(Photo taken Sept 2022 after a foot surgery, that led to a struggle with pills.)

I’m out the door before 9 a.m., which is a miracle for me because I am not a morning person. I put my headphones on, find my favorite running song, “Tik Tok” by Kesha, and take off. It’s a beautiful fall morning and I feel amazing. I’m sprinting, my music is blasting, and for a few minutes I feel like myself again.

Except I’m not really running for my physical health. I mean, I am, but mostly I’m

running for my mental health. My husband has just left on a ten-month military deployment, and we’re only about a month into it. Suffice it to say, I do not take deployments well. I don’t know many military spouses who do. They are exactly as hard as you imagine they are, except somehow harder when you’re actually living through one. For me, someone who already struggles with my mental health and ADHD, the disruption of my routines can be particularly difficult. But I am determined to do this deployment differently because during the last one, I drank.

This time, I’m two years sober. I know more about myself. I have healthier coping mechanisms. Running is one of them, so I run. I run when I’m anxious. I run when I’m lonely. I run when I need to get out of my head. I have convinced myself that this time I know how to take care of myself, and in many ways, I do.

Then I turn a corner and feel something pop in my left foot.

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I wake up and it’s still dark outside. My heart is pounding. My thoughts are racing. Something feels wrong, although I can’t really explain what wrong means. I get up and make coffee because that’s what I normally do in the morning, and I think maybe if I just start moving through the motions of my day, whatever this feeling is will pass. It doesn’t. I’ve been stressed lately, more than usual, and I’ve dealt with anxiety and depression before, but this feels different. There are thoughts coming into my head that scare me so much I don’t even really want to say them out loud.

I don’t want to be here anymore.

Even writing that all these years later makes me uncomfortable because there are certain thoughts we have decided are so dangerous that even admitting you’ve had them feels dangerous.

So let me be really clear about what was happening. I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t preparing to hurt myself. I didn’t want to die. I was experiencing what I would later understand as intrusive thoughts about ending my own existence because the mental anguish I was experiencing had become so intense.

The strangest part was how banal the thoughts were. They weren’t accompanied by some giant alarm bell in my brain announcing that I was having a mental health crisis. They would just arrive alongside everything else. You should brush your teeth. You need to answer that email. You should kill yourself. It was that matter-of-fact, which somehow made it even scarier because I knew that wasn’t right.

At the time I was already taking an antidepressant, so I did what we tell people they’re supposed to do when they’re struggling with their mental health. I asked for help. My grandmother, who I call Baba, was living with me at the time because I was already going through a difficult period in my life. I was safe. I wasn’t alone. I knew where I was and what was happening around me. I wasn’t behaving in a way that would have alerted the people around me that something was terribly wrong. But I knew my own mind well enough to recognize that these thoughts were not normal for me, and I wanted to talk to the psychiatrist who was prescribing my medication.

So I called the office.

A woman at the front desk answered, and I explained that my anxiety had gotten really bad and that I was having some disturbing thoughts. I wanted an appointment with my psychiatrist. I remember trying to explain everything carefully because even then I understood that there were certain words you had to be careful with when talking about mental health. I explained that I didn’t have a plan. I wasn’t actively trying to hurt myself. My grandmother was with me. I was trying to get help because something had changed and I wanted a doctor to help me figure out what was happening.

The reaction on the other end of the phone made me feel as though I had called with a gun to my head.

I remember the panic and the way the conversation suddenly changed. What I had thought was going to be a conversation about getting an appointment became something else entirely. Eventually I was told someone would get back to me, so Baba and I continued through the day. I did my hair. I put on makeup. We got lunch. We went to the grocery store. I remember walking through the store picking out healthy groceries with her because I was trying desperately to take care of myself in all of the ordinary ways you’re told to take care of yourself when you aren’t doing well. Eat something. Drink water. Go outside. Stay with someone. Call your doctor. I was doing all of it.

If you had seen me in that grocery store, I don’t think you would have thought, There is a woman experiencing suicidal ideation.

Because mental illness doesn’t have a look.

When we got home, my neighbors told me police officers had been at my house looking for me. My psychiatrist’s office had sent them.

I understand why mental health professionals have protocols. I understand that suicide is serious and that sometimes intervention saves someone’s life. I am deeply grateful that emergency mental health services exist. But I also remember what that experience taught me, because I was the person on the other side of the protocol. I had voluntarily called the medical professional treating me and said, essentially, Something frightening is happening inside my head and I need help. And suddenly police officers were knocking on my door.

What I learned that day was something I don’t think we talk about enough when we tell people to reach out if they’re struggling: there can be consequences to telling the truth.

I have been thinking about that experience while watching the trial of Lindsay Clancy unfold.

Clancy is the Massachusetts mother who killed her three young children in 2023. Her defense argues that she was experiencing postpartum psychosis and was not criminally responsible for what she did. Prosecutors argue that she understood what she was doing and deliberately killed her children. Her mental health treatment in the months before their deaths has become a central part of the case.

I want to be extraordinarily careful here because three children are dead. There is a family living with a loss so horrific that I don’t think most of us can comprehend it, and I am not interested in turning their deaths into an internet debate where everyone suddenly becomes a forensic psychiatrist. I don’t know whether Lindsay Clancy was legally responsible for what she did. I don’t know what was happening inside her mind that day. I am not a psychiatrist, a doctor or a juror, and watching a trial does not give me the authority to make that declaration.

But there is one part of the conversation surrounding this case that I do feel qualified to talk about because I’ve spent years advocating for mental health and because I have lived it myself: our persistent belief that we can tell how mentally ill someone is by how mentally ill they look.

Throughout the trial, prosecutors and some of their expert witnesses have pointed to Clancy’s ability to function, communicate coherently, make decisions and at times appear outwardly normal as evidence relevant to whether she was psychotic and whether she understood what she was doing. That evidence matters in a criminal trial, and I am not suggesting that jurors should disregard it. The legal question before them is specific and extraordinarily serious.

But listening to it has made me uncomfortable for a different reason.

Because I know how easily “she appeared normal” can become “she must have been fine.”

I know how seductive that logic is because we desperately want mental illness to announce itself. We want someone experiencing a serious mental health crisis to look like someone experiencing a serious mental health crisis. We expect disheveled hair. Erratic behavior. Incoherent speech. Something visible enough that the rest of us can point to it and say, See? Something is wrong.

But on the morning I called my psychiatrist because I was experiencing suicidal ideation, I did my hair and makeup.

I made coffee. I had a conversation with my grandmother. I called a doctor’s office and calmly explained what was happening. I went to lunch. I bought groceries. I could tell you where I was, what day it was and what I needed from the store. If someone had evaluated my mental health by my ability to put mascara on my eyelashes and push a grocery cart, I probably looked pretty damn functional.

I was also suffering tremendously.

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

And I think this is where stigma gets much more complicated than someone openly saying something cruel about mental illness. Sometimes stigma looks like the assumptions we’ve built about what suffering is supposed to look like. We decide who is “really” depressed based on whether they can get out of bed. We decide who is “really” anxious based on whether they can hold a conversation. We decide who is in crisis based on whether they can go to work, take care of their children, answer questions correctly, put on makeup or buy groceries.

Then we’re shocked when someone we thought was doing fine tells us they weren’t doing fine at all.

To be clear, my experience is not equivalent to Lindsay Clancy’s. Suicidal ideation and postpartum psychosis are not the same thing, and my experience cannot tell us what was happening inside her mind when she killed her children. But I do recognize one small piece of the larger conversation: what it feels like to become frightened by your own thoughts while remaining completely capable of moving through the ordinary motions of your life.

I know what it is like to have a thought enter your brain that feels completely incompatible with who you understand yourself to be. I know what it is like to wonder whether you can tell someone about it without having them suddenly see you differently. And I know what it is like to actually tell someone because you’ve been taught that asking for help is the responsible thing to do, only to discover that our mental health system isn’t particularly good at holding the enormous amount of space between “I’m fine” and “I am an immediate danger to myself or someone else.”

There is an entire human being living inside that space.

Years after that morning, I understand my own brain much better. I have diagnoses that helped explain experiences that once terrified me. I understand the relationship between my hormones and my mental health in ways I didn’t then. I know now that I have PMDD, and I know that certain times in my cycle can dramatically change the way I experience my own thoughts and emotions. I am doing better mentally than I ever have in my life.

And I still sometimes experience suicidal ideation around my period.

That sentence is uncomfortable to even write, which is exactly why I think it needs to be written. Having an intrusive thought is not the same thing as wanting to act on it. Experiencing suicidal ideation does not automatically tell you everything about someone’s intentions, judgment or ability to function. And looking composed on the outside doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s happening inside someone’s brain. On one of the worst mental health days of my life, I did my hair. I put on makeup. I made coffee. I went to lunch with my grandmother. I walked around a grocery store buying healthy food. I knew who I was. I knew something was wrong. I knew I needed help.

Both things were true.

I think that’s part of what makes conversations about severe mental illness so difficult. We want mental illness to look like mental illness because obvious warning signs make the world feel safer. We want a clean line separating the person who is struggling from the person who is dangerous, the intrusive thought from the intention, the person who needs an appointment from the person who needs an emergency room.

And now, as someone who hopes to become a mother, the conversation about maternal mental health hits me differently. I think about pregnancy and postpartum life through the lens of someone who already knows that hormones can dramatically affect her mental health. I think about what it would feel like to have a newborn, to be exhausted, flooded with hormonal changes and responsible for another human being while trying to determine whether the thoughts happening inside my own head were something I could safely admit to another person. I think about how terrifying it would be to experience a thought involving yourself or your child and immediately wonder, If I tell someone this, what happens to me? What happens to my baby?

Because this is the contradiction we’ve created. We tell people struggling with their mental health that they need to speak up. We tell mothers to tell someone if they’re experiencing frightening thoughts after giving birth. We put phone numbers at the bottom of articles and say help is available.

But telling the truth requires believing there is somewhere safe for the truth to go.

That’s the part I keep coming back to when I think about Lindsay Clancy. Not whether I believe the prosecution or the defense. Not whether an internet stranger can diagnose a woman she has never met. I keep thinking about the enormous territory that exists before a mental health crisis becomes the kind of tragedy everyone suddenly wants to analyze.

What happens when someone says, Something is happening inside my brain and it scares me? Where are we asking her to go? Who is trained to listen without immediately reducing her to either “fine” or “dangerous”? Where can someone talk about intrusive thoughts without believing that simply admitting their existence will change how everyone sees them? Where can a mother say something terrifying without first having to calculate what telling the truth might cost her?

I don’t think the lesson of the Lindsay Clancy case should be that every person experiencing disturbing thoughts is dangerous. If anything, that kind of fear could make people less willing to disclose them. And I don’t think compassion for mental illness requires us to ignore the unimaginable harm that occurred. Those ideas can exist together, even if the internet generally prefers its morality sorted neatly into teams.

What I do think is that if we actually want people to ask for help before they reach the edge of whatever they are experiencing, then we have to build systems capable of hearing things that scare us. We have to be able to hear someone say, I am having thoughts I don’t understand. We have to be able to hear a mother say, Something doesn’t feel right inside my brain. We have to create somewhere for those sentences to land.

Because telling people to speak up about their mental health means very little if we haven’t created a safe place for them to tell the truth.

(Photo from our wedding day. Fun fact about the Kimbrough’s: we eloped in DC!)

I was walking through this Barnes & Noble this morning when my husband called me.

He was on his way home from a trip, in a great mood, telling me about stopping at Denny’s. I’ve always joked that I married sunshine in a bottle. He’s one of those people who can be genuinely delighted by something as simple as breakfast food on the way home, and I love that about him.

Usually, I can meet him there. But today I just couldn’t.

I have my period, which for me means more than having my period. I have adenomyosis, and PMDD and once a month my body and brain can become extraordinarily difficult places to live. I was in pain. I’d been dealing with diarrhea. My mental health was the worst it had been in a long time. Everything felt heavy. I felt like everyone was mad at me, and I felt like I was failing at things I logically knew I wasn’t failing at.

