Sitting here editing another photo from scratch - no slap on a preset and tab to the next for me - I ponder the freshly acquired stars in the Universe tonight - Dolly and Tim- two 80-year-olds who lived their lives to the loudest, sparkliest, and utter weirdest capacity, up until the very end.

I’d be lying if I said my own shine was feeling a little dulled over the last month plus of non-stop personal conundrums and professional clamor. Closing my eyes at night between hectic days and a pummel of texts and phone calls, I can’t help but always face off with the inner critic that comes crawling inside my psyche when I’m in my most vulnerable state between wacky dreamland and another burdensome day.

Are you sure they aren’t discussing what a freak you are when you left the table? Did you really think your work was going to measure up in the real world? Who do you think you are that anyone would be interested enough in handing you dollars to read your life story or hire your talent?

If you’re unfamiliar with my writing or work, I share my journey out of the world of ultra-conformity to Christian Fundamentalism in high-control religious and political circles - I am a “failed” trad-wife who was shaped by the ideologies of homeschooling, theocratic cult leaders like Doug Phillips of Vision Forum, R.C. Sproul Jr., Doug Wilson (extra eww), and so many more. I was earning gold stars in the stay-at-home-daughter movement, and had an exemplary arranged and “saving my virginity and submissive devotion for a singular man, eschewing college for motherhood and aprons,” kinda marriage.

Feels kinda vulnerable admitting this, but I wasn’t familiar with who Dolly Parton was until my mid-20s, after I’d fled my barefoot-and-pregnant-in-the-kitchen destiny and was living life large by washing dishes and cutting vegetables for minimum wage in restaurants (no college degree meant I had to start somewhere). But my drop into a less-insular environment wasn’t met without a fair amount of ribbing from my friendly - and shocked - coworkers, who, upon learning the pop-culture history gaps in my childhood, promptly turned on Dolly to right this educational wrong. At the very least, I knew who Tim Curry was because what homeschool tutelage is complete without a screening of The Muppets Treasure Island (it definitely wasn’t through exposure to his cross-dressing role in Rocky Horror Picture Show, given my Conservative upbringing lol).

I can’t honestly say that my first exposure to Dolly’s endearing Appalachian vibrato had me hooked and seeking out every single song from this dearly beloved blonde and bedazzled fierce icon. But growing up in a rural and sheltered environment where I was mocked for my ditziness that was most often attributed to my blonde hair (not my neuro-spicy brain), and shamed for the natural assets that a supposed male deity had given me, I could at least identify with an anthem and image she loudly and unapologetically showed off to the world: don’t let your origins define your success, but never be ashamed of where you came from, show off what the good Lord gave you, keep smiling, and reach for the stars.

Since departing my marriage 12 years ago, I am a little chagrined to reflect that many of those years were spent timidly trying to find the line between conformity and authenticity instad of just living, as I struggled to balance my in-the-world but not-of-the-world Christian mindset of the past, and the burning in my cheeks every time someone called me a weirdo for not passing go on another “normal” life and pop-culture quiz. Little did my new co-workers and wannabe friends know that up until then 99% of my life had been spent gliding under the surface, avoiding detection, even as I watched my older brother’s musical inclinations for Nine Inch Nails and Evanescence get tossed in the trash. Suckers! Gotta hide the contraband better, sheesh…

The bones of my former framework extended far beyond a quirky lack of mainstream entertainment, nor did they crumble overnight as I evolved out of my ingrained habits of the past as I flailed out of a timid and sticky shell into something more than a habitual people-pleaser who’d learned all along, consciously or not, that my adaptation to male hierarchical run environments was key to survival.

Outside the four walls of my church, this exhibited itself time and again as I navigated the murky and scandalous waters of dating and working for male bosses post-divorce. I’d thrown all the patriarchal bathwater out, and I was the naive baby leftover scrambling for sensical ways to make money and move forward in this new-to-me 9-5 frenzy. Simply mirroring the likes and dislikes of my mirage of partners and kowtowing to bosses kept the wind in my sails for a fair portion of this wild life journey. But I’d find myself stalled when I lost their focus, reverting once again to incessant thoughts of what particular bits and bobbles of my body and brain they’d taken offense to that I’d regretfully examine under the harsher light of my own mirror.

To be fair to my younger self, I suppose I did take the Dolly route in many ways after all, gravitating towards less gray, making more colorful choices than some would have selected for me. At some point, I dropped the pretense that my curvaceous presence needed to be curtailed and covered for others’ comfort. My creative output into the world has started to range away from the safe, copycat clinging to the borders of what Instagram and algorithms find palatable and popular.

I’m still searching for the golden thread that’s going to keep guiding me to loftier financial futures, and I’m always working on tempering my approach to dating men that waffles somewhere between wanting to shoot them or shag them on sight. But my gusto for life is alive and kicking, especially if I’m searching for my next hot meal - I’ve just learned to pay for the ticket myself. Dolly was an UTTER GODDESS for inspiring millions of women everywhere to take their financial freedom into their own hands and make the damn money, without giving in to corruption or greed.

Twelve years in, I’ve put in the two-steppin’ and sweat to expand my pop-culture knowledge and genuinely flex my taste in all areas, learning the importance of identifying the moment to turn off or walk away from folks and tunes who leave a bad taste in my mouth or grate on my ears. I hope to keep teaching my daughters the same, who have also taught me how to embrace their own likes and dislikes, and quirky musical inclinations (it’s not a road trip if we haven’t listened to Lindsey Stirling’s synthy violin and also their favorite all-girl Japanese band named BABYMETAL).

While I know a little less about Tim Curry’s personal life and impact on the world than the Rhinestone Queen who gave back with two hands, crossing every racial and social barrier to ensure kids everywhere read, were fed, and accepted for who they were, not who others thought they should be, I do know that he made millions laugh. He could put on an incredible show and inspired theater kids everywhere to be more accepting of themselves and give it their all for a performance. I can applaud that, even if he’ll forever in my memory be Long John Silver.

Rest in peace, Dolly and Tim — thank you for reminding the rest of us mortals in an ever-faltering world that living a life designed around one size fits all is the saddest existence we could fashion for ourselves. May we don the clothes and rhinestones that call our name, and stand loud and proud of who we are, no matter our origins or systems that command us to conform and shrink to their size.

And in a world of Donald Trumps and White Christian Nationalists like Pete Hegseth, let’s be a Dolly and a Tim, crafting our own successes without anyone handing it to us, and choosing the clothes, humanity, and personas that defy the stringent stereotypes of man and womanhood, while determining to lift up others around us

Hate is the easiest path to take, so in a world on fire, let’s determine to take the road that goes higher; and if you see someone without a smile, give ‘em yours. Thanks for the reminders, Dolly.

Here’s hoping the Grim Reaper will stop taking the most precious of 80-year-old icons and start swinging the other way soon.

I’ve been on family time and vacation since August 15th — I just recently spent almost a week in a town that could absolutely school me on my lack of knowledge about Dolly, and I promise I’ll return to keep upping my grades on her music and honky-tonk two-stepping. Austin is still going to get a whole report of its own - I’m currently processing how much I loved that darn town, while still conflicted as a whole about the state. See ya back in September, California!

Housekeeping

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There’s a dirty little secret that most people won’t clue you into about full-time self-employment: At a certain point, you’re going to want to quit.

I feel I have to add that I’m writing this with my laptop still cracked open at 9 pm PST, eating leftovers for dinner while my external hard drive is plugged in and importing another batch of images, after having wrapped up and emailed off a different finalized gallery…. Let’s be clear: my eyeballs are burned out, my brain is fried, and my body is fixated on the notion of going to bed. But I need to get ahead already on tomorrow’s work.

I’ve been at my current job, which I created (and adore, for a variety of reasons) for 8.5 years. I am a full-time photographer, with a career that gives me the flexibility I need to handle an out-of-state custody agreement to spend time with my two teenage daughters (which is a major part of my story and history, and a big fuck you to my ex for persisting this long). I don’t have a cap on how much I can earn— in theory, a GREAT thing, but in practice, I’m usually staring down the barrel of feast or famine and always owing more in taxes than the majority of you.

Okay, I’ve shifted now from the table to my bed, and donned my blue light glasses. Lightroom is tucked away for the night, and my unfolded laundry is schlepped back into the basket — I tell myself I’ll fold it tomorrow for sure.

When I tell people that I don’t want to be a photographer forever, they look at me like I grew two extra heads and growled at them. What do you mean? Why not? What else would you possibly do??

Inevitably, this provokes a little bit of ire on my part: I don’t have to give you all the answers, Susan, but I can do whatever I want with my life and job. I literally invented this ongoing role for myself and can morph into another career at some point down the line with or without your advice or permission.

That’s how I respond in my head, anyway, and always pivot the conversation back to another topic, like the increasingly morbid and terrifying temperatures of our ongoing global environmental disasters we’ve wrought through our human foolishness… fuck it, maybe we’re switching it up and talking about a nepo-baby trillionaire crashing one of his stupid-ass rockets into the GODDAMN MOON and leaving a scar on her luminosity.

But tell me again why you think it’s foolhardy for me to consider creating my own fate just like I have for the last 12 years and counting…

Today, the burnout settles into my bones like a charred pile of sticky ash that can’t be swept away.

Nobody yelled at me. Nobody asked for a refund after I completed a job (yet, hah). Nobody is asking me to pull the late weeknight hours and work straight through most weekends when all my friends are taking their solid two days off in a row. Watching Instagram recaps of various acquaintances’ summer vacations, I flick the thought away: “I’ve never had a two-week vacation in my whole life… what would I even do with myself?”

My ongoing work has (mostly) funded my life well. Afforded me the time and cash flow to see my precious daughters (averaging an 18K spend a year on travel to their home state). I’ve enjoyed not checking my bank account every single time I need to make a grocery purchase, and having the ease of mind that comes with paying rent on time, every time. I am an artist who is paid well to do what she loves: capturing the stories that fuel a hospitality industry in the Farm-to-Fork Capitol city of California. It feels good to be recognized around town for my work, and to secure fresh contracts and smiles when a job is delivered and I feel I achieved another ladder rung.

However, underneath the glam of a gorgeously curated gallery, there lies my bruised body and brain. A day’s worth of packing and hauling costly -and heavy- camera gear into my car, and setting out for parts unknown (jk, I’m no Bourdain). Inevitably, there’s a random day in the month where I fuck up and forget a key piece of equipment at home (ahem, weirdly coinciding with a couple of days before my period), or a light isn’t charged, or one of my cameras goes on the fritz; I manage to make it work regardless. My work, by and large, has been a boon and joy to my life.

The shift over the last couple of years has been discernible, though, and at times - like today - it culminated in a Scoville-scale 4 anxiety level that I tried to offset through venting to trusted ears that listened to me say: People just want their shit faster, and I’m feeling like a robot that’s overheating and barely held together by duct tape and Elmer’s glue… I just wanna quit.

I won’t quit.

But I stand by my original statement. I’ve felt and seen the collective turn, degree by degree, towards a mentality of instant gratification, and expectation that I can take my camera, plug it into my M2 laptop, and churn my 62.3 MB files into quick-cooked content for the never-slumbering social media mills.

My contract and education with clients have been clear and gentle: Rush jobs before two weeks = more money. Highlights post-events are limited to a handful of images, which also = more money. Two weeks is a standard industry turnaround time for returns on galleries in the niche of photography I work in.

The pressure builds regardless. Everyone is busy operating businesses and their own lives. I never take it personally. But my brain is keeping score of the number of dings and dents from a growing cacophony of check-in texts and emails: got anything for me yet?

On the one hand, I do acknowledge that I performed a service, and even with explicit parameters, folks are antsy to receive the goods that they are paying me for. And I’m eager to see these pictures put to use with my name attached… I hope they garner me more well-paid gigs.

Beneath the gleaming surface of every social post, though, lies the crumpled frame of my weekends, and the extra moments I could have spent focusing on my daughters that went back instead towards the projects that funded my ability to even arrive at their doorstep. My thighs are cooked from balancing a hot laptop on them when I sacrifice another gym workout or a walk with my dog to tackle just a few more images that are direly needed and quickly forgotten when published. And I’m just damn fucking tired of competing with folks’ compulsory usage of AI to create sloppy marketing posters.

My ode to photography, and all the ways it’s actually helped rescue my life, spans far beyond what I have energy to type out tonight. I love it as an art form, and I love it as a career, but I reserve the right to pivot in any direction I think is going to bring me mental well-being, while supporting myself and achieving my future dreams, which definitely include finally enjoying a bona fide two-week vacation off in a different country.

Do I need to clue you into exactly what I believe is my ticket to the next station? Nah… but I do appreciate you taking the time to read and support this current “distraction” of mine, when I could have been frying my retinas for a few minutes more in Lightroom. Don’t worry, my next project is queued up, and I’ve got my workday dialed for tomorrow.

Whoever said, Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, is a fucking liar. I love what I do, but I work every damn day, and have earned the right to say I’m exhausted; this is not for me forever and ever until I die.

Gonna sleep now and dream about the millions I’ve been told I don’t deserve as a woman… here to prove all the naysayers wrong in that, and keep carving out fresh paths to a calmer life ahead. My nervous system can’t take this for much longer.

Walking Watson between editing and photography gigs.

On Saturday evening, I popped half an edible and a micro-dose of mushrooms, and settled into my reclining seat at the theater with a small popcorn and medium soda in hand, fully committed to the next 3 hours of an epic for the ages.

Christopher Nolan accomplished two things in those three hours:

1. Untethering me from time and space, or even checking my phone once (which might have also been the fungi working on my nervous system).

2. Shapeshifting a classic poem that macho and pedantic men have claimed as their own into a whole new beast… or was it showing us its true form all along?

Okay, sitting here listening to the Ludwig Göransson soundtrack reverberating all over again through my headphones and sipping my fresh brew, maybe I can think of more than just two things - But I wanted to hone in on those.

The story of the Iliad and the Odyssey have long been lodged in my own psyche for twenty years, because like any good classical Home(r)schooler, I read them both. And subsequently went down fascinating rabbit holes as a 16-year-old studying the archaeology and “discovery” of the Lost City of Troy in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann (who employed dubious and destructive methodology to bore through ancient city layers). As I lay under an apricot tree on the grassy hillside of my former childhood home flipping through the pages of Robert Fagle’s1 translations of mythical men, gods, and monsters, a quiver of longing thrummed through my heart: what of my dreams to explore lost lands and lore?

But all I knew then as a teenager was that permission would never be granted for my own secret longings to traverse far-off cities in pursuit of history and discovery. It turned out instead that I would go on to placate my parents, wave goodbye to all familiar faces on the shores of my insular world, and embark on my own terrifying and meandering path back to the eventual beating heart of my own home.

As I quietly padded out of the dimly lit theater, the strum of the lyre and reedy pitch of the aulos plucked at my brain matter. Lying down to drift away, I saw myself walking across the plains of my own dreamscapes, colliding with the characters of my universe. I saw myself coexisting as both a cursed hero and a time-worn and trapped woman, neither free of their past pain.2

The questions of my own Odyssey called out to me in the sprints and sprains of tattered memories and haunting shades, as I searched for the complex exits from my own cursed route to home and peace.

Oh, and just so you know, I don’t believe in issuing a spoiler warning for a 3,000-year-old story, even if we are viewing it through our modern-day sightglass and without wax in our ears; the soundtrack is as much a part of the experience as the scenery was. This article is not functioning as a complete critique of the film, or a head-on tackle of the cast and topics that have left Conservative tongues croaking.

Venture forward with me, warrior.

Flittering Memories and Shifting Maps

Turns out, no amount of chewing on lotus blossoms can suppress internal wounds and secrets long enough to unlock the hidden route back to peace and prosperity or docking your boat for the final time on the shores of your homeland. And when you’ve been busy destroying other folks’ homelands and desecrating their temples, what entitlement is running through your veins that makes you believe in the right to return to your old ways and home? Apparently, it is a fairly common strain of male entitlement that utilizes the unrewarded therapy of women to steer them straight, or to teach them the lesson of finally just… letting go. Sorry, Calypso/Charlize Theron, I feel the emotional sucker punch that a drawn-out situationship leaves you with, too.

