But before all of that, I am freshly 19 years old and sitting in a plush, fold-out chair underneath my lofted bed in my dorm room. My roommate is out and about, and I am alone, tapping through Instagram stories, when I pause on a post of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese.” And by the end of the first line, I am a puddle.

You do not have to be good.

And there you have it, folks—my Mary Oliver awakening!

In the days, months, and years that followed, I took to thriftbooks.com and got my hands on any and every copy of Mary’s writing and collections I could find (and afford). And through the tumult of those years and up to the present, her writing has been a balm, a refuge, a prayer, a precious gift, and a literal lifesaver.

There is a special quality to her writing that is both whimsical and serious. Her words attend to the beauty of the world in a way that does not brush over its danger and sorrow and pain. Her precision and sarcasm both hold and set me free. When she writes that I don’t have to be good, I believe her.

After literal months of anticipation, this past Sunday, I attended a showing of Sasha Waters’ documentary Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, put on by Long Story Books (coming to Inman Park Fall 2026!!), and held at my favorite, the Plaza Theatre.

I cried most of the film and thought back to that moment in my Clemson dorm room in 2019. And then I thought about 9-year old me, mostly barefoot, catching fireflies in my backyard. I thought about meeting God on a canoe dock in the summer of 2013. I thought about being 20 and heartbroken and terrified. I thought about the death of my childhood dog who was the best girl this world has ever seen. I thought about the big snake in the old magnolia tree. And the other snake in the river.

I thought about the world, and I thought about me. I thought about Mary’s words that hold me now and hold all minutiae and meteors of my own life, and the world—the generous peonies and the terror of dark rooms, the patient goldfinches and the blood in the soil.

Now more than ever, in my third year of seminary, living in the city in a forest, at (freshly) 26 years of age, I am—perhaps more aware than I bargained for—that life is wild, and it is precious. No one is getting younger, and I am less and less convinced that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice. And still…

mother earth, / your comfort is great, your arms never withhold. / It has saved my life to know this.1

I am here, in the world, and the world is in me, and we are here together, grappling to make sense of it all.

And when at least twice per day I am sick of trying to make it all make sense, I walk outside, breathe in the beauty of the wrens and the oaks and the pillows of clouds, and for a moment, I am free.

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“This grasshopper, I mean
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.”

In his raspy and wrinkled voice, John1 read from the pulpit of the Iona Abbey Church Mary Oliver’s The Summer Day, in such a way that I think Mary herself would have approved. That is no small thing!

And my tears, all but streaming down my face, had splattered my program with salty puddles. It’s not that I am embarrassed to cry in public—experience has made that otherwise LOL—but I was not sure that The Summer Day really warranted my waterworks display…2

Most people know this poem by its concluding abstraction,
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

… which is kind of the least important part of the whole thing (not laying claim to any ultimate truth here… but I kind of am).

… which brings to me to why I was nearly ugly crying at John’s reading of the poem during the final evening worship service of my time at Iona Abbey.

Throughout my week-long stay in mid-June I had the great honor of journeying with London-based writer and environmental educator Bob Gilbert and a cohort of nearly 40 other folks from around the world—although mostly the UK, US, Germany, and Australia—to experience nature afresh.

With Bob as our guide, we got up close and personal with the ecology of Iona. We learned of the butterbur and the tansy. We studied daisies, lichen, and pearlwort. We learned the stories of the ivy-leaved toadflax and the call of the corncrakes. And we only scratched the surface of all the worlds we could have discovered entirely by meandering around the grounds of the abbey.

Each day, we were tasked with noticing one small thing—like a modest spiderweb or the color of the underside of a wildflower—to report back to a peer as a way to live into Mary Oliver’s admonishment in her “Sometimes”: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” During one session we wrote poems based on our discoveries and another day we added our own verses to the praises of Psalm 148. One time, we were tasked with drawing lichen without looking at our paper! As you might expect, that was humbling.

