I could talk for days about how sailors are jumping from ships, how military service members’ mental health challenges, despite campaigns preaching otherwise, has always been underrepresented and under-treated. How the military preaches awareness and access but stigmatizes anyone who actually seeks assistance or openly acknowledges their mental health challenges.

It took me ten years after I got out of the Army to face and attempt recovery from my own military induced trauma and I never even saw combat. There was harassment and discrimination and assault and what caused me the most damage was not even the acts themselves but the Army’s mishandling of investigating and disciplining.

And so I’ve discovered when I face more trauma, it becomes compounded on the old and I relive each piece as if it’s brand new.

The layers pile up like record albums all playing at once, the music of each fused and echoed in another, together creating a fun house of cacophonous horror. My mental health in the past year has been the worst I’ve ever experienced. My nervous system whirred into survival mode then crashed over and over as I struggled to learn how to self-regulate one emotional engine flaming out while the other spun out of control. My recovery has been nonlinear and I have had to train like an athlete to not eat myself alive. To not climb into holes with no ladder out.

Give me time, readers to come back to you, I’m working on myself. And the work has been arduous

A tumultuous breakup of a 3 1/2 yr relationship which sent me into the most epic mental health spiral of my life.

A year ago this past weekend began a love loss that involved my lover lying and betraying me, then discarding me; my failed attempt at reconciliation where I begged, became the affair and flew to Europe last October to attempt to reconcile with a man who kept me as a toy while he moved on to his new lover.

I take sober responsibility for the decisions I made that contributed to his poor behavior and regret the ways I made choices, conveyed boundaries, and communicated what I valued. My slow recognition of my failings and lack of self-awareness coupled with his eventual final discard of me came like a drowning.

Queue four counselors, drug therapy, and so much CrossFit.  

It’s taken me nearly a year to train myself to emotionally regulate my own nervous system, withhold my responses, think through outcomes before acting, and respect not only other people, but myself. I’ve learned what my boundaries actually are and how to hold them in place. I’ve learned that real listening requires radical acceptance of the present rather than trying to steer the future. I now understand that life has rivers you float. I can steer my own way through, but I’m not the river itself.

My dad died

As I plummeted deeper and deeper into a second round of debilitating depression after the person I most trusted discarded me the second time, my dad received a cancer diagnoses and died six weeks later while I cared for him. I discovered once again that I don’t have the power to reroute the river. That love comes in many forms and we are all cloaked in armor until that armor no longer serves us. That even the most stoic sometimes cannot keep getting up. Caring for my dad while he died, unlocked answers I’d needed my whole life about who I am, how I love, how I survive and my intrinsic value. My dad gave me the words I needed to help buoy me to the surface after he was gone. He saw me drowning and in his final push to survive, instinctively built me a raft to climb onto.

Losing Home

In the months between those two knife points, in an effort to find purpose, I gutted my 650 sq ft beach cottage to create two tiny house bedroom so my daughter, Margo, now seventeen, and I could each have our own space. For the last 6 years I had slept in the living room. First on a turquoise couch. Then a day bed squashed between the fireplace and the west wall facing the sea. My lover gone, my father dead, tearing down my house became a third pillar of loss. I’d imagined the lover there with me through it all and now I struggled to make sense of any of it. Then builders quit or stole or both. Then the County demanded more and more engineering. It stalled. I took up residence in my 120 year old barn/studio and wrapped the bones of my house in plastic to wait.

Nine months later, my house is still 2x4s wrapped in plastic. I live in my studio with a hose for water, a wood stove for heat, and a porta pottie out back. I do laundry at my friend Lynn’s beachhouse, shower there once a week, and sponge bath in my sink. My daughter now stays with her dad and visits me but I miss her dearly.

While I’ve remodeled before, I’ve never done it alone. Having my house perpetually stuck by either contractor debacles or red tape at the County has made me grateful for bare minimum basics. For the last 8 months in my studio, I’ve grown to adore sheer simplicity. The cold winter mornings when I pull on pants and a parka, build a fire in the wood stove. Hot coffee. My electric blanket. Having the Sea just steps away. There’s very little we actually need. And when Margo comes to visit too, this is all of it.

Three weeks after my dad died, Margo totaled her car driving to my house to celebrate my birthday. (She is ok)

Margo is the greatest gift giver I’ve ever known. My all time favorite is a car cup French fry holder she gave me during covid when she was just eleven, so we could munch fries and milkshakes in the car together and plan our beautiful future in the beachside cottage I was about to buy us.

On my birthday, she circled the block to fetch flowers for me when a sedan T-boned her drivers side door. My phone alerted me she crashed and was just a couple miles away. Three minutes later, I found her standing in the middle of the road, crying, surrounded by glass. I work in the office at the Island fire department and to see my own coworkers arriving in the ambulance, and find her unharmed, was the greatest gift in a year of such loss. I wrapped my arms around her and experienced the purest joy at knowing she too was not swallowed up.

My mom’s cancer came next.

My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer soon after my dad died and is undergoing treatment. At 79, she’s resilient, stoic, positive, beautiful, and pragmatic. But she’s grieving my dad and facing her own mortality and aging while doing her very best to care for herself through surgery and radiation. My own partner’s choice to leave in the last year has helped me understand the grief and loneliness my mom’s carrying while also ensuring I show up to support her. I went to Pennsylvania to care for my father, then bury my father, then take my mom to drs, then care for my mom after surgery. My sister is there too, but has an autoimmune disorder and struggles with her own health. My brother arrives each Saturday eats lunch and complete a list of chores she has prepared.

When I can’t physically show up—I FaceTime my mom and she tells me what she ate and if she lifted weights or watered the plants. Her incision is healing and she overdid it lifting the salt for the water softener. She put out my dad’s slippers so he’d come home. If there’s anything I understand deeply, it’s magical thinking

Losing your everyday person is a tremendous hole that before this year, I could not have related to. I now have deep empathy for the toll grief and loneliness takes on us and the mental loops our brains enter to try and survive it

Radical acceptance

For nearly a year, I could not find my way out of holes. I cried and screamed. I raged. I dissected myself and removed whole organs. And then finally I stopped. I stopped trying to move earth and just moved my body. I worked out. I slept. I listened to other people’s problems. And I cared. And sometimes people cared about me.

For the most part, I’ve stopped yelling. And it’s possible, I’ve stopped yelling for good. But I haven’t stopped thinking changing and growing. I’m quietly sprouting roots through the floorboards and branches through the ceiling. I am lonely, but I now walk through life with no armor on. I’ve accepted that people I love, whether through death or their own choices, have left for good. I cannot change anything I’ve done or not done, but I can own up to my mistakes, and not make them again. I can live with purpose and create tiny joy in the details of life. The latte foam I’m trying to perfect. The beauty of washing dishes by hand. The noticing of starfishes. If I am to live this life alone at least I will do it with a slow persistence of intentionality.

I’m Increasing my surface area, saying yes to invites, dating with purpose or not at all (and mostly not at all) and listening without deciding the outcomes in advance. I’m rebuilding my team, but different this time. For the first time in years, I’m curious and fearless in the most healthy ways possible. I’m a different person than I was a year ago. My armor gone. I’m fun Amy again, but this time no longer cloaked in protective shields. I’m raw and genuine. Vulnerable but stable. Once it’s all burned down, the only thing left to do is rebuild yourself, but better.

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You know what I miss most about boyfriends,

yelling at them.

I’m so tired of yoga and meditation and being centered and letting go and moving forward and working on myself and sitting with my pain, and working out and getting grounded and glowing up.

I’m glowed tf up.

I’m sick of it.

🌖 The younger me would have ripped the moon from the sky if she wanted to. Stomped it like a deflated kickball. Stolen a boat and set the sea on fire.

I’m tired of being quiet and tired of the silence and tired of being tired of waiting for absolutely nothing.

I’m tired of forgiving myself and tired of letting things go and tired of going with the flow.

Enough!

The tide had better come back in and stay in. I’ve had enough. Im tired of being pushed and prodded and most of all I’m tired of being bored to death with my own self. I’m climbing in one of these boats and dragging the moon into the sea.

I’m sick of you being in charge and I’m over it.

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I sat alone at the pub watching England beat France while sipping a cider. I do this a lot since the World Cup began. I took a nap and then ripped out blackberry bushes and fixed the kayak hanger and restacked the lumber.

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I thought about this solo trip I took when I was twenty two and heartbroken (again). I drove ten thousand miles around the country climbing mountains and sleeping next to rivers. I wandered a month alone and I was deeply lonely. I read and hiked and wrote. My car broke down in the desert. Then I got giardia. It was before social media and long before I owned a cell phone so exactly no one knew where I was on any given day. I figured things out and each day I realized more and more how much I deeply loved people. I wrote letters sometimes but received none in return. I lived on road side ice cream cones and chocolate covered raisins and granola.

I know how to be alone. I can fix things and keep myself from dying and find my way out of a desert. But like a woman stranded on the moon, I so often just wish a message would arrive from Earth saying we’re sending a pod to bring you home.

What I came away from that trip knowing was that I don’t need people. But that wasn’t the lesson. I spent the whole trek trying to untether myself from people who’d left only to realize later that the tethering isn’t something to run from, it’s what makes us human. The connections, no matter how flawed, are why we’re here.

And so I spent today, not waiting on a message from Earth, but becoming like Earth itself. The quiet part of ourselves that can send a message out so that someone else stranded on some other moon can hear it, because comforting another lonely human is the most human thing we can do.

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Don’t forget who you are. You come from a place filled with peepers and fireflies. You are not afraid of the night or the aloneness of forests and owls. You grew up here in Pennsylvania woods surrounded by farm fields rowed with crooked lines of Silver Queen sweet corn and cabbage like decapitated green monsters and potatoes that will be sliced and fried into bags of salty chips.

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At night in the summer, the air is thick with humidity you could grab with your hands and peepers that chirp you into a blissful trance. The freight trains rumble off in the distance and blow their horns at the crossroads and green rivers that snake between the hills and you have heard these noises even before you knew what they were. Even before you knew words.

But you do know words now. Words like love and betrayal that are black holes you keep trying to climb out of. And when you go home because your life has come apart in heartbreaking ways and then your father dies and you put his ashes in a tiny box in the ground and walk around his buildings looking for things you cannot find and there are broken safety glasses and scraps of long strips of wood he was saving and you take the screen tacks with numbers on them ( from the cabinet above the kerosene) that he told you two years ago you couldn’t have because he was using them get your own. And now you use them as thumb tacks. You use them to tack up words of affirmation on your studio wall that remind you you matter and all of your CrossFit goals like handstand pushups and how you want to spend time with people who value you for you. You are using the tacks now to hold up your future.

You go home and drive around in cars with people you once knew well and who loop you through the woods over and over as you untangle your relationships and peel away at your armor. You get in a car with yet another avoidant man because why not and you have fun not having any idea where you will end up because you cannot stand boring and he says uncomfortable truths that are both knife wounds and funny which is exactly the kind of banter you show up for.  Anything to die laughing rather than to just die. He is wrecked like you but you are better at clawing your way out of deep holes and you can see that but he is tall and can carry you if you asked him to and then just as expected he disappears.

You go home because your mom has cancer and needs surgery and you have no energy for disaster anymore and so she gets better because she also has no energy for it and you eat pizza and talk about which flowers are blooming and what you did at CrossFit and she says that must be so tiring and you say yes of course but not really.

At night you open the windows because you hate the isolation of air conditioning and you listen to the peepers and watch fire flies flashing across the yard for mates and you remember that life is lonely and full of beings lighting up in the night and calling out for one another, each searching for someone to say, I am here, I see you. You are not alone.

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I’d come because I was trying to make sense of who I now was. I’d come because I was lost. I’d come because I’d abandoned myself to the person I most trusted. He’d suddenly made himself a stranger (again). I’d come because I believed if I moved my body to someplace foreign, I could distract myself until my heart and brain caught up. If I moved fast enough, I could leave pain behind. Isn’t that what jet planes are for?

Yet, I sat in SeaTac on Christmas Day waiting to fly to Frankfurt, then Milano, crying. Bawling actually, and blaming myself for all that I’d done to find myself sitting alone in an airport surrounded by families and lovers, completely and unapologetically losing myself in front of them. And yes, readers, I did the most predictable and irrational thing. I FaceTimed the lover who left me for someone else, hoping for a connection. Begging for it. I asked if we could talk, if I could get more answers. Wasn’t there more to say? More to be considered? How could he be content with the ending? But of course, the lover who has moved on to someone new is always content with the ending. They are bored with your tears. They have nothing to offer. New love beds itself in betrayal.

I arrived in Frankfurt wrecked from an overnight Christmas flight steeped in peppermint, ginger ale, Xanax, and heartbreak. My chest as if someone was standing on it, I forced my way onto a train to Romar Square and stood smiling in front of a building-sized Christmas tree. I would adventure my way into happiness. But how could I demand this of myself? How could I travel without my adventure partner and expect joy? Didn’t I always say it was not the places we went but that we went there together? It wasn’t a seven mile death march in searing Mexico heat that was fun; it was that we trekked it, chatting the whole way about our kids, heartaches, hopes, and futures together. It was our shared connection that bonded us to the place and not the other way around.

Alone in Germany, I was a body moving through a zoo of animals of different species. I had fur where I needed fins. I could not find my match. My people were nowhere. I smiled at the camera in a gross mockery of my efforts.

When I reached Milan, Bronlea and Gualtiero met me at the Porta Romana subway exit. Just off a two-week trek with her American friend Kathryn on a Viking cruise, Bronlea was equally exhausted. Nearly ten PM at night, the city was cold and glistening. Gualtiero, Kathryn’s new Italian husband who accompanied Bronlea, was adorable, bearded, mellow, and polite with an innocence that felt wounded. I kissed his cheek as he greeted me, and the three of us walked to his tiny studio apartment, where Bronlea and I would be staying the next five days. Gualtiero had read my blog and wanted me to know that James was an idiot and I should forget this foolish Brittish man, after all they do not know how to spice food.

Gualtiero had his own love troubles, they quickly informed me, as we reached the gate to the apartment. He and Kathryn (newlyweds but living in separate nearby apartments) were unfortunately at odds, and Gualtiero had been pitched out of Kathryn’s apartment and now had nowhere to stay because we were in his studio apartment bed. Kathryn had just moved from the U.S. to Italy and there were some growing pains to work through. He and his parents, who lived upstairs from him, were also suddenly not speaking due to a disagreement. Christmas had arrived less like a bell and more like a knife.

What I’d expected in Italy was to be wrapped in the arms of a Kathryn’s newly wedded Italian family. They’d find me fascinating; I’d fall in love with them, and we’d all become fast friends. We’d sip Chianti and eat gnocchi, seated around an ancient wooden table with Gualtiero’s parents. I’d return in the summer with my teenage daughter, and we’d revisit them. We’d exchange Christmas cards for years. Kathryn, Bronlea, and I would adventure by foot and train, then aperitivo with olives and chips, and stumble home exhausted. We’d wear slinky velvet dresses and tall boots. We’d drink cappuccinos, and I’d meet a dashing Italian man in a pizzeria who’d look at me and declare in broken English that only a fool would give me up.

“You have to bring your benchmark for joy down several notches,” Bronlea reasoned with me a couple of days later as I struggled with constant anxiety attacks. Crowds brought it on. Silence brought it on. The sight of food. The smell of rain. Sunlight. Darkness. Subways. Dogs. Children. People walking arm in arm. Anxiety was a specter coming for me, and I had no armor to defend myself. What I’d felt with James would no longer exist again, I reasoned. He’d transferred his affection to someone else. I couldn’t go on being perpetually disappointed. But could the world not feel so hostile, maybe? I felt like I was having a low-grade heart attack (and isn’t love loss exactly that?) No matter the logic, I could not shake an impending sense of dread. If I was so wrong about my value with James and his loyalty to me, was there anyone I could trust? My psyche scanned the room in wakeful vigilance as if my life was under constant threat. I could not eat. I could not sleep. I felt trapped in a foreign country where friends of friends had graciously given me refuge and yet I could not stop the panic long enough to communicate authentically in any way that felt appropriate.

We wandered the streets of Milan, circling the Duomo repeatedly and actually did spend a magical evening enjoying apperativo with kathryn and Gualtiero as we peered out at the lit cathedral across the square. There were moments I could force myself to capture if I just tried harder.

We savored slices of pizza in cozy streetside restaurants. We gawked at the endless exquisite clown costume pastries. We sipped cappuccinos and tried to make sense of how relationships fall apart and come together and how people manage to communicate at all. This past year had been the first time in my life I’d fully understood that not everyone communicates like I do or that people don’t say what they think most of the time. It’s well known that I crave an uncomfortable conversation if only to get at the heart of a matter and see a person beneath their armor. I will often say the thing that everyone is thinking, but no one will say only to find that sometimes people are shocked when I do. I take social risks and occasionally they backfire. My truths are sometimes too truthful. This has been a year where I’ve begun to wonder if my trustworthy spot-on gut instincts haven’t begun to fail me. It’s made me quieter, smaller, less apt to take the risks I’m historically known for. I’ve managed to lose the one relationship that meant the most to me and I’m questioning everything.

