There are some people who seem to carry a little more light than the rest of us.

Not the blinding kind. Not the kind that demands to be noticed.

A softer light. The kind that falls across a room and makes you feel, for just a moment, that perhaps the world is not quite as hard as you had thought.

Dolly was that kind of light.

I never owned all the albums. I couldn't tell you every song or every note she ever recorded. But I knew her anyway. We knew her in the songs that somehow found their way into our lives. In the movies. On television. In that unmistakable voice that could make heartbreak sound almost beautiful and laughter sound like a form of salvation.

And somehow, through all those years, she kept becoming something larger than a country singer. She became kindness with a rhinestone microphone. She became generosity without the need for applause. She became proof that you could become enormously successful without becoming enormous in the worst ways.

She never seemed to confuse fame with importance. She knew what mattered.

Children who needed books.

People who were hungry.

Families who had lost everything.

A hand extended without asking whether the person reaching for it had voted the right way or prayed the right prayer or lived the right kind of life.

Just…simply:

Here.

Take this.

You need it more than I do.

What a radical thing, in a world that has become so terribly fond of keeping score. Maybe that is why the thought of losing her - the reality - feels so much bigger than losing a celebrity. Because we have lost so many things lately.

Patience.

Compassion.

The willingness to believe that another person's suffering does not have to be understood in order to matter.

We have become very good at shouting across the distance between one another.

And Dolly?

Dolly kept singing across it. Softly. Bravely. ÌWith that enormous heart hiding beneath the sequins.

There are people who leave behind a body of work. And there are people who leave behind a way of being.

I think hers was the latter. Be kind. Give when you can. Make room at the table. Laugh at yourself. Help somebody up. And when you have been given more than you ever dreamed possible, remember that perhaps you were given it so you could give some of it away.

If that is what a life can mean, then perhaps the light doesn't really go out. Perhaps it simply moves.

Into the people who heard her sing.

Into the child who received a book because someone believed every child deserved one.

Into the stranger who was treated gently on a day when the world had not been gentle.

Into all of us who looked at that little woman with the big hair and the bigger heart and thought –

Maybe goodness really is possible.

Maybe you can be enormously successful and still be soft. Maybe you can be famous and remain kind. Maybe you can walk through this world without adding to its cruelty. And perhaps that is the most beautiful legacy anyone could leave.

Not that we remember the songs.

Not even that we remember the movies.

But that, for a little while, because she was here, the world felt kinder. And now we know how much we needed that.

How much we still do.

There are television shows you watch.

There are television shows you love.

And then there is Ted Lasso, which somehow crawled through the television screen, climbed directly into your nervous system, wrapped you in a warm weighted blanket, and whispered, “Okay. Breathe. We’ve got this.”

Which is why, when Season 4 dropped its first episode on Apple TV+ last week, I realized something that should have knocked me in the skull sooner:

We need Ted Lasso.

Desperately.

I know. I know. In a world currently featuring collapsing institutions, rising prices, international chaos, political insanity, and the general sensation that every morning begins with somebody asking, “Would you like today's fresh hell in regular or family size?” it seems slightly ridiculous to suggest that the answer might be a television show about an aggressively optimistic American football coach who wanders into English soccer.

But hear me out.

Because Ted Lasso isn't really about soccer.

It never was.

It is about people.

It is about kindness without being naïve. About forgiveness without pretending that people haven't hurt you. About friendship, loneliness, grief, anxiety, failure, redemption, second chances and the extraordinary possibility that people can actually change.

And somehow, it manages to say all of those things while being one of the funniest television shows ever created.

That is no small achievement.

When Ted Lasso first arrived, the timing could hardly have been more perfect. The world was in the middle of a pandemic. People were frightened, isolated, exhausted and watching the news with a dread that permeated our bones.

We were separated from one another.

We were worried about our families.

We were worried about our jobs.

We were worried about whether the world was ever going to feel normal again.

We were worried that, at some point, Dr. Fauci would not be able to undo the damage that the Commander of Diapers and Injectable Bleach was doing with every presser that was less about the status of things and more about, well…him. Because that's the only subject he knows.

And then along came Ted Lasso.

Here was this relentlessly hopeful man who seemed to have wandered in from another universe where decency was still considered a perfectly reasonable operating system.

And people loved him. Of course they did.

We were starving for something that didn't make our bodies automatically react with defensive measures.

We needed something that reminded us that not every story ends badly.

We needed laughter.

We needed human connection.

We needed to be reminded that being kind wasn't synonymous with being weak.

We needed, quite frankly, a damn hug.

And Ted Lasso gave us one.

Every episode felt like somebody had lowered the volume on the world's screaming. That feeling hasn't completely become obsolete.

If anything, I think we need it more now.

I don't know a single person who seems particularly thrilled with the direction of the world. People are worried. They're angry. They're exhausted. They're watching their grocery bills climb while wondering which constitutional principle is going to be put through the wood chipper next.

Every day brings another headline that makes you stare at your phone and think, Surely this cannot possibly be real.

And then five minutes later:

Oh.

Apparently it can.

There is an almost constant hum of anxiety beneath everything now. You wake up and before your feet even hit the floor, your brain starts taking inventory.

What happened overnight?

What happened in Washington?

What happened somewhere else in the world?

What fresh catastrophe has been delivered to my doorstep before I've even had coffee?

And somewhere in all of that noise, I think we've forgotten something important:

We are still people.

We still need each other.

We still need laughter.

We still need stories that remind us that decency matters.

We still need reminders that a person isn't necessarily defined by the worst thing they've ever done, the worst thing that has happened to them, or the worst thing they've ever believed about themselves. And by “we,” I probably mean me.

That is what Ted Lasso understands.

It understands that optimism isn't the absence of pain.

It is choosing to believe that pain doesn't get the final word.

That distinction matters.

Ted isn't hopeful because everything is fine. Everything is very much not fine. He is hopeful because he understands that people are complicated, wounded, ridiculous creatures who occasionally make spectacularly stupid decisions – and who are still capable of surprising one another with goodness.

Roy Kent is basically the human embodiment of a thunderstorm with anger-management issues, and yet beneath all that profanity and glaring is a man who cares deeply. He is also very, very easy on the eyes.

Rebecca Welton begins as someone consumed by revenge and becomes someone capable of enormous love and generosity.

Jamie Tartt starts out as an insufferable human peacock and somehow becomes…well, considerably less insufferable.

And then there's Coach Beard, who I am convinced was assembled in a laboratory using equal parts eccentricity, wisdom and whatever substance makes a person voluntarily wear that many hats while simultaneously appearing to be dropping acid.

The point is that nobody is static.

Nobody is simply good or bad.

People are works in progress.

Gawd knows – we need that reminder.

Because right now, there is an awful lot of energy being spent convincing us that people are enemies and that compassion is weakness. That cruelty is strength. That admitting you're wrong is some kind of catastrophic character defect.

Ted Lasso offers a different proposition.

What if we tried being human instead?

What if we listened?

What if we forgave?

What if we helped one another?

What if we believed that somebody's future didn't have to be dictated by their past?

What if hope wasn't foolish?

I don't know what Season 4 will ultimately give us. I only know that the return of this show feels strangely significant to me.

Because sometimes the world doesn't need another person screaming into a microphone. Sometimes it needs someone to sit beside us and say, in essence, You're not alone. We're going to figure this out.

Maybe that's why Ted Lasso feels like a weighted blanket.

It doesn't make the world disappear. It just makes it feel a little less frightening while we're in it. And perhaps that is exactly what we need right now.

So, Ted Lasso, if you're listening – and frankly, at this point I wouldn't rule anything out – could you possibly hurry up?

We've got a world to save.

And we're going to need some biscuits.

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August 1

Something changed that day.

Not dramatically.

The sun still rising over familiar rooftops

The trees an extravagant green

Blooming to bursting gardens

Refusing to admit that their reign is nearly over.

And yet

The light has altered.

It arrives with softer hands

Less intent on conquering the day.

More interested in lingering

Against porch railings

Across old books

Through kitchen windows

Where the morning coffee

Steams like a small affirmation.

The air has gathered a little weight.

Not the suffocating heaviness of July

Something richer

As though the atmosphere itself

Has begun collecting stories

Holding them close

Asking us to notice

Before they drift away.

I breathe differently after August 1st.

My shoulders loosen.

Something inside me

Coiled against the relentless

Pulsing beams of summer

Slowly uncurls.

My body has always known

What the calendar struggles to explain.

It knows the promise

Hidden within a cooler dawn.

The first evening that asks for sleeves.

The distant thought of cinnamon

Of sweaters that feel like hugs

Of books opened beneath warm lamplight

Of conversations

That last long after darkness arrives.

Autumn has not come.

But she has whispered

And her call is in the wind.

She stands

Just beyond the horizon

Patient as an old friend

Who never needs

To announce their arrival.

Only a slight change in the breeze.

A different angle of sunlight.

A flock of birds rehearsing

For a journey not yet begun.

There is hope

In seasons that

Know how to become something new

Without mourning what they have been.

Perhaps

That is why my heart feels the shift

As it soaks into my bones.

Change is not always loss.

Sometimes

It is simply the earth

Taking one slow, deliberate breath

Before offering us its most beautiful colors.

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I have a mental illness.

There. I said it.

Not because I want sympathy. Not because I want excuses. Simply because it is the truth. Since being diagnosed by an actual psychiatrist, I have not shied away from talking about it. I've worked really hard to understand the beginnings of my mental health situation, and I have never once used it as an excuse for anything. Before diagnosis and treatment, I simply believed that I was broken and bad. I have to work every, single day to keep the neural pathways forged in childhood closed, and the new, healthier ones free of debris. Every single morning I wake up knowing that before I can take on the rest of the world, I have to take on my own brain.

Borderline Personality can be redirected. You're not cured, but as long as you do the work, you can minimize it. All those switches on the train tracks inside your brain can take you down the wrong path if you choose the wrong direction. Then, your train/actions veer into unhealthy reactions and poor outcomes. Flipping that switch requires deliberate thought and focused intention.

Depression, however, doesn’t take any days off. It doesn’t care whether I have work to do, bills to pay, cats demanding breakfast, or people counting on me. It lurks in the background, waiting for an opening, always looking for another chance to claw its way back to the highest peaks of my life. It’s the semi parked on the tracks inside my brain, waiting for the collision.

Some days I barely notice the fight anymore because I’ve become so practiced at it. That is a talent that BPD teaches you. Fake it ‘til you make it.

Other days, it feels like hand-to-hand combat with a demon octopus.

I began my mental health journey after a “come to Jesus” moment during the early months of the Pandemic. I think that the isolation and the horror of what was happening caused a lot of us to self-reflect. For me, it was a blunt series of questions that I asked myself:

Do you want to continue to feel the way you do for the rest of your life, or do you want to just kill yourself and do it RIGHT this time? What would happen if you could find out what is wrong with you? Do you think that you're strong enough to face whatever it is?

Turns out, I was strong enough. The hard work began late that Fall.

And then life decided to throw in two life-wrecking catastrophes.

My brother died from COVID in December 2020.

Scott died three years later.

How many times does one heart have to relearn how to beat?

People still say, “COVID happened.”

No.

COVID didn’t just “happen.”

A virus happened.

What followed was a breathtaking collapse of leadership, empathy, and common sense. We watched a public health crisis become a political identity. We watched basic acts of caring for one another turned into culture-war slogans. We watched people scream about “freedom” while other people’s families were planning funerals.

My brother was immunocompromised. He didn’t have the luxury of pretending the virus wasn’t real. We, his family, didn’t, either. Not if we wanted to assure his safety from the despicable actions of the MAGA cesspool area of the country we were living in.

He paid the price anyway.

I have never been able to separate my grief from my anger, and maybe I never will. I hold Donald Trump responsible for helping create the chaos, misinformation, and division that turned a public health emergency into a national moral failure. History will decide exactly how much responsibility belongs where. My heart reached its own verdict years ago.

Then came Scott.

My person.

People throw around that phrase now, but unless you’ve had one, I don’t know that you can fully understand it.

He wasn’t just my husband. He was home.