The point of the week, at least as I saw it, was to see again for the first time the sheer wonder and beauty of the world within reach—not your Google images search history of Mediterranean beaches, but more like your backyard. And then hopefully, equipped with new ways of seeing and being, we might take the time to be more conscious and careful in our own everyday, Joe Schmo lives and share our learnings with our friends and neighbors, so they might do the same.

I was struck by a particular moment when Bob asked us specific questions about the trees in our yards—if we know when they lose their leaves in the fall or when they blossom in the spring (or however that works in the Southern Hemisphere), and maybe, if we know their names. I typically pride myself in being rather observant, but I felt my stomach sink when I could not seem to recollect any details about the few trees in my tiny, urban backyard (except for the one that leaves nasty, sticky sap all over my car during the fall season… no thank you).

My peers began to chime in with a smattering of notes and observations from the many varieties of trees that sprinkle their yards and neighborhoods. After I wrestled off the shame-adjacent feelings of feeling like a subpar student (on the list of my worst nightmares… although not quite as high on the list as it used to be), I turned to wonder.

I have lived in the same precious studio apartment in the Virginia-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta for two years now, and thought I had pretty much figured it out. I have walked or biked or ran down nearly every corner of the neighborhood and never hesitate to show guests who visit me my favorite streets. I know when and where to expect the hydrangeas and also the potholes. I have a favorite bench in the park down the street and know the exact length of my walk to my favorite coffee shop in the neighborhood (it is .71 miles, but who’s really counting…).

But, now, what a treat to think that there is still so much more to discover? Even in just my very own backyard…

I read this Instagram post back in 2019 or 2020 (that I can’t find anywhere despite my attempts!!) about The Summer Day specifically in terms of what it means to seize the day. Like, what does Mary Oliver have to say about carpe diem?

Long story short, I think Mary implies that the greatest carpe diem of all is to do less and pay attention more. In her poem, she does not paint over the particularities of a long list of beings just to fit them in or say she did but instead details with ferocity and reverence a singular grasshopper.

On the contrary, a typical day in my carpe diem life, is packing as many things and tasks and to-dos between the hours of 6 AM and 11 PM that I possibly can. Did someone say Enneagram Type 3 (and wing 4 at that!)? And while this way of being is not necessarily wrong, there is always a big slice of me that hungers to do less and savor more… to “walk slowly, and bow often,” as Mary would say. For someone who has spent the last 7+ years of her life studying Mary Oliver’s writing, I cannot say that I am as well practiced in her way.

Much to my luck, spending a week on the 3.4 sq. mile Isle of Iona with abysmal internet connection and some of the most beautiful views you have ever seen was just the place to get to work. Living in community with 40 strangers, sharing meals, journeying around the island together, and beginning and ending my day in worship shook me free from the metrics by which I typically measure my life—emails sent, miles ran, pages read, words typed, distance biked, chores completed, etc etc etc.—and instead attuned me to behold the immeasurable.

Just a few hours before the service with John’s reading, I walked, clutching a cappuccino and my phone camera, one final time up to the White Strand of the Monks and North End Beach of Iona. It was cold and rainy and windy and absolutely perfect.

In an effort to savor every bit of the island as I possibly could, I slowed my pace and took it all in—the 360° views, the feeling of sand and dirt and grass (and occasionally sheep shit) underfoot, the cocktail of coastal aromas (also including a hint of sheep excrement), and the sounds of waves crashing against the rock of Lewisian gneiss, bands of green marble, and red Ross of Mull granite. In my fierce attempt to pay attention, I noticed a stunning snail shell (say that three times fast!) on the path.

As I walked along, I began to notice more and more and more.

And like a yellow brick road, I followed the shells until voilà—the most snail-looking snail you’ve ever seen!

Our lives are remarkably wild and so terribly fragile and precious. The state of the world feels constantly devastating, and yet, there is goodness glinting in every square centimeter of our thick and fleeting lives. And if we wait for the grand gestures, like falling in love or moving to our dream city, we will surely miss it. We could miss the glory of a grasshopper who has flung herself out of the grass or the splendor of one singular, slimy snail, trudging along the hills of sand.

