I just got weary of looking up from my phone and realizing I had wasted twenty minutes scrolling through feeds that had been curated for me with help from me. I started replacing some of that enticing content with things that require my brain to actually do something.

It started with Duolingo. I am on a 791-day French streak, which may sound more impressive than my actual ability to speak French. I may be able to order a chocolate croissant and an espresso or ask for directions when I get one of my bucket trips checked off the list. But I will still look like a dumb American tourist to be sure.

Then came more dedication to daily New York Times games. Then Elevate. And most recently, a history game called Paladin. Which is fun but also a bit AI-glitchy at times.

None of this is exactly philosopher-queen behavior. But it’s an effort. It’s my effort. And that’s how Plato found me. I was working my way through a section on ancient Greece. I had clicked through Plato’s ideas about government, his philosopher-king, and his timeless Allegory of the Cave.

And before the game revealed its modern twist, I knew exactly where it was going. Social media. Sure enough. Tap. THE MODERN CAVE.

And what struck me wasn’t that someone had compared social media to Plato’s cave. People have been making versions of similar comparisons for years. What struck me was that I already knew they would.

In case you aren’t familiar with Plato’s Cave. Plato imagines humans chained inside a darkened cave, facing a wall. Objects pass in front of a twisting fire, casting deep shadows onto the cave wall before them. The prisoners can only see the shadows. And because the shadows are all they’ve ever known, they mistake them for reality.

One prisoner eventually escapes the cave. He encounters the “real” world beyond the shadows and discovers that what he had believed was reality was only a dimmed, artificial representation of it.

Twenty-four hundred years later, here we are, again. Except we’ve made one rather remarkable advancement. Plato’s prisoners at least shared the same shadows.

We don’t. Our walls are keenly personalized.

My feed is listening and watching and learning what keeps me chained. Yours is learning you too. What we click on. What we heart, comment on, share. What makes us angry. What scares us. What confirms what we already believe. What we come back for.

We’ve managed to take an ancient philosophical dilemma and customize it.

You get a wall! And you get a wall! And YOU get a wall!

Of course, Oprah gives away lovely things like brand new cars. We get personalized existential imprisonment. Slightly different energy.

And there is an astonishing amount of money riding on whether we keep clicking through our feeds. Global social-media advertising spending is projected to reach nearly $339 billion in 2026. This represents an18.4% increase from about $286 billion in 2025. Ridiculously smart people, backed by ever-evolving technology and enormous financial incentives, are working around the clock to better understand what keeps us in our personalized caves. And they are paid quite handsomely for their efforts and results. One recent reported compensation package for a senior-level Meta engineer working in machine learning topped $1.2 million a year.

That’s a lot of money competing for something I routinely give away for “free:” my time and attention.

So I don’t think we should ignore the reality that putting the stupid phone down can actually be extraordinarily hard.

There is also a cosmic level of irony in the way I arrived at all of this. I re-encountered Plato while playing a history game on my phone. I’ve spent 791 consecutive days learning French on the same phone. I use it to read. To learn. To FaceTime people I love. Eventually I will publish this essay online. And you will probably read it from your phone.

Technology can be a wonderful tool. It can also be a terribly cruel master. It comes down to a matter of who is directing whom?

I don’t think I’m going to solve that problem. I do, however, have two proposals. Neither is that impressive. Silicon Valley need not panic.

Two Very Weak Rebellions

The first is simply this: Choose more of what gets your attention.

I’m not even arguing that everything we choose should be productive. We do not need another opportunity to optimize ourselves. We have enough of that.

Waste some time. Play a stupid game if it brings you joy. Sit on the porch phoneless. Read a few pages of a book. FaceTime someone. Learn six French words you’ll promptly forget. Do absolutely nothing.

The point isn’t productivity. The point is choice.

Apparently, sometimes I choose to feed imaginary chickens who produce imaginary eggs for imaginary macarons I sell to imaginary customers in Rome.

And I stand on my imaginary poultry business.

Why? Wasting your own time is not as crushing as having your time wasted for you. No, I’m not going to defeat the AI algorithm. I just need to stop letting it win every time.

Which leads into my second very weak rebellion proposal. Do more wonderful things and don’t broadcast it to anyone.

I realize this is all getting a bit radical.

Test: Can you eat your locally sourced, farm-raised, spinach-artichoke-goat-cheese egg-white omelette without first taking a picture and informing Instagram? Not even your private Snapchat story.

The attention economy has created a strange double transaction. The platforms monetize our attention as consumers. And increasingly, we monetize our own experiences as proof we have a decently chic life.

We offer our attention, affirmation, and identity to gain social capital.

Look where I went. Look what I ate. Look who I’m with. Look what my kids did. Look how interestingly cool my filtered life is. Look at me (oh Narcissus, step away from the pool. Please step away).

None of this is inherently terrible. I love seeing pictures of people I care about. Social media has connected me to those people. Sharing our lives with one another is profoundly human.

But maybe we are forgetting that an experience doesn’t need an audience to count as cool. So here’s my proposal. Take the picture if you must. For the memories. But then, and this is where things get really wild, let the picture live on your phone.

Maybe we need a new photo album…TOP SECRET: COOL STUFF I DID WITH PEOPLE I LOVE AND DIDN’T TELL THE INTERNET ABOUT.

A Parisian cafe. A sunset that glistens on the water. Ridiculous laugh-until-you-snort wine moments. People you love. Memories you’ve made. A private little catalog of a life actually lived.

Sorry, this also means no likes. No hearts. No comments (or soup) for you.

But isn’t there something surprisingly intimate and lovely about private memories made with the people who made them? Some moments may actually become more precious when we resist the urge to make them public content.

And there’s also something really sad and jacked up about the fact that I’m calling any of this rebellion. Choosing what I want to think about isn’t radical. Having an experience without posting about it is not rage-against-the-machine level. Sharing a moment with someone I love without reaching for my phone shouldn’t feel like an act of civil disobedience.

I’m simply trying to recover a few ordinary things technology has made strangely difficult. Experiencing a moment nobody monetized. Not the platform. Not the advertiser. Not even you.

Plato: What is the nature of human reality? Are we mistaking dimmed shadows for truth?

Silicon Valley: Let’s deploy some of the most sophisticated technology ever created to capture, predict, personalize, track, and monetize human attention. Keep the cave caving, boys!

MJ: But I did my French lesson today and didn’t post my omelette.

I realize none of this is going to bring down the attention economy. These are very, very weak rebellions. And maybe you can start your own rebellion too.

Nothing too dramatic. Just small choices you didn’t let the AI machinery make for you. Go live your life somewhere beyond the shadows. And don’t tell anyone.

P.S. I am absolutely going to post this essay to Facebook. And I predict Meta is going to try to hide it from your feeds. Of course, social platforms are optimized to self-protect. A sweet satisfaction I get knowing your algorithm doesn’t want you joining even a very, very weak rebellion.

If you’ve worked in education for longer than about five minutes, I don’t have to convince you the work has just become heavier. Educators’ job descriptions have expanded, and expectations have mounted.

Teachers are doing their best to instruct children who are carrying burdens that previous generations of educators simply did not see with the same intensity and frequency. You’re educators, but you’re also counselors, encouragers, mediators, detectives, social workers, cheerleaders, problem-solvers.

And they aren’t imagining this landscape shift. The emotional demands of teaching have grown because the emotional needs of children have grown.

The grim reality is that suicide is the second leading cause of death for American children, teens, and young adults. Approximately 6,400 10- to 24-year-olds are victims of suicide each year. For perspective, that is about equal to the student population of PGSD.

This, of course, is cause for great concern. I wondered if these national statistics were felt here in coastal Mississippi. The responses at convocation left little doubt.

When asked, “Have you ever been concerned that one of your students might be at risk for suicide?”

Out of 141 respondents, 81 selected “Yes, multiple students.” 37 respondents selected “Yes, maybe one.” More than four out of five of the educators (83.7.%) had been concerned that at least one of their students might be at risk for suicide. More than half (57.4.%) said that concern wasn’t limited to just one child, but multiple students.

And those are only the children we tragically lose. Many more are quietly struggling.

Nearly 3 in 5 teen girls felt “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021. This is double what boys reported. Also of note, this is a nearly 60 percent increase and the highest level reported in over a decade. I have a hunch that five years later these numbers are still climbing.

Countless more children are wrestling with anxiety, loneliness, trauma, grief, family instability, or an adverse childhood experience (ACE).

Rattling off statistics does not seem to have the same intended punch as an attempt to place the stats into the story.

Let’s put this into perspective. When an average American teacher walks into their classroom of thirty students, what are they actually walking into:

*Out of the 15 girls sitting in their class, 9 of them are carrying a persistent feeling of sadness or hopelessness.

*Of the 30 sets of precious eyes looking back at them, 9 of them have seriously considered suicide.

*About 20 of the 30 students have experienced at least one traumatic event before age 16.

NOTE: Trauma exposure increases the risk of later anxiety, depression, substance use, and suicidal thoughts, though many children are resilient and may not develop these outcomes.

*6 out of the 30 are carrying four or more adverse childhood experiences (ACES).

*4 have experienced documented abuse or neglect, though I imagine this number is actually much higher when you consider what flies under the radar.

I do not believe the work became harder because teachers suddenly became weaker or lazy or less committed or less prepared. I think their work has become harder because childhood has dramatically changed. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation that previous generations were raised in a play-based childhood, and this has been replaced by a phone-based childhood.

Children now live in a heavier world; as a result, educators inherited a heavier calling.

I had a strong hunch about this. That the emotional weight teachers carry today isn’t simply the result of curriculum changes, testing, or larger workloads. It’s the result of standing in front of a generation of children carrying burdens that previous generations encountered far less often.

And the PGSD convocation produced the receipts.

When asked, “How much has the emotional weight of teaching increased since you began your career?” Nearly 92% of educators said it had increased somewhat or dramatically. In fact, almost two-thirds (64.7%) said the change has been dramatic. To the three educators who answered “Not at all,” if you’re reading this, I’d sincerely love to hear your story. The rest of us may have something to learn from you.

Those numbers are difficult to dismiss. They confirmed what many educators have quietly known for years: something has shifted. These statistics can tell us what has changed. They cannot tell us who educators are or why they choose to continue to show up every morning. Maybe we should circle back to where their stories began.

Why did you choose education? Maybe you are thinking to “have summers off with their children. For PERS benefits. For jean Friday, or that amazing teacher pay (sarcasm).”

Instead, PGSD answered:

“It’s a calling.”

“To save lives.”

“To inspire. To serve. To help.”

“To make a difference.”

I don’t think these two findings are unrelated. I think they explain one another.

The educators who reported carrying dramatically more emotional weight are the very same caring people who entered the profession to make a difference.

When compassion meets unprecedented needs, the result is obviously emotional exhaustion. This exhaustion is not a signal of a lack of commitment. It is actually evidence of profound and costly commitment. A commitment that has the power to change the world for good.

I believe that’s true. But changing the world is not going to happen dramatically or all of a sudden. Changing the world is the slow, exhaustive work of educators offering themselves one sacredly ordinary school day at a time.

Maybe the greatest gift we can offer our teachers is simply this: I see you.

Not another apple ornament. Not another Starbucks gift card. “I see you” could start with something as elementary as a handwritten thank you note.

A note that reads something like this:

Dear Mrs. Myers,

I see the way you greet every child by name and with a smile.

I see the snack drawer you keep to feed hungry kids.

I see the student you quietly check on after class.

I see the extra hours you stay to work on class plans.

I see the heavy burden you carry, even when you think no one else notices.

I see you, and I thank you.

I write knowing I see only in part. I don’t know what happened. My hope is not to persuade anyone toward a particular conclusion. It is simply to bear witness to what communities owe one another while we search for the truth.

One of the things I’ve learned as both a pastor and a therapist is that communities, like people, carry memories. Mississippi certainly does. Some of those memories are beautiful: neighbors helping neighbors when the storms of life blow through. Others are deeply painful, marked by injustice, rooted in racism, and echoing broken promises of the past that still shape the present.

Mississippi history explains why many people, especially Black families, approach moments like this with caution and skepticism. That distrust did not appear out of thin air. It was earned. To acknowledge that history is not optional. It is part of telling the truth.

History tells us why trust is difficult. What history cannot tell us is what actually happened. That is the work of careful investigation, and of a community committed to following the truth wherever it leads.

But I wonder if history asks something more of us as well. Justice requires that we take suspicion seriously. Truth requires that we test it carefully. Compassion asks us to hold both until the evidence speaks.

Seeking the truth is not passive. It requires patient, disciplined work. Every lead should be investigated. Every witness should be heard. Every piece of evidence deserves to be examined.

Justice depends on truth → Trust depends on justice. If we reverse that order, we eventually lose both.

And how we speak to one another while we wait matters just as much as how we investigate. Words do more than describe reality. They help construct it. The stories we repeat become the assumptions we inherit. The assumptions we carry shape the way we interpret events and relationships. Over time, they influence our actions, our institutions, and eventually the policies we create together.

Language is never “just language.” It forms our individual frame of reference and our shared moral imagination. And in moments of profound grief, even words spoken in sincere lament can be difficult to hear above the noise.

Perhaps that is what grief does. It makes every word, every moment, everything, feel heavier. I know something about searching for healing words in the midst of unimaginable grief. My son Jeremy tragically died when he was twelve years old. Knowing what happened did not make the loss any less devastating.

As I’ve watched Nolan’s family walk through this tragedy, I have found myself praying for them without ceasing. I cannot imagine carrying the weight of losing a child while also waiting for answers. Whatever else we may conclude, may we never lose sight of the grief this family now bears. The enormity of a grief like this rarely belongs to one family alone. It ripples outward into entire communities.

Our Coast feels deeply fractured. People who have lived as neighbors and friends are looking at the same tragedy and arriving at very different conclusions. The divide itself has become part of the story. It also calls back to generations of division that have shaped a place like Mississippi. That is something worth grieving too.

