Hello and welcome. Thank you for being here—and a small request before we begin. If this piece speaks to you, please take a moment to like it. Your click does a lot to help me reach a wider audience. Your support helps more readers find this publication, Tethered Together, and join these important conversations about how we remain human, connected, and hopeful in a world that often gives us reasons to despair.

Start With Gratitude

There is a familiar admonition: Be grateful for life.

It is often spoken as though life itself—regardless of its conditions—should be sufficient cause for celebration. Much has been written about enduring lives that are difficult, painful, or profoundly disappointing. Perhaps even more has been written about finding joy by changing one’s perspective: counting one’s blessings, focusing on the positive, and learning to see the proverbial glass as half-full.

There is wisdom in some of this. Perspective matters. Gratitude can steady us. The way we interpret our lives can sometimes change the experience of living them.

But perspective is not magic. It cannot return the dead, undo a betrayal, reverse an injustice, or make an unsafe world safe. Gratitude cannot always quiet grief. And telling people to search for joy can become cruel when it asks them to deny what they know, minimize what they have endured, or pretend that circumstances causing them pain are somehow acceptable.

What Is Hope?

Like many people—even as someone who works in the trade of hope—I sometimes find myself searching for something upon which to place my own.

What, after all, is hope when the evidence appears to argue against it?

Perhaps hope begins with what we recognize in a child.

A child can hold an entire world inside an idea. Before life teaches them to narrow their expectations, they may believe that they can become anything, travel anywhere, invent what has never existed, or help repair what adults have broken. They are animated by imagination, wonder, and a largely unbounded sense of possibility. The future has not yet hardened around them. It remains open.

This may be what we envy when we speak of childhood innocence—not ignorance of danger, necessarily, but freedom from the accumulated evidence adults carry about disappointment, limitation, cruelty, and loss. A child’s hope has not yet been forced to defend itself against everything that could go wrong.

Hope, then, might be understood as a place within us where possibility remains alive: a space large enough to hold our dreams before we know whether they can be realized. It is not a prediction. It is not proof that life will unfold as we wish. It is our willingness to believe that the future has not been completely decided by the past or the present.

Hopelessness is Understandable

For the adult, however, hope cannot simply mean returning to childhood innocence. We cannot unknow what we know. Mature hope must coexist with knowledge. It must find room beside grief, betrayal, injustice, illness, war, failure, and death.

No one should begrudge a person for feeling hopeless in a world that has given them ample reason to do so.

There are people who have worked hard and still fallen behind. People who have loved faithfully and still been abandoned. People who have prayed and received no answer they could recognize. People who have watched institutions fail, communities fracture, and leaders treat suffering as spectacle or political opportunity. Some have inherited generations of unfinished grief. Others have endured losses so profound that imagining a better future can feel less like hope and more like self-deception.

Sometimes darkness does not “set in” because someone has failed to practice gratitude. Sometimes it enters through wounds that never had the opportunity to heal. Sometimes it is reinforced by repeated evidence that the world is not as fair, safe, or merciful as we were taught to believe.

Hopelessness, in such circumstances, is not necessarily weakness. It may be exhaustion. It may be grief. It may be the mind’s attempt to protect itself from the pain of another disappointment: If I expect nothing, perhaps nothing can devastate me again.

But although hopelessness may be understandable, it cannot be allowed to become sovereign.

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Resisting The Dark Invitation

Darkness has a way of making itself appear complete. It convinces us that what is painful now will always be painful, that what has been lost was all that could ever be found, and that the worst things human beings have done reveal the whole truth about humanity. It collapses the future into the present and asks us to mistake a chapter—even a terrible one—for the entire story.

Resisting that darkness does not require denying it. It requires refusing to let it make every meaning for us.

Here are some practical ways to not just resist the darkness, but to also begin the movement toward hope:

1. Make hope smaller and nearer.

When imagining a better life feels impossible, hope may need to shrink to the dimensions of the next hour. It can be the next meal, the next conversation, the decision to get out of bed, or the possibility that tomorrow may feel slightly different. Small hope is not inferior hope. Sometimes it is the form hope takes while recovering its strength.

2. Borrow hope from others.

There are periods when we cannot generate hope from within ourselves. During those times, we may need people who can hold it on our behalf—not people who dismiss our despair, but people who can sit beside it without becoming consumed by it. Hope can be relational before it becomes personal again.

3. Return to wonder.

Wonder is not childishness. It is the capacity to remain affected by what is beautiful, mysterious, or larger than ourselves. Nature, music, art, movement, spirituality, and genuine human connection can interrupt the illusion that pain is the only reality available to us.

4. Create evidence that another future is possible.

Hope strengthens when it is accompanied by action. Repair something. Plant something. Write something. Help someone. Set a boundary. Begin the application. Make the appointment. Organize with others. Action does not guarantee an outcome, but it reminds us that we are participants in the future rather than merely recipients of it.

5. Grieve what must be grieved.

Some people cannot recover hope because they have been encouraged to move too quickly past despair. Hope is not a substitute for mourning. We may need to name what happened, acknowledge what will not be restored, and honor the version of life we expected to have. Grief properly witnessed can make room for a future that does not depend upon recovering the past.

6. Separate uncertainty from impossibility.

Not knowing how life will improve is different from knowing that it cannot. Darkness frequently disguises uncertainty as certainty: Nothing will change. No one will come. I will always feel this way. Mature hope responds more modestly: I do not know what will happen, but I accept that I do not yet know.

7. Protect what keeps you human.

In a brutal world, tenderness can become an act of resistance. So can laughter, rest, friendship, creativity, generosity, and moral courage. The objective is not to remain untouched by darkness. It is to prevent darkness from transforming us entirely into its likeness.

A Vision of Mature-Childlikeness

Perhaps we do not need to recover the innocence of childhood. Perhaps what we need is to recover its openness—the capacity to look at what does not yet exist and make room for it anyway.

The child says, I can become anything, because they do not yet know all the reasons they cannot.

The hopeful adult says, Something else remains possible, despite knowing many of the reasons it may not.

That is not naïveté. It is courage informed by experience. It is the decision to keep some interior territory from being occupied by despair. Hope does not promise that everything will be restored, that justice will always prevail, or that our dreams will emerge untouched. It asks only that we not declare the future dead while we are still alive to participate in it.

Perhaps this is what it means to resist the darkness: not to deny the night, but to refuse to believe that the night is all there is.

Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect with me.

If this piece resonated with you, please share it with someone who may need a reminder that feeling hopeless is not the same as being beyond hope. I would also love to hear your thoughts in the comments: What gives you hope when the world feels especially dark? Where do you place your dreams when believing in a better future becomes difficult?

Please consider liking this piece and subscribing to Tethered Together, either for free or as a paid subscriber. Every like, comment, share, and subscription helps sustain this work and allows these reflections to reach more people.

Until we meet again, friend, I wish you hope and please, remember to Be Kind To Yourself!

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First, thank you for being here and a small request. Before we begin, if this piece speaks to you, please take a moment to like it. Your support helps more readers find this publication, Tethered Together, and join these important conversations about accountability, healing, and our shared humanity.

There is a familiar notion of “doing the right thing.”

Most of us were raised to believe that, when confronted with a moral decision, there is a correct choice waiting to be made. One road is good and the other is bad. One choice reflects courage, integrity, and generosity; the other reveals weakness, selfishness, or failure.

In therapy, we often identify a pattern called all-or-nothing thinking. It is a cognitive distortion in which people view themselves, others, and situations in absolute, polarized terms. Something is completely good or entirely bad. We are either successful or failures. We are loyal or selfish, courageous or cowardly, moral or immoral. There is little room for contradiction, context, limitation, or gray.

To be transparent, I do believe in the existence of absolute good and absolute evil. There are actions human beings take that are indefensible. The deliberate abuse of a child, an elder, or someone helpless cannot be transformed into something moral through clever language, personal history, or psychological explanation. Context may help us understand an action, but understanding does not automatically make that action acceptable.

Yet most of the moral decisions that torment ordinary people are not made at those absolute extremes.

They occur in the gray.

They arise when two legitimate responsibilities collide. They are made under conditions of scarcity, exhaustion, fear, grief, dependency, limited information, social pressure, or competing loyalties. In such moments, the question is not always whether we will choose good instead of evil. Sometimes the question is which good we will protect, which obligation we will honor, and which loss we are willing—or able—to live with.

Our society frequently forces people into positions where every available choice carries some moral cost.

A parent may have to choose between working overtime and being emotionally present with a child. A caregiver may need to place a loved one in a facility after promising never to do so. A person may have to leave a relationship they still care about because remaining in it is destroying them. An employee may stay silent about an injustice because losing a job would threaten the family’s housing. Someone may be unable to care for an aging parent without sacrificing their health, marriage, finances, or children.

None of these decisions feels entirely right.

Sometimes there is no morally clean option—only competing needs, limited capacity, and consequences that must be carried.

When helping another person threatens your own stability

Imagine that a friend asks to borrow money.

The friend is genuinely struggling. Perhaps rent is overdue, the electricity is about to be disconnected, or the family needs groceries. You have some money saved, and your friend knows it.

On one hand, helping may appear to be the moral choice. We should care for one another. We should not watch someone suffer when we possess the means to intervene. Generosity, solidarity, and compassion are essential human values.

On the other hand, your savings may be the only protection standing between your own household and a future emergency. Your car may need repairs. Your employment may be unstable. Your child may need something. You may have previously loaned this friend money that was never repaid. You may have repeatedly rescued others until your own resources became depleted.

How many times must you help before generosity becomes self-abandonment?

If you give the money and later face an emergency, you may condemn yourself for being irresponsible. If you keep the money and your friend suffers, you may condemn yourself for being selfish. Either choice can be used as evidence against your character.

This is where all-or-nothing thinking becomes cruel. It tells us that a good person would give without hesitation, while a responsible person would protect the household without guilt. But what if you are trying to be both? What if compassion and self-preservation are both moral values?

The painful reality is that we are finite. We possess limited money, time, energy, patience, and emotional capacity. A boundary does not automatically represent an absence of love. Sometimes it reflects recognition that we cannot give away what we need to remain stable.

We can care deeply and still say no.

The wound of morally questionable decisions

Some decisions stay with us long after the moment has passed.

We revisit them mentally, reconstructing the circumstances and imagining alternate endings. We ask what we should have known, whether we should have been stronger, and what a better person would have done. We rationalize, prosecute, defend, and retry the case inside our minds.

Regret can be healthy. It can teach us what matters. It can reveal where our behavior departed from our values and motivate us to repair harm.

But regret can also become a form of captivity.

We may come to believe that continued suffering proves that we understand the seriousness of what happened. We fear that forgiving ourselves would mean declaring the action acceptable. Guilt becomes a moral credential: If I continue to feel terrible, perhaps that proves I am not terrible.

At some point, however, self-punishment stops producing accountability.

It does not repair the relationship. It does not return the money, restore the lost opportunity, undo the betrayal, or recover the time. It simply creates another injured person: the self who must continue living after the decision.

For these moments, I propose something I call Radical Self-Forgiveness.

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What Radical Self-Forgiveness means

Radical Self-Forgiveness does not require us to rationalize our actions. It does not demand that we reconcile every decision with our morality or convince ourselves that we were right.

It does not mean:

• The harm did not matter.

• No one has the right to be angry.

• We should avoid consequences.

• Our intentions erase our impact.

• We are entitled to another person’s forgiveness.

• We should repeat the behavior.

• Every action is excusable because life is difficult.

Radical Self-Forgiveness is a form of acceptance. It is the willingness to relinquish our futile attempt to control what can no longer be changed.

It says:

I did what I did.

The consequences are real.

I may wish I had chosen differently.

I will take responsibility for what belongs to me.

I will repair what remains repairable.

And I will not sentence myself to permanent psychological punishment!

This form of forgiveness is radical because it does not wait for perfect moral clarity. It does not require us to prove that we were innocent. It may occur even when we know that our choice was flawed, fearful, selfish, avoidant, or harmful.

We forgive ourselves not because everything we do is acceptable, but because no human being can build a meaningful life while remaining eternally imprisoned inside the worst thing they have done.

Context is not the same as excuse

A mature moral life requires us to hold more than one truth at a time.

A person may have caused harm and also been frightened.

They may have failed someone and also lacked the resources to succeed.

They may have acted selfishly and also been attempting to survive.

They may have known better in theory but lacked the emotional capacity to act on that knowledge in the moment.

Recognizing context does not erase responsibility. It makes responsibility more accurate.

Without context, we reduce a human being to a single decision. With context, we can examine the fears, beliefs, pressures, limitations, and unmet needs that shaped the choice. That understanding helps prevent repetition.

An excuse says, “I am not responsible because of what happened to me.”

Context says, “I am responsible, and I also need to understand what happened within me if I want to choose differently.”

Forgiveness must not become avoidance

Radical Self-Forgiveness should not be confused with spiritual bypassing or premature absolution.

Before forgiving ourselves, we may need to answer difficult questions:

• What did I actually do?

• Who was affected?

• What part of this belongs to me?

• Have I been minimizing the impact?

• Is there an apology I owe?

• Is there restitution I can make?

• What boundary, skill, or support might prevent repetition?

• Am I seeking forgiveness because I have faced the harm—or because I want to escape discomfort?

Self-forgiveness without accountability can become avoidance. Accountability without self-forgiveness can become self-destruction.

We need both.

Accountability asks us to face backward honestly. Self-forgiveness allows us to live forward responsibly.

A practice of Radical Self-Forgiveness

Radical Self-Forgiveness may involve the following:

1. Name the action without euphemism

Do not soften it into meaninglessness. Say what happened clearly.

“I lied.”

“I abandoned someone who needed me.”

“I stayed when I should have left.”

“I left in a way that caused unnecessary harm.”

“I failed to protect myself.”

“I could not give what someone needed.”

Honesty is the foundation of forgiveness.

2. Separate explanation from exoneration

Ask what conditions influenced your choice without pretending those conditions erased your agency.

Were you afraid? Financially trapped? Exhausted? Grieving? Isolated? Trying to remain safe? Repeating a family pattern? Lacking information or support?

