As someone who consumes a lot of true crime, who is fascinated with psychology and the justice system, it takes a surprisingly horrific case to bring me to tears. In fact, it’s rarely ever happened. My brain is fantastically good at compartmentalizing and processing such things. But this case? It sits with me.

Her case is currently in trial, with her ex-husband testifying in the most heartbroken courtroom I have ever seen. He does not blame the woman he loved, he does not paint her a monster. Why? Because he was there. He saw, he knew, and he knows.

Lindsay was suffering. Perhaps from Postpartum Depression, Bipolar Disorder, Postpartum Anxiety, perhaps even more. She sought help in all the ways we’re told to. Doctor after doctor, all pumping her full of medication after medication. Layering on top of each other, a cocktail of mind-altering drugs. If someone took this many different illegal drugs at once, we’d all likely have no problem nodding our heads at the theory that they weren’t of sound mind.

But this case? It’s become a miserable circus full of wild speculation, political ideologies, name calling, and heartbreak. At the core, there’s pain. At the core, there’s failure. But the failures I want to talk about today are, perhaps, very different than the failures most people are droning on about. I’m going to speak from experiences as well as evidence, statistics along side first hand accounts. Because, again at its core, this is a case full of grey nuance. This is not the black and white slam sunk justice many people would like it to be. And it opens up some really wide spreading conversations about justice, mental health, medication, and the way we prioritize pain.

Overview

In case you don’t know the Lindsay Clancy case, I need to give a brief overview of events as the courts have presented. This is the most factual account I can share, we can speak to speculation later.

Lindsay Clancy, at age 36, killed her three children. She had a history of Postpartum Anxiety with previous births, but it became more severe after her third pregnancy and birth. She sought treatment in various way for several months, was prescribed many different mood-altering medications throughout the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. In January of 2023, she strangled her children to death before attempting suicide. She stated hearing a voice telling her to kill her children as well as experiencing hallucinations and suicidal ideation.

She has admitted to the murders and has been standing trial. A trial with the sole intent of determining whether she was mentally aware of her actions at the time.

The Drugs

While the defense is pleading not guilty by reason of insanity, specifically Postpartum Psychosis and Bipolar Disorder, there is a much deeper, darker conversation to be had about her mental health. In the four months leading up to the murders, Lindsay was prescribed a litany of medications. I’ll add the list here, noting that it includes changes to dosages.

· Sept. 15, 2022: Sertraline (25 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Oct. 21, 2022: Lorazepam (0.5 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Oct. 26, 2022: Hydroxyzine (25 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Oct. 26, 2022: Lorazepam (1 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Oct. 26, 2022: Buspirone (5 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Nov. 2, 2022: Lorazepam (0.5 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Nov. 9, 2022: Buspirone (5 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Nov. 16, 2022: Trazodone (50 mg) – Kayvon Izadpanah, MD

· Nov. 21, 2022: Fluoxetine (10 mg) – Julie Paul, RN, CNP

· Nov. 25, 2022: Zolpidem (5 mg) – Julie Paul, RN, CNP

· Nov. 25, 2022: Mirtazapine (7.5 mg) – Julie Paul, RN, CNP

· Nov. 25, 2022: Clonazepam (0.5 mg) – Julie Paul, RN, CNP

· Nov. 30, 2022: Quetiapine (25 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 6, 2022: Diazepam (5 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 7, 2022: Diazepam (5 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 7, 2022: Quetiapine (100 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 9, 2022: Diazepam (5 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 13, 2022: Diazepam (2 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 16, 2022: Lamotrigine (25 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Dec. 19, 2022: Diazepam (2 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 19, 2022: Quetiapine ER (300 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 21, 2022: Quetiapine (100 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Dec. 22, 2022: Quetiapine (25 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Jan. 5, 2023: Tradozone (50 mg) – Alia Goodheart, MD

· Jan. 5, 2023: Lorazepam (1 mg) – Alia Goodheart, MD

· Jan. 9, 2023: Diazepam (5 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Jan. 12, 2023: Trazodone (150 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Jan. 13, 2023: Diazepam (2 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Jan. 16, 2023: Diazepam (2 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Jan. 16, 2023: Amitriptyline (10 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

· Jan. 19, 2023: Diazepam (2 mg) – Rebecca Jollatta, NP

· Jan. 23, 2023: Diazepam (2 mg) – Jennifer Tufts, MD

Let that sink in for a moment.

I’ll jump ahead here, a spoiler if you will, and tell you what I think happened. I think Lindsay had severe PPD or PPA and sought treatment. I believe the wild cocktail of drugs she was on altered her mental state to the point of psychosis. I won’t get into the weeds too terribly here, but look up the side effects of each and every one of these drugs. Look up interactions. Consider that those are only reported. Look into what weaning and changing dosages can be like. Consider all of that, on top of a true mental disorder.

While the defense might not have gone in this direction legally, which I think is wise, I believe it to be true. And I’m not the only one. This topic is bigger, much much bigger. This topic needs its own hefty post, and I’ll write it. Because the pharmaceutical pressure, the drugs like candy, the medication as a first step is all so very scary. Heartbreaking. I want with my entire heart for the medical industry at large to pay for this, but I’m not naive enough to believe that will ever happen.

I don’t bring up this list of drugs as an excuse, as you’ll see. I don’t bring it up to negate what Lindsay did. I also don’t intend to disparage the use of medication in general. But I think most of us can look at this and cock an eyebrow. So, let’s.

It’s on Her

As we discuss this case, the horrible loss of innocent children, I want to make one thing crystal clear: Lindsay Clancy did this. At the end of the day, she is at fault. There will be blame slung everywhere, and I will contribute to that – because this is complicated and she was failed. The failures were huge, but at the end of the day it was still her hands which killed her babies. Nothing will ever change that, and nothing could ever excuse that.

There is a seeming inability in today’s culture to hold two ideas in tandem. To realize that two things can be true at the say time, without being at war with each other. Was Lindsay Clancy a victim? Yes. Was Lindsay Clancy a perpetrator? Also, yes. This is difficult and often painful to reconcile in our minds. How can an admitted murderer also be a victim? It happens more often than you might think.

The internet has become a wild west of ugly ugly words. We are seeing some of the worst of people throughout the covering and uncovering of this case. Blame slinging all over, name calling, finger pointing, you name it. From all the sides, believing all the things. I don’t want to venture too deeply into the weeds with theories, but instead discuss the why behind people being so up in arms here. And to do so, I need to make my stance extremely clear, lest you roll your eyes and call me a dipshit (again). I feel intense, heartbreaking, tearful empathy for Lindsay. I also believe there must be justice for three beautiful little children who were murdered. I support Lindsay in her mental health battle, but I do not support anyone who kills their babies.

Wild, huh?

Never Say Never

I deleted an entire portion of this section. One I carefully and intentionally wrote. Because I’ve learned some experiences and words ought not be shared. And as much as I rail against that, I also am coming to understand that this conversation, the harsh and brutal reality that women can face, might be too much to hash out right now. And so publicly.

So, I’ll say this a little differently: I have struggled. I was lucky enough not to experience anything extreme postpartum, but I have felt the ravages of out of control hormones. I have felt the unique pressures of motherhood. I have experienced, often, the challenges of a mind that runs away with you. And still, even in these broad strokes, writing that brings me intense levels of shame. Because it is so shameful to be a ‘bad mother’ for even a moment. It is so shameful to resent your child in your most exhausted days. It is so shameful to ask for help, to admit defeat, to be a bad mom.

We are told, either in words or our own lofty expectations, that we ought to shut up and be selfless.

Which is why we say:

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“I don’t need help.”

It’s not our husbands’ fault. They ask to help, to take over.

I cannot express enough how our own inner monologues and self-induced pressures keep us from asking for help. I do it every fucking day. Not because I’m a control freak, not because I don’t think my husband can hack it, not because he doesn’t ask to help. But because I want to be able to do it all myself, I feel like I should be able to and if I can’t I’m a failure.

And I know that’s me. But I also know that’s a lot of women, a lot of moms. And from all I’ve read about Lindsay Clancy as a mother, I think that was her, too. Add in a brain that was off the rails from hormones and drugs, and there was no hope for her. If I was her, I would have felt so out of control in my own mind and body that I would have focused almost obsessively on being the best possible mother. I would mask the ever-loving hell out of my pain.

Does this absolve her? No. Not at all. It is no excuse. Only a fraction of understanding. A moment of reflection.

When mothers say we could all be Lindsay Clancy, that’s what they mean.

My husband and I were talking this over this morning, yet again, and we came to an interesting conclusion. Men see things very factually, very black and white logic. Women see the million shades of color. And there is an incredible impasse between these two when it comes to this case, in particular. And while I want to just shout that men will never understand (because they won’t, and that’s factual), that doesn’t help anyone. Because women will also never understand men and their own reactions to this. We are different and never before is that so painfully obvious to me. Men want women to say “I would never hurt my babies”. My perfectly health brain says that without faltering. My husband’s perfectly healthy brain says that without faltering. But never cannot be true if a brain fails. If a brain changes out of our control. Drugs, damage, psychosis.

So, I cannot say ‘never’ for the future broken brain that could occur.

Yes, yes, all of us as women and mothers fucking love our babies. We would never ever hurt them. I would bet everything that Lindsay would have said the same thing about her children – “I would never hurt my babies.”

But a broken brain breaks promises.

That is why women say they could be her. Because a brain can break, and then she is no longer her. No one sets out to experience psychosis. I know men’s reaction to hearing this is strong, visceral, primal. It is to protect and they may see this as a threat (again, long conversation with my husband has opened my eyes to men and hopefully his to women) and God love them for their protection. But women didn’t intend to break their men. They wanted to share, to explain, to express. It got lost in translation and that language disconnect between men and women is, well, kind of unsolvable.

The Husband

If you’ve been following the utter shit show that is the internet during this trial, you might think you know where I’m headed here. But you don’t. So, hang on tight.

Firstly, Patrick Clancy didn’t kill his children and didn’t attempt to kill his wife and frame her. The accusations are insane to me. Now, I do want to express my gratitude for the hive-mind for asking questions. We, as wannabe detectives, have seen enough cases where men kill their entire families for money or reputation or a mistress to know we have to ask the questions. And truth be told, the real detectives here should have asked enough questions to erase any doubt. But they didn’t. So, now the internet is trying to do that job. They have taken his new wife looking like Lindsay and how he said “she killed the fucking kids” on the 911 recording, they have gathered up doubts about CTV footage and shoes and crushed pills and knots and decided he is evil.

Could he be? I couldn’t say it’s impossible. But – it’s so unlikely that I think we ought to all chill the fuck out.

Even if you haven’t jumped on the ugly bandwagon of outright blaming him for murder, you might be in the camp of thinking he’s a horrible husband and father. And you know what, maybe he was. But the evidence doesn’t show me that. The evidence shows me a man who got ignored. We’ve all been so busy rallying behind the mother, the wife, so busy shouting about women’s mental health (all rightfully, if not a bit too loudly), the husband and father got lost in the mix.

Here is a man who is watching the woman he loves fall apart, dissolve before his eyes. Here is a man who is financially holding the house together. Here is a man trying to balance supporting and advocating for his wife, and protecting his babies. Here is a man who nobody seems to have checked on. And it breaks my heart.

How many times did a family member or friend ask him, ‘Hey man, are you doing okay with all this? What can we help you with?” I would bet you not often. Let’s consider for a moment a flipped script. A husband is going through, say, PTSD after being in the Army or police force. He is struggling, medicated, expressing the fear he might hurt his children or himself. How much support do you think his wife would be getting? Outpourings. As it should be.

And there’s that double standard again.

I read someone say Patrick wasn’t helping enough because he was working. Of course he was working, how else are bills paid? Would going broke help anything? Oh, but he went out to brunch with friends and took a trip. Yes, and maybe, just maybe, Lindsay encouraged that because she loved him and likely saw how her struggles were hurting him.

Jesus, if I was in that place with my husband I would be trying to help him through as much as he would be helping me through. That’s a team.

He went to doctors with her, told them she was getting worse with certain medications, expressed his own worries and fears. Advocated.

Patrick’s parents offered to take the kids overnight for a break, and he declined. Apparently in the eyes of the internet that makes him a bad husband. Or maybe, Lindsay said no. Maybe, she didn’t want them out of her sight. Maybe, she didn’t want to burden anyone. Maybe Patrick even knew this without asking her.

I feel out of sorts writing this section. Disorganized. And that’s because I’m furious. While there are a thousand people rallying around Lindsay and a thousand people saying she’s a cold blooded murdered and a thousand more focusing on the babies, where is the support for Patrick? Where is the support for the man who, by the evidence was trying hard to be there. To be what his wife needed him to be. If he had sent her off to an institution, he would be getting destroyed publicly for that, too – for not ‘fighting hard enough’ for her. And yet now, it’s that he didn’t protect his children enough. What an impossible and painfully position to be in.

Maybe he didn’t get it right, but nothing shows me neglect. Nothing shows me evil. Nothing shows me absent. Much of what I see on the internet is based from experience, and that’s okay but we need to be transparent when we are speaking from emotions and personal experience, not just facts.

Listen, I’ve had shitty partners and I’ve had a good partner (yeah, I married that one). And from experience, I would place everything we know to be true about Patrick’s actions in the good category.