John continued,

“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?”

Yes, there is a paralyzing number of things outside our control. And still, “it is just as important as ever to attend to the little graces by which the dignity of our lives is maintained and sustained.” Indeed, “Birds still sing; the stars continue to cast their gentle gleam over the desolation of the battlefields, and the heart is still inspired by the kind word and the gracious deed.”3 Grasshoppers still thrust their jaws from side to side. Snails still slide over mounds of sand, however slowly!

“Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

John concluded.

Maybe the grandest days of our lives will be getting married or finally completing that magnum opus. Surely, we will have many more devastating days, too. And maybe, also, we will open our hearts to behold the immeasurable, incomparable, even unseizable beauty of the “the ordinary, / the common, the very drab, / the daily presentations… the untrimmable light / of the world, / the ocean’s shine, / the prayers that are made / out of grass?”4

So yes—it will be extravagant and heartbreakingly painful, and mostly, probably, it will be radiantly, perfectly plain. Please, don’t miss it.

—

All my love from London… and as always, be free—

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Me, unsure if this was a statement or a question (probably both), blurted, “Yes! I do.”

“Good, good. Here, come this way.” Jim, the gallery attendant with energetic blue eyes, bright white hair, and matching teeth, waved me around the other side of the display partition to reveal the biographical information of the artist in question, Jim Quinton Pringle (second Jim has entered the chat).

Still piecing together our exchange (and trying to figure out from where and when Jim miraculously appeared), he continued, “Did you know he was an optician? He was even called ‘the artistic optician,’” gesturing to the sign with this reference. “He would go to art school before work and then return to his paintings after he finished seeing clients. Sometimes he would even ask his customers if he could use them as subjects. Imagine that!”

Jim, in his cheerfully effervescent way, continued on about the Glasgow-born artist, who was yet little known by most residents. Somehow anticipating my silent curiosity, he assured me that while his last name was indeed Pringle, it had nothing to do with the ‘crisps.’ “A good Scottish name nonetheless!”

He went on. A large portrait Pringle painted of his brother revealed that his gifting was better suited to smaller paintings. “He just needed more training,” Jim consoled. I thought back to the description I’d read on the other side of the partition that the large painting of his brother “lacks sparkle.” Ouch.

Jim thanked me for taking the time to study Pringle’s work, and before I could ask him any more questions, he was gone. Like some kind of angel? Or fairy? Poof! Now you see Jim; now you don’t!

I had stopped into the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow after spending a rainy afternoon in the most precious cafe, sipping tea and munching on the scone special of the day—coconut and white chocolate—truly divine.

Thankfully, after dropping my bags in my room, I made it to the museum a quarter to 4:00, so I had a solid hour before it closed (and before I needed to make it to my evening Pilates class). There aren’t many places I feel so free and at ease to meander and take my time. But an art museum is one of those places. I’m even happy to cover just 2% of a gallery if it means I can stop and smell the roses. And that I did!

I don’t know what it was that made Jim stop to talk me at the Kelvingrove that afternoon. I suppose I was lingering around the paintings of one his favorite artists. Perhaps I looked nice enough and probably impressionable! I guess you could say he was doing his job? But really, if he wasn’t looking, like genuinely looking, he would’ve missed me.

The gallery had these little guideposts of sorts around each collection of paintings, inviting you to reimagine the way you were engaging with the artists’ work. Some encouraged you to consider how various colors evoke different meanings and emotions. One inquired, “What do you think is more important a picture that makes things look real, or a picture that conveys a feeling about them?”

After departing from my delightful interaction with Jim, I noticed a guidepost titled “The Art of Looking,” just one display over. Serendipity! In the person of Jim, I had just experienced and was invited into the art of looking.