He was the person who knew the difference between my fake laugh and my real one. He knew when I was overstimulated before I did. He knew when I needed space and when I needed a hug. He knew how my brain worked, even when I didn’t.

When he died, I didn’t just lose the love of my life.

I lost the place where I rested. Where my brain rested. All of the worries, fears, annoyances, and troubling thoughts that were constantly swirling around inside of me went quiet when he was near. It was as if he took them all and placed them in a holding cell. There was peace.

People talk about “moving on” as though grief is a highway with clearly marked exits.

It’s not.

It’s more like carrying a backpack full of bricks that nobody else can see. Some days you’re stronger. Some days the backpack wins. Let me tell you: that fucker is always heavy.

Lately, I’ve noticed something that scares me more than sadness.

Numbness.

I don’t cry the way I used to. I almost wish I could. At least crying lets something escape - like a pressure valve.

Instead, I walk around feeling emotionally anesthetized, and then I turn on the television or open my phone only to discover another constitutional crisis, another humanitarian disaster, another act of cruelty, another headline reminding me that the world seems determined to outdo itself in finding new ways to break our hearts.

It’s relentless and there is no off switch. We get no intermission, no respite. No moment where the universe says, “You’ve been through enough. Let’s give you a week.”

It’s just…more.

More grief.

More outrage.

More fear.

More noise.

Is it any wonder so many of us are exhausted?

This isn’t a cry for help. It isn’t even a plea for people to fix anything. You cannot fix what is irretrievably broken. Who is irretrievably broken - me.

I’m simply wondering if anyone else feels like their nervous system has been redlining for years.

Because mine has.

I don’t want a fairy-tale ending. I don’t expect the world to suddenly become kind or rational. I don’t expect grief to politely pack its bags. I just want a little peace. Not the absence of sadness.

Just the presence of quiet.

I want my brain to stop preparing for disasters that haven’t happened yet. I want to stop feeling like I have to armor up before reading the morning headlines. I want to remember what it felt like to believe that tomorrow might simply be…Tuesday, or Sunday, or fucking Monday.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

Just a day.

The irony is that I know exactly what Scott would say. He’d tell me that surviving isn’t the same thing as living.

He’d remind me to notice the ridiculous things that still make me laugh. A cat doing something absurd. A perfectly timed sarcastic comment. A Tom Petty song in the car while I'm traveling. A good book. A sunset that stubbornly refuses to care about politics.

He’d tell me that none of those things erase grief. But they do remind us that grief doesn’t get to own every square inch of our lives.

I’m trying. Really. Some days “trying” is all I’ve got. Maybe that’s enough.

Maybe peace isn’t something that arrives all at once with trumpets and fireworks. Maybe it slips quietly into our lives five minutes at a time, almost unnoticed, until one day we realize we haven’t been holding our breath quite so tightly and clenching every muscle in our bodies.

I hope that’s true.

Because I would like to remember what contentment feels like.

Not because the world has suddenly become less frightening.

Not because the losses somehow mattered less.

But because the people I have loved most didn’t spend their lives loving me so that I would spend the rest of mine merely enduring it.

I’m tired. Deep in my bones tired. But somewhere beneath the grief, beneath the depression, beneath the anger and the endless noise, there is still a small voice that refuses to be silenced.

It keeps whispering the same thing.

Not yet.

Keep going.

Maybe tomorrow will be a little quieter than today.

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Things always happen in threes. My grandma always said this because her mother always said this, and so on, back through the ages. My mother was less-inclined to believe it, but she was the most cynical person I've ever known, so it just skipped a generation - to me. I always say this.

Because it’s true.

It's one of those immutable laws of the universe, right up there with "the printer only jams when you're already late with your document and "the low fuel light knows when payday is still four days away."

So when the news broke this morning that Lindsey Graham had died at 71, my first thought wasn't, "Well, that's unexpected."

It was...

Who's next?

Mitch McConnell has allegedly already shuffled off this mortal coil. Somewhere there's a meat suit cooling in a mortuary refrigerator while, if there is a Hell, he's let the butler know that Lindsey's suite needs fluffed, stocked, and ready for occupancy. Eternity's loyalty rewards program has finally paid out. And Lindsey woke up mid-ejection, expecting to see his old friend, John McCain, welcoming him into the gates of Heaven. Instead, he got the Turtle. And Hitler. And those gates look like they'd burn your hands if you touched them.

Satire, folks. Relax.

Or maybe don't.

Because while Washington has been busy providing enough plot twists to keep Netflix employed through 2045, something extraordinary slipped through the cracks.

Congress actually did its job.

The 21st Century Road to Housing Act quietly became law at the stroke of midnight – without a triumphant Oval Office ceremony, without the obligatory gold Sharpies, and, perhaps most deliciously, without the signature of President Poopy Pants himself.

Imagine that.

A government accomplishing something despite itself.

The legislation is the most comprehensive housing reform in decades. It encourages homebuilding, tackles affordability, expands manufactured housing, and takes aim at giant corporate landlords who have been treating the American housing market like an all-you-can-eat buffet while first-time buyers stand outside pressing their noses against the glass.

It's bipartisan.

It helps people.

Which explains why it almost feels suspicious.

Even Karoline Leavitt acknowledged it was a good thing. I can only imagine how well that went over in the Oval Office. About as gracefully as a day-old Big Mac sailing through the air and landing squarely on the wall behind the Resolute Desk.

Meanwhile, our flatulent facilitator of foolishness and fascism continues glaring from behind that desk with the permanent expression of a nursing-home resident who's just discovered they've run out of chocolate pudding. When he isn't scowling, he's nodding off. As retirement-home etiquette goes, he is absolutely crushing it.

The problem is that he's not in a recliner watching Matlock.

He's sitting in the White House, behind increasing security measures, like fences and more alarms and fortified troops that have been permanently reassigned to DC until 2029. It's almost like he doesn’t plan on leaving, isn’t it?

Every single day delivers another headline that would've been rejected from a Mel Brooks screenplay for being too ridiculous. Even Mel Brooks knows when comedy goes too far. I mean, Idiocracy was supposed to be a warning, not a documentary.

And yet here we are.

Yes, security grows tighter. Fences go up. Access narrows. The symbolism practically writes itself. Watch Civil War if you haven't already. Nick Offerman's performance lands a little too close to home – not because it's prophetic, but because it understands what happens when leaders begin confusing public service with permanent occupancy.

But the walls look like they're closing in.

Whether that's because accountability is finally knocking, history is catching up, or the universe simply has a wicked sense of comedic timing, I couldn't possibly say.

What I do know is this: no empire, no administration, no political movement, and certainly no ego is immortal.

History eventually collects its receipts.

Things happen in threes.

Washington might want to keep an eye on the scoreboard.

I wait with baited breath.

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America turns 250 this weekend.

That is both an astonishing and a ridiculously small number to reach as a nation founded on hope and freedom and dreams. Astonishing because, despite incredible amounts of blind ambition and now a president so stupid that people who are stupider than him think he's brilliant – we have not spontaneously combusted. Not yet. Ridiculously small because America is, in fact, in its infancy compared to other countries with dozens of centuries of existence. They know things.

Frankly, it's an impressive accomplishment for a country whose favorite hobbies include arguing with itself, reinventing itself every twenty years, and occasionally trying to set its own living room on fire just to see what happens. Case in point: the White House right now. What a dumpster fire! It looks like a single-wide that has been overgrown by weeds in places and whose yard has patches of dirt and dead grass and whose driveway is littered with half-attempted building projects and broken, rusted farm equipment.

Happy birthday.

I wish you oodles of luck making it to 251.

I have spent a lot of time criticizing this country over the last several years. Some people mistake criticism for hatred. It isn’t. I criticize America because I love the promise of it. I criticize it because I know what it can be. Nobody yells louder at family than the people who both love and desperately want that family to do better.

We’ve never been the polished nation our history books pretended we were. No, those history books they placed in front of us in school were whitewashed (eek) fairy tales about a country that continuously sat in the center of its issues like an exhausted SAHM who listens to the kids upstairs jumping on the bed again, then looks around her living room at the unfolded baskets of laundry and the wasteland of discarded toys, books, clothing, shoes and the cereal smashed into the carpet and a spot where the dog peed again and says, “It's fine. Everything is fine.” We’ve been glorious and shameful. Brave and cowardly. Compassionate and cruel. Sometimes all before lunch.

But we are also the country that looked at the moon and collectively said, “You know what? I bet we could get there.”

And then we did.

We’re the people who invent ridiculous things simply because someone said it couldn’t be done. We build libraries where every person, rich or poor, can walk through the front door without paying admission. We create national parks because somewhere along the line someone decided the majestic beauty in nature belonged to everyone. We rush toward disasters with boats and chainsaws and casserole dishes of tater tot concoctions. We argue constantly, but when the chips are truly down, ordinary Americans have an extraordinary habit of showing up.

As a brilliant physician in high heels, a corset, and truly killer makeup that put all the women in his realm to shame once famously said, “Don't dream it; be it.”

Well… sort of.

I’ve always believed our greatest natural resource isn’t oil or coal or farmland.

It’s hope. Not the quietly noble kind – although that qualifies, too.

Messy, stubborn, irrational hope. The kind that refuses to die.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt at home here. Because I know something about refusing to die. Not always physically although that ideation is never truly locked away.

I mean spiritually.

There have been years that have stripped me nearly bare, down to the sinews and tendons and bones even as the blood pooled around my feet. I lost my brother – the greatest source of joy that consistently brought me love and laughter for 45 years. I lost my husband – the person who looked at me the first time and said, “She looks fun. I want her,” and who kept saying that for 26 years, no matter what I threw at him (nothing sharp, I promise – except maybe words.)

I’ve watched my health change. I’ve buried dreams I was certain would outlive me. Some mornings grief has been so heavy it felt less like an emotion and more like a sleeper sofa from the 70s – those massive, heavy fuckers – I had to drag behind me all day. Grief is exhausting.

It’s also incredibly inconvenient.

No one tells you that becoming a widow requires remembering passwords, learning to buy groceries for one as well as cook for one, paying mortgages, answering emails, and pretending you care whether the printer is jammed (Oh, you got toner on your hands? How awful. My husband is dead).

Somehow capitalism forgot to include a bereavement exemption from adulting.

Rude.

There are days I have laughed so hard I’ve cried and peed my pants a little – giving new meaning to “leakage.”

There are far more days I’ve cried so hard I vomited and then accidentally laughed because at some point your brain looks at your stomach and just throws up its hands and says, “Well... this has become absurd.”

And honestly?

Sometimes it is absurd.

The human experience is deeply weird.

We are tiny creatures riding a spinning rock through infinite darkness while arguing about parking spaces and whether pineapple belongs on pizza. It doesn’t, by the way – but you do you, boo.

Perspective helps.

So does sarcasm.

Especially sarcasm – the kind that stops people in their tracks as they look warily at you and wonder, “She didn’t really mean that… did she?” Yes, Jessica. Yes I did.

Which brings me to gratitude.

Not the toxic positivity, joy-sparking, sickeningly saccharine version and certainly not the “everything happens for a reason” nonsense that makes me want to rocket launch Laura Ashley decorative pillows into the sun.

Real gratitude.

The hard-earned kind.

I am grateful for my children.

For being Nana.

For friends who stayed after my world exploded instead of quietly disappearing because grief made them uncomfortable or reminded them that this could happen to anyone – even the couple who were almost never apart and who finished each other's sentences and who still liked to make out in the Men's Socks aisle of Walmart after 26 years of married sex.

I’m grateful for every cat who has ever decided I was worthy of their affection, which is perhaps the highest compliment available on Earth.

I’m grateful for libraries – those miraculous places of Belonging, where curiosity is free and silence somehow manages to be comforting instead of lonely. The refuge of solace for lonely, lost children to tuck themselves away into corners with books that help them to escape the Hell that is/was their reality. The quiet and cavernous space that now greets me every morning and enfolds me into its welcoming arms.

I’m grateful for music that can crack open memories I’d forgotten I still carried. I'm even grateful for the searing pain that it can bring.