And if I’m wrong?

Then I will admit it, reassess my opinions on Patrick, and not take back a word about men’s mental health.

It has become culturally chic to blame men. And it’s got to stop.

The Double Standard and Chad Doerman

I’ve seen a plethora of those who black and white vilify Lindsay as a cold-blooded murderer comparing her to men who have committed familicide (the killing of one’s entire family). The rhetoric is simple: we didn’t support these men when they claimed mental disorder – we called them monsters and threw them in prison. Therefore, Lindsay Clancy should also be thrown in away as a monster.

That’s one direction to go. I went a different direction.

I first saw this comparison in relation to Travis Decker, who took his three little girls on a camping trip, only to kill them and disappear himself. Now, there were hints that he had suffered from PTSD, but beyond that we knew, and know, nothing about his seeking of help, his mental state, or his reasons for killing his children. There simply isn’t enough information, but it planted a seed in my mind.

Chad Doerman, on the other hand. When I saw this comparison pop up, my heart stopped. This is the debate that really flicked on a lightbulb for me. He claimed to hear voices before killing his children. He didn’t run. He was eerily calm afterwards on bodycam footage. He never denied it. He sobbed in the courtroom. He pled not guilty by reason of insanity, later changing it to guilty. Was he really guilty, was he really insane? He said he was doing it “for God” and that he had been planning the murders. Does that mean he was sane, or deeply in delusion? We’ll never know. But I know we didn’t ask questions. We hated him. The same women empathetic to Lindsay hated Chad.

No, he didn’t suffer massive hormonal swings of postpartum. But do we know what his mental state really was? Did anybody really ask? Shit. As a society, did we just shrug our shoulders at a man claiming mental suffering without a second thought. We were all so damned callous, so assuming he was ‘just a monster’. I was guilty of this. I remember how deeply that case bothered me, how the details were so disturbing I never considered he was genuinely mentally unwell. Was he on drugs? Were they prescribed or illicit? What about depression, anxiety, PTSD, Bipolar? We don’t know because we didn’t ask.

But when a woman kills her children, we ask. At least, most of us. We ask because in our minds (women’s minds especially, because empathy) a mother killing her children is so wildly unfathomable that there must be a bigger reason. What a wild double standard we all just seem to accept.

We have to treat these events similarly. Either there is no more change of not guilty by reason of insanity, or we have to thoughtfully explore that possibilities for both men and women. Fathers and mothers. Husbands and wives.

The Hormone Argument

We shouldn’t allow our hormones to be an excuse for murder, because then as women we’re thought less of. Oops, newsflash: we are incredibly controlled by our hormones. I’m sorry, but it’s fact. Hormones make women and men biologically different (oops again, I’m stepping all in it right now) and women are painfully enslaved to hormones during and after pregnancy. It is, again, factual. That doesn’t mean we should be excused because of it, but it still matters.

When I’m grumpy and short tempered due to hormones, that is a reason but not an excuse. I try never to allow them to rule me, but I am deeply aware that my hormones are a driving force of my behavior. This is normal. What we’re talking about with Lindsay and postpartum is abnormal hormones. No, again, not a justification for murdering your children. But is it a reason why a mother might begin to lose her grip on reality? You betcha.

If we want to dive a little deeper, maybe we should say the ugly part out loud: women are ruled by hormones vastly more so than men. It’s the beautiful part about us that make us able to bring life into the world. And maybe, just maybe, we’re different. Maybe, just maybe, we need to stop trying to be “equal to” men and realize we’re so damn different.

But I Didn’t

I am so glad you, internet woman, didn’t experience the chasm of depression after childbirth or the angry grip of anxiety. I’m so glad you, internet woman, didn’t lose grip on reality or become numb from drugs. Honestly, I truly am. But saying “well, I didn’t…” like that means someone else couldn’t have is just so very ignorant. Because most women take anti-depressants and don’t go into psychosis doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Just because a woman can gather control of her mental state without medication doesn’t mean others can. We are all different. Nuance, people.

The Solution

This it the case and these are my opinions, as tidy as I could get them.

This isn’t a simple case, there isn’t a simple answer. This is not just black and white who-dun-it. This is deeply complex, intensely painful, and the reach is so broad that we’re talking about some seriously huge changes.

Did you know Lindsay called a Suicide hotline, only to be told they couldn’t help her because she didn’t have a plan to take her own life? That can’t be okay, that can’t be something we accept.

Of course we know that there needs to be a massive overhaul of the medical and psychiatric systems in the U.S. I would personally like to see a shift away from side-effect heavy medication being a first step by medical professionals, because those risks are so very dangerous.

But what about an even bigger conversation about Postpartum and why there are these issues arising? And did they exist historically or are Postpartum disorders a modern problem? I have a theory, and I’ll quickly lay it out here: I would like to see the data correlating Postpartum disorders and the level of medical intervention during pregnancy, birth, and directly after birth. My theory is that with the relatively recent, historically speak, rise of highly medicalized pregnancies and births, Postpartum disorders have also risen. I am not the person to do that research, but I’d like to see it. My gut says there is in a connection there.

And what about community? Oh, I know. I’ve said over and over not everybody needs community like people tell me. And it’s true, I’m a solo kind of wolf. But, I was brough to tears remembering the kindness I received in those first weeks after birth. The swooping up into the wings of a collective mothering by women in my community. Meals and dishes done and a smiling face and even just a kind word. It’s a tired, lonely place, even if you have the most amazing husband on earth, there is something to be said for the empathy of women, of mothers.

So.

My husband floated an idea late last night, and I’m adding it in here now. After a long long conversation about this, where we were able to hash out our thoughts and perspectives, and after I pleaded that there still needed to be an answer and we both conceded that men might not be part of that answer, he asked this: What about a group of volunteer women, mothers themselves, preferably who have walked through hard Postpartum journeys, who could do house calls? An extension of midwives or doulas, so to speak. I’ve heard of it before, but not quite in the way we mean.

I imagine being a new mom, tired and overwhelmed and feeling even the normal ‘baby blues’ (which is a normal, healthy, mild version of depression caused by a change in hormones). I imagine being in that hard days, or even after six months or a year, when hormones slam around haphazardly when you quit breastfeeding (which cannot be overlooked, because that’s a wild time). I imagine this, and being able to reach out to a network of women who have been there. Asking for a moment. Having a woman come to your door with a hot coffee, to sit on your couch with zero judgement in her eyes and let you cry. Vent, complain, share the ugliness. I imagine getting advice from someone who genuinely understands, I imagine being seen by another women. A hug, a smile, a moment of pure support.

What a world of difference this could make. And could it be scaled up, improved, even funded? Maybe some women could take a class or two to be better able to support new mothers. Maybe, maybe.

If I was still in the U.S., I would jump on starting this. That being said, I have ideas about who I might reach out to, to get something started. While I know we want the big changes and we want our husbands to understand this, that might not be our reality right now. Maybe this is a moment for women to just quietly stand together. We don’t need to be silent, but maybe we create a place of support that really makes a difference.

What about Lindsay?

While this case has brought to light and thought so many issues that deserve the conversations we’re all having, what about Lindsay Clancy? Where is justice for her children, and what should happen to her? I’ll admit, there is a solid piece of me that feels deeply that she shouldn’t be held responsible legally. That her own lifelong injuries, her constant mental torment over what she did, her undoubtable guilt, is enough. That she should be getting all the mental health support and treatment possible (finally) and try to recover in any and every way.

But while that is how I feel, justice isn’t about feelings. If she is found not guilty by reason of insanity, does this open up the legal doors even wider for others to cry insanity? Without a doubt. And that might only bog down the justice system more for totally undue reasons and cases.

And should she face legal justice for murder? Well, yes. I think? I do not envy these jury members. I don’t feel like there will be a conclusion that feels fully like justice in this case.

Now What?

There are a million more details to discuss, topics to expand upon, solutions to find, debates to be had, rabbit holes to crawl through. And maybe I’ll continue some of these discussions, but truthfully? I’m burnt out. I’m tired of this case, this topic. And I know, being tired of it doesn’t make it go away. But the crux of this all is mental health. And I need a break.

I suggest to all of you living and breathing this case, all of you talking in circles online about it, all of you consumed by what other people are saying, to take a break. Go on a walk, breathe some fresh air, stand in the rain. Read a lighthearted novel, watch a silly show, dance to some music that makes you grin. Find a piece of joy for yourself.

That’s what I’m going to do.

In an increasingly throw-away culture, caring for what you have is no longer revered. And this is more than just mending your pants. This is a larger discussion on tending to and respecting that which you once worked so hard for. That which you once say dreaming of, prayed for, and idealized.

I spent the last two days, in and amongst the daily grind of life, tending to our little potted plants. Plants that woefully wait for garden beds, greenhouses, permanent placement. Fostered little foliage. I didn’t want to do this. I wanted, in my dreamy way, to go forward. To build a new compost pile, to plant new pineapple, to go build our house.

But as I take regular stock of my priorities, I have realized that I denigrate the caring for what I have in pursuit of what I want. Yes, I want dream pray for the time to work towards the house we are building. But I also have a casita. A little dirt-floored abode that has served us as well as it could for four years now. And do I care for it? Show respect or pride in it? No, I do not. I ignore and throw up blinders. I want to move forward. Greener grass that surely will be, but maybe where we’re at could be a little greener if we’d stop to water it.

One look at my few semi-successful garden beds, all but consumed by weeds and disenchantment, and I’d like to toss them to nature and build new and better. To build a greenhouse and start fresh. But I do not have that greenhouse. I have these beds, I have this soil I have worked, these squares of earth that could be fruitful with a little more worship.

What if we extended this idea beyond the land we have, the home we have, the material possessions? What if we extended this to the love we have? The marriage we have, the family and friends we have right now. In the throw away disposable world, not only are we tossing plastic bottles and barely-worn t-shirts, we are throwing away people. Over icks and annoyances, over a perception of something fresh and new being better. If, on the worst of days in a marriage, we looked at our partner and said, nah, this is too much work right now, what would we be losing?

Since when did we, the society at large, decide that it was easier to throw away and start over? To look at a bedraggled garden, a shanty shack house, an imperfect marriage and ignore them while we moon over something bigger and better? What if we poured our love and respect, our work and heart, into those things? To pour into what we have doesn’t have to take away from wanting more. It means that we appreciate where we are, we respect it. We water our garden, tend our marriage, sweep our home. Because those are what we have. Why would God or The Universe or Fate itself ever give you more if you’ve been reckless and careless with what you have? And you can’t possibly think you deserve better or more if you haven’t poured into what you already have.

If I cannot care for the scrap of earth I have, why should I have a whole greenhouse? If I haven’t loved and found pride in the little house that’s sheltered us, why should I have something bigger and better to care for? And the relationships in our lives are precious and deserve respectful tending – if we don’t nurture them, how could we ever expect something different to be better?

I am working to hold onto this idea, to look down at my feet exactly where I am. The horizon is exciting, but no tomorrow is a promise. Where my feet are in this moment is a promise. This earth is mine, this love is mine, this life is mine. So I ought to tend it, to water it, to revere and respect it with all the love I might withhold for the somedays. No more withholding my time or energy or respect or love, no more scoffing a today while mooning over tomorrow.

Today holds all the potential. Everything we have in this moment can be nurtured and we would do well to remember that.

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Half a decade. 1825 days. Five years.

We left a homestead in Tennessee. We boarded a plane to a place we’d only been to once, with a pile of luggage and a big dream. A long long story later, we are somewhere we never pictured and never planned. A jungle mountain side unexpected.

If you know our story, you know that we had an entirely different plan in the years of preparation before our move. You may know that there was pain, resentment, a lot of anger, and not a small dose of grief. I had spent those many years picturing the view out my forever kitchen window. And then that view was ripped away. I had no dream for a moment, no picture, no window.

We found our property here not by so much careful selection as yes-we-can-afford-this chance. Were we desperate? A bit. Naïve? Or recklessly optimistic.

We have been on our property here nearly four years. And some days I am blinded by the wild craziness of where we live. Crazy by the standards of someone not born here. And yet, at year four, it’s been our home, our familiar, for long enough that it’s almost normal. In the daily grind, the dishes piled high for my hands to wash, the animals to be milked and fed and walked and loved. In the hours of homeschool at a plastic kitchen table, the moments spent sweeping away a dirt floor. In the blood and sweat and arguments and tons of clay moved and shaped in the building of our home. In all of this, I forget the wild beauty. I see the view from my one-day kitchen window and glance it by. I see it every day. It’s nothing special.

This is home. And in making a home, a base, a forever carved bit of earth, I have become too familiar with it. I take for granted the view of mist billowing through the tree across our valley, the crazy calls of birds shouting to each other from treetops and sky, even the flowers that explode like fireworks from the green that surrounds us. Of course we have coffee and cacao growing just beyond the driveway. Bananas tower overhead and pineapples dot the hillside. These are so normal now, I forget to appreciate the magic of them.

And you may say that there is no magic in them, that it is only a perspective that ever made it feel magical to grow tropical fruit and point at parrots. You may think that’s normal and that the robins and squirrels of my childhood are magic. But what if, and hear me out here – what if we kept hold of that magic where ever we are? What if we gathered up that magical awe of childhood and new places and never let it fade with time or familiarity?

