I first learned the lifestyle of the nonna (Italian grandmother) had become an online phenomenon while scrolling Instagram.2 The traits of the nonna being hailed in admiring posts include embracing aging, being active members of their community (including keeping track of who is coming and going in a neighborhood), staying in motion through walking and socializing, cooking meals from scratch for family and neighbors, eating seasonally, and living mindfully. One aficionado called nonnamaxxing the “secret to longevity.”

As readers here know, I have a special antipathy for most '“wellness” or “self care” trends, because of how they so often make us feel like we are the problem, not the system in which we live. I see the whole self-help genre as late-stage capitalism’s solution to a problem it created.

After years of chronic stress, overwork, and isolation being quietly normalized, a multi-billion-dollar wellness industry sprung up to sell us a bunch of “fixes” that will drain our bank accounts while failing to change our lives in any meaningful way. (Trust me, I know. I tried most of them before I moved to Italy, which turned out to be the best “life hack” for my health there is).

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A few days ago, I found out what a medical emergency feels like when you’re not afraid of the bill, and it took collapsing in an Italian hair salon to learn it.

The day started innocuously enough. I decided to try a new hairdresser, on the recommendation of a friend. Everything was going smoothly, and I really liked the hairdresser, who is also the salon’s owner.

After he finished my color, which looked amazing, I stood up to go to the bathroom. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the floor with two Italian women and the hairdresser hovering over me, looking very concerned and chattering animatedly about what had happened. My sweet dog Lucy was standing next to me looking confused.

I had blacked out and fainted, and when I fell, I hit the side of my head on the stone floor. I felt okay—the side of my head hurt and was throbbing, but I wasn’t in any serious pain—though I was obviously scared, since nothing like this had ever happened to me before.

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I have an embarrassing confession to make: I used to struggle so much with envy that I not only had to get off of Instagram, but I had to ask my husband to stop telling me what people we knew were posting there.

He could ruin my day with a casual comment about a colleague's success or a trip a group of women we knew took together. I would feel left out and jealous and have all sorts of irrational feelings about situations that had nothing to do with me.

"I struggle with envy," I finally confided to my befuddled husband after snapping at him for forgetting my injunction against Instagram news. He would remind me of my own successes, my extensive network of friends, and the fact that we had a pretty nice life.

None of it mattered.

Reason cannot contend with envy.

I intensely grasped the truth of the saying, "comparison is the thief of joy," and felt deep shame for my behavior.

But I had no idea how to stop feeling this way.

If I had understood sooner why envy occurs, it would have saved me a lot of misery and wasted time.

Envy can be overt, as it was with my reaction to people’s fun and good news on Instagram.1 Or it can be more covert, leaking out as judgment, disdain or worse.

In my case, I could not read an article about Elizabeth Gilbert or listen to friends coo about her books, without feeling something that I couldn’t quite name. It never occurred to me that it was envy. I just thought I didn't like her, even though I did not have one good reason for feeling that way.

What I eventually learned is that whether envy is covert or overt, we are almost definitely projecting.2 Usually, when we think of projection, it involves negative qualities in ourselves that we have disowned (what Jung called ‘the Shadow’), which we then start seeing all around us in other people.

However, what is less known is that we can also project buried talents and positive qualities onto others. Jung called this the ‘Golden Shadow,’ which contains the creative potential and greatness in ourselves that we are unable to see (except in other people), perhaps because we were shamed for these qualities or maybe because owning them would be too disruptive to our lives.

So, if you find yourself reacting badly when you see a person announce they’ve just published their first book or started their own business, pay attention. Your unconscious is telling you that you not only have the desire to do something like this but that you actually possess the qualities required to make it a reality in your own life.

What we miss is that the people we envy are not our competitors; they are our guides.

Often, the Golden Shadow is projected as admiration or even hero worship. But it can also take on a slightly more sinister aspect when we instead feel a simmering rage toward people for having the nerve to do what we are afraid of or feel incapable of doing.

The person who may be labeled a nemesis is actually expanding our awareness of what is possible. They show what we have buried in our unconscious that is desperate to be manifested.

We can have trouble accessing this truth because society tells us that envy is bad. It’s one of the seven deadly sins, after all. So when the green-eyed monster rears its head, it can feel shameful.

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Danielle Crittenden has just released her powerful cri de coeur, “Dispatches from Grief: A Mother’s Journey Through the Unthinkable” about the loss of her daughter Miranda. In this compact and unsparing masterpiece of the grief genre, Crittenden begs us to cease with the platitudes, forced hopefulness and spiritual bypassing that the grieving are so often assaulted with, and just face the facts: grief really, really sucks.