Understanding why is not the same as saying the action was right.

3. Identify what was actually within your control

We often judge our former selves using information, maturity, strength, and distance that became available only afterward.

Ask:

• What did I know then?

• What resources did I have?

• What alternatives could I genuinely see?

• What emotional state was I in?

• What did I believe would happen?

• What could I realistically control?

You may discover that you had more responsibility than you wanted to admit. You may also discover that you had less power than you have been demanding of yourself.

4. Repair what remains repairable

Offer the apology. Return what can be returned. Correct the record. Change the behavior. Accept the boundary another person establishes.

Repair is not a guarantee of reconciliation. The person harmed may not forgive you. Radical Self-Forgiveness does not require them to.

Their forgiveness belongs to them. Your responsibility belongs to you.

5. Grieve what cannot be repaired

Some losses are permanent. Some relationships will not return. Some opportunities are gone. Some people died before we could say what needed to be said.

Forgiveness does not eliminate grief. Sometimes it allows us to grieve honestly because we are no longer using self-hatred to avoid sorrow.

6. Release punishment as proof of morality

Your suffering does not become more meaningful simply because it lasts longer.

Ask yourself:

What do I believe continued punishment accomplishes?

Whom does it help?

What would become possible if I stopped using pain to prove that I care?

7. Live the apology

The strongest apology is not always another conversation. Sometimes it is a changed life.

Become more honest. Establish better boundaries. Ask for help sooner. Stop promising what you cannot provide. Learn to tolerate disappointment. Make decisions that reflect what the experience taught you.

You do not honor the past by remaining broken. You honor it by allowing it to transform how you live.

Forgiving ourselves in an immoral world

Radical Self-Forgiveness is especially necessary in a world that often places morally serious people in impossible situations.

We live within systems that reward exploitation, manufacture scarcity, privatize suffering, and then judge individuals for the compromises they make to survive. People are expected to be endlessly generous without adequate resources, endlessly productive without rest, endlessly available without boundaries, and morally pure inside institutions that are frequently indifferent to human need.

This does not make every decision acceptable. It does mean that our moral judgment should account for the conditions under which human beings are being asked to choose.

Sometimes the right thing is clear.

Sometimes we fail to do it.

Sometimes there are several right things competing with one another.

Sometimes every available choice involves loss.

Radical Self-Forgiveness begins when we stop demanding that our past selves produce a perfect decision from an imperfect situation.

It is not a declaration that we were right.

It is a decision that we are still worthy of becoming better.

You may regret what you did. You may remain accountable for its consequences. You may carry grief because of it for the rest of your life.

But you do not have to hate yourself forever.

Face it.

Name it.

Repair what you can.

Learn what it came to teach you.

And then, with humility, allow yourself to continue living.

Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect with me.

If this piece prompted you to reconsider something for which you have continued to punish yourself, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What might radical self-forgiveness look like in your life? What would it mean to remain accountable for your choices without believing that you must suffer forever because of them?

Please like this piece, share it with someone who may need permission to forgive themselves, and subscribe to Tethered Together for future reflections on mental health, healing, relationships, culture, and our shared humanity.

Until next time, friend, remember to Be Kind To Yourself.

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First, thank you for being here and a small request. Before we begin, if this piece speaks to you, please take a moment to like it. Your support helps more readers find This Publication, Tethered Together and join these conversations.

Culture is one of those words we use with confidence, even when we have not stopped to decide what we mean by it.

We speak of national culture, racial culture, family culture, religious culture, workplace culture, and even the culture of a generation. We use the word to describe our food, music, language, clothing, celebrations, values, manners, and ways of understanding the world.

Culture helps tell us who we are. It locates us within a history and connects us to people who came before us. It gives ordinary practices meaning. A meal becomes an inheritance. A song becomes memory. A gathering becomes belonging. A story becomes a way of carrying knowledge from one generation into the next.

But what else do we place beneath the word culture?

When does something become cultural simply because it has been repeated for a long time?

And when does our reverence for culture prevent us from questioning practices that cause us harm?

The Things We Inherit

None of us enters the world without an inheritance.

Before we can choose our beliefs, we are given a language through which to understand ourselves. We are taught what strength looks like, what respect requires, what emotions are acceptable, how authority should be treated, and what obligations we owe to family and community.

We learn who is permitted to speak and who is expected to remain silent. We learn whether rest must be earned, whether vulnerability is dangerous, whether children can question adults, and whether personal needs should ever take priority over collective expectations.

Some of these lessons carry generations of wisdom. They teach us how to survive, belong, care for one another, and remember who we are.

Others began as adaptations to hardship.

A family shaped by scarcity may learn never to waste anything. A community living under threat may teach its children to remain guarded. People who were denied protection may come to value toughness above tenderness. Those whose survival depended upon obedience may learn that questioning authority is dangerous. A generation that had no room to attend to its emotional pain may teach the next generation to endure without complaint.

These responses may once have been necessary. They may even have helped people survive conditions we can barely imagine.

But a survival strategy can outlive the conditions that created it.

When that happens, we may continue repeating the behavior while forgetting the danger to which it originally responded. Eventually, the adaptation becomes a rule. The rule becomes a ritual. And the ritual becomes something we defend as culture.

Repetition Is Not the Same as Meaning

Not everything we inherit deserves to be discarded. But neither does everything we inherit deserve to be preserved.

There is a difference between practices that connect us to meaning and practices that merely reproduce pain.

There is a difference between honoring our elders and making them immune from accountability.

There is a difference between caring for family and surrendering our personhood to keep the family comfortable.

There is a difference between resilience and never allowing ourselves to rest.

There is a difference between humility and believing that we should make ourselves small.

There is a difference between privacy and the silence that protects abuse.

There is a difference between sacrifice rooted in love and self-abandonment demanded in the name of loyalty.

Yet these distinctions can be difficult to make when a practice has been treated as sacred. To question it may feel like questioning our parents, our ancestors, our faith, or the community that gave us belonging.

We may fear that examination is betrayal.

But perhaps examination is one of the deepest forms of care.

If culture is alive, then it must be capable of reflection. It must be able to respond to new knowledge, changing circumstances, and the fuller humanity of the people who carry it.

Otherwise, culture becomes a museum in which we are expected to live.

The Culture Within Us

We often think about culture as something surrounding us, but culture also shapes the relationship we have with ourselves.

Many of us carry an internal culture built from the messages we repeatedly received.

We may have learned to speak to ourselves harshly because criticism was presented as preparation for the world. We may distrust our own needs because needing anything was associated with weakness. We may feel guilty when resting because our worth was tied to productivity. We may remain in harmful relationships because loyalty was valued more highly than emotional safety.

We may call ourselves lazy when we are exhausted, selfish when we establish boundaries, disrespectful when we speak honestly, or ungrateful when we acknowledge that something hurt us.

Over time, these judgments can begin to sound like our own voice.

We rarely ask who first taught us to speak to ourselves this way.

We simply assume that this is who we are.

But what if some of what we call personality is conditioning? What if some of what we call discipline is fear? What if some of what we call respect is silence? What if some of what we call tradition is unresolved pain traveling through generations?

And what if healing requires more than understanding ourselves as individuals? What if it requires examining the cultural instructions we absorbed about who we were allowed to become?

Culture Is Also Something We Create

We are not merely recipients of culture. We are also its authors.

Every generation decides—consciously or unconsciously—which practices it will carry forward. We preserve some traditions, revise others, and create new ways of belonging.

This does not require rejecting where we come from. It requires developing enough discernment to recognize what remains life-giving.

We can retain communal responsibility without erasing individual needs. We can honor elders while expecting accountability. We can value perseverance without glorifying suffering. We can protect family bonds without concealing harm. We can preserve faith while questioning interpretations that diminish people. We can celebrate resilience while creating lives in which relentless resilience is no longer required.

The question is not simply, “Is this part of my culture?”

The deeper questions are:

What value was this practice meant to protect?

Does it still protect that value?

Who benefits from its continuation?

Who is required to carry its burden?

Does it produce belonging, dignity, and life—or fear, silence, and self-abandonment?

These questions do not weaken culture. They help us separate its wisdom from the wounds that became attached to it.

Reexamining the Culture We Carry

Perhaps culture is not sacred because every inherited practice must remain unchanged.

Perhaps it is sacred because it carries the lives, memories, struggles, creativity, and meaning of people across time. And if it carries human life, then it should remain accountable to human well-being.

We are allowed to love where we come from and still question what we were taught.

We are allowed to honor those who raised us and still name what harmed us.

We are allowed to preserve the rituals that give us belonging and release the ones that demand our disappearance.

We are allowed to ask whether the ways we treat ourselves reflect our deepest values—or merely repeat the conditions under which we learned to survive.

The work is not to become culturally empty. None of us could.

The work is to become more conscious of the culture we are carrying and more intentional about the culture we are creating.

What have you inherited that continues to give you life?

What have you inherited that once protected someone but no longer serves you?

What have you been calling culture that may actually be fear, silence, hierarchy, or unresolved pain?

And what do you want the people who come after you to inherit instead?

We do not dishonor culture by examining it.

We honor it enough to help it grow.

Thank You for taking the time to read and reflect with me.

If this piece prompted you to reconsider something you have inherited or continued in the name of culture, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. What parts of your culture continue to give you life—and what parts are you learning to examine, revise, or release?

Please like this piece, share it with someone who might find meaning in it, and subscribe to Tethered Together for future reflections on culture, identity, healing, and our shared humanity.

Until next time, friend, remember to Be Kind To Yourself.

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Children have a remarkable relationship with joy.

Watch a child whose basic needs are being met.

Give them a cardboard box.

A stick.

A puddle.

Five uninterrupted minutes outside.

They don’t need Tuscany.

They don’t need the corner office.

They don’t need to know where they’ll be in five years.

They don’t even need to know what’s for dinner.

They simply need enough safety to become completely absorbed in the present moment.

That observation has become harder for me to ignore over the years.

As a therapist, I spend much of my time helping adults recover pieces of themselves that somehow got lost along the way. As a professor, I watch brilliant graduate students carry extraordinary levels of anxiety about becoming the “right” kind of counselor. As a consultant, I work with leaders who have achieved many of the goals they once dreamed about, only to find themselves exhausted by maintaining them.

Different people.

Different professions.

Remarkably similar stories.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us stop experiencing joy as something available in the present and begin treating it as something waiting for us in the future.

I’ll be happy...

...after the promotion.

...after I pay off the debt.

...after the vacation.

...after the house.

...after the kids get older.

...after retirement.

Joy becomes deferred.

Not denied.

Just perpetually postponed.

That isn’t entirely our fault.

Children and adults are solving different problems.

Children, ideally, spend their days asking questions like:

“Can we play outside?”

“Can we build a fort?”

“Want to race?”

Adults ask entirely different questions.

“Will I still have a job?”

“Can I afford groceries?”

“What happens if my health declines?”

“Will I ever retire?”

“How am I going to pay for college?”

The developmental task changes.

So does the emotional landscape.

And that’s important to acknowledge because discussions about joy can unintentionally become dismissive.

It would be unfair—even cruel—to suggest that adults simply need to choose happiness while many are navigating financial insecurity, caregiving responsibilities, illness, grief, discrimination, or chronic stress.

But I do wonder whether something else has happened.

Whether, beyond necessity, our culture has quietly redefined what joy requires.

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Capitalism is extraordinarily effective at making us believe that fulfillment always lives one achievement away.

One purchase away.

One promotion away.

One version of ourselves away.

It asks us to exchange today’s contentment for tomorrow’s possibility.

To become people who are always becoming, but rarely arriving.

There is, of course, tremendous value in ambition.

Ambition has built civilizations.

It cures diseases.

It creates art.

It advances science.

It feeds families.

I am not arguing against ambition.

I am arguing against ambition that slowly separates us from ourselves.

The kind that convinces us our lives cannot begin until we have finally accomplished enough.

Children remind us of something most adults have forgotten.

Joy does not always require extraordinary circumstances.

It often requires extraordinary presence.

Research increasingly suggests that many people—particularly younger adults in the United States—report declining well-being, while loneliness and social disconnection have risen. At the same time, some of the strongest predictors of happiness continue to be remarkably ordinary: meaningful relationships, social support, and shared experiences rather than status or consumption.

Perhaps children understand this intuitively.

Perhaps we once did too.

Maybe growing up isn’t simply gaining knowledge.

Maybe it is also losing innocence.

And innocence is expensive.

Knowledge teaches us about injustice.

About suffering.

About mortality.

About bills.

About betrayal.

About the ways the world can disappoint us.

We cannot—and should not—unknow those things.

But we should ask whether wisdom requires surrendering joy.

I don’t think it does.

I think adulthood asks us to make a different choice.

Not between ambition and joy.

But between postponing joy indefinitely and allowing ourselves to experience it along the way.

Children don’t know what their retirement accounts look like.

They don’t compare themselves on LinkedIn.

They don’t spend hours wondering whether they’re behind.

They simply notice that someone else wants to play.

Perhaps that’s not childish.

Perhaps that’s wisdom we slowly forgot.

Maybe the goal isn’t to become childlike in our understanding of the world.

Maybe it’s to become childlike in our willingness to let ordinary moments be enough.

Because if joy is always waiting on the other side of accomplishment...

we may spend our entire lives accomplishing...

without ever arriving.

Perhaps we spend so much of adulthood preparing to live that we forget to actually live.

Children remind us that joy was never meant to be a reward reserved for reaching the finish line. It was always meant to accompany us along the journey.

As adults, we carry responsibilities that children cannot yet understand. We have mortgages, deadlines, illnesses, losses, and people who depend on us. I would never suggest that life is as simple for us as it is for a child.

But I do wonder whether we’ve accepted a bargain without fully examining its cost.

We’ve become increasingly willing to sacrifice today’s joy for tomorrow’s promise.

Sometimes that sacrifice is necessary.

Sometimes it is wise.

But sometimes we’ve simply forgotten that the future we’ve been chasing was never guaranteed in the first place.

Perhaps the lesson children offer us isn’t to become naïve again.

Perhaps it is to remember that joy doesn’t always require extraordinary achievement. More often, it requires enough presence to notice that life is already happening.