In her Joyful, Anyway (can’t stop thinking about this book!!), Kate Bowler shared a story about her 84-year-old cab driver, Charlie. After a full day of shenanigans, Bowler asked him for the best piece of advice he could offer. At first, Charlie responded that at one point, him and his wife had this sense that they were to be doing something special with their lives. Yet when they held onto that particular idea of a life, nothing happened—nothing changed. It was nothing special. Then, Charlie goes on, he tried on the day-by-day thing:

“If you love the people God puts in your way, well… you’ll always be busy. You take it day by day. So every day, I’m not just taking things as they come. I am tasked. You see the difference? This isn’t random. I’m tasked with love.”

That’s it. It matters not only that you pay attention, but also what you do about what you see. Jim saw me and offered me the glimmering gift of a story. Yes—we are tasked with not just looking but loving. And that is the ordinary yet extraordinary, day-to-day matter of it all. We have no idea who or what might cross our paths tomorrow or the next day or the next, but we do have a choice. We can rush along with our heads down and the doomsday spiral on full blast in the chaos of our minds. We can stay lodged in the fallacy that our lives are not already teeming with possibility. Literally guilty as charged. Or we can get busy with the important stuff… like playing peek-a-boo with babies in the line at the grocery store, offering up your seat on the train, writing letters to people you love, making cookies for friends and strangers, telling good stories, sharing about a beloved artist to an interested bystander in a museum, and believing that the worst thing never has the final word… and by all of this I mean…

“All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference… That doing your chosen work with creativity and diligence will shiver people far beyond your ken. That being an attentive and generous friend and citizen will prevent a thread or two of the social fabric from unraveling…

… the small is huge, that the tiny is vast, that pain is part and parcel of the gift of joy, and that this is love, and then there is everything else. You either walk toward love or away from it with every breath you draw. Humility is the road to love. Humility, maybe, is love.”1

And so we must get out of our own ways. May we lay aside every weight that clings so closely,2 knowing we do not have to be good, remembering our place in the family of things…3 our work is loving the world.4 Sometimes, “heaven is just a new pair of glasses.”5 To see again for the first time the life of the world before our very eyes—one that is fractured and starving and, yes, still beautiful and resilient. And our work—to witness and revere, to belong to and care for. I suppose the road to love is just more love. So we best get to work.

All of that from a brief exchange in an art gallery? Well… yes. Because I believe in the life-saving capacity of stories (and also dogs, if we’re counting). Not even particularly this one. But stories can and they do save us, time and again. From Eric Carle to Toni Morrison, from bedtime tales to bestselling memoirs—stories are bread and water, breath and heartbeats.

“I believe with all my hoary heart that stories save lives, and the telling and hearing of them is a holy thing, powerful far beyond our ken. Without the sea of stories in which we swim we would wither and die. We are here for each other, to touch and be touched, to lose our tempers and beg forgiveness, to listen and to tell, to hail and farewell, to laugh and to snarl, to use words as knives and caresses, to puncture lies and to heal what is broken…

I am a storycatcher, charged with finding stories that matter, stories about who we are at our best, who we might be still, because without stories we are only mammals with weapons. I am here to point at shards of holiness. That’s all. That’s enough.”6

So can you linger for just a little while, out of your busy and very important day?7 Maybe you’ll catch a story. Or two. You could live yourself into a prayer. Perhaps you’ll be carried by joy. And you might just look long enough to love.

“It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.”8

Be free, beloveds. Talk soon. Xx.

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1. There is a grueling line in passport control.

2. The WiFi at the airport does not work.

3. You cannot activate an eSIM for Portugal.

4. Thus, your smartphone is no longer smart.

Right. Paper map and asking strangers for help it is! (Dear God, I love you… but seriously?!)

Your stomach growling will prompt you to purchase a pistachio croissant with the best pistachio cream you have ever tasted. Truly, I did not know they could make that good.

In Lisbon, a kind woman, who is clearly overstepping her job description and probably the rules, will offer you the WiFi in the hotel lobby where she works… where you will sit on the pristine white couch, red-faced and sweating—clearly out of place. Your eSIM continues to choose violence, so you capture the directions to get to your hostel via public transit, and hope to God you can figure out.