We ventured into shops to try on dresses, surrounded by fashionable Milanese. Men wore crisp slim suits and women were clad in fuax fur and leggings with high-heeled leather boots. Everyone, the women and the men and the children and the dogs, had amazing hair. I too had gotten my hair colored for the first time and while trauma normally wrecks people physically, I seem to become more beautiful with each knife wound in a cruel twist of fate where there is no one to appreciate it.

With Kathryn and Gualtiero working on acclimating to their new life together in Italy, Bronlea and I gave them space and escaped with day drips. First, a train ride to Lugano, Switzerland where we took a tram up Mount Bré and lunched with a Swiss couple at a chalet at the peak. We bought little chocolate bars and watched children play an ice hockey version of miniature golf. My chest lighter, I felt I could survive at least this one day. We delighted in the sunlight, the waves that whipped up as the afternoon turned stormy, the gray-blue mountains, and the unexpected Mediterranean palm trees. Milan had become suffocating and we’d successfully escaped to the Swiss Alps for respite.

As the days passed, I moved my body slowly through the doors of one ancient cathedral after another, praying for myself, my child, and my future. Over and over I recited my mantras of rebirth and letting go with each lit candle I found. I told myself it was okay to grieve and be broken. It was okay to still be processing how the future I thought I understood had suddenly been swallowed up. It was okay to let go of the younger versions of myself who were trying to protect me by never fully trusting people, (despite knowing this was reinforcing why I don’t trust people). It was okay to be a human being having a human experience, as Wayne Dyer says. It was okay to feel alone and lonely and broken and lost. It was okay to feel betrayed and to question everything I’ve ever done and said and believed. I had built a world that had collapsed and now I needed to build a new one alone. But how?

We caught a train to Verona on the last day of the year and photographed Juliet’s balcony and people putting their hands on the right breast of her statue so many times it wore a hole in her. We walked bridges blown up in one war after another and which were rebuilt over and over. Old stones merged with new. Wasn’t this the obvious answer?

We climbed the steps of the Verona Amphitheater built in 30AD and still used for opera. When they renovated it in the 1500s they found bodies encapsulated. How many thousands of people had lived and died and sat on these massive stones and felt the same things I had? Weren’t we all just the same DNA, the same versions of primal experiences passed down over and over, suffering and loving and betraying and praying and slowly killing one another in a perpetual river of birth and death? If we’re wired for human connection, wouldn’t that explain why severing our deepest attachments makes us feel as if we are dying? And in truth, when that happens parts of us are actually dying.

I reminded myself that I’m not special; we’re all dying and nothing matters and conversely, everything matters and feeling as if you are dying is just a reminder that you are in fact alive. Still in this moment breathing and experiencing loss and love and suffering and figuring out why we continue to build and destroy and rebuild. Why we push and pull and fight against one another and claim our territory and our people and cling to our safety. We are hard-wired for survival and connection and rebuilding over and over endlessly. And if there’s any place to go that will remind you of human resilience, it is Europe, where humans have built on top of ruins and where cobblestone is merged with the steel frames of modern life seamlessly and endlessly as if the human spirit requires the decaying and thriving to co-exist, as if it were a blueprint for carrying on when things fall apart. And though you first thought you did not find what you needed in Milano, what you soon realized was that you were provided with exactly the tools to carry home that you required.

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I’m deeply lonely for the person I’ve lost and trying to be honest with myself about what it is I want out of life. Here are the lies I’ve been telling myself for decades and what I realized in the last couple of months were the actual truths:

Milano, Italy

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1. I’m polyamorous and will never want total commitment.

   Truth: I’m a serial monogamist and loyal to a fault. The polys would say love is infinite with plenty to go around, but after trapezing around unsettled and empty in a poly world for months, I’ve determined it’s not for me. I’m focused, and my energy doesn’t fracture. I fall in love and stay there. I’m flirty, but I need the security of a single relationship. I’ve given up dating completely for any foreseeable future, but if I ever do again, I won’t be open to any shared arrangement. I’m not built for it, and it’s not what I want. I want commitment and I’m pretty sure no one’s ever heard me say that before. Polyamory was a terrible choice for me rooted in fear of being trapped. What I wanted was safety. I thought I could create it by having multiple alliances without realizing that what I needed was a single loyal person who I could depend on to show up for me.

2. I’m a solo.

   Truth: I actually crave cohabitation and want to share space and daily life with someone I love and am deeply connected to. (Also, they must be funny.) I want morning coffee and someone to come home to. I want a best friend and confidant. I want a life with family, holiday traditions, inside jokes, and people to care for and about. I want to share cooking and shopping and lawn mowing. I want to map out which dahlias to plant and watch Netflix together. I want to pick up someone’s socks and find their habits annoying. While there have been years when I savored my solitude and independence, I now find it empty. While there’s nothing wrong with building a life just for me, I realized (too late) that a solo life was never what I was actually building or wanted. I was brick by brick, sauna by hot tub, building a life believing it would entice my person to join me. I never admitted it to myself or the person I cared about most before it was too late.

3. I’m emotionally detached, avoidant, and require total independence.

   Truth: Those were all trauma and abandonment responses. The world taught me I had only myself to survive, so I kept people at a safe distance. But once I do attach to someone deeply, detachment requires painful amputation. And even after a severing, I experience phantom limb pain indefinitely. Sometimes for decades. My attachment to James is, unfortunately, unwavering despite his leaving me for someone else.

4. My joy stems from adventure.

   Truth: Actually, it’s in the connection. I once believed that it was the risky journey that I craved. I now know it has nothing to do with the adventure but who I’m adventuring with, how I feel about them, and how they feel about me. The place and the trek is made magical because it’s experienced WITH someone I’m deeply connected to. Even the most enchanting environment can feel dull without someone who sees the world as you do, and, conversely, some people can make a trip to the supermarket feel like a holiday because they fill you with laughter and joy.

5. I have to protect myself from danger every minute.

   Truth: I can place trust in and depend on someone else. Part of ensuring my safety alone has been a life-long hyper vigilance. I’ve practiced financial frugality that at times has neared starvation as a way to ensure long-term survival. I have lived in a perpetual scarcity mindset. And while survival and fiscal responsibility are important, I have restricted myself from ever having nice things or feeling loved. I’m always in the lookout for physical and emotional dangers and live my life as if at any moment, I may need to escape with a go bag. I also have historically believed people would fail me and so push them away until they do. I’ve resisted protection while desperately wanting someone else to stand guard, so I can rest. It’s not just what I want but what I require. I’m exhausted from surviving on my own. I want to go to sleep believing I’m safe from physical and emotional disaster and I want my nervous system to believe it too.

6. I’m a moody, depressed, anxious person at heart.

   Truth: I just require love and humor like water and light. I used to believe that I was just built different and the world felt perpetually gray. But with the right people who make me laugh whenever I get too serious with myself, I’m fun and joyful. I’m funny and create vibrant, beautiful experiences. I realized that having someone be my person who was genuinely funny and who adored me was the antidote to my suffering.

7. Communication is me giving advice and making demands to protect myself. Truth: There are more than a dozen ways to do anything, including life and relationships, and I can compromise without compromising myself. I’ve finally realized not everyone speaks their mind directly like I do. I made terrible assumptions that if I was voicing my wants, needs, feelings, fears, and insecurities openly, everyone else did that too. I now know that I need to ask better questions, then listen to answers that I might not like in order to compromise and grow. I’ve worked hard on regulating my responses so I don’t default to anger and outbursts. There was a time when I believed all my feelings should be heard in their purest form and I now know that behavior has never served me. The worst outcome might still happen if I quiet myself, but it is more likely to occur if I don’t find out what someone wants and consider if it might be a life I too could enjoy with them.

8. I can always persevere and come out on top.

   Truth: I can’t make someone want a life with me if they’d rather be with someone else (no matter how amazing and cool I am). I’ve been taught that my value lies in how hard I work, what I produce, and how much I suffer to reach a goal. While tenacity has served me much of my life when I needed to persevere, there is also a time to step back and let things fail or thrive without tending to or controlling anything. I believed if I just threw all of my energy into saving my relationship that I could because I never give up and I always come back from failure. “It’s not over if I haven’t won,” I’ve said many times. Yet in this case, I found myself competing with my partner’s desire for another woman. I became a performer and a shell of myself, living in chronic fear, transforming myself to become whatever was needed to stay afloat. I agreed to a pseudo-forced poly situation long after I knew it was not what I wanted because it was the only option I was given not to lose my person entirely. I was discarded for the same woman twice, and each time it felt like a death of myself, my lover, and my future. And it hasn’t stopped feeling that way. My survival instincts became my own demise. I was so afraid of being trapped by a man that I manifested my own fears into being. I lost myself, my sense of worth, and a relationship that could have thrived and been a lifetime of joy if I’d given it the space it needed along the way. I’m deeply mournful of this lost future with someone who truly made me feel alive and happy.

9. I can’t accept a reality that leaves me feeling lost and alone.

   Truth: I can change my behaviors. I can realize what I want. I can’t change someone’s mind, but I can accept the life I’ve found myself in, be honest about what I’ve learned, and live this new truth as best I can. I’m not lost. I’ve discovered who I actually am and what I want and though that might not bring me the person I want, at least I’m living authentically.

10. I can’t go forward and grieve at the same time.

    Truth: I can get out of my own way. I vow to each day accept what I now know about myself, forgive myself, and keep being a better more compassionate person. I’m letting people go who don’t want to experience life with me or value and love me in a way that enables me to become the best version of me. I vow to not stay in relationships that make me feel unsafe, jealous, and threatened, no matter how painful it is to depart. I will ask more questions and most of all I will live my truth and listen more intently when other people tell me theirs.

    The circumstances of this breakup have been so epically traumatic, toxic, and damaging that I’m vowing to give myself anything I need to feel safe and rest until I feel well enough to function fully on my own. I’m still struggling to eat or sleep, but I’m seeing counselors and taking medication to help. I’m moving my body and focusing on myself, my child, my house, and my job. I’m being intentional with myself, and I’m letting myself heal without a timeline or judgement.

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I don’t believe there are things in life that are meant to be or not meant to be. I don’t believe in fate. I believe we make conscious decisions about who we are, where we go, what we want, and who we choose. When the person you thought of as your person tells you he doesn’t see a future with you, you believe him. It does not matter that he’s waffled for months, that he’s perpetually compartmentalizing and avoiding and confused. He’s chosen someone else for his future and he says it’s not you. It does not matter if you still see him as your person. It does not matter that your heart will not let go. You must force your brain and body to let go and let your heart suffer indefinitely. When he stopped seeing you as his, when he started seeing someone else in your place, it was already over. You force yourself to erase the future you saw with him, no matter how painful.

And yet you cannot. You can see it all clearly and you know he can too. The weekend trips into the mountains, the hot springs, the adventure to Thailand. You helping him buy a house in Seattle, the weekends drinking coffee in bed and going on city outings. You moving in with him there and him moving in with you here in your beach cottage you were renovating for him and his children to join on occasion with you and your daughter. An eventual move to England and an international life of adventure. How does one disappear that? You try. And yet you also know he has moved on and has those plans with someone else now. You take the eraser to the board and wipe it away. But it does not entirely erase. It’s still there, barely legible, but there, haunting you. You pace the house like a caged animal. Food is not food. You force yourself to drink a protein shake, but it feels like mud. You are wasting away again. You force yourself to wrap presents and care for your daughter who has just had her wisdom teeth removed. The tide goes out and in and you know you have just one life but all of the color has drained from it.

You know this morning he is in bed with her in Canada and you wake up wondering how often he thinks of you while he is in bed with her and you know it is often because you are unforgettable. And yet forgettable enough to not be the one he’s chosen to wake up with.

You remember that after he called you on FaceTime to break up with you three weeks ago (with his now girlfriend, who’d been his affair partner, staying with him for ten days), what he said to you was exactly what you coached him to say when you were both trying polyamory and he broke up with his girlfriend Mindy (not her real name). You told him to tell her he didn’t see a future with her, because the future he saw was with you. The sting of your own words turned against you. And still they hit you with blunt force trauma. You felt your chest implode and all the blood rush out. You sat in shock, knowing what was coming. You did not cry for a long time. You were in disbelief that someone who clearly loves you would look you in the eyes and execute you at close range.

After blocking him for weeks on socials, you unblock him on Instagram for a few days not so you can reconnect, but so you can sit with the dead body of who you were together. You look at the picture he’s proudly posted of him and his new girlfriend, his crush from when he was fifteen who resurfaced in his life in August after divorcing. (Let’s call her Gwyn). Her head resting on his shoulder at a hockey game with friends in California you will never meet; he’s wearing the brown flannel you would have told him he’s buttoned up too high. The shirt he always thinks is dressy for some reason, but isn’t at all. And though he wore no shirt when he sent you a video of himself splitting wood for Valentine’s Day almost four years earlier, you always imagine he was wearing that shirt just before getting too hot and removing it. You fell in love with him that day. You can still feel the fabric of that shirt between your fingers, the one you’ve removed from his body countless times. You remind yourself that she removes it from him now. You absorb the look of infatuation on both of their faces. You see he looks the same way he looks with you. You let panic move through your body like poison. Then you repeat. Over and over, you look at it until you accept that this is what he’s chosen, and this spot is not yours; it is hers, and he does not want you there anymore. Except you know he does want you and your brain keeps telling you that every time you try to swallow this reality you vomit it back up because your body wants to live.

You remove yourself from this moment like blowing smoke through a long pipe. You think you can live through it if you can just accept it. The Buddhists would say sitting with death is healthy. That to contemplate our own death daily allows us to live more fully. To be aware of our own demise allows us to be fully in the present. But there is nothing in the present that you want. You are supposed to be enjoying your life with him and nothing was wrong until another woman came to steal your future and take it for her own. Nothing was wrong until he dove into that woman. But it is what he wants and aren’t you the one who never wanted a man to be centered in your life again?

You get up every day and build your world piece by piece by putting the energy you put into him back into yourself. Yet most of the energy seeps out. You do not yet know how to go on and life feels empty, but you know you must to survive.

You remind yourself every sleepless night when you wake in a panic, that you spent the last three months doing everything you could to rebuild your life with him, you worked on yourself, you tore down your armor, you told your truths, you showed up, you offered commitment and a life and a beautiful future.

You’d flown to Europe to secretly meet him and rebuild your relationship. He held you in Wales and promised he’d fix everything and make you feel safe again, and you believed him. He’d always promised you’d be together the rest of your lives, and he’d figure out how to make it all work. He promised you, as you hid yourself in London, that someday he’d take you to Chester to see where he was from. You comforted him in Istanbul when he got hair transplants. You told him he was handsome even when his head was covered in scabs, and you meant it. You found him beautiful and brilliant and messy and immature and you adored every one of his flaws. He drew hearts with honey in your morning yogurt and held your hand and adored you once again. You saw his pain and his heart, and his confusion, and you loved him deeply and honestly because you saw him fully, or so you thought, and you only wanted to be alone with him and have this other women gone so you could be safe again and have your future back. By now, you were the affair, and the other woman had fully taken your place in the visible world, but you believed the world was upside down and just needed to be righted.

(None of these secrets need to be secrets anymore because Gwyn’s been chosen, and would forgive anything anyway at this stage. While we had a short time when we were attempting amicability, she has blocked me on socials and will never read this, and I have blocked James, so I won’t have to feel even more deeply alone by watching him watch me suffer without lifting a finger to aid me like he did last time he broke up with me for her. This is my truth now, and I need to speak of it to begin to process the pain. While I have never broken any of my promises or betrayed my loyalty to him before, he has broken every promise he has ever made to me. He has shifted his loyalty to another woman and protected her. He promised me she was just a friend. He promised me he’d keep me safe. He promised me we’d be together the rest of our lives. He promised me he would rebuild us and help heal me from what he’d done. Now I must take care of myself and speak about what’s happened if I need to. I’m not writing to create damage or gain revenge. If I wanted that, I’d have revealed these secrets a month ago before he closed the door on me. The time for that has passed. I’m writing because I have to heal myself as best I can, and I do that through writing and connecting with people. James was my best friend, my daily emotional support, and the person who calmed my nervous system just by being near me. He cut that off abruptly three weeks ago when he called to say he was choosing her and we were over. Without him, I have to reach for help from others, or I’m going to drown.)

It was in those weeks when you were trying to rebuild your relationship with him that you carried the pain of being something he feared would cause him to lose the other woman. You became like a tight-rope performer without a net. You showed up in costume day after day with a smile on your face. You had to hold happiness while terrified of what might come next. You believed you could manifest a path forward and regain him if you just stayed steady and calm. He would come to his senses. He would remember your value. At night, in Istanbul, you slept with your bodies pressed against one another, and you reminded yourself you were safe, if only just for now, you were alive. You held hope in your heart for a future, and you believed you would find one in time because in the end, you always found a way for everything. You could not imagine him ever leaving you, and this seemed an impossibility. He had been inseparable from you since the day he met you. He was infatuated with you and always loyal. Anyone who saw you together could see this and told you so; he was confused, inexperienced with women, and he would mature and realize his error. This detour would right itself, they said.