Long after the cameras leave…after the reporters and influencers move on… after social media finds another story…we will still have to find a way to live here together. And call it Pollyanna, but I believe we could somehow find a way to love one another better.

Our children will still attend school together. We’ll still stand beside one another at ball fields, grocery store checkout lines, and sit together in hospital waiting rooms. We are the same Mississippi that will bring chainsaws and casseroles when the next hurricane hits.

Whatever this investigation ultimately reveals, we will inherit not only its conclusions, but also the way we treated one another while we waited. That, too, becomes part of our shared story. We are writing the history our children will read.

Beneath all of this, I sense something even deeper: a fear that the truth may never fully come to light. That fear is real. It deserves compassion, not dismissal. That fear is one reason emotions are running so high.

Perhaps the real question before us is not simply: What happened on Horn Island on July 4th? That question matters deeply, and it belongs to the public servants charged with answering it carefully and with integrity. And I hope and pray the truth is revealed.

But another question belongs to all of us. Who are we becoming while we seek that answer?

If we become people who take suspicion seriously, test it carefully, and hold one another with compassion while the evidence unfolds, we will not only honor Nolan and his family. We may become a community more worthy of the truth itself.

One of the first lessons every ecology student learns is that nothing in nature exists alone.

A towering oak is never simply an oak. Its life depends upon an astonishing network of relationships: soil, rainfall, fungi hidden beneath the forest floor, insects, neighboring trees, seasons, disturbances, even the trees that came before it. Pull on one thread and dozens of others begin to move. The health of one is inseparable from the health of the whole.

We instinctively understand this in the natural world. No one blames a forest fire on a single tree. No one studies an endangered species without first asking about habitat. Ecologists know that living things are shaped by the environments they inhabit.

What if we’ve underestimated how true that might be of ourselves?

Not simply asking, “Why is this teenager so anxious?” But asking, “What ecology is this teenager growing inside?”

Not, “Why are families exhausted?” But, “What conditions make sabbath rest almost impossible?”

Or, “Why is our world so polarized?” But, “What daily practices are covertly fueling mistrust and separation?

The more I think this way, the more I find myself asking different questions about our current mental health crisis, particularly among children and adolescents.

I’m wondering whether we’ve been missing the trees by not paying enough attention to the forest.

For years I’ve found myself returning to the same seemingly unrelated observations. Families share meals around a table less often. Children know fewer trusted adults outside their immediate families. Young people now carry unfiltered tragedy in their pockets. Teachers increasingly find themselves serving as first responders to emotional crises they were never trained to navigate. None of these changes happened overnight.

And each discipline trying to solve this mounting crisis has something worth paying attention to. Modern psychology has given us remarkable tools for understanding trauma, attachment, depression, and anxiety. Neuroscience has illuminated how experience shapes the developing brain. Sociology helps us understand institutions and culture. Public health elevates missing protective factors. Anthropology asks how human beings organize life together. Theology asks what it means to choose the sacred ordinary above the trivial and fleeting.

I find myself less interested in deciding which discipline is the most “right” than in asking what becomes visible when they begin talking to one another.

What if human flourishing is, at least in part, an interconnected ecological phenomenon? That question has become difficult for me to unask.

Ecologists don’t just ask, “Why is this one tree struggling?” before asking, “What has happened to the forest?”

I’m now asking similar questions. What ecology are our tender saplings expected to be growing inside?

What ecology shapes a thriving relationship? A marriage? A family? A neighborhood? A church? A school? A community?

What practices quietly nourish resilience? Which ones slowly erode it? Which conditions make hope more likely? Which conditions quietly cultivate despair and anxiety?

I don’t yet have a complete framework for all of this. Only a not-unique theory that the human heart and the communities we allow to shape us have a delicate ecology we are not paying enough attention to.

Human flourishing depends not only upon what happens inside us, but also upon the relationships, practices, places, rhythms, and communities - the “ecology” that quietly shapes who we are becoming. I think many would agree we are in a paradigm-level shift that’s eroding time-tested communal anchors.

Like most ecological shifts, this happened gradually, almost imperceptibly, until one day we looked around and wondered what the hell has actually happened to our children.

I have a growing suspicion that many of the things we’ve quietly dismissed as ordinary - sharing meals, wandering through nature, making art with our hands, lingering around church potluck tables, encouraging outdoor imaginative play without adult instruction (or iPads), gardening with grandparents, standing still long enough to watch the sun disappear beneath the horizon - may not be ordinary at all.

I don’t know exactly where this excavation will lead. I only know that the deeper I dig, the less convinced I become that human flourishing is something we need to try to invent.

What if we have spent decades studying the psychology of the individual while paying too little attention to the ecology that individual is growing inside? NOTE: I am not arguing that therapy and medication management are not vital. Nope, they save and improve lives.

It’s more like, I’m curious whether the next frontier of mental health will at least include less inventing the next best treatment de jour, and more about recovering “basic” ways of being human that have sustained the generations before us.

When I offered guidance around boundaries, I would tell folks to limit what they are doing. Allow for some calendar, energy, financial, and relational margin in your life. Be intentional about pouring what you have into the things in your life you have deemed to be the most important.

Recently, something has shifted. A recognition that the way I’ve thought about boundaries, for all its usefulness, has been living mostly in one lane. It has helped me consider what to keep out. How to maneuver around the outside demands around me, clamoring for my attention. What to decline, what not to take on, where to draw “boundary” lines with others. Necessary and helpful, for sure. But incomplete.

My working framework was thinking of overextension primarily in terms of limiting my behavior and not allowing others’ expectations to dictate a response. But what I’m beginning to see more clearly is that overextending our margins has an internal dimension as well. Porous boundaries don’t just lead to exhaustion and impaired relationships. They lead to neurological dysregulation that, if unchecked, leads to something worse (keep reading, more on that in a bit).

Life gave me a little object lesson on this recently in a personal training session. Women’s health gurus have preached that the older we get, the more important weight training and functional training are for longevity. I have always lifted, but for sure leaned more heavily into cardio. I have been making an intentional effort to lift more consistently. I had been steadily increasing in weight. On leg day a couple of weeks ago, I added weights to both squats and deadlifts. I assumed I would be able to add weights to a hex (trap) deadlift, which is a combo of both. The added weight didn’t look dramatically different. And technically, I could lift it.

But a little warning light went off, alerting me that this may be too heavy. The movement wasn’t quite as clean. The added strain on my lower back was vaguely noticeable. There was only a subtle sense that I was just on the threshold between challenge and risk. I could have kept going, but I chose to set it back down. Took some of the weight off. And tried again. Not because I couldn’t do it. But because I realized what it could potentially cost me if I kept going. A jacked back, and then I would be out of the gym altogether until the old lady frame I’m trying to keep from deteriorating heals.

That moment has stayed with me. Because so much of what we carry can feel like that. Not impossible. Not even obviously in the “risky” area. Just slightly beyond what our system can hold without consequence. And because we can manage it, at least for a while, we convince ourselves it belongs to us. And perhaps we have fallen into the temptation to believe it is an “honor” to be able to carry so much. We are accustomed to folks marveling at “how busy” we are. We whip into every commitment on two wheels and announce to whoever is listening how exhausted we are from everything we have done today.

Reality check: This is not cool. This does not make you look important or needed. This is a person who is needlessly wearing out the one and only body they are going to have, and for what? You are worth more than that.

You see, capacity isn’t just about what you can do. It’s about what you choose to sustain over the long haul without a negative impact on, say, your attitude, self-regulation, energy level, life span, or perception of things.

Brené Brown’s “compassion smackdown stack” research revealed that the most compassionate and loving people “have boundaries of steel.” This surprised even her! Boundaried people care enough to have paid close attention to what they are already carrying, walked it all out, and clearly understand what happens when their boundaries start crumbling. Care, without boundaries, doesn’t remain care. Brene says it clearest: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” Ouch! Unclear boundaries over time reshape into resentment, burnout, and a kind of emotional withdrawal. You morph into a robotic, grumpy shell of a person programmed to strive beyond your capacity just to check things off a never-ending to-do list that you created for yourself.

So all along, you are thinking that overextending yourself is doing everyone around you a favor. Showing you “care” so much. But in reality, your self-sacrificing efforts often accomplish the exact opposite. Unclear = Unkind. Sometimes what we frame as kindness is actually chronic overextension fueled by guilt, anxiety, and people pleasing disguised in a socially acceptable costume. The worst part…You convinced yourself this was the “right and good” thing to do. Bless it!

And then this week, I stumbled upon an old account from ancient Rome that is recorded by the early Christian writer Tertullian that strangely pulled this all together for me. As the stories go, during elaborate victory parades, when the hero returned, a servant walked directly behind the conquering general. This servant carried a crown and paced close enough to the conquering general to whisper in his ear: Look behind you. Remember you are still mortal. Whether or not all the details are historically exact, the instinct behind it is “clear.” Even at the height of power, someone was tasked with interrupting the illusion that everything belonged to him. Most of us don’t have someone assigned to that role. And so the illusion that all this is yours to have, handle, and harness goes largely unchecked.

Without some kind of interruption, a whisper that you are a mere mortal, everything begins to feel like it requires your response. Every need feels immediate. Every moment carries a quiet urgency that the body does not know how to dismiss. And over time, the nervous system adapts accordingly. It stays on heightened alert. Porous boundaries are what can happen when no one is there to whisper: this is not all yours.

Which brings us to something simpler, and perhaps more confronting. We are not infinite. Memento Mori (remember you must die).

We do not have unlimited attention, unlimited energy, or unlimited time. There is also a limit to what we can “lift,” a limit to what we can give, a limit to what we can meaningfully respond to in a single day, a single season, a single life.

And yet the world we live in rarely reflects that reality back to us. Culture invites us, relentlessly, to pile on more weight until our backs are metaphorically and quite literally all jacked up. Boundaries, in this light, are not just about creating pockets of margin. They are about paying closer attention, becoming your own you are human whisperer, and thoughtfully analyzing what is actually yours to carry. Then, bonus points for courageously choosing to lay down some of the “weight” that maybe you can technically lift, maybe you are lowkey proud you can carry all this, but at the expense of dysregulating your system and your capacity to remain kind.

A simple litmus test. Ask those who are closest to you. How do you think I am managing all the “weight” I’m carrying? If you get a kind of scared side glance, like can I really answer this and not get bopped on? You know all you need to know. Unclear = Unkind. If you are constantly coming home frazzled, frustrated, barking out orders to the very people you claim to “care” about most, you, my friend, may need to do an inventory of what all you are carrying and choose to put some of that weight down. Not everything that can be lifted should be. Choose kindness!

In my decades of youth ministry, I learned to read a room. You learn the language of eye rolls and silence, of bravado masking insecurity, of the particular ache of being fifteen and unsure of where (or if) you belong. I’ve loaded up two 56-passenger buses and hauled teens from the mountains to the beach. 72-hour trip to Universal, Stranger Things (and every other themed) parties, Chill Weekends led by youth with yoga, arts and crafts, braiding hair, student-led talks and worship, flag football, and enos tied between trees all afternoon. With intention and the best adult leaders ever, we created community for the teens in our care as much as we could.

But then life and the world around you shift.

I stepped into a senior pastor role. My children grew up and left for college. My days filled with crafting engaging worship, community outreach, funerals, and finding money to do all things. Important work, meaningful work…but different. The kind that slowly, almost imperceptibly, moves you further from the raw, unfiltered emotional lives of young people.

I didn’t notice it happening. Not at first. It wasn’t until I walked into a classroom at Ocean Springs High School to teach dual-credit psychology that something in me flinched.

They were bright, funny, creative, and capable students. On the surface, nothing seemed too different than my youth ministry days. And yet there was a heaviness in the room I couldn’t quite name, something ambient and persistent, like a low-pressure system that had settled in and refused to lift. Anxiety and sadness didn’t present as occasional disruptions; they felt woven into the fabric of daily life, so constant they had ceased to register as abnormal. As if this shrouded darkness had been running in the background so long that no one thought to question it anymore.

It unsettled me in a way I can’t easily explain. I went looking for answers. Like up all night like a maniac searching. Was it the lingering effect of COVID isolation, the saturation of social media, the pressure to perform, the quiet fracturing of family and culture? The more I researched and wrote, the less satisfying any single explanation became.

But this thing I couldn’t shake was like a placenta pushing me into something I never saw coming. I transitioned into a clinical therapist role within the Pascagoula-Gautier school district, and the picture sharpened quickly.

The first time I conducted a suicide risk assessment with a student, I remember the clinical language coming easily. Training does that for you. You know what to ask. You know how to listen. You know how to document.

Suicidal ideation. Self-harm. Safety planning. Parent calls. Follow-ups.

What you’re never quite prepared for is how often you will need to do it. And how it left a gnawing, inescapable pit in my stomach that followed me home and paralyzed me on my couch for hours.

National data has tried to name what many of us on the front lines were already seeing up close: nearly one in three high school girls reporting that they had seriously considered suicide, with similar trends, though less often discussed, emerging among boys. More than half of teens reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. Suicide now ranking among the leading causes of death for young people.

The numbers are staggering. But numbers, I’ve learned, rarely capture the feeling in the room. The feeling I couldn’t shake.

And then there is the fragmented abyss of a world they are growing up inside. We often talk about “screen time,” as if the issue is quantity. But what has changed is not just how long they are on their phones. It is what they are seeing.

At thirteen (let’s be honest, NO ONE is verifying age) without interruption, a literal child can scroll past real footage of violence, death, rape, humiliation, despair. Not fictionalized. Not buffered by a Hollywood story. Real.

Seconds later, your attention shifts. A new TikTok dance. A meme. A cute cat or corgi video. And then, again, something darker.

The nervous system has no time to process what it has witnessed before it is asked to move on.

No generation before this one has had such immediate, unfiltered access to human suffering. Delivered quietly, privately, carried around in the pocket of their jeans.

