things more deeply than most other people. And, there is your personality.

Oh.

Well, fuck.

“And here Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?’ for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it. She felt that she was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that she was walking hand in hand with Dinah, and saying to her very earnestly, ‘Now, Dinah, tell me the truth: did you ever eat a bat?’ when suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.”

Since adolescence, I have been trying to fit pieces of myself together into a picture of the kind of person I want to be, the kind of person my family, culture, and society told me I should be: A good daughter, friend, partner, mother, human. I have wanted to do good work and realize the potential I’ve been told all my life that I have.

After all my reading and the session with the therapist, a pile of pieces has changed shape and color and size—the ones that had looked like laziness, disorganization, selfishness, lack of discipline, impulsiveness, flakiness, weakness, and failure. I learn that pieces that can indicate trauma look a lot like neurodiversity. Hypervigilance and hypersensitivity can look the same from the outside. So can fawning/masking, emotional dysregulation, and executive function challenges.4 The picture I had thought of as me is jumbled, and the puzzle is no longer flat and two-dimensional. Now I understand it has three dimensions, maybe four.

And I wonder how the hell I am supposed to put it together now.

The fall is over, but there is still a bit more to say. I promise, this will come to an end (of some sort) with part III. I’ve been figuring it out as I go—which is not at all my usual way of sharing writing. Thanks for making the journey with me.

As always, I’d love to hear about anything here that touches on something for you. I suspect that many of you reading might see something of your own experience in mine. Anyone who has been alive for any length of time has certainly had the experience of going through something that changes how they see almost everything.

I hope all of you are reasonably well. I haven’t written at all about the increased threats we are all now living under, but they are never far from my mind and (I know) yours, too.

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NeuroJustice™

Chapter 8 (Draft): Burnout and Collapse (From The Trouble With Being Good)

Table of Contents…

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3 months ago · 16 likes · Bridgette Hamstead

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NeuroJustice™

How does CPTSD overlay or hide AuDHD presentation, and what happens to identity and self-understanding when the trauma work is done?

How does CPTSD overlay or hide AuDHD presentation, and what happens to identity and self-understanding when the trauma work is done…

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2 months ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Bridgette Hamstead

I love puzzles.

I buy nice ones, because I don’t like the feel of thin, flimsy pieces. I’ll do the ones with a shiny finish, but I prefer a matte image on thick, sturdy pieces of cardboard.

I do not understand why anyone likes a puzzle that is basically a blob of color, where it is nearly impossible to tell where on the puzzle any given piece might go. I know there can be slight variations of color to that become clear in working the puzzle—parts of puzzles I’ve loved have contained some element of that—but with too much of one color the solving becomes almost only about shape, and trial and error. I want the interplay of shape and visual meaning. I love recognizing, for example, that some little bit of blue on the knobby part of an otherwise all red piece is the tip of a glove’s finger against the backdrop of a girl’s sweater.

41 years ago, my mother told me that my brother Joe had a new diagnosis: He was autistic. When my brother was young, in the 1960’s, my parents were told that he had some sort of brain damage, cause unknown.

I had heard of autism but didn’t know much about it. I did some research. The diagnosis didn’t make much sense to me. Joe was extremely affectionate and verbal, and those with autism were supposed to be withdrawn and non-verbal. The noise of his incessant, stuttering chatter had driven me bonkers when we were kids.

I read that siblings of those with autism were more likely to have it themselves. That gave me pause, but I was sure I had emerged from the genetic lottery unscathed. I was the opposite of Joe, in every way that I could see. Joe was autistic and I was not like Joe; therefore, autism was not part of me.

In the early 1990’s, at the beginning of a relationship with the person who would become my second husband and my children’s father, he asked if I had any issues he should know about, meaning things that might make a relationship with me challenging.

“Not really,” I said. “I kind of have a food thing. You know, sometimes I’m suddenly starving and I have to eat right away or I get shaky.”

As years passed, the number of issues increased. I was sensitive to noise and lights and smells. I developed migraine, and then fibromyalgia. I had digestive problems. I startled at noises in ways that others didn’t. I had more and more trouble enjoying the kind of socializing he preferred, drinking and talking with his friends about things I found boring. If my husband tried to get my attention when I was absorbed in a task, it took too long for me to notice him. He hated the way I’d tackle household chores, beginning something in one room, then switching to something else if the first task took me to another room where I’d see a different thing that needed doing. Organizing anything was a project in which things had to get worse before they’d get better. Sometimes when he was upset with me, I’d find it difficult to talk, and I would take long, slow blinks that he found infuriating.

“You said you just had a little food thing,” he’d say each time some new problematic way of my being became apparent.

Once, when I was in junior high, my father told me that I was the smartest dumb person he knew. Or maybe I was the dumbest smart person. Either way, he couldn’t understand why I kept doing dumb things when I was so smart.

Another time, he became angry about something I didn’t do that I was supposed to do.

“I forgot to remember,” I said. That made him even more angry. He told me to stop making excuses. To me, my words were an explanation, not an excuse. I had to remember to remember all the time.

In January I began working with a new therapist. I chose her because her bio indicated expertise with trauma, anxiety, and neurodiversity. Early in my initial intake session, I shared that I tried EMDR once but it didn’t really go anywhere. “I had trouble identifying something traumatic to focus on,” I said. “I haven’t really had significant trauma. Just, an accumulation of small things.”

It took a long time to cover everything in my history that felt relevant. There was my disabled brother, my alcoholic father, my first divorce, the sudden death of my second husband’s ex-wife and instant full-time parenthood of grieving children, infertility, life-threatening high-risk pregnancy, premature twins, divorce from my second husband who threatened to take my kids from me, economic precarity following my divorce, simultaneous mental health crises of two children I was raising, the falling apart of my third partnership in the wake of those crises. I rushed through recent history. “There was the pandemic and what it did to work, and then I retired earlier than I really should have because I couldn’t take working in my toxic school district any more, and then one of the kids had a serious mental health crisis, and my daughter immigrated to another country, and then I learned about my husband’s betrayal.”

“That’s a lot,” she said.

“Oh, and there was also my brain injury,” I said. I’d forgotten about that.

She stared at me for half a beat. “But you haven’t really had any trauma,” she said drily, and we both laughed.

“You know, not the capital T kind,” I said.

My freshman year of college, my writing lab instructor kept me after class one day. She wanted to talk with me about how I put all my essay assignments off until the night before they were due. I’d turned the last essay in late.

She shared that she had done the same thing when she was a student. “I used to put dark eye shadow under my eyes when I’d go to my professors and ask them to accept a late paper,” she said. “I’d tell them I’d been sick.”

She saw so much potential in me, she said, and she wanted to know how well I might write if I gave myself enough time.

I wanted to know that, too, but my big takeaway from our talk was the trick about the eye shadow. I used it more than once.

When I was a kid and my dad would call my name, I’d mentally race through all the things I’d done that day, trying to anticipate what I might be in trouble for. I almost never was in trouble, because I was so careful not to be.

In the early 2010’s, there were a lot of online quizzes to test all kinds of things. One day at work, we were talking about them and I mentioned that I’d taken one to help you determine if you were on the autism spectrum.

“I scored kind of high,” I said.

“Of course you did,” one person said. She was one of our high school’s counselors.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re so on the spectrum,” she said.

“What? What do you mean? Why do you say that?” I asked.

She laughed and shook her head and left my office.

I knew I wasn’t on the spectrum, not really. I mean, sure, I had some things. But I also didn’t have a lot of things. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t be so flippant if I was really autistic. She was a counselor, for godssake. But why had she said that? What did I not know about how others saw me? What might I be revealing that I wasn’t aware of? I wanted to ask her, but I was afraid asking might show even more about me that I might prefer to keep hidden.

Every teacher has a rule or two that is ironclad, that students know never to violate. Mine was: Do not touch anything on my desk.

Except for a few times a year, when I’d clean up everything on it, my desk was usually covered with piles of papers. I wanted to be like other teachers I knew, with their neat and clean organizational systems that relied upon baskets, folders, color-coding, and routines. It felt so much better when my desk was clear. Each fall I began the year with new office supplies and ideas about how to better keep everything together, but they invariably fell apart by October.

Still, I rarely lost anything. My real system was to remember what was in each pile, and it depended upon no one else moving anything on my desk. Any student who came close to touching anything on it got a sharp reminder of the rule.

A therapist I saw in the mid-2010’s made an off-hand comment about my anxiety.

“What do you mean, anxiety? I don’t have anxiety,” I said.

“Of course you do,” he said.

I was dumbfounded. I didn’t feel anxious. I was pretty sure I didn’t behave the way anxious people behave. No one had ever told me before that I had anxiety. (My diagnosis, required for insurance to cover the sessions, was “adjustment disorder.”)

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“Look at what you are doing with your hands right now,” he said.

I was using my right thumbnail to push on the skin around the nails of the fingers on my left hand.

“I can tell you are anxious because of the way you are always fidgeting with your hands. That is something anxious people do.”

Another time he said, “It’s funny. It’s almost like you have PTSD, but I know you don’t because you’ve never had a significant trauma.”

A story my grandmother loved to tell about me:

When I was four, cousins I’d never before met came to stay with my grandparents. There were six of them, and their family had been living overseas. I was sent to my grandparents’ house for a visit at the same time; for my grandmother, more was always merrier.

I was fascinated by these strangers who were family. It was exciting. It was fun. I liked them. But also, there were so many of them, and my beloved grandparents’ quiet house was suddenly so loud, and instead of sleeping in my usual bed tucked under the eaves in an upstairs hallway, we were all relegated to cots in the basement.

The first morning, my grandmother asked how I liked being there with all my cousins.

“I don’t like crowds,” I answered, the only words I could find to attach to my mixed feelings.

She (and everyone she shared this with) found my answer hilarious. I did not see what was so funny. I felt embarrassed and misunderstood.

This essay will not become a 1,000 piece puzzle, but it could.

When I am working a puzzle, I can usually identify the general area in which a piece belongs. I will look at the piece and look at the picture on the box, and I know what it is part of. Often, I know exactly where it goes. (This is very satisfying.)

Sometimes, though, there will be a piece that confounds me. I will study the piece and study the picture on the lid of the box, and I cannot identify anywhere in the puzzle it might go. I will set it aside, knowing that, eventually, something will become clear.

These pieces are often not placed until the puzzle is nearly finished. When I finally see it, I will realize that I completely missed something about the piece. I thought a line was part of a book’s spine, say, but it was really part of a bent elbow. I will wonder why I couldn’t see it before, when its place is now so clear.

A few weeks ago, my husband sent me an article: Bridgette Hamstead’s “Why AuDHD Women Are Misread as Mean, Cold, or Difficult.” He wrote, “Does any of this ring true for you?” I’d heard of AuDHD, but I didn’t really know what it was. Something that came up in my Instagram feed sometimes.

“I’m not sure how others perceive me,” I wrote back to him after reading it, “but all the stuff about how it feels describes me.”

What I meant was: Yes, it rings true. What I meant was: I have had these these experiences my whole life—

• a desire to say what is true

• a discomfort with small talk

• a preference for depth over pleasantry

• an inability to sustain chitchat

• discomfort with eye contact

• communicating information without softening it

• not knowing how to be in community with other people

• missing questions that were asked

• needing to be told something more than once

• zoning out during conversations

• needing to leave gatherings

I didn’t tell him about how, as I read the section titled, “The Compounding Effect of Unmet Expectations,” I was surprised to feel a weight moving up my chest, or how my throat had closed up and then, strangely, I sobbed.

The words that made me cry:

“AuDHD women often carry reputations built entirely from the accumulation of misread signals across years. The reputation precedes them into new environments. It shapes how people receive them before they have said a word.”

I got my last boss the fall before Covid hit. She walked into my office for our first meeting and the first thing she said to me (literally, not even “hello”) was, “Why are you telling everyone that our library programs aren’t in compliance with state requirements?”

“Because they aren’t,” I said.

The conversation went downhill from there.

After the meeting, I understood one thing immediately: I was to stop talking about our compliance with state requirements for school library programs. She was very clear about that. It was a long time before I understood what she didn’t say directly: Others had told her things about me. Others didn’t like what I was saying and doing. She was not interested in my perspective or its foundations. She had decided I was a problem that needed to be fixed before she’d ever met me.

When my husband came home that afternoon, I was sitting next to our coffee table, working a puzzle. I was sifting through the pieces in the box, looking for ones that might belong to the pants of a girl looking at magazines in a bookstore.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“OK,” I said. Then, “Not great. I’m just doing a little self-regulating.”

I didn’t want to tell him yet that the essay he’d sent was the entrance to a rabbit hole, and that I had fallen down it.

I hope to have part II out soon, but I’m away from home, visiting my daughter who lives far away. It’ll probably take me a good long minute.

Likes, shares, and comments are welcome. Always appreciate you sharing your own knowledge and experiences in this space.

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On December 30th of 2024, I learned that my husband had secrets.

Did you ever get the wind knocked out of you as a kid? Maybe fell off the monkey bars at recess and landed so hard on your back that you couldn’t breathe because your diaphragm, that organ that worked so perfectly you’d never needed to know of its existence, much less its name or how it functioned, suddenly didn’t, causing you to gulp for air your lungs couldn’t take in, your impotent lips opening and closing uselessly as those of a fish thrown into the bottom of a boat, a hook torn through its gills?

It was like that.

Not literally, of course. Literally, it was getting my husband tissues and encouraging him to take a nap. It was calling my parents and calmly lying about why we would be late for a planned visit. It was putting Christmas away in an hour of controlled, robotic fury. It was googling therapists and making lists. Those actions would be my metaphorical gasping. Those actions would be me not yet realizing that my usual ways of handling problems would not—could not—get oxygen into the body of my life.

I was at the beginning of a journey through betrayal trauma, which occurs when someone’s trust is violated by a person or institution or system that they rely on for physical, emotional, and/or social survival. Betrayal by a partner does not have to threaten actual survival to be traumatic. According to Psychology Today, “In some cases, a person might not even be entirely reliant on their partner – at least not literally – but it still feels as though leaving the perpetrator is not an option.”

In the moments after I absorbed what my husband had done, my first cogent thought was: I am not going to lose my life over this. I loved my life. I’d worked hard for it. I’d fought for it. It was finally what I’d long longed for it to be. The life I’d made would cease to exist if my marriage ended; therefore, leaving the perpetrator was not an option.

I did not understand yet that my life as I’d known it was already gone.

In early 2024, I launched Rootsie to explore and celebrate what creative work could be within the context of a life that doesn’t rely on the work’s critical or financial success for its sustenance. Three years earlier, my husband and I had married. After a decade of challenges that included separation, rebuilding, and reconciliation, we had finally reached a place that felt solid. With his support, I made the decision to retire earlier than planned from my career in K-12 public education. I consciously and purposely chose a smaller, slower life than the one I’d been living, hoping such an existence would bring me health and a kind of peace I’d not yet known.

It did. My small life helped me weather several storms that might have capsized me in my previous life. When I fell ice skating and sustained a brain injury in November, 2023, I was so grateful that I did not have to figure out how to survive while being unable to work.

My small, seemingly-stable life did not depend upon any outcome from my creative work, but it did rely on agreements of several kinds between my husband and me, agreements based in good faith and on norms so established they felt inviolable.

They were violable. Very, very violable.

It would be easy for me to write my earlier self off as laughably naive or idealistic, perhaps dangerously so, but more than a year into learning about and living through traumatic betrayal, I can recognize the choices I made as being, in part, responses to other, earlier betrayals by people and systems that harmed me. With hindsight and therapy, I can see that I let myself think that if I made my life (myself) small enough, I could be safe. It’s the kind of magical thinking that children do, and it hasn’t protected me any more than a blanket does a toddler who is hiding under it while curled up behind the back of a couch.