And while my husband happily told me about his day, another thought was running quietly underneath everything:

How long until he gets tired of this?

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My butt hurts.

I shift around in the hard chair, trying to find some position that might make it slightly less uncomfortable, but I don’t think that’s going to happen for me. I look up at the clock on the bare wall and then around the room. There isn’t much to look at. White walls. Folding chairs. Tables. A few terrible inspirational pictures that I assume someone, somewhere, thought might cheer us up. Nurses and doctors move back and forth through the halls while people lounge around the common area, playing cards, sleeping, staring off into space. To be honest, everyone looks a little half out of it.

We are in the psych ward.

I’m 24 years old, and I checked myself in two or three days ago because I was having panic attacks and thoughts that scared me, and I couldn’t seem to pull myself out of either. My husband is on deployment. I’ve recently lost a job. My life feels like it is unraveling faster than I can figure out how to put it back together. So now I’m here, in this weird fluorescent-lit holding pattern, taking medication, talking to doctors, trying to figure out what exactly is happening inside my own brain.

Then I see my visitors walk in. It’s my mom and my Baba, and I immediately perk up. For the next few hours, we sit together in this strange little room and visit. I don’t remember everything we talked about. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what they were wearing or what time they arrived. There are huge pieces of those days that have blurred together over the years. What I remember is being sick. I remember being scared. I remember desperately wanting someone to tell me what was happening to me and how to make it stop. And I remember being surrounded by other people who, in one way or another, were there because something happening inside their minds had become too painful or dangerous to manage alone.

I stay in the psych ward for a few more days and eventually receive my first mental health diagnoses: generalized anxiety disorder and major depression. The diagnoses are scary and hard to hear, but they’re also strangely validating. There are names for some of the things I’ve been experiencing. There are doctors who have seen this before. There are medications and therapists and an actual care plan. I leave the hospital with instructions for what comes next and some hope that maybe I can start putting myself back together.

What I don’t realize is that walking out of the hospital is going to be its own kind of hard, because now I have to explain where I’ve been.

At first, I try honesty. I tell people that I was in a psychiatric hospital. I tell them I’ve been struggling with my mental health. And I’m met with awkward stares and uncomfortable pauses and people who clearly have absolutely no fucking idea what they’re supposed to say next. I don’t think most of them mean to make me feel ashamed. I think they genuinely don’t know how to talk about it. But eventually, I get the message anyway, and I stop talking about it.

I remember thinking about how differently people would have responded if something else had happened to me. If I had been in a car accident, people would have asked how I was doing. If I’d had surgery, someone might have sent flowers. If I’d had a heart attack, nobody would have expected me to quietly disappear for a few days and then come back pretending everything was normal. But I had gotten sick in my brain, and suddenly nobody knew what to say.

That was almost 15 years ago, and thankfully, I do think things have gotten better. We talk about anxiety now. We talk about depression. Therapy has become almost culturally normal in some circles. Celebrities tell us about their mental health. People post about taking mental health days. We have made progress, and I don’t want to pretend that we haven’t.

But I also think there is a cleaner version of mental illness that we have decided is acceptable to talk about.

We like mental health stories when they are safely on the other side. We like the therapy appointment, the meditation app, the inspirational quote about setting boundaries. We like recovery when the person telling the story has been sober for years and has a beautiful life to show us. We are much less comfortable talking about what mental illness and addiction can actually look like when someone is in the middle of it. The psych ward. The relapse. The suicidal thoughts. The inability to get out of bed. The family members who don’t know what to do anymore. The parts that don’t fit nicely into an Instagram carousel about self-care.

Hayden Panettiere’s death this week made me think about all of this again.

Panettiere had been remarkably open about her experiences with postpartum depression, addiction and mental health. Earlier this year, she talked with Jay Shetty about something that happened after she publicly discussed postpartum depression following the birth of her daughter. She said she had worked with Neutrogena for roughly a decade, but after speaking about postpartum depression on live television, she was told the company wanted to fire her. Her representative pushed back, and she remained for that year, but Panettiere said she knew the relationship was essentially over. She wasn’t invited back the following year.

Think about what that communicates.

Here is a woman with fame, money, access and an enormous platform who tells the truth about something millions of women experience, and according to her, one of the consequences of telling that truth was potentially losing a major professional relationship.

So what exactly are we asking the average person to do?

What about the woman who doesn’t have millions of dollars? What about the employee who needs her paycheck and health insurance? What about the mother who is terrified someone will think she’s incapable of caring for her children? What about the person struggling with addiction who thinks admitting it could cost them their career, their reputation or the way everyone around them sees them?

I understand that fear because for years, I lived inside it. I struggled long before I knew how to tell anyone I was struggling. I was terrified of what it would mean to admit that something was wrong with me. Eventually things had to become bad enough that I landed in a psychiatric hospital before I started getting the help I needed. And later, addiction would take me to another breaking point before I finally started speaking openly about that too.

This is the part where I think we need to be really careful about the stories we tell about mental health, including mine.

Today, I am thriving. I can tell you about the psych ward because I am standing far enough away from it that the story has a satisfying ending. I can tell you about addiction because I have years of recovery behind me. I can package the ugliest parts of my life into an essay and tell you what I learned from them. I can stand on a stage and talk about recovery. I can turn pain into something meaningful and hopefully make another person feel less alone.

But it took me almost a fucking decade to get here.

And there is something else I understand now that I didn’t understand at 24: I have recovery capital. I have insurance. I have a supportive husband. I have people who will step in when I’m struggling. I have access to doctors and therapy and resources. I have built a life with a safety net underneath me. My mental health still struggles sometimes, but when it does, I am no longer falling without anything there to catch me.

A lot of people don’t have that.

There are people who don’t have insurance or money for therapy. There are people who can’t take time away from work to get treatment because missing a paycheck means not making rent. There are people who don’t have a partner or family member who can take over when they can’t function. There are people who are terrified to tell anyone what is actually happening because they don’t know what it could cost them.

And sometimes I wonder if our conversations about mental health have gotten so polished that we have forgotten about those people.

We say, “It’s okay not to be okay,” but what happens when someone is really, really not okay? What happens when it isn’t a mental health day and a bubble bath? What happens when someone needs to disappear from work for a week because they’re in a psychiatric hospital? What happens when addiction destroys their life? What happens when depression makes them unreliable or difficult to be around? What happens when their illness is no longer inspirational and starts becoming inconvenient?

Do we still mean it then?

Because stigma isn’t just someone making a cruel joke about mental illness. Sometimes stigma is the silence that falls over a room when you tell someone you’ve been hospitalized. Sometimes it’s deciding not to tell your boss you’re struggling because you don’t know how they’ll see you afterward. Sometimes it’s a woman speaking publicly about postpartum depression and then, according to her, learning that a company she’s represented for years wants to end the relationship.

And sometimes stigma is internal. It’s being 24 years old and becoming so afraid of what people will think that you wait until you’re at a breaking point before asking for help.

I look forward to the day when saying, “I was hospitalized because my depression became dangerous,” is treated with the same compassion as saying, “I was hospitalized because something went wrong with my heart.” I look forward to the day when someone can tell their employer they’re struggling with their mental health without immediately wondering whether they have jeopardized their career. I look forward to the day when asking for psychiatric help isn’t treated as evidence that someone is unstable, weak or incapable, but as evidence that someone recognized they were sick and sought medical care.

Because when I strip away all of the stigma and embarrassment and weird reactions and everything I eventually learned about recovery, what happened to me at 24 was actually pretty simple.

I got sick. I went to a hospital. I got treatment.

And I really hope we get to a place where nobody has to turn that into a cleaner story before we decide they deserve compassion.

I relapsed. And not in the way you think.

I’m six years sober after struggling with alcohol, and I haven’t started drinking again. But over the last few weeks, as stress has been mounting in my life, I have started going back to some of my other old coping mechanisms. I’ve been eating poorly. I’ve been eating more sugar. I’ve been shopping more, and I even opened a credit card after telling myself I wasn’t going to do that. My husband is gone for a month, I’ve been working a lot, I’ve been running events, and I’ve been stressed and tired and lonely and doing what humans tend to do when they’re stressed and tired and lonely: reaching for things that make me feel better really fucking quickly.

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Photo from last night’s “ugly gathering.”

It’s four o’clock, and my family is supposed to be here by five. Shit, I think to myself as I look around the house. There’s cat litter all over the floor. I’m still in my workout clothes. I haven’t put on makeup. Where the hell did this day go? I’ve been busy all day. I even ordered my groceries ahead of time because I knew I wouldn’t have time to wander around the grocery store, and somehow I am still running behind. I tiredly pull the chicken thighs and ribeye out of the refrigerator and start prepping the vegetables.

If I’m being honest, hosting is not really something I want to do tonight. I’m tired. My business is growing. My husband is in one of the busiest seasons of his career while also getting his master’s degree, and he leaves tomorrow for a month.

As a military family, you would think after all these years I would be used to him leaving, but I’m not. It never really gets easier. I have a lot on my plate, both literally and metaphorically, and part of me would rather put on sweatpants and call it a night. But my family is visiting from Illinois, we rarely get to see them, and I want to spend time together. So I tell myself this will be easy. My husband will come home, fire up the pellet grill, throw the chicken and steak on there, and we’ll eat.

Except, naturally, the fucking grill doesn’t work.

We’re sitting outside talking about his day while the grill supposedly heats up, except it has been going for about thirty minutes and the temperature isn’t moving. We stare at the grill. We stare at each other. Our guests are arriving, the meat is still raw, and eventually we accept that tonight is apparently not going according to plan, so we turn on the oven and figure it out. Dinner takes longer than expected, but eventually we eat. Someone brings a cobbler recipe they found on TikTok. We play Heads Up. Later, we pull out a conversation deck called Hygge and start asking each other questions, and somehow those questions lead to stories we haven’t heard before. We laugh. We talk about our lives. We spend three or four hours off our phones, sitting around my very imperfect house eating our very imperfect dinner, and we have the best time.

Conversation deck I highly recommend. Great interesting questions.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, I started thinking about how unnecessarily difficult we have made gathering.

We have confused hosting with performing, and in doing so, we have raised the barrier to human connection at the exact moment we desperately need more of it. Because loneliness is everywhere right now. We talk constantly about how disconnected we feel, how difficult it is to make friends as adults, how we don’t have community anymore, and I believe all of that is real. But I also wonder whether we’ve accidentally created so many requirements around gathering that we’ve convinced ourselves we aren’t qualified to do it.

Earlier that afternoon, as I was chopping vegetables and putting chicken thighs and ribeye on a plate, I had this ridiculous thought: I don’t have a recipe. I was literally standing in my kitchen thinking that maybe I should have found some Pinterest recipe or TikTok marinade to make the chicken better. Maybe I should have planned something more interesting or done something besides putting seasoning on meat and cooking it. Then I remembered that I am an elder millennial and we used to just throw shit on the grill. There wasn’t a viral garlic butter marinade. There wasn’t a thirty-second video showing us how to make the perfect summer dinner party. Nobody was telling us which serving platter we needed or how to arrange our vegetables so they photographed well.

Somewhere along the way, hosting became an aesthetic, and listen, I love an aesthetic gathering.

The irony of this entire essay is that I literally work in events and hospitality. I love a beautiful table. I love thoughtful food and gorgeous drinks and creating an experience for people, and I will absolutely continue throwing those kinds of gatherings because they are fun and creative and there is nothing wrong with wanting to make something beautiful. What I think happened, though, is that we made the beautiful version of gathering feel like the minimum acceptable version of gathering, and that is a problem because the barriers to hosting already feel higher than ever. Instagram isn’t the only reason.