We have, in many ways, normalized exposure to things the human psyche was never designed to metabolize at that pace. And we wonder “why” anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation among teens are skyrocketing.

But it gets worse (sorry).

In my current role as Director of Children’s Services and Quality Assurance with South Mississippi Mental Health Center, the lens widened again. And what came into focus has been harder to hold. It is literally shattering my heart.

Because now the children I am doing suicide risk assessments on aren’t just teens.

Kindergarten. Second grade. Fifth grade. Precious little ones are arriving at our doors with scared parents weekly. Did you hear that? Multiple times a week, my staff sees children who cannot return to school until they are cleared, because of something they searched on a Chromebook: How do I tell my mom I want to kill myself?

Or a drawing their teacher found. A crude, stick figure of themselves lying still. With the words “I just want to die.”

Or a statement, delivered without drama, without the weight we would expect: “I just want to jump off a cliff and drown in the sea.”

I’ve found myself trying to remember what I knew about death at that age. I can recall a vague understanding. Older people died warm in their beds. Sometimes, there were terrible accidents you heard about in other cities. There were funerals for old folks, but they were softened somehow, buffered by adult explanations about “they lived a good life.”

But suicide? I don’t remember knowing that was an option. Or a thing at all. Not conceptually. Not practically. Not as something a person might choose to do themselves. It simply wasn’t in the landscape of my childhood. Or my children’s childhood. That absence is what feels most disorienting now.

Not only are children struggling to hold on to any semblance of a childhood, but they are struggling with language, imagery, and ideas that once belonged to a much later chapter of life. Something has shifted, and quietly, without announcement, the boundaries of childhood have begun to erode.

There is a temptation, when faced with something this complex, to reach quickly for an explanation. To assign responsibility and blame. To point to technology or parenting or schools or culture.

What I’m sitting with lately is something more basic, and perhaps more urgent: We are witnessing a paradigm shift level change, and many of us have not yet fully seen it. Not because we don’t care. But because, like me, perhaps we drifted just far enough away not to notice the moment it began.

And it’s time to wake up (unplug from your own phone) and do something.

There are efforts, good ones, trying to speak “hope” into this terrible moment.

Programs like Hope Squad have been working to equip students to recognize and respond when their peers are struggling. In Jackson County and communities across Mississippi, these programs have quietly become lifelines in hallways most adults never walk.

And yet, even as the need has grown, the support for such efforts remains fragile. Recently, funding for expanding Hope Squad in Mississippi did not move forward. Not because the need was debated, but because of a technicality.

A procedural miss. The kind of thing that may seem reasonable to be written off as “Opps! We’ll just fix this next legislative session.” And also, the kind of thing that feels like a grievously unacceptable excuse when you’ve sat across from a five-year-old who cannot go back to class until someone decides they are not going to kill themselves.

Someone in “power” needs to notice. Not in a passing way. Not in a headline. But in a sustained, collective, can-not-look-away, we are going to do something, kind of noticing. Because what is unfolding is not abstract. It is not theoretical.

It is happening in classrooms, in counseling offices, in quiet corners of schools where children are trying to articulate something they do not yet fully understand, using language they should not yet have. At the very same time, the places that once offered refuge. Youth groups, shared spaces, and embodied community are becoming harder to sustain. Ask anyone trying to lead a youth ministry now. The difficulty is not only attendance and engagement, but also not knowing how to reach young people anymore. The pull of isolation has grown stronger, even as the need for connection has become more urgent.

There is a line I’ve been carrying with me lately: We didn’t know. But now we do. And once you see it, really see it, you can’t unsee it. The question is not whether this is happening. The question is what we will do with the knowing.

“HOPE is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.” DESMOND TUTU

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from a single hard day. It comes from the accumulation of many fairly manageable ones.

Nothing overwhelming on its own. A meeting here, a deadline there, a handful of responsibilities like reorganizing a closet, that individually feel entirely reasonable. So why is it that by the end of the day, there is a depletion of emotional and relational reserve that is difficult to account for? Like something just out of your peripheral view.

Part of what makes this kind of fatigue so confusing is that it exists inside a life that, by most external measures, is working. The calendar is full. Most obligations are being met. The day is, in a technical sense, productive.

And productivity, in the modern world, carries its own quiet reassurance. It suggests that things are under control. That forward motion is being maintained.

But there is a cost to a life that leaves no room for interruption or holy margin.

Over time, many people begin to organize their days around a single, unspoken assumption: that time exists to be filled. Schedules tighten. Gaps disappear. Even rest and re-creation become something that must be planned, optimized, or earned.

Busy becomes a proxy for valuable. Full becomes a proxy for meaningful. And somewhere in that exchange, something essential is lost. Because the body does not experience a checked-off to-do list the way the culture idealizes it. Your body experiences it as sustained demand.

One of the more subtle misunderstandings about stress is that it is tied only to external events. Once your tasks are completed or the demands are met, the anxious feelings should resolve on their own. But the relationship is not that simple.

As Burnout observes, there is a distinction we tend to overlook: the stressor and the stress itself are not the same thing. The stressor is the event, the deadline, the conversation, the unruly closet, the demand. Stress is the body’s response to the stressor.

And the two do not necessarily move together.

A conversation can end, but the tension remains. A deadline can pass, but your operating system stays activated. Your external, seemingly put-together world moves on. The internal one sometimes does not.

This helps explain why so many people move through their days with a sense of unfinishedness that has nothing to do with productivity. It is not that things are left undone. You’ve got your daily gold star for busy, important, “successful” citizen.

It is that the experience itself has not been internally resolved. The body is still waiting for a signal, a sign, some indication that it can return to rest. In a life with very little margin, that signal is often delayed. Or missed entirely.

There is, however, another dimension to all this, one that has less to do with how much we carry and more to do with how we relate to what we are carrying. Not all strain comes from what is tugging at you in this present moment. Some of it comes from what has been postponed, avoided, or strategically set aside.

This is where it gets really interesting. And a bit harder to name and rectify. What is it on your never-ending to-do list that you are actively avoiding?

If you are like me, you are quite skilled at this. Avoidance rarely announces itself as avoidance. It shows up as justification. Negotiation. A quiet rearranging of priorities that somehow always places the harder thing… later.

Sometimes it looks like a fully imagined dragon guarding something as simple as an uncomfortable phone call.

More often, it looks like a series of small decisions: You tackle the easy tasks first.
You stay just busy enough not to let your mind linger back to that one little thing you are avoiding. You convince yourself that now isn’t the right time for the dreaded phone call.

And for a while, this can work. But what is deferred does not disappear. It changes form.

You force this discomfort to move out of your direct awareness and into the background of your collective experience, where it continues to shape attention, mood, and perception. Sometimes, while you are actively “hiding” it from yourself.

What was once one specific “thing” you expertly managed to avoid and somehow convince yourself you aren’t actually putting off diffuses into your operating system like an unwanted virus. A single unmet “task” morphs into an undercurrent of unease. A contained discomfort becomes a low, persistent tension.

There is a recurring idea, both in psychology and in older narrative traditions, that what we most need is often located in the place we instinctively avoid. What we most need is often found where we least want to look.

Avoidance, in this sense, is not neutral. It is directional.

We make conscious choices to move away from what feels uncomfortable, uncertain, or exposing. In doing so, we experience a kind of faux immediate relief. But relief is not the same as resolution.

The body does not forget what the mind postpones. Despite our curated illusion of “safety,” the very thing we are working so hard to avoid remains unchanged. Over time, this avoidance also alters your perceived size of things.

What might have been manageable when addressed directly can begin to feel disproportionate when left unattended. Not because it has necessarily grown, but because it has remained unresolved.

This is one of the quieter ways that stress accumulates. Not simply through what is added to your to-do list, but through what you are leaving internally unresolved. Because the nervous system does not distinguish particularly well between what is actively present and what is implicitly looming. It cleverly responds to both.

In this context, it is easy to interpret the resulting tension as a personal shortcoming. A lack of resilience. Laziness. A failure to manage time or emotion effectively.

But the explanation is often simpler and more compassionate than that. Your neurological system is responding to a combination of sustained demand and unresolved experience. It is doing exactly what it was designed to do.

What begins to change things is not, at first, a shift in performative outward behavior. It is a shift in attention. A willingness to notice what you have chosen to fill your calendar with and what has been quietly avoided or shifted to next week. This requires an honest rendering of what you are actually avoiding (and why).

Not with urgency. Not with judgment. (There’s probably a good reason you are kicking this can down the road.) But with a steady curiosity.

• Where is this unresolved anxiety actually coming from?

• What feels unfinished and not in terms of tasks, but in terms of experience?

• What has been shuffled around, rather than courageously moved through?

• And bonus points if you can identify why. Why are you avoiding this in the first place?

These are not questions that require immediate answers. They are questions that create space and opportunity to become more self-aware. And space and attention, in a life that has very little of it, are not insignificant.

What becomes clear, over time, is that the goal is not to eliminate pressure entirely. The goal is to begin to see more clearly what is contributing to it. Because what is seen can finally be understood. And what is understood can, eventually, be addressed.

So what exactly are you intentionally avoiding (and why)?

It appeared late at night, almost as if it knew it would get some sort of a pass because it was generated in that liminal space between attention and fatigue, when the mind is prone to unraveling if rest is not taken.

Perhaps you saw it charitably at first glance: a hospital room, a comforting figure at the bedside, a hand extended in what looks like care, or perhaps healing. Around him, a cast of familiar characters gathers: A nurse, a soldier, a woman in prayer. Behind them, the usual symbols of national identity assemble themselves without hesitation: flag, eagle, monument. And let’s not even talk about the AI glitch of the creepy, flying, kind of soldier with a crown thing that’s calling up Sauron for me. Not sure on that. Moving on… But it doesn’t take long for deeper recognition to settle in. The posture, the robe, the color selection: white, draped with red.

I don’t have to tell you who that belongs to. You already knew instantly.

For centuries, that image has carried a very specific meaning. It appears in early Christian art, in catacombs and churches, in the long tradition of trying to render what ultimately resists being fully captured. The white garment has come to signify purity, transfiguration, something set apart. The red suggests sacrifice, blood, a life poured out in servanthood rather than grasped. Not power taken, but power relinquished, emptied. These are not incidental details. They are part of a shared symbolic grammar, shaped by the central story of the Christian tradition. A story in which authority does not assert itself through dominance, but reveals itself through surrender.

White robe + Red Sash = Jesus.

There is a reason images like this have endured. They were created to tell a story. One that could be recognized across time, place, culture, and literacy. Long before most people could read, images carried meaning. They became a kind of visual shorthand, a way of communicating complex ideas through form, color, and posture. You didn’t need an explanation. You just needed to see it, which is why, when that shorthand is reused, the story comes with it.

You don’t have to agree with that meaning for it to be there. You don’t even have to be looking for it. You simply recognize it.

And once you do, the image resists neutrality. Not because of who is depicted, but because of what is being invoked. Some symbols carry more than themselves. They arrive with shared history attached, with meaning layered over time through story, ritual, and repetition. They are not easily emptied of that meaning, even when used casually. And they are rarely used casually.

There is a particular kind of power in borrowing from a shared imagination. It doesn’t argue or insist; it doesn’t need to. It simply places something familiar in an unfamiliar position and allows the association to do its work. The mind fills in the rest. And if you find yourself wondering how an image like this even comes to be. How one generates it without inevitably typing at some point, “make me look like Jesus,” you’re not alone.

What lingers, then, is not just the image itself, but the recognition of how easily it lands. How quickly the visual language translates, how little explanation it requires.

Even if it is meant lightly, the language it draws from is not.

This is how symbolic language functions. It moves beneath the surface of conscious thought, drawing from a shared memory that lives in stories, in images, and in fragments of meaning we carry without always naming. Because of that, it shapes perception in ways that feel almost immediate. Which is why the reaction to an image like this is not especially surprising. It is, in many ways, inevitable.

Meaning, once invoked, does not wait for permission to be received. You don’t have to agree with that meaning for it to be there.

There is, perhaps, a quieter truth underneath all of this. Not about intention. Not even about interpretation. But about recognition.

Because this is not an image you have to be taught how to see.

You already know who it belongs to.

And once you recognize that, it’s difficult to pretend otherwise. Iconic image reuse, especially in ways that redirect their meaning, carries a particular kind of weight. Not because it is shocking, but because it is effective.

And perhaps that is the part that is hardest to sit with. Not the image itself, but the recognition of how easily it works.

Because in the end, the question isn’t whether you think the image was appropriate. It’s that it doesn’t need to be explained.

White Robe + Red Sash = You already know exactly who that belongs to.

He comes through Jackson–Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport (for the locals, “International” mostly in name) carried not by prophecy alone but by a commercial flight. Jesus steps into that familiar Southern air that doesn’t so much greet you as settle onto your skin, like the humidity remembers you before you remember yourself.

Outside, a rideshare idles at the curb. The driver leans slightly across the seat.

“Downtown, sir?”

Jackson doesn’t introduce itself all at once. At first glance, it could be mistaken for anywhere: littered exit signs, chain restaurants, the low skyline giving way to the golden eagle perched atop the domed Capitol, catching the light in a city still trying to decide who it belongs to and who it never did. But as Jesus’ ride maneuvers through traffic, the details begin to press in, and with them, a kind of knowing that resists simplification.

Brown historical markers line the road, each one holding more weight than its size suggests. They pass the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum, and the driver slows just enough to nod toward it.

“You ever been?”

Jesus shakes his head.

“You should,” he says. “Though it ain’t no light reading.”

It’s said the way people here say things they’ve learned the hard way, passed down from generation to generation.

Not long after, the city shifts. A neighborhood where porches are swept up nice, and rows of azaleas struggle to hold their shape under the Mississippi heat, comes into view. Adjacent to another neighborhood where the wilting heaviness is different: paint peeling, rooflines bowing, the quiet absence of things that used to be there, like something left in a hurry and never quite returned to see what was left.