Besides, you never give up, you never quit, you are tenacious, and no matter how you’ve been beaten, you always get up. But would he get up with you? Would he follow you or had his loyalty shifted too far from you? It was no longer a question of love. He loved you; it was loyalty and he was practically a child when it came to experience and making decisions. But, if Gwyn was adamant on stealing him away from you, you weren’t sure he would not go. In fact, everything pointed to him following. He wanted to know what his life might have been like if she’d picked him when they were teenagers. Now she was picking him and he had another chance at that lost life. Did he feel about her the same way you did about him? Was there an alternative future in reach that might bring him joy that he needed to realize? The only difference was that he had two beautiful futures to choose from.

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You remind yourself that if only one of you shows up, the house cannot be lived in. He’s chosen to build a home with someone else. And yet you know he also wanted this life with you, and so you struggle to burn it down, though you keep trying. You mourn it as the death it is. The death of a magical, joyful life you existed in. And you walk forward alone. You mourn it for as long as you need to. Forever, if you need, but you accept the finality of his decision, no matter how many times he has waffled, you see that he means it? You try and try and try to make it your own. There is no other path for you, and you must choose this with the same intention you have selected every other pursuit in life. And yet, you cannot. You replay every moment when you made the mistakes that set this in motion, and you try to go back in time and fix them, but nothing can change the past. Only the future can fix the past by reshaping our perception of it. You know this. And so you set out to create motion to move yourself forward. But forward is alone. Forward is empty like the present. Like the space in your bed, your heart, your future. Forward is the frantic sound of trapped emptiness, like a bird caught in a chimney, and some days you feel you cannot endure it. Who was the woman you once were who thought she was a solo? Who thought she never wanted to live with anyone again? You realize everything you thought you wanted has changed and this trauma has brought you there. You decide to sit with that knowledge and own it. You know you have come to conclusions too late about what you really want, and now someone else has claimed that life.

You remember the joy he brought you simply by being near you. The days you spent even running errands together were soulful. Days hauling bricks were some of the best dates of your life. He was someone you wanted to do forty years of laundry with because he made you laugh and feel loved every moment of it.

You engage in distractions. You install the wood stove in the barn and climb up on the roof and struggle to get the stove pipe sealed. You sit on the roof and look out at the empty sea. You try to distract yourself, but he is everywhere. When you open your fridge, you see the Olipops and the lychee Ale you bought him for when he was coming back to sit in the sauna and hot tub with you, the knives in the kitchen he bought you to make the meals he loved having with you, and the thin-rimmed exquisite drinking glasses so delicate that you only have one left. The water bottle with the cork housing he purchased you to use in the sauna with him and talk about all of your plans. The burrito blanket he sent for you to be wrapped in when he was in England and wasn’t there to comfort you or massage your legs this past summer. (You’d been angry at him for this present in the moment because you were angry that he wasn’t there with you, and now you wish you had just told him you loved him, and it is too late now, he does not care.)

You return his Christmas presents, but some came from the UK and are already wrapped so you put them in a box to go in the attic with his goretex boots (the second time he has broken up with you and left shoes in your foyer as if he’s left so abruptly that his shoes have been blown off like in a crash), his rain pants, and Mongol Rally balaclava. He’d left these things at your house because he was coming back to attend your work Christmas party and snowshoe with you. You didn’t know he’d suddenly decide he needed to pick between the two of you and that it would not be you. You had been pressuring him to let her go; you could not do this made-up polyamory thing you’d tried to do to save yourself from his affair, and she had been pressuring him to let you go. Now these things are all corpses of your lost life together. The weekend he was to return passed. The plane ticket to visit him next week for Christmas and New Year’s disappeared from your Alaska Airlines app. You sat and wept quietly at work when you saw the notice pop up on your phone that he had removed it.

You pack for Italy. Yes, you are climbing on an airplane because you do not know what else to do. You have a friend of a friend who married an Italian man and has a flat in Milan, so you will go and try to forget, even for a few days. You were supposed to be in California with him for Christmas and now you cannot endure the emptiness of lost love, so you must go anywhere not to feel this. If you will be sad anyway, why not be sad in Europe? You understand that he cannot see your value alongside him, and you cannot let your mind or your heart wait for someone who has discarded you twice. And so you write to process these emotions, to live with loss, to connect with other people who have had these same deeply human experiences. Loss is universal; the kind that makes your soul feel like it is dying is something we fortunately experience only rarely. I expect to be submerged for some time as I grow from this, but I’m done hiding from it. I’m going to walk straight into this Sea until I either find a way to live beneath the water or I have swum all the way through.

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I’ve suffered a love loss recently that’s resulted in me becoming more physically beautiful which feels like an incredibly cruel curse. I’d gladly exchange being ugly and adored over the empty panic that love loss leaves. Beauty is wasted on loneliness. Tonight I walked down past the blue paneled house with the cedar shingles that used to be pink and past my friend Lynn’s house, where sometimes we have book club, and past the house where the man tries to shut the gate to the beach, and Lynn and I spent a year opening it back up because we don’t want that kind of neighborhood. I walked myself down to the sea because it’s what I do now when I’m in a primal panic. When I feel as if my life plans and love are all lost, and I don’t know how to find a future and my chest is tight like I’m dying. When I am lost and shaking, I step out into the water and keep walking over the pebbles until my shoulders dip below the surface, and then I slink myself down and wait until I stop shivering. It is then that I feel my anxiety sink like a crab to the sea floor, and I can breathe again.

I once told a friend that I don’t experience shame, but it’s not true. I am ashamed of shame and my neediness and ashamed that I can be so stoic most of the time and yet pathetically beg for attention the rest. Even what I’m writing now is attention-seeking, and I wince at my own attempts to be seen. In the weeks leading up to my boyfriend’s departure and our splitting up over us both behaving terribly in response to his dating other people and his looming move to California, I began to lose the ability to see. I crushed my sunglasses getting out of the car one day, then lost my distance glasses and immediately broke both my spares. It was as if my life was trying to protect me from the obvious loss that was looming.

Lately, I’ve started impulsively buying shoes as if I have somewhere I need to go and I have nothing to put on my feet. We’d had a trip planned to Wales and England and Turkiye and I believe the shoes are a haunting echo of my psyche trying to make sense of the lost places I’d hoped to go with him. The travel version of me is epically fun and the grief I’ve experienced over not having that experience with him has had a particular effect on me. I bought five pairs of shoes online in a single night! They are all randomly showing up at my door and I do not know what I am doing with the shoes. It’s as if they have a life of their own and they are expecting me to put them on so they can take me somewhere. When my boyfriend left, he departed in haste without his Birkenstocks, and I listed them online for sale in a scorched-earth approach to conflict and loss that I certainly need to address in therapy. It does seem a tamer hobby to arson and murder and so I have allowed myself to indulge, though I now acknowledge that calm conversation might have a better outcome.

Tonight, out there on the water off to my left, there was a man in a rowboat fishing. The sun was setting, and he had a radio playing something that sounded like there were xylophones and an organ. After I emerged from the sea, I lay on a towel on the rocks and listened to the man’s radio and watched him cast into the water over and over. I pretended I was there in the world alone, like the little prince on the moon with his rose, and we were the last two people on Earth, and he had chosen to fish in front of the beach I was sitting on to keep me company with his radio. The man did not know it, but his music and the sun setting and the fish jumping reminded me that I do not know how long I have here and everything is changing and I cannot stop the loss. Hanging on in desperation will not let me meet whatever future is being offered no matter how much it pains me.

I got an app called Liven where I track my anxiety levels and notice how completly batshit crazy I am on a regular basis. It asks me quesitons about how anxious I am at a given moment and the answers look like bees attacked by fireworks. It tells me how I need to identify inaccurate thought patterns and maladaptive behaviors so I can develop healthy coping mechanisms rather than the clearly unproductive ones I employ, like scream-crying in my car and listing my boyfriend’s abandoned sandels online while the highest bidder offers to Venmo me to burn them. (I did not sell or burn them. They are in my foyer in case he ever comes back for them because I am not the monster I appear to be.)

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My mom always tells me that one time I wrote something about depression, going out fishing or something, and every time she tells me it’s like I’m hearing it for the first time and I wonder if I sometimes do write a beautiful metaphor even if i can’t recall it. Lately, I’ve been so depressed I feel as if I’m trapped beneath the sea ice and waiting for someone to bore a hole and lower a hook for me to climb up out of the icy water. Depression is like knowing how to swim but you discover you cannot move your arms. You are trapped beneath the surface and frantic, with all the skills to save yourself but none of the ability to move.

Kate tells me I must force myself to eat, and so I agree to make a protein shake but then I don’t do it. Because of the arm situation. Then anxiety arrives like a school of sharks and I panic and suddenly my arms are flailing, but like a child who cannot swim. I am slapping at the water and begging for help, but no one throws a life jacket because it looks like ugly theatrics, and we’ve evolved to run from panic lest it be contagious.

So, I come home from work and September has thrown us a bone day of summer and I am my best self in the heat with a bikini, even depressed and anxious, I walk to the water and talk to the picnic goers and walk into the sea. Then I sit there as the sun sets, pretending the man in the rowboat is there just for me because these are coping skills when you have forgotten even how to eat.

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Please don’t forget to like and comment and share and subscribe. Readers are the reason I write and writing is how I connect with the world. You are my man in the boat in the Sea.

Last month, I responded to a Facebook Marketplace ad for Free Firewood on the south end of the Island and ended up meeting two brothers, Dave and Steve, who are living with memory loss. Susan, Dave’s wife, posted the firewood. Anyone familiar with negotiating for something free in any online forum knows it’s a cautious dance of 'Is this still available?' and ‘what is your address,’ and then checking out their profile for red flags, Russian bots, and flakey ratings; packing the bear mace into the front seat as you drive down wooded lanes to an intellectual yurty commune artist, or multi-million-dollar waterfront mansion, or skinny bearded octogenarian hoarder shack (it’s always a toss-up). The presence of a woman increases the odds of safety, though Ghislaine Maxwell would be a glaring exception to this rule of thumb.

Susan met me in the driveway wearing a sunhat and work gloves, flanked by remnants of a yard sale and piles of items headed for the dump or Goodwill. Soon I was pivoting their wheelbarrow through the brick path to haul and stuff my Subaru full of firewood. My wood-fired sauna and hot tub need to be fed after all and “free” supports my travel budget. By my 4th load and all of us getting comfortable exchanging the stories of our lives, I discovered they weren’t cleaning out a deceased parent’s house as I’d expected. They were cleaning out Steve’s house.

“My wife died a couple of years ago, and I’ve realized I just shouldn’t be living alone anymore,” Steve told me while walking me to look at some wood scraps I could use for kindling.

“It can be really lonely,” I commiserated.

Then he explained that no it’s not the loneliness, but that he suffers from memory issues, and that Susan and his brother Dave, who also suffers from the same, had offered to have him come live with them in Arizona. Turns out they live close to a leading memory care research facility at which they’ll both be able to take part in clinical trials, Dave told me. He’s been in them for years.

Photo: Dave and Steve

In grad school, I read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory in which he recounts a friend who came abruptly to terms with his mortality when he saw an old video recording of his family just before he was born and saw his world without him existing in an inverted version of his death.

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same people- and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory

Reading Nabakov’s account was the first time I too think I processed life going on without me, as I contemplated the world before I existed. It’s an obvious way to think about your own death, and yet I had never grasped it with such clarity until realizing it was essentially the same thing.

I’m a memoirist, so writing about my life, ruminations, wanderings, and wonderings, my influences, happenings, and layered memories, becomes a writing casserole of sorts. It’s a healthy contemplation on death, as the Buddhists would say, a way to make sense of ever-disappearing life as it seems to plod on with the dual reality that it is ending from the moment it began. And, because we will not know when it ends, we become the one who never gets to experience the pain of our own lost life. So instead, we seem to mourn it our whole lives while attempting to savor the experience of an expiring clock for which we cannot see the end date.

But what happens when we slowly lose the ability to layer memory within a current experience? It is the slow disappearance of ourselves that we must rectify.

Another man, about the age of these men in the photo, came to see me at work about an explanation for a medical transport bill a couple of weeks ago. (To not violate HIPAA, I’ll keep this incredibly vague and just discuss our personal conversation). He told me that, unrelated to the care we’d given him, he’d experienced a brain injury years before and his short-term memory had been damaged, which he said didn’t help since he struggled to remember what he’d already possibly figured out about his bill.

As I pulled up his account to decipher all the numbers, he kept talking, telling me how he’d learned from this injury that there were different types of memory and not all of them were affected. He could remember his childhood friend’s phone numbers but more recent experiences were a struggle. A few years ago, I, too, could remember my childhood friends’ Kevin and Mark Bevacquas’ phone numbers and Bobby Mona’s. But did I still? No, I realized they were gone, disappearing like so much of my life’s memories into the forest floor.

“If you ever wonder if you have dementia,” my friend Robb told me a couple of years ago, “the answer is ‘No,’ You’ve always had a terrible memory.” With that group of friends, I would frequently wonder about the weekend trips I was apparently on decades ago to the coast or the trapper cabin, where I remembered nothing but a glimpse of sea stars, a broken heart, and breakfast amidst taxidermy, while they remembered the jokes, conversations with strangers, and my snoring.

He’s right. One reason I keep X-boyfriends around is so I can ask them the details of trips we took decades ago, the name of that incredible backcountry hot springs in Idaho (Gold Bug), and which species of wild cat we were searching for in the jungle of Thailand (leopard), and what was the name of that vibrant market in Korea (Gwangjang) or the hotel with the salt water hot tub in eastern Washington (Sun Mountain Lodge)? I remember colors and shapes, the way I felt maneuvering a motorcycle through rice fields, the curve of their jawline, the light and shadow when I knew I’d never see them again, the books we read on buses, the scent of seaweed drying in Bali, snow falling when we walked a lit street on Christmas Eve. I remember the vibe, the smell, the weight of loss. I live with a visceral memory of life.

What I found interesting and, in the moment, annoying, was that the man in my office wasn’t afraid to ask me uncomfortable questions. You know the thing I always say I want people to ask me. I take pride in being able to engage in awkward conversations that push boundaries and force us to examine ourselves.

He saw a picture of a blackhawk on my wall above a cabinet and asked me about my time in the Army and why I wasn’t flying now, since I could probably make a LOT more money flying than working here in an office at the Fire Department. He’d been a journalist in the Army, doing press for the American Forces Network, he explained. How fun I responded as I recounted how I’d binge-watched Sex and the City during my two years in Korea before binge-watching was even a thing, thanks to AFN. And of course, I remembered all the PSAs they did.

And then I paused, annoyed in the moment at his question about why I didn’t still fly that cut so deeply into what I see as a failing in myself. It was complicated, I tried to explain. There were the scars of misogyny in a toxic environment, then mental health counseling I’d gotten for it, (that the FAA is now resisting giving me a medical certificate because of). There was the stress of constant pressure and checkrides I didn’t miss. And, the birth of my child while still in the Army, and the years of inequitable distribution of household chores and parenting on top of my career expectations. So much was Patriarchy doing its job of making sure I was too tired and too beaten down to stay in something that was hard even for men with a wife at home doing everything.

I tried to explain some of it, but mostly I couldn’t. Mostly, I tried to say what I always say, that yes, I missed it. Someday, maybe I’d do it again. I wasn’t dead yet! But for now, this was fine. I’m good at data and IT and solving problems, I explained. I’m good at lots of things and flying was just one of them. For days I thought about how I need to learn to answer these questions better. How no one but me sees this as a failing and people are naturally curious and mostly compassionate. I thought about how I should spin my answers better. Be more positive. Not be so forthcoming. Then I rethought it all and decided to be whoever I am at any given moment. Messy. Scattered. Colorful.

I saw a video yesterday of Bruce Willis dancing with his adult children and the caption read “70-year-old Bruce Willis no longer remembers he was famous.” And I wondered at what point it stopped mattering that he was ever famous or if it ever mattered. I think the point of the video was that he’d been whittled down to just being any man dancing with his children and that was a beautiful thing.

Within a couple of days of hauling wood, Dave and Steve start telling me their stories. Dave had been an engineer for a gun manufacturer when NASA asked him to design a switch that would operate like a trigger in space to deploy some sort of folded up spacecraft in an environment with obvioulsy far less gravity. He explained all the testing involved and the joy and fun he’d had coming up with a solution that used one technology to support another. I told him how I used to work at Boeing and I’d once been a pilot.

The brothers then built me a box for my kindling and added ropes for handles and asked me as we loaded up my car if I was single or if my husband knew I was out doing all of this hard labor?

“I’m an independent woman,” I responded with a smile because by now I really liked these guys.

“So is my wife,” Dave said, then guffawed into laughter. “She doesn’t need me at all.”