Life is expensive right now. Unless you have a lot of money, there’s a decent chance you’re feeling some degree of financial pressure. I know we are. Groceries are expensive. Housing is expensive. Going out to dinner is expensive. Everything seems to cost more, and I think there can be a quiet shame that comes with inviting people into our homes when we feel like we can’t afford to give them the version of hospitality we’ve been taught they deserve. But what if they don’t need that version? What if you bought the potato salad from Kroger? What if everyone brought something? What if dinner was frozen pizza? What if the chicken came from Food Lion and there was no recipe because you just put garlic on it and hoped for the best? What if the food was simply edible, there was somewhere for everyone to sit, and when people walked through your door, you were genuinely excited to see them? Maybe that’s enough.

Because when I think about last night, I don’t really remember the chicken. I remember the conversation, and I promise you, no one is going to remember that the chicken wasn’t perfect or that there wasn’t a beautiful tablescape. What I will remember is that we laughed. I learned stories about my family that I had never heard before. I watched people I love sit around my table and talk for hours, and for a little while, none of us were staring at our phones or rushing off to the next thing. Those are the parts of the night that stayed with me.

Some of you are going to read this and think, duh, of course you don’t need an aesthetic tablescape to invite your family over. But I don’t actually think this is just about aesthetics. I think we have made hosting inaccessible, and part of that is the internet. We see the beautiful dinner parties and enormous kitchens and perfectly mismatched vintage plates and elaborate recipes, and after seeing enough of them, I think it’s easy to subconsciously start believing that this is what hosting looks like. But there are other barriers that are much more real, and I think we need to talk about those too.

A lot of us don’t own beautiful homes because a lot of us don’t own homes at all. In the first quarter of 2026, only 36.8 percent of American householders under 35 owned their home. A lot of people live in apartments or small houses or places they don’t particularly love, and maybe they’re embarrassed because they thought they would be somewhere different by this point in their lives. There’s shame in not having enough money. There’s shame in having a small apartment. There’s shame in the carpet you hate or the kitchen you haven’t renovated or the pile of shit sitting on your counter that you haven’t gotten around to putting away. There’s shame in feeling like everyone else somehow got farther ahead than you did, and I think that shame keeps us from letting people in.

Then there’s the other barrier that I understand maybe better than anything right now, which is that we’re fucking tired. We’re working and raising kids and building careers and taking care of parents and trying to exercise and maintain friendships and answer texts and pay bills and somehow remember to make the dentist appointment we’ve been putting off for six months. We’re tired, and when we’re tired, inviting people into our homes can feel like one more thing we have to do.

I’ll admit that when everyone first arrived that night, I wasn’t my usual bubbly, talkative self. I was exhausted. I didn’t magically become energized because people walked through the door. I was still me at the end of a very long day, and instead of pretending otherwise, I let myself show up that way.

By the end of the night, I was crying because I didn’t want them to leave. I almost let being tired convince me that connection was another demand on my energy when, in the end, connection was the thing that gave some of it back.

Maybe that’s part of what we have to relearn, especially when so many of us are exhausted and overwhelmed. Sometimes connection will require something from us. Sometimes we will have to invite people over when we don’t feel particularly bubbly or charming or prepared, but that doesn’t mean we have to perform our way through it.

Because hosting isn’t actually about knowing how to cook. It’s not about owning a house or having a dining room or making enough money to buy everyone a ribeye, and it’s definitely not about whether your kitchen photographs well.

Hosting is about how you make someone feel when they enter your space. Do you look up when they walk through the door and genuinely tell them you’re happy they’re there? Do you give them somewhere to sit? Do you ask them questions because you’re actually curious about the answers? Do you listen when they tell you something? Do you let them see you as you actually are instead of performing some shinier version of yourself for the evening? That is hospitality. It’s witnessing each other.

I think we need more of that because we’re lonelier and more disconnected than ever, and many of the places where people used to naturally find community aren’t functioning the way they once did. I think it’s going to take an intentional effort from all of us to create those places ourselves, but if we’re going to do that, we have to make gathering easier again. We have to stop treating the version of life we see online as the prerequisite for inviting people into our actual lives. Those beautiful dinner parties can exist. I hope they do. I will probably continue throwing them because I genuinely love them. But they cannot be the price of admission for human connection.

Most of life doesn’t look like that anyway. Most of life is lived in the in-between. It’s the apartment you’re renting. It’s the kitchen you wish were bigger. It’s the week before your husband leaves. It’s being too tired to put on makeup. It’s cat litter on the floor and chicken on a pan and a broken grill and grocery-store potato salad. It’s being a little quieter than normal when everyone first gets there because you had a long day.

Maybe that’s exactly the life we should be inviting people into, because the point was never the chicken or the tablescape or proving that we knew how to host. The point was gathering.

So have people over. Invite them into the apartment. Order the pizza. Tell everyone to bring something because groceries are expensive. Don’t put on makeup. Leave the laundry where it is. Put the chicken on a pan.

Open the door and be happy they’re there. Ask good questions and actually listen to the answers. Laugh until it’s later than you realized. Let someone tell you a story you’ve somehow never heard before. Host the ugly gathering, because I promise you, everybody will live, and they might actually feel a little less alone.

Little me.

I’m sitting in the backseat of the car, craning my neck to hear better. It’s hard to hear the adults in the front over the noise of the traffic. I pull my stuffed bear closer to my chest and sigh because this is a rough conversation.

I nod enthusiastically as the driver rattles on and on. I sigh and act frustrated at the appropriate times. I must be doing a good job because, at a stoplight, they turn around, look at me, and say, “Boy, Christina, thank you for listening to me. I really needed that. You sure are mature.”

I’m six years old, just old enough to hold my own in a conversation with adults, and this is where it all starts. I learn that I’m really good at listening to people. I know how to make them feel seen and heard. I know how to make them feel safe.

As the years pass, I run with it. It becomes my whole identity. I’m the strong one, the happy one, the one you run to when you’re in crisis. I will listen. I will show up. I will know exactly when to nod, when to sigh, and when to say the thing that makes you feel a little less alone.

In fact, strangers tell me their secrets while standing beside me in the grocery store. I’ve gotten so good at making people feel safe that it scares me sometimes. If I were a bad person, I could use this skill in nefarious ways.

But I’m not a bad person. In fact, I’m too damn good. I sacrifice myself for the people in my life. I bend over backward, overgive, listen, absorb, reassure, and ask for almost nothing in return.

Fast-forward to 2026. I’m 37 years old, running two large communities and a hospitality business. I meet new people constantly. My entire life revolves around connection, yet I am still lonely.

The room around me is warmly lit. I’m sitting cross-legged in a chair with my shoes off in my therapist’s office. With an exasperated sigh, I finally ask, “Why the fuck can’t I tell people when I’m suffering?”

I’m currently going through infertility, and it’s hard. I can write about it in a newsletter. I can post about it on Instagram. I can turn it into something coherent and meaningful for strangers on the internet. But when it comes to telling my close friends that I am not okay, I clam up. I cannot even bring myself to ask for help.

The interesting part is that I don’t know what kind of help I want. What could my friends possibly do? They cannot make my body cooperate. They cannot make IVF affordable. They cannot promise me that I will become a mother. There is no casserole, phone call, or perfectly worded text message that can solve this.

But maybe that is not why I tell myself I cannot ask. Maybe I don’t ask because somewhere along the way, I decided that my place in a relationship was to be the person holding everything, not the person being held.

I know how to share once I have shaped my pain into a story. I can clean it up, give it a beginning and a thesis, and offer it to thousands of people. That kind of vulnerability still allows me to be useful. You can read it and feel less alone, which means I am still doing what I learned to do in the backseat of that car. I am still taking something painful and using it to care for everyone else.

Sharing privately is different. There is no audience to help, no lesson to deliver, and no reason for the suffering except that I am suffering. I would have to let someone witness the messy, unfinished version of me and trust that I am still worth sitting beside when I have nothing helpful to give them.

Maybe this is why I can spend my life surrounded by people and still feel lonely. I have confused being needed with being known. I have built relationships in which care moves outward from me so naturally that I barely notice how rarely I let it move in the other direction.

I don’t think the answer is to stop being the person who listens. I love that part of myself, and I do believe it is one of my gifts. But I am beginning to understand that a gift can become a hiding place. Making other people feel safe has allowed me to avoid the terrifying work of trusting that I might be safe with them too.

I still don’t know what kind of help to ask for. Maybe that is part of what I need to practice saying: I don’t know what I need, but I don’t want to carry this alone.

At six years old, I learned how to sit in the backseat, hold my bear, and make an adult feel seen. At 37, I am trying to learn something that should be much simpler but feels infinitely harder. I am trying to let the people who love me turn around, look at me, and see me too.

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Show Up Tired

I rush into the gym, excited in the way you are before something you’ve spent weeks planning. My nerves are buzzing as I look around the room, expecting to see people stretching, chatting, and grabbing water bottles. Instead, it’s quiet. Too quiet. I pause for a second and think, Wait... this can’t be right. We had almost twenty people register.

I find the gym owner, and we start comparing notes. We refresh our phones and realize what’s happened. Six or seven people canceled that morning. The rest just never showed up.

If you’ve ever hosted an event, you know that feeling in your stomach. It’s disappointment, sure, but it’s also something deeper. You know someone else carved out time in their day, opened their doors, cleaned their space, and got excited to host your community. You can’t help but feel like you’ve let them down, even though none of it was actually your fault.

I’m standing there completely exhausted. I had worked an event until 11 p.m. the night before, and I was running on very little sleep. On top of that, I was on my period, which, if you’ve followed me for a while, you know is brutal because of my adenomyosis. Every part of me wanted to stay home that morning. Every excuse I hear from other people could have easily been my excuse too.

I’ve been building community for more than three years now, and this is one of the hardest parts of it.

People tell me all the time that they’re lonely. They want deeper friendships. They want wellness. They want events that don’t revolve around alcohol. They want connection. They want community.

Then the day comes, and a lot of people don’t come.

Now, before I keep going, I want to make one thing really clear because nuance matters here. I’m not talking about someone dealing with a mental health crisis, a chronic illness flare, a family emergency, or something that genuinely makes showing up impossible. Sometimes staying home is exactly what you need to do, and I’ve had those days too.

I’m talking about something different.

I think we’ve started confusing discomfort with danger, and I think we’ve become so fluent in therapy language that sometimes we use it to justify avoiding things that are simply uncomfortable.

Read more

My friend Jackie Glass and I. I helped her run her school board campaign. (more on this story below.)

I’m talking with my friend when she hands me her phone.

On the screen is the cutest fluffy black cat I’ve ever seen. Long black fur, bright eyes, the kind of cat that looks like it should already belong to someone.

“I want to foster her,” she says.

The problem isn’t catching the cat. The problem is that she recently discovered the cat has kittens. She can’t possibly foster all of them. The thought of leaving them outside feels heartbreaking, but the thought of taking in an entire litter feels impossible too.

Somewhere between talking about traps, foster homes, and tiny kittens, our conversation drifted into something much bigger.

The kittens started to feel like a metaphor for what it’s like to be alive right now if you’re someone who cares deeply.

There are so many causes. So many people hurting. So many problems demanding our attention. Because of social media, we’re more aware than ever of what’s happening everywhere, all at once. Every time we pick up our phones there’s another family that needs help, another natural disaster, another fundraiser, another crisis unfolding somewhere in the world. Sometimes I wonder if humans were ever meant to carry this much information about this many people.

We talked about how strange it is that caring about everything can sometimes make you want to care about nothing at all. Not because you’ve become less compassionate, but because your brain and your heart eventually reach capacity. When every problem feels urgent, it’s easy to convince yourself that whatever small thing you could possibly do won’t make enough of a difference anyway.