No sign marks the boundary, but everyone who lives here could tell you exactly where it is.

The driver swerves around a pothole without breaking rhythm.

“You get used to it,” he says. “You have to.”

It sounds like he’s talking about the road. But he isn’t.

As they move deeper into the heart of the city, the landscape layers upon itself. Churches rise wherever they can find unpolluted sky, sometimes one on every corner. In some parts of Jackson, there are more churches than grocery stores. In others, more needs than either can meet.

Faith and poverty do not simply coexist here. They share an address, and neither one is leaving.

And then, almost without warning, the atmosphere changes. Fried catfish. Cornbread. Greens cooked long enough to matter. It drifts out of a place that doesn’t need a sign because the locals already know where it is.

Food, here, does more than feed. It comforts. It heals. It invites. It holds people together in ways policy often cannot. Long after the meetings adjourn and the promises are no longer quite as shiny as the 8-foot eagle keeping watch on our Capitol’s dome.

Jackson has always had people who could name things as they are, even when doing so complicates the story. William Faulkner wrote about a Mississippi past that refused to stay past. Eudora Welty noticed the smallest details that gave everything away. Richard “Nathan Paul” Wright refused to soften what needed to be said. Even now, another native son, Marshall Ramsey, can sketch it in a single cartoon frame.

Mississippi doesn’t always speak directly. It says “bless your heart,” and then tells the truth sideways, soft enough to hear, sharp enough to gut-punch you.

By the time Jesus reaches the Mississippi State Capitol, the argument is already underway. Inside, legislators are talking about “choice,” school choice, parental choice, the language of opportunity delivered in careful, polished terms.

Outside, the reality those words attempt to organize lingers. A child cannot choose transportation. A single parent cannot choose margin where none exists. A school cannot choose resources it was never given.

The car idles at the curb. The driver glances in the rearview mirror.

“You want me to wait?”

Jesus shakes his head.

“I think I’ll just walk from here.”

Recognition begins the way it often does. Not with certainty, but with a pause that lingers just a moment too long. A woman balancing a takeout plate slows her pace. A page adjusts the badge clipped to his pressed navy blazer. A man lowers the protest sign he has been holding, just enough to see more clearly.

“You look familiar.”

It isn’t quite a question.

Jesus doesn’t answer. He looks at them with a kind of attention that feels less like an introduction and more like a remembering.

The crowd forms gradually, then all at once. It gathers itself out of the ordinary rhythms of the day, people stepping away from lunch tables, from important meetings, from whatever they were doing before they realized something was actually happening. They bring what they have, which in many cases has never been enough.

A single mother with a question she cannot afford to delay. A legislator who knows how decisions are made before they appear on the light-up board. A lobbyist whose job is to make sure the votes are there before the board ever lights up. An activist who is tired of waiting. A pastor who has said Hosanna enough times to feel the distance and dissonance between hope and reality. A teenager who does not expect much from the city, but followed the crowd and somehow ended up here.

They come from across the dividing lines Jackson rarely fully knows how to name out loud. They carry different diagnoses, different solutions. But underneath it all, they share the same thing: Quiet expectation. Stubborn hope.

Are you the messiah we have been longing for?

Their voices rise quickly and find language as their cries tumble out. Make it fair. Fix the schools. Make it right. Do something. Say something. Pick a side. Tell us we are right and they are wrong.

The requests overlap, contradict, persist. Freedom, to one, means access; to another, protection; to another, the right to be left alone.

Beneath those arguments, quieter but more urgent, are the things no one seems to have much time to debate. A child who hasn’t eaten since they scarfed down their school lunch yesterday. Pockets of the city that have learned to normalize potholes and poverty. A state that doesn’t keep its past in the rearview mirror, but in the passenger seat, along for the ride.

They look to Jesus as though he might provide the simple answers they have come seeking.

But that has never been the kind of king he is determined to be.

Jesus does not move toward the Capitol steps. He remains where the people are gathered, looking at them not as positions to be balanced, or problems to be solved, but as lives to be seen and saved. Almost immediately, something in the crowd begins to change. A shift from “Hosanna” to “Who exactly are you and what can you do for me?”

Whatever they thought they were calling for, this does not quite match. He stands there longer than they expect. No speech follows. No plan is offered.

An angry man steps forward: “So what are you going to do about all this?”

It is the question beneath all the others.

For a moment, it feels as though something might turn, that this is where the story resolves, where the lines redraw, where the kingdom finally takes shape in a way they can all recognize.

But it doesn’t.

Instead, Jesus poses a question to the gathered crowd: What do Mississippians do when the storms of life blow through?

They would say without hesitation.

You show up. You help where you can. You take care of who’s in front of you.

Go and do that.

Because deep down, Mississippi already knows what to do when someone needs saving. When disaster strikes. A hurricane doesn’t ask who you voted for. It takes the power out first, then the roads, then whatever illusion of control you thought you had left. Generators hum through the night, if you are lucky enough to have one. Extension cords stretch across yards. Ice chests open and close. People check on each other before they check the news.

In Mississippi, neighbors show up for neighbors. They bring chainsaws, bottled water, a hot meal when the stove won’t light. They stand in the same yard, passing debris hand to hand, rebuilding something that matters simply because it’s the right thing to do. No one debates. They begin anyway.

What we are living through now feels less visible, but no less real. A slower, churning storm. No wind. No sirens. Just a deep fracture running beneath everything. You can feel it in the constant pull of social media, in conversations that end with we’ll have to agree to disagree but never actually find a settling, in the distance that keeps widening, even when we are all standing in the same city.

And if he is who he says he is, then he is not here to stand apart from it.

He would step off the curb. He would roll up his sleeves. He would move to the center of the disaster zone. He would walk into the places people pass by. He would begin not with judgment, but with presence. With repair. With the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding hope that has been worn down. Not from high above. From beside. From within.

The light changes. Traffic moves. A phone rings. A child tugs at her mother’s sleeve. Life continues.

The divisions remain. The needs remain.

And so does Jesus.

Not as the king they expected. Not as a ready solution that they can implement. But as a presence that refuses to leave you in your time of desperation.

Until one day, thy kingdom come will mean what he intended it to mean all along.

Until then, Jackson keeps telling the sideways truth about who we are. Mississippi, as ever, will be Mississippi.

And maybe in a place like Mississippi is precisely where the kingdom can begin to break in.

DAY THREE Monday, October 7, 2024

”Courage, dear heart.” C.S. Lewis

I had fallen into the habit of waking up before everyone else, but somehow, I was always the last to be officially ready to go. Part of it was because I just couldn’t sleep, and part of it was because I needed the space to get dressed alone. To be in my own head for a moment.

For my perfect birthday “New York fit,” I had planned something bold, something special: a deep reddish/burnt orange velvet coat with large brushed gold, military-style buttons, and intricate black piping that traced the seams in elegant, swirling patterns. It wasn’t just a statement piece; it was art, every stitch precise and deliberate, giving the coat a regal, almost Sergeant Pepper-esque feel. A gift from my mom, circa Christmas 1996. It was expensive, at least to me. My mom had this habit of leaving the price tags on certain gifts under our tree. She said it was in case we didn’t like them and wanted to exchange, but I knew better. She wanted us to know what it had cost her. I can’t remember the exact price, but it was definitely over $200, probably closer to $250, which felt extravagant for a sleeveless jacket in the 90s.

It wasn’t the kind of piece you could wear often. It made too much of a statement; people would remember it. So as much as I adored my Sergeant Pepper jacket, it spent most of its time in the back of my closet, waiting patiently for its magic moment. I managed to hold onto it for almost thirty years. That moment had arrived: my 50th birthday in New York City. It felt symbolic, a tribute to my mom, who never made it to 60, a gesture of honoring her with something she had chosen for me.

I had planned to pair it with a black fitted long-sleeve shirt, black short cuffed shorts Chloe had packed, ribbed tights, and black riding boots that had arrived on the Amazon truck the day before we flew out. They didn’t fit perfectly. The heels too loose on my skinny ankles I inherited from my grandmother. I should have ordered the 5 instead of the 5.5. But I figured I could break them in, wear thick socks, shuffle my way through the city, and maybe exchange them when I got home.

But when I stood in front of the full-length mirror while everyone else slept, I saw nothing but a big red sausage stuffed into too-short black shorts. It didn’t matter how sentimental the red velvet coat was. It wasn’t working. Off it came, and I slipped back into my pajamas, mentally rearranging my entire birthday outfit.

Later that morning, as everyone buzzed around getting ready, I decided to stick with the black shorts, tights, and the ill-fitting boots, swapping the red coat for a silky black bodysuit with a mock turtleneck. The tights I had originally planned to wear had a significant run hairspray wasn’t fixing, so I grabbed a pair I had packed for my evening Birthday look - a classy black leather dress paired with rosy floral print stockings that showed just enough peeping, teasing skin. I caught my reflection again. It felt better. Slimmer (thank you, black) but still...something wasn’t quite right. I could feel the off-ness swimming in my belly. Now, instead of feeling bold and New York, I felt too much. Too edgy, too sexy, or wannabe sexy, too trying way too hard.

That’s when Chloe, ever the blunt one, flashed a Finch Face and said, “Wow, Mom, you look like a hot prostitute.”

A hot prostitute. Great.

“Uh, not exactly the look I’m going for,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her, channeling my mom’s famous death stare.

Chloe backpedaled immediately, engaging yet another version of our Finch Face1. “I’m kidding! You look amazing. Seriously, you look so good, mama.”

But the damage was done. I already felt it. Too seen, like I was trying too hard to be noticed. Still, despite my belly and brain sending out ignored warning waves, I ventured out into the city, reasoning, “It’s my 50th birthday, I can wear whatever I damn well please.” Besides, this is New York! Locals walk around in all kinds of wild outfits, and no one bats an eye. Why should I care what I’m wearing when The Naked Cowboy struts around practically in his birthday suit. Nothing but a guitar and some tighty-whities, and everyone just shrugs. But with every step, I grew more convinced people were staring at me, silently judging. “What is that woman wearing?” Or worse, “Is that an old prostitute?”

Who knows if anyone was actually looking my direction. Who knows if they cared at all about what I was wearing. (Spoiler alert: I feel sure they did not). But with each step, each breath, each glance, the alarm bells rang out. By the time we had walked a few blocks, inching closer to the nearest substation. I knew I couldn’t do this. I was suffocating under the weight of judgy looks from a sea of unfamiliar faces.

“We’re going back to the room,” I said abruptly, stopping in front of a Sephora that wasn’t even open yet.

Chloe was flabbergasted. “What? Mom, really? You’re changing? On your birthday? In New York?”

“Yes. We’re going back. You said I looked like a prostitute.”

Not fair. Not her fault. But I said it, ok.

“Mom, stop. I was joking. You look amazing. It’s your 50th birthday. In New York. Live a little.”

I knew deep down, it wasn’t just what Chloe had said. She had only voiced what was already rattling around in my head while she was still sleeping. I felt overexposed, awkward, trying to be something or someone I wasn’t. All in the name of “You’re 50 today, go a little wild.” Wear what you want. Eat all the pizza. Bottoms up and out. But no matter how much I tried to talk myself into it, this feeling wasn’t going away. It wasn’t budging.

We rode up the 38 floors in the glass elevator, sharing the space with a family who could’ve easily been the ones causing a scene at the M Club entrance. The wife gave me a death stare. Now that look I was sure of. Like she was daring me to even glance in her husband’s direction. I planted myself by the elevator doors, counting down the seconds until we reached our almost-penthouse-level upgrade and feeling like I would not be able to take a full breath until I was out of this ridiculous little get-up.

I changed into something less “New York,” much less bold, and honestly, much more “normal” me: ripped dark jeans, Chloe’s black crew-neck T-shirt, and a black blazer. I ditched the riding boots for a pair of $15 clearance-sale wannabe Golden Goose sneakers, white with gold accents, and the privilege of being the last pair and in my size.

I could finally breathe. No more alarm bells buzzing in my brain. It was better this way. I was still 50, and we were still going to have great fun in the Big City.

It was all an all too familiar a feeling. This push and pull of wanting to stand out, yet retreating into the background. It brought me back to third grade when I won the school-wide talent show. A core memory. I had choreographed a tap dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” practicing every day for weeks in my grandparents’ living room after school, waiting for my mom to return from work. The daily rehearsals commenced ever since I saw the flyer hanging on the red brick wall in the 3rd-grade hallway. You best believe I was taking my shot.

My grandmother took me to the Pass Road Kmart to buy the cassette single, and on the B-side was the glorious extended mix. I opted for the long-play version, determined to really wow the judges. As I practiced, my grandmother sewed. She made me a silky white tuxedo jacket with tails, tailored perfectly, with black sequins stitched onto the lapels and trimming the silhouette.

When the evening of the talent show arrived, I nailed it. Won first place, no less. The MC made such a fanfare of announcing me as the winner and calling my name to come to the front. Instead of standing proudly with the other winners who had made it out of contestant row, all basking in the applause, smiling at their proud parents smiling back at their pride and joy, I quickly grabbed my 1st Place trophy, shook the MC’s hand like a professional winner, and retreated to the very back of the stage. Leaving the “first place” spot oddly vacant at the front of the stage. I tried to disappear behind the rows and rows of kids lined up like tin soldiers, dutifully waiting for names to be called that wouldn’t be. I inched further and further back, careful not to have my tap shoes draw any more unwanted attention to me until I finally found comfort in the red velvet curtains hugging me like an old friend. I could breathe again.

Even then, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to be noticed or to hide.

That same battle was still raging inside my 50-year-old body. The desire to be seen, to be bold, to be heard. And the equal fear of standing in the spotlight where you can be seen and heard. What is this? Do I want to take my shot or not?

After the third wardrobe change of the day, I turned my attention to what Chloe was wearing and tried to nudge her into a more practical footwear decision. She was still torn between her white Doc Martens and thrift-store brown lace-up knee-high boots with dainty heels. They both looked equally cute. One more grungy New York and one more uptown sheek. I gently mentioned the amount of walking we’d be doing and how the Docs might be the more comfortable, but actually cooler vibe, choice. She rolled her eyes and chose the imposing boots anyway.

