Yesterday, while sitting in my chiropractor’s office, I got a text from a good friend sharing the news that Dolly Parton had died. This friend knew this would hit our household particularly hard. My five-year-old has been a devoted Dolly fan since birth. “Aunt Dolly,” as she is affectionately known around here, sent her a book every month from the day she was born until she turned five last February, courtesy of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

I sat there for a minute and took in the sad news. On my way out, I decided the only reasonable treatment for grief was a carb from the coffee shop. I opened the door. “Jolene” was playing. I stopped in my tracks and started bawling. It wasn’t a discreet, “wipe a tear away” bawling but more “whole coffee shop turns in your direction” bawling. The barista looked at me and said, “You’re just expressing what we’re all feeling.” Through sobs, I ordered my cheddar biscuit, then did that deeply embarrassing laugh-cry thing while paying for it and walked back outside. I blame the size of my reaction mostly on pregnancy hormones. But also, damn, we lost a good one.

Fast-forward to this morning, when my brother texted the family thread that Tim Curry had died yesterday, too. If I’m being completely honest, I thought Tim Curry was already dead, sorry Tim. But learning that yet another entertainer who had been so unequivocally themselves had breathed his last breath made the whole thing feel particularly strange.

I told my daughter, who has been watching Annie on repeat lately, that Rooster had died, too. Aunt Dolly and Rooster, both in the same week. She considered this. “What a sad week for movies and songs.” Indeed.

Naturally, we spent the day toggling between Dolly’s discography and The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack while banging out our homeschool curriculum. I even officially logged it under Music Education in her learning log.

Then, while my daughter colored, I began processing the whole thing the way I know best: by writing. Somewhere between “9 to 5” and “Time Warp,” I started thinking that perhaps none of this was supposed to happen. It had to have simply been a clerical error. Two 80-year-old, larger-than-life entertainers, famous for decades and utterly incapable of entering a room unnoticed.

One D.

One T.

Maybe Death had simply been handed a slip of paper that said:

D.T. — 80 — American icon for decades — entertainer — television — distinctive hair.

And, really, he was close. Close, but no cigar.

So I imagined the conversation that must currently be taking place between Death, St. Pete, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry at the pearly gates.

My musings are below, for your entertainment. Please enjoy!

The trouble started, as these things often do, with paperwork. St. Peter was sipping his morning coffee when the elevator doors opened, which I get, sounds a bit unusual. People tend to imagine the entrance to Heaven as something more celestial, clouds parting, trumpets, perhaps a staircase but sometime around the Industrial Revolution, the volume became unmanageable and an elevator was installed. There had been complaints initially, mostly from Catholics.

As I was saying, the elevator doors opened. Death stepped out, looking unusually pleased with himself. Behind him stood Dolly Parton and Tim Curry.

St. Peter, bewildered, slowly lowered his coffee.

“No.”

Death stopped. “What?”

“Wrong.”

“But you haven’t even looked at the paperwork.”

“I don’t need to, why are there two people?”

Pulling a crumbled piece of parchment from his robe Death replied, “It says here:

• DT

• 80 years old

• Longstanding American Icon

• Entertainer

• Distinctive Hair "

St. Peter looked at Dolly, “Hello, Dolly! I’ve been waiting 80 years to use that one.” Then he looked at Tim. Then at the paperwork. Then back at Death.

“You brought me a D and a T.”

“Correct.”

“One person, not two.”

“That was not clearly specified here.”

Dolly leaned over the desk, “well, ain’t you precious.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Death said.

“She wasn’t talking to YOU,” quipped Pete. “This is a real problem we’ve got on our hands.”

Tim meandered toward the gates, looked around, taking it all in, “For eternity, you could have committed just a little stronger to the décor.” St. Peter ignored him.

“You were supposed to get Donald Trump.”

“Oh. Shit. My B,” Death replied sheepishly.

Dolly, who was now sitting demure and crossed legged on St. Peter’s desk, peered at the paperwork, “Donald Trump, huh?”

“Yep. The one, the only, well unless you count the sad spawn he named after himself”, St. Peter responded, loosing almost all his saintly decorum.

Dolly considered this for a moment and while bouncing her own hair replied, “Well, honey, in Death’s defense, it was a skittle of a riddle and the hair clue wasn’t particularly helpful.”

“Thank. YOU,” said Death.

St. Peter looked up for help, “Boss?” Utter celestial silence. “Great.”

“So,” Dolly said, “what now?”

St. Peter looked at the two of them. Dolly, all rhinestones, big hair and impossible generosity. Tim, strange, theatrical and unapologetically himself. Two extraordinary humans who had taken up enormous amounts of space in the world without ever requiring anyone around them to become smaller.