For books. Always books.

For coffee – the elixir of life.

For thunderstorms.

For strangers capable of breathtaking gestures of kindness.

For laughter that arrives unexpectedly in the middle of the most unbearable, truly terrible days. That laughter is probably the most important thing.

I’m grateful for work that reminds me I still have something (probably) valuable to contribute.

For words. Always for all the words.

I’m even grateful for the sadness. Not because sadness is noble. It isn’t. It’s awful. And inconvenient.

It steals sleep. It hijacks holidays. It sneaks into grocery stores when a song comes over the speakers. It's messy, awkward, and terribly embarrassing. It knocks the wind out of even the days when you feel as though there's not enough oxygen to begin with. You're a fish out of water, gasping for air. I really do not recommend.

But sadness is proof.

Proof that I loved someone enough to have my heart pummeled, kicked, stomped, and permanently rearranged into something that could have been a living organ at one time.

Proof that joy existed.

Proof that I was lucky enough to know people whose absence could leave such enormous and permanent holes in my life. In the world.

The opposite of grief isn’t happiness.

It’s indifference.

And I never want to become indifferent: not to people, to beauty, and not to injustice.

And definitely not to this strange, frustrating, beautiful country.

America is 250 years old.

She’s loud. She’s contradictory. She’s imperfect. She’s occasionally and increasingly embarrassing enough to make me want to hide behind Canada. Okay, I was trying to be kind just now. She’s annoyingly embarrassing on the daily and I'm sometimes tempted to utilize the Great-Grandfather clause that would guarantee me Irish citizenship.

But she’s also capable of astonishing acts of generosity, courage, invention, resilience, and hope.

So am I.

Neither of us is who we were when we started, and neither of us is who we still might become.

That’s the thing about birthdays: they’re less about celebrating perfection than survival. About taking inventory. About admitting we’ve made mistakes.

About deciding to keep going anyway.

So here’s to America at 250.

May we become kinder than we have been, and braver than we feel. The hope is that we continue to remain more curious than afraid.

May we remember that democracy is a verb, compassion is a choice, and hope is something we build together, one ordinary day at a time.

And here’s to the rest of us: the grieving, the exhausted, the stubborn. The permanently wounded. The bruised and beaten, scarred by what has been survived – and choosing to carry that invisible weight while somehow continuing to show up. We’re still here. Sometimes that’s the most important truth of all.

Happy birthday, America.

Let’s see what impossible thing we can become next.

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There are two kinds of people in this world: people who move through public spaces undisturbed, and people who, by doing absolutely nothing, trigger a low-grade sociological event.

I am the latter and also, apparently, the event.

This is not because of my personality. I am, at my core, a quiet, coffee-minded individual who would like to look at beads and haunt Barnes and Noble in peace and maybe leave a store without becoming a story someone tells at dinner.

It is because of the hair. My hair, to be exact.

My natural color is a shade of brown so dark it’s essentially “accounting department with sarcasm.” Sensible. Invisible, impervious to your mathematical puns (I’m ready for my financial haircut – just please don’t take too much off the top!) If my original hair color were a person, it would apologize when you bumped into it. I haven’t seen it in years, and if it came back, I’d probably ask it for ID.

In my early twenties, I went red. And not the polite kind. Not “auburn highlights kissed by autumn.” I mean red. The kind of red that suggests I may have opinions and possibly a sordid past slinking through nightclubs and conducting illicit affairs in dark alleyways. Possibly the murder of a jealous lover or two.

To be fair, I’ve had every hair color available to the deeply insecure. Pink. Blue. Purple. Green. Blonde. Black. Even silver – which was exactly as depressing as I feared it would be. At one point, I looked like an oversized mood ring that had somehow acquired car payments and an alarmingly troubling coffee dependency.

But red is the one that stuck. It didn’t just become my look; it transformed me into a public utility. I am now a landmark. Total strangers use me to navigate the grocery store, gesturing toward my head to locate the canned goods. I half-expect the city to start taxing me for providing ambient street lighting, or at the very least, to mandate that I wear a small warning sign on sunny days.

The current shade is called “goji berry,” which sounds like something Gwyneth Paltrow would charge $42 for something in a jar she steams into her vagina, but is in fact a deep, vivid red that announces itself before I do. It starts out rich and dramatic, then – because red dye has the emotional stability of a walk-on character on a soap opera – it fades quickly. Within a couple of weeks, it softens into that more natural, slightly faded red.

Which, inconveniently, was Scott’s favorite.

He loved that quieter, Irish-girl red. Pale, soft; the kind of color that looks like it came with freckles and a tragic backstory played out on an emerald-green cliff near the thrashing sea. And of course, that’s the exact shade my hair becomes right before I need a touch-up. So for a brief, shining window every few weeks, I accidentally become his ideal. To be fair, he really should have considered himself fortunate that I was willing to wear that faded look for him, because he married a DNA-tested, 99% Celtic Woman – somehow, a dusting of Swedish genes blew into my ancestry, but not enough to ruin a Maury Povich-like announcement verifying that “You did, indeed marry an Irish-Scottish-Welsh woman. Good luck and saints preserve you!”

The rest of the time, I am aggressively goji berry.

Also, as a fun bonus of aging, my roots no longer grow in as “darkest brown available.” They are… evolving. There is a lightness happening that feels seasonal. Winter-adjacent. And we are simply not participating in that. The dye schedule is not vanity; it is crowd control.

Because here is what I have learned after decades of being a redhead: people lose their minds.

There are women who have a very specific reaction, especially when my hair is long and freshly done. It’s a quick up-and-down, followed by a subtle repositioning of their husband, like they’re moving a gallon of gasoline away from an open flame.

Ma’am. I do not want your husband. Hell, you look dubious about whether you want to claim him.

I had a husband. He was excellent. The return policy on men is terrible, and I am not currently browsing. If anything, I should be the one gently steering people away from their life choices.

Men, however, react like they’ve just witnessed a solar eclipse without protective eyewear. The staring. My God, the staring. Full commitment. Walking directly toward me while maintaining eye contact like I’m going to deliver a prophecy.

I have watched grown men – taxpaying citizens who are presumably licensed to drive – stare at me so hard they walk directly into things. Shelves. Endcaps. Once, a seasonal display of holiday-themed paper plates. Nothing says “Joy to the World” like losing a fight with Dixie. (There’s a joke in there somewhere–I'm sure of it.)

And I am just standing there, holding a roll of paper towels, suddenly responsible for a minor collision and possibly a divorce.

“Sir, are you okay?”

Him, embarrassingly aware of his wife standing at the end of the aisle with a look that says "I want half,” clumsily pushes the plates back into a pile for the unlucky associate to repair later and mumbles “Oops” without making eye contact and then tries to leisurely rejoin the woman who's going to make the next 24 hours of his life an absolute shitshow.

Then there are the conversationalists. The men – always men of a certain era – who see red hair and think, This requires a speech.

We have one at the library. A Bridge player. He approached me once with the phrase, “I don’t think this will upset you,” which is how you know you are about to enter a conversation that should have died in his brain.

He then informed me that two women had been discussing the discovery that I had tattoos on my breasts. Hear the word “breasts” with a slight hissing sound and more than a little pervert energy.

Now, there are many ways to start a conversation with a near-stranger. Weather. Books – how about books? You are in a public library. “Where is the restroom?” All strong choices. This was not one of them.

To his mind, he was defending me. To my mind, I was about three seconds away from introducing him to the concept of permanent silence by coming over the desk and boxing his ears.

Instead, I said, “Yes, and I have them all over my body. Would you like to go back and give them the full tour?”

He left like a man who had just touched a live wire.

And yet, they persist.

At Hobby Lobby recently, I was in the bead aisle – again, minding my own business, radiating absolutely no invitation to human interaction – when a man appeared behind me and announced, “I’m right behind you.”

Sir. This is not a horror movie. You are not required to narrate your approach.

He then explained that he always says that so he doesn’t startle people, which was followed by him standing eight inches behind me in complete silence, which is, in fact, the most efficient way to become unforgettable in a police report.

I could feel him existing. Breathing. Thinking whatever thoughts lead a person to behave like an abandoned shopping cart.

I did not turn around. I did not engage. I focused on the beads like they were going to reveal the meaning of life and the exact coordinates of the Fountain of Youth. Which in retrospect might have explained why he of a certain age bracket was standing there looking at beads, too.

Eventually, deprived of attention or maybe disappointed because his Joe Biden imitation was not immediately recognized, he drifted away to presumably whisper “I’m right behind you” to someone in yarn.

Through all of this, I remain what I have always been: an innocent bystander. A civilian. A woman who would like to buy craft supplies without triggering a chain reaction of human absurdity.

Yes, sometimes I look good. Sometimes the hair is just right, the light hits it perfectly, and I briefly resemble someone who has her life together.

But I don’t do it for them.

I do it because I like it.

Because once upon a time, I was a kid who learned, very clearly, that I wasn’t the pretty one. And that kind of message doesn’t evaporate just because you get older; it just gets quieter, more polite, more insistent.

So when someone says, “You look pretty,” there’s still a flicker of confusion. A quick internal audit. Are we sure? Did we mean me? Is there someone pretty standing behind me? Sir, are you lost?p

I’ve had to practice saying “Thank you” instead of a self-deprecating “Give it time,” like it’s a foreign language.

The red hair helps. Not because it makes me someone else, but because it reminds me that I get to choose to appear as someone bold. Someone visible. An identity that takes up space, whether the bead aisle is ready for it or not.

It starts out deep, dramatic, unapologetically goji berry. It fades, like all things do, into something softer. Something closer to what he loved.

And yes, that’s what I had when he died.

So I keep it. I refresh it. I let it fade and come back again, like a cycle I understand. The cycle of Before.

And partly because if there is any version of him out there in the universe – watching, hovering, being exactly as inappropriate as he always was when he could get his hands on me – I like to imagine him looking at this hair and thinking, Of course she kept it.

And maybe groaning a little, too, because he can’t run his hands through it anymore.

Which, honestly, feels like the appropriate level of cosmic, sexual frustration.

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I am tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

Not “I stayed up too late scrolling” tired. Not “long day at work” tired. I mean bone-deep, marrow-level exhaustion–the kind that settles into you and makes a home there. The kind that suggests, very politely, that this is permanent now.

Because grief, it turns out, is not a season. It’s not weather. It’s not something that rolls in, drenches you, and then passes on to soak someone else. It’s structural. It moves in, rearranges the furniture, and then has the audacity to act like it’s always lived there.

Two and a half years later, and I am still carrying it. Some days it feels like a manageable weight–something I can shift from one arm to the other, something I can set down briefly while I pretend to be a person with normal concerns like emails and lunch breaks and whether or not I remembered to water the plants or put deoderant on.

And then there are the other days.

The days when a song–some completely innocuous, classic rock song I’ve heard a hundred times–decides to ruin me. (Led Zeppelin? I don’t even like Led Zeppelin!) Not even any of our songs. Not even something meaningful. Just a stray chord, a few notes, and suddenly I am right back there with him. As if grief has a trapdoor built into the most random corners of my life, and it turns out that every corner has four corners, and on and on.

It’s almost insulting, how little it takes.

And the pain when it hits: there are times it’s so sharp, so overwhelming, that I can’t even cry. Which feels like a design flaw, frankly. If you’re going to devastate me, the least you could do is give me the goddamn release valve. But no. It just sits there, heavy and immovable, like a stone lodged somewhere behind my ribs. Or in my throat. I've got to tell you this, because it’s true: it’s the kind of pain that makes you both frantic to escape it–like jump off the cliff before the bear catches you with its sharp claws and teeth–and that also tells you that you must submit to it.

I assume that’s a milestone. “Congratulations, you’ve reached advanced grief. Crying is now optional, and killing yourself probably won't make any difference whatsoever.”

There are entire stretches of time I don’t remember. That first year is mostly gone–blotted out, like my brain decided to protect me by simply… not recording it. I find things I bought, things I packed away, and I have no memory of them. It’s like discovering evidence of a version of myself I don’t recognize.