There is the shock and unreality of learning your beloved and effervescent 32-year-old daughter was found dead on the floor of her Brooklyn apartment with her devoted rascal of a dog, Ringo, curled up next to her.

While Miranda had suffered the health consequences from a previously removed tumor, she and her parents had been led to believe she would go on to live a healthy life despite having her pituitary gland removed. While this could be managed with medication, not getting it perfectly dosed could lead to a compromised autoimmune system that ultimately took her life.

Now, Miranda’s parents’ lives are cleaved into two halves: the Before and the After. They have been transported to what Crittenden calls the “Alternate Universe,” a place populated by parents at different stages of a grief that never truly abates.

My first encounter with grief occurred when my father, only 61, dropped dead of a heart attack. I was only 35 and surrounded by friends who still had healthy and alive parents—even if those parents could annoy them endlessly—while I had moved into the club of People With One Dead Parent.

Even though Crittenden’s story retraces the unique and unending hell of losing a child, so much of what she writes lands with precision for those who have lived through the aftermath of a trauma or death of a loved one.

She writes:

There was no trajectory to my grief. Grief is a shapeshifter. When it abates, it still lurks. [My husband] David likened it to an open computer program running perpetually in the background, draining memory, sapping power.

I’ve often struggled for the words to describe how grief uniquely upended and reordered my life, assaulting me with a physical pain I thought might literally kill me. Just as I felt I had gained some ground in the daily battle to fight off the darkness that would engulf me as I awakened each morning, it would be revisited upon me with double its previous force.

Crittenden finds the words.

Each morning, I feel like a soldier waking up to mud and terror. My sense of mission and purpose is drained. How bad will the assaults be today? How can I keep summoning the strength to continue the bleak march onward? I’m answered by the words of Samuel Beckett: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

How I could have used this book at earlier phases of my life, if only to understand the universality of what I was feeling. That is the gift that Crittenden shares by excavating her deepest pain and telling the truth about what grief actually feels and looks like.

She explains what is helpful to the grieving: a squeeze of the hand or sharing stories about the person who is no longer among us. Don’t ask the grieving what you can do; just do it. Send them a gift, make them a meal, but don’t ask them to think. Their brains are a jumble of confusion, still trying to make sense of the senseless. They are in shock.

Crittenden speaks for all the grieving, I think, when she admonishes those who insisted to her that grief was a “gift.”

She writes:

Believe it or not, there is no shortage of people who believe that the worst thing that can happen to you is actually an opportunity for growth. [N]one, I’d wager, have been flattened by real catastrophe. They use words like “brave” to describe quitting a dull job.

This heartbroken, shattered mother has special ire for an often shared Rumi poem that asserts, “Sorrow prepares you for joy.”

“To which, I know Miranda would join me in saying, ‘Fuck off,’” Crittenden goes on. “Miranda’s death is not my spiritual gain. I was happier with my child than without her. Nothing better will grow in her place. My ‘truth’ is that my daughter is dead.”

Intermingled with Crittenden’s “real talk” on grief are stories about her tight-knit family, and Miranda’s unique role in that unit as a dynamic force and lover of life and her people. The reader also experiences the profound and eternal love of a mother. While this is a book about grief and unimaginable loss, it’s also a love letter from a mother to her daughter about their special bond.

Eventually, Crittenden has a revelation as she counsels a new member of what she deems the “Land of the Grief”—a mother who lost a 32-year-old son to cancer. The mother shares that she has to remember her son’s life was a gift, then adds, “And also that my life is a gift.”

This is something Crittenden can work with. None of the “happiness hucksterism” which she finds so gross, but “a new way to calibrate,” she writes. “I need to embrace my own gift of life to move forward.”

“Perhaps this is what ‘getting through’ grief actually means. Not returning to who you were—that person is gone,” Crittenden writes. “But learning how to live again, and more crucially, why. The chrysalis isn’t a resting place but a vessel for transformation. What emerges may bear little resemblance to what entered. Cliche perhaps…yet it nudges my feet in the right direction.”

When, in 2023, I began the process of purchasing property in Italy with the intention of living there, I had no idea that I was part of a nearly unprecedented trend in the US.

A recent US Census report discovered that for the first time since the Great Depression, more people are leaving the US than arriving. This has resulted in net negative migration[2] to a country that has long stood as a lodestar to the dream seekers of the world.

It’s easy to assume that this is merely a result of the immigration crackdown. But a Wall Street Journal analysis found that among those leaving are a record number of American citizens who are citing cost of living and safety as driving forces behind their moves outside the US.[3]

In addition to those who have already relocated to new countries, Gallup discovered a deep reservoir of Americans who have not yet left, but aspire to do so. One in five Americans said that, given the opportunity, they would permanently move to another country.