In short, I was wrong. In fact, my choice to live small has now made me vulnerable in ways I’d never previously let myself be.

Last November, as the anniversary of my husband’s initial revelation approached, I realized it was becoming harder and harder for me to show up in this space in the same ways I had been. Not writing about the bomb that had detonated in the center of my small, creative life had begun to feel like lying by omission. While I do not think that any of us owe anyone our stories, I do think that if we are going to offer them they should be honest. The more I understood about the risks and costs of the small life I had chosen, the less able I felt to continue with the premise of the story I’d started to tell here.

I want very much to be a reliable narrator.

I haven’t known how to start a new story or revise the old one. It’s been months since I last shared an essay here, and in that time I have written and revised and written and revised this one so many times I cannot tell you how many times I’ve done it. There are at least 4, maybe 5, distinct versions of it. One ballooned to more than 4,400 words. Multiple times I came close to clicking the publish button, but I couldn’t do it.

I think I’ve wanted to know in some sure way the outcome of the plot twist I never saw coming. I’ve wanted a clear ending or beginning. I’ve wanted something like a resolution. I don’t have any of those things yet. I might never have them.

I think I’ve wanted also to feel safe. My life is small, but there are still risks and costs to telling the story of it. There always have been, but I understand that in a different way now.

I write, “I think…” because I am still unsure about so many things. (That much, at least, I know is true.)

It’s impossible to tell this story of my life without including the context in which it is being lived. All women in the US, even those claiming that they “aren’t political,” are living through profound betrayals. Perhaps some men aren’t, but I’d argue that even most of them are, too (whether they know it or not).

Not only are we all trying to survive in the midst of deeply corrupt and dysfunctional systems, but many are also grappling with new understanding of that corruption and dysfunction. We may have had some awareness of the inequities of life in the US and the ways in which powerful people operate, but the events of the past year (especially those of the last two months) have taken us to deeper levels of knowledge. We are astounded by the scope and extent of the deception and harm. Those who have always been openly marginalized and abused are not as surprised, but those who didn’t fully understand how much our well-being depends upon good faith and seemingly inviolable norms are reeling. Anyone fully processing what’s happening can no longer believe or claim in any way that events of the past decade are about one person, or even that our current reality began only a decade ago. Epstein and Trump are vile, but they are not anomalous, singular monsters; the mechanisms that feed, enable, and protect their betrayals are longstanding and widespread.1 We are a nation of fish suddenly aware not only that we are living in water, but that the water was fouled long before any of us were born.

One impact of profound betrayal can be a loss of our sense of reality and self. If we’ve had a long history with a person, institution, or community, betrayal forces us to rewrite it, incorporating our new knowledge of them. We don’t lose the thread of the story we thought we were living. We lose the whole story. We lose ourselves. We no longer know with surety who we are or have been within the narrative of our own lives. In my case, there are so many points of connection between the betrayals in my personal life and those in our shared public life that pulling on a thread in one unravels those in the other.

It has been painful and disorienting and exhausting. I’ve been living through a complicated, ambiguous kind of compounded grief.

It’s the brain injury, of all things, that has helped me get to some understanding of what’s happened and is happening. My responses to harm from my husband and from those running my country are not unlike those I’ve had in response to the injury to my brain.

When I first fell, I denied that my brain had been injured. (I so wanted it not to be injured.) Then, I accepted that I’d been hurt, but I minimized the impact of the harm, gaslighting myself about the extent of the damage. Eventually, I accepted that I wasn’t the same in important ways–but I was sure that recovery wouldn’t take long. I was sure that I would return to skating and living as I had been if I dedicated myself to making recovery happen. I would fix it. I saw a vision specialist, an occupational therapist, and a physical therapist. I did everything they told me to do; I went to all the appointments and did all their exercises and worked on sleep and food and exercise and (and and and)....

I’m now 27 months past my fall, and I am accepting that full recovery is not going to happen, not the way I once thought it would. In November, my vision specialist declared my binocular vision back in normal ranges, but I still cannot skate the way I once did. I probably never will. Letters shadow and blur when I read. My vestibular system is much improved, but stairs can still be a challenge. I cannot do as much in a day as I once could; if I ignore my body’s warning signs and push it, I often lose the next few days to pain of one kind or another. As my OT recently explained to me, just because my vision is back in normal ranges, that doesn’t mean I am seeing as I once did.

I’m realizing that even if I were, it is unrealistic to think that I would be the same as I was more than two years ago. I’ve had two years of living, and living changes all of us, constantly. Sometimes the change happens so incrementally we hardly register it (like the oft-cited frog in water), and sometimes it comes so violently we think we can’t stand it or survive it. But mostly, we do. We adjust to new normals all the time.

Maybe this is the first chapter in a story about that.

What does it mean when we learn that the water we depend upon for the oxygen that sustains us—the only water we’ve ever swum in—is poisoning everyone in it?

Recently, in thinking of the metaphor of the fish in fouled water, I wrote: “I need to find a way to live peaceably in this toxic world, in as safe and healthy a way as I can. I want to learn how to swim more safely among men.”

I hate what my husband did and how it has impacted our entire family. I will never be grateful for any of this experience. I will not celebrate any silver linings in it. Our suffering has been neither noble nor necessary. Some men do not betray their partners, and I wish I’d partnered with such a man.

However, I understand in a different, deeper way that so many of the forces that have wounded me have wounded him, too. The scope of harm to women that we are all seeing through the Epstein files is horrifying, but I appreciate the ways in which it is destroying our ideas about a few bad, monstrous men. I appreciate how it is helping so many of us see the thread that connects seemingly-mere locker room jokes to the sexual enslavement of teenage girls.

Of course there is a taxonomy of harm, and engaging in some levels of it would be unacceptable in anyone I let close to my life, but better understanding how all men are impacted by our misogynistic patriarchy makes it possible for me to see my husband as someone more like me than different from me. I have a father and a son that I love, and I see how they have been harmed, too. There is no avoiding the damage for any of us, and it seems to me now that the key to well-being is not to avoid bad men, or to try to surround ourselves with good ones. It is to see the waters clearly, to live in ways that acknowledge what the waters are made of and have done to us, and to do what we can to clean them.

I am publishing these words with my husband’s knowledge and support. He is still my husband, still a human being for whom I feel empathy and compassion, still a person I love. The water has damaged him, too. He and I are working, both individually and together, on seeing, understanding, and healing from all that has broken us. I’m not sure where or how or when our story is going to end. It’s still a work in progress. The drafts are very rough.

In the months since that day I comforted my husband’s distress, calmly called my parents, and put all of Christmas away in an hour, I’ve thought a lot about the girl I once was. The girls all women once were.

When I was a girl, I loved recess. I remember racing other girls out the school doors to try to be the first to reach the playground equipment. I loved hooking my knee over a metal bar and flinging my body through the air as I revolved around it. I loved the feel of my long hair brushing against the asphalt that anchored the structure to the ground.

A fish, unlike a girl who falls and gets the wind knocked out of her, does not have a diaphragm. It will, however, gasp for oxygen when thrown against the bottom of a boat, betrayed by air that can never be anything but a threat to it. Such a predicament is dire but not necessarily a death sentence for a fish, any more than the fallen girl’s situation is for her. Diaphragms usually recover quickly, and even torn gill filaments can heal. Those thick with scar tissue do not work as well as they once did, and some fish will die from their gills’ reduced capacity, but some fish released back into their waters can still breathe.

They can still fucking breathe.

These words are me, still. Fucking breathing.

Likes, shares, and comments are welcome.

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In the comment section a few posts back, I shared that I was going to embark on a 100 day journaling project that would end on the last day of this calendar year.

I gave it a good try, but I just didn’t like the prompts in the book that inspired the project. I tried writing them by hand. I tried using my computer. For a while, I tried to keep writing in the way I kept journals when I was younger, abandoning the prompts and simply chronicling my life and my thoughts about it. That didn’t stick, either. Although I once kept journals faithfully, I’ve not been able to maintain a journaling habit since sometime in the mid-90s, when several likely suspects converged to kill it: I became a parent, I stopped writing first drafts of anything by hand, and the internet emerged. Journaling didn’t compel me the way it did when I was young, and I’d let go of the notion that anyone (including me) might one day care about my private thoughts and feelings.

Recently, however, my therapist gave me an assignment to write a dialog with my 8th grade self. I shared with her that I have a box full of old journals in my attic, wondering if it would be a good idea to revisit 8th grade Rita (and maybe some of the Ritas who followed her) before trying to talk with her. Memory can be a trickster, and I thought it might be good to hear directly from her about how things were in her life.

She thought that was a great idea, as long as I could treat the experience as something like an archeological dig, rather than one in which I would judge my younger self.

So, one day when I was home alone, I climbed up into my attic and dug out a box I’ve been lugging around with me for more than 35 years, through at least 6 moves. In it was a collection of spiral-bound notebooks I haven’t opened since sometime in the 1990’s.

When I began reading, I understood immediately why my therapist had cautioned me. Earlier me was certainly prescient when she predicted that I would cringe if I re-read my journals at some point in the future. At first, I could hardly stand to spend much time with any of the Ritas; I hopped from book to book, opening pages at random, skimming until I couldn’t stand it and had to close the book. It was so hard not to judge my younger self. It was so hard not to see all the things I didn’t like about her and to think about all the things I wish she’d done differently—even though I taught teenagers for decades, parented 5 humans through their teenage years, and have tremendous empathy and true affection for those navigating the often-tough transition that is adolescence. I could hardly stand spending any time with young Rita, and I began imagining a solstice ritual in which I burned all the notebooks. I could see no reason I might ever want to read them again, and I certainly didn’t want anyone else to.

Then I heard my therapist’s voice in my head suggesting that I try to be curious. I gave myself a day to let those initial feelings settle, and then I went back in, starting with the first page of the first book, reading to understand instead of judge.

It took a few days, but I read through all the notebooks that went through my senior year of high school. Some pages I skimmed or hopped over (young Rita could certainly natter on…), but for the most part I stayed with it. It was hard, but not for the reasons that made me turn away initially. Yes, I hate how much time and ink young Rita gave to her feelings about a parade of boys. How I wish that girl had channeled those energies into other things! But what made it easier to stop being hard on her was seeing how hard she was on herself. There were so many lists of things she needed to do to be a better and more likable person. She gave herself grades on meeting her goals (generally failing ones) and wrote long paragraphs of strategies for doing better.

What also made it easier was seeing things about her I’d never realized were in her. I think my experience of reading and remembering turned a corner when I read the words I wrote on the inside cover of the 8th grade notebook:

If I should die or anything happens to me, I want this book to be burned. It would be very embarrassing to me and it would hurt a lot of people because I’ve written very cruel things about people when I was mad. The only true mean things are the ones written about [5 redacted names] and other things that are obviously true.

This made me laugh and think, I kinda like this girl.

In my memories, she was only rather meek and mostly miserable. She was deeply lonely, and every day walking the halls of school felt like running a gauntlet. That story told by memory isn’t false, but it doesn’t capture the whole truth I could see in the notebooks. She was also passionate, hardworking, resilient, and hopeful. She was sassy. She was profane. She was dreamy. She was weird. (Her role model for how to be a woman was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis—What?!?) She wanted popularity and the love of a boy so bad, but she was not having it when others treated her badly. She wrote endlessly about herself, but world events (and the kind of fears only a Cold War kid would have) also made it into her pages. She had more insight than I’ve ever given her credit for having. At the close of her 8th grade journal she wrote:

Now, I have to have a diary, it’s like a therapy. In here, I can write down everything I can’t tell anyone else (of course, some of it I do). But I can write my dreams, my hopes, my loves, my hates, my happies, my sads, and I don’t have to worry about the paper and pen laughing at me or telling everyone what I say. I’m glad I have this gift. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

It was good to see that although many of the happenings I remember are true (as evidenced in the primary source documents that my journals are), my memories are not automatically carriers of important truths. For all of her introspection (I refuse to call it navel-gazing; she deserves more respect than that), 8th grade Rita could not see important things about herself and her world that Today Rita can between the lines and from the distance of more than 4 decades. Because of the writing I did when I was young, I’m now finding myself revising harmful narratives I’ve been telling myself for years.

And that, maybe, is a reason to go back to developing an old-fashioned journaling habit. Those notebooks are filled with ordinary minutiae that no one is really going to care about, but isn’t it in the daily litany of any life that larger themes emerge? We’re not all going to have the impact of an Anne Frank—and, of course, like so many girls my age, I secretly hoped my diaries might one day be as important as Frank’s (but, you know, without having to endure war, oppression, and early death). Still, aren’t we all living through history, no matter when we live or who we are? And might our records serve to help those who come after us understand things important to them? Even if no one other than later versions of ourselves?

From 2009 until 2023, I wrote a series of blogs that I no longer have access to. I did not save those writings before I let my accounts lapse, and now, after revisiting my teenage journals, I wish I could. Because they were public they were not as honest and raw as my earlier journals, but I think they functioned enough like a journal that I stopped keeping my private ones. Now, because I wrote in an intangible medium, I don’t have access to any of that kind of evidence of who I was and how I lived during those years. The public writing so many of us do serves an important purpose, but 8th grade Rita was onto something about the benefits—the gift—there can be in writing privately, only for oneself.

I see more and more of us thinking about and experimenting with ways of returning to a slower, more analog world, and this experience is nudging me in that direction, too. I’ve gathered a few pieces I’ve come across lately that might be helpful/encouraging/inspiring if you’re feeling that tug, too.

Why Writing By Hand Is Better for Your Brain (Psychology Today)

There’s lots of empirical evidence that writing has psychological benefits. Writing helps people process life’s emotional ups and downs through sense-making—the greater the cognitive effort to find meaning (Ullrich & Lutgendorf, 2002), the greater appreciation of the benefits and improved mood.

How to Make More Memories by Taking Fewer Photos (Karen Trefzger) via Kari at a grace full life

When we don’t fully participate in real life, our brains can’t make the multitude of neurological connections that will give us a vivid memory to savor. When we’re hunting for the perfect Instagram shot, we’re not always paying attention to the beautiful, complex details that make up the moment.

What we lose when everything is mapped. Plus ten things to do offline. (Jenna Park)

When was the last time you looked at a paper map? You know, the kind that is impossible to refold back into its most compact form? Or wandered into a restaurant without checking reviews just because it looked inviting through the window? It’s like buying a book at the book store just because a beautiful cover drew you in, but when was the last time you even did that?

Alongside everything else (Elizabeth Beggins)

When it feels like all we have left to hold things together is tape and tears, something more like glue emerges. Shared stories, collaborative meals, clinking glasses, the gift of time together: the weekend is a release.

reading & the life of the mind (Nicole Mulhausen)

I do nearly all of my reading with my ears while doing chores. It’s hard to wash dishes while reading with the old eyeballs. But when your reading life lives on a little light-up screen, on Goodreads, and the books themselves on Libby, it’s hard to remember. What did I just read? Who wrote that? So many lost quotes, delicious sentences… gone.

And finally, this one is not so much about the benefits of analog, but it is inspiration for writing your story:

This Is the Time to Write (Ali Edwards)

Write imperfectly. Write in fits and starts. Write in lists. Write without paragraphs in one long stream of conscious. Write with a new pen or an old pen or with your fingers on a keyboard. Write when it feels easy and write especially when it feels hard.

You know I’d love a conversation about all of this. Please comment to let me know what you think about analog vs. digital, journaling, your younger self, why any of us write in any way at all (or take photos or make art journals or some way record their lives).