Death had gotten the age right. The fame. The spectacle. The refusal to disappear. He’d been remarkably close and somehow missed by a mile.

St. Peter opened the gates, “They stay.”

Death brightened, “Really?”

“They’re already dead. I refuse to explain this one to God.”

“Understandable.”

Dolly straightened Death’s collar. “Don’t beat yourself up, sweetheart. Everybody makes mistakes.”

Tim raised his iconic brow, “He brought two people for one person.”

“Well,” Dolly said, “nobody’s perfect.”

St. Peter reluctantly handed the paperwork back to Death. “Try again.”

Death stared at it. “Donald.”

“Yep.”

“Trump.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Eighty.”

“This past June.”

“Television.”

“Unfortunately, for decades.”

“Distinctive hair—”

“Forget the fucking hair.”

Death stepped into the elevator.

Dolly blew Death a kiss, “Third time’s the charm, honey, go get ‘em!”

The doors began to close.

Tim called after him, “Whatever you do, leave Rod Stewart and Cher alone.”

The doors popped opened again.

Death poked his head out, “Huh, what did you say?”

St. Peter lunged across the desk, “JUST GO!”

The doors closed.

Dolly excitedly slipped her arm through Tim’s, “Well, ain’t this nice.”

Tim looked toward the gates,“We’ll see about that.”

And just like that, together, arm in arm, D and T sauntered into eternity.

The funny thing is, I never ended up publishing the Maycember essay I had been writing in my head. Maybe that’s fitting. I was living it more than I was observing it. Although after talking with some of my East Coast friends whose kids didn’t get out of school until late June, I’m beginning to think we need a companion term: Junecember. Different month, same awful phenomenon.

Somewhere between field days, dance recitals, baseball tournaments, choir concerts, teacher gifts, camp registrations, graduations, presentations of learning, and the twenty-seven emails asking you to send your child in a very specific color shirt by tomorrow morning, we all crossed the finish line. HOORAY!!!

School is officially out. Summer has officially begun. So why do I still feel like my body hasn’t gotten the memo?

I’ve been thinking about that this week. We spend so much time talking about surviving Maycember/Junecember, but almost no time talking about what happens afterward. We imagine the last day of school as this collective exhale, as though the moment the backpacks are emptied our nervous systems immediately settle too.

At least mine didn’t. My calendar says July. My body still feels like it’s checking for permission slips. I’ve realized slowing down isn’t as simple as having fewer places to be. There’s a lag. The calendar changes first and our minds eventually follow. Our bodies, at least mine, take their sweet ass time.

Recovery isn’t like flipping a switch, it’s more like walking into a dark room after standing outside in bright sunlight. Your eyes need a minute to adjust. Our nervous systems totally do too.

The truth is, I disappeared into Maycember. Only I had another layer running quietly like an open app in the background. I’ve spent the last three months growing another tiny human! I’m entering my second trimester this week, and I can finally feel the fog beginning to lift. It has me thinking about something I had completely forgotten over the last six years.

First-trimester exhaustion!!!!!! There is a special kindness in the way our minds let us forget it. I remembered being tired when I was pregnant with Vivian, the naps and the early bedtimes. I remembered needing to slow waaaaay down. What I didn’t remember was this. I didn’t remember looking at the dishwasher as though someone had asked me to climb Everest. I didn’t remember needing a nap after taking a shower or combing my hair. I didn’t remember opening my laptop to write and realizing my thoughts had simply… disappeared for the day… were they ever even there though?! Brain fog galore!

Forgetting must be nature’s way of making sure there are second babies. People say, “You’re tired,” but tired doesn’t begin to describe it. This kind of exhaustion seems to live at the cellular level. I’ve pulled all-nighters, worked transcon redeye turns, trained for a marathon and recovered from COVID. The closest comparison I can make is post-COVID fatigue, but even that feels like first-trimester exhaustion with the volume turned completely down. Every part of your body seems to agree that growing a human is now the highest priority, and everything else gets whatever energy is left over.

Writing?

Maybe tomorrow.

Returning a text?

HA!

Emptying the dishwasher?

Defintely tomorrow.

And then tomorrow quietly becomes next week, or in my case post- week 14.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that I currently possess two brains inside one body, and for much of the past three months it felt like I didn’t have access to either of them. Writing has always been how I figure out what I think. I don’t usually know what I believe about something until I’ve sat down and wrestled it into words. Over the past few months, I would open my laptop, stare at the blinking cursor, and realize there was nothing to wrestle with because my brain had already gone to bed. That was super humbling. For weeks I kept thinking, I should write. Then I would crawl into bed before eight o’clock instead. Apparently that’s what my body needed.