Everything will be going according to plan until… the last very last bus before the hostel in Colares requires that you have a transit card (contrary to the buses in Lisbon). By the grace of everything that is, the bus driver has mercy on your poor, lost, exhausted soul and lets you on sans transit card.

Through the travel-induced exhaustion and motion sickness that is a bus ride through the rolling hills of Sintra, you will take in the ridiculously beautiful view of the landscape and start to think that maybe all the bumps in the road (literally and metaphorically) have been worth it.

Later, you will walk to Praia das Maçãs to watch the sunset and officially confirm that, yes, it has all been worth it.

You will not set an alarm on a single morning during your stay in Portugal which feels… criminal? OK, no, I am not that insane (?). But you will be forced out of your death grip on productivity and to-do lists. Deep breaths! You will be fine.

You will hike the Caminho da Aguda, tracing the beaches of Colares, and wrestle with the disbelief that water can be that blue.

You’ll decide to stop at the cute little outdoor café on your way back from your hike. Much to your dismay, you will read a sign that says “cash only.” Will I ever get the currency right (see: lack of proper transit card on the bus)? You’ll take a seat anyway and convince yourself that you are happy with your lukewarm water (you are not, but that’s OK) from your dingy bottle that is, in fact, in need of a wash. One of the café employees will come by to ask if you need anything, and you:

1. Realize you are sitting in the very limited café only seating.

2. Apologize and express how you planned to buy something but unfortunately did not bring cash.

The small man with the patient voice will assure you that you can use a card. Bravo! Pastel de nata and cortado it is.

You’ll do your first load of sink laundry and pray your clothes dry in time (they will).

The yoga class you will take with Pedro will remind you to welcome what arises and not be so rigid. Be like water, he’ll say. Flow. Expand. Breathe.

You will finally get the hang of surfing. Each time you catch a wave you will repeat to yourself (if not already being barked at you by the surf coaches):

1. Go slow.

2. Get your damn back foot up.

3. Stay low.

4. Look up!

Something spiritual or life lesson-y there I think. Haven’t figured it out yet. Will report back.

Checking for your passport will become a daily spiritual practice. Please, keep this one.

On your second to last day you will attempt to use up the last of the whopping €20 you spent on groceries for the week. As the grad student budget would have it, you make a stack of 8-9 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which you will survive on for the next three days. Bon appétit!

As you board the bus, which was 15 minutes late, to catch the train back to Lisbon, you barely squeeze your way on past a pack of 16-year olds who seemed to have never learned the concept of an inside voice. And because the bus was late, you will miss the first train. And if you have learned anything so far, it is that you can still enjoy the journey, bumps and all. There is still joy and beauty (and some spare time to read the Anne Lamott book I just started while I wait for the next train).

Over the course of 5 days in Portugal, you will write down as many glimmers as you can possibly catch—in your notes app, your journal, and some on your mind, which you will likely forget, but at least you noticed them in the moment.

After the two hour public transit trek (which would have taken 45 minutes by car, but you are so incredibly committed to the inconvenience and whimsy of public transit), you arrive at Alberto’s home to sleep before a morning flight to Edinburgh (which will be delayed FYI).

And you’ll be so incredibly lucky for all of it. Yes. To be exactly where you are—within a remarkably imperfect moment. To be filled with PB&J and eventually the mini bottle of red wine Alberto arranged in your room. Yes, yes, yes.

“Suppose that we said yes to a single moment, then we have not only said yes to ourselves, but to the whole of existence. For nothing stands alone, either in ourselves or in things; and if our soul did but once vibrate and resound with a chord of happiness, then all of eternity was necessary to bring forth this one occurrence — and in this single moment when we said yes, all of eternity was embraced, redeemed, justified and affirmed.” -Friedrich Nietzsche

Not saying I am a determinist, but I do trust that, “truly we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood.”

So yes to the mystery of how and why. I made it here, by golly! Yes to the attention that is prayer. Yes to all the inevitable inconveniences. Yes to joy. And to the stories to be lived and told.

“Let me keep company always with those who say
‘Look!’ and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.”