Our party of five split up for the first time. Bella, in true 15-year-old fashion, was off to shop (again) in SoHo, tour Chinatown, and be dazzled by the Diamond District. Because of course, if you’re turning 15 in New York, you have to hit up Tiffany’s. Chloe and I were opting for something else: history, art, and nature. At least, that was the plan.

For centuries, medicine has struggled to explain women’s distress: The wandering womb. Hysteria. Fragile nerves. The fainting couch. And eventually, tranquilizers.

Different centuries. Different language.

But the underlying assumption remained remarkably consistent: when something seemed unstable, the unruly female womb was a convenient explanation.

Medical explanations like this rarely arise in a vacuum. They grow out of the cultural stories societies already believe about the female body. The term hysteria itself comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning womb, a concept inherited from ancient medical traditions described in the Hippocratic corpus.

Medicine did not invent that instinct. It inherited it from stories far older than modern science. Long before physicians blamed hormones or nerves for women’s instability, Western culture had already absorbed narratives that tried to explain and regulate women’s bodies and influence. In many of those stories, women ironically appear as both the source of disruption and the ones expected to manage it.

One of the most influential of these stories begins in a garden.

When the Eyes Opened

The Genesis story is not just a theological narrative. It is one of the most culturally influential stories ever told. For thousands of years, the “in the beginning” has shaped how Western civilization understands temptation, responsibility, authority, and even the human body.

At the center of the story stands a woman.

Eve.

The turning point in the narrative comes when Adam and Eve eat from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The text tells us something immediate and striking:

“Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew they were naked.” Genesis 3:7

They become aware of something they had not previously noticed: They are naked. Vulnerable. And now self-conscious.

Early Christian theologians later described this fallen human condition as incurvatus in se, meaning literally “curved inward on oneself.” I first heard that phrase decades ago in a Christian History class at Duke Divinity School. My favorite professor, Dr. Warren Smith, had the kind of holy fire in his eyes that made ancient stories feel startlingly alive. He described sin not first as rule-breaking, but as a complete turning inward — a corrupted bending of the human spirit away from relationship with God and neighbor and toward anxious self-absorption.

The Genesis narrative, interestingly, captures something psychologically recognizable. When vulnerability appears, the instinct to protect oneself rises quickly. At its sharpest edge, that instinct mushrooms into something else entirely. Blame.

The Fig Leaves

The first human response to this new awareness is immediate. They sew fig leaves together and make coverings for themselves. The language suggests not simply hiding, but crafting.

The detail is small, but symbolically rich. The first cultural act that follows human awareness is not domination or conquest, but craft.

It is creating a covering.

They reach for leaves and stitch something together, a makeshift solution for an unfamiliar discomfort. Anyone who has ever tried to manage embarrassment knows the instinct. Hide the vulnerable places. Cover what suddenly feels exposed.

The first human technology in the Biblical story is not a weapon or a tool of survival. It is a covering for the body. Specifically, an apron fashioned from leaves to hide the sexual center. Clothing appears not because the climate changed, but because awareness did.

As archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber has observed, textile work represents one of humanity’s earliest technologies. An innovation historically carried by women. For most of human history, sewing, weaving, and repairing formed the quiet infrastructure of domestic life.

When the human world fractures, someone must help mend the tear. Across centuries, that work has often fallen to women.

Repair the tear.

Manage the disruption.

Restore order.

It is a pattern that has repeated quietly through history.

It is also not insignificant that the text specifies fig leaves. In the ancient Mediterranean world, fig trees were often associated with fertility and domestic life, which makes their appearance here—covering newly discovered sexual vulnerability—feel less accidental than it first appears.

The fig leaves image is strikingly apropos.

The Blame

Then comes the moment that shapes centuries of interpretation. When God asks Adam what happened, Adam responds with a remarkable sentence:

“The woman you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” Genesis 3:12

In a single line, responsibility is shirked and thrust outward in an effort to self-protect.

First toward Eve.

And then, subtly, toward God. The woman you gave me.

This is our first glimpse of a very human reflex: when vulnerability feels threatening, self-protection often takes the form of blame shifting.

Adam blames Eve (and God). Eve blames the serpent.

But over time, the cultural memory of the garden story crystallized in a particular direction. The woman becomes the problem to be managed. Eve became the symbol of temptation. The weaker vessel. The singular scapegoat that led humanity astray.

​​Early Christian writers sometimes intensified this interpretation. The theologian Tertullian famously addressed women as “the devil’s gateway” in his treatise De Cultu Feminarum, arguing that Eve’s disobedience had opened the door to human corruption.

Medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas argued that women were more easily deceived than men, a claim he explored in the Summa Theologica. A view that echoed through centuries of Christian teaching.

The Genesis text itself is a brief narrative of what transpired. Its interpretations, however, proved remarkably prolific and influential.

The Interpretive Burden of Eve

Over time, Eve became less a character in the Biblical story and more a symbol used to explain women themselves.

Modern biblical scholars such as Phyllis Trible have revisited these narratives to examine how interpretive traditions shaped cultural assumptions about women, a project she explores in works such as Texts of Terror.

The female body, with its cycles, fertility, sexuality, and childbirth, became something to interpret carefully, regulate closely, and occasionally fear.

By the nineteenth century, these assumptions had migrated into medicine. Victorian physicians frequently diagnosed women with “nervous disorders,” a broad category that could include anxiety, fatigue, irritability, or dissatisfaction with domestic life. Treatments such as the rest cure, popularized by the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell, attempted to quiet what was perceived as a fragile female nervous system.

Women’s experiences were something to be explained, managed, and governed by someone else in authority.

A Familiar Pattern

By the time physicians began prescribing treatments for “female nerves,” the cultural groundwork had already been laid: Women’s bodies were associated with instability. Their distress linked to biological disruption. Their emotions interpreted through a lens of suspicion and inferred weakness.

Different centuries. Different vocabulary. The pattern remained remarkably familiar.

Women were cast in a strange double role: blamed for the disruption and expected to quietly stitch their sphere back together.

The Stories We Inherit

Medicine eventually inherited those assumptions. When women experienced distress, whether through hormonal shifts, reproductive transitions, or midlife change, the explanation often returned to the same familiar place. The female body. The pharmaceutical era did not invent that instinct. It simply modernized it.

Old narratives have a way of resurfacing, even in places that claim to be governed by science rather than story.

If the garden story begins with eyes opening, human beings suddenly aware of their vulnerability, many of the responses that followed in medicine and culture seem designed to reverse that moment.

A “hysterical” woman is easier to manage when she is no longer fully awake to her own incarnate suffering.

For centuries, much of the cultural response to women’s distress has been an effort to manage Eve. To quiet. To regulate. To control. To govern.

Sedation closes the eyes again.

Awareness softens. Distress quiets. Peace returns.

At least for everyone else.

Your nervous system does not know the difference between a tiger and your to-do list. It only knows whether you are safe.

You wake up exhausted. Before your feet hit the floor, your mind is already scanning the day ahead. Your body is bracing for whatever hot-and-fresh hell may be lurking around the corner.

Mostly, nothing is technically “wrong.” Nothing catastrophic. Nothing life-threatening. And yet your stress hormones circulate as if something is literally hunting you.

What I’ve learned in my professional life (and personal) is that most people are not exhausted because they are weak. They are not overwhelmed because something is broken in them.

They feel this way because they are carrying a nervous system designed for a very different world than the one they live in now.

So let me begin with a simple question.

Imagine what would happen if a tiger walked into the room you are sitting in right now.

This is not a trick question. But, spoiler alert: Your body would not give you time to think.

• Your heart would pound out of your chest.

• Your breathing would turn shallow and rapid.

• Every muscle in your body would tense.

• Your pupils would dilate.

Some of you would run. Some would be paralyzed by fear, unable to access their voice. Some would scream bloody murder. Some would climb on top of a chair or duck under a table. Some of you hero protector types would step forward and place your body between the tiger and someone you love. And someone, inevitably, would grab a donut from the half-eaten box and try to coax the tiger out the door with, “Here, kitty, kitty.”

The point is this: you would not have to decide how to respond. Your nervous system would decide for you.

Because your nervous system’s primary job is not your happiness: It is your survival. It is protection. Period.

The System That Saves You

This highly effective neurological system has kept human beings alive for thousands of years. It is ancient. It is efficient. And it is extraordinarily loyal sometimes to a fault.

But here’s the part most people miss.

Long before constant notification dings, deadlines, and modern pressures, your nervous system evolved around one central question:

Am I safe?

When the answer was no, or even maybe not, it mobilized instantly.

• Fight mobilized you to confront the threat.

• Flight mobilized you to escape it.

• Freeze protected you when escape wasn’t possible.

• Fawn mobilized you to appease the threat and to preserve connection and safety.

None of these responses is wrong. They are evidence of biological intelligence.

The problem? For most of human history, the tiger appeared rarely. Your body is activated. You responded. And then, the threat lifted.

Your nervous system resets. You recovered. You returned to baseline.

The Modern Tiger

Today, the invisible tiger rarely leaves. It lives in your inbox. It sits in your calendar. It follows you home. It climbs into bed at night disguised as racing thoughts.

• Pressure

• Expectations

• Responsibility

• Uncertainty

• Loss and Grief

• Constant doom scrolling

• Political and social division

• The absence of real connection

Your nervous system responds to these modern threats the same way it would respond to a tiger in the jungle.

Not because it is broken. But because it is doing its job like a champ.

Put another way: many people are living in a constant state of elevated cortisol.

Cortisol has been getting a bad rap lately. It’s actually not your enemy. It is essential. It mobilizes energy, sharpens focus, and prepares you to respond to danger. But it was designed to rise briefly and then fall.

Instead of short, resolving spikes, many people now function inside prolonged plateaus of activation. Over time, chronic nervous system activation affects nearly every system in the body.

• Sleep becomes disrupted.

• Concentration becomes harder.

• Emotional reactivity increases.

• Exhaustion deepens.

The American Psychological Association reports that more than 75% of adults regularly experience physical and emotional symptoms of stress, including anxiety, irritability, and fatigue. A recent Gallup Report revealed nearly one in two adults experience “significant daily stress, one of the highest rates among high-income nations.”

Chronic stress is now recognized as a major health threat and contributor to cardiovascular disease, immune dysfunction, depression, and cognitive decline.

These are also the “healthy” 40-year-old men who drop dead, and everyone says, “What? He was a runner. He was in great shape.”

In other words, stress is not something you feel in passing. It is something your body carries and remembers. Survival mode is lifesaving in moments. It is destructive when it becomes your lifestyle.

The Word We Use: Fine

Ask someone how they’re doing, and most people will give a similar answer. “I’m fine.” We say it automatically. Professionally. Efficiently. But fine doesn’t usually mean fine.

Fine can mean:

• Frustrated.

• Insecure.

• Neurotically overloaded.

• Exhausted.

Many high-functioning people live in a state of perpetual F.I.N.E. Not because they’re weak. Because they’ve learned to override their signals. But the nervous system is always communicating (and keeping score).

It whispers first. Through fatigue. Irritability. Difficulty focusing. Restlessness.

Not to sabotage you. To protect you.

Your nervous system is not logical. But it is loyal.

Awareness Comes First

Most people are moving through life unaware that their nervous system is under unsustainable strain. They assume exhaustion, irritability, and mental overload are simply part of being a busy, productive adult.

One of the simplest clinical tools I use, both with myself and with clients, to assess nervous system strain is an acronym called HALT.

When you are feeling all out of sorts, ask yourself:

• Am I Hungry?

• Am I Angry?

• Am I Lonely?

• Am I Tired?

These four states dramatically reduce your nervous system’s capacity. These are our physiological warning lights. Early indicators that your system needs support.

H.A.L.T is never going to be a fully blown solution. It’s a pause. A way of noticing depletion before it escalates into collapse. Because you cannot regulate a system you are ignoring.

Awareness that “fine” isn’t actually fine. Awareness that exhaustion is not a failure, but feedback. Awareness that your nervous system is asking for care, not criticism.

And most of us were never taught how to listen before our bodies start shouting in ALL CAPS.

The Preschoolers

Many moons ago, when my children were adorable little preschoolers, I learned something I now recognize applies just as much to adults.

When a Kirby kid was melting down, the solution was rarely complicated.

They were tired. Hungry. Overstimulated. Or disappointed.

Sometimes the most effective intervention was simply: “Oh, little buddy… looks like you may need a snack.”

Or: “I’m sorry you didn’t get to pitch today. That’s hard when you thought you would. Maybe you will get a turn in the next game.”

Or: “I wonder if you might need a nap. I know I would love a nap right about now.” Even if that was the last thing they wanted, it was often exactly what they needed.

Preschoolers aren’t broken. Or “bad.” Their nervous systems are overwhelmed. And the caring, attuned adults around them understand something essential: You don’t shame a nervous system back into regulation. You support it back into safety.

Adults are not fundamentally different.

We are walking around in older bodies with the same nervous systems, still sending hunger signals, fatigue signals, and overwhelm signals.

Who tells a preschooler to push through hunger and exhaustion? We don’t. At least, I hope we don’t.

We pause. We look for the unmet need. We respond.

But somewhere along the way, we stopped offering ourselves the same attention. Not out of cruelty. Out of societal conditioning and patterned reinforcement.

The Reframe

Your nervous system is not your enemy. It is your fierce, loyal protector. The problem is not that it activates. The problem is that it rarely gets permission to stand down.

Regulation doesn’t begin with force or shame. It begins with small signals of safety: Rest. Food. Breath. Space. Connection.

These quiet acts tell your body what it has been waiting to hear: You are safe enough now. You can chill out.

And when your body believes that, you move beyond mere survival. You were built for more than this. You were designed to live your one wild, beautiful life. I hope you live it well!