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What I didn’t expect? Tears.

I did not notice anyone else struggling with tears, and I worked hard to keep them from spilling over. They felt at odds with the general mood, which was upbeat. Folks were leaning hard into our common hopes, values, and experiences. I saw a lot of smiles and heard a lot of laughter. So, what made me cry?

Watching a young boy dance with two adults dressed in inflatable yeti costumes. His delight. His tenderness. His awe.

Making eye contact with a park worker in his uniform, who was standing quietly in the midst of the crowd of people walking past him. Hearing his quiet, “thank you for being here,” as we looked at each other.

Seeing a sign carried by a young Latina woman: “My ancestors came here looking for a better life for me,” and remembering my two great-grandmothers who were immigrants to this country. Thinking of the things they sacrificed, the denigrations they endured, and the wounds they carried.

Exchanging glances with a man my age who held a sign reading, “Our grandparents fought fascism. Will you?” and thinking of the ways in which both my grandfathers contributed to US efforts in WWII, experiences they rarely spoke about.

Hearing the opening words of Yusuf/Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train,” and feeling once again like a little girl, remembering what it was to be young and to believe that most adults were trying to make the world better.

‘Cause out on the edge of darkness
There rides a peace train
Oh, peace train, take this country
Come take me home again

What sense do I make of my tears? I don’t know. I’m just feeling a little raw, all the time.

I live in a part of Portland that people have not been sharing in all their social media clips countering Trump’s depiction of our city as “war ravaged.” Last week, driving down a street whose sidewalks are always filled with folks who are living with addiction, poverty, and lack of housing, I was struck with an understanding that the world is changing, has changed. The world I knew and lived in and somehow thought would always be no longer is. And it’s not coming back. What’s happened and is happening is not some blip. I have known this, but I felt it in a different way last week. It hit deeper.

I looked at all the young people (because so many of those on the sidewalk are young) and I thought of my own children and I understood in some new way that none of them are going to live with the kind of assurances I got to live with for most of my life. Their lives are going to require different strategies, resources, skills and knowledge than mine has. It felt like a concrete truth of life today, rather than an abstraction that might come to pass someday. I see the possibility in that—truly, I do—but I also see the loss. I long to feel the ways I felt when roadsides did not house tent communities, when schools did not have security guards and locked doors, and when a critical mass of us trusted all kinds of things necessary to our health and wellbeing that many of us now don’t.

I feel so inept, so much of the time, when it comes to knowing how to meet this moment.

Yesterday I walked to the grocery store early in the morning. Outside the front door, a young man sat on the pavement, his back against the store’s wall. I sighed to see him, but I kept walking. It was not newsworthy, hardly notable. Almost unnoticeable, the way common things are.

I went inside, got my groceries, exited. He was still there. “Do you have any spare change?” he asked, looking at me. His face was chapped. It was raining and cold.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any cash,” I said.

“Oh, sorry to bother you. Thank you,” he said. He was so damn polite.

I took a few steps, stopped, turned back. “Is there any food I could get you?” I asked, nodding toward the store. He looked at me blankly and didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to do, so I kept walking.

Approaching my house, I realized I’d forgotten to get eggs, the primary reason I went to the store. I took the groceries I had gotten inside, then I turned around to go back. This time, I thought, I could get cash back and give some to the young man.

By the time I got back, another young man had joined him. I went in the store, got the eggs, and asked for $40.00 back. I couldn’t give one of them money and not the other.

As it turned out, when I came out of the store he was alone again, walking away. It was clear that a security guard had told him to leave. It was easy to catch up to him; he was having trouble walking. One foot was dragging. I gave him a $20.00 and turned back to go home.

When I got there, I pulled the other $20 out of my pocket, and saw this:

Sometimes I wonder how we’re not all teetering on the edge of tears all the time.

Feeling really grateful for writers this past week whose words have been lifelines. Here are a few of them:

From Kari Bentley-Quinn’s The Long Climb:

The Long Climb

The Diary of a Not So Young Girl

This essay was crafted by putting together snippets of what I’ve managed to write in my own journal this week…

Read more

8 months ago · 18 likes · 7 comments · Kari Bentley-Quinn

It’s so reassuring to learn that I am not the only one grappling with how ordinary and extraordinary life feels these days, simultaneously. Of Anne Frank and her diary, Kari writes:

“Her preoccupations, romances, desires and longings all remained the same as any other teenager, even under the face of what was once unimaginable oppression. She felt the same confusion we feel when she started seeing people kidnapped from the street, but still was craving her favorite lunch, or lusting after some dumb boy.

Humanity doesn’t stop just because it’s happening. Life doesn’t stop just because this is happening.

This is how the unimaginable becomes ordinary.”

From Gabrielle Feather’s Holding Both:

Holding Both

100 Things to Do Now You Are Collapse-Aware

This piece was inspired by amelia hruby, phd’s wonderful “100 Ways to Share Your Work + Life Off Social Media”. I’m grateful for the spark of inspiration and offer this in the same spirit: as a companion for those navigating the strange and unfamiliar terrain beyond disillusionment…

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8 months ago · 112 likes · 12 comments · Gabrielle Feather

It was reassuring to see how many of the 100 things I already do. (Would love to know which ones you are doing, too.) I find comfort in this way of looking at collapse:

“To be collapse-aware is to see clearly and to recognise beauty and brutality, fragility and resilience, sorrow and possibility. But awareness alone is only the threshold. What matters is how we choose to live from here, how we shape our days, tend our bodies, nurture our relationships, and weave new stories amid the unravelling.”

From Garrett Bucks’s The White Pages:

The White Pages

When the soldiers come to your town, this is what I'll say about you

Every place is easy to love, because every place is home to people worth loving. I love Chicago and Portland, just as I love Los Angeles and Washington D.C.. just as I will love the next city where the Trump administration will deploy its masked men and gun thugs…

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8 months ago · 176 likes · 32 comments · Garrett Bucks

I absolutely needed to read his words about the problem with all the images being shared to counter the “war ravaged” narrative. We don’t need to be beautiful to be worthy of peace. And these words, too, made me cry this weekend:

“I do love Portland and Chicago. For many reasons, but most of all for the same reason I love every place. Because you care so much, you Chicagoans and Portlanders. Not perfectly, of course. Not without lapses. And not, one could argue, in large and consistent enough quantities to stitch together a broken world. You are not exceptional; you are saddled with the same limitations of timidity and self centeredness as the rest of us. But I know you are out there, hearts on fire. I know you doubt your numbers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t actually enough of you. I know that many of you are scared and confused and exhausted and it is not at all clear what to do or how to do it and that, my friends, is all the more reason to show your care in whatever way you see fit, first whispering, then shouting. We love each other. We don’t know how to love each other all the time. But we are trying.”

Boy, did I need some kind of permission to show my care in whatever way I can. Some way to feel OK about not knowing what to do, really, beyond showing up in the street, moving my feet, and occasionally letting tears spill.

I would love to know how the weekend was for you, how you’re doing, what this time is like for you. Meet me in the comments?

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I am in a class of maybe 15 or so, and for the three hours we gather each week, I’ve been able to think about nothing but the garment I’ve been making and the skills required to sew it. We have a reference booklet—with illustrations of equipment, techniques, and terminology—and an instructor who demonstrates and coaches.

During class I’m surrounded by other students who span a spectrum of ages, genders, and cultures. We all help each other out as needed, but it’s largely a parallel play experience. There is something so very soothing about following a set of precise directions in the company of others, with no imperative to complete them with others. We are each as on our own as we want to be, together.

For three hours, once a week, I am in a place where things make sense. Where I need to concentrate, so I’m not thinking about the problems of my personal world or the larger one. There is something meditative about running fabric through a sewing machine, focused on stitching a straight seam, half-listening to the quiet conversations of those helping each other through our common tasks. There are clear right and wrong ways to do everything. When something gets messed up—and for all of us, things get messed up—it can be fixed. We try to figure out why something happened, so that we can learn from it, but we can’t always. Rethreading the machine solves a variety of problems. So does ripping out stitches and sewing again.

I first used a sewing machine as a child, and my mother taught me some rudimentary skills, but I never took Home Ec or any other kind of class. I’ve long known that there are many things I never learned, and I’ve suspected that my few basic projects have been more difficult than they needed to be. Now, I am learning all kinds of things I didn’t even know I didn’t know. Now, I can stabilize a curved edge so that it won’t stretch out of shape when I’m sewing it into a seam. I can find the grain of fabric and place my pattern pieces so that they will work with it, and I know why I should bother to do so. I know how to bust a seam with a ham!

Last week I attended a reading by author Karen Walrond, whose latest book is In Defense of Dabbling: The Brilliance of Being a Total Amateur. Thanks to Walrond and her work, I’ve got a deeper understanding of why I’ve come to treasure my sewing nights. (She also has a Substack publication, The Make Light Journal.)

Walrond identifies 7 attributes of what she calls intentional amatuerism: curiosity, mindfulness, self-compassion, play, stretch zone, connection, and wonder & awe. Listening to her, I was able to identify exactly what my sewing class is giving me. It satisfies my curiosity; I’m learning about something I’ve long wanted to know more about. It is an exercise in mindfulness (I will never forget the time I was not mindful as a child and ran my thumb right under the machine’s needle), and it provides lots of opportunities to learn self-compassion. My seams are never as straight as I’d like them to be, and that’s OK. I’m doing something in person with other humans, and I’ll be taking my next session of classes from a former colleague, both of which fosters feelings of connection.

I began writing Rootsie with the idea of exploring what it means to live a “small, creative life,” but Walrond is helping me understand that perhaps what I’ve meant by “small” can be more accurately understood as “amateur”—and that amateurism is a worthy pursuit. She notes that despite the ways in which we use “amateur” to diminish or denigrate, the root of the word means “love.” She makes the case that we don’t have to be experts at something or monetize something or achieve great levels of accomplishment to justify the time we give to a pursuit. We can do something simply because we love it—or, in the case of my exploration of sewing, because we might love it.

Am I ever going to make the kind of beautiful garments my former colleague makes, or teach classes as she does? Am I going to open an Etsy shop to sell my wares? Most likely, no. Malcom Gladwell’s famous 10,000 hours of practice to achieve greatness has been repeatedly debunked,1 but getting really good at many things does take time. At 60, there are some things I’m never going to be great at because I simply don’t have the years I’d need to become great. Ice skating is another of my amateur pursuits, and I’m certainly never going to go to the Olympics or coach others now! I’m not even going to be a champion in events for senior skaters. Thanks to age, a brain injury, and the 45-year break I took from skating, my body just can’t take me there, even if I wanted it to. What a gift there is in that! I can’t skate now for anything but the love of it. Wouldn’t it be great to give ourselves this gift no matter what age we are, the way we did when we were children? The way we did before adults started bad-mouthing participation trophies and turning kids’ sports into businesses? Before we started feeling we had to justify ____ (fill in the blank with any kind of art, sport, or hobby you love doing) with some “practical” purpose?

I am completely on board with pursuits that do not have to have a practical purpose, full stop. And, this is where I feel it necessary to acknowledge the time we are living through. Part of my motivation in learning new sewing skills is wanting to develop practical knowledge that might serve me/others as the world I’ve always known is collapsing. (A reason I’m also dabbling with growing food and cooking/baking.) But I do not want to engage in creative endeavors only from some place of grim purpose. I want to engage in them as I engage with my friends, family, and community—from a place of love. From places of play and joy and curiosity, which have practical uses, too.

Horrific things are happening in the US.2 I live in a city that’s being targeted and lied about by our federal government, and I’m learning a lot from watching the responses of my community. Those protesting at our ICE facility are doing so for serious reasons, and they are taking serious risks,3 but they are engaging from places of play, joy, and love. They are wearing inflatable animal costumes!4 They are riding bikes naked in the rain!5 There is a strategic purpose to this kind of protest,6 and it also reminds us what our lives are for (satisfying curiosity, stretching our comfort zones, connecting with others, playing, experiencing wonder & awe). This has got to be a practical purpose of protest, too.

To be clear: I do not think that my sewing is an act of resistance. Resilience, yes, but resistance, no. Both are important (can’t have the latter without the former), and so is the distinction. Engaging in personal pursuits with joy, play, and love are not going to stop the harm being done. So, today I will sew. Tomorrow, I hope you’ll be with me in the streets.7 I don’t think I’m very good at resistance yet, for a lot of reasons. But I’m willing to learn, willing to be an amateur at it. I’ll be engaging from a place of love and curiosity, and I expect—when I see the thousands of people I know will be there with me—I’ll feel not a small amount of wonder and awe.

I’d love to hear from you: What are you doing for joy? What’s something you do that you’re pretty sure you’re never going to be great at—and why do you do it? Thoughts on resilience and resistance?

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Last weekend, I was a fury in the kitchen. Or maybe a Fury.

On Sunday afternoon, I baked a whole chicken. And two trays of roasted chicken thighs and vegetables. And an apple and pear galette. Using the whole chicken, I also made a pot of soup.

The day before that, I spent hours making pesto. I harvested the last of our voluminous basil crop, snipping and cleaning leaves before putting them in the food processor with garlic, cashews, olive oil, and parmesan. I think I made ten batches. Maybe twenty? Many batches were doubled and I’m not sure of how to count them, but I now have a year’s worth of pesto in the freezer. I also kneaded the hell out of a ball of pizza dough I’d started for Monday’s dinner.

On Saturday morning, the person occupying the White House announced that he is directing our Secretary of War to send armed troops to my city, calling it “war ravaged,” and authorizing the use of “Full Force” [sic]. This is a gross insult to any place that has truly been ravaged by war, a waste of resources we all contribute to, and an unconscionable act of aggression against those of us who live here.

It was a beautiful early fall weekend in Portland, with temperatures in the 70’s. Outside our windows, I saw neighbors walking to church, squirrels burying nuts, crows sunning on power lines. My social media feed was full of images of people peacefully enjoying all that our city has to offer us—parks, mountain views, outdoor markets, river walks and wooded hikes, the early turning of leaves, each other’s company. I also saw many images of our local ICE facility with a few protesting but no one obstructing its obscene business, as well as messages from our elected officials telling us how they are lawfully resisting this egregious, dangerous, and destructive over-reach of power.

I am not a person who needs to feel things personally to care about what is happening in and to our country, but there was something about feeling it personally—about seeing my government point weapons at the place I live—that took my now-decade’s worth of anger to a deeper place.

The Furies are goddesses of vengeance. They are of the earth, Gaea, and are associated with earthly fertility. They live in the underworld but ascend to pursue the wicked. They are particularly opposed to crimes within families, which makes sense as they were born of blood spilled when a son castrated his father to take his power.

I gathered my basil in a basket I once used to carry my premature babies with me from room to room of our home. I was not much of a cook or baker when my children were growing up. I am three generations removed from the farmers I descend from, and none of their knowledge was passed to me. My great-grandmother used to send us jars of applesauce she made from fruit grown on her trees, but convenience foods were a staple of the diet I was raised on, meals that came largely from boxes and cans and mixes and packets. Chicken soup was one of the few things I made that my children loved; it was so much better than the tins of stuff I ate when I was a kid. Recently, my daughter shared a photo of chicken soup her husband made from my recipe, more than 5,000 miles away from Portland. It lessened regrets I have about the kinds of things I didn’t do when she was growing up, didn’t understand back then. I certainly didn’t grow any of our food in those years, but now I am learning how to. This year we successfully raised onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas, squash, parsley, thyme, and basil. The pears in my galette came from a tree in our yard. The apples came from local growers. Sunday morning, we picked up carrots from the stand in front of a u-pick farm about a mile from our home. This summer, I taught myself more about how to preserve the food we’ve grown, so we can eat it through the winter.