Younger women are leading the charge.

Incredibly, forty percent of women between the ages of 15 to 44 said they are ready to go, given the chance. This is true regardless of marital status, for women with children in the home, and those with no kids.[4] It’s a uniquely American trend; Gallup found no evidence of such a desire in other advanced countries and surmised that the drive to leave is due to this cohort’s loss of trust in American institutions.

I’ve interviewed dozens of Americans of varying ages, sexual identity, and race about why they left the United States as part of my research for a book I’m writing. Fears about being able to afford health care are always a top issue that is raised. But so is burnout and stress about finances and safety. Many mothers cite gun violence in schools as the single factor that pushed them over the edge. When the New York Times’ Jessica Grose surveyed female readers who were considering leaving the US, gun violence emerged as a major driver.[5]

More than anything, I’ve heard from Americans who have relocated abroad that they are simply seeking what was once considered a normal middle-class American life.

In other words, they want to find the “American Dream,” and have gone looking beyond their homeland’s borders to find a life that previous American generations took for granted.

This kind of existence was one where housing and education were affordable, even for working class families. Health care wasn’t driving people into debt or bankrupting them.[6] Weekends were for cookouts and connecting, not “going the extra mile” for your employer.

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What’s remarkable about Trump Administration officials is how confidently they assert their religiously illiterate views.

Over the last week or so, we saw an incredible sequence of events unfold: a sitting president posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ, a vice president warned the pope to be more careful about theology, and Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense, read a prayer lifted nearly verbatim from Pulp Fiction at a Pentagon worship service.

Trump claimed not to know it was a picture of Jesus, saying the depiction of him draped in a white robe with a halo of sunlight behind him was merely showing Trump as a doctor. While many people think Trump is lying, I am in the minority that thinks it’s entirely possible that Trump isn’t familiar with depictions of Jesus. Either way, Trump did something he almost never does: he deleted the post after a backlash from evangelical supporters who found the post blasphemous.

There was no such backlash from Trump supporters when the Secretary of Defense read a “prayer” lifted from the movie Pulp Fiction. It seems unconstitutional for a Cabinet member to hold Christian worship services, but that’s a separate issue. But what is also problematic is that the prayer he chose to read directly contradicts what the verse he was allegedly reading asserts.

Hegseth repeatedly puts himself and American soldiers in the position of seeking vengeance against Iranians, when any Sunday School student knows that central to Christianity is the idea that Christians should never seek vengeance.1

The “prayer,” which Hegseth noted was based on Ezekiel 25:17, ends with these lines:

And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One, when I lay my vengeance upon thee. Amen.

But the actual verse says this:

I will carry out great vengeance on them and punish them in my wrath. Then they will know that I am the Lord, when I take vengeance on them.2

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This is not a minor difference. Hegseth puts soldiers in the place of God. Yes, I understand that Hegseth was reading a “prayer” directed at a particular audience, and yes, one can write prayers paraphrasing Scripture, so long as it stays true to the original meaning.

What the Secretary of Defense should not be doing is representing that Christianity endorses Christians acting out of personal vengeance, especially when that person oversees people at war, where vengeance could take on some horrific shapes. It also seems obvious that, as a moral matter, no American soldier should ever be taking any kind of action out of “vengeance.”

What Hegseth is suggesting American soldiers do is essentially a war crime. And he’s using Christianity to justify it, which is extremely dangerous behavior.

Hegseth is not the only one inverting Christian theology to justify unjust behavior. Vice President Vance, a Catholic himself, decided that correcting the pope on Catholic theology would be a good idea.

“If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful,” Vance said in his criticism of Pope Leo’s comments condemning the Iran War as unjust in the eyes of God.3 “You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth.”

Catholics across the political spectrum weighed in to blast the Vice President for his lack of understanding of Just War Theory,4 a core doctrine of Catholicism, as well as his impertinence in correcting the pope while demonstrating his own lack of understanding of a Catholic doctrine that applies to a war his administration is waging.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) released a statement from their Chairman on Doctrine Issues backing up Pope Leo, noting, in part, that:

For over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war. A constant tenet of that thousand-year tradition is a nation can only legitimately take up the sword ‘in self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed’ (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2308). That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.5

Pope Leo responded to the brouhaha, speaking to journalists aboard the papal plane en route to Algeria. “The message of the Gospel is very clear: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’” the Pope said.

“I don’t want to get into a debate with him,” Leo said when asked about Trump’s attacks against him. “I don’t think that the message of the Gospel is meant to be abused in the way that some people are doing. And I will continue to speak out loudly against war.”