Ten years of men quagmired by greed + ten years of marauding and mucking up the home search that should have taken two weeks = 20 years of Penelope ruling by proxy in defiance of patriarchal standards while subsisting off the tautening leathery memory of a love that left her.

Misogynistic MAGA chooses to see in this story a woman who supposedly knows her place: fidelitous and waiting for a testosterone-dripping hero husband to return, rescue her, and return “his” home back to equilibrium.

Instead, I saw a true ruler who broke the cultural norms set by the men around her, refusing to allow her worth to be measured by the work of her hands, not accepting the quick comfort proffered to her by suitors or the solutions of her own son to correct what they all viewed as a pressing problem - an abdicated throne. Telemachus was swiftly chided as he was humbled by bow and string, and reminded by his mother that Ithaca had already been guided and governed for the last two decades through the invisible labor of women and female deities.

When he finally makes it back home (BIG spoiler), Odysseus’ final moment of salvation is found ultimately not through prostration to masculine deities’ wrath or sheer brawn, but through long years of learning careful attunement to women’s intuition and knowledge in various forms.

You heard it from Zeus. Stop being a pig-headed dumb fuck; listen to and respect women more (although this is more of a case of do as he says, not as he did according to various mythologies).

Some critics say Nolan underwrites the women in his film, demoting them to a footnote in a man’s weary world. Some say he course-corrected with The Odyssey; some say not enough.

While there’s no denying that Matt Damon and his ragtag male crew and sundry Greek characters -some loyal, some lovable, some lecherous- utilized more of the specially crafted for Nolan IMAX camera footage, the naysayers of the female and trans casting in this film are missing the point: Nolan wanted the viewers to tune in to female embodiment that does not need to physically stomp, shout, slice, or stab their opponents to be taken seriously (well, unless you’re an Amazonian, but they weren’t featured in this film).

Let me be very clear: In no way, shape, or form do I believe or am I suggesting that women anywhere would be taken more seriously if they lowered their voices, especially for men. One of my very favorite scenes on my first viewing was the electric shock of watching Anne Hathaway as Penelope shift gears from patient and passive to righteously incensed at every man around her attempting to write her out of Ithaca’s timeline. Her fury was riveting - the mettle of her soul turned out to be less yielding than the bronze of men’s all.

Who amongst us (women) have not at some point of simply existing been derogatorily labeled as an “angry” or “mad woman” by a man who disagreed with our voices and choices? I recall with clarity the first time my ex-husband - who was oh so used to my meek submission that I once vowed to give him - told me I had “anger issues,” because I was no longer living in obeisance to his will. The man who used to throw temper tantrums at his video games had the gall to tsk my attitude after surviving the utter HADES he subjugated me to in our marriage.

“Nolan lets women be angry,” writes Belen Edwards - and while I don’t disagree with her assessment, I think Nolan did more than that… he let them exist in ALL their iterations without placating a modern audience. The arrows of his spin on a 3,000-year-old narrative swiftly find their target and sink deep into his harshest critics - red-pilled, small-peen, racist and bigoted power-hungry men - without caring that it makes them seethe.

But beyond the clanging of swords, the roar of the waves, and the destruction of thunder, the film’s most pivotal character breakthroughs occur when we are asked to sit with the reflections of the consequences of chaotic, deceptive, and prideful male action without fleeing once more to the sea.

Now that’s the kind of stoicism I can get behind… maybe just with fewer women having to pay the price for a man’s actions or provide him with free therapy.

Restoring the Spirit of the Law

I think one of my favorite things about the Odyssey is that it predates the New Testament by around 800 years. Fuck, it even predates much of the Old Testament. Ya know, that tome that is a compilation of stories, songs, and spirits that modern-day Evangelicals like to claim is the “infallible” word of a singular deity. They love to cherry-pick for verses about JUDGEMENT and WRATH, while ignoring the oldest parts of the Torah and Christ’s (the man) teachings about acceptance, compassion, and hospitality. Teachings that are not dissimilar - if not influenced in part - by Zeus’ law that is woven throughout the Odyssey’s narrative.

Over three hours, we witness the multitude of ways in which (male) hands unweave the spirit of the law while claiming to keep the letter. From the insidious realization that one man’s clever trick undid a whole civilization and ushered in a harsher age, to the feckless attempts to outrun one’s fate, and the voracious greed that is a bottomless pit, we wince and wish they would wake up and smell the bacon: One cannot ask for divine blessing while holding a knife to the throat of humanity.

At home and abroad, the fake piety grates on our eyes and ears. Even the suitors are technically “within the keeping of the law,” while simultaneously abusing it, and crying foul when their lasciviousness and greed are unmasked. Odysseus’ rage and restoration of societal equality in his own home is a much older tale than that of Jesus casting the money changers out of the temple, but both lessons are ageless. Stop usurping religion for your own personal gain at others’ sacrifice.

3,000 years later, we are still grappling with the machinations of men who want to satiate their gluttonous need to rule and ruin the world while barring and starving the rest of us from the table. They claim empathy is weakness, and make a mockery of the only glue that truly binds our souls and societies in unity: Do to others as you would have them do unto you. In other words, don’t be a dick who terrorizes and robs your neighbors blind because you prioritize your gain and hunger over theirs.

Did I chuckle when the tables were turned, and Circe started fattening up a herd of worthless rubes for her next meal? Most certainly. Did I identify harder with Samantha Morton/Circe’s statement about her sister/bird and their relationship functioning better in that form? As one of 10 siblings, I sure did. And, even though she granted Odysseus’ request, it was with relief that we watched them all depart her seaside home after she restored them “back into their disguises,” and leave her in peace. “You’re letting her live?” the ungrateful swine/men asked upon departure. But Odysseus was learning his lesson: that a man who cannot admit defeat until it results in his or his opponent’s destruction is never worthy of wearing the crown and cloak of leadership.

All the Way Home

While I’ve tried my darndest not to blind any Sea God’s bastard one-eyed son along the winding route back home3, life has often felt cursed at the twists and turns of my own journey. I defied the scarred fate of Helen, and shrugged off the duties of a role crafted by male frameworks that view me as “less than” them. According to my ex-husband’s cult leader’s theology, I’m deserving of every mishap and sexual harm that comes my way because I ultimately rejected the headship of a man I only met 6 times before marrying.

My sails are raised, but I still have a few more years to go on this 20+ year journey homewards. I won’t be fully at home and at peace until my heart is rejoined with two more tender ones waiting for me a 1,000 miles away.

Until then, I’ll continue steering clear of whirlpools and wanton suitors who want to drown out and dim my female intuition and divinity.

Housekeeping

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A former client of mine reached out today with an availability inquiry for a new restaurant opening in the Bay Area. I tend to be fairly quick to respond to potential gigs, especially from repeat customers. Dope! So glad to hear from you again. Happy to be considered for this project. Down to chat later today or tomorrow about the details.

I eat my lunch. I watch my editing show (which happens right now to be Resident Alien - brilliant show and hilarious acting), and I progress on client photos so I can cross one more thing off my ever-burgeoning to-do list. Checking my messages, I see a fresh notification from this client:

Ouch. My local prices would’ve had him out the door for two hours of work and 50+ images at around $600. Guessing my travel fee and Bay Area rates weren’t going to line up well with their budget.

But he was right. I’m not the cheapest because there will always be someone else who will do it cheaper. In fact, the last time I gifted a full set of 80 unique and retouched images and 2 hours of my work to a girlfriend who was launching her own business, the owners of the property who hosted her inaugural event (who had also received access to the images for their own use) had the gall to complain about “not getting very many photos.” Wow. Even if I’d charged them only $10 an image, they’d still owe me $800. Guess I better pass that invoice along after all, huh? To clarify, my girlfriend is a sweetheart, and we will be working together more. Only I get to choose when and where to gift my work, and owe nobody a discount because their cousin can do it cheaper.

But getting back to today… my client slipped up and sent me a text clearly meant for someone else involved on the project. And it stung to read words about my own worth that only I get to set, that have been carefully calculated to match my skillset, arsenal of tools, and the years of talent I’ve built up and honed to bring to my client photoshoots.

It pissed me off, but also didn’t surprise me.

My brain started spinning with a response. How about: I’ve kept my rates the same for you the last 4 years, even as all of my peers are consistently raising their prices to match yearly living increases, sooooo, you’re welcome? Maybe he needed to hear: almost all professionals charge extra fees for a rush job. Or: I literally just hired another female photographer for my own branding photoshoot and paid her 3 times what I’ve been charging you for the same amount of hours and didn’t haggle the price or complain about it? Perhaps: Not a single one of my lenses cost less than the price of my photoshoot with you.

Arguing with him or trying to prove my point was going to be a waste of time. My desire to be included on this project evaporated. I’m not auditioning for a role I’ve already performed for hundreds of other clients, completing well over 1,200 photoshoots in the last 8.5 years.

So I bowed out. Said there were other photographers to tap in. Good luck!

Bummer. Thanks! They responded.

No mention of the text gaffe. Not worth my billable hours to try and chase making this feel better.

Hilariously, I’d just received a phone call from a different client, who wanted to discuss the use of AI in their marketing plans and how to continue ethically featuring my work without compromising my art. I was grateful to receive the phone call, because many of my original clients and our contracts predate the dizzying rise of Tech Billionaire Oligarchs who are trying to melt the planet to enrich themselves and the 1%. Future contracts have a NO AI remix/use clause in them after delivery.

Disheartening to dwell on, even as I open my Instagram account daily to see fresh slop from the bowls of the earth we’re heating up every time we as Grok to diagnose us, write our papers, or worse… generate inappropriate and age-restricted pornography.

Honestly, though? It’s never been a better time to be a creator - even as we see big (and small!) businesses - even in my food and beverage hospitality world - turn towards replacing whole creative and technical departments with AI.

Why do I still believe that?

Because authentically capturing and sharing stories, and their human components (that haven’t been fabricated in the inferno belly of a beast that spits out regurgitated “creation” without compassion), will never go out of style, even as our tech oligarchs continue to try and melt and mine OUR precious earth in their feeble attempts to eradicate artistry, handcuffing us to a dependancy on them so they can surveil us all.

I PROMISE I don’t count chemtrails, guys. But counting on our fascist government to produce an AI pic of TurtleMcConnell to prevent a special re-election pre-midterms? Mayyyyyybe.

At the end of the day, I’d rather know when to pass on a cheapskate job that didn’t sit well with me and save my efforts for contracts with folks who recognize the worth I get to set and stand by, and welcome my contribution to the quality of their business. That’s something AI can’t take away, even as I lean into persistently pivoting in a country and world that makes survival for small businesses and creatives ever tougher by their blatant embrace of fascism, grifting at the expense of our economy, and fumbling our health, wealth, and security.

I wish all small businesses well in surviving this hellscape. I take no offense at clients needing to reserve resources, and believe I can ALSO continue to make a living wage without apologizing for owning my worth.

As of yet, I haven’t cracked a 6-figure income, and yes, I do live in California and spend the majority of my spare $$ on traveling to see my daughters in another state. It sucks. But I’ve also managed to create something from the ground up that has (mostly) sustained me all these years. Not giving up anytime soon, and I will dream bigger and better every day.

Housekeeping!

If this post resonated with your own survival efforts in this crappy timeline and inspired you to SET your worth HIGHER and KEEP GOING, feel free to show me a little love by subscribing here for $5/month or supporting my coffee intake at Buy Me A Coffee. Ciao!

p.s. I paid full price for these branding photos without complaining or downgrading the other photographer’s value, so expect to see a few more of them!

p.s.s. Yes, I’m always trying to figure out if I should change photography niches to one with less quibbling over my rates, but alas, I fear that permeates every niche of creative work.

My mouth is tired at the end of the day from chewing on words to placate people. Sometimes my jaw hurts like it’s been chewing on gravel—or is it the surface of my soul, scratched from being used like a tumbler to smooth out others’ sharp edges? Olivia Dean is attempting to rub out the nicks and salve over the scuffs of the past couple of days. Her upbeat lyrics from So Easy to (Fall in Love With) cradle my bruised ears, even as the theme clashes with ever-persistent crises and wounded hearts. My eyes crinkle with tiredness, or is it tenderness?

Grief. It’s a murky bastard. Sometimes it sneaks in on silent waves around my feet, and striding around is slowed by the stickiness. Sometimes I’m reminded it’s tried to bind up my heart for a decade and a half—there’s a frozen zombie that still taps through the single-pane windows of my memory. But most often these days, I’ve caught the stealthy hands of grief in the act of ripping out the brown, crackling bits of my heart. I can spot it clinging to the tail end of a laugh, or taking over a temporary pause on the final drive home of the day. And I can sense it in the moment; a temporary silence before it fills with a small, comforting voice.

I never could quite catch the message at the bottom of my bottles, where I thought I’d drown the grief clinging to my ankles. But those tears never filled my cup until I started pouring it out. Grief wasn’t trying to drown me; it needed me to water it in the brief living moments that ached to root down through the tiny death stones I’d kept collecting and storing inside me. Real grief was settling into my soul to soften the impression they’d left behind as I started to pick them up and toss them out. The bruises were finally healing through each lived moment that undid the deep press of numb thumbs and words.

Grief smiled back as I lifted my empty hands and finally snapped the frail binds that stifled my heart. It sparked to life when I turned the corner to witness the beauty of your face, unfrozen for a moment from the mask of apathy that chaos bids us all to wear. I’d never been fast enough to glimpse it while I’d been preoccupied with tying the strings of my own around my head.

Grief bridged the gap between our feet—our lives, deep chasms closing up in the knowledge that none of us get off this earth without grieving. It’s just choosing how to let it in that changes the memories we leave behind and the ones we’ll see when it’s time to leave this life behind.

Grief is reaching for each other through the walls we’ve created by bricking up our pain.

Real healing grief is giving yourself the grace to take them down and step across the rubble once again.

Are you seeing double with the arrival of another whopper of an article in your inbox? Well, join the crowd, because I was too last night.

Standing at my favorite neighborhood pub, I glanced over at my two exes standing next to each other at the end of the bar, rolled my eyes, then chuckled and went back to texting a different man altogether, who always knows how to show me a good time when I ask for it.

Of the two exes present, one knows better than to try to talk to me after he broke my camera lens and didn’t repay me for it (cheapskate twat), and the other, well… he’s moved on to greener pastures and more committed pussies. I can’t be mad at him for choosing someone else, as I’ve done many times before, but I will still give him a hard time about it (pun intended). 😏

Ya, it’s a small town here, and the dating pool is even tinier when you’re a “sinner” who refuses to stay committed to sucking, serving, and submitting to one Christian dick for life.

As I continue to figure out how to de-center men in my life, while still getting my needs met (RIP to my one-year celibacy goal that had everybody confused anyway, lol - at least I made it 6 months), I’ve looked back at the cast of suitors who haven’t made the cut after their trial period ended and try to sum up in my mind what went right or wrong. Sometimes they even turn around and look right back at me with longing (or annoyance) in their eyes. I continue ignoring them while flicking through my Feeld fantasies and musing on my next try.

Some of the past players committed egregious errors (breaking my shit, non-consensual touching, general assholery, cheating on me/using me to cheat, addictions - not all the same person, just so we are clear). And some of the past players simply discontinued being attractive to me based on immutable character traits (having small children, age, height, dick specificities, mismatched humor - things I can’t fault him about but don’t need to settle for).

Now, before you come swinging at me claiming I’m “shallow,” let’s really dive into some of my biggest takeaways about what I’m truly searching for in a partner that, honestly, have very little to do with their physicality or size of their… wallet. Trust that I’ve been passed over for less, and usually without the fanfare of a man screwing up the courage to tell me that “he’s just not that into me.” I’d rather hear that and do my best not to hurt feelings or ghost someone when I’ve determined to keep grazing on my somewhat limited local options.

Think you’ve got what it takes, big boy? Then let’s jump into it, shall we?