Apparently she survived. Good for her. I’d like to meet her someday.

People think I’m doing well now. I can tell. I go to work, I smile, I laugh, I function. I love my job, genuinely, and that helps. But I also mask so well that someone recently asked me if I was in love.

In. Love.

I almost admired the optimism.

I told her no, of course not. What I didn’t say, because there are limits to what you can drop into casual workplace conversation, is that I am, in fact, deeply in love. Just not in a way that’s particularly fucking convenient for anyone involved.

I am in love with someone who no longer exists in the same way I do.

Which really puts a damper on date night.

People ask about that too, sometimes. Gently, carefully, like they’re approaching a skittish animal. Am I seeing anyone? Would I ever consider it? And I have to resist the urge to laugh, because the idea feels so far removed from my reality that it might as well be theoretical. “Seeing” someone would be a scientific experiment, and I have neither the brain cells nor enough of an intact heart left to engage in such nonsense. The heart that remains must be protected at all costs, because it’s made of paper-thin glass. If it were to break again, it would not shatter inasmuch as it would just disintegrate.

It’s not just that I don’t want someone else. It’s that the thing I miss–the specific thing–is him. The way he held me at the end of the day, the way I could disappear into his arms and feel completely, unquestionably safe. That cocoon of warmth and protection. Home, in its most literal form.

You don’t replace that. And if you're me, you don't even try.

You don’t walk out into the world and say, “Excuse me, could you replicate this exact emotional and physical experience? No? That’s fine, I’ll keep looking.”

Other people manage it. I know they do. I have widowed friends who have found new partners, new love, new lives. And I don’t judge them for it; I just don’t understand it. It’s like watching someone learn to hold their breath for whole minutes underwater. Impressive, but not something my body seems capable of.

And maybe that’s fine. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I just think too much. I honestly don’t know anymore.

What I do know is that I am alone in a way I have never been before. Not physically–I am surrounded by people, by conversations, by the constant hum of life–but internally. In my own head, it’s just me and this vast, echoing space where he used to be. Empty rooms everywhere. And no desire to redecorate.

Sometimes it’s quiet. Sometimes it’s chaos. Either way, it’s mine now. All of it.

There’s anger, too. Of course there is. Anger that this happened, that it ended, that a life–his life–was cut off right when it was finally opening up. We were there. We had made it to that point where things felt stable, hopeful, ours.

And then it was just… gone.

Snuffed out, like a flame. Quick, efficient, completely, utterly absurd.

I get angry for him more than anything. For everything he doesn’t get to do, everything he doesn’t get to be. And sometimes, irrationally, I get angry at him, which makes no sense and all the sense in the world at the same time.

Grief is not known for its logical consistency.

I like to think he would love who I am now. That he would see the independence I’ve built, the life I’ve managed to piece together, and feel proud of it. I think he would love that I found work I care about, that I’m steady, that I’m… okay, in the most functional sense of the word. He’d applaud the fearlessness I so openly display, because really, what is there to fear now? The most terrible thing has happened. There are other, terrible things that could happen, but if I keep identifying as a shark, and relentlessly swim these murky waters, maybe they will never come to pass. Really, life is just a crap shoot.

I also think he would be quietly thrilled and childishly delighted that I’m completely ruined for anyone else.

Which, honestly, feels on brand.

What I want–what I keep circling back to–is not happiness. I’m not naive. I know that version of life is gone. Not entirely, not forever, but in the way it existed with him.

What I want is peace.

Just a small, livable corner of it. Enough to set the weight down for a while without feeling like I’m betraying something. Without guilt creeping in to remind me that if I’m not actively hurting, I must be forgetting.

I’m not forgetting.

I carry it with me everywhere. Like a box too heavy to lift for long, but impossible to leave behind. So, I set it down when I can. I rest. And then, eventually, I pick it back up again.

Because it’s mine.

And because, for better or worse, it’s what I have left of him.

There are days

when the air itself feels used up

As if someone else has already breathed

All the meaning out of it

And left me a paper-thin remnant.

I move through rooms like a rumor

Touching things I recognize

Without feeling claimed by any one thing.

The coffee grows cold in my hand

Because even warmth requires participation

And I have been negotiating with absence

For so long now

I forget how to agree to anything else.

Grief is not always loud

It is not always the sharp, theatrical breaking

People who don’t know expect.

Sometimes it is this:

A quiet, methodical unthreading.

A dimming so gradual

You only notice it

When you realize you have stopped reaching

For the light switch at all.

There was a time

When I believed survival would feel like something

A victory, maybe

A crossing

A slow release of breath

An unclenching of muscle.

Instead, it is a long hallway

With no doors

And a peculiar understanding

that I am both walking it

and being led by it

At the same time.

I have learned how to be efficient

In my sorrow

How to fold it neatly into the corners

Of a day

So that it does not spill over

In places where people might notice.

There is a kind of professionalism to it now

This Carrying.

But numbness is not peace

It is not healing

It is simply my body’s quiet refusal

To keep translating pain

Into something survivable.

And still

There is this stubborn, inconvenient longing

Not for joy, exactly.

That feels too ambitious

Too brightly lit.

But for something gentler

A life where the weight loosens its grip

Just enough

So that I do not have to brace myself

Against ordinary moments.

A morning

That does not begin with inventory:

What hurts,

What’s missing,

What must be endured.

A memory

That does not arrive

With teeth.

I want to stop rehearsing absence

To stop being so fluent in deflection

I want a day

Where I am not measuring myself

Against who I was

Before the world took its careful, deliberate bite

Calling it inevitability.

Is that too much

To ask for grief

That does not hollow out the future

As it passes through?

To want a life

Where I am not constantly negotiating

Between feeling everything

And feeling nothing at all?

Because this middle place

Of practiced numbness

Is its own kind of vanishing.

And I am still here

Against all quiet odds

I am still here.

Which must mean

There is something in me

That has not agreed to disappear.

Something small,

Stubborn,

Undaunted by the long hallway

Something that still believes

There might be a door.

And even now

Even like this

I find myself

Reaching for the handle in the darkness.

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There are currently twelve open tabs in my brain.

Thirteen if you count the one quietly playing music I can’t locate, and fourteen if you count the intrusive thought that I’ve forgotten something deeply important, like paying a bill or having a personality.

This is what a day off looks like when you have ADHD and a house full of half-finished intentions: infinite possibility, zero execution, and a cat named Goose acting as a weighted blanket with opinions – all of them, “Mama, you should stay right here.”

Memorial Day. A whole, paid holiday. A free day. A day for productivity, renewal, transformation. A day where a woman could reinvent her living space, her habits, her sense of self.

Instead, I sit.

Not because I don’t want to do things. Oh no. I want to do everything. The front yard is a botanical cry for help. The plants need thinning, coaxing, dividing – like a gentle horticultural intervention. There are shoots to start for a work project, because apparently I’ve become the kind of person who propagates things now. There’s a bedroom begging to become an oasis instead of a place where I collapse, my bed like a Victorian fainting couch – with Wi-Fi.

There are bins. So many bins. Bins filled with the ghosts of decisions I once made confidently in Michaels, and Hobby Lobby, and one time at work, when 3 large garbage bags filled with yarn were donated to us “in case we could use it.” We descended on those bags like hyenas eating the discarded remains of some carcass left by a lion in the Serengeti.

And paint. I have paint. This is important. Because having paint means I have intent. I could paint the bookshelf cabinets. I could paint the hallway. I could paint the doors. I could become a woman who paints things and then casually says, “Oh this? I did that myself,” as if I don’t also have a drawer filled with batteries that may or may not be dead and so many screws and allen (is it Allen, or Ellen?) wrench kits and a couple of boxes of wooden matches because when you live in rural Pennsylvania, where the power grid is so fragile that it completely collapses when too many people fart in the wind, you keep matches to light candles.

All of this is available to me.

And yet, I do none of it.

Because choosing one thing means not choosing eleven others, and my brain treats that like a moral failure.

So instead, I scroll. Goose settles in, purring like he pays rent instead of the freeloading orange cat without a job that he is, and suddenly I’m watching a video about a woman who renovated a farmhouse in twelve hours using only grit and reclaimed wood from her old shed, and I think, Yes. That is who I am now. And then two hours pass, and the only thing I’ve renovated is my understanding of how little I’ve accomplished.

This is the part people don’t understand about ADHD. It’s not a lack of desire. It’s an abundance of it. It’s standing in the middle of your life like a game show contestant who’s been told they can take everything in the store, and instead of joy, you feel a rising panic because where do you even start? Do you grab the practical things first? The fun things? What if you choose wrong? What if you waste your time? What if you confirm, once again, your long-held suspicion that you are, in fact, a beautifully creative disaster?

For most of my life, I thought this was just… me.

Just my personality. My charming chaos. My inability to finish anything longer than a thought before the next one would come stomping down one of my neural pathways. People would say, “Oh, you’re so creative,” which is a lovely way of saying, “You seem exhausting.”

And underneath that was something less charming: the constant hum of panic. The overthinking. The underthinking. The starting. The stopping. The quiet, gnawing certainty that I was somehow failing at being an actual person in a way everyone else had figured out.

Turns out, there was a reason.

A diagnosable, treatable, nameable reason.

Which is great. Truly. Love that for me.

Would have been nice information to have before my fifties. Thanks, Mom.

Because now I get to look back at decades of “Why can’t you just –” and realize the answer was: because my brain doesn’t do “just.” My brain does “all at once, loudly, with seventeen side quests.” Which, in retrospect, should have delighted my Gaming Dungeons and Dragons aficionado husband – instead of frustrating and driving him bananas.

And then there’s the part I don’t get to fix with medication.

The silence.

Because even when I do manage to focus now – even when I pick a thing, do the thing, finish the thing – there’s no one there to see it. No one to laugh with, or for. No one to turn to and say, “Look, I did it,” and have that look come back – the one that says it mattered.

I used to measure my days in shared moments. In reactions. In the small, stupid things that become important simply because someone else is there to witness them.

Now it’s just me.

Me and my tabs.

Me and the cats, who truly give no fucks about home renovations (except for the empty boxes) or artistic creativity (except for the empty boxes).

Me and the growing suspicion that I have no idea who I am when I’m not being someone’s person.

I know who I was. I was his wife. I was part of a unit. I was the chaos to his… much more organized chaos. I was the person who made him laugh, and God, he loved that. He loved when I was ridiculous. Which, fortunately, was often.

That version of me feels… archived.

Not gone entirely. Just… inaccessible. Like a file I can see but can’t open.

People say, “You have to learn to make yourself happy.”

Which sounds reasonable until you realize you don’t fully know who that self is anymore. It’s like being handed the keys to a house you don’t remember building that's filled with the things you filled it with before one moment exploded and you were blown apart and fragmented into a world that is less like home and more like a void.

So yes, I could paint the hallway today.

I could organize the bins, transform the yard, become a woman with systems and labeled containers and a bedroom that whispers, “She has her life together.”

Or I could sit here, paralyzed by possibility, holding a cat, scrolling through other people’s finished projects like they’re exhibits in a museum called Functional Adults.

And here’s the darkest, funniest part of all:

I know that if I just picked one thing: one stupid, small, manageable thing –I would feel better. Not cured. Not transformed into a productivity influencer with a ring light and a morning routine. But better. That’s what the massive dose of daily medication is for; what it is supposed to facilitate.

I would get that flicker of satisfaction. That brief, elusive sense of peace.

But my brain, in all its infinite wisdom, would like to review all twelve tabs again before making a decision.

Just in case.

Because what if there’s a better choice?

What if there’s a more perfect use of time?

What if –

– and then, it’s 4 p.m.

And the day is gone.

And nothing is painted, or planted, or sorted.

Except, of course, my thoughts. Which have been rearranged, overanalyzed, and repackaged into the same familiar conclusion:

I am the only one here to have my back now.

Which is inconvenient, because I am also the one most likely to get distracted halfway through.

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A patron recently approached me and asked, very earnestly, what I thought of “the pavilion.”