How does a commoner respond when a ruler spreads lies and threatens peace and seems to be instigating—perhaps hoping for—violence in her home?

In lots of different ways, I suppose. I can’t tell you, exactly, why I felt compelled to spend our beautiful weekend in the kitchen. I only know that I did, that I needed to tend my garden, reveling in the sun on my skin and the earth under my nails; that I needed to harvest our already-gone-to-flower basil before this week’s promised rain, marveling in its bounty; that I needed to feed myself and my family, delighting in our full, satisfied bellies.

I needed to revel, marvel, and delight in my place on this earth. I needed to fuel my Fury on that which makes her stronger, reminds her of what she will not give away.

For a fuller look at how things really are in Portland, I appreciate this post from Elizabeth Doerr:

Cramming for the Apocalypse

Dispatches from "war-ravaged" Portland

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8 months ago · 5 likes · Elizabeth Doerr

I particularly appreciate this:

“It goes without saying that, in Portland, we don’t need the military. What we need is proper funding for social services, we need shelters and housing programs that actually help people get off the streets, and we need fully-funded public schools. We also need infrastructure improvements and climate resilience projects as our state gets hotter, and we need a Forest Service headquarters to stay in the PNW so that fire risks don’t increase.”

Your turn

What fuels you? What do you have that you will not give away?

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I haven’t watered my flower box in over a week. In August, if I don’t water it daily (or almost daily) everything in it will die. I’d like to tell you the reason I haven’t written anything here since early August is that I was too busy watering, but that wouldn’t be quite true. Or even close to true. It only takes a few minutes a day to water the box. But it feels true.

Most years, the box under my kitchen window is a source of joy. I buy about 10 annuals and plant them in mid-spring. Usually, they thrive all summer long. Every time I look out the window while I’m making meals, I get a little jolt of happy. Every time I walk or drive up to the house, I get that same jolt. That spark has always felt more than worth the time and money it has cost me to fill the box with flowers and keep them alive.

Not this year, though. My usual methods haven’t worked. I think I’m on my third set of summer plants? I’m not sure how to count; I kept replacing them as they died, and they didn’t all die at once. Back in June, after some died, I bought flowers that I’ve always had great success with—a variety of something like a miniature petunia, with bright, colorful booms—but many of them perished. I blamed it on a spate of 90+ degree days right after I planted. I put new ones in as soon as the weather became more reasonable, but most of those withered into crunchy ghosts of the plants they had been, too. Then I switched to some other flower with lots of tiny white petals. Those haven’t died, but most of the time at least half of the tiny petals are brown, so they generally look like they’re on their death bed. For awhile I tried meticulously pinching off the dead petals, but it was painstaking work with almost no reward. The plants still looked ugly. I hate them.

Somewhere in early August, I decided I wasn’t going to spend any more money on new plants for the box this year, nor was I going to tend the plants beyond watering them. I was going to let the box be what it will, even if I don’t much like what it is. While the white flowers are continuing to live without much change, the coleus—my anchor plants—have taken off with a vengeance. They are towering over the puny white flowers like 8th grade girls over their male counterparts, all leggy and fierce. One has bolted in a way that reminds me of our failed backyard lettuce, with a long stalk shooting up from its head. They fill half the kitchen window with their height, but they feel out of control. There’s no little jolt of happy when I see them.

I suppose that’s why I haven’t watered the box. That, and life has felt largely untenable for this entire interminable year, and the weather has changed. We have been blessedly in the 70’s most days, some with clouds. Clouds! We’ve even had rain; I felt my soul expand like one of those magic sponges one morning when I woke up to wet pavement. The rain doesn’t help the box any, though, because it hangs under the eaves. It’s dry as tinder, I know, but everything in it is still alive. I’ll probably water it soon. It’s just been so nice to get a little break, to be a little less vigilant about keeping everything alive.

I told one of my therapists last week (yes, I have more than one) that I want to stop living on hold, waiting for the crisis in my life to resolve so that I can get back to something that feels like normal. “I want to be back in my life,” I said. “I’m tired of feeling as if I’m just existing through time out of time.”

He asked me what that would look like. I think that might be the wrong question? I’m more interested in what it would feel like.

It would feel like the ground is solid under my feet again. It would feel like I could look toward the future and the landscape there would be familiar. Maybe I wouldn’t know all the buildings in it, and certainly not the colors of paint on them, but I would know the major structures and geographical features. The tall firs would still be standing, as would the mountains they grow upon. I would feel calm, present, and grounded. Upon such a sure foundation, I would care again about small things I usually enjoy caring about—trying a new recipe, doing a good puzzle, watering the flower box.

“What things would you want to do, what would you have in your life?” the therapist asked.

I couldn’t quite answer that in the session, but because I have always been a good student, I made a list after the appointment ended. It was full of things that once filled me with joy, like the flower box flowers.

“The thing is,” I said to my husband, later, “those things feel like consolation prizes. They are frosting, which is great when you have cake, but when there’s no cake….”

I have been trying to eat frosting with no cake for quite a while now, and I have no stomach for it. I find myself craving roasted vegetables, pungent cheeses, crusty bread.

“I am so angry,” I said to the therapist, “because I thought I had a solid foundation, one that helped me withstand all the other things life threw at me. And now that foundation is gone. I want it back. I want to rebuild it, but I can’t do it by myself and I’m so tired of waiting for and supporting someone else’s changes and being so damn understanding all the time.”

“You haven’t lost your foundation,” he said gently. “You are your foundation. You are the only thing that can hold you.”

I know it seems like the plants were the problem. They were the thing that kept dying. But what does it mean when what has been the right plant in the right place for years suddenly isn’t? Doesn’t it mean that the plant is not the problem, but is instead a symptom of one?

It occurred to me back in July that perhaps the issue with the flower box was the soil. Perhaps it was depleted, I thought. I haven’t put new soil into the box in more than five years. Perhaps, I thought, I should take out all the plants and dump that soil in the backyard where we put grass clippings. Perhaps I should get new soil and start over.

Oh, but that was a hard thought. It made me feel inadequate. I should learn how to compost, I told myself, make my own good soil. Or learn how to fertilize. Do something more than just add water. Because of my discomfort (and the effing, intolerable heat), I turned away from that thought about the soil. I let the flowers continue to struggle, wither, fail.

I’m seeing it differently today, now that the weather has turned and we’re on the cusp of a new season. I’m sure the soil could be redeemed by some other person who knows how to repair soil, but I don’t have that knowledge and those skills today. Today, though, I could go to a garden center and simply buy a bag of new soil. Maybe that is just fine? Maybe it is fine to get new soil from the nursery, just as I sometimes get convenience foods from the grocery store rather than making everything from scratch. I don’t have enough time to make everything from scratch. And if I’m really going to go down that road, wouldn’t I eventually have to grow all my own food? Butcher my own chickens if I want chicken soup? Every life is lived in a never-ending negotiation with resources, and none of ours are pure.

Still, relying on someone else for soil that way feels a bit like not being my own foundation—or it did, until a few days after the therapy appointment, when I wondered if I just haven’t been looking at any of this the right way. Of course the soil is crucial, and I’ve long thought of soil as the foundation of a garden, but when it comes to my flower box and the joy it can provide, isn’t the box the true foundation? Isn’t it the box that holds everything?

And isn’t it true that we all need to rely on others some of the time, in some ways? We can’t all do everything and be experts at everything. Can’t I lean on the work of those who know and create good soil? (I mean, I don’t want to butcher my own chickens! And I love chicken soup!) Maybe some of them read these words I put out into the world, and maybe this thing that I can do will bring them (or someone else, because I don’t think this has to be a straight exchange) joy in the way their soil work will bring joy to me. Wouldn’t we have a better world for more of us if we could embrace interdependence, rather than rugged individualism?

Yes, I think, it would be, and so I’ve decided: I am going to put in new dirt and get new plants. I’m going to do it because I can and because I am unwilling to give up those jolts of joy. I am keeping the box. It’s mine, and it’s sturdy, and it can hold any number of plants I choose to grow in it. I am going to put the joyless plants in the compost bin, let the city take them away and put them to better use. I am going to plant new plants, again, for the coming season, one that I’ve always loved more than summer anyway, with its infernal heat.

I am choosing the foundation. I am choosing interdependence. I am choosing joy.

Even fall can be a season for new growth.

One (big) way I’m tending to my foundation:

Sleep divorce is a thing. A good thing. Or you can call it a sleep alliance if you don’t like that terminology. I’ve struggled with sleep issues for years. At a recent visit with my occupational therapist, she shared this graphic with me:

Each level of cognitive task relies on the task below it, and the whole thing starts with energy, which is impacted by the things below the pyramid. I’m paying attention to all of those things, but the biggest change I’ve made has been to sleep. I’m sleeping in our guest room now. We bought a better mattress for it, and I have the kind of blankets that work best for me on it. I am sleeping more—and more soundly—than I have since my kids were born. I got a 10+ hour night recently, a kind of thing I’d have thought was impossible as recently as a month ago. Last night, I only got up to use the bathroom once. IYKYK

Some ways I’m feeding the soil:

I’m retraining my brain to pay attention like it’s 1999. I miss my old brain, the one that could read for hours. The one that had lots of good ideas. The one that craved learning. We did an accidental phone-free Saturday recently, and it felt really good. In the article below, I especially appreciate author Yana Yuhai’s explanation of the neuroscience behind our compulsions to scroll (“Our attention spans haven’t disappeared, they’ve been retrained”), and her suggestions for ways to get our attention back, none of which are dogmatic or dramatic (“make focus feel like a soft return, not a hard reset”). Neuroplasticity for the win.

mindbox

how to pay attention again (the neuroscience of focus in the age of everything)

There’s a specific kind of mental fog that creeps in when you’ve been scrolling for too long. Tired but wired, overstimulated and undernourished. You sit down to do something and your brain slips through your fingers…you check your socials, then your email, then your texts, then your socials again…toggling between five apps, and yet - nothing really lan…

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a year ago · 37806 likes · 285 comments · yana yuhai

I’m beginning a 100-day journaling challenge. Earlier in my life I was an avid journal writer. I’ve tried various ways to return to that practice over the years (hello, Morning Pages), but none have stuck. I recently came across Suleika Jaoud’s The Book of Alchemy, which uses short essays (from so many writers I appreciate) as springboard to journaling prompts. This has what feels like the right amount of freedom and structure, and reading always primes the pump of writing for me.

I was swayed by Jaoud’s argument that journaling’s “physical and mental benefits have been extolled in study after study—everything from reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety to improving working memory and strengthening the immune system.”

As of tomorrow, September 23, there are 100 days left in 2025. There are 100 essays/prompts in the book. I’m looking forward to something positive and concrete to counter all the things that have depleted me this year.

Planting seeds:

I’m learning some new things, just because. A former colleague is a maker of beautiful clothing, and she teaches sewing classes I’ve long wanted to take. My mom introduced me to sewing when I was a child, but my skills are limited and my craftsmanship is mediocre. I never learned the fundamentals. I don’t need to, but I want to—and so I’ve signed up for a three-course sequence that began last week and goes through December. I don’t think I’ve ever made this kind of commitment to something that feels a little frivolous.

Some other new learnings: In the realm of knitting, I learned how to kfb last week (the process wasn’t pretty, but I did it, thanks YouTube); I’m getting better at baking a good pizza crust; and I’ve been re-learning how to use freezing to preserve some of the vegetables we managed to grow this year.

How about you?

I think many of us are grappling with shaky foundations and/or depleted soil. I’d love to know if anything in today’s essay resonates with your own experiences. How are you shoring up your foundation or tending to your soil, and what’s blooming for you as we turn toward autumn?

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I wrote, too, about things I knew could interrupt the work:

Life as I’ve known it has begun to feel like a ticking bomb. I don’t know when it’s going to blow or what the size of the explosion will be, but I know that it will.

I was expecting something like a parent’s illness or death, an eruption in my disabled brother’s living situation, or a crisis in the life of one of my adult children. I was expecting to get hit, in the future, by one of the trains I can see traveling down the track of my life. I was not expecting the equivalent of getting t-boned by someone I know while they’re running a red light, but that’s a good metaphor for what happened to me. Just about two weeks after writing my big, brave, public intention to pursue a writing dream long deferred, my life got hit by something I never saw coming.

Ka-boom!

I don’t want to be unnecessarily cryptic, but there’s privacy to preserve. What the situation means and will mean is something I’m still working through.

When my country began coming apart in late January, I did, too. Of course, the country had been coming apart for decades, but that is when the unraveling accelerated, turned official, and shattered things I once thought invincible. I could not pretend, in either my personal world or the world at large, that the center was holding.

The personal and political betrayals seemed to be in conversation with each other. I wrote a flash non-fiction piece about what was happening, titling it “Just Before They Started Calling It a Coup.” In it, I spun a metaphor for the person who hurt me, imagining them as a mangrove tree, a plant that endures daily flooding from water 100 times saltier than most other plants can abide. They take in oxygen through lenticels, pores in their bark and aerial roots. During high tides, the lenticels close tightly to prevent the trees from drowning.

The piece I wrote ends with me rubbing my thumb over the knob of a lenticel breaking through my palm. The revision—still in progress—is now titled “Adaptation.”

I’ve hardly written all summer, and here it is early August.

When I scroll social media posts and essays, so much that I see feels pointless or fake or weird. Why are so many of us publicly sharing our hot takes, our intimate thoughts, the minutiae of our lives? How can anyone’s opinion on something they have no special knowledge of matter enough to broadcast? (How can mine?) So much feels phony or forced, acts of brazen network or brand building rather than some honest thing it is pretending to be. So many blog/newsletter essays are sales pitches dressed up as literature. I understand why others feel or have a need to do this (capitalism, baby), but I sometimes feel we are all drowning in toxic waters. I want only to turn away from it.

So I have, which has been easy when the plants need so much watering and the berries have been so prolific and the crows and squirrels have been engaged in so much amusing backyard drama. When, despite all that is wrong or hard in it, my life affords me the luxury of retreat.

I’ve been made mostly mute all summer by a nagging question:

If I were to write and share my words, would that be me opening up the lenticels I’ve formed, or would it be me adding to the salty flood?

Born in the last weeks of 1964, I am a very young Boomer/very old Gen Xer, and, like Tom Petty’s American girl, was raised on the promises.1 I can look back at my life now, though, and see how through the whole of my adult existence I’ve been living on the edge of an eroding cliff, scrabbling to hold on even as it was disintegrating beneath me.

I’m now feeling a bit like Wile E. Coyote in all those Roadrunner cartoons I watched as a kid, suspended over a canyon and realizing that there’s no there, there.

The blogs and newsletter and instagram accounts I have been turning toward are those from ordinary people I’ve come to know in some way. I love it when they share the minutiae of their lives, the thing they are expert in.

Here is a berry crumble I made in July, using blueberries from our backyard and raspberries from our local produce market:

Here is a photo I took at a gardening center, of another woman’s cart, because it was so beautifully composed.

Here are the plants I took home that day for my kitchen window flower box:

Here is what my living/dining room looked like when I finally tackled a re-organization of our utility room storage shelves. It was a two-day project.

This is our backyard bunny, hoping (I think) that the clover we’ve let grow is providing adequate camouflage:

This is a photo I sent to my daughter during a call in which my morning was her late afternoon. I am holding the stuffed panda she gave me, wearing hand-me-down pajamas I got from my mom the last time my daughter visited her grandparents, when my mom went through her closet and ended up giving each of us a big bag of clothes. This might be my favorite photo of the summer so far.