It’s important to remember that when those in power weaponize Scripture they don't understand to justify wars and vengeance, the danger isn't just theological — it has a body count.

We’ve all been there: lying awake in the middle of the night, catastrophizing over things that hadn’t even occurred to us in the light of day.

We become convinced a mole on our arm is inoperable skin cancer or that our boss is contemplating firing us because we missed a single meeting. In no time, we are experiencing vivid images of our future: penniless, alone, and eating out of a garbage can.

A few hours later, the sun comes up, and we start our day.

The prior scenarios that had us terrified a few hours earlier fade into the background, and our middle-of-the-night promise to ourselves to schedule an appointment with the dermatologist to have the mole checked is quickly forgotten.

What’s going on?

I had occasion to really ponder this topic as I battled insomnia for four months, starting in November of last year. Thankfully, I am back to my typical sleep schedule, and if I wake up, I can easily fall back asleep on most nights. But for those four months, the middle of the night became a time of terror for me.

It was made worse because for the first month or so, I was only getting about four or five hours of sleep, with sleep medication that normally would have knocked me out for 12 hours. If I didn’t take medication to sleep, I’d wake up every few hours. So in addition to being awake in the quiet and dark for hours on end, I was sleep-deprived, which makes everything seem worse.

But I did notice that, sleep-deprived or not, once the sun was up, that middle-of-the-night panic subsided. I began to tell myself as I lay in bed mid-panic, “This isn’t real. In 3 or 4 hours, you will not care about this.”

This tactic helped a lot. But learning the “why” was a game changer.

One morning, in utter frustration, I put the question to my Instagram community: Why does everything seem so terrible at 3am?

You might wonder why I didn’t just research the topic, which in hindsight would have made sense. But I think I believed that I was the only one having this experience, because I had never heard anyone else talk about it before. So I was surprised at how quickly I received answers from friends, who it turns out also struggle with sleep. I can see now that the reason I hadn’t heard any of this before is that I’m normally a sound sleeper and never had cause to delve deeply into the ‘how’ of sleep.

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I’ve become that person who cries all the time.

I was just reading a post from my friend about her moving back to England from D.C., and I started sobbing. Never mind that she will be closer to me in Italy. Right now, I’m in DC, and I don’t want her to go.

Cue the tears.

If you knew me, you would know how strange this is for me. For most of my life, I hardly ever cried. The first time I broke down with my current therapist, she practically gave me a standing ovation.

I could tell she wanted to shout “Bravo! Well done!”

She had complained before that she could never get a clear read on me. That when she would ask me what I was feeling after sharing about a particularly traumatic experience; my answer was always the same: nothing.

There’s a word for what I had done. It’s called repression.

I had just stuffed every fearful, anxious, or sad thought and moved on as if nothing had happened. It was a coping mechanism that worked well until my body started rebelling with chronic physical issues.

That’s the only reason I even went to therapy. I knew that my health issues were due to repressed emotions and wanted to bring them into the light. I wanted to feel things.

Be careful what you wish for.

The name of Clover’s Substack is “On the Way Life Feels,” and it fits Clover so well because she feels so deeply. When I first met her a few years ago, this kind of way of being was a mystery to me. Now, when I read that title, I think, yes!

The way life feels.

Now I get it. These days, life often feels overwhelming. It feels anxiety-provoking. It feels unstable. It feels like the people in charge are, at best, over their heads. It feels like everything has changed so fast and that there is no going back. I’m endlessly nostalgic for everything: the 80s, the 90s, the 2000’s, pre-COVID. It feels cruel.

A few years ago, I had a new friend who was going through a particularly bad year. She would frequently break down in tears, sobbing about the latest blow to blindside her. I would do everything I could to try to comfort her while feeling awestruck by her ability to express herself so freely and to engage in the extremely cathartic act of crying that so eluded me.

I would think, “I wish I could do that.”

Well, now I can. Yay.

When I first started crying all the time, I knew it was grief about my mother’s death, and because I was in a weakened state from lack of sleep. I had developed insomnia and was only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night.

But months into this, I realized it was no longer specific to my mom’s passing but was all the grief I never processed in my own life, suddenly overpowering my system. The floodgates had been opened.

Then, eventually, I realized I had moved on to something else, likely collective grief. I wouldn’t believe such a thing could happen except I have sat and cried for an hour without a single thought in my head. I have known, on some level, that what I am processing is not actually mine.

If you think this sounds nutty, I don’t care, because I’m a person who does far nuttier things than believe in collective grief.