If we can recover even a little of that—not by abandoning responsibility, but by refusing to postpone living indefinitely—we may discover that the life we’ve been working so hard to build was waiting for us all along.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read my work. If this essay spoke to you, I’d truly appreciate it if you would click like, leave a comment, and share it with someone who might benefit from it. Those interactions help these conversations reach people far beyond this page.

If you haven’t already, please consider subscribing. Free subscriptions ensure you never miss a post, and paid subscriptions help make it possible for me to continue writing thoughtful, research-informed essays like this one.

I’d especially love to hear from you: What do you think adulthood has taught us about joy—and what do you think children still understand that we’ve forgotten? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments. Until we meet again, Friend, remember to Be Kind To Yourself!!!

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Before You Read...

If you enjoy this piece, I would greatly appreciate it if you would click the like button, leave a comment, and consider sharing it with someone who might find it meaningful. Those simple actions help these essays reach more people and continue conversations that I believe are worth having.

As always, …

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Before we dive in, a quick request. If you find value in these reflections, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, or a share. These small gestures help the publication grow, help the writing reach others who might find something useful in it, and let me know that these conversations are resonating beyond my own thoughts. Thank you for being here and for engaging with the work.

AI makes perfect sense to me.

Perhaps that’s why I am skeptical of the promises being made about it.

As a therapist, consultant, educator, and writer, much of what I do involves taking in information, identifying patterns, making meaning, and generating responses that are hopefully useful. Every day I sit with people and listen to their stories. I gather information. I connect dots. I compare what I am hearing to experience, theory, research, and thousands of previous conversations. Then I attempt to offer something back that creates clarity, insight, or movement.

In that sense, AI feels surprisingly familiar.

It takes in vast amounts of information. It identifies patterns. It synthesizes knowledge. It generates responses. It can organize information faster than I ever could. It can help me think, write, brainstorm, and learn. It has genuine value.

What I do not understand is how quickly many people have moved from acknowledging AI’s value to proclaiming that it will solve many of our most pressing problems.

We are increasingly being told that AI will create an age of abundance. That it will free us from work. That it will increase productivity, reduce burdens, and improve quality of life for everyone.

Maybe.

But history gives me reason to be cautious.

Every major technological advancement has arrived with promises.

Industrialization promised prosperity.

Mechanization promised efficiency.

Computers promised liberation from tedious work.

The internet promised connection and access to information.

Social media promised community.

To be fair, each of these innovations delivered something of value. Life expectancy increased. Information became more accessible. Many forms of labor became easier. Entire industries were created.

But the benefits were not distributed equally.

We also witnessed growing wealth concentration, labor displacement, increased expectations, social fragmentation, and widening gaps between those who controlled the technology and those whose labor was shaped by it.

The machine did not eliminate work.

It often changed what was expected of workers.

This is what makes me pause when I hear conversations about AI.

The promise being sold is that AI will make us more efficient.

But as a therapist, I am frequently holding space for people who are already exhausted by efficiency.

Many are not asking how to become more productive.

They are asking how to slow down.

How to rest.

How to feel less anxious.

How to spend more time with their families.

How to stop feeling like they are constantly falling behind.

How to find meaning in lives increasingly organized around performance, output, and achievement.

At the same time, many people feel pressure to embrace AI precisely because they fear what will happen if they do not.

Workers are being told they must learn AI or risk becoming obsolete.

Organizations are encouraging employees to do more with less.

Entire professions are questioning their future.

The underlying message is often not freedom.

It is survival.

Become more efficient.

Become more competitive.

Become more productive.

Or be replaced.

This strikes me as a strange path toward abundance.

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Perhaps the most important question is not whether AI can make us more productive.

It clearly can.

The more important question is whether productivity and human flourishing are actually the same thing.

I am not convinced they are.

Therapy teaches you certain things about people.

People need food, housing, healthcare, and economic security. Those things matter tremendously.

But people also need belonging.

Purpose.

Friendship.

Love.

Community.

Meaning.

A sense that their lives matter beyond what they produce.

The clients who sit across from me are rarely suffering because they are insufficiently efficient.

More often they are suffering because they feel disconnected—from themselves, from others, from their values, and from the lives they hoped they would be living.

And this brings me to what I believe is the most important distinction between artificial intelligence and human intelligence.

AI can process information.

Human beings experience life.

AI can identify patterns.

Human beings experience grief, joy, love, shame, longing, disappointment, awe, and connection.

AI can tell you what heartbreak is.

It cannot have its heart broken.

AI can describe loss.

It cannot sit at a funeral.

AI can explain attachment.

It cannot love a child.

AI can discuss suffering.

It cannot suffer.

Some will argue that these limitations are precisely why AI is superior. It lacks our biases, our irrationality, our emotional volatility, and our imperfections.

Perhaps.

But I increasingly wonder whether the qualities that make us difficult are also the qualities that make us human.

Therapy has taught me that healing often emerges through imperfection.

Through vulnerability.

Through misunderstanding and repair.

Through relationships that are sometimes messy, frustrating, and incomplete.

Through being known by another human being.

The future may very well involve AI becoming integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives.

I suspect it will help us solve many problems.

I also suspect it will create new ones.

What concerns me is not the technology itself.

What concerns me is our tendency to assume that technological progress automatically produces human progress.

History suggests otherwise.

AI makes perfect sense to me.

What I remain uncertain about is whether making human beings more efficient will make them more fulfilled.

And as a fellow human, I share space with people who are living inside that question.

Thank you for reading.

I continue to be humbled that people choose to spend a few minutes of their day engaging with these reflections. Whether you agree, disagree, or find yourself somewhere in between, I welcome your thoughts. Some of the most meaningful insights emerge not from certainty, but from thoughtful conversation.

If this piece resonated with you, I would appreciate a like, comment, share, or subscription. Those small acts help this community grow and allow these conversations to reach others who may be wrestling with similar questions.

As always, Until we meet again, friend, Be Kind To yourself!

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Before you dive in, I’d like to ask a small favor. This is one of my longer pieces. It tackles difficult questions about identity, power, race, class, belonging, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and why we matter. Whether you ultimately agree, disagree, or find yourself somewhere in between, I hope you’l…

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“GET OFF YOUR PHONE!!!”

You’ve heard it before.

Maybe from a parent.
A teacher.
A partner.
A friend.
A stranger online ironically typing it from their own device.

Maybe you’ve said it yourself while simultaneously checking a notification.

It has become the battle cry of a generation that feels something slipping away but cannot fully explain what it is. A desperate attempt to rescue something human before it disappears entirely beneath glass screens, LED light, dopamine loops, and algorithmic seduction.

And yet, despite all the warnings, despite documentaries, studies, think-pieces, and rising screen-time reports, we continue scrolling.

Not because we are weak.
Not because we are stupid.
But because the phone is no longer simply a tool.

It is culture now.

That may be the part we are still struggling to admit.

The conversation around phones is often framed as a moral failure:
People are distracted,
Kids do not go outside,
Nobody talks anymore,
Attention spans are shrinking,
Families sit at the same table while staring into separate worlds.

And all of that is true.

But I think something much larger is happening beneath the surface.

The phone did not merely interrupt culture.

It became the next phase of it.

For most of human history, culture was geographic.
It belonged to places.
Villages.
Tribes.
Neighborhoods.
Churches.
Nations.
Families.

Culture was inherited through proximity.

You learned how to speak, behave, celebrate, grieve, flirt, worship, joke, and dream from the people physically surrounding you. Even disagreement required presence. Community required embodiment. You had to be somewhere to belong somewhere.

Then came globalization.

Borders became more porous.
Trade accelerated.
Migration expanded.
The world became increasingly interconnected.

And then came the internet.

At first, it felt revolutionary in the best possible way. Information became democratized. Voices previously marginalized suddenly had platforms. Communities could form across oceans. People isolated by geography, disability, race, sexuality, religion, or ideology could finally find each other.

The internet promised connection.

And in many ways, it delivered.

But somewhere along the way, connection became replacement.

The internet did not merely expose us to different cultures.
It began dissolving them.

A teenager in Seattle, Lagos, Seoul, São Paulo, and London may now consume the same memes, slang, beauty standards, political outrage, music, aesthetics, and humor within the same hour.

We call this multiculturalism.

But is it?

Or are we witnessing the emergence of the first truly global monoculture disguised as diversity?

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That question feels uncomfortable because we like to imagine cultures peacefully coexisting, each preserved and honored equally. But history does not really support that fantasy.

Culture has always been competitive.

Languages replace other languages.
Empires absorb traditions.
Religions spread by persuasion, force, or survival.
Economic systems reshape values.
New generations reject old rituals and create new ones.

Every culture, in some way, believes it offers “something better.”

That is part of how culture evolves.

And perhaps this digital culture believes the same.

Maybe that is why “Get off your phone” increasingly feels less like practical advice and more like resistance against inevitability.

Because what exactly are we asking people to return to?

The old world?

The one where neighbors knew each other?
Where kids played outside until sunset?
Where boredom existed long enough to create imagination?
Where conversations unfolded without interruption?
Where eye contact mattered more than content creation?

Many people romanticize that world now, partly because they can feel its absence. I readily admit that I do too.

But honesty requires us to admit something else:
The old world was not universally beautiful.

There were people excluded from it.
Controlled by it.
Silenced within it.
Many of the same technologies we criticize today gave voice, visibility, safety, and opportunity to people who previously had none.

So this is not a simplistic argument for regression.
This is not nostalgia masquerading as wisdom.

This is about tension.

The tension between what we are gaining and what we are losing.

COVID accelerated this tension dramatically.

Before the pandemic, digital life was growing.
After the pandemic, it became normalized as primary life.

Work became virtual.
School became virtual.
Friendships became virtual.
Dating became virtual.
Therapy became virtual.
Funerals became virtual.
Community became virtual.

We adapted because we had to.

But adaptation has consequences.

Somewhere during that period, many of us quietly stopped asking:
“Is this healthy?”

And started asking:
“Is this efficient?”

Efficiency won. It almost always does.

And now here we are:
Half-human,
Half-interface,
Moving through a civilization where people document experiences more than they inhabit them.

We photograph sunsets instead of watching them.
Record concerts instead of hearing them.
Send memes to people sitting beside us.
Reach for our phones during silence as though stillness itself has become intolerable.

Even solitude has been colonized.

The phone fills every gap:
every moment of waiting,
every elevator ride,
every bathroom trip,
every uncomfortable emotion,
every hint of boredom,
every existential question.

And perhaps that is why this moment feels spiritually significant.

Because the issue is no longer screen-time alone.

The issue is mediation.

We increasingly experience life through something else.

Through filters.
Algorithms.
Feeds.
Metrics.
Performances.
Curated identities.

The phone is no longer something we use occasionally.

It is becoming the place where many of us primarily exist.

Which raises an uncomfortable possibility:

Maybe the phone is not disrupting humanity. Maybe it is reshaping what humanity becomes.

That thought terrifies people. Especially those of us old enough to remember the transition.

We remember the before.

And people loyal to “before” often feel trapped between two worlds:
one disappearing,
one emerging.

We instinctively believe the old way was more human.
More grounded.
More real.

Maybe it was.

Or maybe every generation says that while watching the next one evolve into something unfamiliar.

Still, even if this transformation is inevitable, inevitability does not eliminate consequence.

Something is being lost.

Attention.
Patience.
Presence.
Depth.
Embodied community.
Silence.
Observation.
The ability to simply sit with ourselves without stimulation.

And perhaps most tragically:
the ability to disappear.

Because now we are always reachable.
Always visible.
Always performing.
Always consuming.
Always connected.
Always “on.”

Human beings were never designed for this level of psychological exposure.

Yet here we are anyway.

Scrolling toward whatever comes next.

So yes.

GET OFF YOUR PHONE!!!

Not because technology is evil.
Not because the past was perfect.
Not because culture should never evolve.

But because we should at least have enough awareness to ask what this evolution is costing us before we surrender completely to it.

And maybe the strangest part of all this…

is that you are probably reading this on your phone right now.

And honestly?

So am I.

Thank you for reading.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d genuinely appreciate you liking, sharing, commenting, and subscribing. If my writing has been meaningful to you and you would like to support this work more directly, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

More than anything, I hope this reflection encourages you to slow down long enough to examine not only your relationship with your phone, but your relationship with attention, presence, culture, and yourself.

Perhaps the question is not simply whether technology is changing us.

Perhaps the real question is whether we are changing consciously.

Until we meet again, Friend,

Be Kind To Yourself!

Before we begin, if this piece resonates with you, I’d genuinely appreciate you taking a moment to like, share, and comment on it. Those small actions help support my writing more than many people realize and help these reflections reach others who may need them.

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Before you begin, if this piece resonates with you, I’d truly appreciate you taking a moment to like it. Your engagement genuinely helps support my writing and allows these reflections to reach more people. Thank you for being here.

Across America, churches are closing.

Sanctuaries that once held weddings, funerals, baptisms, potlucks, choirs, grief, confession, recovery small groups and other forms of community gatherings now sit half-full or completely abandoned. Some have become coffee shops. Others luxury apartments. Some simply sit quietly, their stained-glass windows still intact while the people who once filled the pews slowly disappear. Some of the parishioners moved to new communities, some simply stopped coming, and others found other forms of “worship.”

At the same time, another kind of building is thriving.

At 5:00 AM, parking lots outside gyms begin to fill. Those are the folk who prefer to beat the rush. There are also those who prefer to go around midday. And, of course, the evening and nighttime warriors who get theirs after work.

People arrive carrying gallon water jugs, gym bags, headphones, yoga mats, lifting belts, emotional burdens, loneliness, ambition, heartbreak, anxiety, shame, hope, and exhaustion. Some come before work. Some after putting their children to bed. Some arrive in silence. Some are greeted by name before they even check in.

And increasingly, I find myself wondering:

The church may not be disappearing altogether.
But perhaps many of its functions are being relocated.

The gym is becoming one of the last places where modern people consistently gather in pursuit of transformation.