I had dinner with a friend recently, a newly ordained rabbi. She talked of people she knows in Israel, of the atrocities continuing to unfold in Gaza, of how the people she knows do not support what is happening there, do not support their country’s leadership.

She said, “They just want to live their lives, you know?”

I know.

I remember, with longing, when my life was consumed with little more than just the living of it. When I believed it rested upon a stable there.

I watch reels of people interfering with masked ICE officers, asking for identification, asking for names, asking for warrants, filming, documenting, sharing. They all end with silent people being led away, often to unmarked cars. Despite the immediate outcomes, I believe this sharing matters.

So far, I have not witnessed such a scene personally. I watch the reels and wonder what I would do. Would I be a woman screaming questions or one recording on a phone? Would I just stand there, bearing analog witness? Or would I walk past, head down, eyes averted? I’m grateful for the opportunity to consider these questions in advance, increasing the chances that I won’t just walk by.

We all need to live our lives, and also we don’t get to just live our lives. Or, at least some of us don’t. So what to do? How do we need to be in our world?

I am not sure. I don’t know that I trust anyone who claims to know how any of us should be. (Also, hasn’t it always been this way, whether we were aware of it or not?)

The lessons I’m learning through my personal situation feel apt for the global one unfolding around me. I’d like to simply stand and howl, “I’m too old for this shit!” (and maybe that’s what I’m doing, just a little bit, here) but that does not feel like a good choice, even though, in important ways, I am too old for this shit, no longer having a kind of flexibility I once did.

Also? There’s a weird kind of relief, too. Gaslighting destroys our trust in ourselves. Even if we don’t know know that something’s not right, part of us does know. We sense the edge of the cliff. We can waste a lot of energy convincing ourselves that false things are what they seem to be, what we want and hope them to be. While I wish many things are what I once thought they were, there is something honest and true and good in knowing more fully what they actually are. And in that place, uncomfortable and painful as it can be, I find a kind of hope. I feel as if there’s possibility for a better kind of hard.

So, old or no, howling or no, grieving or no, scared or no, angry-as-fucking-hell or no, I’m working to figure out ways of moving forward (because there’s no going back). I’m working to figure out good ways to be in it, all of it. I don’t have any choice about needing to make choices, but I do get to make some.

We all do, which can be hard to keep sight of when all of the choices feel hard.

Why do I keep scrolling when it so often leaves me feeling disheartened or disgusted or in despair?

Because in the scroll I keep discovering new voices saying things I want and need to hear. Because that’s how I often see words from writers who always give me comfort. Because through it I have found kindred spirits in places geographically far from me, and those connections matter and count. (Physical proximity does not guarantee honesty or transparency or an ability to know who someone is. Believe me on that one.) Because it is often in disembodied digital spaces that I find knowledge and understanding I might not acquire through print books or my IRL relationships and activities. Because our online world is its own kind of real. The idea of cutting myself entirely off from it feels like the equivalent of fantasizing about living off-grid in a secluded forest cabin: Sounds kinda dreamy, but I know that I would not last a winter in such a place. Because inside the cacophony of the trivial, the mundane, the hucksterish, the phony, the ridiculous, and the fear-mongering voices, there are others telling truths that build a fire in the cold.

In response to one of my questions, a writer/friend tells me: “Everything feels fluid right now. And a bit unreal. We can just check in on the voices that feel authentic and know that we're OK.”

Another offers: “I am a big believer in retreat. Sometimes it's exactly what we need.” She then points me to Andrea Gibson’s “Instead of Depression,” and tears rise at, “Sleep through the alarm/of the world. Name your hopelessness/a quiet hollow, a place you go/to heal…”

Another (or maybe one of these, it is easy to get lost in the bread crumb trails) points me to , whose recent words in “Grieving My Beautiful Before” knocked the wind out of me:

The grief I felt for my old life hit me. I kind of put off grieving for it by pretending I was going to get back to it, but now that I'm practicing radical acceptance, I realize I can't get back to it. I can only build a great new life, which leaves me free to grieve that old life. It is knocking the wind out of me.

I trust these voices.

(I still have trust. I refuse to lose trust. That’s a choice I’m making.)

As always, the answers to my questions are both/and, rather than either/or.

So: This is me, showing up in your inbox or feed, lenticels widening, gasping for air. And this is also me, joining the salty flood.

Don’t we all, like Whitman, contain multitudes? Aren’t we all sometimes the person running the stop sign and sometimes the person getting hit and sometimes the person recording from the sidewalk and sometimes the person stopping to call 911? Aren’t we all sometimes the tide rushing in and sometimes the waves ebbing in retreat and sometimes the swimmer not waving but drowning and sometimes the person floating on their back, letting the water hold them, because they need a reprieve from kicking?

This isn’t the writing I was dreaming of eight months ago, or even the writing I thought I would do when I started Rootsie. But it’s the writing I can share today (and isn’t that all any of us can do, what we can do today?), before I step outside to harvest the last of the blueberries (some of which are pink), and maybe go to the gym, and make granola, and do a therapy appointment, and prep the house for my daughter’s upcoming visit, and try to get in a call with an old friend who lives 8 time zones away.

I love to talk with you in the comments, and I hope you’ll understand if my responses aren’t immediate. Know that I will get back to you. I always do.

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But I wake up after only two hours, my pajama top damp with sweat. Just this week we switched the sheets from flannel to cotton, because the days and nights have turned a corner and we’re supposed to have a 90 degree day over the upcoming weekend, even though it’s only early June. I stumble to the bathroom in my medication fog, then stumble back. I’d like to change out of the pajama top; it feels cool in a wrong way. But I don’t because that feels like too much effort. I fall back into bed and hope again for good sleep.

I don’t get it. At 4:06 I wake up for the fourth time, and this time I move to the extra bedroom. My husband’s alarm is set to go off at 5:30, and I’m so damn tired. Usually I like to get up when he does, but not on the mornings after nights like this one. The bed in that room still has flannel sheets on it, and I hope they won’t feel too hot. They don’t. They feel like a hug. I’m grateful for them.

While I am lying there, focusing on my breathing (in-2-3-4, out-3-2-1), I hear the sound of water. Water? It can’t be water. There’s no rain in the forecast. Oh, no! I think. We must have left a sprinkler on all night! I get out of bed, open the blinds. The whole backyard patio is wet. I look for a sprinkler, because, sure, my husband might have set it to run on the patio. You never know. That’s how much I trust the forecast. Or how muddled my brain is.

He didn’t. There’s no sprinkler on. I decide that it is raining, even though I can’t see any rain falling down. I am confused, as I’ve come to see weather forecasts as promises more than predictions. I remember, when I was a kid, how adults used to complain and/or joke about how wrong weather forecasts were. No one does that now because they are usually right. Maybe they won’t be now that we’re defunding so many things we haven’t yet realized we rely on.

I get up at 6:30 to make my husband’s lunch, feeling like a 1950’s housewife, or what I imagine it was to be a 1950’s housewife, which is based mostly on Leave It to Beaver, a show I watched in the mornings before school in the 1970’s while my mom fed us breakfast and made our lunches. I probably should feel more like a 1970’s housewife, but unlike my mom I do not have to make lunches and then go to a job. I no longer have kids to feed, and I am retired now. That still feels weird to me, even though it’s been four years since I worked full-time. I am not, like June Cleaver always was, wearing a dress, pearls, heels, and full face of make-up while bustling around the kitchen with shellacked hair. I am wearing the same gross pajama top, though it is now dry. I have brushed my teeth, but not my hair.

I tell my husband the things I had planned to do today that I now will not be doing: Going to the gym, washing my car, working in our garden. I decide that instead, I will try making the granola recipe1 I found last weekend in the Grand Central Bakery Book while I was looking for a cookie recipe. (Their lemon cream sandwich cookie is so, so good.) I take a frozen loaf of bread out of the freezer to finish baking. I make a cup of tea. I feel grateful again.

While drinking the tea, I read an essay by Elizabeth Beggins, “Waiting to Be Said.” If you like what I write here, I think you’d like what Elizabeth writes in her space. You might like her writing more than mine; I often do. Today, her writing makes me feel like I wish I could be a little more polished, or a little more something, more consistently here. And it also makes me feel good. Elizabeth’s essay makes me hopeful (something her writing often does), and it makes me believe in the power of small actions. It makes me think about church.

I think about how I’ve been meaning to write for so long about church, which I started attending back in November. It wasn’t really the election results that sent me to church. I’d been thinking about visiting or years. But it was probably the election results that got me over some hump about it. I’m an atheist and most white people who identify as fervent Christians put me on guard now, but this church partnered with a civic organization to build a tiny-home community in their parking lot to serve unhoused women most at-risk for abuse in traditional shelters (BIPOC, LGBTQ+, mentally ill) and they are what I think of as actual-Christian Christians. Christians who act like the Jesus I learned about as a child. They say, “All are welcome here,” and they mean it. Their reader board messages have been serving me small morsels of real (not fake) hope since I moved to this neighborhood in 2018.

I have been feeling a little ambivalent about going to church, even though I love the work this congregation does and I want to want to go to church. It’s mostly because I am an atheist and so much of what happens there doesn’t quite fit for me, but also because I’m having a hard time really connecting with others who attend Sunday services. I am looking for community, but I’ve been wondering if this is the right community for me, seeing as I don’t believe in God in the way that most others there do. Elizabeth’s essay makes me think about the value of small connections, though, and wonder if I’ve been asking myself the right questions.

Thinking about this also makes me think about an article I read earlier this week, that my friend Jill shared in her regular Monday roundup, Something Good. The article discussed something called “hypernormalization,” a term coined in 2005 to describe life in Soviet-era Russia. As writer Adrienne Matei explains it,

“…hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening. The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.”

Oof, yeah.

Those that Matei interviewed for the article talk about the importance of being connected to each other as a means of countering hypernormalization, which is at least partly what Elizabeth is writing about, even if she isn’t connecting her ideas to that concept. Both pieces get me thinking that the most important thing about church might be just knowing and being known by others who live where I live, rather than finding some perfect kind of community or spiritual practice. Maybe it can be enough—and more than worth getting ourselves there on Sunday mornings—simply to come together weekly with others who live with us and have similar hopes for the world, and that we know their names and they know ours. Maybe that is a more profound act than I have previously imagined.

I wander around our little house for a bit, so grateful for all the kinds of shelter it provides. I am so thankful to be here alone on this rainy late spring morning when I’m feeling crummy, so grateful for my normal life.

And then I open my computer and begin writing these words, so I can remember these thoughts before they slip away from me. So I can share them with you. I told a writing friend, Tracey (whose work you can find here), that I would participate in Jami Attenberg’s #1000wordsofsummer challenge with her. The idea is to write 1,000 words a day for two weeks. I started strong, but the past two days I wrote 0 words.

These words here are not the kind of words I wanted to write when I told Tracey I was in. I have another project I want (or want to want) to work on. It feels more important than what I’ve been doing here. I’ve been finding it hard, lately, to read posts like this one from other writers. (What do all these words of ours matter? Sometimes it feels like we’re all just talking while the sky burns.) But maybe the other project is not more important. Maybe these are the 1,000 words that need to be written today. Maybe it doesn’t matter what words are written, only that words are written. I’m grateful to have any, whether they are some kind of right ones or not.

Showing up imperfectly (here, in my writing project) might be, for me, a little bit like showing up for church. Showing up for life. It’s not exactly what I want, or want to want, or maybe think I should really be doing, but it’s me saying to you, as Elizabeth says to others in the grocery store, Hi. I’m here. I see you, and I’m glad you’re here, too.

It’s me saying,

Life feels really weird right now, but also really normal, which is part of why it feels really weird. Let’s keep showing up for each other as we can, OK? And maybe introduce each other to some of our other friends, so we can make our connections a little bigger, a little stronger. We might need more of that going forward, yeah?

Anything in here resonate? I’d love to hear about it, talk about it, trade thoughts. And a special request for the comments this time:

If you are a person who shares your writing online, maybe drop a link to your work in your comment? I’m pretty sure some of you who don’t know each other would really like each other’s writing. Or, if you’ve already found a writer you appreciate through reading their comments here, let us know that, too.

I know that there’s no digital substitute for things that only IRL connection can bring, but there’s also a real and equally compelling need to connect with those who are our kindred spirits, or might be. I don’t know how it is for you, but some of my most kindred don’t live anywhere near me and I might never meet them in real life. And I am so grateful for all the ways in which we are helping each other navigate this long, strange trip of a time we’re living through.

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In a recent lunch with a former colleague turned current friend, the subject of school shootings came up, along with complex PTSD. We both left full-time work in education the spring of 2021, after what I now think of as the Covid year.

In Oregon, schools were remote until that spring. Our governor prioritized vaccines for school personnel, and we returned to in-person learning in March, after we’d all gotten our shots. My friend, S., lives with a medical condition that would likely render Covid fatal. I will never forget walking past her middle school classroom in those first days after we returned, seeing her standing in front of a group of silent 7th graders in widely spaced desks, wearing both a mask and a plastic face shield. Classroom doors were open, but the hall was eerily quiet and empty, none of what had once been typical noise spilling out. I felt like a character in a dystopian novel.

My job that year was to oversee libraries not allowed to check out books, and to “support” teachers in complying with mandates that felt impossible to meet. After watching one, a beautiful, gentle human, break down in tears at the end of a Zoom staff development session that I had developed and facilitated, I confronted in new ways my complicity in perpetuating harm.

In the final days of that year, S. and I made our plans. We’d both thought and hoped we would work in education longer, but we both decided that the costs to our health were no longer worth the benefits. We pledged to be each other’s retirement buddy. She was disappointed when, in August, I took a part-time teaching job for the coming school year. It was in a school I’d left in 2009, one I’d helped create, one I’d loved. I told myself it would be different there.

That year, too, had its Covid challenges, but being back in a classroom felt like the right kind of hard. I will always be grateful that I got to end my career on that note, working directly with students. That school was different in important ways, and working there was a gift. Still, halfway through that year, I knew that even part-time teaching wasn’t going to work for me. The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 24, 2022 helped confirm that.

That shooting came up in my conversation with S. when I shared that I’d recently had an essay published and that it was about that day. There was comfort and ease in not having to explain to S. anything about why a shooting in such a different kind of school than mine, so far away from me, had the impact it did.

“You know,” she said, “I’m finally in a place where every shooting doesn’t hit me the way they used to.” We talked about how different schools had been when we started teaching, before locked perimeters, security badges, security officers, hallway cameras, shooter drills, and “run, hide, fight.” We talked about what it did to us to be constantly on lookout for danger. We didn’t consciously feel it all the time; our conscious minds had so many other things to attend to. But we knew it was always there, just under the surface, in the way we came to respond immediately to anything out of the ordinary: a lone adult we didn’t recognize in the hall, a loud and unusual noise, unplanned fire alarms, a certain kind of agitated student. We’d suddenly be scanning, on high alert, running through possibilities in our heads, locating exits. We’d each had close enough encounters with physical danger at work that threats were never hypothetical or abstract for us. Our work environment had become dystopian long before the pandemic, and Uvalde helped me see that.

There’s more I might say. I have so many thoughts about what it’s doing to all of us (of course, some of us more than others) to live in a heightened state of threat and fear now, in so many different settings, from so many different sources. But that would take me down a deep and dark rabbit hole, and all I really want to do in today’s post is share a link to that essay and provide some context for it.

Here it is: “On the Morning of a Massacre of American Schoolchildren,” which is in the latest issue of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes.