Don’t

(Not a complete list, just the top disqualifiers I can think of at the moment)

• Don’t believe in anything resembling Conservative Christian values - If Jesus is your "Lord and Savior” in your bio, I’m automatically swiping left, because I already know you think I’m made out of one of your fucking ribs and somehow less equal to you, and chances are extremely high that you voted for Orange Temu Shitler, and support the alarming rise of fascism in this country, all in the name of “bIbLiCaL vAluEs.” Clown. You can fuck right off if you claim to be “Apolitical” or “Moderate,” too. In the words of Kesha, Don’t buy me a drink, I make my money/Don’t touch my weed, don’t call me ‘honey.’

• Similar to the above paragraph, don’t identify with any of the manosphere world, red pill bro gurus, or the MAHA movement. If you listen to Joe Rogan, SCRAM. If you guzzle raw milk, spend all your free time “researching” conspiracy theories, and have a mealy-mouthed opinion on sexual assault survivors speaking up or gripe about the “male loneliness epidemic” or “declining birth rates,” kindly fuck off and don’t talk to me again.

• Don’t have opinions or complaints about women. And by that, I mean, I don’t want to hear your bitching about your mom, your female coach or teacher, a past ex, or any woman you see out and about or online. If you have the Y chromosome, shut your fucking mouth. I do not care about your thoughts on her body, her clothes/style, her character, or her money. Oh, and men who demean sex work as “not being real work” are about to get slapped by me. I see you out there selling your body and brain to a boss, then coming home to your wives and girlfriends who are doing the unpaid work of mommying and fucking you, while you secretly slip into other women’s DMs. Grow a pair and grow up.

• Don’t be a racist ignoramus. If you’re a white boy who grew up in Whitesville, middle-class America, surrounded by casserole-baking moms, watching football on Sunday with your dad, chances are high we aren’t matching anyway, but in a fluke, if I end up on a date with your white ass, you better have put in the work to expand your cultural horizons, have a deep and abiding respect for immigrants from everywhere, and commit to going outside of your comfort zones.

• Don’t be broke. I don’t need you to qualify for a different tax bracket than the majority of us (I’m busy working on that for my own self), but I DO need you to have a job, handle your own debts and duties, and please, for the love of all that is sacred in this universe, don’t ask me to split a fucking $80 dinner bill if you’re dating me. Literally the last date I went on with a man, I somehow ended up paying for 2/3rds of it while he yammered on and on and on about himself. DUMB. He did not pass go for a second date, let alone a singular kiss.

• Don’t have little kids, or put your aspirations of having kids on our relationship. Baby factory is closed for me. If you have kids who are closer to my kiddos’ age? Sure, I can’t judge you for that, and I am understanding if you ALSO don’t want to date because I have kids. But you better take good care of your kids and be a GREAT co-parent; I’ve got more than enough bullshit of my own going on with my past, and frankly, I’m counting down the days until 18 for both my girls.

• Don’t live with your ex. Don’t live with your Mommy (unless she’s ill/or you’re providing end-of-life care). I understand having a roommate in this economy, but it better be a decently sized living arrangement and not a chaotic bachelor crash pad.

• Don’t have a porn addiction. Notice how I didn’t say “don’t look at porn”? I watch some ethically produced porn occasionally - happy to view it together and get steamier. Speaking of addiction, my boots are made for walking if you’ve got struggles controlling yourself around alcohol, gambling, shopping, guns, and drugs. Notice again, I didn’t say “all.” Moderate drinking: fine. Placing a bet here or there: okay. Treating yourself to a splurge occasionally: awesome. Owning a gun: not a dealbreaker (but not an arsenal plz). Enjoying some herb or fungi: fuck ya, just not 24/7 (I draw the line at snorting or injecting most substances recreationally).

• Don’t have a secret wife or girlfriend. I will out you, and have done it before, jerk. If you want to have a discussion about ethical non-monogamy, I’m all in! More on that in the next section.

Do

(Once again, not a complete list but the pillars of a good partner)

• Do worship the ground I walk on, and have no other Deities before me (only slightly joking here). I’m not going to be chasing you for attention, but I want you to mutually respect mine when I give it.

• Do have a job, friends, and the ability to enjoy life outside of being attached at the hip to me. Co-dependency and I don’t mesh.

• Do have a decent dick - I don’t need 10 inches; that’s what my dildo is for, but more than 4 would be nice. If we fall madly in love, and everything about you is perfection, but your manhood is on the petite side, you better know how to use the fuck out of your tongue and buy me every sex toy my heart desires. Bonus points if you’ve gotten snipped or would do it for me.

• Do love animals (yes, I’ve met dudes who “didn’t like dogs or cats,” fucking creeps). Adore and respect our one Earth. Believe in science and our social responsibility to care for each other and this planet.

• Do acknowledge when it’s your time to say, “I fucked up, I’m sorry.” I’ll do the same - but trust that I will clock any whiff of arrogance and delete your number if you can’t own your attitude or messups.

• Do ask for consent. Continue asking for consent. Routinely check in on that consent. Consent will be revoked when you do not always center my safety.

• Do go into the discussion of ethical non-monogamy with an open mind. If it’s not your style, we aren’t going to keep this train rolling, because it’s mine, and I’m not here to pull teeth convincing you that full-blown monogamy never has and never will work for me. Oh, and while we’re on the topic, I lean both ways and find it incredibly hot (not a requirement, just FUEGO when a man does too).

• Do value having and maintaining a high emotional IQ and being a lifelong learner. By that, I mean I hope you know the difference between having the ability to pass a test and collect a degree and how to handle the carousel of emotions and situations life hands us - both separately and together - with kindness, calmness, and clarity, even if it requires some deep breathing. I’d hope you also have pursued therapy on your own without some other poor woman in your past suffering through your bull-headed resistance to it.

• Do approach me and the world at large with curiosity and compassion, and treat others around you with equality and grace, not contempt. I value a partner who asks questions, pushes past familiar and easy conversation topics, and can match my own wit, humor, and weirdness while maintaining their own sense of self.

• Do take care of your body. I’m not looking for a gym rat or someone to match me in my own fitness journey. But I’m also looking for someone who can climb a mountain with me, pick up a heavy thing and not throw out their back, and yeah, maintain speed in the bedroom. I’m training for life and the eventuality of old age and offsetting fading bone density through lifting and pushing lots of weight. Can you promise me you’ve got the same longevity goal in mind?

In Summary

I’m not selecting a long-term partner for their looks, bank account, or perfect penis. I don’t care about your race. I care about your creed only insofar as it pertains to loving (hopefully not hating) other people/gender expressions. I care most about how you treat and make me feel, even as we balance the tensions of simply being two imperfect humans existing in a flawed and fantastical world.

Think you’ve got what it takes? Add your thoughts below. Just refrain from mansplaining. 😘

P.S. I’m not making any promises, but don’t be shocked if you see more posts popping up with some frequency as I try out a new goal of mine.

Housekeeping

Thank you for reading this post. I try my best to keep the first publication of them free! If you’d like to support me with a $5 to access my archives or buy me a cup of coffee, it’d be much appreciated.

I try to keep all my posts free for the first 2 weeks - but paying subscribers can access my archived work, and I always appreciate the contribution to my busy and expensive long-distance single Mom-life. Have fun dating and stay safe!

I recognize the flitters of a familiar old witch on the fringes of my peripheral mind.

She’s back, and my brain starts aching as her chilly fingers try to pick the lock on memories and mindsets I’ve kept boarded up for self-preservation.

It’s easier for her to slip through the cracks when I’m sleeping - walking around my subconscious, oscillating between wailing and gnashing her teeth and cackling at the chaos she’s wrought again in my fast-paced REM dreamscapes as the people and places I’ve banished from my waking moments dance around me here. The walls I’ve built to keep them all out crumble at my feet.

I try my best to close up my ears to her mumbling incantations and swallow my bread without engaging with her gaze, but my third eye is always wide open, and I can’t help but see her haunting every street corner I pass and floating behind each person I interact with.

This last weekend, as I revisited old childhood neighborhoods in the company of semi-estranged family, I practiced box breathing while reading fresh, hot trash communication from my ex and regulating my own appetites and comfort patterns. Throughout this trifecta of nervous system challenges, the witch was drawing figure eights on a broomstick in the sky above my head.

And I finally just gave up the control and let her.

As work on my memoir has progressed (61,730 words deep), I've wrestled with 25 years of damaged, tainted, and delicate memories ranging from the sexual abuse of my body by a grandparent to the exploitation of my identity and mind by the Patriarchal Purity Culture systems that viewed me as nothing more than an object for advancing their cause. I assumed a role as a wife to a stranger my mom selected for me from the internet, immediately jumped into motherhood, and upheld the ideologies of my husband as a "helpmeet." How I viewed my body, brain, and the universe was in tight lockstep with his beliefs, which mirrored those of our parents at the time. Choosing an existence outside of it was anathema, and I was treated as such.

Leaving that world behind set off a grenade, and a desperate grab at some semblance of control, both by external forces over me and inside my own confused, depressed, and hectic “new” life.

The house I wake up in now, the clothes I wear, the faces I greet, the meals I eat, and the work/maintenance patterns I keep bear no resemblance to the prisons of old… but the witch has been with me every step of the way.

She is me, and I am her. We find ourselves at odds when I refuse to acknowledge a peaceful co-existence.

As I sip my coffee writing this, I chuckle over my ex and his family reading this and spazzing out over me adding witchcraft to the long list of my sins they keep a running tab on.

Control. It was present long before I was cognizant of it in my childhood, and touched every fiber of how I lived and thought. I worshipped it in men for a long time, starting with my ex-husband (he misses it so much that he refuses to co-parent 12 years after our divorce!). I exerted it over my body as a young woman, starving and torturing myself into a smaller shape. The sharp edges of it have nicked my soul as I’ve navigated relationships and friendships pre- and post-divorce. It hovers over every word I type, even now.

But something in me shifted over the last several days. Even as my mind tried to return to the familiar old loop of evaluating the interactions I had with my sisters and mother, I gently nudged it back onto a different path: kindness.

Kindness is the antidote to control - to self, first, then to others.

Nothing about our relationships to ourselves or others will ever be perfectly without tension. I have no regrets about putting strong boundaries in place to protect my own mental well-being, and will not find fault with others doing the same. Where we err is in denying each other’s right to exist with equality and conscious choice over our lifestyles and beliefs. I’m not holding my breath that my ex will ever arrive at that same conclusion for my continued existence outside his narrow-minded world, even as I have let go of the same level of control over his.

My body and brain deflated from the long weekend of travel, emotions, and sister/daughter/auntie interactions; I reached for the antidote to my depression and clasped the witch’s hand, determined to no longer allow my past to dictate my next move or mood.

Intuitive Discipline replaced the Rigid Control of my former knee-jerk response to a world that will never be without some form of crisis, critic, or craving.

When the overwhelming emotions and memories of the past come knocking, the first person I’m usually harshest to is myself, either withholding the care and compassion my body and brain need or self-medicating for a band-aid fix to decades of emotional turmoil.

Perhaps the spell all along has been learning to fade the pain through kindness to myself and others, not erasure or negotiating with those who would control me.

As I shopped for groceries yesterday, chopped veggies and meal-prepped for a week of nutritional success, coupled with my ongoing gym journey of five years, for the first time in a long time, I thought, "How ironic. I’m finally tracking my food intake to ensure that I eat enough to maintain energy, composition, and my happiness instead of starving!”

While a new era of easy weight-loss through GLP-1s is shrinking my girlfriends and family members (no shade to anyone who chooses this path!), I’ve embraced a STRONGER, not smaller, mentality. Perhaps my loosey-goosey days of eschewing macro goals and out-drinking everyone around me have retired, but there is a comfort in knowing that I am feeding my body well and tending to my brain and organs, not second-guessing or swinging the pendulum between care and chaos.

The witch in me nods… maybe she was just trying to get my attention all along to show me the path to a calmer version of healing instead of my old self’s aversion to kindness and discipline.

Surviving my ever-evolving and challenging workouts! Staying humbled.

Housekeeping!

Thank you for reading this post. I try my best to keep the first publication of them free! If you’d like to support me with a $5 to access my archives or buy me a cup of coffee, it’d be much appreciated.

I try to keep all my posts free for the first 2 weeks - but paying subscribers can access my archived work, and I always appreciate the contribution to my busy and expensive long-distance single Mom-life. Stay kind to yourself and others!

I’ve lived with grief inside my bones for so long that it’s shifted into a permanent resident of my soul. An unwanted, but begrudgingly accepted house guest who refuses to pay rent and eats all my floating joy.

Oh… sorry. Did you expect something more upbeat after I took a month off from writing this increasingly flabby column of mine? Fortunately for me, there’s no editor for you all to complain to these days, but trust that the tiny fists of guilt beat inside my sleepy brain every night I lie down to sleep, and grimace with the acknowledgment that I’m going nowhere fast on here by avoiding my audience.

The funny thing about grief is, it’s the living kind of tribulations that makes you want to cling to apathy and avoidance, but it’s the dying kind of sorrow that can reignite your will to embrace this world with vigor and compassion. And it’s my spirit’s work to wake up every day and figure out how to ride that infuriating and increasingly thin line between choosing which one to sacrifice my energy to while I keep breathing.

Writing my memoir has filled me with immense grief as I’ve chewed on the gristle of memories and mourned over my precious time lost to mediocre men and misogynistic movements who viewed me as nothing more than a means to their own temporary satisfactions. Many of these sacrificial minutes have stretched into years, then decades, as I’ve strained to break free from the chokehold of others’ control over my relationships as a mother, daughter, sister, lover, and friend.

Encapsulating the story of what was and crafting it into the future visions of what I long for it to alchemize into has possessed my daily dreaming and doing, as I have pressed forward on writing this book in the slender margins of my life as a creator, friend, and mother - the last of which is tantamount to why I’m living the way I am and learning throughout this process of pursuing MY lifelong dream of becoming a published author.

People feel the need to tell me there’s no money in writing books anymore. To not get my hopes up. That I’ve got to grind away, expecting very little in return, and that I should just be happy for the accomplishment of binding some pages together with glue, then christening, and launching it into the world, even though it’s surely to be forgotten quickly or tossed into some free neighborhood library.

The underlying comment they can’t quite bring themselves to say out loud is that you might achieve what you wanted after you’re gone, but most women die trying to rift the funeral shrouds already crafted for them simply by being born into a man’s world. You’re bound to fail anyway, so why bet on yourself at all instead of shrinking more to keep making space for others to rise?

Problem is, when I meet these sorts of folks who consider it their born duty to inject someone else’s hopeful aspirations with a jolt of “down to earth reality,” that living grief - the one lodged between my ribs that pricks my lungs when I dwell too intently on the thousand miles between my daughters and me - puffs right back up. And it keeps finding ever-evolving and funky ways to squeeze shame and sorrow out of the crevices of my heart and creative soul.

Fuck those kinds of people who are joy-theives.

Ironically, it was through sitting face-to-face with death this last week that I have begun to see that spark in the pitchiest dark. Clasping waxen, curled hands, no longer capable of flying across typewriters or holding a pen, I kissed his cooling head. I thanked his now permanently slumbering ears for all he did in a storied lifetime, and the love he left behind, before the mortician covered his face once more and wheeled his shrunken 88-year-old form out of the hospice care home.

Sitting with my Grandma just a couple of days prior, we’d watched his frail chest rise and fall through external oxygen intake, morphine temporarily staying the march of his pain. And in those quiet afternoon moments, I bore witness to the defeat of this final life chapter in the illumination of love on her face as time-weathered hands cupped the familiarity of 48 years spent together on this material plane.

I wrote my eulogy for my Grandpa later that night. Words I will wait to share at his memorial with gathered family and friends, and slip in as an intermission into my own life chronology, which is currently 58,805 words deep, with 20,000+ more to go.

My Grandfather, James Conrad Flanigan, was born and raised in a small silver mining town in rural Northern Idaho. He transmogrified his humble roots into a lifelong pursuit of writing and storytelling, going on to build a career out of words, interviewing a host of characters who are mostly (all?) dead now themselves - from JFK, to John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Paul Newman, and more. He moved and built a career and home in Washington, D.C. for over 40 years with the love of his life, who sat by his deathbed to his final breath.