Now, in my defense, there is a pavilion in the Square in our town. Benches. Shade. A place where you sit and contemplate your life choices or your sandwich, or both. So in the split second between question and answer, my brain assembled a full Yelp review of a structure made primarily of wood and mild disappointment.

“It’s… fine?” I almost said. “It’s a pavilion. It pavilions.”

Instead, I looked at my coworker, who looked at me, and we engaged in that silent library telepathy that translates roughly to: Do you know what’s happening right now? Because I do not.

Turns out, he meant The Pavilion, the skilled nursing facility attached to the hospital that is no longer a hospital, except it sort of is a healthcare facility, but also isn’t, because healthcare in America now operates like a shell game run by jaded con men (and women) who no longer even try to mask the reality of their grift.

Within moments, I was no longer a librarian. I was a crisis consultant. A sounding board. A reluctant participant in a deeply personal monologue about his father’s care, the alleged laziness of nurses, and a situation I am in no way qualified to adjudicate.

I gently redirected him toward a case manager. He thanked me three times before he departed, relief clearly emanating from his body. I sat there, slightly stunned, wondering how a question about a pavilion turned into a moral referendum on elder care.

This is library work.

It is not, as some still imagine, dusting shelves and shushing people with the quiet authority of a judgemental Victorian ghost. It is not enforcing overdue fines with a ruler and a sense of moral superiority (though, as a child, I was certain librarians lived for that moment). It is not just books.

It is people.

People who need directions. People who need forms printed. People who need help applying for jobs, housing, benefits. It is elderly humans who are quite frankly baffled, exhausted, and disgusted by electronic gadgets that their families insist that they must own andoperate efficiently – humans who can remember a time when you dialed, on a rotary phone, just 5 numbers, which would then connect you to the person you were calling.

The library is people who need to sit down for five minutes and not feel like the world is actively trying to evict them from it.

Sometimes it is a man asking about a nursing home.

Sometimes it is someone who just needs to talk.

And they do talk. Oh, they talk.

They tell you things you did not ask to know. Things you cannot un-know. Entire biographies delivered between the stacks, next to large print mysteries, Amish love stories, and slightly outdated tax guides (Think Tax codes for dummies.) They will come in asking for a self-help book and leave having given you a full, unedited account of why they need it.

And you listen.

Because beneath the oversharing, beneath the rambling and the tangents and the occasional truly baffling detail, is something simple: they want to be heard.

The library is one of the last places where that still happens.

We are a refuge in the most literal sense. In the winter, people come in to get warm. In the summer, they come in to escape the heat – assuming, of course, that our ancient air conditioning system has not finally given up the ghost. Last summer, we deployed fans like we were preparing for liftoff. It was less “public institution” and more “DIY survival experiment.”

We made it work. We always do.

People come in to use computers because they don’t have internet at home. Kids come in after school to play games, to exist somewhere safe until closing time. Others come for DVDs because streaming is a luxury, not a given. Some come because we are the only conversation they will have all day.

And yes, sometimes that conversation is about my hair.

I have red hair. This is apparently a community event, possibly the 8th wonder of the world. That is up for debate.

There are daily announcements. Appreciations. Observations. It is like being a minor landmark.

“Your hair is so beautiful.”

“Thank you,” I say, for the tenth time that day, wondering if I should start issuing tickets. Libraries often have fundraisers; perhaps this is an idea worth contemplating.

But then there are the other interactions.

The ones that matter in quieter, stranger ways.

A patron asks me to read something they’ve written. I, a former English major with, um, opinions, choose instead to be kind. I point out what’s good. What’s strong. Because they didn’t come for critique: they came for courage.

Another enthusiastically explains an app they’ve built. Something about golf.

Data. Metrics. Words that pass over me like a foreign language I almost, but not quite, understand. I nod with what I hope is convincing intelligence, offering encouragement while internally clinging to the single fact I know about golf: it exists, and in the TV movie-of-the-week murder mysteries of my youth, a big, fat golf club resembling a quarter note ( 9 iron? 5 iron? Driver of some sort?) was often the weapon of choice.

Kids tell me about shows, games, their lives in fragments. Some ask for books. Some don’t. All of them are looking, in one way or another, for a place to belong.

And that’s what we are.

We are not just a building filled with books, but a conduit for connection.

Which makes the current moment – this slow erosion of libraries across the country – feel not just frustrating, but dangerous.

Budgets are being cut. Hours reduced. Entire systems strained to the breaking point. Books challenged, banned, politicized. As if the real threat to society is a novel sitting quietly on a shelf, waiting to be chosen. Last year, it was To Kill a Mockingbird. This year, will it be the complete series of Dog Man – because the fictional supposition of a man being part dog is believed, by a bunch of undereducated white people who believe that Jesus was also a white man with blonde hair and that he really did do all of those magic tricks in the Bible because DUH, he was the Son of God, you libtard heathens! – to be the work of Satan?

As if access to information is optional.

As if community spaces are expendable.

We feel it every day. The uncertainty. The quiet fear that one decision, made far away by someone who has never sat at our desk, could unravel everything.

And still, we show up.

We unlock the doors. We turn on the lights (and the fans, and maybe one day, again, the air conditioning). We answer questions about pavilions and printers and life itself.

We listen.

We help.

And in doing so, something unexpected happens.

On days when my own grief sits heavy in my chest – when I am not entirely sure how I will make it from morning to closing – someone walks in and needs something. Something small. Something human.

And I help them.

And then another. And another.

And without quite noticing when it happened, I have made it through the day.

So yes, libraries are about books.

But they are also about survival. About dignity. About the quiet, radical act of showing up for one another in a world that increasingly does not.

We are not obsolete.

We are essential.

Even if sometimes, we’re just trying to figure out which pavilion you mean.

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Midnight, apparently, is when a hospital turns back into a pumpkin.

No dramatic fade-out. No solemn last ambulance ride into the bay with violins playing in the background. Just a clock striking twelve, a quiet locking of doors, and – poof –Bradford Regional Medical Center stops being a place where you go not to die. No more ER. ICU, you say? Hell, that's been gone for years. No more (extremely limited) inpatient care. Just…outpatient services, as if a heart attack can be scheduled between 10:15 and 10:45, right after a blood draw and before lunch.

We are now a community where your best emergency plan is a reliable vehicle, good weather, and a decent sense of direction.

Thirty minutes, they tell us. Thirty minutes to the nearest full emergency room. That’s assuming you can leave immediately, that an ambulance is available, that the roads aren’t coated in ice or swallowed by fog, that your body politely agrees to hold off its collapsing until you hit the county line. Thirty minutes is a comforting number when it’s theoretical. It becomes something else entirely when it’s attached to the phrase “if you can make it there.”

And even if you do? Eight to ten hours to be seen in Olean. Eight to ten hours. That’s not an emergency room; that’s a waiting room with Airbnb ambition.

But don’t worry – this is all very reasonable. Very explainable. Very inevitable, we’re told.

“Financial pressures.”

That phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It’s the polite, corporate way of saying the math stopped working because the people who need care the most are the least profitable to treat. Medicaid gets slashed – $911 billion over ten years, a number so large it stops feeling real – and suddenly rural hospitals start dropping like flies.

Pennsylvania alone: $20 billion in cuts. Rural hospitals: already operating on fumes. Add in uninsured and underinsured patients, and the whole system becomes a slow, predictable hemorrhage.

And then—surprise!—the hospital bleeds out.

Bradford is just the latest patient.

What makes it almost poetic, in that dark, laugh-so-you-don’t-scream way, is that none of this arrived quietly. This wasn’t a twist ending. This was the most heavily foreshadowed plotline for this community in modern history. The kind where the audience is yelling at the screen, “Don’t go in there,” and the character opens the door anyway.

McKean County voted +30 for the administration that made these cuts not just possible, but inevitable. And now here we are, staring at the empty shell of a hospital, wondering how on earth this could have happened.

It’s the political equivalent of setting your own house on fire and then being outraged that the fire department is taking too long to arrive: from thirty minutes away.

And Kaleida Health? They didn’t exactly sneak out in the middle of the night. They’ve been dismantling this place piece by piece like it was a clearance rack. Pediatrics? Gone. OB-GYN? Gone. Behavioral health? Drug and alcohol services? Gone. A 160+-bed hospital reduced to ten, like someone slowly turning down the volume until there’s nothing left but silence.

They didn’t close the hospital. They mined it.

By the time midnight hits, it’s less an ending and more a formality.

And what’s left behind isn’t just a building. It’s a vacuum.

Ambulances now have longer routes, which means they’re unavailable longer, which means response times stretch thinner and thinner until “emergency” becomes a relative term. Volunteer fire departments will step in, because they always do, because that’s what small towns rely on: people who show up even when the system doesn’t.

Two, maybe three ambulances on a good day.

What happens when something big hits? A pile-up. A fire. A night where everything goes wrong at once.

Well.

You better hope you’re not the second emergency.

Or the third.

Or the one that happens just slightly too far away.

And in the middle of all of this – this policy failure, this corporate calculus, this slow-motion collapse – there’s the quiet, personal realization that this isn’t abstract. This isn’t politics on TV or a headline you scroll past.

This is where you had your babies.

This is where your mother was treated when she was sick.

This is where you assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that if something went wrong, someone would be there to catch you.

That assumption is gone now.

And it turns out, losing that feels less like panic and more like…trepidation. A low, steady hum of “this isn’t good” that you carry around with you. You start doing the math in your head. Your age. Your health. The stairs. The what-ifs.

You think about heart attacks and strokes in a way that feels uncomfortably practical.

You think about being alone.

Not in a dramatic, tragic sense. Just in the logistical one. Who’s there if something happens? Who notices? Who helps?

Your son asks what you’ll do when you’re older, who will be there with you, and you say “no one” because that’s the truth you’ve made peace with. Or at least the version of peace that looks like acceptance from the outside.

Inside, it’s something closer to: I’ll figure it out.

Because that’s what people do when the safety net disappears. They don’t collapse dramatically. They adjust. They calculate. They lower their expectations of what help looks like.

Hope, in situations like this, starts to feel like a bad investment.

If you don’t hope, you’re not disappointed.

If you don’t expect anything, then at least reality can’t take anything from you – it can only confirm what you already suspected.

And yet, even without hope, there’s still anger. Because this didn’t have to happen. Not like this. Not this fast. Not this completely.

A hospital doesn’t just vanish.

Unless, of course, it does.

Midnight comes. The doors close. The sign might still say “Medical Center,” but we all know better.

It’s something else now.

And so are we.

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There are people who enter your life quietly: no ceremony, no grand announcement; and yet, they become part of your foundation.

Lisa was that person for me.

She moved into the house next door when I was a little girl, all long, shining dark hair, BAHS choir letter pea coat, glowing teenage confidence, and I was immediately in awe. I didn’t know then that she would become my big sister in every way that matters.

Lisa was six years older than me, which at that age might as well have been a lifetime. She would come over to our house to sit at our kitchen table with my mother, talking about life in that way older girls do – half laughter, half longing; sometimes crying at life's injustices and sometimes furious at family, friends. My mom was her shoulder, confidant; her mother figure when she needed that and her own mom couldn't or wouldn't understand. And yes, isn’t it ironic that in my later, teenage years, I would confide in Lisa's mom?

But back in those days, I mostly hovered nearby, absorbing her presence like sunlight. She was beautiful, yes, but more than that, she was alive: funny, expressive, full of feeling. She had BIG emotions and she wasn't afraid to express them.

Life did not go easy on her. As a teenager, she faced a kind of hardship that could have hardened someone permanently. Instead, it deepened her. It also gifted her with a love that transcended everything. I witnessed her heartbreak, her resilience, and ultimately, her fierce love when she became a mother. I saw what it meant to fight for something precious, to claim joy even after loss. Those lessons settled into me long before I had the words for them.

And somehow, in the midst of everything she carried, she saw me.

I was an awkward, lonely kid –never quite fitting in anywhere, trying to make sense of a world that often felt unkind. My home life was, at best, problematic. She came to see it very clearly, and she made sure that I had little bursts of joy to counter some of the pain. Lisa didn’t overlook any of it.

She stepped in.