Photo: The woodbox Dave and Steve built me for Kindling

My woodfired hot tub and the rest of the bricks and retaining wall

For days, I kept going back. I told them how I assembled my sauna and hot tub and how I was building a retaining wall and finishing up my bricks. They loaded me up with more timbers and bricks and scrap lumber and we took photos together and I told them I’d email them our photos and a link if I wrote about them.

“I’ll send you photos of all the things I build with what you’ve given me,” I said.

The firewood and some of the timbers built into a retaining wall. (Some of these came from my friend Dennis, too, who you’ve heard about if you’ve read previous blogs).

I wondered if Dave and Steve would remember me if I emailed them, and realized it didn’t matter. The time we got to know each other existed one weekend in June when they gave me everything I needed to keep building my solo life. Like the trigger used to deploy a spacecraft, we are each other’s catalyst for one tiny life unfolding into another.

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If you’d like, you can follow me on Instagram at @amywritesandpaints.

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Tomorrow, on June 14th, Trump will spend $45 million in taxpayer funds to celebrate his birthday on the 250th Anniversary of the U.S. Army in a dictator style show of military might and a transparent attempt to associate himself and his hateful ideology with the service and expertise our forces represent. His speech earlier in the week at Fort Bragg with handpicked troops based on political leaning and appearance (also mostly male), behind him cheering as he made partisan comments and attacked his foes, was a marked departure from Pentagon rules on a nonpartisan military.

As a former Army Officer, I was educated that the military’s role is to protect and defend the nation and its citizens regardless of who is in the White House, or one’s own political beliefs. We took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and execute all lawful orders. We were also educated to understand that the Posse Comitatus Act prohibited active duty military from being used in law enforcement against our citizens on U.S. soil and that it was our duty to defy an unlawful order. While certain exceptions certainly apply, including the invocation of the Insurrection Act, during times of extreme emergency, what Trump and Hegseth are engaging in is a steady degradation of the line between what troops have been told they cannot do and what they are now being ordered to do.

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Today, without invoking the Insurrection Act, a U.S. citizen who is an immigrant and veteran was detained by the Marines for the first time in our nation’s history. The hair stood up on the back of many veterans’ necks including my own,. when I heard this news. Yes, he was transferred to civilian authorities and yes, the Marines were tasked with protecting a federal building, but the optics were intended to both cross the line on what the military can do and make crossing the line the new normal for the military. Once it becomes something they do without question, the most powerful, most lethal, best-trained military in the world becomes the President’s fist against the American people. Trump has vowed to shut down protests. Not violent protests. Protests period. This is how he plans to do it and how he plans to terrorize those who dissent. We’re five months into this presidency. Imagine what this looks like two years from now.

The first step was to make the military his own, not the people’s. He began that process at Ft Bragg with the military crossing the line into partisanship. Tomorrow, he completes that step as the military, in a dictatorial fashion, is used as a display of his power over the people. The planes, the helicopters, the troops, the tanks, the dog–all his. All an extension of him on his 79th Birthday. The fracturing of the apolitical military has begun. What Trump and Hegseth want is a military loyal to Trump’s agenda, not the citizens, not the constitution, but to them. Anyone who they believe doesn’t fit that vision will be systemeatically removed. And as time passes and troops begin to question this new partisan military, the goal will be to discipline them into submission or removal. The military will begin to faction and fracture.

Displays like this parade are generally unpopular with troops because they require vast resources, tons of practice, are a distraction from actual training and missions, and generally just suck for troops. They usually take place on a day you’d be with your family and occur for the pleasure of people who have no idea what it means to have to deal with everything about the military that sucks. Donald Trump is a classic example of someone who has no idea what military life is like and has no problem making it suck even more for those who have commited their lives to service. For this reason and the vast waste of taxpayer funds, 70% of veterans in one poll opposed the parade, including a majority of Republican veterans.

Tomorrow, as tanks and troops roll through the streets of D.C, protests against the bill in the Senate, cuts to healthcare, government agencies, veteran aid, and the Administration’s latest crackdown on undocumented immigrants, among so many other controversial polices, will be in full force all across the nation. Couple that with war in the Middle East, and the Nation’s anxiety is at peak panic.

All of this is also a distraction from “The Big Beautiful Bill,” about to pass the Senate, which contains legislation that would shield the Trump Administration from accountability when they break the law, including the 170 times they’ve already done so. There’s also a provision that would impose a ten-year ban on any regulation of AI, including the use of politically motivated AI, which could sway an election.

If protests in D.C. and across the nation become violent (and at least in some capacity, they will), Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act in the coming days or weeks. What follows will be a severe crackdown on protests, which will exacerbate citizens’ frustration and increase the violence, resulting in further disappearance of people to include more immigrants AND U.S. citizens, the arrest of minority party lawmakers, and eventually a postponement or cancellation of midterm elections. If you think these things couldn’t happen without the courts intervening, ask yourself what Army the courts have to enforce the laws a president and his party refuse to obey, and then couple that with the eventual passage of a bill that will protect them from being held accountable for disobeying. If you’re doing nothing, trying to get through your day, and bracing yourself to make it to the midterms, there’s a good chance we don’t make it to the midterms. Not without the American people rising up against these threats and Republican lawmakers growing a pair and John McCaining this tyrant. There isn’t much time left.

Do something.

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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/lawmakers-slam-military-parade-trumps-multimillion-dollar-birthday/story?id=122791267

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bragg-soldiers-cheered-trumps-political-172518382.html?fr=yhss

https://www.nokings.org/

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As an Army veteran, I want to speak out against the actions the Trump administration and SECDEF Pete Hegseth have enacted this month on the U.S. Military. Pete Hegseth will go down in history as a dark stain on what makes our Military honorable. He’s misled the U.S. Armed Forces with his “DEI” attacks on everyone and anyone who is not a cis white man. In direct opposition to Pride Month, he stripped the USNS Harvey Milk of its name last week. But that was just the warm-up.

Yesterday, June 6th, was the final day for transgender troops to “voluntarily” separate from active duty. Those remaining face administrative leave, uncertain discharge status, no separation pay, and repayment of enlistment bonuses.

In the keynote for Special Operations Forces Week back in May, Hegseth said

“Our combat formations don't need to look like Harvard University. They need to look like killers, trained and skilled and prepared. The standards need to be high, and they need to be gender neutral, so that if you can do the job, you're in that formation and if you can't, you are not.”

Yet with no evidence shown that transgender troops currently serving have been unable to meet the color blind, gender blind standards Hegseth has so clearly indicated should be the only measurement for duty fitness, they have been ordered to self-identify for the purge. Upheld as constitutional by the conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court, Hegseth moved forward with the dismissals.

“Everything starts and ends with warriors, from training to the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. No more pronouns. No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses, we're done with that shit [applause] [cheering],” Hegseth announced.

While the purge will impact a small number of troops, less than 1%, with estimates ranging between one thousand and four thousand, for those impacted, the move is devastating. They’ve fought hard to earn their slots, earn their place and acceptance, and with no reason other than hatred, they are being stripped of their livelihood.

Just a few notable transgender troops to watch for in the fight, though there are many:

There’s Col Bree Fram, (on Substack) who’s served 22 years in the military and bid farewell to it yesterday with dignity:

We will continue to serve. We will continue to lead. We will continue to prove—every single day—that we meet the high standards of the military, that the arguments about our capability and readiness used to justify this policy are based on false premises, that we belong.

Chief Petty Officer Ryan Goodell whom I watched in an interview on PBS News on Friday:

“The Navy colors are blue and gold, and that's all you see. Realizing and pursuing my truth has made me more mentally stable. My depression is gone. I'm a better leader. I can think more clearly, I don't have those nagging self-doubt moments anymore. I know who I am, and I lead very effectively. And that's why, in part, I was chosen to be a chief petty officer.”

As well as 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott from that same interview:

Nobody that I have served with thus far has known that I am transgender unless I have told them or they have seen it posted on the Internet somewhere.

At the end of the day, what our fellow service members care about is whether or not we can put on our uniforms and perform our duties.

As Retired General Stanley McChrystal said on Face the Nation in May in support of diversity,

“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth s focus on DEI in the military is a distraction and not helpful. The idea that everybody s got to look a certain way, got to have biceps of a certain size, theres got to be a male, straight, all these things, is not my experience ..”

Gen McChrystal went on to explain that modern warfare has changed, and in the event of a draft, even people with disabilities could serve. I would agree wholeheartedly. We are living in a time when drones operated remotely can wipe out a large segment of Russian bombers. There is a place in the military for almost anyone who is called to serve in some capacity. The military is no longer just humping a ruck. It’s high tech and requires a diversity of skills.

Let me close by using Hegseth’s own narrow-minded words against him from that same speech, Special Forces Week:

“Our standards will be high and in combat formations, they will be gender neutral because the weight of a 155 round or a rucksack or a human being doesn't care if you're a man or a woman.”

From my own experience, I can attest that overall, troops don’t care if the person next to them is a man or a woman. They just want someone they can rely on who can do the job they’ve been assigned. Hegseth has once again chosen bigotry over preparedness. He’s left holes where qualified transgender troops served honorably and with dignity. With every action, he’s making our military weaker than he found it.

Hegseth and Trump must go. Our National Security and the remaining strength of our Nation depend on it. These moves are part of a larger agenda—one that systematically strips our military of thinkers and leaders willing to use their minds, speak up, and hold firm to defending the Constitution. Every month, more leaders and troops who oppose this Administration are purged. As predicted, summer protests are resulting in chaos and violence. While the use of the National Guard to maintain order is lawful, we’re in the early stages of a transition toward a larger crackdown. When Trump eventually enacts Martial Law, turning our active duty military on our citizens protesting unlawful agendas, it’s Hegseth job to ensure there’s no one left who’s willing to dissent.

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Impermanence and the Buddhist Nun

Years ago, I used to attend Buddhist meditations in Mount Vernon, WA, where a nun in robes with a buzz cut told us how she wakes up each day and checks the news to remind herself of the suffering in the world. She then would notice her lovely life with nourishing food, a bed, companionship, flower gardens, coffee, and cakes, and feel grateful for all she had. Afterward, she’d set an intention to do what she could with her day to improve the lives of those she could within her sphere of influence.

Tonight, I thought about how we don’t own each other and barely own ourselves in bodies that are temporary. Yes, we will all die. But what we do with our lives while we are alive and how we treat others is what matters. I thought of how I flew away on a jet to Mexico and then came back to my little house waiting next to the sea for me. I thought of my dad covered in bruises from blood thinners and work ethic, and my mom lonely on Memorial Day when picnic plans didn’t come to fruition.

I thought of sitting in my hot tub with my current boyfriend, crying while telling him about a dinner with a boyfriend thirty years ago. We carry pebbles of pain in pockets deep within ourselves. This is where empathy also lives.

Last week, I took homemade asian rolls to my book club and listened to talks about trips on ships, a middle schooler being fat-shamed, a high schooler who ran away from home, a layoff, a lawsuit, and a nude beach. I listened to women tell the stories of their lives, and I listened to their pain.

I thought of my daughter crying last week while I held her and told her I trust her to pick good people to be in her life. She is tough and independent, and when she asks for my approval, I know it is needed.

I thought of the wild roses behind my sauna blooming and dropping petals like pink paper snow. I thought of how we require grief to love things fully.

Deporting the Moms

I’m a white middle-income mom checking my daughter’s college fund on my phone, then listening to her talk about what new hoodie she wants (yellow adventure vs pink heart) on her phone, while simultaneously horrified as I then watch online a mother pleading in Spanish that her children are in the school in a desperate plea to see them as ICE hauls her away. My daughter points out the travesty that the clothing manufacturer is going to release the pink hoodie before the yellow one, and I remind her that children are starving in Gaza.

I struggle to reconcile our safety and general security, and my child’s sense of entitlement, against the lack of protection for another mother and child. I cannot make sense of it, because they exist simultaneously as if at odds with one another. I conceptually understand that two disparate worlds can exist, yet I don’t know why anyone would want them to exist. The mom with two kids in school does not need to be hauled away to improve the lives of anyone else. It is not justice served.

The stories keep coming of women holding babies and children crying as their mothers and fathers are hauled away. This is not a world I want, nor should anyone want.

“Carol,” a 45-year-old woman from Hong Kong who’d built a life in the U.S. and worked in a cafe in rural Trump-supporting Missouri, was loved by the locals. To their horror, she was recently detained by ICE. These Trump supporters didn’t mean Carol when they said deport the illegals, and now they’re having to rectify what’s currently happening to real people in their lives with what they voted for. They’re wearing T-shirts that say “Bring Carol Home,” but likely, Ming Li Hui, this soccer mom known as Carol, won’t be coming home. She’ll be deported. And yes, it’s your fault.

I saw a sign last week that said This will stop when enough of us say Stop. There is not yet enough of us. People watch their TikTok feeds of cats and try to get their kids off to school while human rights erode. It will take the Right to say enough before this will stop, and by then, thousands of lives will be ruined. If you voted for Trump, understand that this doesn’t stop until you say stop loud and clear to your representatives en masse. You started this and you must stop it.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead

I wake in the morning and listen to NPR news while I brush my teeth and ineptly apply mascara in silent, resigned horror. I notice blisters on my hands where I burnt myself loading logs into the wood-fired hot tub. My life is easy, and yet I feel wrecked half the time from living it. I’m self-soothing, living under autocratic rule by climbing into the emotional intelligence of a man who breaks the internet with the sleeves cut out of his shirt, coupled with basic kindness for humans. There will be a point where my entire Instagram feed is just Pedro Pascal eating sandwiches, dancing, and saying kind things. Today I watched a video where he is seen reading a book (shirtless on the beach) called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, which he describes as a murder mystery and calls it “a woman’s crime and punishment,” and now I must read the book. To escape within the wormhole that Pedro Pascal escaped within is a double escape.

The Big Beautiful Bill

When citizens at a town hall in Iowa pressed Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa for answers on why she was supporting cuts to Medicaid and food stamps when it would result in people dying, she said flippantly, “We all are going to die.” Yes, she then talked about how she doesn’t want to see aid going to people who don’t qualify, like undocumented immigrants, but now we’re really at the heart of which lives matter and which don’t.

As someone who works in the EMS industry and who used to assist veterans with healthcare benefits, I know people refuse transport because they are choosing between staying housed, groceries, and healthcare. As a society, we’re actively choosing to allow people to die when we don’t provide the basic financial resources for food and healthcare to everyone. I don’t care who has a job or who doesn’t. People’s lives are far more complicated and burdened once you dig into the real issues. I don’t care who is here without proper documentation. Everyone deserves to eat and live. These cuts to fundamental basic human care are being put into place to offset 4.5 trillion in tax breaks, mainly to the wealthy, while leaving our friends, neighbors, and relatives in peril.

Healthcare is a fundamental human right that everyone should be eligible for. Men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos exist with more wealth than any human should amass. There is plenty to go around, and the problem is that it’s not going around. The poor white person or the poor brown person trying to survive is not the problem. Donald Trump and his billionaires are the problem, and they are destroying our futures person by person, cut by cut, while telling the masses he’s saving them money. He’s not. He’s killing those viewed as disposable while lining the pockets of the already too rich.

According to KFF, CBO estimates that changes in Medicaid from the Energy & Commerce reconciliation bill are expected to trigger two types of health insurance loss. First, an estimated 10.3 million people are expected to lose Medicaid. Second, an estimated 1.4 million people are expected to lose coverage provided to immigrants regardless of immigration status through programs financed entirely by the states.

The mom using food stamps to feed her kids is not your enemy. The elderly man using Medicaid for his insulin is not your enemy. The veteran trying to stay off the streets is not your enemy. But you are becoming theirs when you do nothing about this legislation.

But What Can I Do Rather than Just Watch Pedro Pascal Dance?

It’s okay to tend your dahlias, enjoy your morning latte, plan your trip to Italy, and sink into Pedro, but you can also pick a couple of things that will help bring change and stop what’s happening in our country from becoming a foregone conclusion.

1. You can call your Republican lawmakers to tell them you won’t be voting for them if they support this bill. This is an even stronger argument if you are a Republican in a Red State.

2. You can talk to your friends and neighbors about why deporting the people in your communities who are working hard to survive and have meaningful lives isn’t making your communities better. You can ask them to join you in speaking out against these deportations. You can ask them to call their representatives.

3. You can go to peaceful protests. Yes, they don’t “do” anything in the moment. But they show numbers and movement toward change.

4. If you are overwhelmed like I am about the daily barrage of injustices, you can pick one or two areas of oppression you are passionate about and focus on just those to support. Give a few hours a week to speaking out, writing opinion pieces, and volunteering where possible. Pick areas like the environment, veterans assistance, immigration, Medicare, food stamps programs, support of Ukraine, support for ending genocide in Palestine, abortion rights, free press, and higher education. So many of these are seeing cuts and attacks and need people to stand up and say NO. They need funding, support, and your time.

5. Don’t shut out your friends and family who have different views from you unless they are actively engaged in harming you. When I was in the Army I was surrounded by people who believed in different things than me. However, I know my being there and voicing my views did change opinions slowly over time. Even if you change one mind, that mind goes on to change others around them and so on. Be the voice who is there when they are ready to hear you.