Whether you’ve been raising kids, caring for aging parents, building a business, grieving someone you love, finishing a degree, or simply carrying more than your share, I think many of us underestimate how long it takes to recover from seasons that required everything we had.

We spend so much of life celebrating beginnings. The first day of school, first day of summer, the first trimester. But I’ve been wondering if we’re actually better served by paying attention to transitions. The messy middle where our bodies and minds haven’t quite arrived at the same place yet.

That’s where I’ve been. Somewhere between surviving and recovering, between spring and summer and between the first and second trimester. Somewhere between I’ll write tomorrow and here I am.

Now, as I round the corner into my second trimester, I can feel that version of myself returning. My curiosity is slowly waking back up. Ideas are showing up in the shower again. I’m noticing things I’d stopped noticing. I’m beginning to feel more like myself, thank God! Or maybe not exactly myself but a newer version.

One who is growing one child while watching another race through childhood at what feels like impossible speed. *insert sob* There is something beautifully disorienting about being pregnant while parenting. You’re preparing to welcome someone you’ve never met while grieving, in the gentlest way, how quickly someone else is growing.

So if you’ve wondered where I’ve been, that’s the honest answer.

I’ve been surviving Maycember.

I’ve been growing a baby.

I’ve been sleeping whenever I could.

I’ve been learning, again, that our bodies often know what we need long before our minds are willing to admit it.

As we step into July, I’m giving myself permission to arrive slowly. To let my nervous system catch up with the calendar. To read without rushing. To swim. To linger over conversations with friends. To watch Vivian play without mentally organizing the next three things.

If you’ve also been carrying the lingering hum of Maycember or Junecember, maybe you don’t have to arrive all at once, perhaps your body is still catching up. Maybe your nervous system is still learning that the race is over.

Summer isn’t going anywhere. It’ll be here when you’re ready. I’m starting to believe that’s the real invitation of this season. Not to do summer but to arrive in it. I’m finally starting to.

I’m glad you’re here thanks for waiting for me!

If it is not completely obvious to you in the ultrasound, IT’S A BOY!!

Before they left, Vivian tore a page off the hotel notepad and wrote me a note in giant uneven kid handwriting. I tucked it next to the bed like it was scripture.

I eat a hearty Japanese dinner. I climb into a giant white bed with snacks and a book I’ve been pretending to read for three months. Sometimes Netflix wins. Usually Netflix wins. I watch terrifying documentaries about the FLDS while eating bbq kettle chips under luxury hotel sheets and feel, honestly, profoundly healed by it. I sleep uninterrupted.

No small feet padding into the room at 5:47 a.m. asking for water. No one yelling “Mom!” through the bathroom door while I’m peeing. No negotiations about breakfast, socks, sunscreen, or whether chicken counts as a protein if it’s shaped like a dinosaur. Silence.

Then a long shower. A podcast. Coffee I drink while it’s still piping hot. Somewhere around noon my crew arrives and we spend the afternoon swimming before a civilized 4 p.m. checkout. To me, this is the perfect Mother’s Day. Not brunch reservations packed with overtired toddlers and women trying to convince themselves they’re relaxing while secretly managing everyone else’s emotional weather.

I want solitude first.

I want to hear my own thoughts arrive.

I want to miss my family a little.

Lying here in this hotel bed waiting for them, I keep thinking about how motherhood feels both magical and aggressively ordinary at the exact same time. There are these breathtaking flashes that crack your heart wide open. The first time they laugh, the strange weight of their sleeping body against your chest and the way they reach for you when they’re hurt before they even understand what hurt means.

But mostly it’s repetition: packing lunches finding shoes, cutting fruit, wiping counters and wiping butts. Reminding someone to eat their chicken approximately twelve thousand times until you begin to suspect your final moments on earth will be spent in a nursing home rocking back and forth whispering, “Vivian, eat your goddamn chicken.”

Still, what an unbelievable privilege it is to shepherd another person through this life. Imperfectly and not always with grace. Certainly not patiently all the time.

I have no expertise here. I am not some serene earth mother dispensing wisdom from atop a mountain. Half the time I’m googling things with the intensity of someone diffusing a bomb. But I try to give my daughter one steady truth beneath all the uncertainty of being alive: you are safe with me, and together we will figure it out.

That’s all most of us are really doing. Figuring it out while unloading the dishwasher. Figuring it out while answering impossible questions from the backseat. Figuring it out while trying not to lose ourselves completely inside the constant giving.

Motherhood is exhausting. It is funny and tedious and deeply humbling. Some days feel transcendent. Some feel like emotional CrossFit in a sticky kitchen. Most are both. That’s what makes it amazing!

Not because every moment is beautiful, but because so many of them aren’t. Love keeps showing up anyway. Devotion to your children often looks less like grand gestures and more like cutting apples into tiny slices while half-listening to a child explain an elaborate imaginary game for forty straight minutes.