This is not an indictment of Christianity, nor is it praise of gym culture as some superior replacement for religion. I grew up in church. I understand the beauty of faith, prayer, worship, and spiritual community. Churches have long provided people with meaning, comfort, accountability, community, moral grounding, and a place to bring both suffering and hope.

But I also think we underestimate how deeply human beings need ritual, belonging, witness, structure, and shared struggle.

And when traditional institutions weaken or become compromised, those needs do not disappear.

They simply migrate.

The church once offered rhythm.

Tuesday prayer meetings.

Wednesday Bible study.
Sunday service.
Evening prayer.
Choir rehearsal.
Communion.
Tithes and offerings.
Testimony.
Fellowship halls full of laughter and food after service.

Life was not merely individualized. It was communal. People gathered routinely around shared beliefs, shared language, shared suffering, and shared aspirations about who they were becoming.

Modern life has fractured much of that.

Many people no longer know their neighbors. Families are geographically scattered. Civic organizations have weakened. Third spaces have disappeared. Loneliness has become so normalized that people now speak about isolation as though it were merely an unfortunate side effect of adulthood rather than a genuine public health crisis.

And yet, human beings still ache for congregation.

So we gather elsewhere.

Increasingly, we gather at the gym.

Think about the parallels.

We pay our monthly offerings (dues).
We arrive faithfully at designated times.
We wear garments associated with the culture.
We adopt common language:
discipline,
consistency,
accountability,
growth,
transformation.

There are elders.
Evangelists.
Disciples.
Testimonies.

People speak openly about how “the gym saved my life.”

And often, they mean it.

Not simply because of physical health, but because the gym gave them structure when life felt chaotic.
Community when they felt isolated.
Ritual when life lacked meaning.
A place to put grief.
A place to metabolize anxiety.
A place to suffer productively.

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For many people, the gym has become emotional regulation disguised as fitness.

You see it everywhere.

The man processing divorce beneath a squat rack.
The woman reclaiming ownership of her body after trauma.
The exhausted father running on a treadmill before sunrise because it is the only hour of the day that belongs solely to him.
The college student fighting depression through routine and movement.
The aging athlete trying to negotiate mortality one workout at a time.

And unlike many other modern spaces, gyms still create repeated physical proximity between human beings.

People begin recognizing one another.
They notice absences.
They exchange encouragement.
They spot strangers during heavy lifts.
They share routines, advice, pain, victories, injuries, and aspirations.

For some, these are among the only consistent non-transactional interactions they experience all week.

The modern gym also reflects something deeper about the psychological condition of our time.

We live in an era where many people feel politically powerless, spiritually fragmented, economically anxious, socially disconnected, and chronically overwhelmed. Much of life now feels abstract and unstable.

But the gym offers measurable progress.

Weight moved.
Miles completed.
Strength gained.
Endurance improved.

Relationships built and nurtured.

In a world that often feels chaotic, the gym offers certainty:
If I show up consistently, something changes.

There is comfort in that.

But the comparison is not perfect.

The gym inherited many of the functions of the church, but not always its depth.

Gyms can become performative.
Narcissistic.
Consumeristic.
Obsessed with aesthetics rather than wholeness.
People can still feel profoundly lonely there.

And unlike healthy spiritual communities at their best, gyms do not always teach people how to care for one another beyond performance, appearance, or self-optimization.

Still, I think something important is being revealed here.

Human beings were never designed merely to consume content and exist in isolation.

We long for ritual.
For transformation.
For discipline.
For witness.
For places where suffering becomes meaningful.
For spaces that remind us we are becoming something.

Perhaps that is why churches and gyms feel emotionally connected in ways we rarely discuss.

Both ask people to come as they are.
Both promise some form of transformation.
Both rely on repetition, faith, discipline, and community.
Both become sanctuaries for people trying to survive the weight of being human.

Maybe what many people miss is not religion itself.

Maybe what we miss is belonging.

Maybe we miss gathering with people who recognize us.
Maybe we miss rituals that anchor us.
Maybe we miss spaces where pain is shared instead of hidden.
Maybe we miss feeling witnessed while we struggle to become.

The church once held many of those functions for millions of people.

Increasingly, the gym now does.

We did not stop believing.

We simply moved the altar.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read and reflect with me.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d greatly appreciate you liking, sharing, and commenting on it. These conversations matter, and your engagement helps this work reach others who may need it.

If you have not already subscribed, I’d love to have you join this growing community. And if you’d like to support my work more directly, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Friend, until we meet again,

Be Kind To Yourself!

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For those who may be new here—my name is Jackie. I’m a therapist, consultant, and writer, and much of my work sits at the intersection of mental health, culture, and the systems we live within. I’m interested in how the stories we inherit shape the lives we end up living.

Before we begin—if you find value in this piece, I…

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Before you get into this—if this resonates at any point, I’d appreciate you taking a moment to like the piece. It helps the work reach more people who may need it.

At what point does awareness become distortion?

Not awareness of the world—
but awareness of yourself.

When does learning about other ways of being begin to quietly reshape how you understand your own?

And more importantly—

when did you start trusting that new lens more than the one you were raised with?

When Does Culture Stop Being Lived and Start Being Interpreted?

In my work as a therapist—and in my work with organizations and teams navigating culture—I’ve seen this pattern more times than I can count.

People don’t come in saying:

“I’m having an identity crisis because I’ve internalized competing cultural frameworks.”

They come in saying:

• “I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

• “I don’t know why this feels wrong.”

• “I feel stuck between two ways of being.”

And underneath that is often something deeper:

A person who has begun to interpret themselves through a lens that was never originally theirs.

Because for most of us, culture is not something we analyze.

It is something we inhabit.

It shows up in:

• how we speak

• how we love

• how we show respect

• how we regulate emotion

• how we understand our role in relation to others

It is not explained.
It is assumed.

Until it isn’t.

Until you are exposed to a different system.

And then something shifts.

What was once instinctive becomes observable.
What was once natural becomes questionable.

And the question begins to form:

Is this who I am—or just how I was raised?

What Happens When One Culture Becomes the Reference Point?

Historically, dominant cultures don’t just exist alongside others—they define the standard.

In the United States, that standard has largely been shaped by white, Western, individualistic norms.

Not just socially—but structurally.

In:

• education

• healthcare

• psychology

• professional environments

There are embedded assumptions about what is:

• “healthy”

• “appropriate”

• “well-adjusted”

And over time, those assumptions become invisible.

They begin to feel like truth.

But what if they’re not truth?

What if they’re cultural?

How Did We Decide What “Healthy” Looks Like?

As a clinician, this is something I sit with often.

Modern psychology—particularly Western models—places strong emphasis on:

• individual autonomy

• emotional articulation

• boundary-setting

• self-expression

And again—these are valuable.

But they are not universal.

In many cultures, health is expressed through:

• interdependence

• restraint

• role fulfillment

• collective responsibility

So when someone from one system enters another, what happens?

Are they being understood—or reinterpreted?

And when they begin to reinterpret themselves—

are they evolving, or being reshaped?

Is This Growth—or Is It Translation?

When you begin to assess your culture of origin through a dominant framework, meaning starts to shift.

What was once:

• respect can become submission

• loyalty can become enmeshment

• restraint can become emotional repression

But is that what those things actually are?

Or are they being translated into a language that doesn’t quite hold them?

Because translation is never neutral.

Something is always lost.
Something is always altered.

Where Does Adaptation Come From?

We often talk about adaptation as a form of growth.

And sometimes, it is.

But in my experience—both clinically and in organizational spaces—adaptation often begins as something else:

necessity.

If your natural way of being is misunderstood, dismissed, or penalized…

what do you do?

You adjust.

You code-switch.

You learn:

• when to speak

• how to speak

• what parts of yourself to emphasize

• what parts to soften

And over time, this becomes normalized.

It gets reframed as:

• professionalism

• emotional intelligence

• cultural competence

But underneath it, for many, is something much more basic:

survival.

If Code-Switching Is So Common, Why Do We Treat It Like an Exception?

If large groups of people must constantly adjust how they show up depending on the room—

what does that say about the room?

We often frame code-switching as a skill.

But it is also a signal.

A signal that:

• authenticity is conditional

• understanding is not evenly distributed

• some ways of being are centered, while others are translated

So then the question becomes:

Is the individual adapting—or is the environment failing to expand?

What Does Integration Actually Require?

We like to believe that integration is mutual.

That cultures come together and enrich one another.

But historically, integration has rarely been symmetrical.

More often:

• one culture becomes dominant

• the other becomes adaptive

One remains intact.
The other negotiates.

So what is the cost of that negotiation?

What Gets Lost in the Process?

Loss does not always look dramatic.

Sometimes it is quiet.

It shows up in:

• the way you begin to edit yourself

• the way you hesitate before expressing something natural

• the way certain parts of you feel “out of place”

And over time, you may not even notice what has changed.

Until you ask:

What have I let go of without realizing it?

Can You Hold Multiple Ways of Being Without Losing Yourself?

This is where the work becomes more complex.

Because the answer is not to reject one culture in favor of another.

And it is not to romanticize where you come from without question.

The work is to develop awareness:

• When am I adapting intentionally?

• When am I defaulting to what feels acceptable?

• What parts of me are still fully intact?

And perhaps most importantly—

Which version of me feels most like home?

Final Question

If you were not measuring yourself against any dominant standard—

what would you still believe about who you are?

Thank you for reading.

If this resonated with you, I’d really appreciate you taking a moment to:

• Like the post (it helps more people see it)

• Share your thoughts in the comments

• Share it with someone who might connect with it

• Subscribe if you haven’t already—and consider becoming a paid subscriber if you’d like to support this work and help me continue writing more consistently

Wherever you might be on this journey, and however you might be contending with your own cultural conflict, Friends, remember to Be Kind To Yourselves.

There was a time when the distance between us was small. By us, I mean human beings.

Not physically—we’ve always been spread across land and language—but existentially. There was less that separated us in how we lived, what we needed, and what we were striving for. Survival, community, belonging. These were not abstract concepts. They were shared realities.

And because of that, when we looked at one another, we were not confronted with endless difference.

We saw reflection.

Not perfect sameness—race, gender, culture, and role have always existed—but enough familiarity to recognize ourselves in each other. Enough overlap that another person’s life did not feel like a threat, a comparison, or a referendum on our own.

Their existence reassured ours.

Something has shifted.

And we feel it, even if we don’t always have language for it.

We are now more connected than at any other point in human history. We can reach across cities, countries, continents—instantly. A message, a post, a comment, a DM.

Connection, it would seem, has never been easier.

And yet, we are more disconnected than ever.

What we call “connection” today is often exposure.

We are not just interacting with people—we are constantly witnessing them. Their lives. Their bodies. Their relationships. Their success. Their happiness. Their pain, curated and filtered into something consumable.

We don’t just know people anymore.

We compare with them.

We measure against them.

We imagine ourselves through them.

And slowly, something begins to fracture.

In my work as a therapist, I see this fracture all too frequently.

It shows up as anxiety that doesn’t quite make sense.

Insecurity that feels disproportionate to reality.

A persistent feeling of being behind, not enough, or out of alignment with a life that is somehow happening everywhere else.

People are not just asking, “Who am I?”

They are asking:

• Am I doing enough?

• Am I attractive enough?

• Am I successful enough?

• Am I living the life I’m supposed to be living?

And the “standard” they are measuring against is not one person.

It is everyone.

And that is a weight too difficult for any person to bear!

This is the crisis.

We were not built to process this many identities at once.

At earlier points in our existence, the number of people we compared ourselves to was limited—family, community, tribe. The range of possibilities for who we could be was narrower, but also more grounded.

Now, the possibilities are infinite.

And so are the comparisons.

We have moved from a world where identity was formed in relationship…

to one where identity is constructed in contrast.

And contrast is unstable.

Because no matter who you are, there will always be someone who appears to be:

• more successful

• more attractive

• more fulfilled

• more certain

Even if that appearance is incomplete or entirely curated.

So instead of grounding ourselves in who we are, we begin to orbit around who we are not.

What makes this more complex is that this shift has come through progress.

Industrialization expanded opportunity.
Technology expanded access.
Social platforms expanded visibility.

None of these things are inherently bad.

But they have made us more differentiated than ever before.

Different lifestyles.
Different identities.
Different beliefs.
Different definitions of success.

And while diversity can be enriching, it also introduces something else:

Uncertainty.

When there are too many ways to be, it becomes harder to know which one is yours.

And when you are constantly exposed to how others are being, it becomes harder to feel settled in your own way of being.

So what do we do?

We search for grounding.

Sometimes that looks like a return.

You see it in the cultural language emerging around us:

• People wanting to “go off-grid”

• A renewed emphasis on in-person connection

• Movements like “tradwife,” which, whether agreed with or not, reflect a desire for clarity, structure, and defined roles

These are not just trends.

They are signals … a return to something more organic … they are rebellion!

Signals that people are overwhelmed by the openness of modern identity and are searching for something that feels stable, rooted, and known.

There is a genuine longing underneath all of this.

A longing not necessarily to go backward…

but to feel connected in a way that is not performative, comparative, or mediated.

To be seen without being measured.

To exist without constantly being evaluated.

To relate without the quiet pressure of being observed.

The irony is this:

We built systems to bring us closer together.

And in many ways, they have made us more distant from ourselves.

This does not mean the answer is to abandon technology or reject progress.

But it does mean we need to be more intentional about how we engage with it.

We have to ask:

• Where am I forming my identity?

• Who am I comparing myself to?

• What am I consuming, and how is it shaping how I see myself?

And perhaps most importantly:

Where in my life do I experience connection that is real, grounded, and unfiltered?

Because the crisis is not just that we are disconnected from each other.

It is that we are becoming disconnected from ourselves.

And maybe the work is not to return to a past version of humanity…

but to reclaim the parts of connection that made us feel human in the first place.

Thank you for taking the time to sit with this.

If something in this resonated with you—if it stayed with you, or put language to something you’ve been feeling—I’m glad you’re here.

If you’re open to it, I’d appreciate you taking a moment to:

• like this piece (it helps more people find it)

• share it with someone it might resonate with

• or leave a comment—I read them, and they genuinely shape where I go next

And if you’d like to continue exploring ideas like this, feel free to subscribe. I’d also appreciate if you considered becoming a paid subscriber.