Not in some grand, heroic way, but in a thousand small, consistent acts: inviting me along, talking to me like I mattered, making space for me in her life. She took me on little adventures that felt enormous – road trips, bowling, choir concerts at the high school, shopping for her wedding; afternoons that stretched into forever. There was music and singing. She had a BEAUTIFUL voice. There were little arguments and yelling. Sister spats, if you will. There were hours spent sitting close on the couch, eating popcorn and watching movies like Jesus Christ Superstar, while baby Amy slept nearby. In later years, after her marriage, we spent similar time together – only this time, there were 3 little girls sleeping upstairs. I was her babysitter, and I loved to play with the girls. I loved them deeply too, because they were a part of Lisa. I saw the fierce mama and the passionately loving one – even when she was kneeling on the living room floor, scrubbing toddler poo - the 3 year-old's chosen medium for fingerpainting - off stucco walls and swearing/gagging the whole time. I pitched in, gagging right along with her, and we made '“shit” references all day, making ourselves laugh even if nobody else got our humor. It was an unspoken, inclusive language. With her, I wasn’t the odd one out. I was her kid sister.

I can't leave Mike out, either, because he was/is every bit as wonderful as Lisa. He mentored me when I was a teen; his high school years were spent playing on the football team and being popular, getting good grades – and then, he enlisted in the Army and put that same, principled effort into his military career. He saw possibilities in me, and I was always anxious about not letting him down. I guess you could say he was a big brother of sorts – I was truly fortunate to have the presence of these exceptional humans in my life.

At one point, when the anger and viciousness had reached a crescendo at home, with my mom's practice of leaving me home to watch my brother and going out with – and at one point, moving in – boyfriends who proved that my mother just could not pick a suitable man, Lisa wanted to take me in. She offered to move my things and take over as my guardian. I was all for it, but my mother was not. What can I say? Things would have been so different for me.

Lisa taught me things no one else did. How to laugh at the absurd. How to sing without holding back. How to exist in the world as a girl with a voice. She even introduced me to a few less “wholesome” rites of passage – ones that, in hindsight, came with a lot of laughter and the kind of ridiculous stories that never quite lose their glow. I can still hear her giggle: delightful, bubbling up and out, unforgettable. We laughed so much.

Lisa loved deeply, and she was deeply loved. Her marriage to Mike was the kind people quietly measure their own relationships against. He adored her, steadfastly, from the very beginning: even when loving her meant simply walking her home from high school and expecting nothing in return. Together, they built a life and a family that became her pride and her anchor.

She was also fiercely principled. When she saw wrong, she didn’t look away – even when it cost her relationships. That was Lisa: loyal, but never at the expense of what was right. It was an especially valuable quality to have when she found her calling: working with people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This was when she entered my brother’s life in a more significant way, and he simply adored her.

As I grew older, life, as it does, pulled us in different directions. She was older, and wiser, and she opposed my first marriage because she'd grown up with him and she knew who he really was. I probably should have listened, but I just got angry, and when she declined to witness our union, I was, of course, hurt. I will always be glad that she got to meet Scott, because he was the one she would have chosen for me.

There were gaps. Time passed in ways you always assume you’ll make up for later. And then one day, you realize “later” is no longer a guarantee. That is a quiet kind of heartbreak all its own.

When I saw her again after the pandemic, and after years of waving as we passed by, brief talks in parking lots of places we were both frequenting and those kinds of encounters, we didn’t need words. Charlie had been taken and I think that our grief was identical. She had been in his life from the day he came home from the hospital. I remember her rushing through the front door that evening just so she could hold him. Losing him to Covid decimated us both. We just held each other and cried in the Laundry Soap aisle at - you guessed it - Walmart. Our husbands stood aside, letting us have that moment of shared pain. Some bonds don’t fray with time: they wait.

Lisa died this week, and the world feels dimmer for it. I ache for Mike, for her daughters, for her grandchildren – for all the people whose lives were shaped by her love. And I ache, selfishly, for myself. Because losing her feels like losing a piece of who I am. She was there in my becoming. She helped shape the person I grew into. I can't even cry. It's as if I've been dipped into this heavy liquid, like motor oil, that has reached every crevice and soaked into my soul. People I love keep leaving well before their time. They are leaving me behind.

Family isn’t always blood. Sometimes it’s the girl next door who becomes your compass, your protector, your co-conspirator in laughter and survival. Sometimes it’s someone who sees you clearly when you are most invisible, and refuses to let you disappear.

Lisa was my sister. Not by biology, but by choice, by love, by years of shared life.

And I will carry her with me – in every song sung a little louder, every moment of courage, every memory that still makes me laugh through tears.

She was here. She mattered. She was loved.

And she always will be.

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King Charles came to Congress this week.

Let that sentence sit for a second, because it sounds like the setup to either a history lesson or a very polite, albeit bizarre intervention. The King of England – that king, the one we dramatically broke up with in 1776 – stood before American lawmakers and, in his measured, velvet-voiced way, tried to remind us who we used to be.

And just what did Congress do with that?

Absolutely nothing.

Neither the King nor his predecessors, including his mother – who was brilliant in matters of diplomacy – have ever set foot in the Capitol to address our Congress. It was quite remarkable. The actual weight of the event was heavy, because world leaders have exhausted every means at their disposal to deal with the disaster that is this administration. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that fact was not lost on most of us. King Charles took one for the team.

But in the aftermath… crickets.

Because while a literal monarch crossed an ocean to speak about unity, stability, and shared democratic values, the President of the United States apparently walked away thinking, “You know what I’ve always wanted? To live in Buckingham Palace.” And then, he did what he always does, and mused aloud.

Of course he did.

He absorbed neither the message nor the symbolism. Not the quiet alarm bells embedded in centuries of diplomatic restraint. No – what he took from the entire experience was a Zillow search for the most famous, visible castle in the world. And his desire to acquire it. “Everything can be bought, if you're rich and relentless enough” is his mantra.

Meanwhile, back in reality, gas is $4.65 a gallon in my town, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and we’re being told quite casually, like it’s a weather update, that global supply chains may be disrupted for months. Prices are climbing, patience is thinning, and people are doing quiet math in their heads at the grocery store like it’s a high-stakes game show: Eggs or dignity? Milk or denial? And for some of us, it's food or medication?

But sure. Buckingham Palace. Let’s circle back to that.

Because if there is one thing this moment in history needed, it was a leader who could take a geopolitical crisis and turn it into a lifestyle aspiration. He took Robin Leach and his ridiculous TV series seriously.

And then there was the speech he gave on Friday. Ninety minutes of it. Ninety minutes of what can only be described as a one-man variety show where the themes included: grievance, confusion, casual cruelty, and whatever “the weave” is supposed to be – which, as it turns out, is not his hairstyle but a communication strategy where coherence goes to die.

He wasn’t unraveling. That would almost be comforting. Unraveling implies there was once a thread holding things together. No: this was something else.

This was a man completely unburdened by the idea that rules, norms, or basic human decency apply to him anymore. A man who stood in front of a room full of his supporters – people who showed up for him, who believe in him – and called them old, insulted their intelligence, and then basked in their laughter like it was applause instead of something much more unsettling.

And they did laugh. That’s the part that breaks our brains every, damn time. Not just what he said, but how it landed.

Because there is something deeply disorienting about watching people cheer while being openly disrespected. It’s like watching someone get slapped and then thank the person who did it. And it happens over and over again.

At one point, he described healthcare policy as “medical crap.” Sure, because the ability of every, single one of the people he was sworn to serve to access adequate, affordable healthcare is just bothersome drivel - like tabloids. Like The Globe.

At another, he proudly walked through a cognitive test as if correctly identifying a bear were the intellectual equivalent of splitting the atom. He attacked the press, dismissed reality, invented stories with tidbits about political opponents that have long been debunked, and suggested that questioning his decisions – particularly about war – is “treasonous.”

Treasonous.

That word used to mean something. Now? It’s just another prop in the performance of a Reality TV actor. And man, has this show ever jumped the shark.

Maybe that’s the most unsettling part of all of this: it is a performance. Not a breakdown. Not a series of unfortunate slips. Sure, he's an old man beset by old man maladies brought on by a life and a lifestyle that has always been taken for granted in a cavalier, extremely unhealthy way.

But yes, it's a performance. Intentional, strategic, and, judging by the reaction, very effective.

He even told us the trick.

“The weave.”

No, that's not the name of his signature dance move – the one Bill Maher has famously referred to as “It looks like he's jerking off two guys.”

The strategy is this: jump from topic to topic. Flood the space. Say so much, so quickly, so relentlessly, that people can’t hold onto any one thing long enough to challenge it. By the time you process one lie, three more have taken its place.

It’s utter chaos. It’s choreography. And it works.

Because somewhere in the middle of all of this – between the rising prices, the geopolitical instability, the speeches that feel like fever dreams, and the growing sense that nothing is being handled by anyone actually in charge – something else is happening.

We are getting tired.

Not outraged. Not shocked.

Tired. There is a difference.

Outrage burns hot. It demands action. It keeps you sharp. But exhaustion? Exhaustion dulls everything. It makes you look away. It makes you unplug – not because you don’t care, but because caring starts to feel like a full-time job with no end in sight.

I unplugged this week.

That wasn’t avoidance. That was survival. Because there is only so much a person can absorb before their brain quietly says, “That’s enough. We’re done here.” And yet – even in that exhaustion – there’s this low, persistent hum of fear.

Because things aren’t okay.

We can feel it in the prices, in the rhetoric, in the way reality itself seems negotiable now. You can feel it in the absurdity of a king delivering a message about democratic stability to a room that no longer seems particularly interested in maintaining it.

And maybe most of all, I know that I can feel it in the silence that follows.

Because, for me, it is about something else, too: it’s different going through this alone. There’s a particular kind of loneliness in witnessing something this surreal, this heavy, this brain-breaking, and not having your person there to exchange that look with – the one that says, “Are you seeing this too?” Fear shared is still fear – but it’s more stable, sonehow. It has edges. It doesn’t just float around the room with nowhere to land.

Doing it alone makes everything louder. And scarier. And I have to tell you, I am scared all the time.

But here’s the thing that cuts through all of it – the absurdity, the anger, the exhaustion. It's the one thing that runs through my brain on repeat, like the ticker tape in Times Square:

This isn’t normal. It isn’t. It’s not normal.

It keeps trying to become normal. That’s the real trick. That’s the goal. Flood the system until people stop reacting. But recognizing how strange, how off, how fundamentally wrong this all feels? That matters. It means something in me – and in you – is still calibrated correctly.

So yes: we can unplug when we need to. Step back. Protect our sanity. No one wins if you burn yourself out trying to process every headline in real time. But don’t let the absurdity convince you that it’s inevitable that it simply becomes.

King “Charles the Third, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of His other Realms and Territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith" came to Congress and tried, in his very royal, very restrained and eloquently moving way, to remind us of who we are supposed to be.

We don’t need Buckingham Palace.

We need to remember that part.

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There’s a moment at every White House Correspondents’ Dinner when the room collectively decides this is all perfectly normal.

The tuxedos. The gowns. The journalists politely laughing with the people they’re supposed to interrogate for a living. The sheer, jaw-dropping absurdity of journalists – journalists – rolling out the red carpet for a man who has made a career out of undermining them. Lawsuits, access restrictions, public attacks, the whole greatest hits album…followed by, “But please, join us for dinner. Black tie preferred.”

The job approval ratings are so low, they’re almost as young as the Epstein victims were. Sycophants like Joe Rogan and – gasp – TUCKER CARLSON are jumping the Good Ship MAGA. Something must be done, dammit.

Just remember, the toadies in this administration are not very bright. Like Hollywood, they like to “reimagine” their old hits. (Yep, the puns write themselves. )

Like a jump scare in a movie you already know the ending to – someone shouts “GET DOWN!”

Instantly the vibe shifts. Secret Service materializes out of thin air like they’ve been rendered in by a defense contractor with a generous budget. People are moving, talking, not talking, definitely not explaining. It’s tense. It’s urgent. It’s…weirdly familiar.

Because we’ve seen this episode before.