When the Womb Was Blamed

Long before there were black box warnings, there was the wandering womb.

The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, the great philosopher, Plato, and later Galen, all believed a woman’s uterus could literally move throughout her body, drifting upward and producing anxiety, breathing issues, emotional instability, and despair. And the interesting tidbit. These guys were completely fascinated by a woman’s womb. They just didn’t quite have all the pieces to the mysteries of being a wombed woman.

They called it hysteria, from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus. (King, Hysteria Beyond Freud.) The prescribed treatments were not investigation, but containment: marriage, pregnancy, increased sexual activity, and anything to anchor the unruly womb in place. The assumption was simple and enduring: if a woman was distressed, her body (not her circumstances) was the obvious problem.

The misdiagnosed “movement” itself was pathology. Not the social structures surrounding a woman. Not the constraints limiting her. Not the information she (and they) were missing. Her biology was blamed for what her environment produced. This framing would persist, in different forms, for over two thousand years.

The Fainting Couch Was Infrastructure

By the Victorian era, a hysteria diagnosis had evolved into a more socially acceptable image: the fainting woman in need of a place to flop on.

The fainting couch became a standard feature in middle and upper-class homes, not as decoration, but as a form of accommodation. Women were expected to collapse under the weight of their emotional and physiological lives. And when they did, the solution was not to examine the conditions producing the collapse, but to provide a place to lie down and recover quietly.

The fainting couch was not treatment. It was infrastructure. It made the inevitable women’s collapse livable for everyone else.

The Rest Cure = The Silent Treatment

In the late 19th century, neurologist Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell formalized what became known as the Rest Cure, prescribed for women experiencing nervousness, fatigue, anxiety, or existential distress.

The treatment required complete bed rest, isolation, prohibition of intellectual activity, and removal from professional or creative pursuits. Women were forbidden from reading, writing, or engaging their minds.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who underwent the Rest Cure herself, later wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as a direct response. In it, a woman subjected to enforced inactivity descends into psychological fragmentation, not because she was inherently unstable, but because she was systematically deprived of agency.

Her nervous system was not failing. Her autonomy was.

The goal wasn’t relief. The goal was that nothing and no one else would be disrupted.

Sedation in Service of Performance.

By the mid-20th century, sedation had become the pharmaceutical answer.

Advertisements for tranquilizers, like Valium, framed these drugs as tools to help women cope with “everyday situational stress.” The stress of maintaining domestic order, emotional availability, and social composure simultaneously.

Not Care. Just take this pill and cope quietly.

And if you grew up watching the women who raised you, you probably saw some version of this play out in real time, though no one was still calling it hysteria.

Mummy’s Little Helper to steady the nerves. A drink in the afternoon to take the edge off. A cigarette to regulate appetite and anxiety. Children at school. House cleaned. Soap Operas on. Pot roast in the oven. Hair set. Lipstick on. Smile ready.

This wasn’t treatment. It was sedation in the service of performance.

And this was prevalent. Did you know that by the 1960s and 70s, tranquilizers had become some of the most commonly prescribed medications in America? Historian Andrea Tone later described this era as a time when anxiety wasn’t eliminated, but it was pharmaceuticalized. Managed quietly. Privately. Without disturbing the social order. (Tone, The Age of Anxiety.)

The Medicalization of Transition

And then, menopause itself gradually became framed not as a developmental transition, but as a hormonal failure state.

Even the words themselves carry judgment. Failure. Deficiency. Loss.

Anthropologist Emily Martin observed that modern medicine often described women’s bodies using the language of breakdown and deficiency. Ovarian failure. Hormonal decline. Reproductive loss. As if the body were doing something wrong instead of doing something ancient and human. (Martin, The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction.)

This distinction matters.

Because when a transition is framed as a defect, the goal of medicine shifts. It is no longer to support the person moving through change. It is to correct what is presumed to be wrong with them.

And paradoxically, women were caught inside both sides of that contradiction.

First, their transition was pathologized and defined in terms of deficiency and decline.

Then, after the Women’s Health Initiative in 2002, the very hormone replacement therapy (HRT) capable of supporting that transition was abruptly withdrawn from millions of them.

Menopause was treated as a medical problem. The Baby Boomers were told, in essence: Your body is failing. But we are not going to help you stabilize it. So women were left in a strange and uniquely modern limbo, simultaneously medicalized and also scared out of taking what could actually help them.

This wasn’t medicine at its best. It was medicine constrained by fear, false narrative, and incomplete understanding.

What we understand now is more nuanced. Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is not about “fixing broken women.” It is about supporting the brain, bones, heart, and nervous system during a predictable biological transition.

It is not an anti-aging fantasy. It is a form of physiological continuity. Menopause was never a moral failure. It was (and is) a developmental threshold. And like all thresholds, it requires language, support, and care.

Carl Jung, writing in the early 20th century, observed that midlife marks a profound psychological turning point, especially for women. He believed the first half of life is largely oriented around adaptation: building identity, family, belonging, and stability within the external world.

The second half of life, however, is oriented toward something else entirely.

Individuation. The process of becoming more fully oneself. Not the self shaped by expectation. The self shaped by truth.

Jung noted that women, in particular, often experienced midlife not as a collapse, but as an emergence. The softening of externally imposed roles created space for something new: authority, clarity, and psychological sovereignty.

In modern language, we might call this integration.

In mythological language, it is the heroine’s journey.

What had been adaptive earlier in life (accommodation, relational attunement, emotional labor) begins to reorganize. The psyche shifts from external validation toward internal authority. From performance toward authenticity. From compliance toward coherence.

This transition is not pathological. It is a beautiful “surprise” reconfiguration of the entire feminine operating system. Many women describe it not as becoming weaker, but as becoming less willing to abandon themselves.

The Heroine’s Journey: Not a Fall, but an Upgrade

Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, long used to map psychological development, was based primarily on male developmental patterns: separation, conquest, and return.

Scholars like Maureen Murdock, a student of Jung, identified that women’s developmental journeys often follow a very different arc. Women’s development didn’t follow the arc of conquest and victory. It followed a quieter, more subversive path. A path that involved adaptation, disconnection from the feminine, adaptation to external masculine expectations, and eventual return to embodied, integrated selfhood. (Murdock, The Heroine’s Journey: Women’s Quest for Wholeness.)

Not to who she was before, but to someone more integrated, more whole.

The traditional Hero’s Journey missed the feminine nuances. The heroine’s journey does not culminate in conquest. It culminates in integration. Menopause, through this lens, represents a threshold crossing. Not a diminishment of identity. But it’s consolidation. Not a loss of vitality. But a redistribution of energy from reproductive function toward cognitive, emotional, and psychological integration.

And this transition is not meaningful only because reproduction ends. It is meaningful because something deeper reorganizes. Many women never have children. Some choose not to. Some cannot. Their development is no less complete. Their authority no less legitimate. Their passage through midlife no less profound. This threshold is not just about motherhood. It is about integrated personhood.

The Box Was Never Just Medical

By the time the Black Box warnings arrived in the early 2000s, the cultural and institutional groundwork had already been laid.

For centuries, women’s physiological transitions had been framed as instability.

Their distress interpreted as malfunction.

Their questioning treated as evidence of said “disorder.”

Containment became institutionalized. Hormonal suppression. Pharmaceutical quieting. Cultural minimization.

The Black Box did not invent this pattern. It inherited it.

And the generation of women who passed through menopause during that era (The Baby Boomers) did so at the intersection of outdated cultural assumptions and flawed medical interpretation.

Many were denied both the biological support and the psychological validation necessary to navigate one of the most significant developmental transitions of their human lifespan. Not because they were weak. But because the system misunderstood what they were becoming.

Reframing the Transition

Menopause is not simply the end of fertility. It is the beginning of a new developmental phase characterized by increased psychological integration, emotional clarity, and reduced susceptibility to external social conditioning.

The symptoms are real. The distress can be profound. But the transition itself is not a disease. It is an upgrade. One that medicine, for much of its history, did not know how to recognize or aid. And so it tried to quiet it.

What We Do Now

We cannot undo the cultural and medical frameworks that shaped the past. But we can name them. The heroine’s journey was never pathological. It was simply misinterpreted. And now, finally, (maybe) it is being understood (better).

The Black Box Era was not an isolated event. It was the modern expression of a very ingrained pattern.

But patterns can change.

They change when women are welcomed to move through transitions not as problems to be managed, but as people becoming more fully themselves.

This is not pathology. It is a feminine rite of passage.

Reader’s Note: In the next essay, I’ll widen the lens further and examine how some of our oldest cultural, religious, and spiritual narratives shaped the way women’s bodies, authority, and transitions have been understood.

On one hand, the Mississippi Senate Education Committee unanimously voted down the school choice bill in under two minutes. Republicans and Democrats came together, including respected conservative voices from our Coast, and chose to stop a policy that would have deepened inequity. Our own Senator Brice Wiggins made the motion to kill the bill. That matters. For many families, especially those who have been historically marginalized, this was a real and meaningful victory.

I am grateful for it.

Naming Harm When It Costs Something

In the same week, Senator Roger Wicker, Mississippi’s senior congressman, publicly condemned a racially charged post shared from President Donald Trump’s official social media account in the middle of the night, calling it “totally unacceptable.” Whether posted directly by the president or by someone acting on his behalf, the message carried his name and authority. That, too, mattered. Senator Wicker naming racism plainly, especially when it costs political capital, is not nothing.

And yet, alongside those moments, something else surfaced that I can’t shake.

The Language We Share Shapes the World We Build

The employment of a racist trope, one with a long and violent history, reminded me that racism (all isms actually) doesn’t only live in policy frameworks or committee votes. It is smuggled in via the shared language we inherit and repeat. In the old playbooks pulled out without much thought, in images, jokes, dog whistles, memes, dismissive “you are too sensitive” rhetoric, and references that carry meaning precisely because we all “get” what’s being signaled. Especially then.

I found myself holding two realities at once: real gratitude for a policy stopped, harm averted, and the recognition that cultural harm does not disappear simply because a bill does.

This kind of language works quietly. It draws from a shared cultural memory. Shows up in the shared stories, symbols, memes, perfectly placed emojis, and shorthand that families, communities, and nations pass down over time. That’s what makes it powerful. And that’s why it’s never harmless. You don’t get to use language like that and then pretend the signal didn’t land.

I name this as a witness to how our shared language functions. Shared signals shape what we come to accept, excuse, or overlook. They form the cultural soil from which policy grows. When harmful language and imagery is normalized, it doesn’t stay in the realm of speech. It trains our imaginations and, over time, our actions, beliefs, and eventually this shared language shows up in the policies we create, defend, and co-sign.

That’s why I think this moment feels complicated.

We can celebrate a policy win and still name cultural harm. We can thank legislators for stopping an inequitable bill and still refuse to normalize racist language or imagery. We can acknowledge voices like our own Senator Wicker for naming this as “completely unacceptable” and calling for accountability. One does not cancel out the other. Both must be held together if we are serious about responsibility for our words, our actions, and the narratives they create.

When Listening Is Reframed as Betrayal

What troubled me further was how quickly a bipartisan decision grounded in prudence and restraint was reframed as betrayal and deep “disappointment,” as if listening, pausing, or collaborating across difference is itself suspect. That kind of rhetoric doesn’t just divide parties; it erodes trust and hardens us against the very listening we say we value.

The Responsibility Doesn’t End with the Vote

In a previous piece on the school choice bill, I wrote about the importance of listening to witnesses, especially those most likely to be harmed by a policy. I still believe that.

This week reminds me that the work doesn’t stop when a bill dies.

Because racism is not only something we legislate against. It is something we have to confront in our language, our leadership, and ourselves.

I’m grateful for the senators who stopped an inequitable bill. I’m grateful for leaders, like our own Senator Roger Wicker, who named racism clearly.

And I’m convinced we have more work to do, deeper, harder, more honest work, if Mississippi is going to become something better than its worst, deeply ingrained reflexes.

The conversation isn’t over.
And neither is our shared responsibility.

The image above isn’t satire. This was once considered a legitimate treatment plan for “everyday situational stress designed to to help women cope with anxiety and the pressures of domestic life.”

It reflects how women’s distress was understood and managed for much of the 20th century. That is to say, it was rarely named and often sedated instead. This was the medical community’s contribution to “shushing” women.

The prescription for our grandmothers wasn’t curiosity or care, but compliance.

The suggestions du jour circulating through bridge clubs and women’s magazines were a highball at noon, a cigarette or two to keep the waist trim, a brief escape into “All My Children,” and, if that didn’t work, “mummy’s little helper” (Valium) to the rescue.

This isn’t about shaming women who took what they were offered. And it’s certainly not a critique of antidepressants or anxiety medications, which save lives and remain essential tools in modern care.

It’s about how women’s physiological transitions were framed.

For decades, perimenopausal distress wasn’t treated as a signal to be understood, but as a disruption to be contained and managed.

Long before black box warnings. Long before the Women’s Health Initiative. Long before menopause became a risk instead of a life transition. Women were taught, both medically and culturally, that suffering was acceptable, as long as it remained quiet.

Symptoms weren’t investigated. They were softened. Quieted. Sedated.

And as strange as it sounds, this era of quiet coping may have been less damaging than what was on the horizon.

When Silence Became Policy

In the early 2000s, a major health study sparked widespread fear around hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The findings were complex, but the message that stuck was simple: hormone replacement therapy (HRT) is dangerous.

So an entire generation of doctors was trained to hesitate, minimize, or avoid treating menopausal symptoms at all.

Dr. Marty Makary, a public health expert, professor at Johns Hopkins, and senior FDA leader, has called the aftermath of the 2002 hormone study “one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine...an American tragedy.” He described it as a form of misplaced groupthink that swept through the healthcare industry.

“With the exception of vaccines or antibiotics, there’s no medication that can improve the health of women on a population level more than hormone replacement therapy,” Makary noted in a recent interview.