As we talked, I found myself thinking about a campaign I managed almost ten years ago. One of my close friends was running for school board, and I spent months knocking on doors, making phone calls, organizing volunteers, and doing everything I could to help get her elected. When election night finally came, we lost. Not by hundreds of votes. Not even by dozens. We lost by fewer than ten votes. I don’t remember the exact number anymore, but I remember exactly how it felt. It permanently changed the way I think about participation because from that day on, I could never again tell myself that one vote doesn’t matter. One conversation matters. One volunteer matters. One afternoon spent knocking on doors matters. Individual actions almost always feel insignificant while we’re doing them, but sometimes they’re the very thing that changes the outcome.

Then she told me something I hadn’t expected.

When she admitted she couldn’t foster all the kittens herself, her neighbors offered to help.

What started as a conversation about one cat became something much bigger. They began working together to figure out how to trap the mom, care for the kittens, and find them homes. In the process, she got to know neighbors she’d barely known before. The cats may have been the reason they started talking, but somewhere along the way they became something more than people who happened to live next door.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since.

Psychologists have found that helping behavior is contagious. It’s called social proof. When we see someone else step in, we’re more likely to step in ourselves. One person’s willingness to help quietly gives everyone else permission to do the same.

There’s another idea that feels just as important here. Psychologists call it collective efficacy, the shared belief that together we can solve a problem. It’s one of the strongest predictors of resilient communities because every time people work together successfully, they don’t just solve the immediate issue. They build trust. They start believing that if something difficult happens again, they’ll figure it out together.

Sociologists have observed the same thing after hurricanes, floods, and other disasters. While the news often focuses on destruction, researchers have found that something else happens too. Neighbors who barely knew each other start sharing generators, cooking meals, clearing debris, checking on elderly residents, and opening their homes to complete strangers. In the face of a shared challenge, people often become more connected, not less.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder if we’ve gotten the order backwards.

We tend to believe that first you build community, and then community helps you solve problems.

But maybe solving problems together is how community gets built in the first place.

Maybe belonging isn’t created because everything is easy. Maybe it’s created in the middle of doing hard things alongside other people.

I’ve been thinking about that campaign, those kittens, and those neighbors ever since our conversation.

None of those stories are really about politics or cats.

They’re about the quiet ways ordinary people change each other’s lives. A vote that feels too small to matter. A neighbor offering to foster a litter of kittens. A person deciding to knock on one more door or make one more phone call. None of those actions solve every problem, but they all create something that didn’t exist before.

Maybe that’s the real gift hidden inside the problems we wish didn’t exist.

Not that they force us to suffer.

That they give us a reason to find one another.

And maybe that’s how belonging has always been built. Not by waiting until the world is fixed, but by deciding that whatever is in front of us is worth carrying together.

A picture of me and my cats Skipper and Sailor, because who doesn’t love a good cat pic.

My breasts were so tender that rolling over was uncomfortable. My brain felt like a matted ball of yarn. Every thought led into another, but I couldn’t untangle any of them long enough to actually do something. I was nauseous. I couldn’t eat. When I finally did eat, it didn’t matter what it was. I ended up in the bathroom anyway. My luteal phase isn’t supposed to start this early, but lately it feels like the window where I actually feel like myself gets shorter every month. The days where I feel like a healthy, functioning human being are becoming fewer, and I’m grieving that in ways I don’t always know how to explain.

There are some griefs that people know what to do with. Someone dies and they send flowers. You lose your job and people check in. You get divorced and your friends show up with ice cream. But no one really knows what to say when your own body slowly starts changing the terms of your life.

I looked at my calendar this morning. I had invoices to send, taxes to finish, an event to work tonight, and about twenty other things that felt important. I love my business. I genuinely do. I love building community. I love writing. I love dreaming about becoming a mom. I love having goals.

My body wasn’t interested in any of it.

Five years ago, that probably would’ve sent me into a spiral. I would’ve spent hours trying to figure out how to fix it. Was it something I ate? Do I need a different supplement? Should I be exercising more? Sleeping more? Working less? Drinking less caffeine? Reading another book? Finding another specialist?

I still ask some of those questions.

But this morning I knew the next right thing wasn’t sitting at my computer trying to force my way through a body that was clearly asking me to slow down. It was going for a walk.

Surely there had to be a version of me that could outwork my own biology.

Looking back, I think I’ve spent most of my life searching for the version of myself who finally wouldn’t have to suffer.

Recovery gave me that phrase years ago: just do the next right thing.

So I drove to Oak Grove Park, one of my favorite places.

The lake was smooth as glass. The trees wrapped all the way around it, reflecting perfectly in the water, and for a few minutes it felt like the world had stopped trying so hard. There were birds somewhere in the distance and the steady sound of my shoes against the trail. Nothing around me seemed to be in a rush. The trees weren’t trying to bloom faster. The water wasn’t trying to become something else. Everything simply was, and I noticed how different that was from the conversation happening in my own head.

As I walked, I kept repeating the same things to myself.

I don’t have to like today.

I don’t have to understand why this is happening.

I release the need to feel okay before I believe I’ll be okay.

I’m enough without performing.

I only have to do the next right thing.

I don’t understand why I’m suffering, but I accept that, today, I am.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word equanimity. In Buddhist philosophy, it’s the practice of remaining steady in the middle of both joy and suffering. Not pretending they feel the same. Not pretending one doesn’t hurt. Just not allowing either one to completely take you away from yourself. I don’t have that figured out, but I think I’m practicing it.

Somewhere around the second lap, I found myself thinking about college. It’s funny what your brain pulls up when you finally get quiet.

I could see myself sitting in a dark basement with a warm beer in my hand that I didn’t even like. There was pizza on a paper plate in front of me, another thing I wasn’t interested in eating, but I was surrounded by friends, especially a few guys I wanted to impress. So I laughed. I drank the beer. I ate the pizza. I acted like this version of me was completely natural.

For years I would’ve told you I was just laid-back.

I wasn’t.

Being liked had become a form of safety. Growing up with trauma and childhood abuse taught me to constantly read the room. Who needed something from me? Who was upset? Who could I make more comfortable? I became really good at becoming whoever I thought people needed me to be. People-pleasing wasn’t my personality.

It was survival.

Looking back, I don’t think I was obsessed with being the chill girl because I actually wanted to be. I think I believed that if I didn’t have too many needs, if I wasn’t too emotional, too complicated, or too difficult, life would somehow become safer.

I’ve realized lately that I never actually stopped trying to control things. The strategy just changed.

Instead of trying to control how people saw me, I started trying to control life itself.

Now my calendar is color-coded. I plan weeks in advance. I exercise. I meditate. I read the books. I take the supplements. I limit caffeine. I eat the protein. I do all the things we’re told are supposed to make us healthier, happier, calmer versions of ourselves.

Some of those things genuinely help.

Some of them are also me trying to negotiate with uncertainty.

Looking back, I don’t think I’ve just been trying to become healthier. I think I’ve been trying to become the kind of person suffering couldn’t find. If I exercised enough, healed enough, organized enough, productive enough, recovered enough, maybe I’d finally earn a life where my body, my mind, and my heart stopped asking so much of me.

I don’t think that’s how this works.

PMDD doesn’t care about my Google Calendar. Adenomyosis doesn’t care how disciplined I am. Infertility doesn’t care how badly I want to become a mother. Mental illness doesn’t politely wait until I have fewer meetings scheduled.

For a long time, I thought all of that meant I was failing.

Now I think it just means I’m human.

One thing I have learned, though, is how to meet suffering. I don’t mean that I’ve become good at it, and I certainly don’t think suffering is something we should aspire to. If anything, I’m exhausted. I’m exhausted from living like this. I’m tired of doctor’s appointments. I’m tired of wondering how many good days I’ll get this month. I’m tired of negotiating with a body that seems to have its own plans.

But because so much of my life has been hard, recovery, mental illness, infertility, and now chronic illness, I’ve had to learn a different relationship with suffering. Not because I wanted to, but because fighting reality every single day was exhausting me even more.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I’d been making a bargain with life.

If I became healthy enough, disciplined enough, healed enough, productive enough, organized enough, easy enough to love, then maybe suffering would finally leave me alone.

It took me thirty-seven years to realize that was never the bargain life was offering.

There are philosophies that call this radical acceptance. Buddhists talk about equanimity. The Stoics wrote about accepting what is outside of our control while focusing on what remains within it. Whatever name you give it, I’ve found it strangely freeing. Not because I’ve given up hope or expect less from life, but because I’ve stopped spending so much energy arguing with the reality that’s already in front of me.

That doesn’t mean I stop hoping. I still hope IVF works. I still hope my symptoms improve. I still hope one day my body feels more like home than a mystery. Hope and acceptance don’t feel like opposites to me anymore. Somehow they’ve learned to sit beside each other.

The other thing recovery taught me is that this, too, shall pass. Every depressive episode I’ve survived has eventually lifted. Every PMDD cycle has ended. Every season of grief has changed shape. Even joy doesn’t stay forever. Nothing does.

Some days I find that comforting.

Other days I’m simply exhausted by it.

Both things are true.

I don’t have a lesson to wrap this up with because I’m still living it. Maybe that’s why this newsletter has always been called In Process. I’m not writing from the other side of any of this. I’m writing from a walk around a quiet lake on a Tuesday morning when my body hurt, my mind felt tangled, and all I knew to do was take one step after another.

Today, the next right thing was a walk around a quiet lake. Tomorrow it will probably be something else. I’m slowly letting go of the idea that there’s a version of me who finally earns a life without suffering.

For today, one step at a time is enough.

A scene from my walk today.

I’m Running Late. Again.

I look down at my watch and laugh to myself. Ten minutes late. I can live with that.

I hurry across campus, digging through my purse trying to find the little piece of paper where I’d scribbled the room number. I finally find it, walk into a brightly lit classroom, quietly pull out a chair near the back, and set my purse on the floor.

The woman leading the meeting smiles as I walk in. She’s probably in her twenties, wearing business casual with this bright red blazer that somehow makes her look both welcoming and incredibly put together. Around me are a bunch of other college students.

It’s a Young Republicans meeting.

I’m 19 years old, still in college, and mostly just trying to figure out what I believe.

For the next hour I listen. Some of what they’re saying resonates with me. Love of country. Faith. Personal responsibility. Service. Those things mattered to me then, and they still do. But there were other things that made me uneasy, and I couldn’t quite explain why.

I walked out of that room more confused than when I walked in.

At the time, I was attending a Christian college in Ohio. I grew up around conservative ideas, so I just assumed they were mine too. But something kept bothering me, so I started reading more. Listening more. Taking an embarrassing number of online political quizzes.

Slowly, I realized I actually leaned more left on most issues.

Not because someone convinced me.

Because after wrestling with it myself, that’s where I landed.

A few years later I found myself volunteering for political campaigns I genuinely believed in. I knocked on doors, talked to strangers, and spent weekends trying to help elect people I thought could make life a little better for the communities they served.

One afternoon after canvassing, a group of us ended up sitting on someone’s front porch drinking sweet tea. The conversation drifted toward politics, and someone casually said that if anyone in your family voted for Trump, you should cut them out of your life. Divorce them if you had to.

I remember feeling my whole body tense.

Because my husband voted for Trump.

And my husband also happens to be one of the kindest people I’ve ever known.

He’s a Navy rescue swimmer. He serves this country every single day. He would stop on the side of the road to help a stranger without thinking twice. He’s not racist. He’s not hateful. He’s not the caricature that conversation made him out to be.

I remember sitting there thinking, What am I supposed to do with this?

It brought me right back to that classroom in college.

Confused.

Not because I suddenly changed my political beliefs, but because I realized I didn’t seem to fit perfectly anywhere anymore.

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the way I stopped looking for the political party that represented me perfectly. I realized I might spend the rest of my life not fitting neatly into either one. I was surprised by how much that actually felt like a loss.

I don’t think we talk enough about that kind of grief. There’s something comforting about belonging to a tribe. There’s security in knowing exactly where you fit and exactly what you’re supposed to believe. When that starts to fall apart, it can feel lonely.

Maybe that’s just what getting older has done to me. Every year I’m a little less certain about almost everything.