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In our discussion, we explore:

• How chronic stress—especially from childhood—creates the conditions for autoimmune disorders to flourish in midlife

• Why the answer to her illness wasn’t more doctors or better supplements, but excavating trauma and fundamentally changing her relationship to work and life

• The stark differences between American and European culture around work, community, public space, and what actually constitutes a good life

• How giving up tenure, marriage, home ownership, and a car paradoxically gave her back her health and sense of self

• Why taking the next step matters more than having the whole plan—and how the universe meets you when you finally move

I interviewed Anne as part of the research for my upcoming book, It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: What I Learned When I Left America and we recorded this at the end of 2024. As I was rereading the interview, I realized that so much of what we discussed is as pertinent now as it was when we originally chatted, so I decided to release the interview in full.

Anne spent 23 years building an academic career, finally achieving the holy grail: a tenured position as a full professor. This was supposed to be the dream: job security, intellectual fulfillment, the reward for decades of dedication. Instead, she found herself physically breaking down, fighting an autoimmune disorder that left her afraid to drive her car, spending most days collapsed on the couch, and facing a degenerative prognosis with no real medical solutions.

Anne’s body was giving her a message her mind had been trying to ignore: something had to change.

What followed wasn’t a neat pivot or a five-year plan. It was a radical unraveling - she left her marriage, sold her house, and resigned from her job. Anne spent the next year traveling through Europe with little more than a suitcase, trying to answer the most basic question: Who am I when I’m not performing the life everyone expected me to live?

Since then Anne’s Ménière’s disease symptoms have virtually disappeared. She was living in the UK (in Scotland when we spoke, and now in England), a place that felt like “a home I never knew I had.” She walks everywhere, sits in cafes, moves slowly through beautiful cities, and has learned what it means to live at a pace her nervous system can handle. And in a twist she never saw coming, she was awarded a scholarship to pursue her dream of getting a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Manchester (which she has now completed).

Anne’s story isn’t about everyone moving to Europe or abandoning their careers. It’s about listening to the wisdom of your body when it’s screaming that something has to change. It’s about having the courage to step into uncertainty rather than stay in a situation that’s slowly destroying you. And it’s about understanding that the way we live in America - the constant stress, the isolation, the car dependency, the lack of safety nets - isn’t just hard. It can make us sick.

Anne’s journey reminds us that sometimes the most radical act of self-care isn’t a better morning routine or boundary-setting technique. Sometimes it’s burning down the life that’s killing you and trusting that you’ll figure out what comes next, one step at a time.

As Anne puts it: “At some point, you just have to feel it in yourself that you can do it, that you’re capable, that you will figure it out.”

You can listen to the interview here on Substack or most podcasting apps or read the transcript below.

Anne Boyd Transcript

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In the world's richest country, people are reduced to begging strangers online to pay for life saving health care — and we've somehow normalized it.

Such a phenomenon is almost unheard of in the United States’ peer countries, where health care is often free, and if it’s not, it is rare that anyone is bankrupted trying to be treated for an illness. Yet, in the US, approximately 67 percent of U.S. bankruptcies are reportedly linked to medical expenses.1

Worse, the Americans who run these online campaigns often pay a pretty price for health insurance, but still can’t cover the jacked-up costs of the medical care they receive. They often have to turn to friends and family for loans or gifts of money, sell their homes to cover the costs and/or set up an online campaign to pay for something they can’t go without.

It wasn’t always this way.

When I was growing up, medical care was affordable and almost always covered by insurance. This was true for me well into adulthood. I never heard of people going bankrupt or accruing medical debt. Today, we hear about this tragedy befalling people all the time.

One such person was actor James Van Der Beek, who passed away recently from cancer. His family set up a GoFundMe campaign and has raised a few million dollars. There was a backlash because it was reported that before Van Der Beek’s death, he was able to secure money from friends for a down payment on the nearly $5 million Texas ranch he and his wife had been renting for their family of eight.

How accurate this is remains unclear; a friend went online to defend him, arguing that those condemning the family over the house don't know the full story.

Whatever the case, the fact is that an actor who was a household name didn’t have enough money to cover his medical care. It’s easy to write this off as poor financial planning, but the fact is that a third of Americans end up in debt for their medical treatments.

The Atlantic reported that patients are now often told by hospital administrators to use GoFundMe campaigns to clear their outstanding balances. This may be why these campaigns are on the rise. “One study found that, in 2020, the annual number of U.S. campaigns related to medical causes — about 200,000 — was 25 times the number of such campaigns on the site in 2011,” reported The Atlantic2

This is chilling.