I’ve also recently created a paid section, The Inner Room, where I plan to go deeper and write more directly. If you find value in my work and want to support it, becoming a paid subscriber helps me move closer to doing this more fully.

Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

More soon. Until then, friends, Be Kind To Yourselves!

The lights are already on.

The stage has long before been built.
The script has been written—revised, rehearsed, performed across centuries.

And now, quietly, almost imperceptibly…

The casting has begun.

Every Empire Needs a Story, a play … a Grand Production.

No empire survives without a narrative.

Not just power—but purpose.
Not just dominance—but justification.

America’s story has always been one of paradox.

A nation born proclaiming freedom…
on land taken through the erasure of Indigenous life.

A country that would come to speak of liberty…
while holding millions in bondage.

A solitary nation under God…
still searching for a moral center worthy of the words it speaks.

A people convinced of their exception…
yet bound by the same patterns that have undone empires before them.

A promise, powerful and unfinished…
caught between what it has been, what it claims to be, and what it has yet to become.

This is not a footnote.

This is the origin.

The original sin was not simply violence—
it was the ability to narrate that violence as destiny.

The First Role: The Hero

Every empire casts itself as the hero.

America did not just grow into power—it grew into identity.

There were moments—real ones—where the script seemed to bend toward redemption:

• Abraham Lincoln and the abolition of slavery

• Reconstruction’s brief, fragile attempt at reimagining democracy

• The New Deal, where Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the role of government in caring for its people

• The defeat of fascism in World War II

• The Civil Rights Movement, forcing the country to confront itself

These were not illusions.

They were interruptions.

Moments where America looked in the mirror and chose—however briefly—to become something better.

And from these moments, a mythology solidified:

• America as the good guy

• The global protector

• The defender of democracy

• The promise of something better

The Rise to Global Power

Power, once accumulated, must be maintained.

The 20th century positioned America not just as a nation—but as an empire in all but name.

Under leaders like Roosevelt, America did not just rebuild itself—it reshaped the world:

• Economic dominance

• Military reach

• Cultural influence

• Institutional authority

America became the center of gravity.

And with that came something even more powerful than force:

Narrative control.

The Illusion Holds—Until It Doesn’t

For decades, the story held.

Even as contradictions remained.

Even as:

• Black Americans continued to face systemic violence

• Indigenous communities remained erased from the national imagination

• Foreign interventions destabilized regions under the banner of “freedom”

The narrative persisted.

Because narratives don’t collapse when they are challenged.

They collapse when they can no longer be maintained.

The Shift: When the Hero Becomes the Villain

Something is changing.

Not all at once.
Not dramatically.

But undeniably.

Internationally:

• Allies are questioned, strained, or abandoned

• Global leadership feels transactional rather than principled

• Trust erodes

Domestically:

• Housing becomes unattainable

• Mental health deteriorates

• Healthcare remains inaccessible

• Work consumes life, but does not sustain it

The promises feel… thinner.

The gap between what America says it is—
and what people experience—

is widening.

And So the Script Changes

When the story begins to fail…

The roles must be reassigned.

This is where we are now.

A casting call.

Who Are You in This Story?

Every system in decline requires participants.

Not just leaders.

People.

Some are cast as:

• Villains – those blamed for the system’s failures

• Saviors – those promising restoration

• Believers – those still clinging to the old narrative

• Critics – those calling out the contradictions

But most of us?

We are cast as something else.

Extras

Background.

Movement without agency.

Present—but not powerful.

• We go to work.

• We pay our bills.

• We scroll.

• We argue.

• We vote.

• We disengage.

We participate in the system…

Without shaping it.

The Comfort of the Role

There is a strange comfort in being an extra.

No responsibility for the plot.
No burden of authorship.

Just presence.

And for many, there is something deeper:

Dependence.

We need the system.

Even when it fails us.

Especially when it fails us.

Because stepping outside the script feels riskier than staying in a flawed one.

Our Complicity

This is the part we rarely name.

Empires do not sustain themselves on power alone.

They sustain themselves on participation.

• On belief.

• On silence.

• On adaptation.

We:

• Normalize what once felt unacceptable

• Adjust to what once felt temporary

• Accept what once felt impossible

Not because we are weak.

But because we are human.

And humans adapt.

What Happens Next?

History offers possibilities, not guarantees.

Empires do not all fall the same way.

Some collapse violently.
Some reform.
Some slowly fade into something unrecognizable.

The question is not:

• Is America declining?

The question is:

• What role will we play in what comes next?

Because This Is the Truth

The casting call is already underway.

Roles are being assigned—
by systems, by narratives, by power.

But there is one role that is never offered.

The Author

That role is taken.

Or it is not.

So I Leave You With This

Are you an observer?

A participant?

An extra?

Or something else entirely?

Because if this is, in fact, the slow unraveling of an empire…

Then the question is not whether a story is being told.

It is:

Who gets to write it.

Thank You!

I know things feel uncertain right now—maybe even unsettling in ways that are hard to name.

If you’re feeling that, you’re not alone.

But uncertainty does not have to lead to paralysis. It can lead to clarity. To awareness. To choice.

Stay present. Stay thoughtful. Stay engaged.

If this piece resonated, I invite you to like, subscribe, and share it with someone who might need to sit with it, and be part of the conversation.

We still have a role to play in how this story unfolds.

Until we meet again, friends, Be Kind To Yourselves!!!

Costco Is a Grocery Store Now

What a Warehouse Club Reveals About the Quiet Shrinking of the American Middle Class

Costco is a grocery store now.

Not officially. Not in the way a Safeway or Kroger is. The building still looks the same. The carts are still oversized. The pallets still rise in tall, industrial stacks that signal abundance.

But functionally—behaviorally—it has become something else.

People stop there on their way home from work. Families go multiple times a month. Some go weekly, picking up just enough to get through the next few days.

The warehouse that once represented buying in bulk now serves a different purpose:

Buying what you can afford right now.

Costco wasn’t built for that.

The Old Math

Warehouse clubs were built on a specific version of the American middle class—one with financial breathing room.

You paid the membership. You made the drive. You pushed a massive cart through wide aisles and left with a month’s worth of life stacked in oversized packages.

You didn’t go every week.

You went when it was time to restock the house.

And if you were like most families, there was a number that lived in your head.

Two hundred dollars.

That number meant something. It wasn’t just a total—it was a signal.

A full cart.
A stocked pantry.
A freezer with options.
A sense that you wouldn’t need to think about groceries again for a while.

Two hundred dollars meant distance.

Distance from the next trip.
Distance from running out.
Distance from the quiet, recurring stress of daily consumption.

Bulk buying wasn’t just about saving money.

It was about stability.

Spend more today so you can worry less tomorrow.

That equation only works when you have enough margin to do it.

What Changed

That margin has been shrinking for a long time.

Not all at once. Not in a way that announces itself.

But steadily.

Housing costs more.
Food costs more.
Healthcare, childcare, insurance, utilities—each one quietly taking a larger share of income.

Wages have risen for some people, but rarely at the same pace as the cost of living.

And when the space between what you earn and what you must spend gets tighter, something shifts.

Not dramatically.

But behaviorally.

You adjust.

Maybe you buy fewer items.
Maybe you skip a few things.
Maybe you stretch what you already have.

Or maybe you come back next week.

The Shift You Don’t Notice at First

There wasn’t a moment where everyone decided, “Costco is a grocery store now.”

No announcement. No redesign. No visible change.

The shelves didn’t shrink.
The packages didn’t get smaller.
The logic of the store didn’t change.

What changed was the margin people were bringing into it.

Bulk buying requires liquidity. It requires the ability to spend more today in order to save over time.

When that ability narrows—even slightly—the behavior changes.

Instead of stocking up for the month, people buy what they can afford this week.

Instead of one large trip, they make several smaller ones.

And slowly, almost invisibly, the warehouse becomes something it was never meant to be.

A grocery store.

Walking Through Abundance

Costco still feels like abundance.

That’s part of what makes the shift so easy to miss.

You walk in and everything is oversized.
Forty-eight packs of granola bars.
Massive bags of rice.
Multi-gallon containers of oil.
Stacks of paper goods that look like preparation for a natural disaster.

The space itself communicates plenty.

But people move through that abundance differently now.

You pick something up.
You turn it over.
You look at the price.

You do the math.

Sometimes you put it in the cart.

Sometimes you put it back.

Not because it isn’t worth it.

Because you’re not sure you can spare it today.

And that distinction matters.

The New Calculation

The model still works.

In many cases, buying in bulk still saves money over time.

But it assumes something that’s become less common:

The ability to prioritize long-term savings over short-term cash flow.

When that ability shrinks, the calculation changes.

Bulk starts to feel like commitment.

A larger purchase isn’t just a deal—it’s a decision about whether you can afford to tie up that money right now.

So people adjust.

They buy less.
They spread purchases out.
They come back sooner.

And over time, the rhythm of the store changes.

The occasional trip becomes a routine stop.

When the Future Gets Smaller

Bulk buying is, in a quiet way, a belief in the future.

It assumes that next week—and the week after—will be stable enough to justify spending more today.

That your income will arrive as expected.
That your expenses will remain predictable enough.
That the risk of buying ahead is low.

When people shift away from that pattern, it’s not because they forgot how bulk discounts work.

It’s because the future feels tighter.

Shorter.

More uncertain.

Planning shifts from a month ahead to a week ahead.

Stocking the pantry becomes managing the next few meals.

These are small adjustments.

But taken together, they signal something larger.

A shrinking margin doesn’t just change how people shop.

It changes how people think about time, risk, and stability.

The Store Didn’t Change

Costco didn’t change.

The hot dog is still $1.50.
The rotisserie chicken is still $4.99.
The model still assumes that buying more now should save you money later.

If anything, Costco has tried to preserve the old math.

But the people pushing the carts live in a different economy now.

One where the gap between income and necessity is narrower than it used to be.

And when that gap shrinks, behavior follows.

The warehouse trip becomes a weekly errand.

The bulk run becomes a grocery run.

A Cart Full of Signals

If you want to understand the health of an economy, you can read reports.

But sometimes the clearest signals show up somewhere else.

In parking lots.
In checkout lines.
In the quiet routines of everyday life.

The way people shop tells you something about the space between their income and their security.

It tells you how far into the future they feel comfortable planning.

It tells you how tightly their decisions are tied to the next paycheck.

For a long time, warehouse stores reflected a kind of American confidence.

Today, the shelves are still full.
The carts are still big.

But more and more people move through them differently.

They buy what they can.
They plan shorter.
They come back sooner.

Not a collapse.

But a narrowing.

Costco Is a Grocery Store

This isn’t an indictment of Costco.

If anything, Costco stayed the same.

What changed is everything around it.

The wages.
The costs.
The margin.

The fact that many people now shop there week to week doesn’t say much about the store.

It says something about the country.

About how little room exists between what people earn and what they need.

About how even abundance can begin to feel like rationing.

And sometimes, the clearest way to see that shift isn’t in a report or a statistic.

Sometimes it’s in a cart that used to be full for two hundred dollars—

and isn’t anymore.

Thanks for Reading

If this resonated, I appreciate you taking the time.

If you found value in it:

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Subscriptions are always free, and paid support helps sustain the work.

Either way, I’m grateful you’re here.

Be Kind To Yourself.
— Jackie

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I. The Fuel

There’s a long-running joke about Michael Jordan.

He took everything personally.

A look.
A quote.
A shrug from an opponent.
A comment taken slightly out of context.

He would catalog it, reinterpret it, sharpen it — and then use it. What might have been neutral became disrespect. What might have been forgettable became motivation. And what might have been minor became fuel.

Elite athletes do this all the time. They manufacture slights. They reinterpret ambiguity as dismissal. They turn friction into fire.

But this isn’t really about basketball, or any sport for that matter.

It’s about something far more common — the strange and intoxicating energy that comes from feeling overlooked.

Underestimated.
Dismissed.
Afterthought.

There is a particular kind of momentum that comes from believing you have something to prove.

I recognize that momentum.

When I was finishing my PhD, there were moments when I was deeply exhausted. Not casually tired. Not busy. Exhausted in the way that makes quitting feel rational. The kind of fatigue that makes you question whether the finish line is worth it.

There were legitimate frustrations. There were mentors who could have shown up differently. There were institutional dynamics that were imperfect, at best. But if I am honest, I didn’t just observe those shortcomings — I amplified them.

In my mind, they became sharper. More personal. More symbolic.

I told myself stories about being underestimated. Stories about having to prove something. Stories about who had not fully seen my capacity.

Some of those stories had truth in them.

Some were narrative fuel.

And that fuel worked.

It carried me through long nights. Through doubt. Through the creeping temptation to disengage. It gave my exhaustion an edge. It gave my fatigue direction.

When I finally crossed the finish line, I expected triumph.

What I felt first was release.

A loosening.

An emotional exhale I did not know I had been holding.

Looking back, I realized something unsettling.

I had not just been working hard.

I had been running on anger.

II. Why Anger Works

Anger is not just emotional. It is physiological.

When you feel angry, your body shifts. The sympathetic nervous system activates. Heart rate increases. Adrenaline rises. Cortisol enters the bloodstream. Blood flow redirects toward large muscle groups. Your body prepares for action.

This is not metaphorical. It is measurable.

Researchers in affective neuroscience have long distinguished between emotions that move us forward and emotions that pull us back. Sadness tends to withdraw. Fear often freezes. Shame collapses inward.

Anger advances.

Psychologist Eddie Harmon-Jones and others studying “approach motivation” have demonstrated that anger — unlike many negative emotions — is linked to forward movement. It narrows attention. It increases perceived control. It creates readiness.

Anger says: Do something.

And when you are exhausted, that matters.

Exhaustion whispers: Stop.

Anger interrupts that whisper. It becomes the voice that refuses to let you stay down.

It can temporarily override helplessness. It can convert fatigue into defiance. It can transform powerlessness into purpose. It asks, “how long you’re gonna feel sorry for yourself?”

That is why it feels energizing.

But anger is also often a secondary emotion.