6. Divest from the Oligarchs. Stop giving them your dollars. Drop your Amazon subscriptions. Buy books from bookshop.org . Sell your stock from companies that support this Administration’s policies. Shop small and local as much as you possibly can. (#6 was an edit from a reminder from Beth Anderson to hit the purse.)

7. End your day watching Pedro Pascal. Honestly, it helps.

Digging up Fires to Put Them Out

I have a friend who works with me in the fire service who once explained that in wildland firefighting, they have to dig down to find the fires burning underground and then put them out. On the surface, you can’t see the fires, he explained, but they are in the roots of the trees and the ground below and can go on burning below the surface, spreading, and igniting all around you. Living in America right now feels generally normal. You go to the store, the cinema, and soccer practice, and life is going on, but beneath the surface, little fires are burning everywhere, consuming us piece by piece. We are on fire at our very roots, and it may take us years of digging up each hot spot and putting out every one of these fires before we can stop living in fear of what’s lurking below and waiting to consume us. And so we must keep digging until the work is done, spade by spade.

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Note to Readers: if you’ve read my essay, “What the Dick is Wrong with Men,” this is a prequel four years earlier.

Two things made me realize how desperately lonely I was. The first was a car screaming northbound on Interstate-5 engulfed in flames as I commuted southbound in traffic thick with morning anxiety and dread. I was headed to Boeing, where I ticked away hours of my life liaising with procurement agents and engineers over parts for airplanes that would be designed and built, always too late or too over-budget or both. At my desk, I’d taped a photocopied meme to my computer monitor that a fellow despondent coworker had humorously given to me of a blue sky with puffy clouds that said, “This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”

I had a seven-year-old daughter and a beach cabin I was remodeling on an island North of Seattle with my child’s father, whom I’d met while flying helicopters in the Army. He’d taught me to perfect my dust landings, and we’d bonded while hauling Generals to live-fire exercises north of Uijeongbu in South Korea. My life back then had been a series of adventures flanked by lovers. I was an independent woman who didn’t believe in marriage and planned to eventually couple up to have a child, though I didn’t yet understand the long, tedious haul required to do so or that my gender might dictate what was expected of me. I thought I had a modern relationship, but what I discovered after having a child was that I was expected to curate a fulfilling, lucrative career, while also managing the lion’s share of household and childcare duties. I was now a forty-two-year-old mom with a desk job who brooded over the inequity of dirty dishes, grocery lists, and daycare pickups. While my partner now flew civilian helicopter EMS, I was parked in front of a desk and the chasm between us was a depressing, dark space from which I couldn’t navigate my way out.

What I noticed most about the flaming car was that it didn’t seem to be slowing down or searching for an exit from the streaming traffic. The driver blazed along as if the hood was not fully engulfed in flames. I stared blankly at the car in my rear-view mirror and spot-checked my sanity with the visible slinky effect of people in cars witnessing other people’s disasters.

The second thing that happened was an epiphany during a walk-in clinic gynecological examination. I’d had pelvic pain for months, or had it been years? I wasn’t even sure how long, and as a respite from my life, I left my child with her father on a Saturday afternoon so I could sit quietly alone in a waiting room reading Glamour and swiping through my friends’ vacations on social media.

“Do you menstruate regularly?” the doctor asked me.

“Not always,” I said, touching my finger to my lip in perimenopausal thought, and marveling at his blue-gray eyes and thick head of swooping black hair. He was the kind of doctor you encounter on prime-time TV that doesn’t exist in real life. I’d been chatting him up for several minutes about good places to hike on our Pacific Northwest island and was glad I’d run a brush through my hair because he was now asking me questions about my body and habits that were thrillingly intimate.

“Was sex painful?”

Sometimes, yes, but mostly I just didn’t want to be with who I was with anymore.

“Did I have trouble sleeping?”

Yes, all the time. I was a wasteland of boredom and exhaustion. “Just look at the bags under my eyes,” I said, laughing and flipping my long brown hair away from my face.

Hungry for pleasure, I mulled over answers to his questions as my tongue toyed with the remnants of the multiple lollipops I’d devoured from the candy dish in the lobby. I could taste shards of the electric cherry and the sultry root beer I’d sucked on. We smiled and looked too long into each other’s eyes. Then we commiserated about the challenges of parenting as I mentally sorted through every porn video I’d ever seen of a doctor’s office to find just the right mix of sexy and rough but not too rough to entertain myself with while I ran my eyes over his hands his arms his chest his pelvis.

“Any chance you could have an STD?” he asked, like a prerequisite to my thoughts.

“Oh, um, no, I don’t think so,” I answered and then explained that I’d been with my partner for over a decade, but could you ever really know what the other person was or wasn’t doing?

I realized with embarrassment then, that I was so lonely I’d been flirting with a man who was about to examine my vagina clinically.

Ten minutes later, I was naked except for a crinkly paper gown, and we awkwardly avoided eye contact. Then he climbed into the space between my legs and murmured things like “uh, hum, everything looks fine down here,” as he examined my labia, and then “this might hurt just a bit” as he inserted a lubed-up metal speculum.

I stared at a photograph of a sailboat on the wall just over his head, between my legs, where he was not performing cunnilingus. The boat’s white sails were fully engulfed, and the long, grand, immaculate bow glowed in the sunlight. What I noticed most, though, was that there was no one on board the boat, or at least there was no one visibly on board the boat. It was a white specter floating in an endless turquoise sea in a photograph on a wall outside of my reach. At the same time, a beautiful man I desperately wished I could connect with was crouched between my legs with surgical gloves on telling me softly and sympathetically that my vagina looked fine.

But what wasn’t fine was everything else. What wasn’t fine was not being seen or loved anymore. What wasn’t fine was being forced to be everything and nothing all at once. It was then, with a TV doctor-looking man’s head in my crotch, that I decided to quit my job and attend grad school. I wanted to write, and adventure, and experience new people. I wanted to be more than someone who did what was expected of her each day. And mostly, I just wanted to be wholly me.

It took me several more years to finally negotiate my way out of my relationship. We were deep in the pandemic when I gathered up friends in surgical masks to help me move out. But finally, I was free. I bought my own beach cabin on the other side of the island, complete with a massive western red cedar that I wrapped in solar twinkle lights. I sat in an Adirondack chair beneath it in a sage green bikini, sunglasses, and flip-flops, drinking margaritas and reveling in the 50/50 co-parenting I’d always wanted and now finally had.

“I want what you have,” other tired mom friends said. “You look so happy.”

A year after moving into my new tiny beach cabin, I took a job on the Island as an analyst at our local fire department and felt recovered enough from my breakup to stop swearing off men. I was forty-eight when I opened a Bumble account seeking an adventure partner. And when my first two dates, booked on the same day, were both named Pat, I began assigning numbers. Pat 1 lacked confidence but had a nice beard. Pat 2 was a gentle, sensitive photographer who was still in love with his ex. Tim 3 was funny, hiked as a date, and had a big, bold smile and soulful eyes. Paul 4 was into British cars and open water swimming, but lived too far away on another island. There were lots of men I chatted up, but most never got numbers.

I was really getting into the swing of things when I met Brent 5, a tall backcountry skier who took me dancing and let me practice making out with him. I knew how to wrap up a summary of my breakup, life history, and relationship goals into a positive sales pitch. I wanted international travel and adventurous day trips. I didn’t want marriage. Ever. Neither would I move in with someone, and I wouldn’t help raise their kids. I was fun and independent, and I wanted a man or multiple men to share my life with. I wouldn't be exclusive, and I understood if this was a deal-breaker.

By the time James 6 walked into the Fire Department to volunteer, I was a pro at chatting up men. Was his accent British or Australian? I asked while fingering my hair and grinning. Already, I wanted to run my hands all over him while enticing him to enunciate words like garage and aluminum. And yes, we both shared a love of flight, and of course, he did enjoy hiking, and I could absolutely show him around the forest. I ran my eyes over his lanky physique, his long legs and European fit slacks (tight in the ass and crotch), as I asked him out for drinks. We got pizza or burgers or both, I don’t remember, but what I do remember were his sparkly blue eyes and the way he looked at me with tenderness and want. I could see in him intelligence and brokenness and a longing for connection that opened him up to hope–that opened him up to me, the real me, the one who didn’t have to fill the role of anybody but me.

For so many years, I’d been trapped, slowly combusting from my skin clear through to my organs, until there was almost nothing left of me. I’d been a car on fire, careening down a busy highway with no exit plan. Until one day, I just exited.

I exited and created a better version of myself. I exited and built the life I wanted on my own terms. I exited because the loneliness was the fire, and I was the only one who could save me from carrying on until it consumed me. I exited, because I understood that this is my life and it’s ending one minute at a time, and instead of burning it up with loneliness, I sought to ignite those minutes with adventure and a fantastic, magical spark of connecting with people I adore.

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Let’s start with a general lay of the land. Because to tell you what is wrong with men, you must know what is wrong with me, the one observing, sampling, and judging. I’m a heterosexual cis woman. A Gen Xer.

I’m a wild horse attracted to other wild horses, though sometimes I’m sensible and date British men who say funny things and make me laugh. I color outside the lines on principle. Yet, I’m a rule follower who cannot stand rule followers. My sunsign is Aries—the home of the blood planet Mars, the god of fire, the god of war. I’m naturally violent and aggressive. Fortunately, I’m small.

I say true things to people about what’s wrong with them, daily, openly, sometimes even at work, the moment it occurs to me, while also adoring people with the deepest flaws. I like to rip covers off flaws and point to them like rare species of moths. I dissect them. I pin them to boards. I like it when people tell me uncomfortable truths about themselves, about me, about their lives.

I join groups, but am always the freak. I go to run clubs and sometimes book clubs (though I rarely read the book because I have other books I’m busy with) and feel as comfortable in a bar in rural Alaska as I do in Manhattan. I have a dark sense of humor, and I’m tragically independent. I’m that woman you’ve seen on Instagram driving her own coffin to the grave.

I love men, yet have always been opposed to marriage and have never been more unhappy than when I was trapped in a marriage-like situation, complete with gender normative expectations for me. I’m someone who, if it were announced on the eleven o’clock news that I’d buried a man (or several) in the woods and burned down a neighborhood, no one would question my guilt. They’d question how I got caught and which man. I’d be popular in prison with the inmates and the guards.

Me after a hike with James to the top of Mt Batur in Bali to watch the sun rise.

Forty-Year-Old Men

I date men. This is a terrible pastime, and as many women have pointed out, if attraction were a choice, this is not one we’d make. Drinking margaritas and sitting in hot tubs, engaging in deep conversations with beautiful women, is what I’d do, is what anyone sensible would do, if given a choice. Instead, I’m stuck with men.

With all that said, there are other things to know.

I’ve been dating forty-year-old men since I was twenty-something. I’m now fifty-two. Hence, I have some experience with men.

Men who are forty have learned to endure women. They’ve learned to love women. They’ve learned what not to say and how to treat you. They are too old to be vapidly stupid and too young to be pathetic. They are in the sweet spot before their asses fall off along with the hair on their heads. I’ve had a few favorite men who were as young as thirty-six, but always, when they hit forty, they are a perfectly ripened avocado. They will never be better than this. Split them open and scoop them directly into your mouth.

If you meet a man who was not a specimen for show at forty, there is a good chance he never will be. When people speak of the power of the human spirit to evolve, those people are talking about women. We evolve till our deaths. We take up weight lifting at ninety. We are octogenarians still considering how we can reinvent ourselves—we become park rangers and hike the Appalachian Trail at seventy; we go back to college at sixty and become botanists; we write our first novels at fifty and take up fencing.

All this after careers and childbirth and endless laundry and ferrying children to sports.

Meanwhile, men get old, play golf, and wait for their dinner.

Karl

(Not his real name)

Last Saturday, I went on a date with a man we’ll call Karl. Karl was fifty-six, and though he was an over-ripe avocado, who am I to be ageist? I thought. I’m still angry that my 18+ co-ed soccer team pitched me to the curb when I turned fifty, so maybe I needed to rethink my dating preferences, I reasoned as I looked in the mirror at my neck sag.

I should sample the 50s field, I thought, because how long will forty-year-old men still want to date me?

Possibly forever, cuz amazing, I reminded myself

Karl checked enough compatibility blocks to make it to a third date. We’d met for dinner and drinks twice, talked on the phone several times at length about things like how best to get cash in Mexico and the places he’d gone spearfishing. He was tall and thin, well-groomed with a full head of dark hair and a master’s degree. He worked a government job outdoors doing scientific research. He was outdoorsy and conversed intelligently about his analysis and his life. He used words like mercurial and evapotranspiration; he talked both figuratively and metaphorically about flipping over rocks to see what you find. Often in the evening, he’d text me links to songs by John Hiatt, Greta Van Fleet, Gillian Welch, or the Cowboy Junkees—music that indicated a man with a soul.

Sidebar on ENM

If you’re someone who knows my boyfriend James, and you’re wondering what happened to James. Nothing. We always agreed to see other people, and do this thing called Ethical Non-Monogamy (ENM), and so we are dating other people and each other. Besides, James travels for work or to see his kids quite often leaving lots of gap time when I’d like to enjoy other people. But mostly, we’re both just having dinner with other people, and then I complain to James about what is wrong with men, and he tells me about yet another fascinating woman who probably spent decades reinventing herself to show up amazing and have dinner with James.

The Hiking/Dinner Date Options

I was in Austin the week before the third date with Karl, for a work conference on data. As a sidenote, I like taking numbers and turning them into visual representations of numbers and then figuring out what the numbers say about who we are and how we can be better. I work for a fire department, and it’s one of the myriad things I do when I’m not writing or building things or destroying men’s lives with mean things I say.

My last day in Austin, I texted Karl, three date options with the question, “All three of these are multi-hour adventures and then dinner. Is that too much?”

1. Oyster Dome Trail, 6.3 miles, followed by dinner at Cob and Cork in Bow.

2. Sugarloaf Mountain and Mt Erie Loop Trail, 4.4 miles, followed by The Brown Lantern Ale House in Anacortez.

3. Pine and Cedar Lakes Trail, 5 miles, followed by Storia Cucina

On Friday, I flew back from Austin, and Karl texted that he could see I’d put a lot of thought into the options, so he’d put a lot of thought into the selection. Later, he texted back that Pine and Cedar Lakes looked good.

The Date

Part I: The Hike

We met that next day at a park and ride in Burlington, and since I’d vetted Karl online, (yes, he’d definitely written scientific papers, and worked and lived where he said he did and didn’t have a secret wife or children), I decided we could ride together to the trailhead and dinner.

Karl arrived right on time and sprang from his car with vibrancy, ready to hop in. I rolled down the window and asked if he’d mind driving. I’d been traveling so much that I could use a break. Of course, he didn’t mind.

I transferred my hiking gear to his car, and we were off. He asked if I could direct him to the trailhead, and I pulled up the map on my phone so I could navigate. I asked how he was and what he’d been up to. He said just working and not much else. He didn’t ask me anything, so I told him about Austin and my week at the conference. I probed again about how he was, and he said fine. The car was quiet, and he didn’t put on any music (where was John Hiatt, or John Prine?), or ask me anything, and finally, I just sat there in silence, holding my phone with the map and looking out the window.

At the trailhead, I got out and strapped on my bear spray, my hydration vest, and my day pack with first aid kit, rain jacket, and snacks. He stood by the car waiting.

“No water? “I asked when I saw he didn’t take his water bottle from the car, or a pack, or anything.

“I should be fine,” he said.

Wow, I thought, he’s going to do this 1700 ft ascent with no water. He must be in great shape! He’d mentioned many times how arduous his normal work day was, dragging equipment and trudging through water. Type 2 fun, he’d said. He’d described traveling, free diving down, and spear fishing. He’d mentioned being a fast walker, and since he was nearly a foot taller than I, I’d already considered I might need to jog to keep up on this trek.

Within 200 feet up the trail, Karl doubled over, panting and sweating. I asked if he was okay, and he said he was fine it was just quite an incline. I continued on and tried again for conversation, but Karl was barely making it up the hill. He stopped and leaned against a tree. He mentioned he wasn’t used to going up hills. Another couple hundred feet and he was set on a log unable to recover his breathing. He’d been seeing spots, he said.

I imagined maybe he was having a random heart attack, maybe he had a health condition he hadn’t mentioned and now it would come out. I checked my phone for service and considered how we’d get him to the trailhead and an ambulance if needed. I implored him for information. He gave none other than this was just a lot of incline. I finally realized Karl doesn’t actually hike. This was far beyond his ability; this hike that I could have slow-jogged up with my pack on, he couldn’t even walk with zero gear. We were not a match.

“You did pick this hike?” I asked. “You saw the terrain and the elevation gain on the map right?” The man is a biologist. He definitely can read a topo map and an app.

“I just saw there were lakes and thought that would be nice,” he replied.

I thought about how he said he’d be intentional about what he chose since I’d been intentional about planning the day.