Sobriety did that.

Coming out did that.

Starting a business definitely did that.

Every one of those experiences chipped away at this idea that life is clean and simple and people fit neatly into categories.

Politics has become another version of the same lesson.

When I got sober, I realized I didn’t fit into drinking culture anymore. When I came out, I realized I didn’t fit into the identity I’d carried around for thirty years. When I started Free Life, I realized I didn’t fit into the career I thought I was supposed to have.

Maybe that’s why I have so much compassion for people who are still figuring out what they believe. I know what it feels like to stand in the messy middle, where everyone seems to want you to pick a side, and neither side feels quite like home.

The older I get, the less interested I am in finding people who agree with me.

I’m much more interested in finding people who are committed to each other.

I’ve realized I’m not really looking for people who think like I do anymore. I’m looking for people who know how to disagree well. People who stay curious. People who can admit when they’re wrong. People who can change their minds when they learn something new.

I think that’s emotional maturity.

Now, I also want to be clear about something. I’m not talking about tolerating abuse or racism or cruelty. Those deserve boundaries.

What I am talking about is the gray space in between.

The family member you disagree with.

The neighbor who votes differently.

The friend who sees the world through a different lens.

I think we’ve become way too quick to reduce people to a vote, a headline, or a social media post.

And if I’m being fair, I’ve done it too.

I’ve caught myself rolling my eyes before someone even finished talking because I assumed I already knew what they believed. I’ve made snap judgments. I’ve reduced people to labels.

It feels satisfying for about thirty seconds.

Then I remember how much I hate when someone does that to me.

Maybe I’m wrong about some of this. I probably am. That’s kind of the point.

The older I get, the more suspicious I become of anyone who’s completely certain they have all the answers, including myself.

This is actually one of my favorite parts about Free Life.

Every month I look around the room and realize I have no idea who voted for who.

What I do know is who’s training for a marathon. I know whose mom is sick. I know who’s starting a business. I know who’s struggling with infertility. I know who’s celebrating another year sober. I know who just got laid off. I know whose kid is heading off to college.

I usually have no clue how they voted.

And it turns out it doesn’t matter nearly as much as the internet would have us believe.

I’ve never watched someone become more compassionate because they won an argument online.

I have watched it happen over coffee.

I’ve watched it happen over mocktails.

I’ve watched it happen sitting around a fire after yoga.

I’ve watched it happen because someone stopped being an idea and became a person.

Once you’ve laughed together, cried together, celebrated together, or simply listened to someone’s story, it’s a whole lot harder to reduce them to who they voted for.

That’s what gives me hope.

As a military spouse, I’ve had the privilege of living in different parts of this country. I grew up in Ohio. I live in Virginia now. My husband’s family is from Texas.

The America I experience every day looks very different from the one I see on my phone.

The internet would have us believe we’re living in two different countries.

My actual life tells me something else.

I see neighbors helping each other after storms. I see military families from every political background bringing meals to someone whose spouse just deployed. I see people volunteering at races, coaching Little League, checking on elderly neighbors, and helping someone load groceries into their car.

Most people, regardless of who they voted for, are just trying to build a good life.

I think we’ve forgotten that.

Or maybe we’ve just stopped spending enough time together to remember it.

I keep thinking about what kind of country I actually want to live in.

It isn’t one where everyone agrees.

That country has never existed.

I want to live in a country where disagreement doesn’t automatically end the relationship. Where families stay at the dinner table long enough to hear each other out. Where neighbors know each other’s names before they know each other’s voting records. Where we spend more time on front porches than we do in comment sections.

I recently came across a quote from Barbara Jordan that I haven’t been able to shake.

“What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”

I don’t know exactly what that America looks like.

But I have a feeling it starts a lot smaller than Washington.

It starts with us.

Today there will be fireworks, kids chasing each other with sparklers, folding chairs lining neighborhood streets, and families arguing over whose potato salad is actually the best. Somewhere there will be Republicans helping Democrats carry coolers. Democrats saving seats for Republicans at the parade. Neither of them thinking much about it because, at the end of the day, they’re just neighbors.

Maybe that’s why I keep building community.

I don’t think gathering fixes everything.

But I do think it’s a lot harder to hate someone once you’ve shared a meal with them. It’s a lot harder to write someone off after you’ve heard their story.

Every time I host an event, I’m reminded of the same thing.

People are almost always more complicated, and a whole lot more beautiful, than the labels we give them.

The Story Isn’t What Happened to You

I wake up to bright fluorescent lights.

Where am I? I think to myself.

One of the hardest parts wasn’t being there. It was wondering who I could even tell.

I wish I could tell you that people flooded my room with flowers and balloons.

That friends stopped by after work. That someone showed up with my favorite snacks or a card that simply said, “We’re thinking about you.”

They didn’t.

In fact, I remember lying in that hospital bed thinking that if I had been in a car accident, people would have visited. If I’d had surgery, they would have sent flowers. If I’d had a heart attack or another physical illness, people would have known exactly what to do.

But mental illness felt different. It was invisible, uncomfortable, and often misunderstood. I knew people cared about me. I also knew they didn’t quite know how to respond.

That realization changed the trajectory of my life.

Not because it made me angry, but because it gave me purpose.

If people didn’t know how to talk about mental health, maybe I could help make those conversations a little easier.

I didn’t know it then, but that moment became the foundation for years of advocacy, recovery, public speaking, writing, and eventually building Free Life, a business rooted in helping people build meaningful connections without alcohol.

Looking back, I’ve realized something surprising.

The hospital wasn’t actually the story.

The story was what happened inside of me while I was there.

That’s the mistake I think so many of us make when we try to share our experiences. We assume the story is the event itself.

The divorce.

The addiction.

The diagnosis.

The business failure.

The miscarriage.

Coming out.

Burnout.

Those experiences matter, but they’re rarely what people connect with most.

People connect with what those experiences changed inside of us.

Over the past several years, I’ve shared openly about sobriety, entrepreneurship, burnout, mental health, infertility, and recovery. People often ask me how I know what to share, and the answer usually surprises them.

I don’t begin by asking myself, What happened?

I ask myself, Why does this matter?

That’s a very different question.

I’ve also learned that not everything belongs on the internet.

One of the healthiest lessons I’ve ever learned is this: don’t share from an open wound. Share from a scar.

That doesn’t mean you have to wait until your life is perfect before telling your story. It means giving yourself enough distance to understand what the experience has taught you before inviting other people into it.

I’ve also learned that you don’t have to tell every detail to tell the truth.

There are parts of my story that belong only to me. There are parts that belong to other people. There are details that wouldn’t help anyone if I shared them. Protecting those boundaries doesn’t make my story less honest. It makes it more intentional.

The goal isn’t to tell everyone everything.

The goal is to tell the part that serves.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that vulnerability was the goal.

Connection is the goal.

Service is the outcome.

Every time I sit down to write an essay, record a podcast, or post something online, I ask myself the same question:

How can this help someone else feel less alone?

That question has become my compass.

Because our stories aren’t valuable simply because they’re difficult.

They’re valuable because of the meaning we create from them.

Because of the conversations they begin.

Because of the shame they dissolve.

Because of the communities they build.

Because of the courage they give someone else to keep going.

Free Life exists because I shared my recovery story.

Sober Storytelling exists because I believed people needed a place where they could tell the truth without fear of judgment.

The community I’ve been fortunate enough to build didn’t grow because I had the hardest story. It grew because I kept asking how my story could become useful to someone beyond myself.

Lately, I’ve realized this process has quietly become a framework I’ve been using for years without realizing it.

It’s the same process I’ve used to write hundreds of essays and social media posts, build a business rooted in community, facilitate more than fifty Sober Storytelling events, and continue making meaning from experiences I never would have chosen for myself.

I’ve started putting language around that framework, not because I think everyone should become a public speaker or build a business, but because I believe every person deserves to become the narrator of their own life instead of remaining the main character in their pain.

Our experiences don’t automatically become wisdom.

We have to wrestle with them.

Reflect on them.

Find meaning within them.

Then, if and when we’re ready, share them in ways that make someone else’s path a little less lonely.

Maybe that’s what stories are really for.

Not to bring attention to ourselves, but to remind one another that healing rarely happens alone and that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do isn’t simply survive our story. It’s learning how to let it serve someone else.

For the past several months, I’ve been quietly building something that captures this philosophy.

It’s called Stories That Serve, built around The Meaning Method, a framework for transforming lived experiences into stories that create connection, inspire action, and leave a lasting impact.

I’ve started putting language around that framework, not because I think everyone should become a public speaker or build a business, but because I believe every person deserves to become the narrator of their own life instead of remaining the main character in their pain.

Our experiences don’t automatically become wisdom.

We have to wrestle with them.

Reflect on them.

Find meaning within them.

Then, if and when we’re ready, share them in ways that make someone else’s path a little less lonely.

Maybe that’s what stories are really for.

Not to bring attention to ourselves, but to remind one another that healing rarely happens alone and that sometimes the most powerful thing we can do isn’t simply survive our story. It’s learning how to let it serve someone else.

If you’re thinking about sharing your own story, whether it’s with one person, online, on a stage, or simply in a journal, here are three things I’ve learned over the years.

First, don’t start with what happened. Start with why it mattered.

Most people can tell you the facts of their lives. The stories that stay with us are the ones that reveal how those experiences changed someone’s perspective, identity, or understanding of the world. The event catches our attention. The meaning keeps it.

Second, you don’t have to tell every detail to tell the truth.

One of the biggest misconceptions about vulnerability is that honesty requires complete transparency. It doesn’t. Some parts of our stories belong only to us. Some belong to other people. Some simply aren’t necessary. Sharing with integrity means asking, “What will help someone else?” rather than, “How much can I reveal?”

Finally, don’t ask whether your story is interesting. Ask whether it’s useful.

That single question has changed the way I write, speak, and lead. Every time I sit down to tell a story, I ask myself, How can this help someone else feel less alone? When service becomes the goal, the pressure to perform disappears. Your story no longer has to be the biggest, hardest, or most dramatic. It simply has to be honest enough that someone else sees themselves in it.

That’s the philosophy behind everything I’ve built, from Free Life to Sober Storytelling, and it’s the foundation of a new workshop I’m creating called Stories That Serve.

Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing more about The Meaning Method, the framework I’ve developed for transforming lived experiences into stories that create connection, inspire action, and leave a lasting impact.

Because I don’t believe our stories are meant to end with us.

I think they’re meant to become bridges that help someone else find their way forward.

I Struggled With Alcohol, But I Don’t Call Myself an Alcoholic

It’s 9 a.m.

I bolt upright in bed and immediately regret it. My head is pounding. My mouth feels like sandpaper. I grab my phone from the nightstand and squint at the screen.

Ten missed calls. Three text messages.

My stomach drops.

I’m supposed to be meeting a client.

At the time, I worked for myself as a marketing consultant, helping small businesses with branding, social media, and communications. I was trying desperately to build something of my own, but I kept getting in my own way. The night before had followed a familiar pattern. I told myself I’d have a couple drinks. A couple became several. Several became another late night that seemed like a good idea at the time and felt significantly less brilliant the next morning.

I throw on clothes from the pile on the floor, chug a glass of water, make coffee, and rush out the door. By the time I arrive, my client is understandably frustrated. I apologize, blame traffic, and stumble through the meeting. Somehow I get through it. Somehow I always got through it.

Afterward, I stay at the coffee shop to get some work done. I open my laptop, stare at the screen, and put my head in my hands.

Something has got to change.

The thought isn’t dramatic. Nobody is threatening to leave me. I’m not getting arrested. My life isn’t falling apart in any obvious way. But I know this can’t continue. I know I’m drinking too much. I know alcohol is making my life harder. I know I’m tired of making promises to myself and breaking them.

What I don’t know is what to call myself.

Years later, I found myself sitting in a recovery meeting listening to people introduce themselves.