Beneath it, there is frequently something quieter:

Fear of failure.
Fear of irrelevance.
Fear of mediocrity.
Fear of not becoming who you believed you could be.

For high achievers — and for people who know they have potential — that fear can feel heavy.

Potential is celebrated in our culture. We call it a gift.

But once you are aware of it, potential can begin to feel like a weight.

You do not just have ability.
You are expected to actualize it.

Research on achievement identity and burnout suggests that when individuals tie their sense of worth to performance, the pressure to fulfill perceived capacity intensifies anxiety and self-criticism. The higher the expectation — internal or external — the greater the fear of falling short.

Some people numb out under that pressure.

Some disengage.

Some distract themselves.

And some get angry.

Anger can feel cleaner than shame.

It can feel stronger than fear.

It can feel more dignified than admitting you are tired.

And so, we use it.

Not because we are irrational.

But because it works.

At least for a while.

III. The Shared Fatigue

Step outside the individual for a moment.

Look around.

Burnout rates are at historic highs. Gallup has consistently reported that a majority of American workers experience frequent burnout. Anxiety and depression rates, particularly among young adults, have climbed steadily over the last decade. Housing costs have outpaced wage growth in most metropolitan areas. Student loan debt sits in the trillions. Side hustles are normalized as necessity, not ambition.

We carry our jobs in our pockets now.
We carry outrage in our feeds.
We carry comparison in our algorithms.

Add to that the rapid proliferation of online gambling, the constant monetization of attention, the pressure to brand ourselves, optimize ourselves, perform ourselves — and it becomes difficult to argue that the modern American nervous system is not under strain.

This is not a partisan observation.

It is a physiological one.

It is genuinely difficult right now to build a stable life.

For young adults, especially, the path toward something resembling security feels narrower than it once did. Affordable housing is scarce. Entry-level salaries do not stretch far. Retirement feels abstract. Healthcare feels precarious. The cost of living creeps upward while the margin for error shrinks.

And culturally, we are told to hustle harder.

Be grateful.
Be resilient.
Be exceptional.

The fatigue that follows is not weakness.

It is cumulative pressure.

The kind of tired that makes disengagement understandable.

The kind of tired where collapse — emotional or psychological — would make sense.

But instead of collapse, we often see anger.

Public anger.
Private irritability.
Shortened patience.
Digital hostility.
A hair-trigger defensiveness.

We critique it. We pathologize it. We moralize it.

We call people entitled. Soft. Dramatic. Radical. Too sensitive.

But what if we are misreading the signal?

What if, in many cases, anger is not a symptom of fragility but a refusal to disappear?

What if anger is how exhausted people stay engaged?

Anger can provide energy when hope feels thin.
It can create direction when the future feels uncertain.
It can protect against the void that opens when we admit how depleted we are.

It keeps the engine running.

It allows us to remain participants instead of victims.

And in a culture that equates vulnerability with weakness, anger feels safer than grief.

Safer than saying, I am overwhelmed.

Safer than saying, I am scared this may not work.

Safer than saying, I don’t know how sustainable this is.

Safer than admitting that something feels deeply unsustainable.

So we stay irritated.

We stay activated.

We stay sharp.

Because the alternative feels like surrender.

IV. The Cost of Running Hot

Here is where anger becomes complicated.

It works.

It energizes.
It sharpens.
It protects.
It propels.

It feels empowering.

But it is expensive.

Chronic anger keeps the nervous system in activation and the mind hypervigilant. Elevated cortisol over time disrupts sleep, strains the cardiovascular system, and narrows cognitive flexibility. It inhibits the ability to form trusting, vulnerable relationships. Research on emotional regulation shows that prolonged sympathetic activation reduces our capacity for nuanced thinking and increases black-and-white interpretations of threat.

Anger simplifies the world. That may work for survival, but it also narrows what we are able to see.

It creates villains.
It clarifies enemies.
It sharpens narratives.

It creates an uncomfortable edginess.

That clarity can feel stabilizing.

But clarity is not always accuracy.

And activation is not the same as strength.

When anger becomes our primary fuel source, something subtle happens. We begin to depend on it. We may not consciously seek conflict, but we feel uneasy without the edge. We feel flat without the friction. We feel unmotivated without something to push against.

Because anger has been doing more than energizing us.

It has been protecting us. It’s wrapped us up in a cocoon that makes us feel safe, protected, impervious to pain, invulnerable.

The question is not whether your anger is justified, because if we were honest, it mostly is.

The question is what it is guarding.

Is it guarding exhaustion you haven’t allowed yourself to name?

Is it guarding fear — of failure, of irrelevance, of not becoming who you believed you could be?

Is it guarding grief — over opportunities lost, expectations unmet, promises that feel broken?

Is it guarding shame — the quiet suspicion that maybe you are not as far along as you should be?

Is it guarding vulnerability – the kind that exposes in a way that feels too uncomfortable?

Anger feels powerful.
Exhaustion feels vulnerable.
Grief feels exposing.
Shame feels intolerable.

So anger steps in.

It allows you to stay upright.

It allows you to stay engaged.

It allows you to say, I am fighting, instead of, I am tired.

And on some days, it’s the only thing that gets you out of bed and about your day.

There is nothing weak about that adaptation.

In many cases, it is intelligent, it’s self-protective, it’s safe.

But adaptations that help us survive one season can become liabilities in another.

If anger has been your fuel, that does not mean you are broken, different, weird or needing to be fixed.

It means you’re one of us - the many who adapted to pressure.

The deeper question is whether we want to keep paying the cost for living this way.

Because anger can move you forward.

But it cannot tell you where you actually want to go.

At some point, we become the passenger on the long road trip of life with anger being the driver.

And this way of living cannot sustain us indefinitely.

Because eventually, even the hottest engine overheats.

V. Choosing the Fire

If anger has been your fuel, it does not make you irrational.

It means you adapted.

It means something in you refused to shut down.

It means you chose activation over collapse.

There is dignity in that.

But fuel is not the same as direction.

Anger can move you.
It cannot tell you where you actually want to go.

At some point, the question shifts.

Not: Is my anger justified?
But: What is my anger building?

When I was younger, I used to struggle with the posture of Martin Luther King Jr.

I understood the injustice he faced. I understood the violence, the hostility, the humiliation. And part of me wondered how someone confronting that level of brutality could remain so measured. It felt almost restrained. Almost too composed.

Shouldn’t he have been angrier?

What I have come to appreciate is that he was angry.

He simply refused to let anger dictate his direction.

He disciplined it.

He converted it into moral clarity. Into strategy. Into collective movement.

He did not deny the fuel.

He chose how to burn it.

That distinction matters.

Because anger, left undisciplined, narrows the world. It sharpens enemies. It simplifies narratives. It keeps the nervous system on alert.

Disciplined anger, however, can become conviction. It can become courage. It can become sustained effort rather than reactive combustion.

We are living in a moment that exhausts people.

That is real.

We are living in systems that strain the nervous system.

That is measurable.

We are carrying pressures that are not imagined.

That is shared.

But we are also still human together.

We still have the capacity to decide how we treat each other.
We still have the ability to refuse dehumanization.
We still have the option to build small communities of steadiness inside larger systems of agitation.

Maybe the goal is not to extinguish anger.

Maybe the goal is to examine it.

To ask:

What is it protecting?

What is it afraid would happen if it softened?

What grief is underneath it?

What exhaustion needs acknowledgment?

And then, slowly, intentionally:

To build lives that do not require anger to function.

Lives where rest is not weakness.
Where effort does not require resentment.
Where disagreement does not require dehumanization.
Where potential feels like possibility rather than indictment.

Anger may be the fuel of the exhausted.

But it does not have to be the only fuel available to us.

Eventually, every engine must choose what it runs on.

The question is not whether you are tired.

The question is what you want your fire to build.

A Personal Note

If you’re new here, let me reintroduce myself.

I’m a therapist.
A writer.
A consultant.
A father.

I spend my days sitting with people in their most private fears and their quietest hopes. I work with leaders navigating pressure, with couples trying to stay connected, with individuals wrestling with purpose, exhaustion, identity, grief.

And over the years, one realization has become impossible to ignore:

We are far more alike than we pretend to be.

Underneath the politics.
Underneath the algorithms.
Underneath the defensiveness and the edge.

We are tired.

We are trying.

We are carrying more than we let on.

This space was born from that recognition.

A commitment to examine what it means to be human right now — honestly, without shaming, without sensationalizing, and without pretending that complexity can be reduced to slogans.

I have also made a decision: none of my writing will ever sit behind a paywall.

These reflections, these diagnoses, these invitations — they belong to anyone who finds them useful.

If my work resonates with you, the greatest support you can offer is simple:

Read.
Share.
Like the post so it reaches someone else who may need it.

Subscriptions — free or paid — help this writing travel. Paid subscriptions, in particular, allow me to keep investing time in these essays and to continue building this space with intention.

But whether you subscribe or not, I’m grateful you’re here.

If something in this piece struck a chord, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Comment. Respond. Share your perspective.

Most of all —

Be Kind To Yourself!

Not in a performative way. Not as an afterthought.

In a real, deliberate way, like you mean it.

The world is loud enough.

You don’t need to be harsh with yourself too.

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Before you begin—if this piece resonates, a quick “like” is a small gesture for you but a meaningful one for me. It helps this series reach readers who are also trying to stay thoughtful, human, and connected in a moment that rewards speed and outrage. Thank you for reading, and for hoping.

Comedy as a Survival Skill

I recently attended a Dave Chappelle show in Seattle, and I left reminded of something I think many people misunderstand about him. Dave Chappelle is not simply telling jokes. He is holding up a mirror to a world that feels increasingly unhinged, cruel, and absurd—and then daring us to laugh at what we see reflected back.

There is something almost surgical about the way he does it. He takes what is tragic, depraved, grotesque, and unmistakably human, and he turns it into a punchline. Not to diminish the suffering, but to make it survivable. I sometimes wonder whether there is a quiet rage beneath his humor—a kind of scream disguised as comedy—because while the audience laughs, he is often naming truths that should leave us stunned into silence.

And yet, that’s the genius. Laughter becomes a release valve. A way to stay present with realities that might otherwise crush us. It’s a softening of the blow, not a denial of it.

I am not a comedian. I don’t have the gift of timing or the armor of punchlines. What I have instead is a growing sense that America is in serious trouble—and very few jokes to make it easier to swallow.

A Culture That Argues Instead of Grieves

Earlier this month in Minnesota, a 37-year-old woman named Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot during an encounter with federal immigration agents. Renee was a mother of three, a poet and writer, and someone whose loved ones describe her as warm, joyful, and deeply human. She and her wife had reportedly stopped to support neighbors when the situation escalated. What remains now is not just a disputed narrative, but an absence—a life ended, a family broken, a future erased.

And almost immediately, the country did what it has become very good at doing.

We argued.

We debated legality, justification, and threat. We retreated into positions and talking points. And in the process, the gravity of the loss itself barely held our attention. Renee Good became a symbol before she was allowed to remain a person. Her death was folded into the machinery of outrage, flattened into an argument, and moved along.

This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern.

I wrote about this in Front Seats to an Empire’s Demise – Rot and Decay: the way our public life has grown brittle, performative, and hollowed out. We argue incessantly, but we grieve very little. We posture endlessly, but we sit with almost nothing. Even our outrage now feels curated—optimized for reaction rather than reflection.

In another piece from the series, Sowing and Growing Divisions, I named how fragmentation has become our default posture. Division is no longer a byproduct of disagreement; it is a condition we seem to accept, even nurture. We are rewarded for sharpening our edges, not for tending to our wounds.

And so the rot deepens—not because we lack information, but because we lack connection.

Which brings me to hope.

Hope Was Never Logical

Hope is an uncomfortable word right now. It feels naïve—maybe even irresponsible—to speak of it when so much evidence suggests collapse rather than renewal. The data is grim. The headlines are relentless. The institutions we were told would hold us together feel brittle at best, predatory at worst.

If hope were a logical conclusion drawn from observable facts, most of us would have abandoned it long ago.

Which is why hope has never been logical.

In the Christian tradition I was raised in, faith is described as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” I’ve been thinking about that line lately—not as doctrine, but as diagnosis. Faith, by definition, emerges when evidence runs out. Hope shows up precisely when the math stops working.

By almost every measurable standard, there is little reason to believe things will improve. Trust in institutions is eroding. Political imagination is shallow. Violence feels routine. Many people are quietly resigning themselves to the idea that this is simply how things are now.

And yet.

Hope persists—not because the facts are encouraging, but because surrender feels like a deeper kind of death.

As systems fail and resistance retreats, hope becomes less about optimism and more about refusal. A refusal to let cynicism be the final word. A refusal to let collapse hollow us out completely.

Hope, in this sense, is not passive. It is not a mood. It is not denial. It is a discipline. A practice of choosing connection over isolation, meaning over numbness, and responsibility over despair—even when the evidence is thin.

History reminds us of this, if we’re willing to listen.

Courage Without Guarantees

When I think about hope in moments like this, I think of Harriet Tubman—not the sanitized version we teach children, but the woman herself. A woman operating in a world that offered no evidence her work would succeed, no assurance she would survive, and no institution to protect her if she failed.

She did not pause to calculate whether freedom was likely. She did not wait for conditions to improve. She moved anyway.

Hope, for her, was not belief in a favorable outcome. It was resolve. Action taken in the face of overwhelming odds. Faith made flesh—quiet, disciplined, unflinching. She did not ask what was possible. She asked what was required.

History is full of people like this. People who acted without guarantees. People who chose courage without certainty. People who understood hope not as optimism, but as responsibility.

That distinction matters now.

What I sense in this moment is not just fear or anger, but resignation. A collective shrinking. A turning inward—as if disengagement were the safest response to collapse. As if lowering our expectations might somehow protect us from grief.

But resignation does not protect us. It hollows us out. It teaches us to survive rather than to live.

Hope interrupts that trajectory—not loudly, not dramatically, but persistently.

It shows up when we choose connection in a culture that profits from division. When we listen instead of retreat. When we grieve fully instead of converting loss into arguments. When we refuse to let tragedy become just another data point in an endless scroll of horrors.