What if we were ninety and still found twinkling magic in rainbows? What if we lived somewhere our whole lives and still found awe in the nature around us? What if we extend that to the people we love? I have known my husband over a decade and I still choose to find sparks of magic in a kiss from him.

Even when the days are long, the lists unyielding, even when what was once easily fresh and magic to us has thrown a wrinkle of rainstorms and arguments our way – what if we just choose to see the magic? The wild and delicate flowers, the perfect catch of sunlight as it dips down for the night, the dark earth and rain smell of the jungle, the nudge of our dog’s nose against our leg, the way the one we love kisses us just because.

We would all be happier to be filled with a bit of magic.

I am flowing, like water. Changing like the caterpillar within its cocoon. I am ever morphing, always adapting. I am fixed and steady, an ancient tree swaying, bending but never breaking. I am the ocean, moved by the moon or perhaps the moon that moves the tides. I am the guiding star and I am that intrepid traveler.

Somehow, I am both and all. Not by intention, not because I have been placed here through mal intent. I have become, through trials and storms and windswept moments. Sandstone carved. I have been determined, shaped, bespoke. I am the culmination of everything I have been, have seen, have touched and heard and tasted. Every breath of air into lungs becomes a part of my story.

There is beauty in the becoming, in the being. There is also pain in being the carved, angst in the push pull of the tide. There are scars on tree trunks from those who have not revered. Being is not a static state, it is standing tall, learning to bend with the storms, not fixed rigidly to snap and break, to topple. Learn to bend, to shapeshift, to alter and adapt and change.

Oh, the things we are from nature. I are not aside from nature, I am utterly of it. Of dirt and sun and rain and grasshoppers. For only from Mother Nature could come the gritty beauty of sun-bleached coastlines, battered into their brand of beauty. Only from the mad unpredictably of wildness could be born the strength to endure. To persevere. To continue.

And continue I must. We are told to be strong, to be bold, to be more. But I lean into the wind, face to the rain, arms burnt by the sun. I am not strong because I fight. I am not bold because I shout. I do not require bigness within myself. I am strong because I let the bitter waters of those who seek harm to slide around me. I am bold for the whispered mantras I speak into the early morning mist. The vastness of nature is big enough itself and I am but a dot dancing through it.

Shame is not to be cast aside, to be snuck under the rug and ignored, nor discussed away with excuses and platitudes. Shame and guilt are powerful lessons, a gage of sorts – are you doing something morally wrong? Against what you believe, who you are? What a lesson to learn. What a gage to tap into.

On forums and Facebook groups for moms, there is the term ‘mom guilt’ thrown around. Or, I suppose I show my mothering age there, since it’s social media now – Instagram and TikTok and whatnot. Mom guilt, which most of us have felt at some point. But the rub, the issue, the point where I take a soapboxing posture? When it’s layed aside. Oh, don’t feel guilty you’re trying your hardest or every mom feels guilty, don’t worry. No, I worry. And maybe no, I’m not trying my hardest.

I grew up, grew into being a woman and a mother, a homemaker and a wife, in a world that told women they should feel guilty for nothing, shame for nothing. And more so, I suppose, if I take a larger view of society, men are told the same thing often enough. Though I truly think that the gross overcorrection of modern 4^th-wave feminism is to blame for this not-my-fault mentality. A different topic, though intertwined as most things are.

In any event, this is how I grew up, and unlearning that is still a battle. It’s accountability in its rawest form – to look at shame and guilt as beacons towards what is right, what is moral, what is in best connection with your own self.

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I am not essentially opposed to the idea of judgement or stereotypes – the words get a bad rap, when in reality it’s how we have always interacted as humans. We judge people, their words and actions and personalities. Judgement does not equate negativity. But, and here’s the topic I want to chew on: how much deeper do we really go?

The first impression of me, for instance, I can wholeheartedly promise isn’t the breadth of who I am. Far from it. Those knee-jerk reactions to people, born of experience and personal perspective (both valid lenses to view from) don’t take into consideration the entirety of a person. Of course they don’t.

Being on the internet in the minute way that I am, I am incredibly aware of the perception of people who do not know me. It’s an interesting, if at times gutting, example of what quick judgements can get wrong. Or, at least, incomplete.

I was floundering the other day, staring at a mile-long list of topics I’m really passionate about, topics I want to dive into and discuss here, words I know I want to share. And yet, I felt like they weren’t on brand in some way. When I made the move to Brave Verses, the move to make my writing separate from all other aspects of my life and thus utterly without borders or boxes to color within, I thought it would free my brain. But I still, perhaps from ages-old conditioning, try to fit myself into little boxes. Interests, genres, topics, beliefs. And I don’t fit. My interests are weird and wide and I am intensely passionate about the most bizarre topics.

I think of something I feel pulled to write about, and then stutter myself short because who cares or it doesn’t fit with anything else I’ve written. And maybe those are true statements (in fact, I’m positive they are) but that doesn’t mean that the pieces of the puzzle that make up who is writing should be cast aside. In other words, those interests are all part of me. And the entire point of this writing is not to pigeon hole, but to open up my arms impossibly wide, and write about anything.

One might look at my year-long stint of reading exclusively romance novels and chalk me up to being a typical millennial woman with an eye roll cherry on top. But you don’t see the long list of other books I have stashed away or have devoured with equal gusto. Cheese making in Spain, cannibals and the missing Michael Rockefeller in Papua New Guinea, the graphic and detailed biography of a forensic pathologist, a tome about the history and connection between smelting and serial killers, and let’s never forget my prized anthology of Shakespeare. I am multifaceted. I smirk while singing along with the trashiest of modern country right along with questionable 90s hip hop and rap, seamlessly shifting to the melodies of bluegrass and then the Australian sensation of Iyah May.

And let’s talk about her for a moment. If you’re bouncing around the right side of the internet, you might recognize her for her somewhat underground virality. My first impression before listening? Another pretty blonde musician. Catchy pop. Cool. And then, bam. Her intelligence, her wisdom, her fucking bravery, exploded my impression of her. And then to learn she is not only this based musical legend, she is also a doctor. Which, again if you’ve listened to her, is a wild surprise and only adds to the impressive puzzle of Iyah May. And those pieces are only what she is choosing to share publicly, with utter strangers around the world. I am sure there is so much more to her, as an individual. It would have been easy, especially if the internet wasn’t the wild world it is, to write her off as ‘just another pretty blonde musician’ and miss out on so much.

I could list off so many more people in the public sphere and in my own small circle, who are magnitudes more than their first impressions provide. But here’s the thing, what about your life? What about you? It doesn’t mean we necessarily need to behave differently, but what about being a touch more open to the possibility of humanity? The multifaceted quality of humans? And before you jump in with a waving hand and a ‘but!!’, I know there are people who are truly one-dimensional. I know this doesn’t apply to every human on earth. But most? I would say yes. How many people around you do you think hold opinions or ideas, interests and passions, that you know nothing about? And maybe would they be infinitely more intriguing if you allowed them to be? Or, they allowed themselves to be?

Because authenticity in a big way is scary stuff. You can authentically be one-dimensional and it doesn’t cast you as a liar. But to be authentically all of you? That’s rare. And scary. And opens one up for a flood of criticisms and loss. I’ve been there. I’ve lost, when just expressing fractions of my opinions or concerns. I’ve lost family, I’ve lost friends. But I haven’t ever lost myself.

This isn’t a wholly selfless piece I’m writing – this isn’t just about expectations and judgements of others. It’s about my writing, my struggles with I can admit abashedly is mostly what I’ve been sharing lately and that’s a touch embarrassing. The wild world of topics I find interesting is about to blow your mind. Or maybe not, maybe true crime and current events and the history of salt aren’t your cup of tea. That’s okay, because I’ll also write about being a mother and a wife and living off grid. I’ll still write about food and culture and Ecuador. You’ll still see power anthem poems slam and if you’re very very lucky you might get peeks into the newest fictional endeavors.

Where are I doing this? How am I doing this? I don’t have a fucking clue. Not a singular damn clue. I’m far too busy, with a million priorities pulling in different directions. But what I do know? It’s in my heart to write.

And not this, not here’s a little ditty about my life. Not once-in-a-while, but with gravity and dedication like I’ve never placed upon my writing before. And more so, moreover, more more, I am about to crack open a whole lot of my thoughts and opinions that I’ve spent a long time being quiet about. Quiet kept friendships, kept familial ties. Quiet kept ugly comments out, appeased in the way only a people-pleaser can. Perhaps I’ve gotten old enough to care less, perhaps I’ve learned that the best people in life will stay through disagreements. I know sharing what I plan to share, what I plan to write about, could divide, but I’ve been quiet and still divided. Maybe it’s time I was a little more Iyah May-bold. I’ll channel her: “Nothing to lose or left to prove”.

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I once had a too-big-for-our-ages conversation with a friend about religion, faith, the afterlife. We laid on her trampoline under stars, arms and legs akimbo. We spoke in soft whispers about our questions, our beliefs – words I wasn’t ever encouraged to speak before. I told her an idea, something I had likely never expressed before and certainly not since: What if what someone believes and has faith in is their absolute truth?

I am typically not a fan of the phrase “your truth” because truth is truth in factuality and holds little regard for you own perspectives and feelings. But perhaps it’s true. If you believe in heaven, you’ll reach it. If you espouse reincarnation, you’ll come right back. A body in the ground is just that, and so it will be for you.

This concept is, truthfully, less about what really happens and finding those answers our higher brains want so badly, and more about letting everyone believe it as they see fit. As they feel, as they want. Do we need the answers or just a soft place to mentally land when the going get excruciating? And thus the question that rubber ball bounces around my mind in the quietude of daily tasks: what do I believe?

I used to hate that I was raised without faith. And when I say without faith, I mean as atheist as one could possibly get. There was no, at least in my memory, room for possibility. Religion was a giant empty space in my childhood. And I hated it. I wanted something to grasp, to hold, to give me answers. I wanted reasons why my cousin died so young, where she was, why my parents fought so much, why we were all here in these flesh suits wandering around, why I was depressed when I didn’t do anything to deserve it.

I have been on what someone might call a faith journey for a while now, but maybe that’s just life. Maybe everyone is on a journey of reason and faith and religious seeking, changing, growing, eventually maybe knowing. I know I will never bow down to a god, I will never place my hand on any text in absolute blind faith. It isn’t who I am.

And now I am finally able to really be thankful for the empty space in my childhood that allows this space to learn. Without the early indoctrination, well-meaning or not, the mental freedom is being allowed to believe whatever. I cannot say I was encouraged to explore, but the lack gave me reason to do so. It took until much later in life to start this exploration. Or, did it? Maybe those teenage moments on trampolines were the early stages. Come to think of it, so were a lot of magical, miraculous moments that gave me pieces of believing.

What do I believe? I believe that spirits can reside in butterflies. I believe that sasquatch is real and thus anything is possible. I believe aliens exist and we know so very little about the universe. I believe that miracles happen, but I have no idea how. I believe emotional energy is real and can be harnessed.

Ultimately, I believe what I have experienced. What I have seen, what I have known. I have never been good at blind belief. I question far too much, too readily, too voraciously, to simply nod along. Any religion or belief system I have studied, I ask but what about and why is that and explain how and those things are often not encouraged within the confines of a religious text or teaching. The benefit of this is that I know what I believe to be true. That list is absolute and within doubt or measure.

I wondered the other day have I can be so sure these are absolute beliefs and it came easily: I feel no need to convince. Don’t believe me? Cool. You do you. I don’t need to convince and share, I don’t need to teach and smash my faith in your eyes. It’s mine, all mine.

And to be transparent, I have more beliefs, more faith. Fuzzy, foggy, looking glass kind of faith where it’s there but undetermined, unspecified, a little murky and unsure. In my own heart, I don’t need to be sure. Will I pray to a god that might or might not be any version of ‘real’? Yep. Will I practice the positive thoughts that will attract like energy? Yup. Will I meditate in a nature full of spirits? You betcha. I can do it all, because maybe, just maybe, faith isn’t separatist. I can believe in the potential of it all, the possible truth of anything. It does not make any one belief less real or important. In fact, it makes my faith so much more full and authentic.

I have the distinct memory of sitting on a couch, something like fifteen years ago, in what was once my house, facing the man I was once very sure I would marry. He held my hand and in what I can only retrospectively call a last-ditch effort to get back together, told me I shouldn’t chase fairy tales. Happily ever afters don’t exist. I can’t explain how he thought this would entice me back, but that might have been the disconnection all along. A core reason we never really worked. I blinked at him, in the dark wood-paneling of this house, like I wasn’t sure who he was. I might have, just maybe, believed him for a minute. One of those soul-tired, doubt-filled moments we all have. I have looked back on this moment in the many years since, with a shake of the head. How silly I was to consider that he might have been right. How silly to almost fold, to almost believe I should stop seeking The One.

What felt like moments before my now husband dropped into my life, I was briefly dating a man who was absolutely ideal on paper. As a single mom, young and determined to provide a whole family unit, I needed good-on-paper in a way my free younger self didn’t care about. My desire, my once-upon-a-time dreams of happily ever after were sliding onto the back burner in the most heartbreaking way. I cannot explain this man in any better way than this: the first time he came over to my house, he cooked me baked chicken breast. Plain. He was baked chicken. Perfectly fine, but wildly uninspiring. Walking our babies in strollers, I asked a friend if I was silly for not wanting to continue with him – I asked her, who was wisely married for years at that point, what I should do with my absolute lack of feelings for him. She told me I was too picky, and that I should settle for ‘a good guy’. I couldn’t get past the absolute lump in my throat.