I hope the words there say all the things I might say here, but in a better way. It is about a lesson in a high school English class, and about a school shooting, but it is really about more than either of those things. At least, I hope it is. Maybe read it as if it were a poem, if you click through. (Also, there’s an audio recording of it, if you’ve ever wondered what my voice sounds like.) And maybe read the poem that the essay hinges on, Jim Daniels’s “American Cheese.” It’s a good one. That we happened to be reading that poem on that day will always make me feel that there are forces at work in the universe beyond my ken.

As always, thank you for reading. Please feel free to share thoughts and questions in the comments.

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Hoping you have a peaceful, rejuvenating weekend.

My parents are both in their 80’s, and we all have good enough health to do this work and enjoy it. Both my husband and I were able to take the whole weekend off (both physically and mentally), to be fully present with my family and in our tasks. My dad was a machinist and my mom worked a series of clerical jobs, and they’ve always lived a small, frugal life, which is how they’re now in a place we all find excessively beautiful. It was nice to spend this kind of time there.

The weekend felt abundant with things that matter to us.

While we were enjoying our abundance, there was a lot of churning on Substack about recent events with a big writer who came and abruptly left because responses to her presence made Substack feel like a place that isn’t good for her mental health.

There are a lot of different ways of looking at what happened, but this post isn’t really about what happened. It’s about abundance, which I saw come up both directly and indirectly in many, many posts and Notes that have been shared about Big Writer and others’ responses to her. Some proclaimed that, “There’s enough for everyone,” and others that, “Writing here isn’t a zero sum game.” Others argued the opposite. One writer I follow who writes for the same audience as Big Writer (or, at least, a segment of Big Writer’s audience) reported losing 50% of her paying subscriptions in the days following Big Writer’s arrival on Substack. Perhaps that was due to something else, but it lends credence to the idea that there isn’t, actually, enough for everyone when some people have extra large helpings of any monetary pie.

Because I’m not trying to eat any of that particular pie, none of the churn touched me in any way that matters, and that is a kind of abundance I’m grateful for.

This is not to say that I enjoy all the kinds of abundance that exist in the world. When Big Writer closed her Substack publication, she walked away from at least $50,000 in annual income. (Given her more than 200,000 subscribers, it was probably more.) The ability to walk away from that kind of money is a form of abundance I don’t have. It is one that most of the writers I follow or subscribe to here don’t have—even the ones who are, themselves, making that kind of money.

We each have only so much of it, don’t we? I wish I could pay for subscriptions for all the writers I read. I wish everyone who reads my words could pay me for the labor I put into them. I’d like to pay everyone, out of principle and kindness, but it’s part of my economic reality that I can’t. I don’t have that kind of abundance. This is the main reason I figure I will never put anything I write here behind a paywall. I hope keeping the fruits of my own labor free is some kind of compensation for all the valuable writing I consume but don’t pay for.

Choosing to never put my writing behind a paywall is a kind of abundance that’s available to me, in part, because I’ve chosen to live a small life.

I spent a lot of years working in a place that wasn’t good for my mental health because I didn’t have the kinds of abundance that Big Writer does. I had to stay, for a long time. Even though I have enough for now, if I could make $50,000 from my writing, it would be very hard to walk away from it because part of my interior life contains questions that those like Big Writer likely do not have to worry about: What happens if the social security income I’m counting on in a few years goes away? What happens if Medicare goes away? What happens if my child has a medical crisis and can’t access care? What will happen to my disabled brother when my parents are gone? What if prices keep increasing at such a faster rate than my now-mostly-stagnant income? How will I manage my chronic health conditions if I have to go back to work? What kind of work would I be able to get, at my age and with my skills? What happens if my husband dies or can no longer work before he’s eligible to retire?

I carry this set of worries/questions because I made the decision to live smaller than I was. I’ve chosen to live with them because the cost of these worries feels easier to bear than the costs my work extolled from my mental and physical health, and I finally got to a place where I could make this choice and be OK enough. Maybe that is a way in which Big Writer and I share some commonality, even though our lives and work are very different.

The areas of life in which I don’t have abundance are a trade-off for the areas in which I do, and isn’t that true for all of us, big and small? I don’t have to pay attention to Big Writer or worry about how the next Big Writer will impact publishing here or elsewhere because it won’t change anything that affects my survival or how I operate as a writer. I can keep on writing for my small audience and reading the circle of small writers I’ve found no matter what any of the big (or medium) writers do. Notes and reels and all the other things that change a platform do not have to change the way you use it unless you are trying to make a living (or something else) from it. I have empathy for those who are, and I don’t judge them for bringing attention to the ways in which such things as Big Writer’s arrival or new tools to master/spend resources on impact them. I don’t discount or dismiss their anxiety. We all have to eat.

I’m so glad I don’t have to share it, though. I’m so glad I don’t have to try to get a piece of the same pie that they are. That’s a kind of abundance, too, the ability to choose what kind of pie we want. (Mine is more of a tartlet, which is plenty for me.)

I will not pretend that I don’t, in some ways, envy what Big Writer has—her wealth and the peace of mind it can buy about a lot of things, mostly—but there are so many other parts of her life I would hate if they were part of mine. I’m so glad I will never, ever have to make a podcast. Or tolerate commentary about my personal life from people who don’t personally know me. Or be unable to go out for ice cream without being stared at or wondering if I’m being stared at or if someone is taking my photo to post in a TikTok. That is some of what her money and fame and success and all that they can buy costs her. I don’t know that I would trade places, even if I could.

There is a kind of abundance that comes from being an unknown. From living a private life. From not needing to care what lots of others think about us. From being free in the ways that matter to us.1

“What kind of hard do you want?” is a question my mother asked me nearly 20 years ago when I was facing a tough decision. It has helped me so many times since then. “What kind of abundance do you want?” is the other side of that question’s coin, one I’m finding equally valuable. A beloved childhood song2 told me that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, but more and more I think that freedom is another word for abundance. I am freer in some ways than Big Writer—or anyone who’s experienced material success from their creative work—in that I have much less to lose from what comes of mine. They are freer from some kinds of worry I carry, and I am freer from some kinds of worry that they likely carry.

I hope some people will like these words I’m laying down here on this warm May morning while I’m sitting at my dining table and looking out my window to the squirrels and birds and bunnies who share a little plot of my city with me. I hope they’ll talk with me about them. But I’ll be OK if they don’t. That OKness means I am free to write what I want and do (or not do) with my words what I want.

That’s a kind of abundance I never want to lose.

I would love to hear your thoughts about freedom, abundance, small living vs. big living, ambition, or anything else this essay brought up for you. Let’s talk in the comments?

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Your hearts and shares mean so much to me. If you find value in this piece, I hope you can “pay” me with one or both. I’m not after money here, but I value the kind of readers who’ve found this place and welcome more. Your hearts and shares help more readers see my work. Thank you!

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I went on a picnic last month. Yes, that shiny stuff around the campfire pit is ice, and that’s snow on the ground under the trees. We were a few feet away from a frozen lake.

I was in Sweden, doing as the Swedes do: We bundled up, went outside to experience nature, and later went back inside to have fika. I’d show you photos of fika, but I think the first rule of fika is that you don’t take photos of fika. Because fika is about being present with another human, a hot beverage, and a nice treat. It’s about connection, rest, and replenishment. It’s a staple of Swedish culture.

I was visiting my daughter and her Swedish husband, who are both full-time students in their late mid-20’s. What struck me most about their life is how healthy it is. They have time to sleep for at least eight hours every night. They have enough time and money to prepare healthy food at home. They belong to social organizations that meet regularly. They walk and bike most places they need to go. They have freakin’ hobbies. Their days contain a balance of school, study, sleep, fun, and the work of maintaining a life (cleaning, cooking, laundry, and other chores). We had fika every day I was there.

I do not know any student or working person in the US who is able to live this way. (I’m sure they exist; I’ve just never known any.) So many of us, no matter our age, struggle with debt, lack of affordable housing, daycare, eldercare, healthcare, and thin/breaking/non-existent social supports. Unlike most students here, my daughter and her husband benefit from free tuition, a living stipend, subsidized housing, high-quality healthcare, and a society that prioritizes well-being for everyone.

I am profoundly happy for my daughter, grateful for the opportunities available through her adopted country,1 and envious and sad when I think about how life could be different for us in the US. About how my specific life might be different if my daughter could live the same way here that she can there.

One morning after I returned home, I sent my daughter a text:

If you fika by yourself is it still fika?

She said she’d say yes, but that the social nature of fika is an important part of it. I knew this.2 Most of my friends, though, are working, and our ways of working and living in the US don’t support us having fika together the way Swedes have fika. I tried fika-ing alone, but it didn’t feel the way it had felt in Sweden, with my daughter and members of her new family.

Soon after, I came across Cody Strahm’s essay “We Tried Living Like Europeans in the US.” In it, he describes differences in lifestyle he and his wife experienced on extended stays in European countries: more exercise, more connection with other people, healthier food. Both enjoyed measurably improved physical and mental health after living and working there for 2 months.

Acknowledging the difficulties of moving abroad and not wanting to leave the home they felt committed to in the US, Strahm and his wife decided to try living a European lifestyle here. I was really hoping the essay would show me how to do that.

Sadly, it did not. Instead, the essay explored why their experiment failed: different norms, infrastructure, and values. As much as Americans love the idea that we’re all in charge of our own destinies, so much of anyone’s life is shaped by the place they live and the people they live amongst. Strahm found that, “To live a European lifestyle in America is a lonely endeavor. It is swimming upstream, glaringly out of place.”

I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised. I remembered a trip to Italy I took with my young family two decades ago, where I felt comfortable in a bikini for the first time ever. We spent a lot of time on or near the water, and most women, regardless of age or size, wore two-piece bathing suits, something I never saw at home. I swore that when we returned I was going to continue to wear the suit I bought there. I thought the problem was something I could overcome through my own mindset, and that if I just wore my suit with confidence and my new understanding, I could feel as free at home as I felt in Italy.

I did not.

I tried, but I wasn’t comfortable. No one ever said anything about how I looked or what I was wearing. It was just different here, and I felt it.

In Sweden, people like to say that there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. It’s an attitude born of living through long, dark, and cold winters. It’s an attitude that says it is possible to thrive in difficult conditions. It suggests that it’s essential to accept reality without judgement of it and control what you can within it.3

I’ve been thinking a lot about what might be metaphorical “good clothing” for those of us living through a dark and cold season. (Which feels like everyone right now, even though it’s full-on spring in the northern hemisphere.) Simply adopting the ways of other people and places is not the answer—they won’t work here the way they do there—nor is putting our heads down and pretending that the weather is something that it’s not. That’s a good way to go mad or get frostbite, I think.

As I, along with so many of you, are trying to read and understand the emerging landscape of now, I want to acknowledge the weather of the time and place I’m living in, and figure out how to not just survive it, but to thrive in it.

Emigrating elsewhere is not a realistic option for me, and I’m not going to pretend that anything I might do here will feel the way it would if I were doing it somewhere else. Riding my bike and partaking of fika (in whatever form I can manage) is not going to compensate for lost rights, rising hate, wide-spread economic insecurity, and legacies of violent injustice. It will not keep me safe from our authoritarian government’s deregulation and agency gutting and subsequent impacts on our food supply, water, transportation, public health, and education.

I’m also not planning to go out and buy a two-piece suit and say to hell with provincial, misogynistic, Puritanical attitudes that make women feel they need to cover up their bodies. I could do that, or something that is the equivalent of that, and I could try to will myself to feeling the way I want to feel, but I know that I won’t. The best I might do is wear that suit in spite of how things are here, in spite of how people in this culture and time and place feel about a 60-year old woman with the kind of body that ordinary 60-year old women have wearing a two-piece swimsuit in public. I could wear it as resistance and protest and assertion—and maybe at some point I will decide to do some things for those reasons—but I won’t pretend that it will feel the way I wish it would, or that it will restore the things we’re losing and have lost or right the wrongs we’ve always lived with. I think it might be an example of wearing bad clothing for the weather. For me, at least, today.

These are not solutions that will cultivate thriving here, and, yes, if it’s possible, I want to thrive. Today. Full stop. In spite of (waves arms wildly) everything. I want to thrive not as an act of resistance, but simply because I am 60 years old, and I don’t want to give away what’s left of my life waiting for some better time that might not come before I go. Since none of us ever know how many years we have left, this stance, I think, is valid for anyone at any age.

Last week, my husband and I went on a picnic. It was a balmy spring evening. We found a spot overlooking a water reservoir. The grass was filled with tiny daisies. There was sun, but not too much. There was a breeze, but not too strong. There were people, but not too many. I didn’t have to worry about keeping my footing on ice. I didn’t have to bundle up. My butt didn’t go a little numb while we sat and shared our meal.

As picnics go, it was picture-book perfect. Idyllic. Easy. I savored every minute of it. It felt a lot like how we think thriving should feel.

But here’s the thing I realized while the sun was warm on my face: If I only picnic when conditions are perfect and easy, I’m not going to get to enjoy very many picnics. Also, it was a different kind of nice than the frozen-lake picnic I enjoyed last month in Sweden. Almost like two different pleasures, entirely.

That picnic we shared in Sweden, it was cold. It was beautiful, but a different kind of beautiful than our spring picnic. I was glad for it, and I enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed last week’s picnic, but it was harder than a spring picnic; it would have been easier to simply stay inside. I had to choose the joy, had to choose that cold kind of beauty. I had to borrow the right kind of clothing and bundle up. We had to build a fire. I had to be open to the kind of pleasure that was available to me there, in that place and at that time.

Look, I know there is such a thing as bad weather. Some weather we can’t survive, much less thrive in, no matter our clothing. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. And we’re not all living in the same climate, even if we’re living in the same country, and we don’t all have access to the same kinds of protection. I don’t want to deny that, either. Perhaps the Swedes can have the attitude about weather that they do because of all the shelters they’ve built for each other, the kinds of shelters we don’t have here.

Still, the understanding that picnic is giving me—of the choice available to seek joy and beauty regardless of the weather and other conditions I can’t change—that’s a takeaway I’ve brought home from my visit, a souvenir I will try to find a place for in my life here.

Starting with fika, in whatever way I can have it. Because some kind of fika is better than no fika, always.

This is one I’m hoping will spark some conversation. I know that some of you have never lived in the US. Some once lived here but have made your life elsewhere. Some of you are thinking about leaving the US, or are in the process of doing it. Some of you, like me, anticipate living out your lives wherever you are, no matter what happens (whether you want to or not). And I know that the ideas I’ve shared here can be applied to adapting to the range of challenges that many of us are navigating: aging, grieving, disability, chronic pain/illness, neurodiversity, caretaking, and more.

I would love to share our collective understanding and knowledge about the idea of thriving no matter what. When is it possible and when is it not? Are you doing it? And if yes, how? What works and what doesn’t for you? And if no, what are your barriers?

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I have recovered enough to be able to look back at January, 2024 and realize I was not in anything close to what I think of as my right mind. The irony of forging ahead at that time with plans to launch a project extolling the virtues of a small, slow existence does not escape me.

A lot of other things have happened since then, too, in both my personal life and the world, some of which I’ve written about here and some of which have been so profound, painful, and private that I have only alluded to them or not mentioned them at all. After a strongish start, my writing here became sporadic, and I abandoned efforts to promote it or build an audience. I increasingly felt I’d lost the thread of the conversation I’d started. Or that the conversation I thought I wanted to have had become irrelevant.

What creative work was I doing, anyway? What could I possibly say about living a creative life, and why would it even matter given all the terrible things happening to so many of us?