There’s always a “threat.” There’s always a guy. The guy is armed – then he isn’t. He’s apprehended – until he’s not. He’s alive – until he’s dead, according to fervent tweets from Kash “Crazy Eyes” Patel – until, plot twist, maybe he’s alive again. At this point the suspect has more status updates than a software patch.

And the details? Oh, those evaporate like spilled champagne on a ballroom floor. Details? We don’t need no stinking details!

What we’re left with is the outline of a story and the insistence that we take it very, very seriously, because it’s very, very true, even as it refuses to hold still long enough to make sense.

Meanwhile, the optics are doing Olympic-level gymnastics – but with very bad landings.

You’ve got a room full of journalists: people who have spent years documenting attacks on the press, restrictions, lawsuits, access games. They’re now dressed to the nines, essentially hosting the main character of those stories like it’s a holiday special.

“Welcome! We’ve prepared a lovely evening of light criticism and heavy hors d’oeuvres. Sir, your steak is so well-done, it was nearly mistaken for an old steel wool scrubber – just how you like it. Here’s the Heinz!”

It would be satire if it weren’t already happening.

And then, in the middle of all this alleged high-stakes chaos, comes the pivot. Not to clarity. Not to explanation.

To a ballroom.

A bigger ballroom. A better ballroom. A ballroom so secure it sounds less like a venue and more like the final level in a video game. Bulletproof glass. Drone-proof ceilings. Probably shark-proof carpeting, just to be safe. See? You knew that I'd tie in the title of this piece somewhere.

Because nothing says “trust the situation” like interrupting a security scare to pitch square footage.

At this point, the entire evening starts to feel less like an event and more like a live-action trailer for a reality show no one remembers signing up for. America’s Next Top Crisis: WWE Edition. It's the Highbrow Event of the Year!

And here’s the problem: when everything is staged like this? When every moment arrives with maximum drama and minimum follow-through? People stop reacting the way they’re supposed to.

They don’t panic. They don’t rally.

They squint.

They start noticing the pattern. The repetition. The way every incident seems to come pre-packaged with urgency but expires before it delivers answers.

It’s not that people think nothing ever happens. It’s that they no longer believe they’re being told the whole story when something does.

That, my friends, is a credibility problem you can’t solve with more spectacle.

Because spectacle is the problem.

You can’t flood the zone with exaggerated claims, questionable visuals, and a constant stream of “unbelievable” moments, then expect the public to snap back into full trust mode on command. That’s not how trust works. It’s not a light switch – it’s more like a Jenga tower, and at this point, we’re down to one wobbly block and Karoline Leavitt insisting everything is structurally sound.

Even the contradictions have become routine. First report: chaos. Second report: under control. Third report: details forthcoming. Final report: never mind, everyone move along.

It’s less “breaking news” and more “narrative jazz.” Improvised, inconsistent, and somehow always ending right before the part where it’s supposed to make sense.

And through it all, the Correspondents’ Dinner waits outside for the all-clear; the food is GETTING COLD. A celebration of a free press that looks like – okay, IS – RSVP’ing to its own marginalization.

That’s the real absurdity here. Not just the incident – whatever it was or wasn’t – but the willingness to keep performing normalcy while the foundation underneath it constantly rumbles.

Because at some point, the audience stops playing along.

They stop gasping on cue. They stop believing the stakes as presented. They start watching the production instead of the story. They crawl under their tables, drinks in hand, and record the whole thing with their iPhones.

Somehow I do not think that the tense “bomb drills” I took part in as a Cold War child of the 70s is the correct response to a loud “noise” in the foyer – geez, right in front of my crab rangoons!

But alas, once that happens, every “incident” risks landing the same way:

Not as a warning.

Not as a tragedy.

But as another episode.

Same script. New night. Slightly bigger ballroom.

At least the underdressed actor portraying the “unhinged Leftist scum” wasn’t the old DoorDash lady. Instead, it looked suspiciously like the actor who played Stuart – the geek who owned the comic book store – on The Big Bang Theory.

It’s good to see that he’s getting work.

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This is how to get a sitting president (only the current one) to rubber stamp a batshit crazy agenda, should you have one.

First, you've got to catch the bleary eye of the current president, whose actual attention span is that of a fungus gnat. It doesn't matter how. You can accomplish this by recording yourself complimenting his masterful prowess as a leader, a doctor, a peacemaker, a fast food connoisseur, and that oldie but goody, the Artful Dodger of the Deal.

You can share a meme that manages to convey a selfless devotion to every move he makes, including how he combs his glorious hair, shakes hands until he's bruised, and that most popular of popular moves: giving constructive criticism to female reporters (You need to smile more).

If you have a podcast and for the last fifteen hundred days you have streamed yourself deliriously and enthusiastically listing the virtues of this most godlike, strong, (very strong), powerful Prince of Peace (some restrictions may apply), and if you tag phrases like

"I'm, like, a very smart person."

"I’m a very brilliant person." (Yes, there is a theme.)

"Winning"

the chances are pretty good that he will come across your posts if you make enough nonsensical, Trump-flattering noise. Who knows when - maybe during a Cabinet meeting when he's (mostly) awake and idly scrolling on his phone while "the Generals" report on the way the bombs destroyed Iran's ENTIRE military - "like, it's gone."

Or on Air Force One as he heads to Florida to spend quality time with his wife and children, and to attend church services, and to appear at a soup kitchen to serve chicken and dumplings to the homeless and if you bought that maybe you are a very stupid person, because DUH, he's golfing.

Or yes, some night at 2 AM while he's burning the midnight oil (pooping), combing social media for any and every flattering sound byte about himself, and more than a few criticisms that will lead him to assume that the OP is perhaps a very stupid person and he'll make them the subject of an unhinged, meteorically bonkers, fantastically insulting bunch of words that mostly make sense and convey the fact that he thinks the OP is an enemy of the state for asking if "covfefe" is a grammatical error or a code name for one of the 12 year-olds on Epstein's island.

It doesn't matter how he finds you; just that he pays attention to your 90-second reels, unsubstantiated propaganda, and quick, little threads on social media that flatter him and elevate him to a status somewhere above God. Or at least the Pope - that nasty man.

Once you have his ear, you can talk to him about your vision quest in the Mohave, where you ingested a wholesome, organic, non-GMO sourced (that really doesn't matter because non-GMO doesn't mean shit to this president who inhales Big Macs on a daily basis and drinks formaldehyde-laced Diet Coke but it sounds good for the purposes of this writing) psilocybin fungi and experienced TOTALLY HEALING of your decades-long PTSD caused by being stuffed into your locker when you were 14 years old and a 4'11" 90lb geek.

He will think you're "onto something" even though he will also boast that he was a very popular student and that would have never happened to him. Then, in an Adderall-fueled fever dream of an early morning makeup session, he'll decide that your miraculous recovery from such a debilitating mental illness

is actually a cutting-edge medical BREAKTHROUGH and he'll announce that he is holding a very rare press conference – on a Saturday no less, which is the only thing rare about one of his pressers because he is the epitome of an attention vampire.

He'll have you flown to DC, and there, you will stand behind him at the Resolute desk, nod your head in all seriousness, and beam with pride as he signs an Executive Order directing research into 'shrooms as an effective medical treatment. You will totally forget that just the day before, you were talking about how you didn't sign up for this war and that this president is in rapid mental decline and needs to GO.

Somewhere in outer space, L Ron Hubbard is screaming because even he knows that all of this is a distraction from the hundreds of ways in which Donald Trump is a losing loser who loses, and Kash Patel is planning a "research week" at the Poodle Lounge in Las Vegas.

Science, baby.

What’s most exhausting about this moment in American life isn’t just the chaos – it’s the normalization of it.

I don’t mean the kind of exhaustion that comes from a long week or a bad news cycle. I mean the bone-deep, soul-sapping fatigue of watching something you love get chipped away in real time while half the country insists it’s never been better. The kind where you start your day already bracing for whatever fresh hell of absurdity is about to drop, and somehow you’re still surprised by it.

Because none of this is normal. It is not normal to watch scandal pile on top of scandal until it starts to feel routine. It is not normal for truth to become optional. It is not normal for a sitting president to behave like the federal government is a personal checking account with a very large, very patient overdraft policy.

And yet? Here we are.

There’s a pattern now, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

Grand, sweeping declarations blasted out like breaking news from on high: the war is “over,” deals are “done,” victories “total.” The stock market twitches. Oil prices react. Pundits scramble to puke out large amalgamations of catchphrases and shocked disbelief. For a brief, dizzying moment, reality bends around the announcement – whatever it happens to be.

And then reality snaps back, like a boomerang of suck.

Foreign leaders contradict it. Details fall apart. The timeline makes no sense. The facts – such stubborn, inconvenient things – refuse to cooperate. Within hours, sometimes even minutes, the story starts to unravel, thread by thread, until what we’re left with is not a breakthrough but another really bad reality tv performance.

And here’s the part that should scare us more than it does: the performance still does something. It moves money. It shifts confidence. It creates just enough chaos to be useful.

To him, his family, and his billionaire oligarchs.

That’s not leadership. That’s manipulation on a scale that this country simply cannot support. You don’t have to squint to see what’s happening – you only need to be willing to look.

When access to power is tight and unpredictable, the people closest to it tend to land on their feet. Or, more accurately, onto piles of money. Lawsuits against the government - his government - where the lines between plaintiff and defendant are nonexistent - is something almost laughable if it weren’t so effing serious. He announces settlements that are legal because he says so and he has judges willing to play Pontius Pilate – to step away from the table and wash their hands – and it just illustrates how deeply the rot has permeated the soul of this country.

Family members circling the same orbit of influence. Billionaire allies who seem to benefit from proximity in ways the average American can’t even begin to access. And Congress? Congress names the problem. Writes bills about the problem. Holds hearings about the problem.

And then… nothing.

The bills stall. The outrage fades. The cycle resets.

At some point, oversight starts to feel like a stage play we all know by heart. The speeches are delivered. The outrage stalks the stage. The concern is expressed. The curtain falls. And nothing actually changes. It's just an all-around bad performance in a bad movie, but no one's willing to shut down the show.

Here’s the quieter damage – the kind that doesn’t scream but lingers.

Our allies haven’t abandoned the American people. Let’s be clear about that. But they have adjusted how they see American leadership, and that shift matters more than we seem willing to admit. Trust, once lost, doesn’t simply just disappear. It erodes.

It looks like hesitation. Like side conversations happening without us. Like agreements that used to be automatic now requiring extra layers of caution. The United States is still powerful, yes – but power without credibility is a very different thing. There’s this ideology called “soft power.” The United States once excelled at the subtle art of the thing. Now? The United States is soft in all the wrong ways.

We are not as reliable as we once were. And the world has noticed. Our former allies – and it causes me deep pain to use that word, former – are moving on without us. Not because they want to, but because he has forced them to.

There is a constant hum of anxiety now, and if you say you don’t feel it, I honestly don’t know how.

It’s the not knowing. The “what now?” that hangs over everything. The casual way we talk about massive, world-altering decisions like they’re weather patterns – unpredictable, unavoidable, and completely out of our control.

Will there be a deal? A conflict? A reversal? A tweet that changes everything before lunch? Will he go full-tilt bonkers and do something that kills even more people?

It’s too much. It’s just… too much.

And the most dangerous part? You can feel yourself starting to adapt to it. Starting to expect it. Starting to absorb what should be unacceptable as just another Tuesday. Admit it. You’re exhausted.

What breaks my brain on a daily basis is this: there are still people who look at all of this and see success.

Not just tolerance – admiration. Trust.

I really should keep one of those jars along the lines of a Swear Jar, only call it the WTF Jar, because if I put a dollar into it every time I said “What the fuck?” out loud? I wouldn't be rich, but I'd have a nice savings account.

We are not arguing over policy anymore. We are not even arguing over ideology. We are living in entirely different versions of reality, built on different facts, different standards, different definitions of what is real and what is performance.

How do you bridge that? How do you reason across a divide where the baseline has disappeared?

This is where I’m going to be blunt, because anything less feels dishonest.