One of his greatest gifts to his family, who he adored, past and present, was chronicling his/our family history, printing a hard-bound two-volume series, titled “One Man’s Magical Memories.” His love of amateur magic tricks ran deep, and many precious childhood memories of him center around the performances he gave my siblings and me on visits. I will cherish this book forever, as he inscribed it to me:

Sitting in the hush of his last living moments, I rubbed my Mother’s back and held her hand. I asked my Grandma questions to better understand the man who had gifted me these life tomes, but perhaps not included all the snippets about this moment of that. I closed out the chapter of his life with a better understanding of who he was, and a tiny green tendril of hope within my daily existence to keep reaching for the stars.

My life has been spun out in so many directions for so long, many of them frustrating, torturous, and taxing. But in this past week’s inhales and exhales, I found the sturdiness of my own feet inside the framework of my soul to stand stronger and reach skywards, and the strength in my arms to continue encircling those I love.

Through the grief and gristle of living and dying, I will keep using my deeds and words to transmogrify the pain into something more tangible than bruised memories.

And I promise it’s going to outshine the dark obscurity that the hatred of the past wishes I’d stay buried in.

Goodbye, Grandpa.

Thank you to Calvin and Hobbes for teaching me as a child the power of the notion of “Transmogrification.”

The four walls surrounding me tonight look a little different than what I just spent the last week enjoying with my daughters. I’m in a humble Airbnb room on my own, having dropped my precious sweethearts back at their current Montana home, heart hugs exchanged - the next time I see them, they’ll be a couple of months older, and I’ll shoulder the bitter jolt from knowing that I wasn’t there for every day of their evolving curiosities, fresh daydreams, and growing teenage appetites.

Northern Montana was breathtakingly beautiful - and even managed to wow my own girls (who were growing tired of my oohing and ahhhhing at every turn in the scenery) when we took a ski lift to the top of Big Mountain summit with 360-degree views of Glacier peaks and the Canadian Rockies to the East and North of us, and a sprawling lake-filled valley behind us. Snuggling both of them against the frigid Alpine air blowing off the still snow-capped mountain slope on our descent, I wished I could freeze time or that we could all turn into birds and take flight far away from the gruesome and torturous machinations of men.

But eat like birds, we did not.

One of the greatest joys of motherhood — especially as we celebrated my youngest turning 13 — has been healing my own long-held complex relationship with food and my body. Watching my girls watch me has become one of my greatest motivations to model body acceptance and self-compassion in ways I hope they can clearly see.

This last week, in between giggles and meal preparations, and lots of snack procurments to refuel after our aerial and outdoor adventure day, I settled down to gently reexamine a ghost of my own teenage years, and untangle the eating disorder and body dysmorphia I experienced after surviving my childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my Grandpa.

Food became a comfort to me during a chaotic and emotionally neglected half-hazard healing experience. Like mending a broken bone by placing a bag of ice and a band-aid on it, I was left with my shame, increasing family responsibilities as the oldest daughter, and access to a LOT of junk food that helped feed me and my 9 siblings.

When memories ceased being so very fuzzy post-abuse around the age of 16, I swung the pendulum with a ferocity in the other direction that resulted in losing my period and descending into a brutal depression for close to two years. Food became the enemy I could battle and beat through precise controlled measurements and calculations on scales and in secret notepads that told me how many carbs I ate and calories crept up throughout the day. I’d sneak into my parents’ bathroom to incessantly weigh myself multiple times a day, clocking every little change and stressing that no suitor would find me desirable if I stayed this “fat.”

Desperate to drop the weight, and longing to leave my miserable home life where I was constantly used as the unpaid maid and second Mommy as part of my “wife-in-training,” education, I managed to struggle through the thick and thin years of my own desire and OCD about my perceived imperfections. Along the way and through my pregnancies, I grew to accept healthier habits and exercise/lifestyle approaches that didn’t harm me.

Looking back now, I know that most of my female peers, and my own mother, were incapable of modeling anything other than a righteous pursuit of “skinny,” probably for a wide variety of reasons that somehow always led back to an unspoken attempt at control in lives and relationships that invariably felt just outside of it.

While I have zero doubts that my daughters will come to me someday as adults with a litany of their own sorrows and grievances over my own choices and parenting style, as I’ve watched them blossom into gorgeous and courageous young women, I knew ONE thing I wanted to help steer this ship towards as their Mother: avoiding the rocky shores of body dysmorphia that might cause us to wreck for years on end during the most precious growing years of body acceptance.

I did not want them to go through what I did if I could help contribute to a different outcome.

While watching a delightfully weird and wild movie called Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children that featured power-hungry monsters who dined on gifted kids’ eyeballs (yes, really, lol), I mapped out our dinner: tri-tip roast with creamed corn off the cob, and roasted broccoli and onions, followed up with Ben and Jerry’s ice cream for dessert, of course!

Other meals featured salmon, garlic mashed potatoes, and Caesar salad, a creamy pesto-chicken pasta, pizza, and wings (our go-to for night one), berry pancakes, plenty of thick-cut bacon, and fried eggs with loads of hot sauce. The birthday girl’s breakfast request was homemade cinnamon rolls with maple icing, and rolling them out, this flame within me for being able to bake and tend this temporary home with my two darling girls on MY own terms, ignited and roared high. I love being there with them, and every second we are together, I wish I could just stop the cruel world and custody situation set in motion by my ex, and shelter together, dreaming and designing our next meals together.

But for now, I will keep defying the odds thrown at me, and showing up to rank my Airbnb kitchens and roll up my sleeves to curate meals for growing bodies and curious minds.

When the credits rolled for Miss Peregrine, I almost gasped at the song: It was one of my favorites from Florence and the Machine, and as I started singing along, the girls asked me how I knew it… because every lyric of her song I Wish That You Were Here reminds me of them, and I’ve loved it for many a year. It’s right up there with another one of my favorites from her called Hunger. Click the link to watch her fantastic music video

In between our movie viewing, ads kept popping up that I clocked before my girls did: incessant GLP-1 choices with various celebrities and bodies exhorting the viewer to weigh why this option was better than their competitors.

And on the hunt for fresh cat videos (cats in Kimonos is a real trend, and the giggles viewing them were top-notch) and summer skin-care routines, I scrolled past ghoulish-looking female bodies, shrunken arms and puffed lips, eye sockets sunken, clavicle bones razor sharp.

Rather than charting an avoidant course away from what I knew their eyes were already viewing, I decided to tackle the subject head-on and chat with my daughters about the ongoing trend for people to access fast weight-loss options, and how harmful it can be in the long-term for bodies that don’t necessarily need to be on them without also prioritizing healthy meals and body movement that grows and preserves our muscles. They nodded in agreement, and I know it won’t be the last time I have a conversation with these tender hearts growing up in a misogynistic world that pushes them to be the smallest and weakest version of themselves to placate male-dominated beauty standards.

And now, as the clock is ticking towards my flight tomorrow morning, my alarm is set for 5:15 am, and I’m preparing to dive deep back into the depths of another insane wave of work when I touchdown. But tonight, I hope my words and my encouragements settle deep into my darling’s minds as they go about their lives when I’m not there to roll my eyes at the pervasive weight-loss ads and exhort them to greater heights and adventures than the malnourished minds around them will allow.

Tonight, I write my own prayer to my daughters as I close my eyes and remember us standing on top of our mountain summit:

Please take hold.

These memories.

Your hand in mine. Gentle smiles. Loveing head bunts like a cat. Soft hugs.

Please take hold and root, the remembrance of all three of our feet swinging together so high above the half-frozen slopes and alpine green as we climbed so high, not even an eagle could spot us, atop this craggy cliff, longing for our arms to become wings.

Please hold and remember to tend the tiny furls of memories when dark ravenously comes knocking on the doors of our souls.

Please take hold of this world with bravery and curiosity that exists on the other side of our quiet sorrows. I love you, and pray and hope and dream that the precious moments of memory-making together will help us all access the other side soon.

Until these final years close the distance between my daughters and me, I will keep fighting the skinny monsters that sneak in to steal our joy, I promise.

Housekeeping!

Thank you for reading this post. I try my best to keep the first publication of them free! If you’d like to support me with a $5 to access my archives or buy me a cup of coffee, it’d be much appreciated.

I try to keep all my posts free for the first 2 weeks - but paying subscribers can access my archived work, and I always appreciate the contribution to my busy and expensive long-distance single Mom-life. We all have a hunger!

As you might have guessed from the title of this post, today is a weird day for me, and it has been going on for eleven years now.

Seeing newer-minted Moms than me post their baby-bump, delivery, first-year, and current-year pics reminds me that almost no photos of those blurry two pregnancies of mine exist from 15 and 13 years ago… and that I also agreed to not post any pictures of my daughters online until they are 18 and can make that decision for themselves.

When I moved to Montana as a doe-eyed virgin bride of 21, my father-in-law insisted that I trade in my iPhone 3 for a flip phone with a local area code, since I was married into the family, and his phone plan now. And six months into new motherhood, I had to hawk my camera gear to pay for the gas to road trip from Montana back to California for a younger sister’s wedding. Even though I’d been instructed to trust that my husband would fully provide for our expanding family with his solo income, our monthly budget barely stretched to keep groceries in the fridge and the meager electricity bill paid on time, let alone a 2,000-mile round trip in my 1998 F-150 truck. Additionally, I’d implicitly trusted the headship of my marriage, and my dear husband insisted that I delete all my social media, just like he did. Any pictures from that time are long vanished, even from the deepest dives.

As far as not sharing pictures of my own sweet girls, well, some sacrifices were made back in January of this year to reach mediation on other, more important issues to me regarding amending the bare-bones and horrific parenting plan that has been a thorn in my side since 2017. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make in a maddening world that breeds and sustains monsters. I face them, unafraid, challenging the weak control they attempt to exert over me… but I can’t disagree that showing off the faces of my most tender and innocent darlings to the altar of social media consumption is a decision that needs to be made based on their own autonomous desires and wishes in how they present to a curious, and at times - ravenous - world.

Of course, my ex’s demands came with a hefty wallop of shame. Every year divorced from him is a flex in my book and a mark on my moral ledger he keeps in my absence. I rejected him 12 years ago in the continuance of his role as my husband, so he set about nixing my access to mothering the children I already had.

When my memories circle back to roost on the näivete of my 20s, ceding full control of my body, bank account, and mental well-being over to the hands of a stranger in service to the Christian Patriarchy, I wince. Gingerly flipping through the sparse journal entries from 2011-2017, which I kept in an attempt to chronicle my pregnancy journeys and new motherhood, I see the broken fragments of a soul tenderly glued together in the shell of a woman and mother who was barely surviving the loneliness and poverty of the short few years of marriage. The guilt of finally giving up on God and her Pioneer gumption to stick with being a stay-at-home wife and mother comes to a dead end in 2017, when I stopped journaling altogether and focused on survival — my life took a hard turn into sheer financial survival after that, and my handwritten accounts of it slowed, as I pivoted to new work, and continued trips to see my children in another state.

Scrawling my anxiety onto these leatherbound pages, I stepped into the narrowly defined role that had been carved out of my future since childhood… no dreams beyond that of husband and a bundle of babies. Like good Christians, we crowdfunded our insurance funds to cover the cost of each at-home natural childbirth, deliveries directed and managed by a local midwife. Since we took our wedding vows, and through the guidance and vetting of our parents, my ex and I knew we were aligned on all matters of holistic and natural medicine, anti-vaccine choices, and a general mistrust of modern medicine and federal and state health guidelines, especially when it came to planning for our future children. I am saving the bulk of my homebirth storytelling for proper placement in my book, but it is slightly amusing to flip through former entries of yore, not knowing if I was penning my hopes, dreams, and complaints to a little boy or girl - we had forgone ultrasounds for both my pregnancies, trusting God to grow a healthy baby over the next 9 months.

While we’ve been sharply divided in the decade and a half on almost every single parenting decision that has been made unilaterally by my ex since welcoming our first sweet daughter (power, once given to a hungry totalitarian, is quite hard to wrest back, turns out), I see the longing and struggle to find that middle ground in my dusty dreams and communications with him to please let me mother my daughters and co-parent. But my refusal to return to him and the childhood faith that once commanded my service as a trad wife and homemaker ensured my pleas fell on deaf ears.

The juxtaposition of two parallel journal entries from different years is not lost on me, as I jotted this entry down on 03/25/11 as I adjusted to my new pregnancy body and hormones:

Nobody gaslit me better than my own childhood-primed and conditioned fundamentalist wifely self during this time period.

A couple of years later, I penned this heartbreaker of a page about my second daughter’s arrival on 06/19/13:

Motherhood then was not a conscious choice I made. But it has become an awakening. And over these painful and stilted years of non-co-parenting attempts, and missed holidays, it has revealed itself through divorce and the slow deconstruction of the male gods of my youth. Those hands long ago tried to choke out the ancient, pure maternal breath I now finally inhale without their futile restraints.

Do I still feel the jab of another empty holiday with no cards, no call, as my ex turns up the dial on his cruelty towards the mother of his children for the 10th year in a row? Yes.

Do I fuel my fiery hope from the ashy remains of the funeral pyre I built to torch my abysmal and terrifying marriage, and fashion back together the charred scraps of a blank vessel I once sacrificed to a random man’s imprint? Also yes.

Not a day goes by that I’m not counting down the days until my sweethearts turn 18. I’m sure he has big plans for them, continuing to shrink to fit into his basement dwelling universe. But I have more expansive dreams and worlds already built for them that will no longer seek permission from my misogynistic captors of old.

I can’t wait to raise that sail, as we race across the ocean together, no backward glances. Until then, I’m staying steady at the helm, as I chart my own courses, captain of my map and maternal intuitions… I am grateful for the life I’ve built from nothing; no deities get credit for my blood, sweat, and acrid tears. And the choices I made along the way to ensure my stability, safety, and sanity, I would make all over again for the betterment of my children’s and my future.

You know the guy… he’s an ally! And he’s popping off in your DMs, messages, and email more than your bestie girlfriend’s group thread. He’s just being “nice.” He wants you to see and feel how supportive he is of your life. He claps for you! Maybe he’s on your paid subscriber list here, or you know him in real life, and he does you favors accompanied by, “You available for a hang? Are you doing okay? I’m here as a shoulder to lean on!”

The one-sided word count starts piling up as you half-heartedly throw him an occasional “heart” or thumbs-up. Your anxiety ticks up a switch when you open that red notification to see a familiar profile pic haunting the ghostly chambers of your inbox. Once again, not the fish you were trying to bait… Will he ever get a clue?? Months go by, no change.

One fed-up day, you finally suggest that he reach out less, and he reacts. “I never meant to make you uncomfortable - I’m not trying to date you!” He’s shocked you could even envision him as one of the “bad” guys, and now he’s wounded… perhaps you dial back the boundary a smidge, and just like giving a mouse a cookie, he’s back and asking for the fucking milk soon enough.

At risk of offending some of my paid subscriber list that skews heavily male, if getting your $5/month - $60/year support means tolerating a constant pestering, I’m better off without ya. My manicure costs more than your pittance, which is appreciated, but if it’s served up with a side of entitlement access to me, you can keep your chump change - I’m not a publicly traded corporation.

“But ANNA,” I hear the chorus say, “just look at the pictures you post and the subject matter you write about… of course you wanted the attention, otherwise why’d you wear that outfit and openly talk about your body?”

No, dear reader, I’m not obligated to give anyone one iota of my time, even if they wanted to hand me a bag full of gold bars, or I walked down the street topless. I am fully prepared to kick paid subscribers to the curb for overstepping and walk away from thousands of dollars of photography work if I’m getting the heebie jeebies from this would-be client. It’s a trigger I’ve pulled before and will again without hesitation.

There was a version of me, once, that did not act with a swift determination to protect her time, her body, her resources, and access to “friendly” dudes who just wanted to bolster her life… because without them, she might get lonely, not go as far, have less access to nice things, and an improved life that only they could provide. That other (and younger) side of me was oh so afraid of offending them if she said “no.”