In mid-March, exhausted from one of the most difficult winters (years? decades?) I’ve lived through, I left for a two-week visit with my daughter and her husband in her new home on another continent. What an emotional and mental palate-cleanser! It was good to get some distance from the US and my life in it. It was good to be in a landscape with so much white space.

While I was there, I received an email notifying me that an essay I’d submitted to an online literary journal had been accepted for publication. Maybe it was being in a place with so much expansive sky and ice, or maybe it was having some respite from my troubles, or maybe it was achieving the level of physical recovery that I have, but with that acceptance I came to see all the ways in which I have been doing what I set out to do.

My small creative life hadn’t looked or felt the way I thought and hoped it would, and so I hadn’t seen it for what it was.

I had imagined days filled with making of various kinds—writing, cooking, crafting, gardening. When I wasn’t making, I’d be caring—for my health, for my beloveds, for the world outside of my personal one. I would have clear purposes, and I would progress steadily toward them. There would be an ease in my days that comes with having balance. There would be joy and calm. Lots of joy and calm.

It is hard for me to admit, but I had some creative life fantasies akin to other lifestyle fantasies I’ve scoffed at. Why was it so easy for me to see how unrealistic and dangerous trad wife narratives are, for example, but not the one I had developed about what my small, creative life might be? I know farm women do not dress in billowy dresses to collect eggs while their cunningly-dressed babes frolic around them, but I somehow imagined myself spending long mornings writing (or sewing or designing things) in a clean, pleasing home, sitting in front of my window at a table covered with books, papers, plants, and a candle or two. I’d snack on apple slices from a charming thrift-store plate and sip from a steaming mug of tea while I worked, cozy in a pair of wooly socks and my grandpa’s old cashmere sweater.

Yeah, that would be great, but it’s so 2014 Pinterest/Instagram talking, you know?

I’ve maybe had a few mornings kinda like that, but our small home doesn’t have a room dedicated to writing, and if I’m taking time to write I’m taking time away from all the domestic chores that make such a scene possible. Thus, I’ve had many more mornings perched at a table covered with unprocessed mail, used napkins, and dirty dishes, my feet cold because I haven’t done laundry and air comes right through the big windows I sit in front of. I’ve had even more sacked out on the couch in old sweats, felled by a migraine and/or emotional exhaustion.

When I thought about my intended focus here, I felt as if I didn’t have much creative life to share, or much worth sharing. Who wants to see a tired older woman’s photos of the canned soup she made for lunch because she spent the morning paying bills and meal planning and doing a little bit of writing in her messy living room, and she now feels too worn out to make something better to eat? Where’s the creative inspiration or interest in that?

And yet, somehow, I’ve managed to accomplish a long-term creative hope (publication in a literary journal) that isn’t an easy one to realize. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, and it’s caused me to reflect on how it happened. I hope to go into more depth on what I’ve seen in later posts, but the big bullet point components of the small creative life I’ve actually been living are these:

• No consistent schedule. Creative work happens in and around a lot of other things (chores, illness, life crises, feelings, political action). It comes in dribs and drabs and occasional spurts.

• Consistently creating. I can’t manage a set writing schedule, but I’ve written something almost every week.

• Low standards. I give myself permission to spend time on things that might amount to nothing much. (That’s how consistency happens.)

• Small, attainable goals. Mine for this school year were simply to submit something somewhere and write consistently. (See: low standards)

• Relationships with others doing similar work. We all write alone, but I’ve learned I can’t go it alone. At least, I can’t go very far.

• Compromises. In the past year, I’ve let some creative tasks and desires go so that I could hold onto others. (Looking at you, Rootsie.)

• Attending to mental and physical health. I can let the house get messy, but taking care of myself is pre-requisite to anything else. (I hate this.)

• Abundance mindset. I will not start or continue anything if I focus on how long it might or will take me to finish it. I try to live and create as if time is infinite, even though I know it isn’t. (That accepted essay began as a blog post nearly 3 years ago.)

So, yes! I have been creating. I’m not an imposter.

OK, great, but what about the question of relevance? Does it matter to think and write and talk about what a small creative life is or might be like? Especially now? Or does doing that make me a privileged a-hole who’s not reading the on-fire room?

It is easy for me to lose faith in the belief that art matters, but I’m going to argue that it does. Given all the fires, life is only going to get harder for those who make art or craft of any kind, especially for those who do so only in the margins of our lives. And art, by everyone at every level, matters.

Art, by everyone at every level, matters.

I’m using “art” in a very broad sense here. Gardening is a kind of creative work I’ve been hanging onto. Even though my husband I don’t know much about gardening, we see our front yard, especially, as a canvas. We see it also as an offering. We get a lot of foot traffic past our home, and I’ve lost count of how many people have stopped to tell us how much pleasure they get from our garden. Sometimes, through the window, I see people stopping and looking at it. Creating small moments of pleasure for other people matters, especially when so much of what we find outside our doors is grim.

But it can be hard to feel OK about spending time on making art or feeling joy in our creations.

Earlier this week genre novelist Chuck Wendig shared a blog post about how hard and weird and wrong it can feel to be a writer now. It is, he says, “Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down.” He talked about wanting readers to feel good, but that “feeling good right now also feels somehow bad,” and says that it is maybe “one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange.”1

I know just what he means, and it has had everything to do with why I have felt blocked here. All kinds of things can and have stolen joy from me over the past year, but I read his words and thought: I’m damned if I’m going to give up the joy of feeling joy. The essay acceptance I got is a small win, and it brought me joy, and I’m going to enjoy it, just as I enjoy the brief blooms of our spring flowers and the joy of those who enjoy them.

(Lotta joy in that last sentence, isn’t there?)

I can’t speak for all folks who create, but I know that for me to keep at it, it helps to see different and real ways of making a life with creative work in it. My work might happen in bits and bobs around various kinds of trauma and turmoil, and I’ve had to make (and will continue to make, I’m sure) all kinds of compromises with it, but doing the work has helped get me through those hard things. And I know, from the generous comments of readers here, that some of that work has helped others get through what they need to get through, too, as the work of other creators (many of you reading here) helps me.

Our creative work doesn’t have to change the world or our lives to have value. (One published essay certainly isn’t going to substantially change mine or anyone else’s.) It just has to make those things better, even if only for brief moments. I’m coming to see the sharing of both our art and our processes of making it as a kind of mutual aid, a way of keeping each other going in the face of all that challenges us.

Figuring out, together, how to make space for the power and joy of creative work isn’t less relevant when the world is on fire. It’s more. I’m so glad to be doing that with you. Finally, in a real way, warts and all.

Whew! That was a lot of words. I’d love to read some of yours. What is giving you joy in this dark time? What’s the value of making for you? What cool things are you making/doing? If you’ve struggled to make or find the a place for creative pursuits, what have you learned from the struggle?

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If you’re not a subscriber, maybe today is the day to sign up? I don’t offer anything more than the essays you’ll find here, so I’ll only pop into your inbox a few times a month (if that).

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If you find value in today’s essay, someone else like you probably will, too. I’d love for you to give it a heart (❤️) or share it, so that it will be easier for them to find. Thank you so much for reading here.

I have one of those bodies that doesn’t trust my conscious brain to run the show. It likes to let my mind think it’s in charge, maybe the way we sometimes let toddlers think they are in charge. But every time my mind is doing the equivalent of trying to stick a fork into a wall outlet on the day I skipped my afternoon nap, my body (by way of my amygdala) puts me right onto the time out chair. Hard.

What this has looked like recently is a 4-week series of physical calamities that have taken me out of my life: migraine, back spasm, more migraine, and then—because I guess I was not getting the memo—migraine + respiratory illness. Migraine for nine out of ten days while coughing up phlegmy garbage. (The migraine let up on day 5, only to return with extra force on day 6. I guess it decided I hadn’t quite learned my lesson.)

I haven’t been keeping up with my regular reading, but I’ve been scrolling headlines/titles enough to know that I’m not the only one with an enflamed nervous system. (Of course I’m not.)

I’m only just beginning to return to what feels like myself (this is the first time in weeks I’ve felt any desire to exchange words here), and I thought I’d share some things I’ve learned/relearned in the past few weeks that might be helpful for others to hear:

1. You do not have to justify being where you are. You just are where you are. Yep, I’m a privileged, white, cis-het woman. Yep, I have so many things so much better than so many other folks right now. But I’ve got reasons to be where I’ve been these past weeks, many of them invisible because I’ve been stuffing, hiding (even from myself), and carrying them for a long time. My recent state has revealed that strategy’s ineffectiveness, so…here I am. Where we are is not a matter of our character or strength or lack thereof. It just is. Instead of judging ourselves for where we are, maybe we can just observe where we are. Note it. Respond to ourselves with empathy and kindness, the way we do with children when they are worn out and having a meltdown.

2. It’s OK to cry and sleep when you are grieving. A week or two before all of this started, I began watching Grey’s Anatomy, from season 1. I haven’t watched it for years, but there it was on Hulu, and I decided to see how it holds up. One week in the midst of my prolonged breakdown I might have cried during every single episode I watched. Once or twice, the cries were of the big, ugly, sobbing variety. My therapist encouraged this. She said that sometimes we need a little help in releasing our emotions, and if old, junky TV that makes you nostalgic for things that have passed does the trick, that’s just fine. Some days I watched an episode, cried, and then took a big long nap. Grieving is exhausting, and we need to rest when we need to rest. My therapist said this is all good, as long as it’s not something I do all day long. (It wasn’t and isn’t.)

3. You do not have to do all the things right now. In fact, maybe you don’t have to do any of the things right now. In the past few weeks, I have not made 5 calls a day. I have not donated any money. I have not canceled my Prime membership or closed my Facebook account. I haven’t marched, spoken out, or written anything for others. Lots of other people are doing lots of things, and I am glad and grateful for them. I’m guessing there may come a time when I can do those things and they cannot. We get to take turns. My timing sucks, but I cannot will myself to a better place. (Believe me, I’ve certainly tried.)

   Speaking of not doing all the things, this applies to your house and family, too. Turns out, you can survive for awhile on a diet of mostly grilled cheese sandwiches and vegetable soup. No one is coming over to visit you in this state, so who cares if your bathroom is a little grubby? (Actually, who cares even if they are?) Let your husband make his own lunches for a week (or two or three), even though he is working and you are not. You’ll get back to it all later.

4. You will feel better when you are better. And then you will want and be able to do things. At first, I was so frustrated at all the things I couldn’t do, the things that make my life what I think of as my life. But at some point, I began asking myself, “What do I want to do?” and tried to listen for a real answer. This is not my usual go-to question. I’m more likely to ask, “What should I do?” or “What do I need to do?” It was hard, at first, to distinguish between “What do I want to do?” and “What do I want to want to do?” I wanted to want to go grocery shopping, for example—normally I like to plan good meals and shop mindfully for their ingredients—but the truth was that I was in no shape to shop or cook and so I didn’t really want to do that. The real answer was often that I wanted to work on a puzzle or lie down and listen to my audiobook or lie on my bed and close my eyes. These are all reasonable things to want when your body has decided that it has had enough of how your mind is handling your life. So I gave my body what it wanted, trusting that if I did that, eventually my body would once again let my conscious mind hold the reins of our existence.

Today I’ve been migraine-free for almost a week. My congestion is clearing, though still present. I’ve been moving slowly, but I’m moving. I might clean the bathroom today. I might put a coat of paint on the kitchen cabinet doors that have been waiting for me in the garage. I might cook something for dinner. Or I might read the book on grieving that my therapist recommended, and finish that puzzle, and just pick up things around the house that have wandered away from their usual places and call it good. I am taking today as it comes, more grateful to be in circumstances that allow me to make such a choice than resentful to be in those that make me need to make it. Maybe that’s truly the best we can hope for in challenging times?

We are all running a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself, and don’t forget to hydrate. (And hug a puppy if you can. That always helps!)

(All Peanuts gifs can be found here: https://tenor.com/search/charlie-brown-good-grief-gifs)

I’ve missed connecting with you here. If you’d like to, please check in and let us know how you’re doing. How are you holding up? What are you carrying these days (and can you somehow put it down)? What’s giving you strength or comfort? You know I love to visit with you in the comments.

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And if you liked this, please give the heart (❤️) a quick click. Your hearts warm mine.

Snow is starting to come down in hard, mean flakes right now. It’s not falling. It’s being blown sideways by a cruel, biting wind. All the schools here are closed, even though right now the roads are clear. It’s mid-morning, so officials made the call long before we could really know what the weather was going to do. Which way—or even if—the winds were really going to blow.

It’s always such a hard call for them to make. Call off school in advance, and the storm might not come. Then, everyone is mad at the disruption that didn’t need to happen. Keep school open, and you might end up with a huge mess that could have been avoided: Kids sent home early, but stuck on busses that can’t get through the snow. Parents who can’t get home to meet them. Accidents. Pain and confusion. Then, everyone is mad at the lack of foresight. Everyone is mad because someone didn’t do something to prevent something that seems so obviously inevitable in hindsight.

Because there is a teacher in my household, we’ve been wishing for a snow day. This is probably not going to be the day we’ve been wishing for. We’ve been wishing for the snow days of nostalgia, the kind we remember or think we remember from years past. Drifts of snow, the kind you sled on or make snowmen from. Red cheeks, white-crusted hats, cups of cocoa and afternoon movies and puzzles and naps. How many people wish for the return of something that never really existed? At best, we are remembering small moments, highlights from days gone by that also included squabbling children, worry, boredom, stress from upended plans. One year, on the fifth in a string of snow days with small children, I woke to a cold house. The power was on, but I couldn’t get our propane stove to turn on. I looked out the window and saw our chimney in pieces on the ground, pushed off the house by the weight of all the beautiful, pristine snow that was starting to melt and slide from the roof. I was too beat down from the previous days to cry or crumple into a heap—and besides, I had kids to feed and keep warm and reassure. I remember sighing, deeply.

Today is probably going to be more of an ice day than a snow day. In truth, where I live now, most snow days are actually ice days. At least, it’s been that way for about 10 years. It’s just taken some of us awhile to catch up, to see that there’s a new weather pattern. We are going to hope the power lines hold. We’re not really prepared for an extended outage. We don’t have a backup source of heat or a good supply of food that can be eaten without cooking. It’s been a tough week, and even though we knew this weather might come, it was taking all I had to just get through each day as it came. The forecasters have teased us several times already this winter with snowflakes on the weather app that never materialized on the ground. So, it was easy to think that it wasn’t going to really happen this time.

We were wrong about that. And now, there are some small things we can do but also there’s not all that much we can do, other than cross our fingers and hope for the best. Be glad for our shelter and that, right now, the heat is still on. Send out signals to our people, let them know we’re here, we’re OK, everything is fine.

Be ready to pivot, adapt, make a new plan.

I’ve been collecting resources of things we can/might do. Here are a few:

From My Orange Desk

Tuesday Tools: Join the resistance

Of course, it’s a coup. Approach it as such…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 6 comments · Patti Digh

Couch Nap

How to survive a healthcare apocalypse: Top 10 tips from two critical care physicians.

When we started Couch Nap, we wanted a major pillar of this newsletter to be a discussion of the macro forces affecting our healthcare system. We called it the “looming healthcare apocalypse” series, and planned a long docket of cheerful hits like maternity unit closures…

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a year ago · 579 likes · 35 comments · Vicky MD MPH and Kristina MD

The Midnight Manuscripts

Saving Democracy: A Crowdsourced Plan for Effective Action

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller…

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a year ago · 761 likes · 253 comments · Don Knight

Please let us know how you’re doing, or share any resources that you think are worth sharing. Hope you’re all keeping warm.

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(PS: In the time it took me to write this, the street covered with snow. Officials made the right call this time. I’m grateful for that.)