Four tenths of a mile into the hike we turned around. Karl could not walk up a hill that he’d chosen for the day, nor did he provide explanation for this lapse in physical ability. I did not shame him. I offered compassion, but I was perplexed.

Part II: the Park with Handsy Grandpa

At the car he suggested we walk around a local lake he knew of nearby that had a flat trail and a park. Yes grandpa, I thought, lets take a walk in the park. Maybe he’ll start explaining things like why he’s not talking to me at any level expected on a date, why he’s completely out of shape but didn’t mention it, or why he drives in the car with zero music despite being a music lover.

At the park we walked, I engaged in one sided conversation. I asked questions like do you know much about the plantlife and follow up questions to things we’d discussed in other meetups. He replied with short answers or a yes or no. I told him about some of my experiences in places I lived like Alaska and searched for anything to get him to share. Eventally, I gave up and we walked in silence next to each other. If I’d had my car, I’d have walked straight to it and gotten in.

When we’d looped the lake he proposed we sit on the grass and enjoy the sunshine.

“Sure that would nice.” I replied thinking maybe the man just doesn’t speak when he’s walking…..or driving. Maybe at rest, he converses.

We sat in the sun and watched boaters. We watched a woman pick a white pencil-thin lightboat off a rack and walk to the water and clip across the lake with precision. A man was near shore teaching his young daughter to row one as well. We both wondered aloud what kind of boats those were and I searched my phone.

Then Karl turned to me, slid in closer, put his arm around my shoulder and leaned in for a kiss, which I received hesitantly but compliantly. I was more baffled that he thought we had a connection than by his forwardness. This was a date after all and trying things out is pretty normal. But what wasn’t normal was not talking to me. Not asking me questions to get to know me more. Not attempting to connect with me on a an emotional or intellectual level. This was not a hookup where connection didn’t matter. This was the building of a relationship.

We had talked multiple times before and what I expected was deeper, more personal information. What also wasn’t normal was not noticing me shrink as he moved in more. I crossed my legs and folded my arms in to my chest and he comfortably moved his body in closer as if I was providing any sign of interest. I was not giving off interest vibes, nor was I interested. I was not flirting. I was not smiling. I was not laughing. He was not funny or charming or even interesting. I had not laughed or smiled in hours. I was bored, lonely, and despondent. This date was a terrible bore. Why hadn’t I driven myself so I could escape? How had I gotten myself into this? It was date three, how had I missed all this?

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Part III: Dinner

“Let’s get some food,” I declared. Yes, he was hungry he agreed. We drove of course in total silence for fifteen more minutes to Storia Cucina, parked, and walked in silence to the restaurant. I selected seating outdoors near a heater. It was a sunny spring day and I wanted to at least enjoy the weather.

Karl sifted through the menu. I could see his frustration. I’d already selected a cocktail and was considering a seven mushroom pizza.

“Where’s the food?” he asked to no one as he turned pages after page of the mini menu, flipping aimlessly through.

“It’s right there on the second and third page,” I replied. “Where it says pizza and pasta and ensalada.”

“I don’t have any idea what to get,” he said frustrated. It was obvious he could not adapt even to a menu with a few words of Italian, despite the fact that he knew at least bits of German, Spanish, and French and had a masters degree in biology. He’d peppered me in text with Spanish as we’d discussed my upcoming trip to Mexico and he’d thrown in the german and french words for butterfly and I thought about how I’d provided links to the hikes and the restaurants with menus and he picked this.

“You did pick this,” I reminded. And helped him decide he should get pepperoni pizza and salad because I was clearly on a date with grandpa (who was just four years older than me in regular earth years).

When I ordered my cocktail he said, “wow, a cocktail, really living it up!” I remarked that it was a Saturday night and they had beer and didn’t he want one? Wasn’t this part of the expectation? We’d have dinner and drinks and get to know one another even more after a fun hike up a mountain to lakes?

“Oh no,!” he responded as if he didn’t drink or wouldn’t think of it and I recalled how on the last date he’d had two beers and a beer the first meet up as well. Was I even on a date with the same person? Where was the smart outdoorsy guy who loved type 2 fun and was adventurous? I began questioning my sanity.

“Do you have tattoos?” he asked me. This was only the third question he’d asked the whole time we’d been on the date and it occurred to me with alarm that he was imagining my naked body. I diverted by saying no, but elaborated by telling him all about the tattoos my former boss and friend is getting and how he’s now not getting this Buddhist swoop one that I’m thinking of getting which means it won’t be weird since we couldn’t get matching tattoos because that would be epicly weird.

Karl didn’t laugh at my matching-with-my-former-boss-tattoos joke.

“Do you have tattoos?,” I countered.

“No,” he said. Not no, and then an explanation about his thoughts on tattoos. Just no.

The salads came and Karl got up and switched to my side of the booth without warning or asking for permission. He mentioned it was warmer by the heater near me, as if that warranted him sliding in beside me. Had he asked, I’d have said no. Then hands on my leg. Again, I slid farther away. Then eating his salad and pizza again with no interaction. He ate as if we’d come simply to eat food and leave. I poured my cocktail down my throat like it was a shot because I now really needed a drink. As he continued to slide in closer, I signaled for the check.

“It’s so nice to be dating someone who pays her share of the check,” he said when I asked for separate bills. I brought up the various schools of thought on this debate over who pays, pointing out that men created the patriarchy that didn’t allow women jobs or freedoms and still perpetuates a society where women make less but are expected to maintain ourselves to physically pristine standards. Besides men often show up to the table with little to offer a woman besides money, I pointed out. I simply always pay for myself, I said, because I believe men expect something for their money and I’m not a commodity. I have a job and I don’t need a man, I explained.

“You’d be surprised. Most women want me to pay for everything,” he said. I thought about how little he’d offered me in the last four hours, how I felt like a caretaker, and regretted not making him pay for my time.

We rode back to the park and ride, twenty five minutes, you guessed it, in almost total silence.

I escaped to my car and he sped off. I told everyone I knew about this date. I called James from the park and ride and nearly cried, telling him blow by blow about this experience. He was empathetic. I pointed out he goes out with fascinating women. And this, this is what I get. Men who think showing up is all they have to do.

He reminded me how stunningly handsome and charming he is and maybe he just attracts great women and I reminded him he’s an idiot and this wasn’t a time for humor. He also pointed out how amazing he appears in comparison and I agreed, annoyed. Except it was a time for humor. All day I’d been thinking how if he and I had been on that date we would have laughed our way up the mountain, then snacked at the lakes and gone for pizza and drinks having a marvelous time. How had I so misjudged? I prided myself on vetting men, but did men even have the same standards? Why was this considered enough? How had he showed up so unprepared and put forth so little effort to show me what he had to offer?

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Friends were baffled. A co-worker and friend, Chad, said he used to take women up Oyster Dome on the first date to weed out the weak. I should just invite five men all at once and whoever can carry on an intelligent conversation, make me laugh, and make it to the top gets date two.

The Experiment: What the Dick is Wrong with Men?

Over the next few days I looked at chats I’d had with men in apps. I started new chats with men in apps who looked interesting. I noticed how I’d read their bios, ask questions specific to them, then, when they responded, follow up with a relevant narrative about myself and then ask them another question. Over and over, I did this with men asking me almost nothing other than to mention I had great pics. (In the right light, I do look pretty great in a bikini.). However, in many cases, they asked me absolutely nothing. In only a few cases did they really explore who I was or what I thought. It seemed they did not know really how to interact or didn’t have the curiosity or didn’t think they needed to make the effort to gain momentum. Likely, they just weren’t that interested, I surmised. But often they are. And still they often do not interact with awareness. This man, who’d gone to date three had also behaved the same way for four hours. Oblivious of my signals. Oblivious that he should talk to me!

I wondered if it was me. I wondered if I had expectations for men that far exceeded the norm. I thought back to men I dated over the years. I wasn’t wrong. Many of them were interesting and curious and funny. I texted an old boyfriend Mike who Karl had initially reminded me of. Mike called. He was funny. He asked me all about my writing and my hot tub and how I’d built my sauna. He said things that made me laugh. We talked about our thoughts and feelings and the state of the world and the fall of democracy. He made me feel better. I felt connected. I felt like I was talking to a person who could see me. Who understood me. He felt whole. I felt whole. The world flipped itself back rightside.

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The Text Exchange

Two days went by without a peep from Karl. That’s when Karl confirmed he’d had no idea what an awful date he’d shared with me. This was normal for him. He texted something about thinking about my crazy hair and how his legs weren’t even sore.

Why would your legs be sore? I thought. We walked .4 of a mile before turning around.

I responded:

“Karl, after Saturday, I needed some time to process the day and my thoughts. I’d like to provide some feedback on what took place on Saturday from my perspective.

I feel like you didn’t show up with a similar level of emotional intelligence, energy or curiosity for me, for the day, and for life in general.

While I researched and planned options, you said you’d put thought into choosing, but chose a hike you couldn’t physically complete and a restaurant where the menu seemed to confound you, despite both the trail and menu available at the links. If you had health conditions or were seriously out of shape, you didn’t divulge any, so I was surprised at the outcome.

When it comes to emotional intelligence, I’d perceived via our first two meetups and phone conversations that you could hold up your end of the conversation and had what seemed to be a desire to get to know me as a person. I think I misunderstood what level of relationships you may be having with women. It appears you may not be dating with the same emotional intelligence I’m used to.

On Saturday, despite my consistent probing for who you are mentally and emotionally, you offered very little about yourself, your thoughts, or your feelings. You asked me little about me or my life and left vast wastelands of dead air in which you should have been getting to know me. Despite lots of softball questions from me, you gave short answers, offered nothing interesting, and left me stuck with a very boring companion.

You expressed love of music, yet we rode in the car for quite some time, both directions in almost complete silence, with little conversation on your end and no music. I was confused by both. A date is your time to showcase who you are and your value. You did neither.

You made physical advances that were entirely unreciprocated, yet you continued to press as if they were mutual. Though I was recoiling with each advance, you behaved as if this was your normal mode of operation, which made me very curious about how you’re approaching intimate relationships. Not checking in to see if a woman will reach for you, but each time moving in as if her compliance is permission is not actual permission. I felt zero connection to you because you had failed to establish one via dialogue and general vulnerable interaction, and I wanted zero physical interaction with you. I was physically turning away or folding myself up each time you moved closer. These were things to take note of and respond with space. I was shocked when you switched to my seat at dinner when I’d given no indication I’d wanted you near me. I’d been recoiling in the park and was just trying to get to the end of the date to get away from you.

At dinner, still wanting to give you the benefit of the doubt, to see if you could turn things around, I’d expected real conversation and introspection. I’d thought we’d sit and talk about meaningful issues and life experiences. I thought we’d have a slow dinner, a few drinks, and really enjoy the evening. You ate quickly, didn’t talk, and it all felt forced and awkward. I’d considered that maybe you’d found the hike a distraction. But what I quickly realized by dinner was that you weren’t interested or weren’t capable of exploring the landscape of who I am; you were simply interested in creating a physical connection. I’d made it clear that without an intellectual and emotional connection, I don’t physically connect.

I was confused by all of your behaviors and lack of ability to reflect and connect with another person on a deeper level. You strike me as someone who hasn’t worked on themselves and learned to converse and show up with the actual emotional intelligence required to date someone like me or to really engage in meaningful, fulfilling relationships. I felt like I was on a date with a teenage boy in the body of an aging man.

It’s important to read the room, and you were not present, nor did you add any value to my day. I came home feeling like I’d been physically violated (though fortunately just a little) and with a level of loneliness one only feels when spending time with someone who has no idea how to connect in a meaningful human way. The experience I had with you on Saturday was empty.

I expect men I date to show up and add real value to my life. I don’t need men. I choose men who are funny, intelligent, fit, energetic, emotionally present, creative, curious, and self-aware.

I think you have a lot of work to do on yourself to offer a woman the kind of value we expect in 2025.

I’d be very interested in hearing what your interpretation of the time we spent on Saturday was, and what was going on in your head?”

Karl replied:

“Hi. Thank you for the text and explaining your feelings. I have not been myself lately. With the states budget crunch, my employment has become a little tenuous. That has affected me greatly, I've had trouble concentrating and being present. On Friday I found out exactly how tenuous it is. I actually thought about canceling with you but I thought it might be good to get outside and spend some time with you. I feel awful about making you uncomfortable but I honestly was not picking up what you were putting down. I apologize.”

Me:

“The first I’ve heard about what you just shared about budget cuts is right now, which is unfortunate. During the 4 hrs we spent together that would have been a fabulous topic to deep dive along with all the issues and trepidations surrounding it—Including how it might be affecting you in the moment. Instead, I had basically 4 hrs of silence and someone who was handsy without invitation.

I would suggest that you be more open and honest about what’s going on on future dates with other women. Based on this experience, I won’t pursue this relationship further. I hope my feedback helps you in the future, though. Vulnerability and openness are going to be your best path to meaningful connection.”

Karl:

“I'm very sorry. I agree with your call and thank you for your advice.”

Harold & Maude

“I’m going to date forty-year-old men when I’m eighty,” I declared to James.

“You’re not really in your 50s,” James, who’s 44, said. “You need to date in your age bracket—the 40s.” He’s been telling me for years how irrelevant our age difference is because I don’t behave my age.

I have a dinner date on Monday with another 44-year-old man who’s into hiking and kayaking and lives on the Island. I’m considering switching dinner to an arduous hike to weed out the weak, as Chad said. Can a man both share himself emotionally and intellectually while moving his legs and asking me questions about me? Should I consider making men pay for drinks when the date is terrible? I refuse to lower my expectations or my standards. I also refuse to have terrible dates and not provide feedback, so the next woman isn’t subjected to a dismal afternoon.

I’ve always been a fan of the cult film, Harold & Maude. Harold was a young man who was intellectually and emotionally curious. He had a dark sense of humor and repeatedly faked his own suicide in grand theatrics to get his mother’s attention. When he met Maude, who stole cars, was an artist, and went to funerals for fun, he saw her wild beauty and fell in love with her despite her impending eightieth birthday. Maude was a woman who’d cultivated herself; she was a fabulous date at any age.

I know I’m going to hear, not all men. And it’s true. But I know so many fabulous aging women and I know just a handful of fabulous aging men at the same caliber, whether married, single, or dating.

From an observation standpoint, the patriarchy has told men that they can show up unqualified and unprepared and put forth little effort, and that is enough (Pete Hegseth). While women are socialized for the exact opposite, and it seems no more evident than in the dating world. At a time when women are choosing either late marriage or no marriage at all, and children are optional, men are going to have to show up with more to offer than a paycheck. We no longer need you.

It’s time for men to be held to the same standards as women. I expect a man to show up and match my energy or at the very least be emotionally vulnerable enough to share who he is and why he’s damaged. I expect men to work on themselves and evolve. I expect men to communicate and be curious about me and about their world. It’s not enough to just show up and it never honesty was enough for any of us. Women just weren’t allowed options. And now that we have them, we’ll choose alone, or time with our friends over men who don’t meet us at our level.

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Bodies are falling from the sky again. This time a NYC helicopter with its rotors and tail boom severed, the body flipped upside down—a bird with all its lift capability completely chopped—a terror in mechanical form—no control inputs viable, a pilot’s worst predicament, helplessly plummeting inverted into the Hudson.

Two days ago, near the same time six souls on board the Bell 206 fell from the sky to their deaths, I launch from La Playa de los Muertos into the sky, my body strapped into a harness and dangling below a hot pink and white parasail. The speed boat below slingshots out into the bay as I fly upward, higher and higher—the boats and people shrink away. And though I have never parasailed before, this launching and floating a couple hundred feet above the water and earth, feel familiar, slightly terrifying, and comfortable. My time as a pilot on pause for now, flight is an old lover you revisit to find they have aged and put on different clothes, yet stayed recognizably the same with their mannerisms, their inflections, their stubborn and wild updrafts, and moody drops.

The afternoon is busy heating up. Out on the beach, my two teenage travel companions get harnessed up. They wait anxiously for their turns to fly while doing fit-check videos as I feel the afternoon updrafts surging my body higher and higher.

This is my first trip to Mexico and in the days before the parasailing, I decide to do what I do in foreign countries—go for a wander however the locals do. Though the teenagers protest such pedestrian travel, I hand each ten pesos and we board a local bus headed along the coast for Boca de Tamatlan where we negotiate with men at the dock for water taxi tickets to the village of Yelapa. After the bus ride, we eat fresh mango, cucumber, and pineapple with chile from the snack stand and then bump across the water into the bay where a village perches on a hillside and a beach wraps around to another high dock. We hike cobblestone streets wide enough only for donkeys or ATVs to the waterfall. There are open-air restaurants with wooden tables and saltshakers shaped like traditional Mexican mejurs and hombres and merchants along the paths selling bracelets. The trek complete, we hop another speed boat to the barely populated beach and nap in lounge chairs while Mexican women in bathing suits down a bucket full of cervezas and sing unapologetically loud in Spanish to the music blaring from their portable radio.