As my test-tube Purity Culture origin story unfolds, I can look back through the chapters of my journey and see the faces and places I bent over backwards for a multitude of asshole men who contributed nothing to my life, and left the deepest scabs. I was conditioned from early girlhood to young trad-wife indenturement to placate and perform for the Patriarchy. We literally worshipped it by that name in our households. Women didn’t say no to men! We served it up warm and sensually anytime he wanted it, and called him Lord, Master, and Keeper, while staying silent in our congregations and communities by God’s command.

When I left that particular pox-riddled fold, I jumped feet first into the freedom of working outside the home! Making friends! Having my own space! It was intoxicating, and at times, intoxicated. The forgone college days experience that I’d traded for an apron and being barefoot and pregnant in a random dude’s kitchen, roared to life. I didn’t know I’d been this starved and shriveled for socializing!

Unfortunately, my brain and nervous system didn’t magically shed the deeply conditioned, internalized subservient mindset from my youth. That shit was wrapped around the roots of my soul, choking me still. And it made me a prime vulnerable target for a horde of exploitative men who were likely shocked at how easily their boorish behavior pushed me over, once upon a time. Ick.

As I sit here on my couch inside the home that I’ve paid for on my own for the last four years, with the only dude in the world I truly care about, napping next to me after I fed him his breakfast, I reflect on why it’s equally annoying to encounter these “allies,” aka, the nice guy, who is engaging in all the behaviors I outlined in paragraph one. As infuriating as being cat-called on the streets is, at least those dudes are doing it to my face, and I don’t have to tolerate hearing it every other hour.

Both offenders make me wanna stop what I’m doing and scream at them, KNOCK IT THE HELL OFF! But, if I’ve learned anything over the years of dealing with my own demented and narcissistic wraiths from the past, it’s to ignore the undead fuck outta them.

I figured I’d still tackle this sticky subject, however, and help both parties out a tad by doing a split guide:

For the recipients of unwanted attention - How to Handle Emotional Vampires

For stooges begging for crumbs - How Not to Be an Energy Drain

No pointing fingers here - but if you’re feeling offended by anything I’m writing, maybe it’s time to look in the mirror.

How To Handle Emotional Vampires

Hello, Darling. If you’ve jumped to this section, chances are high that you have also experienced a midnight monster hankering to take a big bite out of that juicy, sweet, gorgeous ball of a persona you emit into the world. Don’t dim it down one bit, or dash your phone against the wall.

You almost wish he’d ask you for a pic of your boobies instead of being barely tolerable - but you know blocking him for asking for your opinion 100 times in a row would result in him blubbering bitter tears and whining about being a victim instead. So you tolerate it as he slowly, steadily sucks your energy… what to do?

First, take a deeeeeeeep breathe. Unlench that drop and drop the shoulders. Wiggle your fingers and shake out the annoyance. I’m all for blocking anytime you feel the vibes are off, no explanation, but if you haven’t quite arrived at that ultimate step yet, here are a few ways to tactfully handle pests before going nuclear.

While that first friendly DM doesn’t always indicate it will be followed up by dozens more attempts to grab your attention, a few in a row are a great way to spot these circling creatures and head them off at the pass before they feed too much on your energy.

Step 1: Stop responding, duh. Starvation can often be a semi-successful route to making the less persistent critters drop off - they are looking for low-hanging fruit, and you know their DMs go in a circular motion through a whole cadre of folks. They need that easy hit of dopamine if just one of them responds. Don’t move the needle for them.

Step 2. Hide the fruit. You’re dealing with a mid-grade haunter - they disappear at times, but every few weeks pop back up, boo! Likely, whatever source they’d been feeding off of before you dried up, and they need a new life-giving source. Their persistence is unnerving. They’re asking for more frequent updates and access to your life than your own parents get. Remove their access to your stories, restrict their ability to DM, and delete conversations without responding. If they get the clue, cool! If not, proceed to step 3.

Step 3. Tell them to back off. Doesn’t have to be nice or with an apology. “Stop blowing up my phone, I’m not interested in being friends, with benefits or without. The plate is full, lose my number.” If they respond with penitance and understanding, awesome! You can go back to not thinking about them daily because they are inserting themselves into every hour of your life. If they pitch a hissy fit, fast-forward to step 4.

Step 4. Block. Ignore. True ice queens ignore his man-child behaviors, so he looks like the toddler flopped on their back in the middle of the grocery aisle, screaming and wailing. Buffoon. But these grown men know what they are doing. They are testing your boundaries and pushing buttons to see which ones get you to back down and let them slip back in. Don’t give it to them. You might see them out and about in public again, but they don’t exist to you anymore, and definitely don’t get free hugs.

Of course, this is an incomplete guide and not always applicable to certain situations, i.e., that “nice pest" is your boss or coworker, or long-time family friend. But even in these cases, YOU do not owe anyone, no matter their relationship to you, that uncomfortable energy exchange when it’s become clear they are looking for a deeper vein to bite. Act accordingly.

How Not to Be an Energy Drain

Well, hey there. If you’ve arrived at this particular section, there must be a little niggle inside your soul that has whispered at times, “She doesn’t want your efforts.”

I’m not gonna give you fellas a step-by-step. Even having to point out your particular grey-zone aggressions grates on my soul. Sure, I’ll recognize the shortcomings being raised in a misogynistic culture that shames and teaches you to stuff your feelings, while simultaneously screeching a sense of male entitlement when interacting with the opposite gender or non-binary folks.

But when you launch your 356th fire emoji into your target’s inbox with no response, what are we really getting at here, fellas? Have you tried wandering into the forest to talk to a tree, instead of barking up hers?

Actually, please see a therapist first. But if your current methods of attention-grabbing are failing… take a step back and ask yourself if maybe the intended recipient does not want their ANYthing grabbed.

Before I log off, here are just a few pointers for you, if you truly do wish to have a sparkling handful of a shimmering creature’s essence bestowed upon your beige life:

• Get clear with yourself on your goals for reaching out - are you trying to make a new friend? Spark a potential romance? Or keeping it professional because you really like her photography style and wanna hire her?

• Send her a thoughtful opener beyond “hey” or a fire or heart-eyes emoji. Scan the information she has put out into the world and thoughtfully peruse it. What books is she reading? What projects is she working on? Don’t ask 5 questions in a row, though.

• Ask how you can support her - are you trying to hire her for your own nefarious desires? Don’t. But can you offer to buy her the book or an affordable tool that she’s had her eye on? Got time to boast and show off your shiny new toys, but still asking her to go Dutch on a meet-up? Not exactly wooing her if that was your intention.

• Politely back away if she has left you on read for any amount of time. No “poking.” No “checking in,” to remind her that YOU are still breathing… if she wasn’t checking, she doesn’t care either way. Sorry, but she can’t keep tabs on everybody who orbits her while she’s busy building her own universe. Maybe try building your own instead of trying to insert yourself into hers?

If none of the above works for you, I guess just ignore it all and keep hitting your dim head against those brick walls with babes who don’t wanna play ball with you. JK, please go ask your really fucking honest friends where you need to improve yourself, approach, behavior, and body odor-wise. Hopefully, for your sake, you can make some improvements.

What else would you add, or do you have your own experience with this kind of nuisance? If you’re offended by anything I’ve said, please keep your opinion to yourself, or I’ll be blocking you with my middle finger next.

P.S. That dude napping next to me on the couch has four legs and while I love him, I still have to pick up his shit on the daily.

Housekeeping!

I keep all my posts free to readers for the first two weeks - if you’d like to support me to keep writing more (in between the feast and famine of self-employed photography life), you can subscribe here for $5/month or send me something on Buy Me a Coffee. Thank you for reading and sharing my work!

A whole year ago, I launched what quickly became a hullabaloo in my family. Although it had been cautiously shared on semi-private links, it rapidly became leaked somehow that I was engaging in what some of my more religiously aligned family members (both current and former) dubbed: immoral behavior.

I was a fucking whore of a daughter who needed to be controlled by her father!! Well, that is, at least according to one married-into-the-family-character. I wasn’t in the room when he said it, but accounts say it almost led to a knockdown fistfight between certain family members on Mother’s Day.

Several phone calls and hours later, one thing became clear: My sexy little side hustle with just a handful of subscribers wasn’t so secret anymore.

Given that I was (mostly) doing this to survive what ultimately turned out to be one of the toughest years for me financially as a self-employed photographer, I thought, “What the hell,” and publicly announced my naughty new venture across all my social media platforms.

The response was surprisingly tame… and kind. And overwhelmingly non-judgmental, even from female friends and mentors. If anyone unfollowed or blocked me, they were inconsequential in my life because I didn’t notice, nor did I care.

Those who had formerly benefited from my compliance with their control over my life — within the confines and obscurity of Purity Culture as a teenager and young woman, wife, and mother — were shocked when I publicly expressed my sexual autonomy as a 35- and 36-year-old woman who had divorced myself from them and disavowed their coercive, patriarchy-worshipping systems.

She must still be messed up in the head from what her Grandpa did when she was little; they blared their assessments and warnings through emails and phone calls to other family members. Cut her off, freeze her out, shame her, they admonished others.

Ironically enough, none of the folks calling for my relationships to be cancelled, have in any way, shape, or form, financially contributed to the last several years of me providing for myself as a single Mom who also still foots the bill for fulfilling her out-of-state-custody agreement that was signed a decade ago under duress, while having her young children (checks notes), oh yeah… withheld from her in another state by her manipulative and vindictive ex-husband.

Ultimately, the reasons behind why I chose to start an OnlyFans do not need to be explained or justified to you, Dear Reader, or to my ex-husband and ex-mother-in-law of 12 years, or to any other family member or friend. Whether I was putting that small chunk of change I made towards paying for $2,500-$3,000 trips every two+ months to see my sweet, and small but growing hostages in another state, or paying off debt, or saving for a trip to Italy (newsflash, I wasn’t, and to date have never taken a two-week vacation in my whole adult life, which isn’t exactly a source of pride for me), the reasons behind wanting to make more $$ to aid in my own life survival and well-being, do NOT have to be measured against anyone elses’ particular set of moral standards.

My whole adult life, I’ve mostly lived paycheck to paycheck; I don’t know what it looks like to see over 10K in my checking account most of the time, or to have good lines of credit, or to have at least a few month’s of living costs squirreled away in a savings account (and I know a good majority of Americans live in this reality, too). I was also raised and indoctrinated into a fringe fundamentalist culture that homeschooled me from K-12 teaching me I was inferior to men, and that my one Holy purpose in life was to become a wife and mother - all the women around me stayed at home and raised their broods ranging anywhere from five kids to a dozen (or in some cases like the Duggars, FAR more - I still remember my Mom speaking on a stage with Michelle Duggar at a 2010 Vision Forum “Baby Conference” that promoted anti-choice lifestyles for every family in America, enforced by the government! Sound eerily familiar?

Then I said, “I Do,” taking a stranger from off the internet and two states away to be my husband, for better or worse, richer or poorer - being told I was eschewing college because that was for evil, Liberal Feminists who didn’t want husbands to take care of them. However, I didn’t anticipate back then that I’d be plunged pretty immediately into the For Poorer part of our “Godly Union.”

What’s mine became his, I mean ours… in theory. Every dollar in my bank account I’d been saving, and every household item I’d been storing for my hopeful home starter kit was transferred to joyous matrimony. Packed tight into the 1998 Ford F-150 I’d also bought in anticipation of living in snowier northern landscapes. All he had was an inherited 1978 Chevy Impala - not exactly the best car for a growing family, or tackling icy interstate highways between California and Montana.

But, I’m getting off track here - back to the OnlyFans set up.

My dissent from Purity Culture has been pretty well-tracked through the foundational articles penned on here. A much-more in depth examination is being infused into the growing chapters in my book. I wasn’t even allowed to wear a sleeveless wedding gown at my own theater of a ceremony 16 years ago— quite literally, I had a dress sewn to spec by a costuming seamstress who was an auntie of someone in the tiny little white chapel where we stuffed my parents’ “friends” in to the gills. 150 people I no longer fancy a friendship with, nor do they with me.

But trust. My profane adult web page launch was like hoisting raw meat aloft on a stick in the sub-Saharan, and shouting, “Here, Kitty, KITTY.”

The heads that turned had never given consideration to my body other than the times it was stripped down in front of other women and my husband as a naked vessel for home-birthing more contributions to the Quiverfull Brood - a role I left in the lurch when I dashed offstage.

They wiped their own browser histories clean, just like my ex started doing when I first discovered porn from his late-night internet sessions while I was sleeping through the first trimester of our oldest daughter’s pregnancy.

They relieved pedophiles from immediate leadership roles in churches, but let them sneak into the back pews, so long as they said they were REALLY sorry. No need to call the cops on a repentant man and ruin his life!

They voted for a man who is an adjudicated rapist and, beyond the shadow of a doubt, a pedophile and sex trafficker, yet turn around and applaud laws that make criminals out of 10-year-old girls impregnated by a male family member, or women suffering the sudden and sad demise of a more hopeful pregnancy.

But they sure as fuck gave a rat’s ass about what a former cult member of theirs was doing with her own sexual and reproductive autonomy, twelve years after torching her bridges to them.

It’s funny - really - how mummified my mind, my body, my character, used to be in petrified obedience to these folks… and just how far I’ve come from finally inhaling oxygen outside their casket.

I’m going to say this loud, clear, and as furiously as I can in a country that is hellbent on melting down every right of ANYONE who is not a white, cis, and Conservative male in this country: your body, your choice.

That extends even to the fat fuck pastors leeching off congregants who promise them real results in the generational recipes they’ve cooked up to reclaim this country from the Libtards! It seems like every other day, we are seeing news articles pop up about this Evangelical leader or that MAGA shit-licking loyalist who leads a more lurid online presence than their fellow congregants can stomach.

But, dear, ugly, teeny-tiny weiner babies, I don’t care what you choose to do with your saggy, wrinkled, soured, twisted, stained, and tainted bits. What rouge you put on your snout, or tassels on your hairy nipples… just so long as you leave. me. the fuck. alone. in MY. Adult. Choices. It’s your hypocrisy that reeks to the ozone layer.

Remember, emphasis on ADULT - pedophiles don’t fall under this umbrella - castrate and lock them up, the lot.

My life has been a decade and a half of playing helter-skelter catch-up in every which way out after crawling out of the grave I was supposed to stay buried in, like an Obedient, Good Wife. Not a day goes by without an overwhelming gratitude for having spent the last decade-plus rebuilding the framework of MY own choices and happiness from the mangled wreckage of exiting that world that justified its abusive control over me.

The Piper has been paid the price for my ferry across the dark river outta there. And while the past continues to gouge me, there’s no blood left for them to draw.

As I sat on the couch this last week, playing catch-up on a resurgent flood of photo work this year, after so many touch-and-go months where I stripped more sinew off the bones of my savings, I flipped on my TV, filled with gratitude for a quieter afternoon to get creative with my editing.

Spying the title of a trailer I’d watched a few weeks prior, I was excited to delve into the first several episodes of a new Apple TV show called “Margot's Got Money Troubles.”

Not to spoil it too much (warned ya, look away now), but a very young Elle Fanning (with a MILF Mom, Michelle Pfieffer), ends up sleeping with her lit professor, ends up pregnant, KEEPS the baby (a win-win for the anti-choice crowd, right?), and quickly finds out how viciously cruel the world is to single-moms, even pretty white ones like Margot. RIP to Margot’s illustrious future as a writer.

Long story short, with the very endearing introduction of a former pro-wrestling father now grandfather (played by Nick Offerman), Margot is faced with grocery bills, minimum wage earnings, and distant relatives… and starts her own midnight sultry adventure, and OnlyFans (lose-lose now for that Conservative Christian crowd). Acquiring fresh boxes of diapers is no longer a concern; she stays the course and rakes in the dollars. TBD how the show ends, but it’s a delightful and riveting watch.