It was probably mere weeks after I ended that, with zero tears on my part, that this man who is anything but baked chicken waltzed into my world and turned it the fuck upside down.

I have heard splashed around the idea that butterflies are red flags. That the tummy flutters of newness with a man are a sign of ‘nervous system dysregulation’. I don’t know when the modern woman discounted that feeling of giggly excitement as dangerous but honey, you’re missing the fuck out. And I’m not just talking about the nervous jitters of first dates or kisses, I’m talking about how over a decade loving the same man changes absolutely jack shit. How my heart triple skips a beat and my whole self is filled with butterflies when that man, my man, comes home. How I have to stop in the middle of cooking dinner to go plant a kiss on him. How whispered words in my ear in the middle of the day make my cheeks burn and the biggest, goofiest grin take over my face. Those butterflies are golden. They are everything. They are the sign that I’m still right where I belong. They are excitement and love and just enough giggly nervous girl energy to keep me young. I will be old and grey and wrinkled to hell, and those butterflies will still be flying strong for my old, grey, wrinkled husband.

It worries me, quite honestly, that young women are being fed a line that butterflies are dangerous and fairy tales can’t come true. That Disney princesses are nonsense and princes don’t save the day. The princes really can save your day, if you let them. If you find the right one, he really will scale your hair and slay your dragons, he will absolutely kiss your coma’d self. And he’ll do it all while deliciously demanding you to be the very best you. Because falling for the prince doesn’t mean self-sacrifice, it doesn’t mean losing anything. It means gaining the world, gathering up so much love that your own light can shine ten times brighter. Good love, good princes, make you a better woman, a better version of yourself.

As problematic as the foregoing of happily ever afters is, perhaps we should also reconsider the frequency and variety of toads we’re kissing in the pursuit of forcing princely behaviors. Toads are toads, warts and all, and no amount of womanly affection is going to turn them into the men of dreams.

Sometimes I think about these moments, these pushes towards settling for less than my prince, trying to turn another toad into a white knight by shear willpower. And how it’s only by the grace of my absolutely stubborn sensibilities that I didn’t. That I stomped my metaphorical foot with a nu-uh, I don’t settle that kept me from falling into mediocrity. If I had listening to people around me, if I hadn’t been so hell bent, stubborn or fanciful, if I hadn’t believed so utterly in the happily ever after, I wouldn’t have found mine. I wouldn’t have found my other half, soul mate, yin to yang. I wouldn’t be 11 years into another 30 some. I wouldn’t be sitting in a casita in Ecuador writing about our love while my husband works his ass off to provide for us. I wouldn’t be anything I am today without having been stubborn enough to keep looking. I had been this fingertips pinched together close to settling. Either with baked chicken guy or someone else equally not correct for me.

It might have been another handful of years before I accepted it, entrenched then too deep to easily extricate myself. I would have been married to the wrong man, tied and tethered and my people pleasing self likely would have stayed way too long. Missed chances, opportunities, years of love and happiness. While stubbornness is not my most attractive quality, maybe it’s what ultimately saved me from a baked chicken kind of life.

I have kissed enough toads to know they never turn into princes. But let me tell you, when a prince sporting a Carhartt jacket and a grin shows up at your door and unleashes a whole god damned butterfly conservatory in your belly, you grab him and you never let go.

Should we be persecuted for the art we create? The dissection of poetry, journals, music, drawings, in the wake of violence or crime is something that I am so deeply opposed to it’s almost surprising to myself. Psychology of criminals, of those capable of evil deeds, has always intrigued me. What makes a monster, what contributes, and what could ever be done to hold off the inner evil. What signs to look for, what measures to take. But does that extend to art? Should it extend to art?

In all my deep diving into true crime cases, in my sorting of patterns and looking for logic, I so often see the analyzing of a suspect’s art as some armchair method of deduction. It rankles me, in a really visceral way. Perhaps because I could see myself being analyzed wildly unfairly via word choice. I have been, in fact.

I’ll take you back to tender years, the first in my teenaged life, and the first in a public school that felt like a massive blue and gold ocean to my tiny little angsty girl-fish self. Hormones and change and familial upheaval was taking its decidedly expected toll on me, and I felt the first shivers of depression and anxiety. It took hold of me in ways that demand their own novels to explain. My angry, self-destructive, deeply dark inner dialogue found an outlet other than physical self-harm. I wrote. Big, ugly, monster-y poetry. They would just flop out of me like all the beaten-up parts of me, the deep and nasty and unseen. When the rearing beast named Anxiety sat on my chest and wouldn’t let me up until I took it out on myself, I wrote. And that shoved it off. I found that - a way to push it away and let it out onto paper until my brain felt better and my blood cooled and I could sleep. Could smile at my parents and answer a teacher’s question.

I filled notebooks meant for school with words not meant for anybody but me. And then, I found a kinship friend, one with her own broken-ness. Ironically enough, someone who loved the same person I did. That’s a highschool mess for you, right there, but perhaps an aside from this story (I got picked, after all, smug little awkward girl-fish got the love). But this friend? This little blond spitfire who had all the same messy brain demons? I trusted her. In the way only a girl who didn’t have enough life experience really can. Namely, with absolute unyielding faith. I handed her a copy of a particular poem. One I, sadly, no longer have. Because it was beautiful in all its gory glory. I know that, even now, it was awfully beautiful. I thought, if anyone on this fucking planet could understand that it was my therapy, it would be her. And she? She had been ‘reformed’, had suddenly been ‘fixed’ by parents and religion and I didn’t realize her betterment made her too good for me, better than me. More righteous than me. (I can admit, as an adult now, that she was absolutely trying to help me in a way she thought was best, but it was all so wrong for me).

She took my carefully folded note of poetry straight to the school counselor. Straight to a man who everyone had nasty nicknames for. Straight to a man who I would end up in front of. I was called out of class, was sat before his desk on a hard wooden chair. I sat there, with long sleeves covering my wrists, not having half a clue what this was about, but being positive it wasn’t going to go well for me.

My poetry had been analyzed, shared, interpreted, dissected, and ultimately labeled. I was labeled because of my art. I was dangerous, I was in trouble, I was ‘crying out’. I wasn’t, in fact. I had found a method to teenage madness. I had found an outlet that made sense, and made me whole. But adults didn’t see it that way, people whose brains weren’t utterly fucked didn’t see it that way. They saw red flags and flashing danger signs and tried to smash the brakes on me. They tried to see something in my words that wasn’t there. And missed everything that was. I wasn’t dangerous, I wasn’t damaged (okay, maybe a little), I posed no threat to anyone.

So, perhaps I’m a touch personally biased. But I know if someone was looking they would have pinned violence on me for the words on lined paper. So, should we really retrospectively analyze someone’s art for signs we ‘should have seen’, when maybe those signs are only a product of confirmation bias? Song lyrics that seem terribly suspect now that there’s a murder investigation. Journal entries that vaguely lean in a dark direction. Nothing outright, no confession or intention, just a lot of ‘dark’ thoughts. Name me a teenager who hasn’t had a dark thought. A human being with a touch of anxiety who hasn’t wanted to rip their own hair out, or someone with depression who hasn’t blandly considered just lying down and giving up. Or, even, gasp, an artist just using words. A bunch of words that sound good and pretty, or dark and broody. A painter who paints in slashes of red and black, dark imagery that can be skewed to represent motive where there is only art.

Back in those hallowed halls of highschool, I was once told that my interpretation of a poem was wrong. What do you think he meant by this line? Nope, you’re wrong. Wrong? I was wrong in my interpretation of someone’s words? Did you ask the author what he meant? I could wax poetically angry about the school system for ages, but that’s not the point here: the point is that you don’t know what someone else was thinking when they created art unless you ask them. Ask me what I meant by a poem, and I might tell you something wildly different than you assumed. And that’s just fine.

Most artists of any ilk don’t create to invoke an exacting and precisely perfect interpretation. We instead create to invoke emotion. Read a poem of mine, all abstract and chocked with metaphors, and let yourself be swept along. What emotions or parallels you see, you feel, those are yours. Not mine, as author and artist. We all see the world, art included, by way of our experiences. Our experiences, knowledge, predetermined biases, even what we know about the author. We gather all that up and form it into the lens with which we view. And that’s fine. That’s art, after all – that’s the point.

But can we please stop yanking apart art to see the bits that suit agendas? Can we stop teaching children to ‘properly’ identify intentions behind artists? These aren’t productive, and can in fact be detrimental. Not only to the artist, but to the viewer, the listener, the reader. You are missing out on so much experience. Read that poem by Robert Frost and feel whatever you feel, think whatever you think. The metaphors are yours for the interpretation. Listen to We Are Young and let the lyrics be guided by your own life, your own moments and memories. Don’t tell me what any art is ‘supposed’ to mean. Let me feel it all on my own. And don’t dare paint the artist with broad strokes based on narrow viewpoints.

Art is expansive in the best possible ways. It transcends so much in our world, leaps beyond sentence structure and medium use and the tidy boxes people prefer. Art is the best kind of messy, and that isn’t something you can dissect.

Another day of heat, of sun that dries and shines and makes my eyes hurt. Another day of what feels like sudden thirst. The ground is cracked in caverns running across paths and hillsides and every scrap of naked soil. The earth begs for green and cover, but alas it is bare.

It feels it won’t end, like the solar panels will be the only winners here, like we’re in desperate need of hoses if the garden has any hope. It feels like we haven’t seen the rain in forever, and yet I know only a moment ago we were bemoaning the endless wet. The mud and slop and rain that didn’t cease. Has it been a week? Two? Longer? Time is a funny thing. It stretches and compresses, moments lasting lifetimes and months gone in a blink. A year, nearly, gone in the space of a breath.

I scramble for purchase as it all slides away, proverbial sand in the hourglass I cannot hold. It’s all taking way too long and happening far too quickly. It’s been so long since…and there’s no time left. Push and pull, the moon’s grab on the tides and the spinning of our rock. It’s big and small and terribly odd.

People say that time is a construct, a man-made idea. But age is not, seasons are not. They have always bookmarked passages. I bookmark them in years since. And right now the rearing up of years since is strong.

We have lived on our lovely scrap of soil for three years. Three long short years. It feels like forever and a moment ago and it’s all a bit much to fathom. All the things I thought we would have, would be, would feel at three years in are still an end-of-the-tunnel light. It’s gone too fast and taking way too long. Was I overly optimistic or just foolish? The dreamy garden is still miles of dry clay dirt away. The house is half walls and mostly roof, a not-yet-fleshed-out skeleton of dreams.

And my own self? About a million years and ten thousand miles from where I wanted to be. Is this the price of lofty goals? If my to-do lists were short would I be able to cross off every item by the end of the day, instead of stare at a few measly lines through words? If I wanted less, would I feel more accomplished? Perhaps. But perhaps, absolutely, that’s never going to be me.

I’m thirty-six. My birthday passed with little fan-fare, which is exactly how I liked it. Another day, another reflection of self. Stronger, though, this year. Who am I/Why am I/Where am I. And for the first time, I’m very sure of all the answers. I cannot express exactly why this is, but it is. And to finally understand who I am is, to be frank, bizarre.

It’s not about a title, or a job, or a ‘meaning’ to my life. It’s about the core of me, of who I am, and what I seek in life. I have spoken, for years upon years, since I was old enough to think into the future more than a moment, in what I want to be terms. The girl, woman, I wanted to be. The wife, the mother, the writer, the homemaker I wanted to be. Like it was something to work towards. Like I was something else now, and one day I would be all those things. It wasn’t about driving towards goals, it was about a separation between all the things I idealized and what I am right now.

Funny enough, while my life feels a little like a scattered mess of instability, I am finding that in this moment I am the most absolute in myself. We tend to do that, to separate who we are from who we want to be. Instead of I want to be said in the same internal tone as I want a million dollars, what about I know I have it in me to be. Or I already can be. It doesn’t mean that I actually am, currently in this exact moment, the wife I ‘want’ to be. It means that it isn’t some ethereal possibility, some Schrodinger’s self. It means that I already possess the capacity, the ability, to be exactly who I am – who I have always ‘wanted’ to be.

It’s semantics, surely, but words are as critical as the intentions behind them. I know my flaws, my imperfections, are plentiful, and my gaping maws of shortcomings could swallow oceans – because I’m human. Because I’m still working on digging down to the core of myself. Why it’s covered so thoroughly, I couldn’t tell you. But I know that in new habits formed, I become more and more myself. And in that, more the woman I want to be. Not by stepping outside myself, changing myself, or casting off an old self. Instead, by letting that which sits in my soul to finally come out.

It’s radical, or maybe not. It might be logic to others, but to the workings of my own grey matter, it’s new age. It’s a fresh perspective. It’s the kind of lightbulb moment that might change my whole self, whole life. Not in leaps, not in shocks, but in the little moments that make me a better person. The moments when I feel most absolutely who I am.