Yes, people can change their minds. Yes, democracy depends on that. Yes, we need people to wake up and see what’s happening.

But there is such a bitter edge to watching that realization arrive only when it becomes personally inconvenient, isn’t there? When prices go up, when the chaos hits closer to home, when the cost is no longer abstract. When, say, a transgender woman of great wealth and visibility – who has consistently gone against the community she claimed as hers – cannot travel outside of the country because her renewed passport has been returned to “M” in the gender section. She’s upset. She’s tried to contact Mar-a-Lago to ask the president to personally intervene. Once you get past the sheer audacity of such an outrageous ask, the anger bubbles to the surface. We’re supposed to embrace these poisonous idiots back into the fold of solidarity? I think not. Apparently, the MAGA powers that be feel the same. They aren’t accepting – or returning – her calls. Boo hoo.

Choices have consequences. Votes have consequences. The devotion, the excuses, the insistence that this was all somehow strategic or brilliant: that mattered. It led us here.

So no, the instinct to throw open the doors and say “welcome back, no hard feelings” doesn’t come easily. Trust doesn’t work like that. It shouldn’t.

And here is the tension: we still need a path forward that includes people who are finally willing to see clearly. Not because they deserve immediate absolution, but because the alternative is staying stuck exactly where we are. I'm not going to trust them. I'm not going to embrace them or even shake their hands. But I know that we absolutely need them if we're going to reclaim this country from the clutches of authoritarianism.

And can we please – please – stop turning politicians into religious figures?

He is not a savior. He is not an “anointed one.” And he is not the Antichrist either, which is yet another development amongst the disgruntled cultists who have begun to see the light now that all of the chickens are coming home to roost. Dragging religion into this doesn’t elevate the conversation; it derails it. It turns political disagreement into moral warfare. It makes people dig in deeper, not think harder. The separation of church and state exists for a reason, and this is exactly that.

So here we are.

Watching corruption that isn’t even subtle. Watching systems that feel like they’re straining but not quite snapping – yet. Watching a country that still has the tools to hold power accountable but can’t seem to agree on when, or how, to use them.

I am angry. I am tired. I am done pretending this is fine.

But more than anything, I am unwilling to accept that this is just how it is now.

Because the real danger isn’t just the corruption. It’s what happens if we get used to it. If we start factoring it in. If we shrug and say, “Well, that’s politics.”

It’s not.

And if we let it become that – if we let this level of dishonesty and self-dealing become the baseline – then we don’t just lose a news cycle or an election.

We lose the structure entirely.

We lose the country entirely.

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Life is just a shitshow, isn’t it? Stress is unrelenting and ever-present. Even on those days when *cough* things seem calm, there's this undercurrent of dread - about the next thing, the next tweet, the next “breaking news,” the next freight train barreling through.

Evolution of the human species has heightened awareness of the multitudes of different ways in which a human being can suffer. One of the big ones is mental health. There was a time when something as “simple” as depression could get a person locked away in an asylum, where their illness wasn't treated inasmuch as it was exacerbated - by minimizing it, ridiculing it, starving the human spirit, and downright torture. We have come quite a long way in ending the stigma. September is designated as Suicide Prevention and Awareness Month. It's been an important step in spotlighting something that really is at epidemic proportions. But having a “month” shouldn't relegate awareness to a specific time, should it?

It has never been more crucial as this world becomes even more chaotic. Please - be mindful with people who have HIGH-FUNCTIONING DEPRESSION.

Let me go through some red flags for you. They don’t necessarily appear at the same time, and a High-Functioning Depressed person doesn’t need to tick all of these boxes to be included. Chances are, you'll notice some of them and not others. It's especially important to keep your eyes on the person exhibiting signs if you know their backstory - a reason for you to suspect that they're depressed. Sometimes, though? None of that is apparent. And that's scary.

1. They get up, get dressed, go to work, and get the job done. Then, they cry in silence when nobody’s watching.

2. They check on everybody else - they have a reputation for being a caretaker, but they don’t feel safe asking for help themselves.

3. Their smile is practiced, while their eyes are emotionless; their “I’m fine” is automatic. You can bet that their breakdowns are private by design. Nobody wants to see that.

4. They appear to be okay, give solid advice, and hold everybody down or lift them up, but here’s the thing: when their world quiets down, their thoughts get loud. And depression lies when it talks.

5. You think they’re okay because they’re productive - look at them, getting things done! The truth is, they only stay busy to avoid feeling anything.

6. Building others up and supporting them seems to be in their DNA. When the day is done, they're left feeling empty inside.

7. The triggers are everywhere and invisible, too. They keep it together in public, but they fall apart in the bathroom, in traffic, or right before bed.

8. Just because they don’t admit “I’m struggling” does not mean they’re not drowning inside. In fact, that may be why they can't articulate it.

9. They apologize for being “too much” on those occasions when the mask slips and you see the anguish. The fact is, they've just been holding too much in for too long. It's like a pressure release valve for emotions, and it's also distressing for them when it happens. The last thing they want is to call attention to themselves.

10. High-functioning depression doesn’t look like laziness – it looks like overworking, overthinking, and never resting. The truth is, depression is a full-time job that nobody wants.

So, when you see one of those mental health awareness messages that advises you to “check on your strong friends,” Don’t just copy and paste it. That's not the responsible way to look after the ones who are suffering right in front of you, silently.

Do it. Check on them. Don't give it a lick and a promise, either. Be quietly, stubbornly present and unrelenting.

Because the ones who always say “I've got this” are usually the ones who don’t. They suffer in silence. They laugh through pain. They downplay the darkness they’ve experienced in the past and assure you that they've “moved on.” And they're masterful at how to function when they’re barely holding on.

Don't be the person who says, “I had no idea; they said that they were fine.” Don't be the person who says, “But they were really getting things together.”

If you've ever said these things, it's important to look around you for the ones in pain. On the surface, those things are true, but below? It's very dark. You might just be the one who can lead them into some kind of light.

Suicide Prevention and Awareness isn't just in September – it's 365 days a year.

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For about six weeks, I didn’t have health insurance.

I’d been using a marketplace plan for over a year - about 18 months. It was affordable, predictable, manageable. So when I heard the federal tax incentives that lowered premiums would end in 2026, I expected a bump. I received it. Not a catastrophe. It was manageable. I figured I was one of the lucky ones.

Then, toward the middle of February, I went to pick up a prescription - and was told my insurance was inactive due to nonpayment. No notice. No email. Nothing. Just… gone. When I dug into my account, I found a bill for over $1,600 a month. For one person. No explanation, no warning, no realistic way to pay it. I guess that, between government shutdowns and talk about extending the tax incentives and lots of other nonsense that I don't understand, my premium just... went up.

So I did what a lot of people do: I scrambled quietly. It's what you do when you're thrown into a "situation." I know this crisis mode well.

I paid out of pocket. Used GoodRx. Stretched what I could. But I couldn’t afford my Ozempic - $200 (with a prescription and a GoodRx account - $500 otherwise) I simply didn’t have. I went six weeks without it, terrified that the diabetes I’d worked so hard to control would come roaring back. No surprise - as the half-life disappeared, the hunger crept in. Not overwhelming, but noticeable. Enough to remind me how fragile “manageable” really is.

Eventually, thanks to someone at work who went above and beyond, I got set up with health insurance through my job. As a full-time employee, I was supposed to get it in January, but our director's ongoing medical leave delayed all of the things she normally handles in the HR department - which is a lot. I had been fine with waiting... until I wasn't.

The new insurance kicked in April 1st. My Ozempic is now $50 a month - not great, but survivable. I’ll make it work, because I have to.

That’s the part that gets me: everything is “I’ll make it work.” Gas is over $4. Food, utilities - everything keeps climbing. And if you’re a single-income household, there’s no buffer. Just constant calculation. What gets cut, what gets delayed, what you can live without. It makes me angry - this slow erosion of stability, this sense that survival now requires compromise in every direction.

And all of that is sitting on top of everything else. The constant churn of national chaos. The exhaustion of watching leadership fail in real time. The "mad king" constantly taking us to the brink of catastrophic destruction, and the lack of ANY kind of action by our elected officials to fix all the things he's stomped on and broken, like a petulant child in his playroom who's been told that he cannot have a cookie. It's disgusting, and there isn't a single person in government who isn't complicit. The feeling that ordinary people are left holding the weight of decisions they never made - it's become unbearable.

And underneath even that - quieter, but heavier - is this: today would have been Scott’s 55th birthday.

I used to make it special. He loved it, just like a kid. The dinner, the dessert, the attention. Now he’ll always be 52. And somehow, that lands harder this year.

Yesterday, I found a dime on the floor by my desk. A familiar message that he was near. The year on the dime: 2024. The year he died. I laughed - sharp, bitter. “Yeah, I get it.” A reminder. A nudge. A message I didn’t ask for but understood anyway. A subtle, "Tomorrow's my birthday," and his giggle of anticipation. Something I would roll my eyes at and chide, "Are we turning 5?" while ticking off preparations in my head, wanting him to have a wonderful day. His day of birth, which was a gift to me: the birth of my person.

Grief doesn’t get quieter. It just settles in. It's a malignancy that won't kill you unless you let it.

So this is where I am - figuring it out, like everyone else. Quietly adapting. Quietly carrying it. Trying to make something survivable out of something that shouldn’t be this hard. Cumulatively, it really is a lot.

And I can't help but wonder how others manage to survive being dead inside - for years, decades. Because being dead is the only way that I'm alive, and yet when the pain creeps in, I've made the choice to feel all of it instead of finding ways to anesthetize myself.

I had to take today off - not because of the day, but because the side effects of my first Ozempic injection in six weeks have been severe. Let's just leave it at "it's not pretty." My daughter texted me first thing this morning. She's always so in tune with how a day like today lands with her Mama. It's because her pain of loss is as acute as mine. In some ways, she is worse-off than me in terms of acceptance. She said, "I miss him so much, and if it hurts me this bad, I can only imagine how you feel." And then, "I know that somehow, he misses you just as much as you do him."

Maybe.

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There’s something nobody tells you about love when you’re in it - especially the good kind. The rare kind. The kind where you don’t just share a life, you share a language.

If you have that person right now, I need you to understand something: you are standing inside a miracle that you probably think feels like routine.

One day, if that person is gone, it won’t just be the big things you lose.

It will be the end of having somewhere to put your day.

It will be coming home with a story and realizing there’s no one who already knows the cast of characters. No one who understands why that one comment bothered you, or why that one small win actually mattered.

You will lose the person who could look at you after a terrible day and say, “You’re okay. You’re more than okay. You’re a badass bitch, and they’re just… wrong.” And you would believe them - not because you needed reassurance, but because it was them saying it.

When I had a bad day, Scott didn’t try to fix it.

He’d look at me and say, completely serious,

“Do you want me to kill them and dispose of the bodies? I’ll do that for you.”

And I would laugh - because obviously no, please don’t commit a felony on my behalf -but what he was really saying was: I’ve got you. All of you. No matter what.

Then he’d tell me to let it roll. That people are stupid sometimes. That I’m fine. More than fine.

And I believed him. Not because I needed reassurance - but because it was him.

When Scott died, I didn’t just lose my husband.

I lost my best friend.

My witness.

My translator.

The one person who saw every version of me - and stuck around.

Now, when something shakes me, when I start to doubt myself, there’s no one in the world whose voice carries that same authority over my fears. No one to wrap me up and make the doubt feel small again.

And that’s the part that people don’t see.

The loneliness isn’t loud. Sometimes it’s just the absence of being known in real time.

So if you’re sitting next to your person right now - if you know you’re lucky - don’t treat that like background noise.

Pay attention.

Lean in.

Say the thing.

Hold them a little longer.

Because the ordinary moments you think you’ll always have?

Those are the ones you’ll miss the most.

I don’t know how to survive the rest of my life doing this. It feels too heavy. My heart aches. My soul feels torn in two, with one piece hanging onto the past and the other hanging by a thread in this reality.

Maybe after some sleep, I will have shed this desolate feeling and the weight of the day from my shoulders.

To begin another day anew.

Without him.