Glancing up in amusement and sympathy as I uploaded the umpteenth client gallery and passed along a fresh invoice, I recalled with a wince the first time my card was declined at a grocery store, bags waiting to be loaded, toddlers fussing. A kind stranger leaned over and tapped their card. Tears rolling down my cheeks, I was too ashamed to glance up at them, but whispered my thanks.

I’ve used my body for a lot of things in the years since. Used my hands for peeling, cutting, washing, frying, wiping in all manner of kitchens. Used my legs and back to hoist keg after keg after keg of beer I’d sold to dozens of various restaurants and bars. Used my feet and eyes to pivot and perfect each shot I see in my mind, even if my whole frame and brain complain at the end of another excruciatingly long work day. Used my pussy to quiet men since I was once told before my wedding night that I should rarely say no to them when they want it.

But very rarely, up until recently, have I started to remember to use it for the most important function of all: Pleasure.

My own dalliance with OnlyFans lasted a few months before I pulled the plug with the arrival of a request to change our parenting plan now that I was a “sex-worker.”

It did give me great joy to have the ex-party reminded, however, that adult activities carried out in either of our home states, so long as they didn’t involve our minor children, while certainly a spicy topic of gossip at family dinner tables, didn’t legally warrant grounds for someone having it only their moral way (more than they already have).

“You can keep it up if you want.” My lawyer told me that after another expensive and necessary legal mediation was wrapped up.

“Good to know.” I clicked off our Zoom.

I’d learned a lot in those few months of exploring how my sexual fantasies matched up to others … guiding men towards the boundaries of tipping me for views, ratings, and late-night chats. All the play pretend girlfriend wet dream material stuff I knew they bitched they didn’t get at home. I’d provided this to a rotating cast of clowns and manipulators over the years, penniless and free, while they carved up my body and feasted on my bits.

Charging them for it felt invigorating. And to be honest, it still does. After a lifetime of getting used by men in every which way, I wanted a bite. I still do.

But as I sat through the long winter and stormy spring, I dwelt on where the desire sputtered, and which soul windows were letting in a draft. Some of the best orgasms I had were done with an audience - a spark that still flickers. Where was the mismatch then?

Every day I walk down the street, I am objectified. Wearing anything less than a turtleneck (and even then), I see exactly where men’s glances go as we pass by on the street, mine obscured by sunglasses, as they rarely lock eyes with my face. And honestly, I’m past caring about calling them all curs for wanting a peek. I know what I’m looking at when an attractive man or woman walks past me, too. My pearls are unclutched and dripping down my neck.

In the end, I realized that trying to center their male fantasies, both virtual and physical, was never going to match up with my long-term ones, and that my play-pretend otherwise was binding up my valuable time in pursuit of merely crumbs, when I truly desired the whole fucking meal. OnlyFans served its purpose for a time being - it got me to the places I needed to be, and reminded me that I am incredibly sexy, I have a gorgeous body, and a brain starving to feast on words — My own.

I likely won’t start an adults-only online escapade back up anytime soon, even though I enjoyed it while I did it, no regrets. There will certainly be revealing and sensual photoshoots for my own personal enjoyment ahead. But, I realized that the world will remember my story when I roar it from the rooftops and throw a book at their head instead. Ain’t nobody going to be looking away when I hit publish on that fresh drop.

P.S. Just to be clear, I believe that you can fully and autonomously choose ANY adult work you want with or without having to be in dire straits, so long as it’s not coerced - I applaud everyone for their individual choices, and do think that a man/woman who works a 9-5 in a corporate office, or stay at home moms or dads, are not morally any better or worse than those who choose to do something with their bodies others may not.

I’m also not making the equation that you cannot both choose adult-centered work, AND pursue your other creative goals and fantasies. In my particular circumstances, I just don’t see the balance working out well for the long-term goal of publishing this book that has been brewing inside me. Evolution is the name of the game; the future remains to be explored.

A little visual treat for making it this far. Care to tip me?

Housekeeping

Thank you for reading my posts. I try to keep the majority of my work free for the first two weeks. Paying subscribers can unlock my archived work from the last two years. If you enjoyed this article, would you consider becoming a subscriber to support me at $5/month, or I’d love it if you helped fuel my little caffeine habit by Buying Me A Coffee, or kept my mental health meet-ups with friends affordable. Thank you so much!

Waving goodbye through the back windows of our van, we climbed the winding hill and watched the golden sunset over our friend’s house. The white tower of their mother-in-law's unit faded from view — we’d spent the last few days crammed in there. Lying on the ground in my sleeping bag in the living room the night before, I tried to listen to my parents’ muffled voices behind the bedroom door, but all I could hear was my mother’s quiet sobbing. I turned my face to the side and stared at the haunting clown painting on the dark wall, tears sliding down my nose and into my mouth.

As we turned back down our own long gravel driveway, I could already see from the top of the road that my grandparents’ motor home was gone. All that was left behind was faded, worn-out turf and a few plastic lawn chairs — a pockmark on the face of our property. A haunted ground of smelted memories and unanswered questions.

My younger siblings chirped and chattered, curious about where Grandma and Grandpa had gone.

“They moved,” was all they were told. My older brothers exchanged glances and grimaces — they’d been briefed by our Dad on the situation and told to step up their responsibilities watching over the younger kids.

Unpacking my duffel bag in the room I shared with my two younger sisters and one of my little brothers, I shoved my socks and t-shirts back into the dingy white dresser drawers and flopped down on the bottom bunk. Pinching my legs through my jeans, I searched for any feeling inside my body other than numbness — all my fingers left behind were bruises nobody would ever see anyway.

Falling asleep back in my own bed that night, I knew I no longer needed to worry about the creaks in the night coming from a lumbering form — all he’d left behind was the ghost of a trauma I couldn’t yet name, even as I wrapped myself tighter in my blanket of shame. After all the secret-keeping I’d done, all I could do now was choke on the thick silence his misdeeds had brought into our house. He was just… gone, while I was left without any answers, only assurances that I’d never see him again. And I never did.

Within a week, I was giving my testimony to a female detective and showing her on a teddy bear, in a private room, where his hands had wandered on my own tiny parts of my body.

Twenty years later, I finally learned what had happened to my Grandpa Eugene and Grandma Mary when I sat down with my father to go over the details of his final confrontation with his own parents.

Watching my father’s eyes mist over, he paused to draw shaky breaths between recounting, as we tenderly uncovered old wounds over a cup of coffee.

A meeting at a diner arranged. A $3,000 check slid across the table. A verbal promise made to leave the county. A broken word discovered, a threat carried out. A phone call to the sheriff. An arrest. A volley of weasel words and lies launched. A disowning of their own son. Six months spent in county jail. A Nolo Contendere plea bargain struck. And a sixty-plus-year-old pedophilic sex offender freed. A whirlwind move out of state. Parole broken. Acrid phone calls and emails filled with hate lobbed at my father.

My father never saw his own father again after that breakfast confrontation — now twenty-four years ago, on his own birthday. His mother declared him dead to her. His sister cursed him out and cut off communication as she welcomed their parents into her home.

It was my father who was to blame, they said — he was trying to get away with molesting me and pin it on his own parents. I was called confused and a liar; just a lonely little girl making up stories for attention, who didn’t know who was really causing her harm.

Eventually, the vitriol and poisonous communications slowed to showing up only on my Dad’s birthday and holidays. My Grandpa made multiple attempts to contact me over the years through various emails and social media profiles he could find, right up until the year he finally died. I blocked them all.

When I got the news that he’d passed away — somewhere on the East Coast, grave unknown — I hunted down the one photo I’d still left buried in a box of mildewed polaroids.

Snapping on the lighter, I watched the ring of fire consume my blonde six-year-old head, and finally his balding one, his vulturous gaze locked on my body as he pushed me on the swingset.

Lying in the peace of my own bed now at thirty-six, I don’t believe in heaven or hell. I know that this evil, familiar boogeyman of old is a rotting sack of flesh and bones who died bitter and miserable, nobody weeping over his toxic last breath. And as I exhume these decades-old memories, I uncover her past with a tenderness and clarity that a fog of shame had once obscured in the years after he was taken away in handcuffs

Out of the pitchiest of graves and the black holes I keep falling into as I dive back for memories, there’s the faintest glimmer I can spy in these past reviews. And scratching her way towards a luminous surface is a soul that kept a little scrap of hope beyond being labeled a victim, knowing her story had already been whispered before she walked through various church doors.

In her hands, she holds the key to life on the other side of this veil of sorrow. And every click of the shutter beneath her finger brings her one step closer to feeling something more than numb again.

She wouldn’t know until fifteen years later that therapy had been turned down on her behalf after her abuse was exposed. But peering through a new viewfinder, the world called to her on the other side of the glass, whispering through a new lens words and future dreams she never had to share with anyone — secrets were safely kept between blades of grass, falling leaves, and a fresh wind that swept away the past.

My silence on here hasn’t been intentional. I can attribute it mostly to living life fully through my (work) lens. It’s been a whirlwind month-plus of photographing sports arenas, foreign dignitaries, swanky rooftop bar parties, VIP high-end restaurant openings, spring menu launches, editorial gigs, and a kaleidoscope of sparkling faces.

In between the heftiest workload I’ve taken on since the Biden Administration — yes, seriously, it’s been a painful, scrappy existence for a year and a half — I tried to maintain a disciplined workout schedule, flew to see my daughters, tweaked my back somehow, and stepped into an advocacy role for female friends of mine who exposed a community scandal involving a local “celebrity” chef. Nothing says talent like plating skills with a side of sexual assault and harassment, amiright??

Catching my breath and sanity between gigs and group text updates, I’ve kept my eyes on the breaking news headlines, and felt my pulse jump time and again as we witness the downward, demented spiral of a madman with access to our nuclear codes. My sleep health and screen time have both suffered, tethered together as I soul-search for the willpower to stop the panicked daily scroll habit.

My disgust for much of mankind remains, while my appreciation for some has grown out of this steaming pile of manure we are tasked with consuming every day. I keep the good ones close and connected to the betterment of my own community, while elevating those I see doing Herculean work with their voices, virtually and otherwise. As shocking and disgusting as it has been to swallow the acrid reality that rape academies exist — with online traffic dwarfing other legitimate commercial websites — or to digest the decades-long cover-up and cabal of evil men who enabled and encouraged Epstein and his cohorts, as a woman who has also experienced sexual abuse and assault by more than one perpetrator, I remain unsurprised.

But I do remain angry and invigorated to enact change in the remainder of my own timeline, which is a micro-blip in this vast universe. Artemis II visuals and vocals reinforced what we have forgotten as we trudge, head down, glued to our bad-news devices: we are the same thing on this one planet we call home, and we have to get through this together.

As I continue to think back and tap out the remembrances of my own past for this book, I recall so many faces and apologists who traipsed through my life, wreaking maximum damage with minimum consequence. Some more so than others. Some intentional, some not. But this last fall was the final straw for tolerating any more excuses, when my bumbling and tipsy date at the time, swept my current work camera body and lens onto the ground at his house, shearing my hopes for salvaging my favorite and oldest 55mm lens, and ensuring our own future ended that night by his follow-up actions. Consoling this 40-year-old man, who just as swiftly crumpled to the ground, blubbering and wailing over the mishap he’d caused, I held the crashed bits of my work tools and our crumbling relationship in a hug for one more night until the wine wore off. Two months of getting to know somebody somehow felt like weathering two years instead.

My pride overrode my pursuit of payment, and I dropped it along with the relationship. He hemmed and hawed about it anyway; ultimately, I never saw a Venmo reparation — our last transaction had been splitting a $45 dinner tab anyway; my dating taste really needs to at the very least upgrade to less broke crybabies.

When I saw him most recently out and about, he did ask for a t-shirt back that he’d left at my house months back, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t give me a mirthful smirk to inform him it was in the trash along with the lens he’d cracked. Our final interactions left me determined to stop giving my time and energy away for mediocrity, yet again. I KNOW refocusing that energy on myself, and my own writing and life will yield much better investments.

April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. And this year, it is also the first time I’ve felt myself truly turn a corner on a dream I’ve never quite been able to pluck from the fading ether of my subconscious — bringing this book to life. My story traverses far beyond a singular incident, isolated in the petrified past of a little girl who wasn’t given the tools to move past the perversions of a family predator, left wondering if her purity for a future patriarchal marriage was left intact or dented.

This book is not coming to fruition through the margins of my life… I am writing it as I am living it; co-existing with the perpetual heartbreak of leaving my children with a hostile and controlling ex and his family, while holding onto a titanium hope that our future is around the bend… just a few more years of circling the moon, my Darlings.

No Palantir can predict my future outcomes when I finally hit publish — birthing a story decades in the making, while digging graves for the specters of my past. But I do know one thing:

It cannot stay buried inside me any longer.

Car selfies snapped before prestigious photoshoots.

Housekeeping

Thank you for reading my posts. I try to keep the majority of my work free for the first two weeks. Paying subscribers can unlock my archived work from the last two years. If you enjoyed this article, would you consider becoming a subscriber to support me at $5/month, or I’d love it if you helped fuel my little caffeine habit by Buying Me A Coffee, or kept my mental health meet-ups with friends affordable. Thank you so much!

Something akin to a powder keg just went off in the hospitality industry of my not-so-little but still tight-knit, California Capitol hometown — and it’s only been a couple of days. On top of carefully Tetris-ing my work schedule through the rest of the month and packing my bags for a Saturday morning flight (destination: Northern Skies), I’ve been lending a listening ear to the ones still holding the pulled pins and checking in on friends riding out the shock waves.

Turns out, there’s only so long you can sweep accusations and behavior under the rug while the people who got dismissed watch you expand, collect accolades, and cash checks — all in the uncomfortable silence of witnessing and being on the receiving end of conduct that was never exactly star-worthy by any standard.

The best way to describe it is a horrifying, scabbed, and bruised collision — #MeToo meets a worker-led accountability campaign. Two movements, each powerful on its own, united by a swift cancellation policy in an era that has run out of patience for stroking fragile male egos, looking the other way, or worse, running headlong into brick walls in the pursuit of justice and recompense.

It took the weathered words of one 96-year-old woman to finally put a trash bag over a former figure’s statue and namesake in our local parks — and the mental, financial, and physical anguish of countless workers refusing to let their voices go hoarse — to watch a very prominent Danish chef finally step down.

As the horrors of our national and global landscapes continue to escalate — led by a corrupt and wanton would-be emperor and his sycophants — we clock in and out, smile for bosses, clients, guests, family, and friends, while the toll quietly rises with every weary tick of the clock, every headline consumed, every post and story liked.

We watch helplessly through our phones as babies, places, stories, animals, and neighbors are destroyed, downtrodden, starved, and erased — all while our oligarchic overlords play a maddening game of profit and loss. Disheartening feels like too small a word.

So it makes sense that community pushback, when it comes, is hard and swift. People can sense the give right now — and justifiably so. So much hurt feels outside the reach of our direct control. But hometown heroes fall the hardest.

Our behavior does not exist in a vacuum. Eventually, we all have to face the honest reflection of our words and actions — especially the ones carried out while claiming to love and support the community around us.

As the debt of man-made crises and violence continues to bleed into the earth’s deeply stained mantle, we turn and look around our own weary reserves of empathy and tolerance and ask ourselves: Do we feed it more?

In many instances, the answer is a resounding no. Take my name off your missiles. Give me back the keys to my own power. Get your hands off me. Restore what you stole and destroyed — and please, hold the crocodile tears while you do it.

When we open our accounts and tally the rising prices and tempers around us, what we should truly be feeding becomes crystal clear at the bottom of the ledger: Compassion.

The last few battery-draining days have left me recharging more than just my phone, as I’ve mulled over evocative memories of familiar schisms within the multiple congregations I attended through my childhood and teenage years. The phone would ring, the emails would ding, and up from the grave a resurrected morality horrorshow would spring. We thought it was buried! They exclaimed in fear.

The gossip was intoxicating for many, while streams of victims pulled their long sleeves down over their marks and sipped back the bloody silence on Sundays that was handed down by leadership and its supposed “accountability.” Sexual, physical, financial, and emotional complaints were handled internally, rarely seeing the light of day for the majority of plaintiffs — but the rumors would be quietly passed along.