Practicing Hope

Hope begins with a reconnection to something internal—something quieter than outrage and sturdier than despair. A reminder that we are more than spectators to our own unraveling. That we still have agency. That we are still responsible to one another.

I don’t believe hope will save us in any grand, cinematic way. Empires rarely end with redemption arcs. But I do believe hope can save something smaller and more essential: our capacity to remain human in inhumane conditions.

Hope was never logical. It was never efficient. It has always been a form of beautiful folly—chosen not because it guarantees success, but because the alternative is surrender.

And surrender, in a moment like this, is the one thing we cannot afford.

I don’t offer this as comfort. Comfort feels dishonest right now. What I offer instead is an invitation—to resist the numbing, to resist the retreat, to resist the temptation to become smaller in response to a world that feels increasingly brutal.

If Rot and Decay named what is failing around us, this piece is an attempt to name what still flickers within us. Not optimism. Not certainty. But the stubborn, inconvenient impulse to care anyway. To stay present. To remain in relationship when it would be easier to withdraw.

Hope, as I understand it now, is not something we feel. It is something we practice. It lives in the choices we make when no one is watching. In the way we speak to one another. In our willingness to slow down long enough to see the humanity we are so quick to erase—including our own.

We may not be able to stop the unraveling. History suggests we rarely can. But we can decide who we are while it happens. Whether we harden or soften. Whether we disappear into cynicism or remain available to one another.

Hope was never logical. But it may be the one thing that keeps us from becoming indistinguishable from the wreckage we are witnessing.

And if there is still a spark worth tending—within ourselves, and between one another—then perhaps that, too, is a form of resistance.

Quiet. Unremarkable. And absolutely necessary.

Thank You

This essay is part of my ongoing series, Front Seats to an Empire’s Demise, which explores the cultural, moral, and relational conditions shaping life in the United States as long-standing systems strain and fracture.

If Rot and Decay named the erosion I see around us, this piece turns toward what remains—however fragile—when certainty collapses. These reflections are not prescriptions or predictions, but an attempt to stay honest, connected, and human in a moment that rewards speed, outrage, and simplification.

Hope, as I’m using it here, is not a denial of reality. It is a refusal to let reality absolve us of responsibility to one another.

Thank you for reading—and as always, be kind to yourself.

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This Shouldn’t Surprise Us—And Yet It Does

The reports that emerged in the early hours of this morning—that Nicolás Maduro had been captured and removed from Venezuela by U.S. forces—arrived with the shock and awe such moments always carry. Sudden. Disruptive. Charged with the weight of history in the making.

And yet, if we’re honest, this wasn’t entirely a surprise.

For months, the signals had been accumulating. Escalating rhetoric. Economic pressure framed as moral necessity. Repeated assertions that Maduro was not merely an authoritarian leader but a criminal one—beyond the protections of sovereignty, beyond negotiation, beyond patience. The language shifted from condemnation to inevitability.

When governments begin speaking that way, outcomes narrow.

So while the timing may have startled, the trajectory did not. This moment is found at the end of a long runway, not at the beginning of a sudden turn. And that distinction matters, because it reminds us that what happened today was not an impulsive deviation—it was the culmination of a posture already adopted.

History tends to move like this: loudly at the moment of rupture, quietly in the months that make it possible.

Criminals, Cartels, and the Problem of Credibility

The Trump administration has been relentless in its framing of Nicolás Maduro: not simply an autocrat, not merely a failed leader, but a criminal—an alleged drug trafficker, cartel collaborator, and kingpin presiding over a narco-state. That framing matters, because it does more than describe. It prepares.

Once a leader is recast as a criminal rather than a head of state, the moral and legal barriers to intervention begin to erode. Sovereignty becomes conditional. Due process becomes secondary. Military action becomes not only possible, but narratively necessary.

And yet, this framing lands amid a credibility problem the administration has repeatedly created for itself.

This is a government that has shown a selective relationship with law and accountability—one that speaks forcefully about criminality abroad while extending mercy, protection, or political grace to figures aligned with its interests. The case of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, convicted in U.S. courts for his role in large-scale drug trafficking, is often invoked as evidence of this inconsistency: criminality is intolerable—except when it is inconvenient.

That contradiction becomes even starker when placed alongside the international response to Israel’s leadership.

Benjamin Netanyahu has been the subject of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity related to Israel’s conduct in Gaza. These are not rhetorical accusations. They are formal legal determinations by an international judicial body tasked with prosecuting the gravest crimes under international law.

And yet, the consequences have been largely symbolic.

There has been no arrest. No transfer. No meaningful enforcement. Netanyahu continues to travel selectively, govern, and prosecute war with the backing—or at least the tolerance—of powerful allies.

This contrast raises an unavoidable question: who gets to be labeled a criminal, and who merely gets accused? And perhaps more importantly, who has the power to enforce those designations—and who does not?

International law, after all, has no standing police force. The ICC depends on member states to execute arrests and cooperate with enforcement. When powerful nations refuse, the law becomes aspirational rather than operative—binding in theory, optional in practice.

So when the United States insists on criminality as justification for unilateral action in Venezuela, while dismissing or sidelining international legal findings elsewhere, it exposes a deeper truth: criminality is not simply a legal category. It is a political one.

That reality does not exonerate Maduro. But it does complicate the moral clarity of the story we are being told.

Because when justice is applied selectively, it ceases to function as justice—and begins to look like power, wearing the language of law.

We’ve Been Here Before

For Americans with any historical memory, this moment should carry a familiar weight.

The most obvious parallel is Panama in 1989, when the United States invaded under the banner of restoring order and arresting a criminal leader. Manuel Noriega was labeled a drug trafficker, deposed by U.S. forces, captured, and flown to the United States to stand trial. At the time, the intervention was framed as necessary, decisive, and morally justified.

In the narrowest sense, it worked. Noriega was removed. A trial was held. A chapter was closed.

But history rarely ends where the press conference does.

Panama paid a steep price in civilian casualties, institutional disruption, and long-term social trauma. While governance eventually stabilized, the intervention itself became a case study in how easily moral certainty can eclipse human cost—and how quickly the larger promises of transformation fade once the objective is achieved.

And Panama was not an outlier.

Across Latin America, U.S. interventions have repeatedly been justified by the language of order, security, and justice. Sometimes the targets were communists. Sometimes drug traffickers. Sometimes dictators. The labels shifted, but the structure remained the same: identify a villain, remove them decisively, and promise a better future on the other side.

What followed, more often than not, was instability, resentment, and a long, uneven process of recovery borne primarily by the people who had the least say in the intervention itself.

This history doesn’t mean that every intervention is identical, or that no leader deserves removal. But it does challenge the comforting idea that regime change—especially when imposed from the outside—naturally produces the outcomes it claims to seek.

Removing a person is simple. Repairing a society is not.

And so when we are told that this time will be different, history asks us to slow down—not out of cynicism, but out of responsibility. Because the cost of being wrong is rarely paid by those who authorize the action. It is paid by those who must live in its aftermath.

A World Reordering Itself

What happened in Venezuela didn’t happen in a vacuum. It sits inside a larger, unsettled moment—a world quietly, and sometimes violently, reorganizing itself.

In Europe, Vladimir Putin continues a grinding war against Ukraine, testing not only borders but the endurance of Western resolve. In the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu prosecutes overlapping wars—against Palestinians in Gaza and against Iran by proxy—reshaping regional norms around force, deterrence, and consequence. Now, in the Americas, Donald Trump asserts U.S. power in a way that feels less like leadership and more like muscle memory.

Each of these moves carries its own logic. Together, they suggest something larger: a global order no longer pretending that shared rules are binding, only that power is.

And then there is China.

While other powers lean on missiles, invasions, and spectacle, Xi Jinping continues a quieter, longer game—expanding influence through infrastructure, trade, debt, and strategic patience. Dominance without invasion. Control without occupation. Power exercised with fewer cameras and longer timelines.

Against that backdrop, Venezuela’s importance becomes clearer.

Its relationships with Russia and Iran made it more than a troubled state; they made it a node in a network of proxy relationships. What unfolded today is not only regime removal, but a message—about spheres of influence, about red lines, about who still believes they can enforce order through force.

This is what a multipolar world looks like in practice: not consensus, but collision. Not shared enforcement, but selective action. Not a single global referee, but multiple actors testing how far they can go.

Venezuela, like so many places before it, becomes less a cause than a canvas—its people caught in the space where larger powers work out their anxieties about relevance, control, and decline.

And beneath all of this sits a quieter, harder truth: Venezuela is not being engaged because of its people.

It is being engaged because of what lies beneath them.

Venezuela’s vast oil reserves—among the largest in the world—render the country legible to global powers in a way its human suffering never quite has. In this calculus, Venezuelans are not central subjects but incidental ones, their lives rendered secondary to the strategic value of natural gas, oil, and influence. The nation becomes significant not because of the dignity of its people, but because of the utility of its resources.

This is the oldest story in global politics: countries reduced to commodities, sovereignty negotiated around extraction, and human consequence treated as collateral rather than concern. In that frame, Venezuela matters—but only instrumentally. Only insofar as it can be leveraged, disciplined, or claimed.

And so the reordering of the world reveals itself not just as a contest of power, but as a reminder of whose lives are deemed worth centering—and whose are treated as expendable in the pursuit of dominance.

Celebration, Precedent, and the People Who Live With What Comes After

It is important to say this plainly: many Venezuelans will celebrate this moment.

For years, the Maduro government presided over economic collapse, rampant corruption, political repression, and a humanitarian crisis that pushed millions to leave their country. Daily life became a negotiation with scarcity, fear, and exhaustion. For those who lived under that weight, the removal of Maduro may feel less like geopolitics and more like release.

That response deserves acknowledgement and respect.

But celebration and justice are not the same thing. And relief, however genuine, does not answer the harder questions that follow.

History tells us that removing a leader—especially by external force—rarely translates into immediate or widespread improvement for ordinary people. Corruption does not evaporate with a single arrest. Institutions do not suddenly regain legitimacy. Economies do not heal simply because a figurehead is gone.

What fills the vacuum matters far more than what created it.

Too often, the aftermath of regime change becomes a period of uncertainty marked by power struggles, fragile transitions, and renewed suffering—conditions borne not by those who authorized the intervention, but by those already living on the margins. The language of liberation fades quickly when food remains scarce, violence persists, and political futures remain unclear.

For Americans, this moment should prompt a different kind of reflection.

If this action is meant to reassert the United States as a global leader, it is worth asking what kind of leadership is being modeled. There are no moral points awarded for overpowering weaker nations. There is no enduring prestige in repeating strategies that have consistently failed to deliver stability, dignity, or self-determination for the people they claim to help.

What continues to emerge instead is an image of a nation relying on force where imagination is required—confusing dominance with leadership, and action with progress. In that sense, the moment feels less like renewal and more like repetition: a tired superpower reaching reflexively for tools it knows, even as the world moves on.

And so we arrive at the uncomfortable truth that sits beneath both celebration and skepticism:

Maduro’s removal may mark the end of something.
But it does not yet tell us what has begun.

That question—what actually improves life for Venezuelans, not symbolically but materially—remains unanswered. And history suggests it will not be answered by spectacle alone.

Power, Decline, and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

Moments like this have a way of revealing more than they intend to.

On the surface, the story is about decisive action—about strength, justice, and restoring order. But beneath that narrative is something more fragile: a deep anxiety about relevance, control, and decline.

Great powers rarely announce their uncertainty out loud. Instead, they perform it.

When institutions feel confident, they invest in systems, diplomacy, and long arcs of cooperation. When they feel threatened, they reach for spectacle. They demonstrate power rather than cultivate it. They confuse movement with progress.

This is not unique to the United States. It is a pattern visible across history and across empires in their later chapters.

What concerns me is not simply the removal of a leader many consider corrupt. It is the story being told about what power is and how it should be used—that force can substitute for legitimacy, that intervention can stand in for imagination, that complex problems can be solved through singular acts.

These stories are comforting. They offer clarity in a world that feels increasingly unmanageable. They reassure us that someone is still in charge, that history can still be steered decisively.

But comfort is not the same as truth.

The harder reality is that we are living through a period of fragmentation—of global norms, shared enforcement, and moral consistency. Power is no longer singular or stable. It is contested, uneven, and often reactive. And when power is exercised without humility or coherence, it tends to accelerate the very decline it is trying to deny.

What this moment reveals, then, is not just something about Venezuela or the United States, but about a world struggling to let go of old scripts while having no clear replacement ready.

And in that uncertainty, the stories we choose to tell matter. Because they shape not only what we justify—but what we fail to imagine.

Why I Keep Writing Anyway

I’ll end here, not with answers, but with something closer to a confession.

Much of the time, I feel powerless in moments like this.

I don’t command armies—and I wouldn’t want to. I don’t see force as a solution to the kind of problems we keep creating. I don’t sit at negotiating tables. I don’t shape policy or determine outcomes. And watching history unfold through force, spectacle, and competing narratives can leave one feeling small, irrelevant, and tempted to disengage entirely.

Writing is my refusal to do that.

I write not because I believe I can resolve these tensions, but because I don’t want to look away from them. I write because disengagement is its own kind of surrender—and because shutting down, tuning out, or numbing ourselves may feel protective, but it ultimately leaves the loudest voices uncontested. I also write because history needs witnesses. It needs a record that not everyone consented to the story being told in their name.

If this piece stirred something in you—agreement or disagreement, discomfort or clarity, frustration or curiosity—I hope you’ll stay with that feeling rather than rushing past it. Share this if it helped you think. Comment if you see something I missed or if you read the moment differently. And if this raised questions for you, I hope it also sends you back into your own reading—history, context, perspectives beyond mine—because none of us should outsource our understanding of the world to a single voice.

We don’t need more certainty right now.
We need more people willing to stay awake.

I’m grateful you’re here—and grateful for the chance to think in public, together. Until we next meet, be kind to yourself.

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If this piece resonates with you, a quick like is a small action on your end but a meaningful one for me. This publication grows through reader support, and your engagement helps these reflections reach the people who need them. Thank you for being here.

The In-Betweeners

There is a particular kind of person who learns, early on, how to move through worlds without ever fully arriving in any of them.