Unfortunately, I could cite hundreds, if not thousands, of stories like this. Health care costs are a top reason my husband and I decided we could not continue living in the United States long term. You never know when an accident or health issue could leave you deep in debt or bankrupt.

I have interviewed dozens of people who left the US to live in other countries and they never fail to mention health care costs as a primary factor. What does that say about the US, that you have to flee what is often referred to as the best health care system in the world?

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Before we get into the interview, I wanted to announce that Zerlina Maxwell and I are dreaming up a retreat in Italy for our readers. If this sounds like something you would like to attend, you can register your interest here, and more details will be shared soon.

In today’s conversation, I spoke with Hope Chambers, a marketing consultant, content creator, and mother of two, about her move from Nashville to Amsterdam. Her move wasn't just a geographic shift—it was a complete reimagining of what constitutes a good life.

Hope had achieved what many would consider success: a thriving marketing career, a house in Nashville, and a burgeoning consulting business. But something wasn’t quite right. The isolation of car-dependent living, the constant career pressure to always earn more, and—most urgently—the reality of raising children in a country where kindergarteners practice hiding from shooters changed everything.

What followed was six years of strategic planning: going freelance, building a business that could move with them, saving money, even testing out different cities. This wasn’t an impulsive escape—it was a carefully constructed path toward something better.

In our discussion, we explore:

• How decentering career and money can paradoxically lead to greater contentment and peace

• Why living in half the space in Amsterdam brought more happiness than a full-size house in Nashville

• The profound shift that happens when basic needs are guaranteed, and you stop attaching your identity to professional achievement

• How bike culture and walkable cities create the community connections that combat American isolation

Her transformation offers something many of us desperately need: proof that it’s possible to step off the treadmill, that contentment doesn’t require constantly one-upping yourself financially, that there are places where five-year-olds aren’t victims of gun violence.

In her words, “you couldn’t pay me millions to move back.”

Housekeeping: I have handed in the manuscript for my book It Doesn’t Have to Be this Way, and will be publishing regularly again, so I’ve un-paused paid subscriptions.

Also there is still time to sign up for my workshop with , “Everything You Want to Know About Leaving the United States.”

If you watched the Super Bowl, you may have seen one of the “He Gets Us” commercials about Jesus.

These have been running every year since 2022. I wrote about the ad they ran in 2023, and how what appeared to be a positive message actually was problematic because it was leading with things that most people agree with, but ignoring the more conservative anti-gay, anti-women’s leadership beliefs of the churches the organization directed people to. These are not the views being promoted in the ads and likely would not be aligned with many of the people who respond to the ads.

The churches people are sent to are called “seeker’ churches and I have had some experience with this phenomenon, and I think it is misleading and can cause a lot of harm to people who don’t understand the difference between Christian denominations (this is how I was at the time I started attending the ‘seeker church.’)

This year’s ad was right up my alley—in a way a critique of late-stage capitalism and the consumerist, “more, more, more” ethos of the US and the impact that has on us individually and communally.

It was called “More” and raised awareness of how Americans are always pursuing “more” to fill the void inside them, when what they really need is something deeper, like knowing Jesus. I agree with the premise, though I’d say that developing some sort of spirituality or deeper meaning in life is the solution. It doesn’t have to be Christianity.

If you want to read more about this, I’ve included the essay I wrote in 2023 below.

Sign up for workshop below here.

This is actually a Rumi poem, but for me it’s a nearly daily prayer.

Leave the thinking to the one who gave intelligence. In silence there is eloquence. Stop weaving and watch how the pattern improves. — Rumi

Can anyone relate?

Patient Trust

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—
and that it may take a very long time.

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And so I think it is with you;
your ideas mature gradually—let them grow,
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.
Give [God] the benefit of believing
that [God’s] hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ excerpted from Hearts on Fire

In case you haven’t noticed, the world has been changing and continues to do so at a rapid pace. It feels like chaos, because it is.

But while this chaos has caused enormous problems, it has also had an upside. It has made people seriously question what they have accepted, whether in their personal lives or what happens in public life.

I’ve noticed serious shedding of old ways of being for many people. I’m noticing many people starting to say they don’t want to live the same way anymore, whether it is personally or by accepting larger forces that shape our lives. They are realizing they can’t trust institutions for stable employment, for example, and are coming up with creative ways to build more stability by working for themselves.

My chief of staff is a great example of this. After being laid off, she started her own consulting practice and feels a greater sense of ownership over her future by having diversified income sources and working for herself. In her own words: “Stability and certainty do not inherently come from having a full-time job. Stability and certainty come from knowing that no matter what the situation, I will be able to figure it out.” She has been running her business for two years now. Within the last six months, she’s seen a significant uptick in people reaching out to ask how she built her business as an independent consultant, mentioning that they want to do something similar in the next six to twelve months. In the first year and a half of her striking out on her own, there were substantially fewer (if any) of these calls.