The air is warm and heavy with unbidden storm

Rain and sunshine warmed earth collide in an evening full of weight

She stands amongst the cicadas and angsty thunder

She stands and holds a hand to her chest in prayer

She does not pray for wisdom or peace, the plea for which so often pours from her soul

She does not pray for more money or land, for more babies on her hip

And she certainly doesn’t pray for quiet in her valley

She prays, eyes wide open, for more of this

For more of the beautiful weight connecting her to earth

More of the near tangible power in her veins

Like her and the universe are one

All the power in the storm and all the depth in the earth

All the love in the universe and God and thunder and trees

She runs too much, she works too hard and not hard enough

She is everything and sometimes late at night, nothing at all

But in this particular twilight , she is everything

I, like everyone else, have been sitting with a distant heartbreak. I have felt unbelief and shock, disgust and desolation. I have wondered at humanity, the lack of it and the twisting of it. I have seen a video I cannot unsee, cannot un-remember. I have seen the responses, the Youtube videos and Instagram posts and all the beautiful words of remembrance. What I have seen the very most? Love. I have seen so many pour out love for a man who wanted goodness in the world. I have seen post after post, words upon words, of admiration and love. Heartbreak and confusion, yes. But hate? I have seen this only from one side of a deeply rutted trench. A trench or a wall - either way it’s dividing.

There are people celebrating the death of a husband, a father, a truthteller and seeker. They are praising a bullet that ended the life of a man who believed in God and goodness, in family and freedom and the United States. These are not bad things, not ideals of an evil man.

I heard comparisons to a slew of other deaths: the sidewalk slaying of Brian Thompson, the Minnesota legislators gunned down in their own homes. I do not agree with these shootings. I do not agree with the assassination attempts on Trump. I do not, in generalities, agree with taking a human’s life at your own will. I can, however, concede understanding. These were, are, people in power. People who have, in some minds, hurt others. A CEO of an insurance company who had a hand in suffering and even death. I’ll concede that. Legislators who have their fingers in laws, budgets, and policies that affect everyone. I’ll concede that. Even Trump, one could see his agendas and intentions as dangerous for themselves, and wrongly or rightly, I’ll concede that.

But Charlie Kirk? He did nothing to anyone. He spoke words. Beautiful words. Honest words. Were his words sometimes harsh? Perhaps. Uncomfortable? Absolutely. Difficult to hear? Yes. Divisive? You bet. But they were words. They did not insight violence.

I want to talk more about words, about free speech. About where the lines are, and who draws them in sand and cement. Where do words turn into actions and who’s to blame if they do – but that’s for another day.

(I encourage anyone interested in learning what Charlie said that has often been twisted to mean something else, taken out of context, or generally misunderstood, to check out this video. And! Go watch Charlie for yourself. Watch him debate with grace and confidence people from every single walk of life. You can absolutely disagree with him, with his opinions, his viewpoints, his beliefs (I have, I do), but please don’t believe falsehoods about his words.)

I have spent the last few weeks sitting with this. I began writing this the morning after Charlie Kirk was murdered. I wrote it swimming in a grief I didn’t fully understand. I wrote it in moments I couldn’t think of much else, soaked in the mess of internet opinions and hatred. And then I stopped, I took steps away, I decided to focus on me and mine for a moment. I hugged my son extra hard, explaining that the little things aren’t, maybe, so important – a stuck drill bit, a change in plans. I kissed my husband and told him how much I appreciate him. I tried to fill my ears and brain with goodness. Found podcasts that lit up my soul, instead of making me question humanity.

I breathed. A lot, and deeply.

And now, today, I feel differently in some ways, and more convicted in others.

Let me explain.

The world is terribly broken. I don’t pretend to know everything, but I know plenty enough to realize that the darkness in the world is more insidious and pervasive, much more evil than most people know. It is easy, once you began the walk down the dark path of the big truths, to fall into all the darkness yourself. To let the evils consume you, envelop and encase you until you are actually affected by it all. I don’t think that is what we all need to do. Some of us, some less empathetic, more able to catalogue and shelve internally, need to do this for the greatest good of truth. Some of us, my hand raised, aren’t meant for that. I don’t feel called to root out evils or expose lies or scream into the ether. My calling? My calling has always been smaller and quieter. To affect my tiny circle of influence. To mother well and wife well, to tend my bit of soil and the hearts that choose to love me. I have, admittedly, gotten a little lost in the bigger world, when sometimes I need to come back down and remember my calling. My place, my meaning, what I believe my purpose on earth is.

I unfriended someone on Facebook. Not even a friend, someone I once knew and never bothered unfriending before. She wasn’t being horrible, but she was incredibly misguided in what she was sharing. I pressed comment and let my cursor blink. And then I unfriended. My job isn’t to change minds, to argue, to take a public stand like that. That doesn’t mean others shouldn’t, and I pray they will now more than ever. But my place? My place is and has always been in the pouring of goodness. I don’t fight wrong with more wrong, with loud voices and bitter words. I never was that person, but when faced with so much anger thrown, it’s often easiest to throw it back.

I became, quite by almost-accident, entrenched in a political debate in the comment section of our own YouTube video. A video about the protests, the strikes and road blockades happening in Ecuador right now. A video, at its core, just informing people who might live here or want to visit soon. It became, predictably, political. I debated and argued, in all the kindest ways I know how, with people who have very different world views than I. I let it absorb me, consume my thoughts. Then, I stepped away. Not because I am not convicted, not for lack of interest or knowledge, not because I don’t care, but because sometimes the biggest differences are made closest to home. So, I’ll wash the dishes and put my hands in soil and pet my goats.

It’s all so complicated. Religion is complicated. Spirituality is complicated. Church is extra complicated. Politics in beyond complicated. Do you know what isn’t, shouldn’t be, complicated? Morality. Humanity. We used to, by and large, know what was right. What was moral. Outliers notwithstanding, humanity was more or less moral. At least, in the United States. And even in remote tribes, they are moral even if their flavor of morality is vaguely different. Morality and humanity, side by side, ought not to be such a trial. Such a hardship.

Have we, as humans, just lost morality? Common sense and dignity? It doesn’t matter what side of anything you are on. If you are Buddhist, Christian, Agnostic, or Wiccan, you can still see how wrong the slaughter of a morally good man is. No one should disagree with this simple fact. And yet our timelines and newsfeeds and for you pages are filled with so much vitriol it’s staggering.

Many people have been feeling called, in the wake of this loss, to speak louder, to share more boldly in their truth seeking. I have felt called to speak softer. For my softness, my gentle heart, my optimism and patience and kindness are all traits I have let erode with the digging for truths. I don’t believe my best self is the self that sees the worst in the world. I don’t believe I show up as the best woman, best mother, best wife, when I entrench myself in politics and evils and truths masquerading as conspiracies. The best me is the me who I forgot how to be.

That is what I take from this loss, from the way the world responded to the loss. This is what I take away from a man who believed in family and love and God and above all else, people. I think there is no better way to honor Charlie Kirk than by honoring ourselves.

Be the change you want to see in the world. This doesn’t have to solely apply to the world at large, this can apply, and perhaps should best apply, to your personal insular world. Be the person, the example, you wish to see in those around you.

This is a lesson learned by every parent, for the mimicry of children is humbling. From repeated curse words to mannerisms to the way teenagers mirror our own reactions, children are the first and greatest lesson in this. But I have come to find, not the only.

My mood, my approach to my family, is reflected straight back at me. At others. It is a ripple affect of response that squeezes my chest. Humbling, empowering, and exhausting. No matter the intentions of my family, it’s true that my mood is somehow the guiding light here. The determination of the day’s mood.

We are told to surround ourselves with people we want to be like, for we will become them. At least, in part. It is true and it also goes both ways, which is something I haven’t considered enough before. That you must be what you desire from those you are surrounded by. You cannot force anything upon another. You cannot force a mood, a behavior, an attitude, not even or maybe especially on a child. You must model. You must hold that within yourself and let it shine outward, a ray of sun to be caught. A beautiful contagion.

Caught by someone needing the infection of goodness. Of patience, understanding, grace, love, light. We all need it sometimes, to be shone upon by another. No one is sunshine always and clouds are inevitable. But if you want sunshine on your own skin, you might need to be the light for others.

It’s cliché, it’s simple. It’s also painfully true. I find I must practice this extra, not only because I am a weather vane, but because I am a chameleon, shifting and morphing to match my surroundings. A trait that can be harnessed for good or can twist me into something I don’t recognize. It happens slowly, the taking on of others, the morphing and mimicking. It isn’t overnight, but like grains of sand trickling through an hourglass until you are empty of yourself, full of someone else. Only then, and maybe not even then, can you flip it over and let the sands fill back into yourself.

And harder, hardest, yet is when the people you love most on earth are the people whose cloudy days you allow to shadow you, to glaze vision over with muddled grey and blot out the internal sunshine of self. It doesn’t make them bad people, but it means the cycle of storms is brewing into something dangerous. Sometimes earth-altering. It takes courage, it takes strength, and it takes a lot of empathy to be the one to step back and shine.

To wipe off the raindrops and polished the dingy window, to sparkle up and shine brighter than the clouds. We’ve all heard be the bigger person but maybe it really ought to be something along the lines of shine brighter. Someone else might need it, and they might pick up that sparkle of light you’ve thrown their way, and melt it into themselves. To shine a bit brighter for the next person, or to shine it straight back, brilliantly, at you.

How people respond to adversity, to hurdles, to hardships or problems, says more about them as people than nearly anything else. Do you respond with anger or malice, lashing out? Do you fold, incapable of solving the problems? Is there capacity to see the glass as fuller than it really is or the ability to take the necessary deep breaths? Hardships peel back the layers we fold over ourselves and bare the realities of our personalities.

The past couple weeks have been a personal trial, and it’s brought a lot of thoughts to the forefront for me. We are a team here - my husband and I are partners in every way, working together to make life good and our future even better. Part of that teamwork right now is my darling husband working off-farm to make ends kind of sort of meet.

My gratitude for him runs extra deep right now, knowing how hard he is working to provide for us. But that leaves me here, managing not only my own typical set of tasks and chores and projects, but his as well. It is relatively easy on a day-by-day basis when he is working locally. But when we planned for him to be many hours away for three days, I took a deep breath. I do not like being apart from him, not overnight and especially not for more than one night. Call me co-dependent if you’d like, but he is my other half and I feel terribly incomplete without him. We each have roles here, in our marriage and our life together, and the absence is acutely felt.

And if I’ll be blatantly and painful honest here, I suck at this particular not-really-hardship. The annoyance of my husband, who I rely on and have normalized spending every day with, suddenly having to take off on a moment’s notice to work for the day shows. It shows and bleeds into my mood, it undoubtedly is obvious to the man who is only working hard for us. It’s silly, and it’s a fault in how I handle a hurdle in my day. It’s minor, but an example of how every single thing that happens that we don’t like, that isn’t ‘to plan’, that upheaves a plan, is a chance to practice a response. A response becoming of the type of person we want to be. Do I want to be someone who snaps about the 10 minute project I expected my husband to do that now I ‘have to do’? Or want I want to be the wife who kisses her husband, thanks him for his efforts, and takes care of the job she’s totally capable of? It’s a no-damn-brainer.

Moreover, we had an added layer to this emotional cake. We had been totally and completely blocked off, physically, from the outside world. Our chaotic story is relatively well documented, at least our Sunday and his journey, on YouTube, but my unique perspective, here at home, is perhaps missing. On Sunday morning, with a mile-long list of food and supplies to acquire, faced with a mudslide utterly cutting off any hope of getting out via vehicle, I folded hard for about five minutes. Crushing anxiety and stress, and a few choices words. And then, to work. Both the physical work of clearing a footpath, and the mental work of figuring out how to feed us and ration propane and gas. When more land came down, with my other half hours and miles away, I buckled down and managed it. I rationed gas and power and propane and food, I cared for animals and fed the road crew, I kept my head on straight and got through. Until my husband came home, and then the exhaustion hit terribly hard. And while I know rather clearly our ‘hardship’ was absolutely nothing compared to so very much of what I’ve seen people survive in the past few years around the world, it shows us who we would be in worse times.

My point in this? Some people fold, some people rise, and some people do a little bit of both. I am someone, I have come to realize, who will do a little bit of both. But not because that is who I am at my core. If I let my knee-jerk reaction take control, I would go back to bed and cry. I would rage and snap and turn frustration into anger. It takes practice, in these small hardships, to learn how to respond in the bigger moments. Do I step up and do my part with a smile or do I complain the whole way through? It isn’t easy to accomplish, but it’s easy to choose which version of myself I’d like to be.

I have watched inconveniences floor people, turn them into nasty ugly versions of themselves that were just dormant monsters all along. I have watched people rise above unimaginable odds with grace and love. Do any of us really know why certain people respond in the ways they do? Not likely. You can say how you would react in any given scenario, but the reality is far more baring.

We have watched from afar the catastrophe that was and is the Texas hill country flood, and just like a year ago when we watched Hurricane Helene destroy a corner of the country we loved, we are floored by not only the devastation, but by the sheer human willpower. The love, the tenacity, the determination and absolute strength of people who pull through, stand up, and live. Who fought currents and saved lives, who pick up the pieces, who hug and hold and feed their community, who have lost everything and continue to give. There is so much in this world that is terrible, dark, abhorrent, heartbreaking, and peels back the layers of evil people. But in these darkest days of peoples’ lives, there is so much goodness. A light shined on humanity, a reminder that not everyone is made of darkness underneath. Some people are the best of the best, through all the layers.