Not because they are lost.
Not because they lack identity.
But because their identity was formed in motion.

I think of us as the In-Betweeners — people shaped by more than one culture, more than one set of norms, values, and expectations, yet never fully claimed by any single one. We learn how to belong everywhere, function anywhere, and still carry a quiet sense that we are never completely home.

This experience is common, though rarely named.

Immigrants who arrive after childhood has already etched its first impressions.
People of color raised or educated in predominantly white spaces.
Children who move between languages, codes, neighborhoods, or class worlds.
Anyone who learned that survival required translation.

In my own life, that translation began early.

I came to the United States as a teenager — old enough to have already lived a life, absorbed a culture, internalized beliefs, morals, humor, and ways of being that were not American. Those early years mattered. They shaped how I understood community, authority, faith, masculinity, joy, and restraint.

And then, suddenly, I was here.

What followed was not a clean transition from one identity to another, but a layering. Over time, I became immersed in Black American culture — its rhythms, its brilliance, its grief, its codes of belonging and protection. Later still, my adult life pulled me into white, suburban, corporate spaces, each with their own unspoken rules about professionalism, safety, success, and proximity to power.

Each world required something different of me.

Each offered partial belonging.

None could hold the whole of who I was becoming.

Living Without a Single Anchor

For In-Betweeners, identity is rarely inherited intact. It is assembled.

Instead of asking Who am I? in the abstract, we learn to ask:

• Who do I need to be here?

• What parts of myself are safe in this space?

• What needs to be muted, emphasized, translated, or protected?

This isn’t duplicity.
It’s attunement.

It’s a learned sensitivity to context — a kind of social intelligence that develops when belonging is conditional. Over time, this constant adjustment becomes automatic. Code-switching stops being something you do and becomes something you are.

The cost of this is subtle but cumulative.

You may be welcomed, even praised, for your adaptability — while rarely being fully known. You may be seen as competent, articulate, and resilient — while carrying an unspoken fatigue that comes from always meeting the room before the room meets you.

In-Betweeners often belong functionally but not existentially.

We know how to show up.
We know how to succeed.
But we are less certain where we are allowed to rest.

The Burden and the Gift of Code-Switching

Code-switching is often framed as a skill. And it is. But it is also a burden.

On its hardest days, it feels like:

• constant self-monitoring

• chronic vigilance

• emotional labor that goes unacknowledged

• the quiet fear of being “found out” as not fully legitimate in any space

It can make rest feel unsafe.
Stillness feel undeserved.
Silence feel like exposure.

And yet — this same capacity is also a gift.

In-Betweeners tend to be deeply perceptive. We notice patterns others miss. We read rooms quickly. We translate across difference with fluency. We often become bridges — between cultures, between people, between systems that don’t naturally speak to one another.

In workplaces, this can look like leadership.
In families, it can look like mediation.
In communities, it often looks like service.

But bridges, if we’re not careful, get walked on.

Part of adulthood for the In-Betweener is learning when to translate — and when to stop. When to adapt — and when to insist on being met where we stand.

Belonging as a Lifelong Negotiation

What many In-Betweeners carry, though rarely name, is grief.

Not always dramatic. Not always conscious.

Grief for the version of belonging that never quite materialized.
Grief for the home that exists in memory more than in geography.
Grief for the self that might have emerged had belonging been simpler.

And still, there is also something quietly hopeful here.

Because people who live between worlds often develop a deep understanding of shared humanity. We know, firsthand, that identity is complex, that people are more than the categories they’re placed into, that culture is learned, not owned.

In a world increasingly fractured by rigid identities and false binaries, the In-Betweeners carry something essential: the capacity to hold complexity without collapse.

We are tethered together not by sameness, but by the effort it takes to understand one another.

Here’s to the In-Betweeners

So here’s to you, fellow In-Betweener.

I see you.

I see you — who learned early how to read a room before you spoke.
You — who know how to belong just enough without ever fully exhaling.
You — who carry multiple cultures in your body, your language, your humor, your silence.

I see you — immigrant kids who arrived old enough to remember another home, another way of being, another version of yourselves.
You — who still translate in your head before you speak.
You — who feel the pull of a place that shaped you but no longer fully holds you.

I see you — people of color raised in spaces where you were the exception, the representative, the “articulate one,” the one who learned how to be palatable without being erased.
You — who know the cost of code-switching even when others only see the competence it produces.

I see you — those who move between class worlds, between faith and doubt, between tradition and reinvention.
You — who learned how to survive by adapting, and are now learning how to live without disappearing.

If you’ve ever felt too much of one thing and not enough of another.
If you’ve ever wondered where you would land if you stopped translating yourself.
If you’ve ever carried pride and grief for the same identity at the same time —

You’re not alone.

The In-Betweeners are not unfinished people.
We are layered people.
And in a world desperate for certainty and simplicity, that layering is not a weakness.

It is a form of wisdom.

A Small Request

If this reflection gave you language, recognition, or even a moment of discomfort, I’d love for you to like, share, and subscribe if you haven’t already. This is a supporter-driven publication, and your engagement makes it possible for this work to continue.

Most of all, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

We’re tethered together by these stories — whether we’ve named them yet or not.

Until we next meet, remember, Be Kind To Yourself!

Welcome to a new series.

In this series, I’ll be taking characters from popular film, television, and art—those we love, loathe, root for, or can’t stop thinking about—and breaking down the human psychology beneath the surface. Not to diagnose, excuse, or reduce them, but to understand them. And in doing so, to better understand ourselves and our shared humanity.

Stories matter because characters carry the questions we don’t always know how to ask out loud: Why do we become who we become? What shapes our choices? What do we do with pain, power, love, fear, and longing? By looking closely at the inner worlds of fictional people, we often gain language and insight for our own.

Whether this series continues will largely depend on you. A quick “like” is a small click for you, but it’s a meaningful signal for me—it tells me this work resonates and that it’s worth continuing to build. Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Spoiler note: This piece discusses major plot points through the end of Season 1.

There are characters we “like.”
And then there are characters who feel like a mirror we didn’t consent to stand in front of.

Carol Sturka, the lead of Pluribus, is not written to be lovable. She’s written to be understood—eventually. The show’s hook is famously strange: the story centers on the “most miserable person on Earth” who becomes uniquely positioned to “save the world from happiness.”

But Pluribus isn’t ultimately asking, What would you do if the world became a hive mind?
It’s asking a more intimate, more irritating question:

What if the thing you’ve used to survive… becomes the thing that imprisons you?

Carol is abrasive, cold, hardened, stoic, sharp. Successful, too—she writes wildly popular romance novels that the world devours. Yet she appears to resent the very work that made her rich, almost like it’s evidence of her own compromise: I gave you what sells, not what’s true.

And if you’ve ever felt trapped by the version of yourself that “works” in public, you know that particular kind of grief.

And then there’s the closeting—what it costs, what it protects, and what it calcifies.

Trauma doesn’t just hurt. It organizes.

One of the most quietly devastating reveals about Carol is her past: she was sent to a conversion therapy camp as a teenager after her parents realized she was gay.

You don’t need to be a clinician to understand the psychic violence in that.

Forced conversion doesn’t just leave a scar. It often rewires a person’s internal world around core lessons:

1. Your desire is dangerous.

2. Your truth will cost you love.

3. Survival requires performance.

4. Love is conditional

5. You need to be “fixed.”

So when adult Carol reads as guarded, emotionally sparse, disdainful of other people’s needs, even contemptuous of sentimentality—it’s tempting to call that “personality.”

But trauma often looks like personality until you recognize it as strategy.

Abrasiveness can be armor.
Coldness can be boundary-setting that calcified.
Stoicism can be dissociation dressed up as discipline.

And the “I don’t need anyone” posture?
That can be a vow made by a younger self who got tired of begging to be safe.

Carol survived.
But survival is not the same thing as living.

The bottle isn’t the villain. Avoidance is.

The show hints—then essentially confirms—that alcohol is not just a casual habit for Carol. It’s a coping strategy that’s gotten big enough to require infrastructure.

We learn that a motion detector was installed in her liquor cabinet—an alarm meant to tell her partner if Carol was drinking.

That detail is doing a lot of work.

Because when someone installs a device like that, it usually means:

• promises were made,

• trust was strained,

• and “I’ll cut back” stopped meaning anything.

This is where I want to tread carefully.

I’m not interested in moralizing addiction. I’m not interested in flattening Carol into a cautionary tale. Alcohol use disorders are complex, and people don’t drink “because they’re bad.” They drink because something hurts, because something is untreated, because something feels unbearable, because sobriety would require contact with memories they can’t yet metabolize.

But.

There is a hard truth that adulthood eventually demands:

Trauma explains behavior. It does not excuse harm.

If Carol’s drinking contributed to the “almost” of parenthood—the dream she and her partner never got to share—then we’re not just watching a private struggle. We’re watching consequences.

And even more painful: we’re watching the grief of a life that didn’t happen.

Which raises a question the show cleverly leaves open:
Did Carol even want a child?
Or did she want what a child symbolized—normalcy, legitimacy, proof that she could build something lasting in a world that once told her she shouldn’t exist?

Sometimes we chase “the next chapter” not because we want it, but because we want to outrun the last one.

When the world disappears, you finally meet yourself

One of the most psychologically honest arcs in Pluribus is Carol’s relationship with solitude.

After the Joining, after the world shifts, Carol gets what she’s always performed like she wanted: space. No people. No expectations. No social labor. No emotional reciprocity.

At first, she basks in it. There’s a perverse joy in finally being free of the burden of others—especially if “others” were historically where her pain lived.

But the show doesn’t romanticize isolation. It exposes it.

Because eventually, the freedom turns into something else:

• silence becomes a sentence,

• self-sufficiency becomes starvation,

• and “I don’t need anyone” becomes “I have no one.”

This is the part many of us don’t want to admit:
Avoidance works—until it doesn’t.

And for Carol, it doesn’t.

The “artificial connection” problem

Enter Zosia—her hive-mind chaperone, her companion, her almost-savior.

Carol is desperate for connection, yet terrified of what connection costs. So when she finally lets someone in, it’s with someone who is… complicated. Because Zosia is not simply a person. She is also a representative of the Others—the collective intelligence that absorbed most of humanity.

Carol’s attachment becomes intense. Possessive. Protective.

And here’s where Pluribus does something painfully real: it shows how loneliness can make us compromise values we were once sure we’d die for.

Carol’s earlier moral clarity starts to blur. She begins defending the Others. She begins rationalizing. She begins making space for what she previously called evil—because, in her experience, it also feels like the only tenderness left in the world.

That’s not just sci-fi writing. That’s attachment theory with better lighting.

People who have been deprived of safe connection often become vulnerable to any connection that feels soothing—especially if it comes with structure, predictability, and the promise of being cared for without having to be fully known.

Consent: can a hive mind say “yes”?

Now we arrive at one of the biggest ethical knots in the show—and one worth sitting with.

Carol judges another survivor for enjoying a world where “people” exist to fulfill his wishes. And she has reason to—because the issue isn’t pleasure. The issue is consent.

If the Joined exist to serve the desires of the un-Joined, can they meaningfully consent?

The show itself invites this question in unsettling ways. When Carol sarcastically asks for weapons, the hive mind complies—without hesitation, without discernment, without concern for harm.

That’s not free will.
That’s appeasement as governance.

And if appeasement is baked into their design, then “yes” becomes complicated.

Because consent is not just the presence of agreement. Consent requires:

• autonomy,

• the ability to refuse,

• freedom from coercion,

• and coherent selfhood.

So we have to ask:
If Zosia is “Zosia” only insofar as the collective permits her to be… then what exactly is Carol consenting to?
And what exactly is Zosia consenting with?

This question becomes even darker when we learn that the Others obtained Carol’s frozen eggs—originally frozen with her partner—without her consent, as part of a broader plan to convert her.

That’s not romance.
That’s violation.

And once violation enters the room, Carol’s attachment begins to read differently. Not weaker—just more tragic.

Because it suggests the connection she clung to may have been engineered. Or at minimum, permitted, curated, and leveraged.

Hypocrisy… or grief-driven collapse?

So is Carol a hypocrite?

Maybe.

But I think “hypocrite” is too simple. Hypocrisy implies casual contradiction. Carol’s contradiction reads more like collapse—the slow surrender that happens when a person can’t hold their values and their loneliness at the same time.

And that’s the adult lesson.

Not “be better.”
Not “heal faster.”
Not “get over it.”

But this:

If you don’t take responsibility for your healing, your pain will eventually start making decisions for you.

Carol’s trauma is real.
The harm of forced conversion is real.
The grief of losing her partner is real.

And still—Carol is an adult.

Which means she doesn’t get to outsource the cost of her unprocessed pain indefinitely. Not to alcohol. Not to solitude. Not to a carefully curated “connection” with a being that cannot refuse her.

The world doesn’t owe us healing.
But we owe ourselves accountability—because other people will pay the bill if we don’t.

What Carol teaches us (if we’re brave enough to learn)

Carol Sturka is a case study in how a person can be brilliant and successful and still emotionally stranded.

She’s also a case study in how:

• unaddressed shame becomes contempt,

• avoidance becomes identity,

• loneliness becomes vulnerability,

• and grief makes us reach for whatever can numb the ache—even if it costs us our integrity.

And maybe that’s what Pluribus is really critiquing: not happiness, but the fantasy of happiness without agency.

A world where no one disagrees with you.
A world where no one leaves.
A world where “yes” is guaranteed.
A world where the self never has to confront itself.

That’s not peace.
That’s sedation.

Thank you for reading and for spending time with this work.

If this piece offered you language, clarity, discomfort, or a new way of seeing, I’d be grateful if you’d like, share, and subscribe. This is a supporter-driven publication, and if you’re in a position to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber—your support directly sustains the time, care, and depth that go into this work.

Most of all, I’d love to hear from you.
Share your thoughts, insights, agreements, disagreements, or questions in the comments. And if there are characters—heroes, villains, or those living somewhere in between—you’d like me to explore next, leave your recommendations. This series is as much a conversation as it is an analysis.

We make meaning together.