I hear from people of both parties that they are disgusted by the political party they always supported. I’ve lost count of my Democratic friends who are enraged by how feckless they find Democrats in the face of what is happening to the country. They aren’t becoming Republicans, they just simply don’t trust the people they used to trust to run the country in a way I’ve never heard them express before. I have Republican friends who find the party they belonged to and often worked for completely revolting.

They aren’t willing to be loyal soldiers anymore.

I’ve seen a lot of people let go of or lose things that were key to their identity, and who are now asking, “Who am I really? Who do I want to be? What kind of world do I want to live in?”

They aren’t looking to the old authorities to tell them what that should be. They are following their own guidance.

Different people pin the beginning of the chaos at various points. There was a major shift when Donald Trump was elected in 2016—a complete disruption of the political order. His re-election was an even more radical disruption because he came back into office untethered by any desire to have establishment figures in his orbit, which in the first term provided at least a few guardrails.

COVID was another obvious turning point that reshaped how we operate in society. Far too many people got used to being alone and stopped venturing out as much, even when it was safe to do so. But being used to something doesn’t make it healthy. We moved into an era where many people now feel it’s fine to bail on plans with friends or family last minute because they are engaging in “self-care” or whatever. Over the last few years, social media was awash with videos of people who planned a dinner party, or even a birthday party, had a swarm of RSVP’s and then found themselves sitting there with just a few people, or in the worst cases, no people.

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Dear Mom,

A year ago today, you died. Even as I write this, I can’t quite believe that it’s true. A part of me thinks that if I dial your number, you will pick up. That you are still sitting in your comfy TV chair, binge-watching CNN.

I often go back and listen to saved messages on my voicemail from you, and I am beginning to wonder if this is healthy. Is it time to delete these? Or is it the opposite—they should be kept for all time?

I’ve been dreading this day for the last month, as much as I dreaded my first Christmas without you. You always loved the holidays so much, and they make up the bulk of my happiest childhood memories.

There is also something that makes what I already knew was real feel real: not getting a call from you on my birthday, December 14, or on Christmas. For five decades, I’ve wished you a Merry Christmas. For five decades, you have wished me a Happy Birthday.

I miss you. I miss your laugh. I miss your annoying calls about how you couldn’t get into Facebook again, usually eating up an hour of my time helping you fix it. I’d happily give you that hour right now. Even the contentious aspects of our relationship don’t make me miss you less.

My therapist tells me that there is something about the one-year mark of a death that has extra impact, and I’m here to confirm that. The type of pain I am in I would wish on no person.

You are the person I want to talk to about all this, and yet I can’t. I mean, I can, but I can’t actually hear what you are saying back. I can imagine what you would say: Honey, I don’t want you to suffer. It was my time to go as I was suffering. You have a wonderful life, and I want you to enjoy it. Go out and have some fun.

Fun doesn’t seem to be in the cards today. Even the thought of eating makes me nauseous. As you know, when I’m sad like this, my appetite disappears. It reminds me of the time I came home after a broken engagement, and after proffering various foods that I rejected, you walked out with a plate of bacon and said, “I know you will eat this.”

You were correct. I don’t know if I told my husband that story or if he thought of it on his own, but he presented me with a plate of bacon yesterday, and it’s sitting in the refrigerator now, and I have no appetite for it.

I have known the pain of heartbreak. But I have never known the pain I am living through now. People keep saying to me that losing your mother is on a different level than other losses. She carried you inside her body for 9 months—the relationship is simply like no other. This is true even if your relationship with your mother was complicated or problematic, which, as you know, ours was.

As I told you on your deathbed, despite all the issues between us, I was glad you were my mother. Tears welled in your eyes, and you shook your head somewhat disbelievingly. I told you it was true: you had been my hero. I reminded you of all the women you helped as a professor and Dean, and what an important legacy you had left, that you were a badass: one of the first female archeologists in Alaska.

I always looked up to you and desperately wanted your approval and love. Much of what is good about me I learned from you. At the same time, a lot of the trauma I’ve had to work through came from you as well. I didn’t feel it was necessary to explain that to you as you lay dying. Plus, I knew you knew that already.

Your caregiver told me that you had told her that you wished you had been more patient with me when I was young and listened more, rather than sending me to live with my dad when I was ten. You felt that I held that against you.

As I told you that day, I never held that against you. You and I simply could not live under the same roof for more than the summers I then spent with you, and that was obvious even to me, a ten-year-old.