I, for one, want to surround myself with those people who’s truest bared selves are awe inspiring. And moreover, I want to be one of those people myself.

Mornings like this on the farm is especially beautiful – tranquil and calm in that special after-a-rainstorm way. Everything green and smelling like water and earth and air, birds chirping and flouncing through the sky in what I can only imagine is true joy.

It rained last night, the first big rainstorm in over a week. Instead of dread and frustration at yet another endless rainstorm, now the rains come with a bit of relief. Instead of soggy bottoms, the plants lift leaves up to receive the fresh water, such as do I lift my own face to catch sprinkling drops that linger this morning.

It’s funny how a little time and distance, a little perspective can change even our opinions on the water the falls from the sky.

Raindrops cling to the maracuya vines, filtered light catching in the foggy morning in the valley. Rains starts again, pattering the steel roof in its own musical beat.

I dream most abundantly of what will be, the futures stretching out ahead, the horizons of new possibilities, the eyed-closed dreams of abundance and peace. I spend little to no time sitting in the peace of now. The joy or gratitude of the moment I exist within. I am a person of goals, of movement. I still myself rarely and bounce from task to goal with a fervor I question.

Life being imperfect, not-yet, almost, and always-waiting does not lend to gratitude easily. Does not lead me into peace or quiet, contentment or reflection. It is too easy to see all we do not have, all I do not possess or hold within my hands that I ache for. The overflowing abundance of growth, food filling buckets and baskets and freezers and bellies, a tidy home with cool earthen walls and a floor my bare toes can wiggle against, slow quiet afternoon rests with my husband on a porch overlooking our valley.

I am often caught in wicked cycles of negativity and pessimism. Why this has all taken so long, the wrong turns along the way, people who have pulled proverbial rugs from under us, the weather gods themselves. Why me, poor me. It is far too easy to sink into this feeling, and fair to do, as well. Fair it may be to feel this way, it serves no one and nothing in the end. Or the middle, where I sit today.

I am in the middle. The middle of my own life, the middle of my son’s childhood which is flying by and scraping my heart raw. In the middle, hopefully early middle, of my marriage, one which I never foresaw for myself and is infinitely important. In this middle, do I want to be so focused on the future, the ‘end’ or the one-days that I miss all this tender middle? The soft, fragile, critical middles of my life? No, I don’t.

What I do want is to sit in the evening, after dinner and until far ‘too late’, talking to my husband. Looking at him, talking to him, laying my legs across his lap. I want to relish in the togetherness without the constant to-do list floating through my mind with its prickly little teeth. I want to say yes to my kid-turning-teenager asking me if he can read to me his endless insect factoids, without having half my self out the door ‘needing’ to do something else. There should be no else to these people I love most. I want room in my life for more, for peace, for calm. I want to show up with gratitude even when the pennies are counted carefully and the freezer is more full of ice than food. I want to show up with my eyes open, lungs filling, instead of letting the haven’t-dones catch me up, choking all ability to enjoy the present moments I – we- have worked so hard for.

Nothing we have in life has come easily, nor without hard work and dedication, nothing handed out or found by way of luck or privilege. And yet, I find it wildly difficult to sit back, take a breath, and enjoy anything we have now. And we have, I have, so much.

I have a husband who looks at me like I hung the moon, whose eyes light up every morning when he sees me. I have this marriage, five years strong (ten, together, with promises that count infinitely more than paper) that has taught me everything about love and compromise, priorities and myself. I have this man by my side who challenges me to be better and best, who loves me despite – not because – of my faults, who never falters in his devotion to me, to our shared dreams, to the life we have created together. I know I would be far less of a woman without him, and I am forever grateful for him in my life, by my side.

I have a son who is growing before my eyes, who made me a mama and gave me the world in so many ways. He is wild and crazy, full of ideas and love and laughter and noise. He has given me, since he was a baby on my chest, the kind of wide-eyed unconditional love that can only come from a child. And better now, he still has the capacity to love me absolutely, seeing me with almost-twelve-year-old wisdom, understanding I am not perfect or magical, but I am mama. He promises me he’ll never be too big or too old to hug me, to tell me he loves me. I have, in his wide brown eyes, the kind of love that nothing can tarnish.

I have food enough to feed my family, a catalyst to stretch my culinary creativity and my budgetary skills. I scrape and save and plan down to cents, and we eat well. I have this omelet, made bright yellow by our free-range pain-in-the-ass chickens’ eggs, rich and decedent all on their own. Paired with sharply spiced sausage and onions, soft salty cheese made fresh this morning by the same hands – mine- who milked the goats just an hour before. Balanced, wholesome, filling, and ticking all the right boxes. I am so grateful to be able to feed my family well.

I have land beneath my feet that is ours and cannot be taken away, earth enough to eventually sustain us. I have the most incredible views, no matter which direction I spin. Hard fought, hard won, and even in the hardest moments still to come, this land is ours. My gratitude for it runs deeper every day, every muddy hill is ours, every tree to consider, every valley we have yet to discover. Even the land beyond ours, that which we hold no ownership of, feels a part of our world – wild and green. Our journey to having earth to call ours was long and arduous and that makes it sweeter now to relish in.

I have my body, in all it’s imperfections and struggles. It shows up for me, still, every day. If I am but a spirit inhabiting a body, this one is good and I am grateful. It has held up through motherhood and injuries, being taken for granted and abused, forsaken and ignored. And now, I am grateful out loud every single day for the body that is healing. Muscles that stretch, lungs that fill, a heart that beats strongly, all allowing me to live the life I dream of. I have a body that, after too long, can now heal. There is no better show of gratitude than in taking care of a body that has so long taken care of me.

I have a mind full of curiosity, with the abilities and inclinations to think critically, the see all the wonderful painful facets of the world around me. Justices and injustices, good and evil, and the beauty in all of it. I have learned, in my adulthood, to gather up information like water droplets in the desert – with preservation and reverence – these are precious. My mind’s desire to learn is endless and vast, and it formulates and synthesizes and catalogues in a way utterly unique to my chemistry and DNA. My mind, once a place I actively avoided spending time in, is now my happiest space. Sinking deep into thoughts, imaginings, even fears – my mind is known and understood, again for all it’s faults. Being comfortable in and grateful for one’s own mind and its wild grey matter folds is something intensely beautiful in the crazy human condition.

I have so much, right here and right now. It would do me a world of good to recognize it, relish in it, absolutely wallow in gratitude for the life I have right this very instant.

Once upon a time, I wrote book reviews. And just because I stopped doesn’t mean I have stopped reading – in fact, the opposite is true. But in an attempt to redirect, or better yet, allow the natural direction of my writing, I have found those book reviews to be terribly – pedestrian? Boring? Banal? The list goes on. I felt the self-imposed need to ‘review’ every book I set eyes upon.

Let’s try something new, shall we?

My taste in books is as varied as my husband’s taste in music. Set his musical interests on random and it’s awesome whiplash for the ears. My whiplash comes in the form of books. Literature and what I can’t quite call literature. From a heavy hitting book by a world-renowned forensic anthropologist, straight to a heart-wrenching historical fiction novel, and then slipping into a unbelievable child star memoir, I will read it all with gusto. There have been some stand outs lately, and an interesting pattern of thought on a particular genre I’d like to discuss.

Kristin Hannah

I spent a woefully long time ignoring the praise of her work, the many women speaking so incredibly highly of her writing. Not out of disbelief, but because there is perhaps a little goth girl left in me who likes to rebel against popularity. If something is trendy, I’m automatically uninterested. Because, let’s face it, my taste is rarely that of the masses. But Kristin Hannah? She’s literary gold. Modern, literary magic.

As someone who doesn’t have endless time to read, I need the novels I pick to grab me and not let go. To envelope and involve me. What I want from a piece of dramatic literature is the kind of epic ballad that rarely exists in the modern world of words. Her topics and settings are broad, without a specific through line, and yet when I read the first few handful of sentences, it’s like sliding into your own bed after a long trip. It’s homey, it’s known. Something utterly familiar and I know I’m on a ride worth my time.

I did make a mistake: I started with the best. I started by reading The Great Alone, which floored and amazed me. Absolute tears streaming down my face, heart racing, visceral. It was magic and exhilarating, powerful and tremendously heart-wrenching. The problem? None of her other novels have beat it. The Nightingale was good, though I have some issues with the history of it (funnily enough, I could simply look past disagreements and enjoy the literature for just that) – it was sad and adventurous and painful, but it left me within days. Unexpected was Firefly Lane and Fly Away, a two-book series that followed the lives of two very different best friends. At first a somewhat typical coming of age story, it turned into so much more. Throughout their lives and loves, losses and questionings of their choices, I felt so much comradery with them each in turn. Even through two books, while lovely and tear-bringing, when I virtually closed the last book, I took a breath and moved on. The Four Winds was wonderful and deeply sad, edged all over with hope. Just the way I like it, set in the Great Depression, which is a piece of history I know very little about. It was interesting and vital, and yet left me.

What hasn’t left me is Leni and Cora and Alaska and their story of generations, of mother and daughter, of love and pain and coming home. Making home. When I think of it even now, months and months later, I feel the heaviness of tears well in my chest. I don’t know if I can adequately express this book to anyone. I told my cousins that it is one of the very best books I’ve ever read in my life. All time top five, easily. It haunts me and sits in my soul in a way few other collections of words ever had. Somehow the perfect balance of love and pain, adventure and loss, good and evil. I want to tell every woman to read it, but I equally think you should save it for the end of your Kristin Hannah binging.

That being said, from my own perspective of things, as a writer, I have found something oddly inspiring in Mrs. Hannah. Her first books are awful. Drivel of the worst kind. And I don’t mean smutty romance, because I’ll joyfully read that in spades. These are so badly written and messy, so hard to read, I had to make sure I was actually reading a book by the author I loved. Yes. Her first few. Now, I could judge and gasp and it could negatively affect my viewpoint on her as an author. Instead, I am inspired. If she, someone whose accolades and fans abound, could start off her published life quite, shall we say, questionably – does that mean I could, too? It gives me some power to simply write, to try, to learn and develop and become a better writer aloud. Instead of hiding it away and waiting until I’m better or best, maybe I ought to shout and share and know that I’ll grow in the eye of others. Terrifying, but truly inspiring.

She is truly one of the best fiction writers out there, and I say this with annoyingly high standards. Because while I’ll read just about anything and enjoy most of it, I nearly always have criticism in the style or quality of writing, if in no other way than it just wasn’t for me. I can’t imagine Kristin Hannah not being for you.

Lily King

As I often do, I chose her novel Writers and Lovers on an absolute whim, having no idea who she was or what exactly I was in for. Hooked from the first sentence, and glued all the way through. It was so good. I was sure the protagonist being a writer had something to do with my attachment to her and the depth of my own feelings towards to storyline. Until I read The English Teacher, a wildly different storyline with the exact same sense of awe. There was just something about these books that was different. I wasn’t being told by words how I ought to feel, what emotions should be elicited. Instead, the words were the feelings. I am possibly incapable of explaining it better than that. Without descriptive words to elicit the intended emotions, the structure of the writing itself guides your reading experience. Sentence structure acts like a musical score, setting the tone and mood.

King is a truly incredibly artist with her words, an immense storyteller, and the lessons I have learned as a writer are incredible. I want to inject a dose of that magic into my own writing – another lesson learned without intention.

I picked up (virtually) Euphoria without reading a summary. I don’t, honestly, enjoy reading the summaries of books. Too much like trailers to movies, it spoils the magic surprise of it all. I knew I loved her as a writer, two books deep at that point, so I had no doubt I would also love this no matter the storyline. So, color me fucking floored when it chronicles the tangled story of anthropologists in Papua New Guinea. If you read my review of Savage Harvest you might remember the incredible fascination I happen to have (thanks to Stephanie Harlowe’s YouTube series on Michael Rockefeller) with the tribes and cultures of the place. Euphoria was intense, hair raising. Where Savage Harvest was more analytical, though a wonderful read, Euphoria was something more. Fiction based in fact, full of grit and love, lust and bloodthirst, and the deeply engrained rituals of people I cannot relate to and yet wish I knew. There is just something about that place that has sunk into my soul in a weird way. I cannot get enough of the stories, the experiences, the visuals painted. The sago and headhunting, a life dictated by the river.

I think a part of the magic in Lily King, what amazes me from a literary standpoint, is that her books are so incredibly different, with a flavor unique to each story, and yet they are all somehow written absolutely in her style. From a story of love and choices and following dreams in the city, to headhunting and affairs in a remote jungle village, somehow I never forgot who’s words I was reading.

The Genre of Romance

Oh boy, this is going to fun. Some women might categorize smutty romance novels as a guilty pleasure. I don’t, because I feel no guilt over my enjoyment of them. A far, far cry from most of what I read, I find incredible joy in immersing myself in an outlandish and wickedly predictable story of romance, love, lust, and whatever highly predictable hurdles a trope has to offer. Most aren’t well written, so when I find an author that does a decent job of writing, while balancing love and lust, I’ll have a hard time pulling myself away.