When the whispers turned to waves and broke the dam holding back a righteous reckoning, the congregants would splinter — the illusion that one could ascend beyond answering for their crimes, shattered to the cheers of some, and the stubborn denial of others.

I find myself standing in a parallel universe of power-hungry, patterned, predatory behavior — propped up by the greased palms of a man’s world. It’s a mind-fuck to be told by modern-day society to get back into the kitchen, while simultaneously being expected to ignore the absolutely horrific mess that the men who already staked their claim there professionally are making.

Reaching for the one tool I know will cut through the wreckage, I hone it — scratches and nicks abound, but the edge is still sharp: Compassion.

After days of hard conversations, absorbing the influx of information, and sitting with the stories and swords lodged in other people’s chests for far too long, I’ve struggled to find my footing in this particular arena. We watch while friends and offenders grapple with each other to the noise of a rumbling crowd and hawked popcorn.

My personal life has not been touched by the individuals or businesses currently in the muck, and nobody is evaluating my choices and livelihood with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down — well, not yet, or I simply don’t see it.

But I will unequivocally stand in the corner of women who risk everything — personally and professionally, especially in small towns — to speak up about sexual abuse and harassment.

I will never downplay or silence toxic workplace behavior, particularly when it involves physical harm and financial fuckery. I will advocate for and amplify voices that were once muted, guiding them to appropriate channels so they are no longer suffering in silence—provided they are willing to go all in and shine a light on investing formerly protected perpetrators.

Compassion and companionship are what I can bring to this ongoing tussle. I know what it feels like to walk roads that are maddeningly lonely and intimidating, because I finally used my voice.

Do I believe people can change — and what does that even look like? Ego-bruised chefs demand to know why we can’t simply accept that they are HAPPY and CHANGED and NO LONGER BAD. The spite that lives in our souls from their former stabs feels raw and salted.

I believe people can and do change — I’ve witnessed it in my own family and life, to varying degrees. But I also believe there needs to be universal standards for morality and human rights within every workforce, especially one as heated as the food and beverage industry — standards that hold chefs, owners, and leaders equally accountable to safety, inclusivity, and environments free of harassment and abuse. That absence, or violation thereof, cannot be waved away with a “you just don’t understand how talented he is, or how delicious the concept.” Women, LGBTQ+ folks, and minorities are not smudged footnotes in the rulebooks that have disproportionately enriched white, cis men for decades.

A very seasoned and talented Chef, Andrew Zimmern, wrote a far more succinct article on what true and lasting reform within the hospitality industry would look like practically. I would encourage you to read it here.

Andrew Zimmern's Spilled Milk

NOMA, My View: Spilled Milk #433

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6 months ago · 50 likes · 9 comments · Andrew Zimmern

Here’s hoping some of these fresh and old wounds can help enact this change in my local restaurant and hospitality industry and abroad, and Chefs find more than just Jesus when reaching for their pocketbooks to rectify wrongdoings.

Twelve years ago, I landed on the shores of the hospitality industry as a much skinnier and more naïve version of myself — starving, short on resume experience, a freshly divorced and formerly stay-at-home mom of two. The community I live in now gave me more than just a job as a pretty okay dishwasher and a somewhat fumbling line cook. It gave me friendship and a purpose beyond servitude to a singular man who had been benefiting from my free labor and unquestioning loyalty.

Rolling my sleeves up has never been a problem — I’ve never shied away from a full plunge commitment, sometimes to my own detriment. I encountered rageful, manipulative, cold, exploitative, and harmful characters, more than once. I evolved through relationships, personally and professionally, and learned which bosom pals left scorch marks and which quieter ones earned my respect.

There have been so many challenges as I’ve jumped higher bars for lesser rewards than I’ve watched some of my counterparts clear — let alone the naysaying crowd on the outskirts of my life, reliably reminding me I’m no longer upholding my “Godly duties as a traditional wife and mother.”

Tonight, eight years into my photography career, I sit and reflect on all of it — the supposed glam, the broken glass, and the bottles of salve passed around as we repair fences once more and evaluate our own handiwork. Will it hold this time?

Gratitude for this community — the one I live in and work alongside — fills me as I send off fresh links to gleaming galleries. Compassion buds tender. Accountability sparks. And as I tell my stories and listen to others, I hold a steady flame for the possibility of change, forward momentum, and restored growth along paths we once thought unsolvable.

I cannot stop believing in the possibility of that future for myself, for my friends, and for our own children and the next generation of leaders and visionaries for a more abundant and safer world where we can all dream about our next plates and pictures.

Spring has sprung - and so has full-blown allergy season. Growth, yayyyyyy!

Housekeeping

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They say, " Don’t take your work home with you.”

But I like to go above and beyond - I take my work right into bed with me.

I wonder what’s deteriorating faster: my pixel rate or my mental health. But bills!

Driving my car around the block today, my ears keened to the creak of what I now know to be my control arms. Hah! I say, isn’t that a fitting depiction for these rudderless times, with doom just lurking around the corner? Wait… Is that light green or red? Damnit! There goes my eyesight, too.

Ding went one tension rod. Then the next. Finally, the whole thing collapsed.

My hands held the shriveled carcass of my lighting modifier. Job complete.

Upgrading my dying tools at several hundred a pop, just one. at. a. time.

They say, write like you’re running out of time, but nothing has enforced that notion better than the imminent threats of a maddened and diseased old king. And one who hates my very survival by showing resistance to the notion that I have a role in upholding HIS versions of a perverted Heaven on our one and precious earth that he has tried to rob of her mirth.

What is change worth, no matter how “noble and worthy” the cause, if the prices come at the horrendous sexual, emotional, and mental exploitation and rape of all women and children in every society? Traded and sold. Frontline-facing, sin-eating, worn-out, tattered, and patched soul either in service to or survival from the noxious death fumes of a failed Patriarchy.

My word count could never match the output of putrid gasseous incoherent ramblings of tyrants and their sycophants, but as I reflect on the toll of constantly having to quantify and evaluate my own worth in a world that constantly tramples and trashes our equality, I remember how important it is to size up my standards for my time and voice. May these stories never be held so close to the chest as a 96-year-old. I changed this for me.

But, no matter how old. How frail. How close to death’s veil… women change the world when they share their vulnerability and fears they eventually rose above to challenge and stomp out the Patriarchy in systems that kept us in check and silent for so long.

What deepest cuts and burials we continue to allow to happen to our mothers, daughters, non-binary, and trans communities anywhere on this green earth, will eventually happen to even the loudest naysayers who live at the expense of our lives within these privileged and cis male classes.

I walk the stories. I lift the stories. I speak the stories. I edit the stories. I dream the stories. I write the stories. I converse with the stories. I watch the stories told through someone else’s lens and voice in TrainDreams… floating away on the frail utility of man, backdropped by enchanting, fearful, and at times, feral Forest, deep in the Pacific Northwest mountains.

Creak, pop, crunch. I stand to take a pee again - hot and bothered and hydrating my cranky self, my muscles cramping from taking out the rageful strings that twist inside me, knotted up, and I type and pull and move my body, and repeat the motions again and again…

… I can’t figure out if I am curbing my real appetite for rest and recovery by feeding it with a work frenzy or curbing my sexual enthusiasm for men by reading the hourly influx of news, which is nourishing my doubled-down desires to bang out multiple chapters.

Patriarchy has to go. Matriarchy is begging to be fed. Please for the love and sanctuary of our ONLY earth, it’s time to dethrone these Fuckers.

One story and testimony at a time, and that latter bit, it IS catching up.

Okay, back to editing. Clients are paying. Take-home dinner is cooling. But my appetite is dwindling as sleep catches up. In my dreams, I’ll have published my own stories. Finally.

I’m just gonna waterfall, down dog, up dog, greatest stretch, happy baby, cow/cat/cow/cat, deep squat, gonna pretzel my way towards some buttier joints. Been too load-bearing lately, time to loosen up and pop a few vertebrae back into place to deal with the heaviness of this world’s shit so I can keep on going.

“My ex-boyfriend used to call me fat.”

The high I was on this last Monday, celebrating the Lunar New Year with friends, while surrounded by lion dancers and sipping scotch highballs, screeched to a temporary halt as I stared up at her, mouth agape at her statement. Cora is a goddess, standing several inches taller than me, her sleeveless fuchsia colored jumpsuit showing off sculpted arms she’s built through years of faithful workouts. I’ve watched this gorgeous friend of mine outlift multiple men at the gym we both attend, and her strength while executing heavy repetitions with smoothness and grace is a constant inspiration to me and a sheer joy to witness.

I looked incredulously at her and her current boyfriend, a longtime chef friend of mine. They are a sparkling match, and I adore how comfortable she is with teasing him and the care and tenderness he exhibits towards her in every arena so far.

“The fucking audacity. What an insanely shitty thing to say to you!”

Clapping back at the ghost of this man who was haunting our celebratory evening and my friend’s mind, she nodded, and we clinked glasses, laughing at how she’s left him in the dust and moved into more resilient and splendorous realms of her life.

I know a thing or two or ten about starving my own self physically, financially, and emotionally to shrink to a more palatable size for men’s appetites. And it’s through counting the scars and pit marks of my own soul from the sacrifices I’ve made over the years for them, with nothing to show, that I bristle even harder at this type of abusive behavior being exhibited towards friends of mine, or any woman.

We heard and saw that exact type of misogynistic mockery and pandering on full display in a locker room full of weak-willed men who laughed alone with the jokes of a sexist, rapist we’re forced to call “President.” A man who has a decades-long history of sexually abusing and demeaning women, and in this most recent terrorizing stint as leader supreme, has told more than one woman in his presence to “smile more,” and “be quiet, piggy.”

Those same puny-minded men, who laughed behind the backs of their female athletic peers who’d won gold just before their own victory, had to choke down their McDonald’s at the White House days later, widely ridiculed and mocked for their duplicitous double standards.

The U.S. Women’s hockey team, who turned down the fiddler’s invite to party with these silly little boys who’d yayayad at them in the presence of an adjudicated rapist and felon, already had, by comparison, been treated a few days before their victory to a sumptuous luncheon in Milan, hosted by Stanley Tucci. They are also being treated later this July to their own victory party in Las Vegas, funded by Flavor Flav and sponsored by a multitude of big brands who stepped up to the plate in the media fallout of that locker room phone call.

The dichotomy couldn’t be more stark in a country that has somehow managed to install pedophiles and demented chauvinists into the highest offices in the land, resulting in turning life into a living hell for anyone who’s not a white, cis male.

As I continue to sink much of my daily mental and emotional reserves into pulling samples of 12, 16, and even 25-year-old memories to blend through my storytelling lens alongside my ongoing lived experiences, it is painful to walk through crumbling rooms and touch moldy walls within myself, even in pursuit of this memoir that has surpassed 23,000 words and is steadily climbing.

A hollow shell of me — exhumed and laid out across these pages — has nearly starved to death more than once. She married young, church and family blessing the union, and took the vow of self-sacrifice a little too literally. It was a marriage til death did they part, and her ex did his best to bleed it out, taking everything she offered up after vows were exchanged— her money, her motivation, and her means to escape.

The homemade wedding dress living in a box of keepsakes under my bed — undoubtedly haunting my lucid dreams — was tailored for my former 110-pound frame. I'm not sure why I've kept it through dozens of moves and a lifetime of mayhem over the last sixteen years, but it serves as a sticky reminder of how committed I was to starving myself to play the part. I escaped one deeply miserable life as a stay-at-home daughter, only to become some random man in Montana's stay-at-home wife and mother — dulling and dimming in the despair of knowing she'd made a massive mistake, with no sanctified exit signs posted for a good Christian girl like her.

Today, in between tapping away at my keyboard on my memoir and walking the dog, I worked in a three-hour brilliantly splendid Sunday sandwich catch-up session at a local park with a group of girlfriends, also from my gym. Nobody commented on each other’s bodies or nitpicked anyone else in our circle for their looks or lifestyle choices. Our laughter was resplendent, the clouds danced in a blue sky overhead, and my social cup overflowed. This was peak girlhood, not whatever the hell I - and so many others - have experienced in our growing up and young adult years, being told by men and magazines to shrink, shrivel, and shut up; chiding others who don’t conform to these manic making rules.

And tomorrow, as I rise to tackle the start of one of the busiest work months for me in an entire year, I am reminded once again to embrace and celebrate the appetites that keep me hungering for more than just the crumbs men have been willing to part with my whole life. I’m building the damn table and setting the feast for myself first. And I’m applauding every other woman and person who is doing the same thing, especially despite the mockery and mildewy mindsets of a perverted, old, and failing guard.

As a photographer, I find beauty and inspiration in every body and life that yearns for more than awards at the expense of others’ mental or physical peace. As a movement enthusiast, I laud everyone who pushes and practices the spectacular feats of our temporary frames, no matter their size or conformity to current beauty standards. As a writer, I find meaning and peace in pursuing this hardest undertaking of all: regrowing a bounteous garden within myself from the ashes of all I burned to placate men and their gods.

I’m getting hungrier every day… my appetite is just getting sharpened, as I permit myself to reach for more.

Oh, the irony of consuming this ice cream during our ongoing American Nightmare.

Housekeeping

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I’m not sure if the news or my equally glum love life this last year++++ is finally catching up to the strenuous glare of news and social media consumption in this hollowed-out capitalistic-slow-rolling apocalypse we are all melancholically living out, but it’s enough to make me hunt for the worn-out pair of blue light Amazon trash glasses I do possess.

Noticing patterns. It’s a bit of my job, by the description, I feed people for my ongoing career I seem to be dragging out. Creating art is what I remind them. Seeing the light is what they nod back to me. My life is lived in texturizing, colorizing, cropping, cloning, smoothing, darkening, and granular adjustments. No really. Take a look at my photos; I never thought they would keep me going more than 6 months. 8 years ago.

Drat. I ran on. I meant to grab those glasses, *partially closes lid so as to not lose the upload.* Which? Be right back, babes. Here we go. *Snaps one take, as is, no edits.* Pinky swear. I look around the glare of reality reduced by short, hazy stops. My half-stacked piles of library books, a quarter read, my appetite was bigger than my stomach. Tacking on a return to tomorrow’s list or tasks now, I’m not sick.

Public faces, mine, hers, yours, theirs, ours, some random person on the other side of the world you’ve never met yet. I stared at the hidden ones of mine, saved up memories over years of glittery, curious, elated, and silly-sweet moments spent with the best company. Company I would keep over every single dazzling thing the world offered, if I could choose that for them and me.

Day meet bed. Ooops, face meet washcloth, teeth meet floss first. Sigh. The bed hog next to me inherently sighs, too. His furry rear pressed close, sapping my warmth as I fight for leg room. My thoughts sink as quickly as my body does, today was a humdinger back on my feet after a quick bout with a winter cold.

Hoping my dreams tonight aren’t quite as lucid. Alarm set for 6:10. Don’t you do it… no need for a last cycle on notifications. Just listen to the rain. Remember, don’t complain. At least choose your audience. Which can feel like the whole fucking wide world in these troubled… ah, damn. I’m recentering as I nod, off… here.

Catch Me Tomorrow Live 7am PST

Do I like this photo of myself? No. Pinky swore.

I had to log off of social media last week for a bit - not to hide from the news, but to recalibrate this humming anger inside every fiber of my being from being fed what feels like an endless loop of horror and justified rage. My algorithms aren’t exactly geared towards the consumption of airhead MAHA trad wifery or considerations for opposing viewpoints about child sex trafficking rings... You can’t exactly play the Devil’s Advocate when it comes to child rape, unless your name is Pam Bondi, and all you care about is the profit and loss ledgers of the monstrous, pedophilic orange god you serve, while soullessly ignoring the survivors standing right behind you. There is a jail cell waiting for that bitch.

Apps temporarily deleted, I determined to put my anger to good use for my own future. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse (which you can read about here), and as a mother of teenage daughters, my own life has been profoundly affected by the damage done by the crimes committed by a different - now also dead - old, white man who was my Paternal Grandpa. The trajectory of my future afterwards was also, in no small part, determined by the response of the Purity Culture circles and churches I was groomed by.