Still, I felt abandoned. And your death has stirred that in me again. I feel you have abandoned me, even though, of course, you had no control over your own death. But I just want you to come back for a little while longer. I thought I was ready for you to go because you had lost so many of your faculties, and life was too hard for you. But I wasn’t prepared.

Other friends have said to me that they thought they would be ready because their parents were in pain or they were ancient. But I tell them what others said to me: you are never prepared for your parents to die.

It feels a bit like God dying.

To children, parents are at a minimum demi-gods. Even if you intellectually know they will depart the earth one day, it feels incomprehensible when it happens.

I know you had no choice on the day that you died, but by moving on the day after Christmas, this anniversary has been even more gut-wrenching than it would have been had it not landed smack dab in the middle of the holiday season. I know that I’d be devastated regardless of the date of your anniversary, but at least my therapist would be working if it had happened in February. At least my friends wouldn’t be off on holiday or busy attending to their holiday duties in a way that makes asking for support seem extra selfish.

Many people have told me that now that you are in a different place, you can be the mother you were meant to be because where you are is pure love. I’ve chosen to believe this. I feel your presence. I ask you for help with things, and when I do those things, they seem to go more smoothly. I’ve chosen to believe that we now have the relationship that I think we both always wanted.

“The first half of life is about becoming who you needed to be to survive. The second half of life is about unraveling everything that no longer aligns with your soul’s purpose,” wrote in a post that caught my attention, for this kicker: “That’s not a midlife crisis—it’s a rebirth.”

This is a great way to frame moving into the second half of life in an intentional manner. It’s also true that while birth is a beautiful process, it is inherently painful and so it often is with a rebirth.

It’s not just painful because of how other people react to how you are changing. It’s painful to let go of big pieces of your ego/personality that gave you a false sense of identity.

When super-achievers go through this process they tend to slow down and their work output is noticeably lower. There are a lot of people who don’t like this.

I thought of this recently when I saw the writer address complaints that she wasn’t posting enough content on Substack.

She wrote to the disgruntled paid subscribers (I bolded the part that really jumped out at me):

I know, I know. Unsubscribe, of course, I get it. It’s not even that I’m too busy to be bothered (I wish!) – in fact usually I’m not posting because the satisfaction and relief that comes from putting something/anything out there and getting a response is too beguiling. So much more enticing than struggling with emptiness, with not knowing what to do, with my body, with the anxiety of no audience and no productivity. But I have to get lost like this, go into the awful unknown – not stay in constant + reassuring conversation with the public – in order to break new ground. It’s uncomfortable (for me) and I’m sure it’s boring as a subscriber.

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Today is my birthday, and it’s not the easiest one since it’s the first time in my life I won’t get a Happy Birthday call from my mother.

So, to cheer myself up, I thought I’d do a giveaway or two.

I typically only work with coaching clients who come through word of mouth, though I’m considering opening it up more widely once my book manuscript is handed in.

But today, I’m giving away three 1:1 60-minute coaching sessions. We can focus on anything that is bedeviling you, or work with (or figure out) your Enneagram type.

If you would like to be entered to receive one of the coaching sessions, email kirsten@kirstenpowers.com and include a general idea of what you would like to focus on in the session, which will be done via zoom.

And while I’m at it I’ll throw in a birthday discount for yearly readers.

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A 2024 survey showed that 3 in 5 Americans feel their mental health is negatively impacted by the holidays due to high levels of stress.

Thirty-six percent report an increase in anxiety, and 28 percent report an increase in depression.

For those who are navigating complex family dynamics or celebrating a holiday without a recently passed loved one, it’s even more difficult.

Not exactly the most wonderful time of the year for many Americans.

I’m generally not that affected by the holiday seasons, but this year was different.

I shared last week about the grief over my mother’s death that assaulted me about a month ago, and is hanging on with a vengeance, made exponentially worse by the fact that we are deep in the holiday season, which brings up so many feelings of nostalgia for my mom. It doesn’t help that the anniversary of her death is December 26. (I so appreciated all the supportive and kind comments, as well as the commiserating over how difficult this time of year can be on that post. I was extremely touched by the stories of grief so many shared.)

As we know, these are the times when everyone is busy with their travel plans, shopping for presents or visiting friends and family. It’s not the time your friends are free to sit with you as they reassure you, especially since they often aren’t even in town or are hosting out-of-town friends and relatives. Traveling is what I would have been doing had I not been frozen in place with anxiety and grief. I had to cancel those plans when it was clear I was in no shape for an international trip.

In a cruel twist of fate, it’s also the time when your therapist (should you be so lucky to have one) is on vacation.

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