I was thinking about this, which is somehow utterly ironic – the deep self-reflection of why I like mostly vapid stories, with utterly predictable endings. And that is why. Life is unpredictable, and my brain is always on. I’m constantly consuming information about something, and if I’m not, my brain is going a mile a minute considering, imagining, worrying, wondering, formulating, planning. Turning off my brain has always been a challenge for me and whatever I find that calms the stormy chaos is beautiful. I adore reading immersive novels or intelligent nonfiction essays and memoirs. I consume them with abandon. But I also need a break sometimes. Shallow romance novels are the medicine for my overactive brain. And there is zero guilt in that.

In a world where happy endings are seemingly more and more rare, where fun takes an adult backseat to responsibility, is there really harm in something that brings a bit of happily-ever-after joy to life? I think women are made fun of or looked down on for reading such books, and while it might show to some a lack of literary aptitude (these are rarely really well written or highly polished pieces of prose), it might just be a bit of happiness. I used to read these types of books to feed my single-woman imagination, which only encouraged my stubborn drive to wait for my fairytale ending – and look how that worked out. Pretty well, in fact. (She says with a smirk).

Now? Now I find it escapism at it’s finest. Something to put a grin on my face when I drink my tea in the morning, or to shut my list-centric brain off at night. But that’s me. What about other women? Because let’s face it, I don’t think men are reading these. There is something bigger at play, here. Something societal that will be a hot button topic, no doubt. Are the men in these romance novels betas? Are they weak? Are the main character women dominant? In case you don’t read these: the men are almost always dominate, masculine, ‘ideal’ examples of men and the women, no matter how they start in the story, end up wanting the fairytale. I am sure there are tropes that fly in the face of what I’ve just said, labeled as some type of ‘feminist’ romance. But the ‘main stream’? The stuff that women hide on their tablets or old school under their pillows? Those are not weak men simping after boss-babe women. They are masculine, often domineering men. They are, in a nutshell, what modern women secretly want.

I shrug here, because I know I’ll get push back and flack, but I’m speaking truths here. If women really wanted soft and uber-in-their-feels men, why are they reading novels about the exact opposite? And why is that something to be hidden or feel guilty about? Maybe it’s deeper than a tinge of embarrassment over the genre, maybe it’s shame for going ‘against’ what modern women are ‘supposed’ to want in a man. At its core, being a ‘bad’ new-age feminist.

Whether it’s Fifty Shades style (don’t read them, just don’t - the writing is abysmal­ and the storyline is all kinds of flawed) or just a flirty little Western romp – there is obviously something innately appealing about the romance genre for women. It’s scratching some itch, societally speaking, that nothing else seems able to. For me, it’s the silencing of the chaos, the happy drivel coating my over-indulgent brain and letting it calm down. For other women, maybe an escape into something they wish they had (I’ve been there, too).

If a woman could set down the expectations to be strong and independent, to want a feminized version of a man, if she could be truer to her self and her instinctive feminine energy, maybe these books could be a gateway to realizing what she really wants in a man. In a relationship, a marriage, life as a whole.

I find the world of literature (can we call all books literature?) fascinating for its breadth of content and intention, the ability to illicit not only emotions, deep or shallow in turn, but also to ignite conversations and contemplations. So much of the starting point for long philosophical musings start in the words I read. An epic novel set during the dust bowl turns the gears in my mind around the health of the earth in agriculture and not only what we can learn from the past, but the shear strength and tenacity of people and what they, we, are capable of doing just to survive. A tangled love story in the middle of the anthropological heart of headhunting territory, a story about greed at its core, as well as family and love, only proved to heighten and expand my hungry interest in the area, the culture, the time, the good versus evil that we think we understand in black and white terms. An enemies to lovers trope against all odds managed to open up a consideration for what women in the modern messy era of love and dating really want, what secrets hide in their hearts at night, and why exactly those desires need be secret at all.

Reading is a window into so much. Yourself, humanity, societies, the past and present and future of all of it. Without written words, so much would be lost. The world is too large and expansive, too disconnected now for spoken word to suffice. The written word is how we share, how we learn and understand, not only facts but how we expand our own emotional intelligence, and how we can, if we dare, allow our minds to expand far beyond the content of the words we are reading, to allow those words to be a jumping off point for so much more.

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I strive, always, to be a positive light. To be a positive role model, partner, teammate, woman. I strive to be glass-half-full, looking on the bright side. I strive for these things for the people around me, for my family who needs me to be at my best self. But I also strive for myself.

I spent years of my life in darkness, in anxiety and depression filled voids of chaos, confusion, apathy, and way too much empathy. I was a walking, talking juxtaposition that very few people would have labeled with depression. But I was. And while I have sorted and sifted and found my way over the last 35 years of life, and while depression’s greedy claws rarely find their ways into my skin and bones anymore, it still happens.

The first two months of 2025 knocked and kicked and punched me. I won’t discount that they did much the same to my family, but this is not their story or words, but mine. Homesteading losses and painful choices, relying on the wild generosity of near-strangers on the internet to buy my family food and a literal roof, illness and injury after illness and injury, parenting a would-be teenager and navigating how ‘mom’ is different than ‘mama’, it’s all been entirely too much.

I crashed, with sobbing hopelessness that quickly turned apathetic. Some portion of my mind still fully alive lit up like the metaphorical light bulb. This is depression rock bottom. I have witnessed in my past more time than I can count, the patterned cycle of my depression. There is a stacking of hardships, of loss, of confusion, of whatever, and I keep moving forward, step after step, without many outward signs. I rarely see them myself, until I’m near the bottom. I akin it to slip-slide running down a rocky cliff. I can kind of keep my footing and stay upright, but there’s a flailing lack of control to the madness. And I know eventually I’ll hit the bottom – hard. Sometimes it’s a rougher landing than other times.

Relatively speaking, today didn’t hurt too badly. I’ve hit harder bottoms, much much harder bottoms with much worse consequences and injuries. So a moment of shattered heart and sobbing I’m not happy isn’t the worst. And then, after the rock bottom comes a flash of clarity enough to blind me. I cannot express it better, but I know now I’ve hit my current rock bottom. I’ve bottom out of energy and hope and the will to keep plastering on a happy face. It’s all crushed and bruised.

The only thing left at the bottom is to pick myself up, tend to my wounds, and keep going. It isn’t always a perfect climb up the other side, sometimes it’s slow and painful to pick my way back to something better. But I know I can’t fall further. There is no where further, this time.

Depression isn’t linear or definable. I need no diagnosis or therapy, and I seek zero advice. I know myself, my brain, my heart, my soul. I knew the signs, perhaps, but chose to ignore them because if I’m being honest there was nothing I could do. I sometimes have to ride it out until the end, until I break down and break through.

That doesn’t mean tomorrow will be perfect, it isn’t a magic pill. But it’s all lighter, brighter. I can breathe again. I can focus, can communicate without clenched teeth, can see that there is better in the world than the dark wall against my face.

I wonder at why to share this – don’t I often. And whether it is self-fulfilling, in that I want admiration or pity, or sympathy. I don’t, actually. I think about who I was when I was younger, a girl so utterly controlled by the depression and anxiety, told at every turn that I couldn’t handle it alone. I needed therapy, “well, have you been diagnosed?”, drugs can help, talk to someone. I pushed against that so hard everyone likely thought I was a miserably stubborn teenager hell bent on self-destruction. I wasn’t. I was learning. I was picking through my brain and figuring it out. It’s the same reason I don’t care to have letters stamped across my forehead deeming me anything in the DCM5. I’m keenly aware of myself, I understand my patterns and processes. I have, for the most part, a rather good handle on it all.

This didn’t come from talking it out with someone else, someone professional that has never, thank God, been in my head. I am the only one in here, the only one to know the inner most workings. To sort through tabs and folders and hidden boxes in subconscious closets.

So why now? Why do I share this, I wonder. Is this a bidding for pity, for sympathy, for understanding? Likely to some degree – anyone who shares themselves bared open is a touch narcissistic. But what’s more, truly and honestly, is the desire to reach out for someone else. The someone I may never know, never meet, but I know they exist. I know there is someone out there who is just like the girl I used to be, the girl who hung desperately upon the words of someone like me. When I read words that felt like they not only reached into my soul, but were of my broken soul, it was the only time I didn’t feel alone.

It is lovely and wonderful for your parent or sibling or partner, your best friend or someone else to tell you they understand and that they love you. It’s something else entirely for someone who shares brain chemistry, shares the darkness that bats at the edges of your mind, who can say I know it in a way utterly more intimate. It is the best way to be seen when you are in your own personal loneliest hell.

Because at the very coldest heart of depression sits loneliness. A depth of alone that isn’t about people surrounding you, it isn’t about who is on your side or in your life, it is the gaping chasm of alone that sidles up against misunderstood and damaged. All monsters that gnash their teeth and flick their claws, ready to swallow you up whole if you dare let them grab ahold. And the best weapon against them? Being seen.

So I want you, whoever you are that one day stumbles across these words, to know that I see you. In your darkest, ugliest, emptiest, scariest moments. The moments when you deem yourself wildly unlovable or wholly broken, damaged beyond repair or wickedly dark. I see all of that, not past it. There is no in spite of here. The darkness doesn’t own you, but you can own it.

I once wrote a poem, dark and bloody and brooding, that I have since sadly lost. This poem destroyed friendships and opened my life up to all the wrong things – a story for another day, about people who didn’t see me. But it also taught me, not only the words I put on paper as a teenager but the aftershocks of sharing it, that I have within myself the power to battle back the darkest demons. I have skills and practices that allow an outlet for depression and anxiety that is healthy. It isn’t a cry for help, it is the help. Words are my therapy. Poetry and prose, metaphors and monologues are the processing I need. No lay-on-the-couch-and-listen-to-the-professional therapy would ever amount to half the light giving expression that words provide me.

Whether I leave a writing session with a face salty from tears or a heart bursting with hope, I have altered my own reality with the allowance of my own words. I share this, because I think back to the girl I was who felt tremendously alone and misunderstood. I was told time and again to ‘get help’, when the help was always within me. I can concede that some people may not find that power, may not even have that outlet, and might do the very best with sharing, with ‘professional’ help (though I have my personal doubts about the professionality, necessity, and morality of such industries) – but that’s the point.

There is no one-size answer to the kind of darkness that sits in some of us. It is a monster we must, each and individually, learn to reckon with.

I have been thinking about grief on the farm. Heartbreak on a homestead. The juxtapositions of grieving one animal while simultaneously being at peace with the intentional taking of another’s life. This lifestyle, this job, this way of existing that we have chosen is unique in its grief. In the process and understanding of grieving.

Out of a depth of love and abhorrence of suffering for our beloved animals, we put down the biggest pig around. The Bog Beast, Wilby, Wilbur, Wilbs, Wilby-Pig. Our hearts could no longer take the obvious pain he was in, and in the same breath we could not wait for the natural end and risk the loss of meat, as well.

It hurts to say, a welling up in my eyes and a twist in my stomach, to speak of him in terms of meat. With utter frankness and transparency, my mind had to disassociate the job in front of me from the animal I loved. I could not look at his huge face, now blank and soulless, while I harvested everything I could. And yet I slipped out words to him in the process, utterances of thanks and mutterings of how huge he is while sliding down a muddy, bloody hill. I was shattered in every way possible.

I didn’t want to harvest his meat, and I put up walls of excuses to my husband when in reality I was just too ashamed, too sad, too confused by my own grief. I sobbed, angry and confused, the night we decided to kill him. The night we chose to end the life of a pig that meant so much to us. In so many ways.

Again, juxtaposition.

Not only was I flooded, am I flooded, with the empty air in his area, mud that’s drying and a fence forgotten, with the huge hog that won’t ever fling his drool on me again, but I am also devastated for our future. For the future piglets we won’t have, our amazing breeding program put to death right along with him.

I’ll never really question if what we did was right, for in that much I have peace. A strange settling peace as I stroked his suddenly small seeming head. One finger right between his pained eyes, I told him it was time and we were going to kill him. That I was so sorry and we all loved him so much. It was the most eerily peaceful death, just one great sigh and he was gone. His huge presence on our farm was gone in a breath, a breeze. Life is so incredibly fragile.

We all had our jobs that day, all difficult in our own ways. I cannot speak to anyone else’s grief, but I want to speak to mine because I think this is important. We are not heartless homesteaders, taking lives without real consideration. We do not raise animals for slaughter without a care for their time alive, and we love them so deeply it wounds us.

In the scrambling through the barbed tangles of grief, I found myself questioning why this is infinitely harder than the lives we have taken for the sole intentional purpose of feeding ourselves. We have killed pigs who we raised from piglets, who we named and pet and scratched, who we hand fed bananas and loved on. Pigs who, often, we saved the lives of when they were wee little piglets, for somehow those are the pigs we always end up keeping. And while we take it with the utmost reverence and I almost always shed a tear, after that it’s all business and work, and there is no crashing wave of grief.

So why, then, is this is devastating? Did I merely love Wilbur more? Do I attach differently to an animal I know we’re keeping? Perhaps. Which feels almost shameful to admit. That we have animals we love differently, if not less. Do I feel less kinship to a pig who I know will live a beautiful seven months before we take its life, before I pray over it and methodically, carefully use every piece of it’s worldly body to nourish myself and my family? Perhaps. Was Wilbur just special? Probably. But was he special because we mentally stamped ‘keep’ on his big dumb forehead, because we knew we could allow ourselves complete attachment, to really bond? Which means we aren’t so fully bonded to the animals slated for consumption. I used to think we were. I feel a bit disjointed over the revelation.