The growth I see in my own life now has been informed by an unflinching review of the systems that, while in my own case, did the right thing when I finally rang the bell and revealed to the horror of my parents, what had been occurring on our family property for a year and a half.

But, while I always carry undying gratitude for the immediate and unwavering belief in me and the action my parents took on behalf of protecting me from this pedophile, despite his family relationship to us, my processing of what came after is complex, because much of the recovery response centered around continuing to stigmatize and keep sexual health and education taboo and “dirty.” I dare to argue that my childhood lack of knowledge about my own body, understanding, and protecting it from the perversion of predators is what led to my abuse to begin with.

What came in the decade after bears almost as much weight and harm as the original transgressions committed towards me when I was a confused and terrified 12-year-old.

While he was arrested, jailed, got a bargain for pleading Nolo Contendere, and eventually left (after disowning his son -my father- for doing the right thing), I stood in the chaotic rubble my trembling confession wrought. Instead of therapy, I was handed turtlenecks. Instead of understanding my body was meant for my ownership and pleasure FIRST, nobody else’s, I was left feeling deeply ashamed and embarrassed by the hormonal changes that incited an adult man to notice and molest me. And while his abuse had stopped short of rape, so I could still be raffled off as “intact,” I spent years unable to look boys or men in the eye, my cheeks crimson red inside every church, knowing my story had preceded our family’s attendance there.

Purity Culture censured me for the body I awkwardly grew into. The label of survivor was withheld as I was encouraged instead to participate in online polls hosted by evangelical boys and men to determine which variations of the outfits, jewelry, makeup, and hairstyles we wore as teenage girls and young women were more or less helping incite their lustful thoughts. Body glitter was out, body-shaming was in. Whatever it took to prevent my brothers in Christ from stumbling over my very existence, I was willing to sacrifice it for their selfishness. I was told I needed to save every ounce of my sexual being and energy for the “sanctity” of marriage; otherwise, everyone in this world I had been raised in since birth would reject and shame me.

There was no time to assess the damage done as a victim of this system while preparing my whole life to consider myself “whole and complete,” but only as a Christian wife and soulmate of the man I trusted my family to arrange for me be with.

Before he even “committed” to courting me “with the intention of marriage,” my ex-husband and his family were taken aside, without me present, to be informed of my past “dings.” Considering this now, I was a pretty sweet deal, without him having to put anything down. At 21, I was a top-of-the-line (technically still virgin) highly functional model, complete with a robust homemaker education, undefiled by College or work outside the home for some other man, and packed full of all the bells and whistles to make an Insta-home for him and me, with babies to follow. There was no birth control inside my literal wooden “Hope Chest,” but it was packed to the brim with household items, and my - now our- bank account came flush with the 18K I’d been saving through working for my Dad’s company (at home of course). My Father handed me off at the altar to this man I’d only met six times before we said “I Do,” and a week later, my new husband drove us away from my childhood home in California, to Northern Skies in the truck I’d bought with my own money a year prior, stuffed with all our wedding gifts and the meager belongings I’d amassed as a stay-at-home daughter.

The story of leaving that marriage is one I’ve penned countless times. Today, I want to focus my anger into a better understanding of how the abuse that occurred to me 25 years ago, pre-marriage and kids, was against me then and continues to be by the defenders of Conservative Christian Fundamentalism.

The man I once called Grandpa is long gone and buried somewhere I don’t care to know about. But his incestuous legacy was leaving me with soul bruises that others kept pressing on, darkening and deepening, all while denying that their treatment of me was wrong. Every choice I made after the fact, which they deemed “immoral,” was chalked up to my childhood molestation. Every time I tried to speak and live openly and positively about the blossoming of my sexual health that I’d worked hard to recover from the pearl-clutching vice of Purity Culture, some estranged family member or former acquaintance would pop up to screech that I was only behaving this way because I must be permanently twisted in the brain by the decades old perversions I suffered at the hands of a dead pedophile.

The same people who once controlled my life, and educated me through books and sermons and strict admonitions that I was only “worthy” of being accepted by one of their male candidates into a “holy and happy” marriage if I saved myself sexually for him, are the same ones who in one breath are condemning me now (and any other woman) for my post-divorce autonamous and consensual adult sexual choices, while justifying their vote for and defense of a sitting president who is at the heart of the largest pedophile and sex trafficking ring and cover up in our entire American history.

Sigh.

The predominantly white Christian sector that helped install this most hideous abuser of all, who was friends and likely co-conspirators with literal monsters, and has surrounded himself with scyophants and harpies who justify every illegal and immoral action done in worship of his name, wants to eat their cake and have it too. They want to hyper-sexualize and objectify women for the sole purpose of satisfying their husbands in their delusional traditional “homemaker” roles, while looking the other way when abuse occurs, denying it, or worse, blaming the victim by picking apart their appearances and behavior, while the perpetrators walk around Church sanctuaries scoping out their next victims. Forgive and forget is a pattern I’ve seen occur over and over. Unless it’s something I did that crosses their religious code of conduct.

My parents have tearfully apologized now that I am an adult, and I accept their sorrow while also recognizing that they need to work on reparations for the damage their dogmatic lifestyle and parenting choices did to my life. Even after my childhood trauma, they’ve had to face the monster of unchecked sexual abuse inside some of their former circles, and I’m thankful it rattled them to their core and changed the course of some of their beliefs.

I continue to fight the temptation to shrink and hide my own sexual expression and enjoyment, and refuse to remain small in MY life, so those who haven’t fought for my survival and recovery feel more comfortable with my existence.

What we saw on display yesterday during our Nation’s congressional hearing, in a room crowded with survivors, was disgusting. Especially coming from a woman who must have no soul after she has looked the most disgusting truths about these monsters in the face and decided to still bet on covering up for her demented and vile Master.

This system of unbridled Capitalistic male dominance always has, and always will, abuse, murder, and do maximum damage to us ALL - I do not see any hope for this country until we reckon with the origins of White Christianity and Nationalism as we know it, unless we acknowledge that it’s time to dismantle and rebuild this system and trajectory we are on. Until we can collectively dream of a future where raping little girls, boys, and controlling women’s bodies their whole fucking lives isn’t given a pass because, “Well, haven’t you seen the stock market??” then this country is cooked.

The horrific truth is that human sanctity, no matter the color of their skin or immigration status, the protection of children, and the equality of women have always been weighed on the scales of predominantly white men’s profits and pockets. This was normalized through colonization and the slave trade, and reimagined now that the elite rich realized how much further they could push the boundaries of morality while skirting the law on private islands, jets, and mega yachts.

We need to burn it all down. I will not tolerate this future for myself, my daughters, or anyone else’s children.

My rage was well-utilized this last week as I let my thumbs recover from scrolling and focused my mind on continuing to build my own lasting legacy, free from monsters, breathing easily from the constraints of the chastity movement of my past, and fearlessly focused on doing one thing for MY future and my daughters: Persisting.

May you find the courage to, as well.

P.S. That top image of a little girl in pigtails, hands on hips, defiantly posed against a wide sky, is a tribute I walk past every day on my way to my gym. She is me, she is all of us who are fed up with kowtowing to authority that enables our abusers to walk free while their victims and survivors are dealing with the aftermath. Believe women. Stay strong. Stay stubborn in pursuit of the truth and justice.

Housekeeping

If you enjoyed this article, would you consider becoming a paid supporter at $5/month or supporting me on Buy Me a Coffee at any amount that works for you? I’m keeping my Substack newsletter open to all for the foreseeable future, but I always appreciate your support of a semi-starving artist’s lifestyle. Thank you for reading!

Anna

When I woke up this morning, I knew I’d forgotten something in the haze of yesterday evening’s flirtations as I smiled and sipped on refills of my drink, shrugging off the stress of a heavy work cycle right now and incessant worries about the state of the world.

The face opposite mine familiarly grinned and laughed as we caught up. I could drink him in visually all day…

Housekeeping

As always, I try to keep the majority of my work on Substack free and open to all - I don’t feel comfortable sharing some of my erotic work without a paywall in place. If you want to support me outside of Substack, I’d love any contribution on Buy Me A Coffee that you want to send. Only a Substack paid subscription can unlock the next installment of this article, however. If you are a supportive friend or family member, you’ve been warned to view and read with sensitive eyes.

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When something’s good, it’s never gone. Love’s got the world in motion, and I know what we can do.

World in Motion by New Order has been playing on repeat for the past hour in my house. I wonder what kind of music Alex liked to listen to on his way to work or the grocery store or gym. I muse on what Renee played for her kiddos as she dropped them off at school for the last time/. Guess we will never know.

It’s been a full 24+ hours since yesterday morning’s events.

You probably know which ones.

The moment none of us can unhear, where one gunshot led to a peppering response of ten launched by a handful of masked goons.

37 year’s old was extinguished in less than 37 seconds of a volley of ammo sent into his prone back, head likely contussed from the endless bludgeoning, face shoved into the icy cement, eyes doused in pepper spray just seconds before as he put his physical body between a woman who had just been shoved to the ground and the fat ICE thug who had double-handed hurled her there.

Alex Jeffrey Pretti’s last words before his final breath ceased vaporizing in the sub-zero Minneapolis temps, were, “Are you okay? “

As I rewatch the video from multiple different angles, it cannot be more crystal clear that the immediate lies our highest overlords are spinning are slipping - just like their agents do on literal ice in a city that’s smaller than my own. Not only did he NOT have the gun he was legally conceal carrying in his hands (Minnesota is an OPEN CARRY STATE BTW, a literal wet dream for 2A Incels), his immediate kneejerk reaction was NOT to do harm, and it WAS NOT to reach for the 9mm pistol holstered in the small of his back… it was to protect the smaller frame of the unarmed woman next to him who was trying to escape being mauled by the masked men with murder on their minds.

Read that again. He held up his hands, no gun in them, stepped his lanky legs in front of the pigs that pursued a fellow citizen, and was promptly executed by the same state-sanctioned goons. Presumably pissed off that their original target - said fleeing woman - was blocked by Alex’s tall and unwavering frame. We know that he had looked death in the eyes so many times before as an ICU Nurse at the Minneapolis VA. He did not budge when he met it this icy morning on January 24th, 2026.

Just like I don’t know Alex’s musical preferences, I cannot guess at what religious beliefs he practiced, but they unequivocally included a heartbreakingly selfless principle of “laying down one’s life for a friend.” Greater love had no one in that moment than Alex, even as the State played Judge, Jury, and Executioner, stripping him of his 1st and 2nd amendment rights and filling his back with lead.

Alex didn’t look like “the enemy of the state” they want you to believe is lurking on every crack in the cement in every urban street of this massive country. He was a tall, young, white male, with a track record of being the very best of us: a helper, a healer, and a hero who uplifted and comforted others as they made their various transitions through the pain and suffering inflicted by their service to this country.

This is not to minimize or compare the deaths of dozens of others over the last 24 months of this Dept. of Homeland Terror has inflicted. I weep for the babies, toddlers, Fathers, Mothers, and Grandparents that have been snatched, disappeared, chained strangled, sexually assaulted, and murdered with impunity by a terrorist organization our tax dollars are funding. What happened yesterday should be a chilling mile marker in the 1946 Poem penned by German Pastor, Martin Niemöller post-WWII. We are at the final stanza of the poem, btw.

Almost 12 years ago, on March 13th, 2014, I came face-to-face with an armed squad of Federal agents, an ATF SWAT team whose investigation into my ex-husband’s less-than-legal worship at the altar of gun ownership culminated in a raid, search and seizure of our property that snowy Montana morning, in the shadow of a stern mountain range.

Growing up in a Christian, Republican big family, with anti-establishment/science/choice/higher education values that pre-dated MAGA, I watched my Dad routinely cut checks for the NRA, and take my brothers onto the further stretches of our thirty-six acres to target practice with .22 shotguns.

Fulfilling my supposedly predestined role as a female of becoming a stay-at-home wife and mother, playing it out with submission and support for whatever my new husband wanted to do or believe in, I upheld the tenets of the Patriarchal systems that we had been groomed into by our homeschooling parents and their dogmatic religious circles,

Turns out, what my ex was really into was owning as many firearms (some of questionable legality), as he could buy or make. The latter was how I found myself alone and sitting on the floor of my living room, with both my daughters - still in diapers- clasped close on my lap. I’d barely secured the evidence they were searching for beneath our feet, moments before they knocked on my door, knowing that my daughters would have lost both parents that day if they’d discovered the arsenal piled in his office closet.

My militia cosplaying ex had taken his feverish pursuit of new, steel toys too far, as he flipped parts kits on Gunbroker.com for the dollars to keep building up his own arsenal, “and provide for his family.” My monthly grocery budget for our family 4 was 1/4 the amount he’d drop on a single purchase of another build.

Those who have been following me for a while already know what a pivotal role firearms played in breaking wide open my already shitty marriage, as my subservience to a 2A Militia fantasizing male met the inevitable sacrifice of my own selfhood. I’ve lost years, sleep, and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the last 16 years since I said “I Do,” to a man who took everything from me (including easy access as a parent to my daughters), as his ego fluffed with the worship I was instructed to lavish on him.

My time of being quiet and submissive is long over.

I tell my stories, not to detract from the brutal importance of elevating the pain and harm being inflicted on others around our nation, but to scream from proverbial rooftops - perhaps even literal, soon - that the so-called Christian, gun-worshiping, coalition of folks from my past who once preached minimal government interference in how they wanted to raise their families and live their lives, have turned out to be nothing more than boot-licking SCYOPHANTS who would never, EVER live like Jesus did, up until his own murder by State Sanctioned Soldiers in Service to Religious Hypocrites.

I reject my past affiliations and associations with those people who are now eerily silent as we watch one Civilian execution after another.

If the pastors preaching in your pulpits today are not condemning yesterday’s actions, and the preceding deaths and violations of liberty and human rights guaranteed to ALL in this country, no matter their race, creed, or gender, then you are not worshipping the Jesus I read about.

No part of me identifies as a Christian anymore. Not in the sense that I close my eyes and pray to a deity that Fascist Cucks are using a cover to enable votes to get away with the murder and brutalization of their neighbors.

But I know that the Jesus - the man I read about in the New Testament - would have strode boldly into these fake temples worshipping their orange-fake gold calf, whip in hand, and anger in his heart as he overturned their grifting tables. And he would have done exactly what Alex did yesterday - step into the fire for another human being in distress.

I frequently walk around my California town with a camera in my hand, as a proud resident now, going on 11 years - our population numbers 107,219 more than Minneapolis; I meet friendly faces and exchange hellos almost every time I step out of the house. And I wonder when it will be our time to witness a crushing force of masked evil and hatred descend in unmarked vehicles with maximum firepower and unchecked orders to “Do harm,” outcomes and multiple witnesses be damned or vanished. Many cities around our country are under this siege by a bottomless maw of thugs in service to our Federal Government, and a decompensating would-be-Mad King.

My 37th birthday is in August. We are all going to die eventually, hopefully most of us at ripe, old ages surrounded by loved ones, with our walls covered in the framed memories and transcripts of a life well-lived.

But if I don’t make it until then, identified at some point by the State as an ANTIFA product of a childhood raised in the 80s and 90s, radicalized by Disney’s Animated Robin Hood, and a simple embrace of Christ-Instructed Empathy, let this be my anthem for my family, friends, and neighbors to find:

I Stand Against State-Sanctioned Terror, Murder, and Deceit. I reject the Evangelical Churches that are not rallying behind humanity right now. And I call down hypocrisy on the heads of the 2A clowns who want to eat their lead and have it too.

Fuck ICE and abolish it forever.

Don’t let the fire in your lungs sputter. Express yourself now more than ever.

I prefer to keep my camera handy now instead of a gun.

Housekeeping

If you enjoyed this article, would you consider becoming a paid supporter at $5/month or supporting me on Buy Me a Coffee at any amount that works for you? I’m keeping my Substack newsletter open to all for the foreseeable future, but I always appreciate your support of a semi-starving artist’s lifestyle. Thank you for reading!

Anna