According to Makary, 50 to 70 million women over the last 23 years were denied the life-changing, even life-saving, benefits of hormone therapy because of that fear-based dogma.

And then he added: Those millions included his own mother.

The problem? We now know that the study’s conclusions were overly generalized, and in many cases, misapplied, especially to healthy women in early menopause.

But for two decades, widespread fear, not data, guided care.

The Generation Who Paid for It

What we understand now, but failed to act on then, is the concept of a critical window.

For many women, during the first 5–10 years at the onset of perimenopause, is when hormone therapy offers its greatest protective benefits, particularly for cardiovascular health, bone density, metabolic function, and possibly brain health.

Millions of women passed through that window during the years when hormones were discouraged, withheld, or dismissed.

This wasn’t just about hot flashes. It was about heart health. Brain health. Longevity. Possibly keeping dementia at bay. Survival. About not dying when you didn’t have to.

And it is largely Baby Boomer women, now in their 60s and 70s, who bore the heavy cost of the Black Box era, passing through menopause during the height of medical fear.

The Quiet Reversal

And now, quietly but significantly, the medical community is reversing course:

• Guidelines are evolving.

• Research is expanding.

• Clinicians are retraining.

• Providers are speaking out.

In November 2025, the FDA quietly removed the long-standing black box warning from certain hormone therapies. A warning that shaped medical fear for more than twenty years and…

• There was no apology tour.

• No public acknowledgment of harm by providers or institutions that train them.

• No collective reckoning.

Just a subtle change that amounted to a seismic admission: We may have gotten this wrong.

What Was Lost

The warning didn’t just live on pill bottles. It lived in exam rooms. In dismissive comments by providers. In sleepless, sweaty nights, just trying to survive. It was embodied in the “it’s just stress.” In the“welcome to aging.” In women quietly wondering if they were losing their minds.

And when the warning was lifted, there was no collective acknowledgment of harm:

• No ritual of repair.

• No public remembering.

• Just silence. Again.

When you harm tens of millions of people, you don’t simply update the guidelines and hold one press conference.

You owe a reckoning.

For Our Mothers and Grandmothers

This isn’t about hysteria. It’s about memory. And moral repair. It’s about the women who trusted their providers. Who were told (and are still being told), “You are just getting old.” The generation of women who paid for this medical “mistake” with their bones, their hearts, their minds.

We may not be able to give them back the decade they lost. But we can refuse to let their story disappear into footnotes.

We name this for what it was: an American Tragedy. We tell the truth about what was at stake. We choose to do better. That’s the beginning of restorative justice.

*Reader’s Note: This essay is part of an ongoing conversation I share with my sister Cherry, WHNP, at The Peach Pit. Join us.

But we’ve lost the language for endings.

Puberty. Periods. Pregnancy. Birth. Babies (Or the tear-stained pillows of women who can’t make babies or have lost babies). And then… strangely, radio silence.

We aren’t prepared for what it looks like when that whole system starts to wind down.

For something that happens to literally every woman who lives long enough, the lack of shared language around menopause is… stunning.

For a long time, menopause wasn’t just ignored culturally - it was sidelined medically too.

In the early 2000s, a major health study sparked widespread fear around hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The findings were complex, but the message that stuck was simple: hormone therapy is dangerous.

So an entire generation of doctors was trained to hesitate, minimize, or avoid treating menopausal symptoms at all.

Dr. Marty Makary, a public health expert, professor at Johns Hopkins, and senior FDA leader, has called the aftermath of the 2002 hormone study “one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine...an American tragedy.” He described it as a form of misplaced groupthink that swept through healthcare.

According to Makary, 50 to 70 million women over the last 23 years were denied the life-changing, even life-saving, benefits of hormone therapy because of that fear-based dogma.

And then he added: Those millions included his own mother.

The problem? We now know that the study’s conclusions were overly generalized, and in many cases, misapplied, especially to healthy women in early menopause.

And now, quietly, but significantly, the medical community is in the middle of a reversal.

Guidelines are evolving. Research is exploding. And clinicians like Dr. Kelly Casperson, Dr. Louise Newsome, my sister, Cherry Graves, WHNP-BC, FNP-BC, MSCP, and many others are leading the way toward more informed, nuanced, and compassionate care for women navigating midlife.

And this shift isn’t just happening in podcasts and specialized clinics. In November 2025, the FDA quietly removed the long-standing black box warning on certain hormone therapies. A warning that had shaped medical fear for over two decades.

It was a subtle move, but a seismic one. A rare moment when the system itself admitted: we may have gotten this wrong.

In other words: We’re not crazy. The system really did go silent and leave us wandering around the deserts of peri-menopausal hell. And the deep knowledge is finally waking up.

And this isn’t a small story. At any given moment, there are hundreds of millions of women globally in perimenopause or menopause. By 2030, that number will pass one billion.

And that medical silence mirrored something deeper happening culturally. Somewhere along the way, the feminine story just stops.

As if once the reproductive system winds down, the plot ends. Or worse, we’re supposed to quietly exit the stage.

But here’s the thing I keep bumping into, both in my personal life and in my work as a therapist: Women in midlife aren’t disappearing. They’re transforming.

And we don’t yet have good language for what they’re becoming.

The Body’s Long Goodbye

It takes years for a young bud’s menstrual cycle to regulate. Puberty is messy, emotional, unpredictable, and deeply embodied. We expect that. We give space for the chaos.

But what no one really tells us is that it can take eight to ten years to shut the whole system down.

Perimenopause is not a flipped switch. It’s a slow, erratic unwinding.

Hormones spike and crash. Sleep gets weird. Your body gets overheated. Emotions get louder. Energy tanks. Memory gets foggy. The body feels strangely unfamiliar. Questions rise to the surface like “Why do I just not feel like myself?”

It’s not unlike adolescence. It’s adolescence just in reverse.

Which makes sense, actually. We’re not “breaking down.” We’re transitioning forward.

Yet culturally, we treat this phase like a pathological system malfunction instead of a sacred transformation.

The Science No One Told Us About

And then I read something that completely reframed how I see this season. Humans are one of the very few species on earth known to experience menopause. The others are all toothed whales, including orcas, belugas, narwhals, and pilot whales.

Scientists call it The Granny Effect.

When female orcas stop reproducing, they don’t fade into irrelevance.

They become seasoned leaders:

• They guide the pod to food when resources are scarce.

• They remember migration routes from decades past.

• They help younger mothers and their young survive.

• They hold the collective memory of the group.

In other words, grandma knows best.

Orca grandmothers don’t make babies anymore. They make everyone else more likely to survive.

Nature didn’t sideline them. Nature reassigned them.

Not decline. Reassignment. Not a breakdown. A promotion.

And here’s the reframe I keep coming back to: Menopause is not a breakdown. It’s a transition into a different, new kind of power. It’s an awakening.

And when I think about that, something resonates deep in my bones.

What if menopause isn’t decline? What if it’s nature’s reassignment?

The Human Granny Effect

When you look at history, this pattern shows up again and again.

So many of the women who changed the world didn’t do it in their youth, beauty, or fertility years. They did it after.

• Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to give up her seat.

• Julia Child didn’t become famous until 50.

• Toni Morrison published Beloved at 56.

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined the Supreme Court at 60.

• Mother Teresa didn’t start her global work until her 40s.

• Maya Angelou wrote her most iconic work in midlife.

• Jane Goodall became a global leader at 52.

• Gloria Steinem hit her stride after 40.

These women didn’t lead from reproductive power. They led from experience. From discernment. From having nothing left to prove. And everything left to give.

Fertility ended.
Authority and re-assignment began.

A Spiritual Reframe

In Christian language, resurrection never means “going back.” It means becoming something new.

Menopause isn’t a fall from relevance. It’s a transformation of function.

The body changes. The role changes. The voice strengthens.

The baby-making factory closes (and to be fair, it was never open for some by loss and some by their empowered choice not pro-create).
The elder emerges.

This is the death of one identity, yes. But also the birth of another.

A woman less governed by approval. Less hijacked by hormones. Less obligated to perform.

And more able to see clearly.
Speak honestly.
Lead wisely.

Maybe the Chaos Is the Promotion

What if perimenopause feels chaotic because we’re in the middle of a promotion we were never told about?

What if the brain fog is clearing out old scripts? What if the irritability is the nervous system refusing to carry unnecessary emotional labor? What if the exhaustion is the body shedding a role that no longer fits?

Not decay. Reassignment.

The orcas already know this.
The women throughout history lived it.

We just forgot to name it.

The New Myth We Need

We don’t need another story about midlife women being invisible, broken, or “past their prime.”

We need a new archetype.

• The Elder who remembers what matters when chaos is swirling.

• The Granny Orca With Receipts.

• The Woman who becomes the compass when her pod gets lost.

Not the insecure girl anymore.
Not the striving mother (or woman) in the trenches.

But the one who has walked through grief, hormones, loss, reinvention, and come out with something the culture desperately needs:

Wisdom.
Discernment.
Leadership.
And fewer cares to give.

Maybe this season isn’t about losing yourself. Maybe it’s about finally being introduced to the version of you who no longer exists to reproduce, perform, or prove.

The factory closed.
The elder emerged.

For so long, our creative force lived in the womb: in cycles, blood, birth, in loss and becoming.

But what if in midlife, that same force doesn’t die… it migrates?

From the womb to the mind. From reproduction to revelation. From making life to making meaning.

And no one told us this was actually a promotion. But nature has spoken. And I’m here for my Granny Orca with receipts season.

It kind of snuck up on both of us over a ridiculous, over-the-top chocolate cake at Murky Waters Friday night. (Adrienne’s request. I understood the assignment and leaned all the way into her chocolate love language.)

Three tables pushed together. Our loud, sometimes obnoxious family. Stories flying. The birthday girl, Adrienne, shushing us like we were unruly teenagers. Which is fair.

Somewhere between the sugar high and the chaos of Chloe’s nightshift ER stories, Cherry and I started talking about mountains.

At first, literal ones. We’re already scheming about Breckenridge for Mardi Gras 2027, and my son, Eddie, is taking the birthday girl to Vail next weekend for her 30th. So yes, getting away to the mountains was very much on our minds.

But then the conversation shifted.

Not just the postcard kind of mountains anymore, but the interior ones.

The long climbs of grief. The thin air (and hair) of midlife. The way your body just…WHAM-O! Changes on you when you’re not fully paying attention. The storms that roll in out of nowhere.

And the slow, sometimes wobbly walk (crawl) out of a deep valley after something has broken you open in a way you weren’t sure you’d come back from.

I think a lot of us have been talking about mountains and valleys for years without maybe naming them that.

You climb. You get winded. You slip. You scrape your knees. Sometimes you make it to the summit. Sometimes you have to turn back. Sometimes you carry someone out of the dark woods and back toward the path. And if you’re brave, or blessed, or stubborn enough, you eventually come out of this present suffering with a few scars and maybe a story or two that could help someone else on their trail.

Right there, tucked into this moment of celebration, I blurted out what had been quietly forming between us for a long while now:

“What if we just… threw something into the universe together?”

Because here’s the slightly hilarious part: Cherry and I have done life together, well, all our lives. We grew up in the same home. Share the same familial story. We moved out to Duke/UNC side by side, raised our kids together, came back home together when life shattered us, buried my son, Jeremy, together, buried our mother together, buried our father together. We’ve buried grandparents who felt like home. Through it all, we have clung to one another in a way that few people experience in a lifetime, and we are deeply grateful for that bond and privilege.

And yet somehow, it is only in recent months that it has occurred to us that our vocational callings fit together like two pieces of the same puzzle.

Well… duh. Isn’t that just like God?

Sometimes the most obvious things don’t arrive with a trumpet blast. They sneak up quietly over chocolate cake, in a loud restaurant, and suddenly you can’t unsee it.

Here’s what we’re beginning to see.

Cherry is the body piece of this puzzle.

A Family and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner, Menopause Society–certified, deeply grounded in research about hormones, heart health, movement, and the stubborn truth that no pill replaces good nutrition and exercise.

Women cry in her office, and not because things are hopeless, but because they finally feel heard. They’ve found someone who listens, believes them, and gives them options they were told they couldn’t have. And of course, I’m biased, but my sister is the Menapause Whispering Guru on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Period.

Cherry will be the first to tell you that hormones matter, but so do movement, sleep, nutrition, and tending to your whole life.

I bring a different part of the picture.

The mental and the spiritual. Years in ministry as an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church. Now also a provisional licensed counselor and a professional school counselor. (Didn’t fully see that one coming, either).

Decades spent sitting with people in grief, trauma, anxiety, and longing. I’ve also camped out in the valley of despair myself, and by the grace of God, I am finding my way back out.

I labor with minds, hearts, stories, and souls. I think and write a lot about how trauma lives in the body, how grief reshapes us, how our digital addictions taint us, and how, against all odds, people can come back from the pit of hell and reinvent their lives.

Together, we believe something pretty simple, but learned clinging to the edge of some pretty treacherous mountains:

Struggle and pain don’t get to have the last word.
Reinvention is possible, even in midlife.
The body keeps score, yes, but you are not stuck with the wounds and battle scars of your yesterdays.

Our anthem: Take courage, beloved one. The best is yet to come!

Body + Mind + Spirit.

Pretty simple.

We’re not pretending to have our life together at the top of the mountain, or to be the people waiting for you there, sipping mimosas and sharing a laugh. We ourselves are still learning and growing.

Maybe we’re more like sherpas. Those people who have already been up and down a few hard mountains, hands blistered, hearts battered, but eyes a little wiser, who turn around and say, “I’ll climb with you.”

Not waving a victory flag from the top, but a steady companion beside you, breathing hard with you, a little scared like you, but offering a hand when the trail gets slick.

If you know Hinds’ Feet on High Places, you’ll get this immediately. In our family lexicon, we often call ourselves “Much Afraid.” Brave and trembling at the same time. Limping, tender, broken, but stubborn, still standing, still moving, still climbing. Still believing that the God who got us this far isn’t about to leave us now.