We’ve only been a day in Puerto Vallarta before the crowds and the tourists and the constant pressing of merchants and the boys and men far too interested in my blond teenage companions have me exhausted from hypervigilance. No man with us as a built-in repellent, I stick my hand out in the universal stop position and say, “They are children. Go away,” to Mexican and American men who call out to them and want to approach too often.

My days of solo travel in my twenties had felt this way. Each night, emotionally exhausted from carrying the armor of navigating the world alone while sorting the harmless men from the dangerous, when I simply wanted to be anonymous and solo. And so to Yelapa we went for the day. To hike to the waterfall and drink in quiet cafes and nap under umbrellas without bother and let my guard down for the afternoon.

The next day, we zipline in Negaro Ecopark because again, escape.

“Things are getting pretty wild in America,” Javiar, our guide, says to me as he hooks me into a line and pauses with a long questioning look. He’d spent some time living in Oregon and had been to Bellingham just north of where I live and I already feel like I know him.

“I didn’t vote for him,” I reassure him. “I’m part of the resistance.”

“How did you know what I was thinking?” he asks smiling and soon we are bonding over sharing trauma—tariffs and deportations and dick-tators in between zip lines.

“You must do more than protest,” he says. “You must divest.”

“I have.”

“Your president looks like a Russian asset”

“I know, he probably is.”

By the time we’ve completed all the ziplines he and I are thick as thieves and conspiring a plan for me to direct our enemies to his jungle.

“Cut their balls and disappear them,” I whisper as we giggle together at the end of the day. I hand him my helmet and he unbuckles my harness.

“What are you doing the rest of the week?” he asks and I explain we are thinking of parasailing, but my teenage companions just want to lie on the beach and tan because they are idiots, while I want to escape to more places like Yelapa.

Then he brings up Bob Dylan.

When I was fourteen I heard Bob Dylan for the first time. It might have been Idiot Wind or Lay, Lady, Lay or Subterranean Homesick Blues or Maggie’s Farm, I’m not sure. What I do know is that his music gave me safe refuge to be a total freak. There’s time before Bob Dylan existed for me and time after. In the after, there could not be enough Dylan and I understood then that there was nothing I could think or do or say or write that could ever be too weird. Bob cracked the freak world wide open. I had seen into the mind of someone who I understood saw the world the way I did and no matter how much I did not fit, there was a lyrical place in his music where I did.

“Yelapa is where Bob Dylan used to go to escape,” Javier tells me as I realize we share not just a love for revenge but also music. On the plane to Puerto Vallarta, I’d watched the new Dylan movie, A Complete Unknown, and had Bob on the brain ever since. I stood there beaming with delight at Javiar, understanding why without knowing it at the time, I had run away to Yelapa. I then reimagined every step I’d taken up the cobblestone winding streets. The boat ride in and the tiny pier we climbed onto. The crashing waves and the street cafes and the cats. The coconut tree I sat under for shade. And I saw Bob there seeing the same things and being weird and moody and wanting to sink into being anonymous again while also being uniquely amazing and fully himself. I saw him decades ago with his young skinny body and floufy hair and me superimposed over him with my backpack and my moody teenager companions snapping photos with smartphones. I saw Bob laying the trail once again for me to find him and escape to be solitary and solo but never alone.

In the sky over Puerto Vallarta, I’m not coming down.

When the boat whips its way around the bay and brings me in for the beach landing the updrafts keep sending me higher even though I know the boat and the men on the ground expect my parachute to begin descending. I am almost over the men and still hanging fully deflected in the air straight up and I am now a bit concerned and thinking thoughts like this isn’t quite right while also pretending I am flying this parachute like it’s a helicopter to keep my mind from worry. I know this is not going as planned, but I also know they don’t need me fighting the fix. I feel the cyclic and collective and I create an imaginary chin bubble to look down at the ground through. I know the updrafts will stop and I will begin to fall but that’s also what has me concerned.

I am a former helicopter pilot who is afraid of heights. An obvious contradiction that’s difficult to rectify except to say I tend to walk directly into what terrifies me as a way to manage fear. It’s a method I wouldn’t recommend to the literal heights I’ve taken it, but it works. It’s a technique by which you riddle yourself completely with anxiety as a method to rid yourself of that anxiety. It’s like a flash burn over and over that you become more tolerant of. In the end you’re covered in scar tissue, but it trains your body to become tolerant and resilient rather than debilitated. As time passes you grow increasingly confident with each fear you learn to manage, and slowly you begin to take on new challenges.

Farther down on the beach, I can see where we’ve frequented sunbathing in rented chairs under umbrellas. Where Esquel brings us drinks and chats in perfect English because he grew up in South Carolina.

“Why did you leave America?” I asked him the day prior, while sipping a green flash and he tells me his mom brought him to America when he was two months old. He was deported when he was seventeen in the first Trump presidency. My mind jumps to kids in cages. Now twenty-five, he brings Americans drinks and works for tips.

“My mom still lives there,” he says. “My dad’s somewhere here in Mexico but I’ve never known him.”

I then try to imagine the terror of being forcibly removed from the country you’ve called home your whole life when you’re just seventeen. My own kid at sixteen is fully grown in so many respects and yet so helpless in others. I’m not sure what makes us American but he seems just as American as me despite his lack of papers. Then I think back to Javiar my new bestie on the zipline who’d lived in Oregon and also had perfect English and I wonder if he too wasn’t deported.

On the ground, the men yell and run about and radio the boat with new directions for modifications. I wait patiently as the fall finally begins and the crew leader blows his whistle once to signal me to pull in the left side of the chute to slip it into the beach. I feel my left arm rise and pull as I follow his instructions over and over listening carefully to let go exactly when he whistles twice and resume pulling each time he blows once again. Forever the flight student, it’s more important to me, I realize, to execute perfectly all of his instructions than it is to hit the beach unscathed. I want the crash investigators to say over my lifeless body, she performed flawlessly. There was nothing more to be done.

“Like a pro” the instructor with the whistle says as he pats me on the shoulder after I’m safe on the ground and he unclips my harness.

These days the proving is for me. I’m here reminding myself I can still launch into the sky and come down in one piece. I can still feel the echos of crippling fear that’s always been there and fold it up like origami the whole way to the ground.

When my feet do hit the sand my daughter’s best friend is launched right behind me into the sky and my own child is waiting with her harness on. She asks if I think they’re too light. She heard the men radioing and yelling when I was too high and now she’s not sure about this though her bestie is now careening out over the bay.

After reassuring her she’ll be fine if she listened to instructions, I tell her, “You don’t have to go. I don’t care that I’ve paid.”

“I want to go” she says with a touch of worry and bravery. And of course, she does go up into the sky, and like all three of us, returns changed.

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We are in a dire moment for American democracy, and we need not just protest but do everything we can to stop this Regime. Today thousands showed up with signs and with energy and with loud voices in Seattle and across the Nation. Though I was behind on packing to get on an airplane tonight to Spring break holiday with my daughter and her friend, I got up early this morning and took the light rail to Seattle with my vocal friends.

Here are my key takeaways from today:

1. The amount of pain you feel saving democracy should be proportionate to your paycheck. If you have treasure, contribute treasure. If you have time, contribute time.

   

2. Democracies don’t fall in years. They fall in months.

3. People must resist at every turn to stop a dictator. (This includes universities, law firms, businesses). You must resist even if it will be painful. Get in the way.

   

4. While we listened to speakers energize the crowd, and demand accountability from our representatives, I thought a lot about what Barck Obama said yesterday at Hamilton University: “It is up to all of us to fix this. It’s not going to be because somebody comes and saves ya. The most important office in this democracy is the citizen, the ordinary person who says, ‘No, that’s not right.’”

No one’s coming to save us. Don’t put off standing up, speaking out, and resisting. We’re who’s coming. Don’t stop til freedom is restored.

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Ruth Bader Ginsburg graduated from Columbia Law School 1st in her class (yes, ahead of every man) in 1958. She had also been 1st in her class at Harvard prior to transferring to Columbia for her final year to be nearer to her husband, also a lawyer, who a law firm had hired. Yet, upon graduation, not a single law firm would hire Ruth because she was not a man. She had attended her classes, cared for their child, and also attended her husband’s law classes for him as he fought cancer. And yet, despite this impossible workload, she still graduated first in her class. I want you to imagine any man graduating 1st in his class at Columbia Law and not being sought after.

I also want you to imagine, just for a moment, the scope of Ruth’s rage at this injustice.

A bright supernova swallowed into a patriarchal black hole. To have to survive in a space meant to crush you is maddening.

There is a Fine Line Between Stubbornness and Tenacity

After days of hiking and sleeping on the ground solo in the Joshua Tree National Park and then more days at AWP, a writers conference, in LA listening to authors talk about writing for Resistance, I find myself on an airplane in row 22C fighting a six foot tall 20-something man for elbow space—like physically fighting him for an inch of space.

Meanwhile, I’m watching On the Basis of Sex on my phone, a movie about Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg—I watch Ruth, a small woman who is bigger than life, forced into tiny spaces, while this man next to me simultaneously presses his right elbow against mine and pushes steadily and forcefully hard to remove me from the armrest. But I will not move. I hold my elbow firm on my half of the tiny armrest like I am in a tug-of-war for my life. And immediately, the armrest is no longer an inch of space thirty thousand feet in the air that a man has decided he is entitled to more than me; it is about a man trying to block me from spaces (The Boy Scouts, Little League, The Army) so he can occupy ALL of it, and I am not having it.

I once read a short story where a woman who has just been wed in an arranged marriage in India finds herself in bed with her new husband. He rolls over to sleep, wrapping himself in the sheet, which inadvertently uncovers her. There would never be enough left over for her, she realizes, lying there in the cold night of the clear metaphor of the rest of her life.

“You do not own the armrest,” I say with a calmness that excites me after several minutes of holding my elbow firmly in place as he pushes fiercely against me. I mentally toy with the mechanics of castration on a plane and consider what tools I have at my disposal. Rubber bands attached to a paperclip twisting.

“You can have the front,” he responds, nodding at the front half of the armrest, his voice irritated with my refusal to move out of his way. I look at the space he’s left me. As if my elbows could even reach that far forward. As if we’re still talking about elbow room.

He’s with a group of other twentysomethings, young men and women all returning from some outdoor group wilderness (perhaps church?) adventure. I’ve been listening to them discussing things like their upcoming weddings, and I want to internet-stalk his fiance and help her understand she’s marrying a man who literally won’t allow a woman twice his age and half his size to share even his armrest.

If you know me, you will know that I did not budge a single centimeter until forty-five minutes later when the plane landed, taxied, and deboarded. I would have let my arm be fed into a mangler before I would have budged. No matter how he pushed against me, I met him with equal force. I met him with the rage of a woman watching an RBG film, prepared to cut his balls. And when I deplaned, I took my time, slowly gathering my things, blocking the whole aisle with my tiny body until I was done. I would not let this prick of a man push me aside, no matter how small the stakes. I met his microaggression with my microresistance. Give an inch, and they will take our Country, I thought.

At AWP, I listened to the poet Christopher Soto, who wrote a book of poems called Journals of a Terrorist. He’s a striking, articulate, soft-spoken man with a neck tattoo. He said something in the panel I attended on resistance that struck me to the core. He said, if you wait for the red line to be crossed, if you keep asking yourself what’s the point at which we’re in a constitutional crisis? What’s the point at which this is an authoritarian government? whats the line I need to wait for to be sure this is here? It will be too late. You are already there. You have to fight it now or you will not have the power to fight when you clearly know you are there. YOU ARE THERE. Fight now!

Senator Cory Booker Erasing the Record of a Racist is Everything

By now we all know that Senator Cory Booker spoke in protest on the Senate floor for 25 hours, literally standing up to the Trump Administration. He fasted for days and dehydrated himself in preparation for an epic protest in which he would not be able to use facilities or sit down.

“The power of the people is greater than the people in power…To redeem the soul of the nation…Let’s be bold in America..it’s not left or right, it’s right or wrong…let’s get into good trouble”

-Senator Cory Booker

Here’s where you can go to thank him for his Service:

Brave Little Voices

Thank You, Cory Booker

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a year ago · 4 likes · Brave Little Voices

Protests: What to Wear, Who Not to Bring, and Where to Go

This weekend, on Saturday April 5th, 2025, consider attending a protest to continue fighting this Regime. Protests are taking place all across America. Here’s your guide to showing up to a protest prepared, finding a protest near you, and protecting yourself and your rights:

Pathfinder Chronicles

April 5: Take to the Streets—Join the Nationwide Protests!

On April 5th, people across the country will be taking to the streets to make their voices heard…

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a year ago · 124 likes · 9 comments · Robert Dempsey

There’s Hope

Susan Crawford’s Wisconsin Supreme Court win, despite Elon Musk flooding the opposition with funding is the hope we needed to go forward.

The Women Post

Who is Susan Crawford? Wisconsin Supreme Court Winner Has Fought for Union and Abortion Rights

Despite Elon Musk’s outpour of fundraising, Crawford was declared the winner of the Wisconsin Supreme Court race. As she prepares to take her place on the state's highest court, many are eager to understand the implications of her win and the judicial philosophy that has guided her career. Let’s dive into Cr…

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a year ago · 14 likes · The Women Post Media

One last thought: When it comes to tenacity:

Tiny giant women are standing up in defiance. Eighty-year-old Lynn McFarland stood up for the rights of undocumented immigrant children to be educated and was hauled out by police. She refused to leave until she was heard.

The Daily

Tennessee Troopers Carry Brave 80 Year-Old Woman Out of Hearing For Protesting

Enjoy this free edition of The Daily. Please support our pro-democracy journalism by becoming a subscriber…

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a year ago · 218 likes · 58 comments · Sarah Jones

Republicans and Democrats coming together to support the right for lawmakers who are new parents to vote by proxy is another fight we need. We all know that parents rights most support women. And when men are also allowed the right to parent equally it gives women the space they need for actual equality at home and in the workplace.

There are so many beautiful things happening right now. I want us all to just take a moment to relish these events and the strength of the American people to stand up to injustice and keep fighting for a better country. It’s not over. Keep getting up each day and making a small difference in any way you can.

RBG did not allow herself to be crushed. She did not allow her fire to be extinguished. She remained level-headed and strong-willed; she surrounded herself with people who saw her strength. She calculated and planned and pushed inch by inch, case by case. Very few of us will ever have the impact that RBG did. She was a giant.

Not every fight is worth your energy. Instead of fighting a man on a plane for elbow room, use your energy more wisely to demand that justice be restored. We can do small things en masse and produce a large impact. Be a Cory. Be a Ruth. Be a Christopher. Be a Susan. Be a Lynn. Be You. In whatever way is you, get out there and be heard.

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But what else are you supposed to do with it?

Anyone who knows me knows my natural order is to burn the world to the ground. Yet, women are taught to suppress their rage. It’s why some medical professionals believe we end up with so many autoimmune disorders. Unreleased rage burns holes in our bodies. Yet, go wild with rage and you’ll be called Emotional. Crazy. Unhinged. Hysterical. There’s a long history of locking up women like me or burning us at the stake. Men, on the other hand, are taught that rage is the only emotion they’re allowed to express. Half the population isn’t allowed to have it; the other half can only have it. We are socially constrained emotional inverses of each other—None of it in natural order.

I flew from Seattle to Joshua Tree a few days ago for a solo trekking journey in celebration of my 52nd birthday. I’m sleeping in a tiny white tent on a sleeping pad that keeps losing air because it has a hole that I never remember to fix. It’s cold at night and scorching in the day. Just like I like it. Extreme. Variably uncomfortable. Challenging. Radical. Beautiful. Glorious.

The last time I was here was a year ago with my daughter who is full-grown and the same size as me—5’2”. (So much for only dating tall men. My genetics are dominant miniature Queens.) Then, she was fifteen and I was fifty-one—like a playing card you could flip with the young 15 on one side and the inverse 51 on the other. The fifteen-year-old is like a new and improved even mouthier, more rage-filled, more confident model with better muscle tone and today’s priveldeged perfect teenage hair and Sephora skin regimes. It was 105 F degrees when we stayed in Palm Springs and the teenager’s favorite event was floating around the pool browning herself on a pink flamingo floatie while drinking $8 virgin piña coladas and jamming to Drake. Inversely, mine was stargazing deep in Joshua Tree and watching the moon rise and cast joshua tree-shaped shadows across the silent desert floor. We lay on beach towels together in the desert night on opulent white boulders and since her phone was out of cellular range, she talked to me. It was wild.

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When I was seventeen my dad went out in the night and unhooked the cables to the car battery of my 1982 Ford Escort. He’d been telling me to take the school bus instead of driving to school every day for some time and I wasn’t listening. I’m not sure he understood that I didn’t just dislike the people on the bus or the lazy way it took forty-five minutes to meander to school, I was completely and desperately exhausted. I was taking too many AP classes and the only one I was knocking it out of the park in was Honors English (go figure). While my math aptitude was high, my math grades were definitively not. My math notebooks were filled with doomy poetry rather than equations. I wouldn’t fall in love with math for another decade after I began staring at density altitude graphs and later when I began to create the math of metrics at my job at Boeing and now at the Fire Service where numbers can show people how we can become better. But back in High School, I was exhausted from trying too hard at too many things. Most evenings I was either working as a lifeguard or playing Varsity soccer and then staying up ‘til two studying. I was overwhelmed and surviving on pots of coffee. Riding the bus was one more thing for which I couldn’t cope.