Until next time… be free. All my love—

I am seated after having spent the first half of the train ride standing, straddling my backpacks and gripping the trolly pole in the center of the car, shuffling around it at each stop, making way for passengers exiting and boarding. I glance up at the quartet of seats diagonal to my right and see a father seated across from his son—the back of the little boy’s head facing me. The father is holding a Bible—white leather with pages rimmed in gold—and is leaning forward toward his son. The little boy begins to make wide and grand gestures with arms and hands, while squirming his small body around on the seat, as if to tell a wild, adventurous story. He goes on and on, and for those few minutes, that little boy is the only thing that exists for the father. There are no text messages to attend to, no social media feed to scroll, no indifference or despondence within which to relish. His world is seated before him, and he is fully attentive.

I hear the echoes of the French philosopher Simone Weil’s words,

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.

Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”

In that moment of pure attention and generosity, the father offered his son a prayer. The truth is that a whole world does exist outside the being of his child, but for those minutes he chose, with a glimmering smile on his face, to offer his unmixed attention toward his son.

As the pair got up from their seats to exit the train, I noticed the little boy had face paint on his chunky left cheek—perhaps a sign that their day had been filled with festivities beyond the telling of an extravagant story on the Sintra-bound train.

And I guess you could say I, too, offered up some kind of prayer as I bore witness to the precious exchange of story and reverence. And if the witnessing was not already a gift in and of itself, it, too, offered me a slice of joy. Exhausted and defeated as I was, what are the odds I would glance up at just the right second to behold a moment of grace?

I am reading (and loving) Kate Bowler’s Joyful, Anyway where she writes,

“… but I believe in joy. We can’t mistake it for anything less than what it is: one of the most powerful ways we experience the deepest and most healing forms of gratitude, delight, and hope. It is a kind of transcendence; joy is a glimmer of love and forgiveness and wholeness that lifts us out of reality for a moment and gives us back to ourselves, anew.”

In my train seat of exhaustion and wondering, What the hell am I even doing here—on the rollercoaster of budget solo traveling?, I experienced joy—just like that. However, as Kate Bowler writes, joy does not just happen to you.

“The poet Christian Wiman once said you can’t make yourself joyful any more than you can surprise yourself. I’m sure he is right. You can’t force a feeling, but perhaps you can make yourself available to it. Maybe you just show up and allow for the possibility that something will shift. You let yourself move, even a little, and trust that something locked up might finally give. The best you can do is hope that, one day, in a moment you can’t plan or predict, a sudden rush of lightness will find you—and for a moment, you’ll feel free.”

Realizing I was going to get absolutely nowhere without a heavy dose of humility (see: asking strangers for directions in a country where I don’t speak the language and my smartphone is not cooperating), my defenses were already down. If I have learned anything about anything, it is that you never know what is around the corner—be it stealthily lurking or innocently and eagerly lingering—the only constant is change, and chances are, we will feel so many different things, and probably, all at once.

Steeped in my own reality of weary vexation, and yet soft enough around the edges for something to give, I was struck by a moment of sheer delight and hope, in the form of a little storyteller and the most attentive listener (the son and his father, in case you aren’t following lol). In witnessing the “rarest and purest form of generosity,”2 I was transformed.

As the train slowly glided toward my stop, I gazed out the right-hand side window, and through the tears (of exhaustion and also joy) welling in my eyes, I took in the breathtaking Portuguese landscape of towering, rolling hills and lush, evergreen trees. Sigh. Yes, there is more.

Talk soon. Be free. Xx.

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I woke up early on Wednesday morning, well before my alarm, after a rather sleepless night. Groggily, I quickly checked my phone to learn of the winner of the presidential election, hopped out of bed, no time to waste, and put the coffee onto to brew while I made my bed and changed for my 7:30 AM workout class. The angel on my shoulder somehow won in getting me to that class. 

Right away, though, I was predictably feeling off and also a lot. I kept sitting with these feelings. I did my best to integrate them into my morning movement and breathe through them on my bike ride home from the studio, although imperfectly. 