“Hi, I’m Mike, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The room nodded.

Then another person introduced themselves the same way. Then another. By the time it got around to me, my heart was racing. Not because I didn’t belong there. Not because I didn’t have a drinking problem. Not because I wasn’t desperate for help. I just couldn’t get the words out.

When it was my turn, I said something awkward instead.

“I’m Christina, and alcohol has become a problem in my life.”

I remember feeling like I had broken some unwritten rule.

The strange thing is that my hesitation wasn’t denial. By that point, I knew alcohol was hurting me. I knew it was affecting my relationships, my mental health, my work, and my ability to show up for my own life. The issue wasn’t whether I needed to quit drinking. The issue was whether I was allowed to quit drinking if I wasn’t an alcoholic.

That distinction ended up mattering more than I realized.

For years, I thought I couldn’t possibly have a drinking problem because I wasn’t what I imagined an alcoholic looked like. I had a career. I paid my bills. I wasn’t drinking in the morning. I wasn’t getting DUIs. I wasn’t losing jobs. I wasn’t experiencing the version of alcoholism that movies, television, and recovery narratives had taught me to recognize.

What I was doing was spending an extraordinary amount of energy thinking about alcohol. I was counting down until I could drink. I was using it to manage anxiety, loneliness, celebrations, awkwardness, stress, and grief. I was making rules and breaking them. I was waking up embarrassed by things I’d said or done. I was constantly negotiating with myself about when I would drink, how much I would drink, and whether this time would somehow be different.

Most importantly, I was becoming someone I didn’t particularly like.

The problem is that our culture tends to present alcohol as a binary. You’re either a normal drinker or you’re an alcoholic. You’re either fine or you’re in crisis. You’re either in control or you’ve hit rock bottom.

But most of life doesn’t happen at the extremes. Most relationships don’t go from healthy to catastrophic overnight. Most careers don’t go from fulfilling to unbearable in a single day. Most people don’t wake up one morning and find themselves completely lost. Things usually happen gradually. They erode slowly. They become heavier over time until one day you realize you’ve been carrying something that no longer belongs to you.

I think alcohol works that way for a lot of people.

The truth is that alcohol doesn’t have to destroy your life before it starts diminishing it. It doesn’t have to cost you your marriage, your career, your health, or your freedom before it starts taking more than it’s giving. Sometimes it simply makes your life smaller. It steals your energy. It steals your confidence. It steals your mornings. It steals your ability to be fully present. It steals opportunities you don’t even realize you’re missing because the losses happen so gradually.

That’s where I lived, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned since getting sober, it’s that the gray area is far more crowded than most people realize.

The irony is that the label itself became a barrier to change.

Part of the reason the label felt so complicated for me was because I’ve always believed that the words we use to describe ourselves matter. “I am” is powerful language. Whether we realize it or not, those words shape how we see ourselves and what we believe is possible.

In early recovery, calling myself an alcoholic was useful because it explained a lot. It helped me make sense of behaviors that had confused me for years. It gave me a framework when everything felt chaotic. It helped me understand why I kept doing things I swore I wouldn’t do.

But over time, I found myself becoming more careful with identity-based language. The label started to feel limiting. Instead of describing something I was experiencing, it began to feel like it was defining who I was.

I never wanted my relationship with alcohol to become the most important thing about me. I never wanted to reduce an entire human life to a single struggle. More than that, I worried that identifying myself primarily through the lens of a problem subtly took away some of my agency. It made me feel as though I was permanently defined by something that had happened to me rather than empowered by the choices I was making to heal.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that people shouldn’t use the word alcoholic. For many people, it saves lives. For many people, it creates belonging, accountability, and community. I have enormous respect for that. This is simply my experience. Over time, I found that language like “I’m in recovery” or “I’ve struggled with substance use disorder” felt more accurate because it described something I was navigating, not something I fundamentally was.

I spent years asking the wrong question.

Am I an alcoholic?

I analyzed it from every angle. I compared myself to other people. I looked for evidence. I searched for certainty. I tried to determine whether my drinking was bad enough, severe enough, or serious enough to justify quitting.

Looking back, it’s a ridiculous question.

Not because alcoholism isn’t real. It absolutely is. Not because labels aren’t useful. For many people, they are. But because I was treating sobriety like something I had to earn. As if I needed enough suffering first. As if there was a committee somewhere reviewing my application. As if I needed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that alcohol was causing enough damage before I was allowed to walk away.

We do this all the time as humans.

Someone says they’re unhappy in a relationship and we ask whether it’s really that bad. Someone says they’re burned out at work and we tell them to stick it out a little longer. Someone says they’re struggling with alcohol and we immediately start investigating whether they qualify for help.

Have you lost your job?

Have you gotten a DUI?

Have you hit rock bottom?

Have you tried moderation?

It’s as though we believe people should continue suffering until their circumstances become undeniable.

But why?

Why do we make people prove they’re hurting before we allow them to heal? Why do we require evidence before we permit change?

At some point, I stopped asking whether I was an alcoholic and started asking a different question:

Would my life be better without alcohol?

That question changed everything because suddenly I didn’t need a diagnosis. I didn’t need a label. I didn’t need anyone else’s approval. I didn’t need to compare my drinking to someone else’s. I didn’t need to build a legal case against myself.

I just had to answer honestly.

Would my life be better without alcohol?

The answer was yes. A loud, terrifying, undeniable yes that I had been trying not to hear for a very long time.

Six years later, I can see how much of my life was waiting for me on the other side of that answer. The friendships. The clarity. The peace. The business I’ve built. The community. The confidence. The ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings instead of running from them. The realization that connection was always what I was looking for, and alcohol was often getting in the way of it.

For some people, the word alcoholic provides clarity, community, and a framework that helps them make sense of their experience. I respect that deeply. Recovery communities saved my life, and many of the people who helped me stay sober proudly identify that way. But what ultimately changed my life wasn’t finding the perfect label. It was giving myself permission to stop arguing with reality.

What I care about now is creating enough space for people to ask honest questions about their relationship with alcohol before things become catastrophic. I care about the people who suspect alcohol is taking more than it’s giving but don’t feel qualified to quit. I care about the people who are functioning, successful, capable, and quietly exhausted from carrying a relationship with alcohol that no longer feels good.

Because if that’s where you are, I want you to know something I wish someone had told me years ago: you do not need permission to change your life. You do not need a dramatic story, a diagnosis, or a rock-bottom moment that leaves everyone around you nodding in agreement. You do not need to prove that you’re suffering enough before you choose something different.

For years, I thought the question was whether I was an alcoholic. Looking back, that question kept me stuck because it focused my attention on identity instead of impact. The better question, the one that finally changed everything, was much simpler:

Would my life be better without alcohol?

Sometimes the bravest thing you can do isn’t wait until everything falls apart. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is trust yourself while everything still looks fine from the outside.

I was in a bar in Norfolk years ago. The place doesn’t exist anymore, but it was either a gay bar or a lesbian bar. I can’t remember which. What I do remember is that it was loud, crowded, and exactly where I wanted to be at the time.

I was drunk. Very drunk. Back then, that wasn’t noteworthy. It was a normal Friday night.

I was having one of those conversations that always felt profound after a few drinks. The kind where you’re telling a stranger your life story and convincing yourself you’ve formed a deep connection because you’re both oversharing.

At some point, the woman I was talking to asked, “Are you straight?”

I remember laughing and saying, “Well, I’m married to a guy.”

She looked at me and said, “That doesn’t mean you’re straight.”

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(Photo of Renew and Refresh Event)

I finally sat down around 4 p.m.

The event was over. The everyone was gone, the yoga mats were rolled up, and for the first time in nearly two weeks, I had nowhere to be.

I collapsed into a folding lawn chair in my backyard, one of my favorite places in the world, with a copy of Lena Dunham’s memoir in my lap. To say I was tired would be an understatement. The last two weeks had been packed. At one point I counted five events in a seven-day stretch. Just a few hours earlier, I had wrapped up Renew & Refresh, a wellness gathering I host in my backyard during the summer where we do yoga, sound healing, and cold plunge.

I felt proud of what I was building.

Free Life has grown a lot this year. The events are bigger. The business is making more money. Opportunities that felt impossible a year ago are suddenly showing up in my inbox. The thing that started as an idea in my head is slowly becoming a real business.

Before opening my book, I did what most of us do now without even thinking about it.

I opened Instagram.

The first thing I saw was a creator I genuinely admire. She runs community events in Miami that are similar to mine, and she was talking on a podcast about the events she’s built, the sponsorships she’s landed, and the growth she’s experienced.

Almost instantly, I felt that familiar tightening in my chest.

Five minutes earlier, I was proud of myself. Now I felt behind.

The thing is, she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was talented, creative, successful, and I genuinely admire what she’s built. But as I watched clips of her events, I found myself mentally taking inventory of all the ways I was falling short.

Her events were held in beautiful venues. Mine are literally in my backyard.

She had hundreds of attendees, household-name sponsors, professional videography, curated gift bags, and a level of polish that makes you stop scrolling. Earlier that morning, I had been setting up a six-foot folding table from Walmart and covering it with a Free Life tablecloth from Amazon.

Everything about her events looked bigger.

Prettier.

More legitimate.

And the longer I watched, the more I started feeling like a failure.

What’s wild is that five minutes earlier, I had been proud of those people who showed up that morning. Nothing about my business, the event, the connections that were made, or the growth I’ve experienced had changed. The only thing that changed was what I was comparing it to.

What's wild is that five minutes earlier, I had been proud of those fifteen women who showed up that morning. What made it even more meaningful was that many of them weren't first-time attendees. They were returning community members. Real people who continue to come back because they've found connection, friendship, and belonging through these gatherings. One woman told us she was brought to tears during the sound healing. Another shared how much these events have helped her slow down and reconnect with herself. These weren't just ticket sales or attendance numbers on a spreadsheet. They were actual human beings whose lives had intersected with something my yoga instructor and I had created. Nothing about that changed in the five minutes I spent scrolling Instagram. The only thing that changed was my ability to see it.

And it got me thinking about this idea of enoughness.

When you’re ambitious, when is enough actually enough?

Because I love being driven. I love building things. I love setting goals and chasing them. I don’t think ambition is a bad thing. In fact, ambition has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. It’s helped me get sober. It’s helped me build a business. It’s helped me survive some really hard seasons.

But somewhere along the way, ambition can quietly shape-shift into something else. Something that whispers that no matter what you accomplish, it’s not quite enough yet.

Psychologists call this the hedonic treadmill. The thing you once desperately wanted becomes normal, and before you’ve even had a chance to enjoy it, your brain starts looking for the next thing.

You wanted your first event. Then you wanted more people at your event. Then sponsorships. Then bigger sponsorships. Then another revenue goal. Then another opportunity. Then another city. Then another milestone.

The finish line keeps moving.

And American culture seems uniquely designed to speed up the process.

Everywhere we look, we’re being asked what’s next. How’s the business? What’s your revenue? How many followers? How many subscribers? What’s your five-year plan? What are you building?

We rarely stop to ask a different question:

What if what you’re building right now is already pretty incredible?

One of the reasons I started this newsletter is because I’m interested in how we grow without losing ourselves. How we build businesses, relationships, and meaningful lives without sacrificing our mental health in the process. As someone in recovery from both addiction and mental health struggles, I know what happens when achievement becomes the only thing that matters. I know what happens when we keep chasing relief, validation, success, or worthiness somewhere outside ourselves.

The target keeps moving. The feeling never arrives. Eventually, you’re exhausted.

But the older I get, the more I think the real danger isn’t comparison itself.

It’s what comparison steals from us.

It steals our capacity for joy.

Because the problem wasn’t that her events were bigger than mine. The problem was that for a few moments, I lost the ability to appreciate what was right in front of me.

I couldn’t see the individuals who had spent their Saturday morning connecting with each other.