So this is our small “hello, world.”

Not a launch. Not a thought-out plan.

Just two sisters setting our vocational lanterns a little closer together so the light is wider.

We don’t know what this becomes. Maybe a podcast. Maybe writing. Maybe speaking. Maybe just a shared space where we think out loud about midlife, bodies, grief, faith, and the power of believing in reinvention.

For now, we’re surprised, curious, a little delighted by all this, and wondering if anyone out there might want to walk alongside us for a bit.

If you’re in perimenopause (like we are) or menopause, trying to make sense of your body, then Cherry is your person.

If you’re carrying grief, anxiety, or a quiet longing to reinvent your life, that’s where I live.

If you’re somewhere in between exhausted, curious, tender, trying to be resilient, and maybe a little “Much Afraid,” and Much Beloved, then maybe this is for you, too.

If this resonates, we’d love to hear from you. If it doesn’t, that’s okay. Best believe we’ll keep talking at our loud little table anyway. 😅

For now, we’re just two (soul) sisters, holding two lanterns, with a lot of shared history, and a little invitation to you:

Want to climb with us a little while?

Since hitting publish, I’ve been carrying something heavier than policy.

I spent time listening to yesterday’s House floor “debate,” which felt more like a formal Q&A session, and I haven’t been able to shake what I heard, or more precisely, who I heard.

Again and again, Black legislators stood up almost alone and named, with clarity and impassioned composure, how this bill would likely harm poor communities and communities of color. They didn’t speak in slogans. They spoke from history, from lived experience, and from deep knowledge of how policies land in real classrooms and real neighborhoods.

They were attorneys, educators, and thoughtful, principled gentlemen and ladies who carefully explained why a system that allows publicly funded schools to exclude, while public schools must include, creates two very different systems under the same taxpayer umbrella. They were not arguing in abstractions. They were naming consequences.

There was also a very human moment in all of this that has stayed with me. As I was listening to the floor debate, I missed one representative’s name before he spoke. The camera didn’t show me his face, but whoever he was, he was on fire! Precise, sharp, and asking exactly the right questions about access, equity, and who this bill would actually serve. I later scrolled back, caught his name when he was recognized to speak, and looked him up.

It was Representative Robert Johnson from District 94, who I learned is the House Minority Leader and an attorney. Representative Johnson commands respect, and even one of the presenters of the bill paused to thank him for his thoughtful questions. Y’all, listen to him. 🫶 He understands this issue in his bones.

And here’s the part that sits heavy with me.

If the representatives, like Mr. Johnson, with constituents most likely to be harmed by a policy, are nearly unanimous in warning us that it is dangerous, that should matter. A lot.

At a minimum, it demands a thoughtful pause. A leaning in. A commitment to listen seriously to these witnesses. Not defensiveness, not dismissal, but a genuine turning of our listening ears toward those who will live with the consequences.

A friend reminded me of a philosophical idea called “standpoint epistemology,” a fancy phrase that simply means people who live inside a problem often see it more clearly than those looking at it from a distance. I love that term, because it gives language to something my heart and gut were feeling.

Black legislators are not just “one opinion” in this debate. They are, in a very real sense, authoritative witnesses to how underfunding and structural inequity have shaped Mississippi’s schools for generations. Black leaders carry knowledge born of lived experience. We don’t have to agree on everything to take their warnings with extraordinary seriousness.

In the same way that women understand sexism differently because they live it, or teachers understand classrooms differently because they work in them, these legislators carry knowledge born of lived experience that we ignore at our peril.

And yet, despite that compelling witness, the bill passed the House by just two votes.

That closeness tells me this was not a fringe objection. It was a deeply contested, morally charged decision that will now move to the Senate. The fight is not over.

As I listened, I kept hearing mention of the presence, often unseen, of high-paid lobbyists pushing this bill. I don’t say that as a conspiracy. It is simply part of how our system works. But it is fair to ask whether the financial incentives behind this policy align with the needs of the children who stand to be most affected.

Lobbyists are paid to expand markets and create new funding streams, which can be beneficial. That is their job. But that job does not require them to lose sleep over whether a single mom can transport her child across town, or whether a child in crisis can access mental health care at school. Those realities belong to families, teachers, and communities, not to the firms shaping this legislation.

And let’s be honest. Most of the policymakers advancing this bill are not in classrooms. If we truly want to know what students need, we should start by asking public school teachers, the people who show up every day with our children.

That is why I keep coming back to something simple and stubborn.

If Mississippi truly wants to invest in children, let’s get serious about investing in all of them, not just the ones who can navigate a new, fragmented system.

• Let’s fully fund the Mississippi Student Funding Formula we wrote into law in 2024.

• Let’s raise teacher pay and support those who show up every day for our kids.

• Let’s expand mental health services in schools, where the crisis is already walking through the door.

• Let’s strengthen early literacy, pre-K, and the supports that actually move the needle for students who have been historically left behind.

Those are not flashy priorities. They don’t create new markets or generate lobbying contracts. But they work, and they benefit every child.

As this moves to the Senate, I’m holding two things together.

• A commitment to facts, funding formulas, and policy details, which is the substance of my earlier post.

• And a commitment to listening carefully to the voices of those most affected, especially the Black legislators who stood up almost alone and bore witness to the truth as they see it.

Because at the end of the day, I keep returning to this.

Freedom that depends on zip code, the ability to shore up the tuition gap, or an admissions approval isn’t freedom. It’s a luxury.

And luxury should not be the foundation of public education.

If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll read my earlier piece and sit with it. Not to agree, necessarily, but to understand the stakes as I see them from inside our schools.

The conversation is not over.

Mississippi has an opportunity here to surprise us all, to refuse the tired refrain that “Mississippi is going to Mississippi,” and I hope the voices of those most affected are listened to most closely.

Why aren’t we fully funding Mississippi’s school funding formula (first MAEP, now MSFF)?

For decades, Mississippi failed to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. By replacing MAEP with the Mississippi Student Funding Formula, the state acknowledged that the old system was not working as intended. Yet the central question remains: Will Mississippi honor its own commitment to fully fund an equitable education system designed to serve every child, regardless of zip code?

That failure, across both formulas, has fallen hardest on poor communities, rural districts, and children of color.

Until Mississippi fully funds the Mississippi Student Funding Formula (the state’s own successor to MAEP), any conversation about expanding “school choice” rings hollow.

In public policy, freedom without equal access is not liberty. It is a privilege administered by the state.

Freedom that depends on zip code, income, or admissions approval isn’t freedom: it’s a luxury.

Because choice only exists when “equal” access exists.

“Choice” Without Access Isn’t Choice

House Bill 2 is framed as empowering parents. I understand why the promise of choice resonates with families who feel unheard or underserved. But let’s be honest about who can realistically use this “choice.”

A single mother working multiple hourly jobs cannot transport her children across town to a private school with no bus service.
She cannot reliably cover tuition gaps that vouchers do not eliminate.
She cannot easily rearrange work schedules around private school calendars.
And there is no guarantee her child will even be accepted.

Private schools are allowed to choose who they serve.
Public schools are not.

That distinction matters.

When public dollars fund schools that can exclude, while public schools must educate every child, we are no longer talking about freedom. We are creating two publicly funded systems with unequal obligations.

That is not fairness. And it is not reform.

This Is a Poverty Issue. And a Racial One.

Mississippi doesn’t get to pretend this debate is neutral.

When transportation isn’t provided, tuition can still be charged, admissions are selective, and accountability is optional, the families who benefit are already resourced. The families left behind are the same children public schools have always served.

Calling this “choice” ignores the reality that poverty limits choice long before policy ever enters the picture.

Public schools are community anchors. They provide meals, special education, transportation, mental health services, and stability. When we weaken them, entire communities feel it.

If We’re Serious About Kids, Fund What They Actually Need

I work inside schools. This is not theoretical.

We are in the middle of a youth mental health crisis. Anxiety, trauma, depression, and suicidal ideation show up in classrooms every day. Vouchers don’t address that.

If Mississippi truly wants to invest in children, here’s an idea to toss around:

• Fully fund Mississippi’s school funding formula (the Mississippi Student Funding Formula)

• Expand high-quality pre-K statewide

• Strengthen early literacy and intervention supports in grades K–3

• Invest in school-based mental health services

• Provide meaningful teacher pay raises and retention incentives

• Expand school-based family and community support partnerships

None of this is flashy. All of it is effective. And all of it benefits every child, not just the ones with options.

Public Schools Didn’t Fail Mississippi. They Delivered.

Mississippi’s academic gains didn’t happen by accident. They came from intentional investment, accountability, literacy reform, and the relentless work of educators in public schools.

Using that success to justify draining resources from the very system that produced it is dangerous and short-sighted.

If the goal is truly “making sure our babies are getting educated,” then the answer isn’t fragmentation.

It’s commitment to all Mississippi children.

A Call to Action (Time Sensitive)

House Bill 2 is headed for a full House vote. Time matters.

When public dollars are used to fund schools, the state has a moral obligation to ensure transparency, accountability, and equal obligation to every child.

Please contact your representative today and urge them to:

• VOTE NO on HB 2 (broad vouchers/school choice)

• VOTE YES on SB 2001 (teacher pay raise)

• VOTE YES on SB 2003 (retired teachers returning to classrooms)

Capitol Switchboard: 601-359-3770
House Speaker: 601-359-3300

Ask for schools that serve all children.
Ask for funding before fragmentation.
Ask for accountability for what was passed in 1997, then in 2024, before expansion.

Mississippi doesn’t need a luxury policy dressed up as freedom.
It needs the courage to uphold the commitments it made in the 2024 session and fully fund the system that already belongs to all our children.

Start with MSFF.
Start with teachers.
Start with mental health.
Start with the children who don’t get the luxury of choice.

What began as a playful side project. A catchy tune born out of a newfound creative portal after weekly preaching ended turned into something more serious, faster than I expected. You can read all about it here.

When the People Who Love You Pull You Aside

After sharing the bootleg copy (hehe) with my family and a few friends, the weight of their reactions was substantial.

Some comments were filled with care and concern for me.
Some were super funny.
Some landed harder than I anticipated.

One loved one described the contrast between the upbeat pop sound and the dark, explicit lyrics as jarring. Another said it has a great beat and hook that gets in your head, but it’s just too raw. They joked about the mental whiplash of hearing “this” come from a pearl-wearing, 50-year-old Southern pastor driving an old-lady SUV. Apparently, if I were a 25-year-old platinum-blonde edgy preacher, it would hit differently.

(I laughed. And then I sat with it.)

Someone else said, half-joking, half-serious:

“It feels like you’re coming out hot from preacher life. Like… uncensored catharsis.”

One well-meaning soul warned me I’d “get canceled” and reminded me it was so obviously AI. Yes. I know. I said that. I wasn’t hiding it.

Still, your concern is duly noted.

Someone mused I really love it, “It’s like Avril Lavigne and Nicki Minaj had a baby. But it’s kinda dark, don’t you think?”

One of my cousins listened. And she panicked, which was part of why I included the blurb in the original piece, “This is NOT about me. It’s not autobiographical.”

Texted her mom something like:
“WHO locked them in a closet with only stale peanut butter crackers? Why didn’t someone get arrested? I was about to call somebody. Even if they’re 80 now!”

It was funny. And not funny. And revealed something important.

People care deeply about abuse and especially when children are involved.
They’re just not used to hearing it named so directly. So in your face. So “jarring,” I suppose.

The Heart Behind the Song

My intention was not to create something “jarring” (two different loved ones used this exact word to describe the song).

It was the survivors. It was always about the survivors.

I wanted to create something hopeful, an anthem that says:
What happened to you was awful. But it does not get to take your life.

Some of the first people who heard the song felt exactly that. They said it felt empowering. That it named what is usually hidden or tiptoed around.

For a moment, I thought: Yes. This is doing what I hoped. It’s dragging neglect and abuse to the light and forcing a reckoning of sorts.

The Text That Changed Everything

After expressing concern, one person added almost casually: “But what do I know? I’m not an abuse survivor.”

That sentence stopped me in my tracks. Literally within a few minutes of ingesting that little red pill and going down the accompanying rabbit hole, I had deleted the project’s release.

To which this kind soul said, “Oh no. I didn’t want you to do that. Seriously, what do I know?”

But I did because suddenly I realized something I hadn’t even considered. It was what I didn’t “know.”

I’m not an abuse survivor either.

And that’s when the question shifted.

It wasn’t just Is this well-intended? It became Is this actually helpful, and who gets to decide that?

The Ethical Fulcrum

The song is powerful ( I think). It’s direct. It does have an explicit content warning. And yes, I acknowledge it can feel jarring.

Direct language like this does two things at once:

• It validates people who are tired of euphemisms.

• It alarms people who are conditioned to keep things polite, and we just don’t talk about things like this.

Both reactions are real. And I could live with folks saying this is “jarring” or shouldn’t be said by a preacher, or not fit for public consumption.

But jarring is not the same as harmful.

The real turning point wasn’t that it was created with the help of AI, profanity, age, optics, or me being a pastor.

It was this looming question:

If I’m not a survivor, how do I know this helps instead of harms?

That’s the moment moral imagination checks itself. I couldn’t stomach releasing art if I wasn’t pretty confident it serves the people I hoped it would.

Why I Pulled the Release

I realized I was imagining how survivors might receive the song without actually asking them.

And I wasn’t ready to ask yet.

Because I didn’t want to risk a close friend of mine hearing this song and it “harming” them.

That’s when I just knew I was not ready to release this.

Because if the whole point is empowerment, even a lingering question about harm was enough to create a pause, and in this case, a flush down the digital toilet.

So I did. I flushed it.

Where I Landed (For Now)

You can all exhale. This particular creative little side street is over (for now).

My solace in all this: Creativity doesn’t disappear when it pauses. Sometimes it matures. And you best believe I will be back at something. Who knows what?

But, hey, Whatever Works.