After showering and finding it within me to make myself a nourishing meal, I grieved with a few of my colleagues during our regularly scheduled Zoom staff meeting, as we shared words of lament and hope to hold onto. Then it was due time to journey to the park down the street from my house—the one adorned with gargantuan trees, reminding me of beauty, of largeness.

Ahah. Now I know. 

I was thrust back into the summer and fall of 2022—seasons panged with such learning and tenderness, such heaviness and pain. You see, it was during this time that I called a spade a spade in the most challenging and painful way I ever had. I claimed the “Me Too” that had been yearning to be heard, to be healed. 

In the months that followed I mustered up the courage to call the person who assaulted me to inform him of the truth and was met with the most disappointing and invalidating response ever—disbelief. 

That stomach-to-the-throat, world-turned-upside-down-and-inside-out feeling is the one I felt when I read the headlines on Wednesday morning. Damnit—our bodies are so wise. 

Folks, we have just re-elected a rapist as president, who has shamelessly flaunted sexually assaulting women. 

In Trump’s words: “You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful... I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything… Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

Must I mention the hush money payments he made to porn actor Stormy Daniels or the more than a dozen women who have experienced sexual assault or harassment at the hands of Trump? 

And as a survivor myself, that feels like a fucking slap in the face (excuse my French—or don’t… lol). 

I have seen privileged white Christian girls, with whom I attended Clemson, “praising Jesus” for Trump’s election and others mock those who have expressed their suffering publicly, claiming that we should be grateful we had the chance to vote and that if we want to know what real suffering looks like, we should look to those impoverished in the Global South (I could get into how the U.S. is actually contributing to the entrenched poverty of the Global South, but that’s a story for another day). 

Dear God. 

The idea that our feelings need to score high enough on the suffering board is actually just bullshit and contributes to increased shame and suffering in the world. I call upon some wisdom from Dr. Brené Brown, renowned writer and storyteller and research professor at the University of Houston. These words are from an episode of her podcast, Unlocking Us, which she released during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020:

“The entire myth of comparative suffering comes from the belief that empathy is finite. That empathy is like pizza. It has eight slices. So, when you practice empathy with someone or even yourself, there’s less to go around. So, if I’m kind and gentle and loving toward myself around these feelings, if I give myself permission to feel them and give myself some resources and energy of care around them, I will have less to give for the people who really need them. 

While I am empathic with myself, there’s less to go around because empathy is finite. False. False. When we practice empathy with ourselves and others, we create more empathy. Love, y’all, is the last thing we need to ration in this world. 

So, let’s stop ranking suffering. There’s enough love and empathy to go around, putting ourselves down because we’re struggling, but have it so much better than others right now, can kill our empathy for others. What’s helpful is perspective. Complaining is okay, letting ourselves feel these hard emotions is important and mandatory to be empathic people, but we can also piss and moan with a little perspective. Hurt is hurt, y’all. And every time we honor our own struggle and the struggles of others by responding with empathy, the healing that results affects all of us.” 

Enough said. 

In her poem “Churching”, Kristin Chang writes, “Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed.” 

So for those of you might not get it, I beg of you this: What if that had been your daughter? Your sister? Your mother? Your friend? Sexually assaulted by a man who knows no remorse? 

My heart absolutely breaks for the women who came forward about their abuse at the hands of president-elect Trump, only to have millions vote for him. While on a much smaller scale, I know the feeling of waking up, begging to believed. I know the feeling of having panic attack after trauma response after panic attack, longing for the truth to set me free. 

Of course, this is not about me—it is about us. Our stories of suffering matter because we know that our flourishing is deeply interconnected. 

“I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own,” Audre Lorde urges. 

I am not here for pity or a cry for help. But I do hope that if you have not already, you might gain at least a sliver more of understanding of what it’s like as a survivor of sexual assault to wake up and find out that a rapist is going to be your president (again).

I leave you with words Dr. Lilla Watson, an Indigenous Australian activist and academic: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Be blessed, dear friends. Let us work together.

Be free—
Cate