My throat chokes, going back to that day. The day I knew I had to take a knife to my beloved pig’s body. To cut his huge muscles from his bones, and make the very most of an unimaginable loss. I felt that weight horribly. The weight of making his death count for something. Do not let his life be in vain any more than it must. I have never, in all my meat eating, animal butchering years struggled to eat the meat of an animal I have loved. Even the first pigs, after we all sobbed harsh tears because it was a huge job to emotionally undertake, even then I didn’t stumble over the eating of the meat. It transforms for me, once a kill is completed. The animal’s self, it’s soul, is gone with its breath and now it is meat. A switch, and as emotional as it can be, that is the moment for work and sustenance.

Not so with Wilbur. Not so when we had to winch him out of the muddy pit he was in. Not so when I looked into his empty eyes. Not so when I held a knife above his massive body, knowing the next step to take. There was no separation, no switch to flip. Just a pile of heartache and heartbreak sitting in my chest right along with the weight on my shoulders to do a good job.

And the, albeit more subtle, weight I feel now to raise up his last babies extra well. To love them more, appreciate the genetics more. To see the big ears and black spots and touch their little noses with extra reverence, for they are the last of Wilbur.

Grief has no tidiness, not even or maybe especially, on a homestead. There are people who would scoff at this, consider animals as less than and livestock lesser still, people who don’t bat an eye at the death of any of them. I am not that kind of person. I would find it repulsive if I was. I’ve always known the depth of my own grief, I have always managed and understood it in relation to the taken lives on our land.

This loss has shaken me. Has brought in sharp relief the fragility of life, the sorrow of loss, the depth of pain, the empathy possible, and the complexity of grief. However the grief finds you on a farm, and it will, it is good and real. It is not to be ignored or stashed away, to be ashamed of – if you do not feel grief over at least one loss, you are missing what it means to be human. Or, even, animal. If you’ve ever watched a bonded animal pair torn apart by death, you will know they can love just as wholly as we do.

I close my eyes and see Wilbur’s big face, his eyes full of pain and love in equal measure. I know he knew, I felt in my bones. He knew it was his end, and he knew we were there to help see him across. The only salve to my still tattered heart is exactly that: he knew he was loved until he knew no more. And there is nothing more I could ever want for my animals than that.

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In December we celebrated cow day. And by cow day, I mean our anniversary. And by celebrate, I mean we paused for kisses and heart eyes a little more often than usual. While neither of us are big on ‘days’ – holidays, birthdays, anniversaries – I do tend to find myself reflective. Not so much, this year, reflective on our love or marriage (spoiler: it’s so good) but the time we have spent together.

We have now been together ten years, married for five. The decade mile marker beamed brightly in my mind, a delineation of time that meant something a bit more than the last nine years. Ten years, a decade. I was a twenty five year old baby when we met. When he walked into my house and my life and my heart (that’s a fib, he was in my heart already), I was a single mom with a one year old, borderline desperate to find my person and absolutely ready to give up. I was tired and weary, but I was also immature in a million ways. Life had smashed lemons in my face, but I had also failed to learn how to make lemonade with anything resembling grace.

I came with a baby and a truckload of baggage. I hardly had a clue who I was, and somehow I have been lucky enough that my maturing and growth has happened along side my husband. That his oak-standing-tall masculinity has tethered the flighty heart of a twenty-something girl until she could grow into a thirty-something woman. I’d like to think I’m a good deal more grounded than I was. Perhaps I’ve lost a bit of whimsy in my dreams, but certainly not an ounce of laughter.

Beyond the infectious belly laughs only a baby can bring on, I hadn’t laughed or been tremendously silly since I was a child myself. I didn’t make up songs at random, I didn’t dish out goofy flirty comments with my whole chest. I didn’t make jokes, and if I ever did, I certainly didn’t expect laughter in return. I used to be reprimanded by friends and men and family alike that I took myself ‘too seriously’, which always felt like a blow. I felt like life ought to be taken seriously. And I still do, don’t mistake me. I take myself and my life and my jobs and roles and duties and love very seriously indeed. But I have learned to laugh, as well.

I might still write with next to no humor and I might still take life and myself seriously as a damn heart attack. But I have found a seemingly endless spring of laughter and lightness and humor inside myself that I was never before aware of. My husband tapped that spring, perhaps on purpose, perhaps by chance. He made me laugh from the very beginning, through heavy and huge conversations before we ever met. Through sometimes tears and the enormity of falling in love, he made me laugh. Full belly laugh, crying over something ridiculous, a stupid movie or a silly comment. A dad joke or a wildly inappropriate side glance. He has made me laugh and snort and shake my head grinning for a decade.

He met me, little ole’ me, when I was too-serious in all the wrong ways, burdened and begging for love. He could have taken advantage of my position in a million different ways (god knows other men would have, other men did). He could have said it was too much, that I was too much or not enough or any other soliloquy possibility that plagued my nightmares in the early weeks of our relationship. I consistently believed he’d wake up and bail, that he just wouldn’t return a text one day, that he wouldn’t ever show up at my door again.

Silly me.

And now, silly me.

We laugh endlessly together. Even when the days are long, the sweat literally pours off our brows or the hours of parenting are so hard we wonder why anyone does this. We can still smile, still laugh, still put our heads back together and share a kiss. A laugh. He still gives me butterflies, still curls my toes with a kiss, and still makes me blush far too easily.

I don’t know if we’re particularly special, but I don’t see this type of love often. I don’t see the kind of relationship or marriage we have. Surely it exists, but my heart aches to see how few women get to experience the absolute magic of loving a man like I do. Of being loved by the kind of man that loves me. I still don’t know what he saw in me, what he sees in me, why he still looks at me like I hung the moon. I’ll never know, but I will also never doubt that.

As I was thinking over this more, watching palms trees sway outside as I washed dishes, I considered how I have changed. And how so many people will tell someone, especially a woman, “oh, you’ve changed” in the tone we all read that in. In the tone that really means “you let some man change you, you’ve lost yourself, you changed for him”. It is and isn’t true. I have changed immensely since I was twenty five. I have changed since I was thirty. I have changed since I was yesterday. We should all continue to strive towards improvement. Self assessment and reflection, considering how our behaviors and actions, our personalities and shortcoming, affect those we love. I wouldn’t have ever learned to be better at communication if I wasn’t married to the man that I am. I would never have moved to Ecuador, might have never followed homesteading dreams, and certainly wouldn’t have the confidence in my opinions that I do. Not because of him and yet absolutely because of him.

We are, in many ways, who we surround ourselves with. Human beings are incredibly adaptable, some of us more chameleon like than others, able to shift aspect of our personalities depending on who we are around, like sliding doors to closets of ourselves. Some people slide open the worst, the angriest, the least productive and messiest closet doors, a meeting of their own energies. I’ve felt that, I’ve experienced that. Not because I am inherently a mean or angry person, but because I matched an energy, I let a closet door slide open. Surely, we can learn to lock them regardless of the outside push and pull, but life is immensely easier and more beautiful if you can unlock all the doors and be sure that the person you choose as your closest companion will gently pull open the very best closets, the beautiful hidden wonders within yourself. And slowly, over time, patch over the doors to the dark places until they are mere scars on walls in the house of your mind.

I look at my husband, the man who swept me up with love and affection, with brutal honesty and demanded in the sweetest ways possible for me to be the best version of myself, and I realize the depth of my gratitude. And of my change. Eleven years ago I couldn’t have imagined the kind of wildly healthy relationship existing, for me or anyone else, that would allow me such intense security and confidence. To know, without a single doubt, that he will love me forever. That we are meant and made and paired perfectly. That despite the hardest and darkest hours and days, the seasons of change and growth, the painful conversations and the nearly impossible decisions, we will still persevere.

His love for me, his incredible ability to show that love in all the ways most precious and important and entirely unique to us (socks and chocolate and cheese and mashing potatoes), has allowed me the changes I wanted and needed to flourish as a woman. I am still changing, still evolving, and still learning along side him. And I know, deeply and without doubt, that he will continue to love and support me through the changes to come.

As is a common occurrence in my life, I have been inspired into an internal discussion via something I’ve heard. As I bounce around the kitchen and house, I almost always have a podcast or video playing – a way to keep my brain occupied and working while my body and hands are mindlessly busy. In this case, I’ve been watching Sorted Food’s Pretentious Ingredients Marathon.

Let me explain this. Sorted Food is a YouTube channel dedicated to food, in a lot of different ways. I’ve watched them for many many years, and enjoy this particular series because they highlight ingredients that might be deemed ‘pretentious’.

Pretentious: attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed

Often, whether they agree upon the pretentious quality or merely classify a food product as ‘too expensive’ or ‘unnecessary’, I am struck by a pattern. Firstly, some of these things are truly silly and nonsensical, I’m speaking outside of champagne glitter. Iberico bacon, specialty raised chicken, heritage goose…these are foods that they don’t believe are good enough for their hefty price tags. And while I agree I could and would never pay such steep fees for delicious food, that doesn’t mean that these things aren’t worthy or honestly, that they aren’t everyday ingredients for some of us.

Take that package of Iberico bacon they said was amazing, but had no place on a ‘fry up’ plate. Excuse me? I will go to the mat for my bacon, put it up against the magical Iberian pork any day. Rich, dark, marbled, fatty, succulent. And every-day. It gets added to breakfast sandwiches and omelets and breakfasts plates. It isn’t a special occasion for us, instead the norm.

Ask many homesteaders who grow and raise and process and prepare their own food from their land, and they will agree they eat like absolute kings. They eat, on a regular daily basis, the kind and quality of foods that so much of the population would reserve for the most special of occasions. While we talk at length all over the place about the resilience of homesteading, the self-sufficiency of growing our own foods, we are also smugly grinning about the incredible quality of that food. We aren’t seeking to grow food that mimics low-grade grocery store foods.

We don’t want nutritionally devoid, rock hard and tasteless tomatoes. We grow tomatoes from richly nutrient dense soil, the fruits of which are deeply colored throughout and bursting with sunshine. The favorite pork is not hitting our table as ‘the other white meat’ – tough, bland, and dry. We could raise those pigs, in those conditions. But that is not the goal, the dream, the intention. Instead, our pork is a cousin of that Iberian pig, feeding off guavas and bananas and termite mounds instead of acorns. Our pork could be mistaken for beef or lamb in color and marbling, cured to perfection for bacon and ham, spiced perfectly for sausages, and made into the most satisfying and healthful bone broth.

This might seem luxurious to many, and in fact it really is, but it can also be an every-day item. A random Wednesday morning of Iberian-esque bacon. Pasture raised duck, often considered a pricey and special occasion only bird, is so common place in our world that I have jars of tender and rich duck meat canned in jars, lined up on a shelf in the kitchen. It isn’t reserved for a holiday plate, instead the every day celebration of duck fried rice or a duck salad sandwich.

Avocados, which were once a precious few in a shopping cart, a must-have for tacos but something the held guilt for the quantities of money handed over for the bumpy green fruit, are now stacked up 20 high for the week’s eating. I had a blink of panic or guilt over that number on Sunday, but when that amounts to a mere five dollars of rich fatty nutrition, what was luxury becomes almost cheap.

So is the dollar amount allocated to a food item the determining factor of it’s worth, it’s pretentious label, it’s worthy-ness? If the Iberico bacon was cheaper, you wouldn’t call it any of that. You would call it incredible and eat it daily. Are we privileged to have such rich abundance? No, not in the slightest. We work hard for that abundance, we have toiled to place ourselves in a place and situation where that level of food taste and quality is an every day celebration.

As we build our farm and skills, as we learn and overcome challenges, we are aiming towards our daily meals being so world-class it’s astounding. I feel almost ashamed of the quality we are able to achieve, the richness I feel in every bite of dinner, every sip of coffee. Which is another topic altogether, the society-imposed guilt over your own hard-won successes and abundance. But in the vein of food, I cannot help but wonder what would happen to human’s relationship with food, with incredible food, if they grew it themselves.

I used to feel that such delicacies were so far out of my possible reach I might as well be aiming to pull down a star. Iberian jamon was never going to happen. Aged goat and sheep cheese, world-class coffee and chocolate, intensely flavored ruby-red tomatoes and fruity little orange hot peppers. Fermented hot sauces, salty loaves of gluten free bread made with freshly milled grains grown in our soil. The kind of quality of food that would feel down right pretentious and silly, unattainable and unreasonable, except that it is rapidly becoming our every day staples.

And I don’t think this makes us ‘pretentious’ by any right. In reality, so much of what seems outrageous now is actually the simple food of centuries past. Food and the culture around it has simply changed so much, so dramatically, that we can hardly imagine Iberico bacon on a Tuesday morning when sugary cereals sit in bright cardboard boxes. Which should be the normal, and which should be the outrageous? The common place and the special-occasion?

Perhaps we just choose to live a life where the food we eat, the food we enjoy and find joy in, is the best possible quality. We talk endlessly about health and how what you eat makes you literally who and what you are. But for the love of food, sometimes it’s really about the joy of it. So, we’ve designed a life for ourselves where we can enjoy the supreme pinnacle of culinary delights on any random day, on every random day.