If this writing speaks to you in some way, please give it a heart ❤️ or a share. It would warm mine on this bitterly cold day. 🙂

It is a late afternoon/early Sunday evening at WinCo, which is one of the worst times to be at WinCo. Everyone who is at WinCo should be home making dinner, but they aren’t home making dinner because either this is the only time they can do their shopping for the week or because they are missing the ingredients they need that have brought them here to WinCo at a day and time that turns the grocery store into some kind of devil’s playground. They’d need to be the kind of people living the kinds of lives where they don’t have to shop at this time or don’t realize, right when they need it, that they are missing something that would have made it possible to have a nice, comforting meal to assuage the Sunday scaries that are excessively, existentially scary on this particular first Sunday of February, 2025. But they aren’t that kind of person.

Or, at least, I am not that kind of person, not right now.

So here we all are, some with carts loaded and others with just a few items necessary to get through the night. (A carton of half-and-half, in my case, plus some toothpaste because I remembered after getting here that we are almost out, and some cans of tomatoes just in case because I didn’t check the tomato supply even though I am trying to make tomato soup.) The lines at every register are spilling-into-the-long-wide-aisle-in-front-of-the-registers long, because they are always long at WinCo. Because WinCo never has enough staff on hand to open all the registers, even when the line extends all the way to the beer cases at the other side of the store.

In the bank of 17 registers, 5 are closed. (Yes, I counted.) There are only 2 express lines open, each with lines longer than those for the loaded-cart folks, but they should go faster, right? As long as we all play by the posted rule of having no more than 15 items to purchase. That’s what I think when my husband and I get into one of the express lines.

Because we are standing in line and I’m trying to stay off my doomphone, I have time to look at the people around me. The man in front of us is an older white dude. Maybe our age? Thin, with a nicer looking coat than most of the other WinCo patrons. He has a lot of prepared foods in his cart.

“That guy’s bachelor shopping,” my husband whispers to me.

Because I’m trying to stay off my doomphone and because it is Sunday night and I especially hate WinCo on Sunday nights and because the lines are so god-awful long, I listen to the devil whispering in my other ear and I count that guy’s items as he loads them onto the conveyor belt. There are 19.

“He’s over the limit,” I mutter to my husband. Of course, I think.

I try to distract myself with magazine covers, but one featuring “what it’s like to grow up royal” just pisses me off, even though the faces on it all belong to children, and sure, yes, of course I’m glad that Princess Kate’s cancer is in remission, but all I can think about is how nice it must be for her to have the kind of healthcare she does, which I’m pretty sure none of the people shopping at WinCo have. I am not thinking how nice in a nice way. Everything about WinCo makes me acutely aware of social classes and which one I belong to.

Then I hear, “Hey man, you’ve got more than 15 items.”

It’s the man standing behind us, younger than the man in front of us, holding a large jug of Arizona iced tea, and nothing else. One item. He’s talking to Older White Dude, who ignores him. Older White Dude acts like he doesn’t hear anything.

“Hey, you’ve got more than 15 items.” Louder, harsher.

Older White Dude turns to face him. “So?”

“So people have noticed.”

(Shit. Am I the cause of this? Because I grumbled about how many items he had?)

“So what? You want me to put it all back in my cart? Is that what you want?” Older White Dude shows no signs of weakness. No shame, no embarrassment. He’s all fight, no flight.

“I’m just telling you, man.”

“Stop telling me what to do and maybe mind your own business.”

“I’m not telling you want to do. I’m just telling you that you’ve got more than 15 items.”

Arizona Tea Man’s seemingly peaceful words do not defuse Older White Dude’s anger. The two men go back and forth, and with each exchange Older White Dude doubles down on how he hasn’t done anything wrong and stop telling him what to do. Tea Man keeps saying, “I’m not telling you to do anything. I’m just letting you know,” but I hear his agitation growing, rising to meet that of Older White Dude.

Finally, Tea Man stops responding, but now Older White Dude can’t let it go.

“Maybe if she (he gestures to the cashier) doesn’t care, you shouldn’t either.”

Should I say something? I wonder. Take Tea Man’s side? Because I said something first (even if I didn’t say it to him)? Because Older White Dude is being a dick?

I mean, I’m mad at Older White Dude, too. It’s not so much because he has 19 items. To be angry over that is petty, and I know it. I knew it when I grumbled about it to my husband. It’s more that it seems like it is almost always older white dudes who push the limit on the express line. It is never harried young women with children, or older women with just 16 items. The women almost always go to the other lines. It is almost always dudes, usually white, often with more than 20 items. You know they know what they are doing and somehow think it’s OK that they are doing it, that somehow the rules don’t really apply to them. Of late there’s been a whole lot of Older White Dudes fucking things up for all of us who have spent our lives playing by the rules and still—still!—here we are at damn WinCo on a Sunday evening. So, it’s easy for me to be pissed at this particular Older White Dude, even though he’s never personally done anything to me (other than get ahead of me in this line with 19 items) and I can’t tell who he voted for so technically I can’t blame him for what’s really bothering me right now.

But also: It is the witching hour at WinCo on a Sunday night, and we are all tired. We are shopping in a place full of nearly-expired food, bad fluorescent lighting, and garish signage.

This is not Whole Foods. There are no pyramids of bright, fresh produce. No magazines beckoning with subtly beautiful cover art. No young, attractive cashiers with artful sleeve tattoos disappearing into their actual rolled-up plaid flannel sleeves. We are living and shopping in the other Portland, and everyone and everything in this place is tired, in all senses of the word.

I think of the invisible burdens I am carrying, the things that are more than partially responsible for my being here at this time, some that even people close to me don’t know about. Those things might garner some empathy if they were apparent to anyone else standing in one of these interminable lines, pushing a cart with a wobbly wheel, and I wonder what hidden pain Older White Dude might be carrying into this experience. Maybe it’s not his privilege or position in the world that made him break the rule, but is instead some grief or worry or fear or threat that he can’t put aside or down. I wonder what other thing might be keeping him from being able to just say, “Sorry, I didn’t realize.” Or, “Hey, would you like to go ahead of me?” Or even, “Why don’t you give me that jug of tea and I’ll put it in with my things?”

I’d be cool with any of those responses from him, but I don’t ask my questions or make suggestions or say anything that might help either man in this situation because I am frozen. I am frozen because I am standing between two men whose anger is escalating, and I know that is never a safe place to be. My go-to response to threat is freeze, and that’s what my amygdala has me doing. (This response may seem a little over-the-top, but someone was murdered in this store not too long ago, and the coup of my government escalated over the weekend, so threats feel abundant. )

And then the moment passes. Both men stop talking to each other. We all get through the line and exit the store. On my way out, we pass Older White Dude and I think about asking him why he couldn’t just say “sorry,” but I don’t.

Instead, I think about how people who aren’t getting what they need are so much more likely to turn on each other, rather than to each other. How I was feeling mean and petty about the guy having 19 items because of my own grief, anger, exhaustion, and fear. How he shouldn’t have been the target of my feelings, but how the understaffed store should have been. Or the societal forces and structures that makes this grocery store the only one within a reasonable distance of my home. Or how there are hierarchies of grocery stores and people, and we all found ourselves stuck near the bottom of the ladder on a night before we all have to face whatever it is that our week is going to be confronting us with.

Of course this thought is not some lightning bolt of insight. I know this is what we do, and who I should be (am!) really angry with, but in that moment in line I (and Arizona Tea Man) couldn’t do anything about any of those larger forces creating our hard feelings. The only thing I might possibly have been able to change about the situation is that older white guy right in front of me. I don’t think I had the power to change anything fundamental about him, something that would make him aware that it’s just not cool to go through the express line when you have more than 15 items because of how our world would be if everyone ignored things we have put in place to make life better for all of us. But I might have been able to get him, maybe, to go through that line with only 15 items, like the rest of us were doing, and in that way, maybe I could restore the world to just a little bit of order. I’m guessing that’s what Tea Man was trying to accomplish, and I don’t fault him for wanting that. Older White Guy should have gone in another line because the least we can do, when we’re all stuck together in the same shitty grocery store, is play by the same shitty rules that we did not create and cannot control or change. We should do it simply because that’s a way in which we can be nice to each other when we’re stuck together in a place none of us wants to be.

But maybe another thing we can do, when we see one person who isn’t being nice in that way, is to maybe cut them some slack. Maybe we can tell ourselves that that’s what they need today, and if they get what they need today, they might make a different choice tomorrow. Maybe we can all try to be kinder to each other than those who aren’t stuck in shitty grocery stores have been to us. At the very least, maybe we can take some small comfort in hanging onto our humanity, the thing that makes us assume that people like Older White Guy are doing the best they can with what they have. We can choose to treat him the way we’d want to be treated if we were having a hard night and just couldn’t bear getting in a long line with all the full-cart people when we have only a few items over the express-line limit.

Because, on a cold, winter night early into the beginning of an oligarchical fascist takeover, this particular Older White Guy isn’t the real enemy, and I want to remember that. I also don’t want anyone to be collateral damage between one angry man trying to buy some Cup o’ Noodles and another one trying to buy some iced tea in a plastic jug. I want us all to hang onto the parts of ourselves that can be generous and expansive, even if only in small ways, even if we’re all going to go on not getting enough of what we want and need. Maybe especially because we’re not going to get enough of what we want and need.

How’s everyone holding up? How are things going in your part of the world? How are you responding to the truly bat-shit things happening in the US right now? What are your thoughts on Older White Dude and Arizona Tea Man? And groceries? (How about them egg prices, right?)

Would love to check in with you in the comments.

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And if you’d like more reading, here are a few things keeping me fortified/comforted:

I Will Stay If You Will Stay (Pam Houston) (not sure why Substack is not giving me the kind of snippet you’ll see for the rest of these posts)

“Nearly a lifetime ago, a young Joy Harjo wrote a poem called “She Had Some Horses,” and a young me read it and decided I was correct in my suspicions that women make the world. Today I call on each of us to do just that. To use our hearts and our hands to make micro-countries of love inside this larger country of cruelty.”

On the Commons

Moral codes that withstand the wreckage of history

Oglala Lakota Artspace, a mixed-use Native arts and cultural center on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, will receive 5% of On the Commons paid subscription revenue from now until the end of the year. Next quarter’s will be given to Blackfeet ECO Knowledge…

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2 years ago · 141 likes · 57 comments · Antonia Malchik

“Jacob knew what was being asked of him. He also knew that his own morality—for which the words justice and honor and honesty are only brushstrokes—would not allow him to sacrifice an innocent man’s life for the sake of his own, innocent, life.” (This is a “just trust me”)

Mrs. Doe

If it's cheap and convenient, I'm not buying it

Hello frens…

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a year ago · 61 likes · 23 comments · Krissy Teegerstrom

“I’m talking to the able-bodied people who live in cities, have access to transportation and extra spending money and still have single toothbrushes overnighted to their house. AKA, many of my wonderful, beloved friends.”

milk fed

the quiet rebellion of a little life

hello. there’s a pervasive myth that has seeped into every corner of our current reality claiming that in order to have a meaningful life, we’re told that worth is measured in titles, achievements, and the scope of our influence. it’s a myth that demands endless striving, as though the only lives worth living are the ones visible on the world’s stage…

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2 years ago · 5334 likes · 172 comments · caitlyn

“choosing a little life is an act of defiance. it’s a way of saying, i will not measure my worth by how much i achieve or acquire. i will measure it by how deeply i live.” (Go just for the Frog & Toad and Beatrix Potter illustrations, but do read the words and get to the end for great book and movie recs.)

Writer Noise

Here We Are

This day. This year. The start of the next four years…

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a year ago · 20 likes · 21 comments · Cindy House

”I often tell my students that you have to write into the meaning of your work, that you can’t know everything until you’ve stacked up some pages.”

Little Bluestem Farm Almanac

"No Such Thing as Bad Weather"

Painting by Ellen Langford…

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a year ago · 10 likes · 2 comments · Beth Foose

“Being outdoors and working in close relationship with the natural world teaches me humility. I am not the center of all of this. I am a participant in an ecosystem that is much larger than I am and I find great comfort in not being in charge.”

Take care of yourself and your people. Sending love.

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(NOTE: I published a different version of this piece yesterday, and then I unpublished it because I shared information from a friend that, perhaps, I shouldn’t have. What follows is an edited version.)

My Substack feed is full of messages of strength and hope, and that’s good I suppose, but on the second day of the new regime I got a private message from a friend about something I don’t feel able to share here—and that alone is sobering and disturbing in ways that don’t surprise me (now) but rock me all the same.

Like so many of you, I am trying to figure out how to be OK in this (not with, but in), but so far I’m not very OK. I’ve lost count of how many pieces I’ve read about the powers of going local, connecting with community, continuing to create, not letting them steal our joy and attention, not letting them live rent-free in our heads, not letting them destroy our humanity, etc. and I appreciate the sentiments and where they’re coming from, I really truly do, but…enough, already. It feels a little too much like 2017 resistance to me, if that makes any sense. Like, it’s all good, and there’s good in doing those things, for sure, but is it really going to do what we hope it will? Any more than our protests and postcards and phone calls and donations have? Does it acknowledge what’s really happening?

Reading these pieces has begun to make me feel not OK (because I really don’t want to go back to 2017 in any way), so I’ve mostly stopped doing that. I seem to have joined a church, despite my atheism, primarily because of their community-based activism and because it’s nice to meet with other folks once a week who share my values and learn new things about organizations doing good work in our city and just sit with it all for an hour in a safe, loving space. (The pastor says my atheism does not disqualify me for membership, so I don’t feel I’m there under false pretenses.) I start volunteering with the library this week and I’m learning how to get involved involved in the church’s projects. I’m greatly limiting my time with social and other media.1 I’m focusing on the day I’m in. I’m reaching out to my people. I’m doing my best to put healthy things in my body and to move said body. I’ve deep-cleaned our house and I’m back in therapy for support with my personal stuff.

These are all good things and I will continue to do them. And I’m still not really OK. Some of that is because I’m in the midst of a personal firestorm—and isn’t that true of many of us? We are still navigating all the hard personal things we always have, but we’re doing it on a foundation that is not what we’ve long known it to be. And yes, sure, the shifting has now been going on for a long time, but it’s suddenly accelerated and there’s just no denying what’s been happening any more.

I’m coming here just to say: We’re not OK. It’s not OK. Something has died or is dying and I don’t know much about grief but I do know that denial is the one sure-fire thing we can do to prolong it and make it hurt even more than it already does. I’m doing the thing writers are often advised to do: I’m writing the kind of thing I want to read. I don’t want cheerleaders right now. I don’t want false hope or platitudes. Don’t you dare tell me that this is all for the best in the long run, or part of God’s plan, or that we’re lucky to have had what we had for as long as we did. Don’t tell me that the country is rotten from the core and it all needs to burn down anyway. There are parts I love. There are ideals I love, as far short of reaching them as we have always been. And even if I can’t name exactly what it is, I know that something precious died this week. (And for the love of anything holy, don’t you dare tell me that it hasn’t. Don’t you even think about gaslighting me that way.) I need to mourn with those who are also mourning, and I want space for all the feelings that come with loss: anger, depression, sadness. I want to rage against the dying of the light. Don’t rush me and those who are feeling as I am to some false kind of feeling better. I’m holding out for the real deal, and the only way I know to get there is through.

1

The only things kinda sorta helping me feel OK are articles such as this one, which acknowledges the big picture of what’s happening and the true difficulty facing us AND provides actions/roadmaps for countering it.

New Means

The Nazi Regime Begins

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a year ago · 437 likes · 18 comments · J. P. Hill