I couldn’t see the text messages I regularly receive from people telling me they met a friend at one of my events.

I couldn’t see the person who recently told me that Free Life helped them realize they weren’t the only one struggling.

I couldn’t see the impact because I was too busy measuring the scale.

And maybe that’s part of the trap.

Scale and impact are not always the same thing.

We live in a culture obsessed with bigger. Bigger audiences. Bigger launches. Bigger followings. Bigger revenue goals. Bigger houses. Bigger everything.

But if fifteen people gather in a backyard on a Saturday morning and leave feeling less lonely than when they arrived, is that actually small?

I don’t think it is.

So how do we stay ambitious without burning out? How do we continue reaching for more without constantly feeling like we’re falling short?

I don’t have all the answers, but I think part of it starts with actually allowing ourselves to feel the impact of what we’ve already done.

People thank me for Free Life all the time. They tell me they loved an event. They tell me they met a friend. They tell me a conversation changed their perspective. And if I’m being honest, I usually brush right past it because I’ve already moved on to planning the next thing.

Maybe that’s the work.

Not building bigger.

Receiving more.

Actually pausing long enough to let the gratitude land.

Actually feeling the impact instead of immediately chasing the next milestone.

I’ve also started asking myself a different question when I get caught in comparison:

Would the version of me from five years ago be impressed by the life I’m living today?

The woman who was struggling with alcohol. The woman trying to manage her mental health. The woman who had no idea if she could build a business.

She wouldn’t be worried about whether there were fifteen people or one hundred and fifty people in my backyard.

She’d be amazed there were fifteen.

Most importantly, I think we have to define enough for ourselves before the world does it for us.

Because if enough means being the biggest, the most successful, the most profitable, or the most followed, we’ll never arrive. There will always be someone with a bigger venue, a larger sponsorship, a prettier setup, or a more impressive highlight reel.

But if enough means creating meaningful work, building genuine community, helping people feel less alone, and still having a life you enjoy living, that’s a very different definition.

As the sun started to go down, I looked back at the yard where fifteen individuals had gathered that morning.

Fifteen.

A number that had felt meaningful at noon and disappointingly small at four o’clock.

Same backyard.

Same business.

Same impact.

Different story.

I don’t think the goal is to stop wanting more.

I think the goal is to learn how to want more without making your current life feel like less.

Because if I can’t appreciate fifteen people gathering in a backyard on a Saturday morning, I’m not sure one hundred and fifty would solve the problem.

The number would change.

The mindset wouldn’t.

Me and my yoga instructor Alesia.

(My husband Clayton cut the flowers for me. He’s the true gardener. I just cosplay as one. lol)

Yesterday I was driving to meet a friend for a walk.

On the passenger seat next to me sat a bouquet of hydrangeas I’d cut from my garden and a couple cans of De Soi. It wasn’t her birthday. Nothing major had happened. I just thought it would be nice to bring her something.

As I was driving, I found myself thinking, I want to be this kind of person more often.

The kind of friend who brings flowers. The kind of friend who remembers birthdays, checks in after a hard week, and shows up when it matters.

And almost immediately, another thought followed:

Why haven’t I been?

I started thinking about all the things I’ve missed over the years. Baby showers. Birthdays. Family gatherings. Funerals. Friends I meant to call back. Text messages I forgot to answer. People I genuinely cared about but somehow never seemed to make time for.

For a minute, I started doing what I usually do and making it a character flaw. You’re too busy. You’re distracted. You’re not a good enough friend.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if there was something bigger going on.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but I don’t think COVID gets enough credit for how much it changed our relationships. Not because COVID created loneliness, but because it accelerated something that was already happening.

The social fabric was already fraying.

Long before anyone had heard the word coronavirus, loneliness was on the rise. Fewer people were participating in religious communities. Fewer people belonged to civic organizations. People were moving more often, changing jobs more frequently, and spending more time online and less time together. The U.S. Surgeon General has pointed out that our loneliness epidemic was building for years before the pandemic ever arrived. COVID didn’t create the problem. It poured gasoline on it.

Then the pandemic came along and interrupted many of the routines that were still holding our relationships together.

We stopped gathering.

We stopped dropping by.

We stopped celebrating together.

We stopped grieving together.

For months, isolation became a public health necessity. But habits have a way of sticking around.

Life started moving again, but I don’t know that all of us did.

Sometimes I think we’re walking around wondering why we feel disconnected while forgetting that relationships require practice. Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t care. But because showing up is a muscle, and many of us haven’t exercised it consistently in years.

I know I haven’t.

And this isn’t a judgment. It’s an observation because I’m talking about myself too.

The irony is that I spend a lot of my time thinking about community. I literally built a business around helping people connect. I host events. I write about friendship. I’m writing an entire book about relationships.

And yet there are still moments when I realize I’ve let people I love drift further away than I intended.

Not because I don’t care.

Because somewhere along the way, showing up stopped being a habit.

I also wonder how much of it is fear.

Psychologists talk about something called the liking gap. It’s the tendency for us to underestimate how much other people like us and enjoy our company. We assume people are less interested in us than they actually are.

When I first learned about it, I immediately thought about friendship.

How many times have I thought about texting someone and talked myself out of it?

They’re probably busy.

It’s been too long.

I don’t want to bother them.

That would be awkward.

Meanwhile, research suggests that people are usually happier to hear from us than we expect. We underestimate how much a text message, a phone call, or an invitation might mean to someone.

I wonder how many friendships are sitting in limbo because both people are having the exact same thought.

I wonder how much of our loneliness comes not from a lack of love, but from a lack of initiation.

Maybe we’re all sitting around missing each other while assuming nobody wants to hear from us.

The thing that gives me hope is that habits can change.

That’s what I was thinking about as I carried those hydrangeas across the parking lot. The beautiful thing about friendships is that we can get better at them. We can become more thoughtful, more intentional, and more present. We can decide to send the text, make the call, bring the flowers, or schedule the walk.

Relationships aren’t fixed. They’re living things. They require attention, maintenance, and care. And if the last decade has taught me anything, it’s that those things disappear faster than we think when we stop practicing them.

But the opposite is true too.

The practice can begin again.

Maybe rebuilding community isn’t some massive cultural challenge that only politicians, nonprofits, or experts can solve.

Maybe it starts with remembering someone’s birthday.

Maybe it starts with checking in on a friend who’s been having a hard time.

Maybe it starts with a walk.

Maybe it starts with a couple cans of De Soi and some hydrangeas from the garden.

Maybe it starts with showing up again.

Life is happening whether we’re paying attention to it or not.

Our friends are getting older. Their kids are growing up. Their parents are getting sick. They’re getting promotions, going through divorces, struggling with anxiety, celebrating wins, and carrying burdens we know nothing about because we haven’t picked up the phone.

One day, there won’t be another chance to make the call.

The older I get, the more I realize that relationships don’t usually disappear in some spectacular explosion. They fade from neglect. A canceled coffee date here. A text you’ll send later. A month that turns into a year.

If there’s someone you’ve been thinking about, call them.

If there’s a friend you’ve been meaning to see, put it on the calendar.

If you’ve been waiting for the perfect time to reach out, this is it.

Because the truth is there is no moment in life when things suddenly become less busy. There is no magical season when everyone finally has more time. Life keeps happening. The calendar keeps filling up. The years keep moving.

The people we love are not guaranteed forever.

And maybe that’s exactly why they’re worth showing up for today.

I let out a satisfied sigh as I rolled over and watched the morning sun land across my boyfriend’s muscular, naked body. We were tangled in sweat and sheets, limbs intertwined underneath thin white blankets that smelled faintly like detergent and skin. We’d just finished having sex for the second or third time that morning. I honestly couldn’t remember.

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It’s early and I’m rushing through the hotel hallway trying not to be late. My husband is graduating from American Public University this morning and I’m already spiraling.

Did I grab my phone?

Where’s the room key?

How bad is traffic going to be in D.C.?

I slam the hotel door behind me and jog toward the elevator. The entire weekend has been a blur of crowded sidewalks, packed restaurants, tourists everywhere, families carrying flower bouquets through hotel lobbies because it also happens to be Mother’s Day weekend.

The elevator doors open and I step inside next to a cheerful older woman holding flowers.

She smiles brightly at me and says, “Happy Mother’s Day! Are you a mother?”

The atmosphere in the elevator changes almost instantly as I quietly mutter, “No,” and awkwardly look down at my feet.

She glances at me and quickly says, “Well anyway, have a great day.”

The elevator door opens and we both walk out into the busy D.C. streets pretending that interaction didn’t just happen.

To anyone else, this would look like a completely normal interaction. And truthfully, it was. She wasn’t cruel. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was just being warm and human and making conversation with another woman on Mother’s Day weekend.

But I’m dealing with infertility. In fact, I’ve been struggling with it for three years now. Of course, this woman doesn’t know that. But it hurt nonetheless.

As I walked down the street toward the graduation, my mind immediately started racing.

How dare she assume I’m a mother?

Not all women are mothers.

We really shouldn’t wish every woman a Happy Mother’s Day.

But as quickly as the thoughts came, I realized they weren’t entirely fair either. We can’t police every single thing people say to each other. If we did, we’d stop interacting altogether. And it already feels like we’re living in an era where people are more disconnected, isolated, and afraid of saying the wrong thing than ever before.

So what’s the solution here?

How do we stay open and connected in a world where everyone is carrying invisible pain?

The truth is, before infertility, I probably wouldn’t have thought twice about that interaction either. I may have asked the same question myself. But pain has a way of widening your perspective. It forces you to realize how little we actually know about the people standing in front of us.

The woman struggling with infertility.

The man grieving his father on Father’s Day.

The person at happy hour trying desperately not to drink. (This was me for years before I got sober!)

The woman at the baby shower recovering from a miscarriage nobody knows about.

The lonely person showing up to the community event hoping someone talks to them first.

The divorced couple smiling through family photos.

The person whose mother died years ago but still feels gutted every May.

We are brushing against each other’s invisible pain constantly.

I think suffering can make us more thoughtful if we let it. Not more fearful. Not silent. Just more aware. More capable of pausing before we speak and considering that another person may be carrying a reality we cannot see.

And yet, I also think we are becoming so terrified of saying the wrong thing that we are forgetting how to connect altogether. Every conversation now feels loaded with the possibility of offense or misunderstanding. So people retreat. They stop talking to strangers. Stop asking questions. Stop reaching toward one another at all.

That scares me too.

I think this has made us worse friends too.

I’ve seen it in my own life during hard seasons, and if I’m being truthful, I’ve done it too. Someone is grieving or depressed or going through a divorce or struggling with infertility, and because we don’t know exactly what to say, we end up saying nothing at all.

We avoid the text message.

Avoid the call.

Avoid checking in because we’re terrified we’ll say the wrong thing or make it worse somehow.

But I actually think silence is often far more painful.

There have been moments in my life where people disappeared not because they were cruel, but because they were uncomfortable. Because modern culture has trained us to believe every interaction has to be perfectly worded or emotionally risk-free. Add in social media, cancel culture, and the constant fear of being misunderstood, and people are increasingly afraid to say anything at all.

But that’s not the answer either.

Human connection requires risk. Friendship requires risk. Community requires risk. Sometimes loving people means fumbling through awkward conversations. Sometimes it means saying, “I don’t know what to say, but I care about you.” Sometimes it means getting it wrong and staying anyway.

Because I don’t think the goal is to create a world where nobody ever accidentally hurts anyone. That’s impossible. Human relationships are messy. We are going to misunderstand each other. We are going to make assumptions. We are going to step on each other’s grief sometimes while simply trying to be warm or kind or human.

I think the deeper issue is that very few people know how to simply stay present with pain. We rush to fix it. Explain it. Bright-side it. Solve it. Spiritualize it. Turn it into advice. Especially in our current culture where every uncomfortable feeling is treated like an emergency requiring immediate resolution.