So when I went to start the car and it wouldn’t, I just went back to bed. I skipped school pretty routinely to get extra rest or catch up on homework so it wasn’t a surprise for me to just not go. I expected to sleep the death sleep of a teenager, then wake, eat a sandwich, spend the day studying, and regroup for the next day.

But while I slept, things went sideways. When the school called to get my absence excused, my dad, who also savors confrontation, said he hadn’t seen me and they should call the truant officer.

The next day in the office, I tried to explain.

“Wait, your dad knew you were at home in bed?” the office admin asked when she tried to hand me an in-school suspension slip.

“Yeah,” I said, “we’re having a bit of a disagreement about my car.”

She asked if I wanted her to call him and see if he wanted to take back his statement. I didn’t. Explaining my dad would take too long and the only thing I was going to call was his bluff. I wanted to take the punishment in the purest form of opposition. I wanted my dad’s ruse to get played out to the fullest extent. It would be an experience.

The next day, I sat in a basement windowless room with other kids who were In-School-Suspenion (ISS) regulars. Think Breakfast Club except no one was sexy. One lanky boy spent the entire day passed out. He woke only to go to the bathroom. Another talked cars with the bored teacher who sat with his feet up on the desk reading automotive magazines. A girl in all black passed the day chewing one piece of wrigleys gum after another and drawing in her notebook. Meanwhile, I finished a paper on a Thomas Hardy novel, and read four hours of European history I was behind on. I was an absolute freak in this situation.

Then I began writing about what was happening here in the ISS dungeon for my journalism editorial assignment. Kids who were being punished for skipping school among other infractions, were pulled from classes to sit in a windowless room where no teaching or learning was occurring. Devoid of sunlight or fresh air, we sat in a room only conducive for sleeping or slow death. Even as a kid, I could see these other kids needed what I also needed, counseling, tutoring, attention, mentorship, a healthy meal, and yes, more sleep. And what they were getting was the exact opposite, except maybe the kid who got SO MUCH sleep.

When my article was published in the school newspaper teachers (and students) approached me to compliment both the writing and the awareness it was raising about students who weren’t getting an education or rehabilitation. I wish I could say the probably eighty-five people who read my article formed a coalition and demanded the ISS room be closed down and all the kids exhibiting problems get the help they needed. It did not. I don’t know if Meadville High School still deals with kids this way, but I do know what I learned through that experience was that there are positive ways to burn off rage at a wrong situation.

Yesterday, one day prior to my 52nd birthday, I hiked 8 miles through Joshua Tree’s Boy Scout Trail. I hiked dusty trails past smoketree bushes and prickly pear and pencil cholla, and BLOOMING hedgehog cactus. A roadrunner ran across the trail in a desperate hurry. A cactus wren sang atop a Joshua Tree. I sat beneath the sliver of shade created by a thin Joshua tree that always reminds me somehow of a lama kneck. I painted a watercolor in my travel journal. (For those of you who don’t know, I’m also a painter.) I ate a hummus wrap and feasted on peanuts. I hiked deeper into the desert and sat beneath a smoketree’s shade and read Ben Master’s The Flitting about grief over his father’s dying and his mostly posthumous connection to his father’s love of butterflies. I thought about how we reject our connection to our parents in a brutal show of independence often up to the bitter end.

Somewhere along the trail, my phone caught a cell tower, and the now infamous Signal chat security breach Atlantic Article popped in like an oasis: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans. I crawled under a tree and read as I filled with I-told you-so rage. The article accompanies a photo of Pete Hegseth and JD Vance sitting on a couch as it accounts blow by blow how an Atlantic journalist was seemingly inadvertently added to a Signal chat known as Houthi PC Small Group, that contained classified information detailing a planned military operation in Yemen. And while all of the senior Trump Administration Officials on the chat string had access to the appropriate SCIF where military operations could have been discussed, they chose to operate via cell phone without concern for the security risk it posed to our military personnel. The phrase Loose Lips Sink Ships, came to mind.

As fellow veteran Pete Buttigieg said yesterday, if he’d been responsible for a security breach of this level when he was a lieutenant he’d have been charged and done time in Leavenworth. But these are white privileged straight men who have insulated themselves from prosecution, who will deny their faults and continue to fail up. Who carelessly place soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen in peril, while paying no consequence for their own inept actions. The incompetence of this Administration is enraging at best. It’s potentially deadly. It’s simply terrifying to wonder how much of our National Security has been breached in the two months before a journalist discovered this travesty. As Buttigieg said yesterday on his Substack:

From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuckup imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth texted blow by blow, confidential military operations, over a chat string—a National Guardsman with combat time, a Fox News contributor Trump lover, and no actual qualifications to lead the entire Defense Department, a man who ordered the erasure of what he called DEI hires on all military websites as if they held positions because of and not despite their gender, skin color, or sexual orientation. This man touts merit-based hires, yet lacks the merit to hold any leadership role, a former soldier who should have known better, is now denying he did anything wrong.

Pete Hegseth needs to be fired. Period. There’s no other justifiable outcome. He’s completely incompetent and putting us all at risk.

Today is my 52nd birthday. I’m now setting off to hike again in the desert. To take respite. To find more blooming cactus. To discover an Oasis. To continue raging and becoming my best self. To demand change. To demand order. To demand we right the wrongs. May our Country sojourn its way out of this racist-led incompetent darkness.

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Emily Dickinson once famously wrote to a friend, “I’m out with Lanterns looking for myself,” describing how she felt about moving to a new home and searching for her identity again. The sense of loss. The sense of searching for who you are again in unfamiliar territory. That unsettled and uncomfortable feeling losing home can elicit. That’s how I feel watching the America I believe in burning itself to the ground. The America where you could say anything and no one could stop you because it’s your right. An America where you have the freedom to express yourself no matter how wild or alien or unpopular it might be. An America that welcomes the tired the poor the hungry. An America that sometimes gets it wrong (we’ve made many mistakes in war), but that sets out to fundamentally defend democracy and freedoms in the world and has come to the aid of our Allies. We are now waking up to the reality that while we like to think of ourselves as the gun-toting crafty good looking and professorial Indiana Jones; when left without checks and balances, we are an oppressor, a dictator, a selfish dick. The truth is we have always been some version of this, but we’ve managed to overcome our missteps because power was not concentrated in one Branch. And perhaps there’s still hope. The courts are fighting it out. The professorial Indiana Jones may prevail as the hero if we can keep it from going fully sideways.

We know that we are an America with deep-rooted racism and misogyny, but we’ve been trying to correct our wrongs and be a better version of ourselves while some of us have been trying to return to those wrongs. I believe in an America that will keep trying to become better, work harder, will fail sometimes, but will get up and keep improving. It’s what I do and it’s probably the most American part of me. However, we are now an America on a self-destructive rampage— eating itself, poisoning itself, lighting fires, and beating its children. For most of us, we’re waking up each morning, slightly more terrified of our ever-changing self. It’s worse than aging, it’s worse than disease, it’s disfigurement. It’s dementia. It’s losing the parts of yourself that make you identifiably you. Who are we without freedom? Who are we without rights?

A large swatch of America feels lost right now, homeless, or worse, like we’re watching people being led on a slow death march to the cattle cars with no clear path for a detour or emergency brake. Most friends and relatives fall into one of the following camps:

• They do not want to talk about what’s happening because they cannot cope with the anxiety of our fast-declining democracy. (Cue panic attacks and Netflix escapes and news blackouts.)

• Or they do not want to talk about it because they do not know what to do or what to believe. (Cue awkward conversations trying to find what camp someone falls into before changing the topic to kids and workout tights.)

• Or they DO want to talk about it and they are doing everything they can and it’s not doing anything. (Cue calling their representatives daily and sending emails and protesting then collapsing into rage crying.)

• Or they are indifferent or apolitical? (is that even possible right now?) or supportive of what’s happening or aren’t worried about it. It’ll sort itself out, they say. (Cue living their lives exactly as they always have with zero notice of any changes and no interest in discussing a contentious topic.)

Back in the Fall of 2024, I began preparing myself for the daily onslaught of anxiety we’re now experiencing while hoping for the best. I picked out, saved for, and eventually ordered a sauna and hot tub. I live modestly in a tiny 650 sq foot home and sleep in the living room. These purchases were a big splurge. They were both natural-looking, clean feeling. Zen like. Cedar clad with smooth metal straps. They were safe havens. A way to weather this anxiety creating Regime and it’s oppression I believed was coming. And so I set to work building first a space for them to sit. I dug in the rain for days to create a terraced area on my property that slopes toward the Salish Sea. I dug with a pick ax and hauled dirt and dumped dirt and smoothed and shoveled and raked. I dragged railroad ties and drilled holes with an auger bit and secured a retaining wall. I called my friend Austin to deliver me gravel, then sand. I salvaged bricks and hauled them home in my Subaru a couple hundred at a time. (I’d turned brick hauling into a part-time job last summer when I built my first bricked patio down below this new terrace. You can see it all on my Instagram @amywritesandpaints)

I bricked in the space for the sauna and spent all of January assembling it in the rain and snow and sleet. I was cold. I felt powerful and purposeful and sometimes I got frustrated and sat and cried. I was out there in my fly flow ski bibs and pack boots building when the Blackhawk and CRJ crashed. When the DEI attacks began. When the erasures and deportations and DOGE and firings commenced. When the sauna was done, finally after more than a month of building after work and on weekends, I climbed inside and sat in the scent of cedar and looked out through the bubble window at the Sea and the sky and the gray line where our neighboring island sits between sea and sky.

Then the hot tub arrived from Canada–strategically squeaked in just before the tariffs hit. My friend Dennis hauled it from the local distribution warehouse and more friends came to help me roll it up the hill and put it in place. It’s made by a tiny company in British Columbia that rivets and welds a big aluminum tub with a wood-stove right inside the body of it. It took me a couple of days to assemble it, split more wood, and fill it with water, and then I built a fire in it and fed it wood for hours and waited as the water began to heat. The sun was setting and the sky growing blue then black with stars poking through as I climbed inside and sat there in the hot water in the quiet, with the twinkle lights coming on in the big elephant tree above and the waves out in the Sea sloshing against the shore and the starlings in the birdhouses putting themselves to bed. I sat there listening to the fire crackle in the stove as the water steamed and I felt my entire body settle down as I sunk my shoulders beneath the surface. I felt myself able to look at the horrors head-on once again. To not turn away. To keep speaking out. To not stick my head in the sand. To put myself in the way if I have to. I built myself a place to take respite so that I can reset, regroup, and go back out to keep fighting for what matters and for the people who can’t. I felt myself know we are going through something but we will find our way out. We will remake ourselves again. It will be painful, and uncomfortable, and terribly difficult, but we will find our way home.

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On Tuesday evening, I went on a date to Cabelas with my handsome, debonair (his words) British boyfriend (BBF) to try on pistols and pick out ammunition. Though he comes from a country where gun ownership is rare and highly regulated, he’s as enamored by guns as much as he is by fast cars and fighter jets, and he spouts off makes and models with dizzying excitement.

BBF asks me questions like Do you think I could get a gun as a non-citizen?

Yes, of course, with a properly approved application from the State, we discover online.

And Can you buy ammo ONLINE?

Of course, this is ‘Merica, I say.

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And then I think about how I’m handling instability in our Country: The factions. The tariffs. The economic insecurity. The isolation from our global allies. The concern from Canadian friends that we’re going to invade them. The daily anxiety as our freedoms are eroding.

There’s this saying that goes something like: Airplane pilots are easygoing, while helicopter pilots are always expecting disaster. The stereotype acknowledges the effortless design stability of airplanes versus helicopters and the personality traits that are attracted to them. While I’m rated in both, I have far more time and ratings in helicopters, though I no longer fly anything. I mostly work at a desk these days, yet I do still fall into the camp of someone who prepares relentlessly for the worst. I don’t mean bunker-and-canned-goods prepared, though that no longer feels fanatical. But I do mean, I keep bear spray and a knife on my desk at my office just in case and face the entrance in a restaurant aware of the exits. I go into the wilderness prepared to spend the night if needed and when engaging in the far more dangerous activity of spending time with men, I carefully vet potential online dates. I take risks, safely.

With democracy crumbling and fascism rising like a bloating corpse, I see the need for personal protection. BBF and I wander through waves of Cabelas camouflage and Carharts to the well-lit glass counters displaying pistols with bright red safety locks in the same pumped-up glossy fashion as designer makeup in Sephora. The no-nonsense white man with a wide forehead and anti-gun control politics who works the counter pulls guns from the case and expertly explains to me the various safety mechanisms, stock lengths, calibers, and price points. I don’t feel comfortable with the Glock 43’s safety mechanism, I tell Cabela man, and he says that’s a sensible decision. Still feeling lost and overwhelmed, I tell him the Baretta 9mm, which I’d qualified on decades ago in the Army, was too large for my small hands. I struggled for accuracy with the trigger reach and haven’t shot anything in years. He listens carefully to my needs. I feel heard by this man. I’m starting to trust him. He makes recommendations. He shows me a weapon his wife prefers. Still, I feel awkward and overwhelmed with options, though we’ve narrowed it down to just a few sensible choices.

Then Cabela man tells me how he prefers a metal gun and I ask what he likes about it—is it just how it feels or is there something more?

I enjoy forcing men to talk about their feelings in awkward places and in awkward ways. He says he likes the weight of it in his hand. He likes the feel of the metal. And I sense without asking that he likes not just how the gun feels but how it makes him feel about himself. I understand, I say. He mentions his own time in the Service and I think about all the right-wing men I served with who initially saw me as a female leftist vegetarian and later saw me as a competent pilot and friend. Connecting on a human level in close proximity always broke down our differences into things that didn’t matter. We became people who were just trying to help other people and each other.

A customer standing nearby recommends going to a shooting range just north where you can try out a catalog of weapons to see what feels right before purchasing anything, and that suddenly seems like a most sensible follow-up date, which thrills BBF. The man behind the counter agrees that would be best as well and so it is decided.

While I hope we circumvent an internal war of our own making, I want to ensure I can make a break or stay put with confidence. And confidence with anything comes with repeated practice and an eventual rise in skill—something I’ve learned through much repeated failure and crying and trying over and over until I get better at things. I do already own guns. But, now is the time to find one I feel most comfortable using. With preliminary weapon research complete, we compliment the American strip mall gun shopping experience with endless salad and breadsticks flanked by pasta at the Olive Garden just across the car-speckled parking lot where we discuss the details of our work lives and the two remaining gun options:

Sig Sauer P365XST 9mm

Smith &Wesson M&P Shield EZ 9mm

Yes, readers, I’m open to your opinions and recommendations. Also, how much ammo is enough? One subscriber named Dennis says there is never enough. I probably don’t have the budget for endless ammo, but really, how much is enough?

Spring is here and Summer is close behind. I expect the violence and unrest to grow and a Trump-backed government may begin cracking down on its own citizens. We’re already seeing the slippery slope of first targeting legal residents. A green card holder activist, Mahmoud Khalil, who is married to an American citizen, is being detained and slated for deportation for his political activism, and whose free speech is protected by the Constitution, according to legal experts.

Foreign Policy in Focus, a group of “Scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the U.S. a more responsible global partner” in their information on How To Counter Fascism notes on their website:

If history, especially of the United States, is any indication, one must not preclude the possibility of violent civil war, and should that become a real threat, to take the appropriate steps to counter it. CIA analyst Barbara Walter is not crying wolf when she writes:

Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized anocracy [a degenerating democracy] that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe. January 6 was a major announcement by at least some groups—such as the Oath Keepers–that they are moving toward outright violence…In fact, the attack on the Capitol could very well be the first series of organized attacks in an open insurgency stage. It targeted infrastructure. There were plans to assassinate certain politicians and attempts to coordinate activity.

I want to believe we’ll find a path through without violence. I want to believe Americans will save each other from what we have unleashed. But wanting and believing and advocating and protesting can only carry us so far. The courts may fail to reign in growing unconstitutional acts.

It’s time to prepare for our own safety. The second amendment protects our right to bear arms, so that we can defend ourselves against a potentially unjust government—in this case, a government that may circumvent the judicial system and come for law-abiding citizens or permanent residents who voice dissidence. Perhaps we’ve found that moment in time when the left and right share ideals, when the Second Amendment, with all it’s controversy, is embraced by the left as necessary in a time when taking up arms feels simply logical.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating for violence against the government, law enforcement, or our military. I’m advocating for ensuring that if widespread violence occurs and we need to defend ourselves from harm or a faction of our government that goes rogue against our Constitution, we should be prepared to defend ourselves, our homes, and our families. I am a patriotic American who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution and the rights of all of us to be free. I intend to keep doing just that.

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