The amount of messages I receive anytime I talk publicly about infertility is overwhelming. Recommendations. Protocols. Supplements. Doctors. Stories about someone’s cousin who finally got pregnant after relaxing on vacation. People are trying to help. I know they are. But beneath all of it, I think what’s really happening is that unresolved pain makes people uncomfortable. We want suffering to become manageable as quickly as possible.

But some things in life are not immediately fixable. Sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is simply remain present. To say, “I’m sorry.” “That sounds painful.” “I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.”

And maybe that’s what belonging actually is. Not creating a world where nobody says the wrong thing or avoiding every potentially uncomfortable interaction. Not emotionally sanitizing human connection until nobody risks speaking anymore. Maybe belonging is creating relationships strong enough to hold honesty when pain enters the room. Maybe it’s learning how to stay connected even when life is awkward or unresolved or heartbreaking.

Maybe it’s realizing that every person we pass is carrying something invisible, and despite that, continuing to reach for each other anyway.

Also, huge congrats to my husband! He graduated this weekend with his bachelor’s in environmental science from American Public University. He did all of this while being an active duty chief in the Navy. So proud of him.

What the Hell Is Community Anyway?

A few weeks ago I was behind the bar at one of my events in Norfolk, one of those early spring nights where the weather finally cooperates and people actually want to be out of their houses, and everything looked exactly like what I thought I was building when I started Free Life. There was music, people ordering drinks, laughter floating around, little clusters forming and breaking apart, that low hum of conversation that makes a place feel alive. From the outside, it was working. This is what connection is supposed to look like.

But I remember pausing for a second and just watching, really watching, and noticing something I can’t unsee anymore. There were people deep in conversation, some who clearly knew each other and some who were trying to, and you can always tell who’s trying because there’s this subtle courage to it, like they’re leaning forward just a little more, asking one more question, holding eye contact a beat longer than feels comfortable. And then there were people just outside of it all, not fully alone but not quite in it either, standing with a drink, scanning the room, checking their phone, hovering in that in-between space where you’re technically included but don’t feel like you belong. I’ve been that person so many times, even now, which is kind of wild considering I’m also the one who created the space in the first place.

That’s the part I didn’t expect when I started this. I thought if I could just build the right environment, if I could take alcohol out of the equation and give people something better, something more intentional, that connection would just… happen. And to some extent it does, I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t, but there’s this deeper layer that I keep running into where you can do everything “right” and still feel like something is missing, like everyone is orbiting each other but not quite landing.

It’s spring 2026 and my calendar is almost fully booked for the summer, which is something I used to dream about and now is just my actual life, and Free Life has grown in ways that honestly still surprise me. There are events happening all over Hampton Roads, more non-alcoholic options than ever, more people questioning their relationship with alcohol, more spaces to gather, connect, try something different. If you had told me three years ago that this would be the landscape, I would have thought, okay, we did it, this is the solution.

And yet, we are still lonely.

We are still anxious, still disconnected, still struggling to form the kinds of relationships we say we want. And that tension has been bothering me because if the problem was just alcohol, or just access, or just not having enough spaces, then we should be seeing a different outcome by now. Something isn’t adding up.

I don’t think the problem is building connection. I actually think we’re pretty good at that part. We can spark it, initiate it, create the conditions for it. The harder part, the part we don’t really talk about, is maintaining it. Staying in it long enough for it to become something real. Not just one good conversation, not just one event where you felt a spark, but something that actually continues.

There’s a definition of community that comes from research, and I’m not usually trying to sound like a textbook, but this one has been sticking with me because it explains a lot. At its core, community is not just a group of people, but a shared sense of belonging, mutual care, and ongoing connection built through lived experience over time. When you break that down, it gets a little uncomfortable because it highlights exactly where things fall apart. Belonging is not just being invited, it’s feeling like you’re actually part of something. Mutual care is not liking each other’s posts or having a nice conversation, it’s showing up for each other in real ways. Ongoing connection means it doesn’t end after one interaction. And time, which is the part we all want to skip, is the thing that turns something from surface-level into something that actually matters.

We want community to feel immediate, like something you can walk into and instantly be a part of, and sometimes you do get those moments where it feels easy and natural and you think, okay, this is it, but real community is built in the second and third and fifth interaction. It’s built when you go back. It’s built when you recognize someone and they recognize you. It’s built when the conversation picks up where it left off instead of starting over from scratch. It’s built in consistency, which is honestly where most of us struggle.

And I get it, because showing up consistently is hard. It requires effort, it requires time, and more than anything it requires a level of vulnerability that most of us aren’t used to anymore. It’s one thing to have a good conversation with someone at an event, it’s another thing to follow up, to say hey, I actually liked talking to you, do you want to get coffee, to risk that small but real possibility of rejection or disinterest. It’s easier to keep things light, to keep things moving, to stay in that safe zone where nothing is asked of you.

But that safe zone is also where connection dies.

There’s something Vivek Murthy said that I keep coming back to, which is that the core pillars of community are relationships, service, and purpose, and that these aren’t just nice ideas but actual drivers of our mental and physical health. They impact depression, anxiety, heart disease, even early mortality. When you zoom out and look at it that way, this isn’t just about feeling a little lonely or wishing you had more friends, this is about something much deeper that is affecting how we live and how we function as a society.

And right now, something is fractured.

We have more ways to communicate than ever, more events, more options, more access, and somehow less depth. Less follow-through. Less of that feeling of being known in a real way. I don’t think this is because people don’t care. If anything, I think people care a lot. I think they want connection, they want community, they want to feel like they belong somewhere. I just think we’ve lost the muscle for it.

Connection is a skill. It’s something you practice. And for a long time, especially after COVID, a lot of us stopped practicing. We got used to staying home, canceling plans, keeping things easy and controlled, and now we’re trying to re-enter social life without the same capacity we used to have. So we show up, but we don’t always know what to do once we’re there. We hover, we skim the surface, we leave early, we tell ourselves we’ll try again next time.

And then we wonder why it doesn’t turn into anything deeper.

Free Life started as a way to help people build deep connections without alcohol, and I still believe in that mission completely, but I’m starting to understand that what we’re actually doing is helping people relearn how to be with each other. How to stay in the room when it feels uncomfortable. How to move past surface-level conversations into something more honest. How to take the small risk of following up, of inviting, of being a little more open than feels natural.

Because community is not just something you attend, it’s something you participate in, and participation requires something from you.

It requires you to go back.

It requires you to remember names, to ask better questions, to let people see you beyond the surface version of yourself. It requires you to choose people, and to let yourself be chosen, over and over again, long enough for something real to form.

So what the hell is community anyway?

It’s not just a room full of people, and it’s not just shared interests or a common identity. It’s a group of people who keep showing up for each other in small, consistent ways over time, until one day you realize you’re not on the outside looking in anymore, you’re actually part of something.

And if that feels harder than it should, you’re not wrong.

But it might also be the thing that matters most.

It’s evening, and it’s one of those perfect nights where the air feels soft and everything slows down just enough to notice it. There’s a low hum of voices in the background, people laughing, glasses clinking, music just loud enough to blur into the moment without taking it over.

Someone walks up to my bar to grab a drink, and we start talking. I ask how they’ve been, and they give me a real answer. Not the quick “good” people throw out to keep moving, but the real version. Work has been hard. Their kid is struggling in school. They’re tired, but still trying, and there’s this mix of heaviness and hope in the way they say it. I listen. I tell them how I’m doing. We laugh a little. There’s this small moment where we both feel seen, like, okay, someone gets it.

And then it happens again, and again, all night.

I’ve been running my non-alcoholic mobile bar for three years now, and this is the part no one really talks about. Yes, I’m serving drinks, but what I’m really doing is standing in the middle of human connection. I’m watching people arrive as strangers or acquaintances and leave just a little bit more known.

And the irony is not lost on me. I’m six years sober from an addiction to alcohol, and here I am playing the role of bartender.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about that. About what the bartender actually meant to me, especially at the height of my drinking. Because even in the middle of my addiction, even when things were not okay, I had a place I went to all the time. One wine bar, two bartenders, and one in particular who knew my order so well they would have a glass of red waiting for me before I even sat down. Usually a Tempranillo, sometimes a Pinot Noir, always something old world, always the same.

Here’s the part I haven’t shared publicly, but I’m thinking it even now as I write this. I miss it. Not the way I drank or the spiral that came with it, but the feeling of it. Happy hour. The familiarity. Walking into a place where someone knew my name, where I could sit down and catch up, where I didn’t have to explain myself from scratch every time.

The more honest I get with myself, the more I realize it was never really about what was in the glass. Of course the drink matters. The quality matters. The ritual matters. But that’s not the thing I’m actually missing.

I’m missing the place.

What I’ve started to understand, both from my own life and from standing behind this bar watching hundreds of interactions unfold, is that the bar was never just about alcohol. It was one of the last places adults had permission to just show up. No invitation, no planning, no reason other than I feel like being around people tonight.

There’s actually a term for places like that. They’re called “third places,” a concept from Ray Oldenburg. Your first place is home. Your second place is work. And your third place is everything in between. It’s where life happens. It’s where you go to exist around other people without needing a specific purpose. It’s where conversations start without an agenda and relationships build slowly, over time, without anyone forcing it.

For a long time, the neighborhood bar filled that role. Not because of alcohol, but because it was one of the only spaces left where adults could be social in an unstructured, low-pressure way. You could walk in alone and somehow not feel alone.

But we’re not going out anymore.

Bar and restaurant attendance has been declining for years, and it dropped even more after COVID. A significant percentage of adults say they go out less often than they used to, and younger generations especially are drinking less and opting out of traditional nightlife altogether. On the surface, that sounds like progress. Healthier choices, more awareness, more intention.

And in a lot of ways, it is.

But there’s a tradeoff no one is really naming. We didn’t just cut back on alcohol. We cut back on gathering.

At the same time, loneliness is rising. The U.S. Surgeon General has called it an epidemic. People report having fewer close friends than they did even a decade ago. We’re more connected than ever online, and somehow more disconnected in real life.

And I can’t help but wonder if those things are connected.

Because when you remove the place, you don’t just remove the drinking. You remove the accidental conversations, the familiar faces, the bartender who knows your name, the low-stakes interactions that slowly build into something meaningful over time.

We didn’t just stop going to bars. We lost one of the last places where adults knew how to casually belong.

So what I’ve realized is this. It never really mattered what was in the glass.

And that’s actually the part that makes me hopeful, because I think the future of gathering is better than what we had before. I think we’re moving toward something healthier, more inclusive, more intentional. Not perfect, but better.

This is why I’m so excited about non-alcoholic drinks. Not because they’re trendy or a substitute, but because they let people stay in the room. They let people keep showing up.

And I know how this might sound coming from someone in recovery. I’m not anti-alcohol, and I’m not here to tell you that you shouldn’t drink. That’s not my role, and it’s not my message.

And I want to say this clearly. If bars are triggering for you, if being around alcohol or even non-alcoholic drinks is not supportive of your recovery, I respect that completely. Protecting your peace comes first. This conversation is not meant to override that.

What I am saying is this.

Non-alcoholic options belong in the bar. Not tucked away on the menu as an afterthought, not as the sad lemonade or the water with a lime. They belong right alongside everything else, because they make space for more people to participate.

Because real hospitality includes everyone.

Part of the reason the non-alcoholic industry has taken off is because there was an entire group of people who quietly stopped going out. Not because they didn’t want connection, but because there wasn’t a place for them anymore. There wasn’t a way to be there without explaining themselves or feeling like they didn’t quite fit.

And now there is.

Which means we don’t have to lose the place in order to change what’s in the glass.

So yes, as a sober person, six years removed from an addiction to alcohol, I am telling you something I never thought I would say.

Go back to the bar.

Not for the drinking, but for the conversation, the familiarity, the awkward small talk that turns into something real, the chance to be seen and to see someone else.

Go back because we need places like that.

And this time, let’s build them in a way where more of us get to stay.