I know every mother thinks this, but I genuinely believe I have the best kid in the world. Or maybe she’s simply the best kid for me.

Sometimes I look at her and feel this almost unbearable sense of cosmic luck, like somehow we found each other across whatever strange machinery delivers souls into families. She fits into my life with such eerie precision that I cannot help but wonder if I fit into hers that way too.

Perhaps motherhood is being chosen by someone who still asks you to watch them jump into the pool for the seventeenth time. And saying yes every single time!

We also spent a morning in Monkey Forest, where a particularly friendly adolescent female monkey took an immediate interest in us. Before we went in, I coached my daughter carefully. We do not touch the monkeys. We do not make eye contact. If they want to come near us, that is on their terms. She took it all in with the solemnity of someone preparing for a diplomatic assignment.

And then she was magnificent.

A monkey climbed onto her, groomed her, and at one point attempted to steal her earrings. My daughter remained so calm, so centered, so entirely unbothered that I found myself both amazed by her and slightly undone by my own nervous system. I have been to this forest many times. I have always welcomed those interactions. I have never been afraid. But there is apparently an entirely different experience available when it is your child calmly participating in a situation you cannot fully control or predict.

It was fascinating to watch my anxiety flare in real time while she moved through the encounter like a tiny enlightened being.

Afterward, she said, “Just call me Vivi Goodall,” which was funny enough to justify the entire journey on its own.

There is something deeply moving about monkeys. To watch them examine our hands and then their own is to be reminded, in a way that feels almost unsettling, of how thin the divide really is. To watch the mother monkeys tending to their cheeky babies is to recognize maternal behavior so familiar it nearly collapses the distinction between us. The whole experience made the thirty-seven-hour- “travel day” to get there feel entirely worth it.

Another favorite moment was giving my daughter some pocket money at the market and watching a five-year-old who once would not make eye contact with strangers suddenly stride into stalls ready to negotiate. A small child bartering is about as delightful as it sounds. Endearing, hilarious and oddly impressive. She made some excellent deals and also handled disappointment well when something could not be bargained down. There is nothing like seeing your child become more fully herself in a new setting. It feels a little like meeting them again.

We stayed in the most adorable two-bedroom villa with a kitchen and private pool, breakfast included, for less than the cost of a standard Marriott room in Cleveland. My daughter was thrilled by the fact that she could go skinny dipping first thing in the morning while we watched her from bed. There are some freedoms in childhood that feel so pure and joyful.

Since my husband and I visited in 2018, we have fantasized about bringing future children back for a year at Green School, the wildly beautiful, Waldorf-inspired international school built around nature, sustainability, and global awareness. This time we took our daughter to visit, and she fell in love with it as completely as we once did. So did we, again. There would be a thousand logistical questions to answer, obviously. Real life loves to interrupt fantasy with spreadsheets and visa requirements. But still, it became something new while we were there. Not just our dream, but a family dream.

That felt significant.

And maybe that is part of what Bali has always offered me. Not just beauty, though there is so much of that. Not just rest, though my body always seems to exhale here. Bali offers a kind of remembering. A way back to parts of myself that are easier to hear when the pace softens and beauty is treated not as luxury, but as a right.

Yes, it has changed.

Yes, some of the old magic has been interrupted by traffic and trendiness and the inevitable erosion that comes when the world discovers a place and begins consuming it.

But the deeper magic is still there. In the offerings. In the smell of incense in the air. In the artistry of ordinary things. In children finding each other across language. In monkeys reminding us we are not nearly as separate as we like to imagine. In the possibility of a family dream spoken aloud and taken seriously.

I am leaving, again, feeling what I always seem to feel when I leave Bali, which is grateful, a little heartbroken, and already in conversation with the version of myself that will return.

I just got back from my first trip returning to work as a flight attendant, and somewhere between hour 27 and hour 34 in the sky, I completely lost my grip on time, space, and what day it was. I’m pretty sure at one point I asked someone what year it was and meant it.

This wasn’t anxiety like neurosurgery anxiety. No one was going to die if I forgot how to plate a dinner tray or fumbled a service flow. But still, my heart was beating faster than it needed to. Things had changed, protocols, service standards, little nuances of timing and choreography that make the whole machine run smoothly. And my brain, which has recently been more focused on domestic duties, writing, healing and keeping a small human alive, had not been in “airplane mode.”

And just to keep things spicy, I wasn’t easing back in. I was the purser. So before the trip, I sent a message to the flight attendant working with me, the one who would be my right hand. I said, Hey, I’m a little rusty. I might need some patience and some grace. He wrote back: “I got your back.” And he meant it.

His name is Milfort and for four straight days, this man quietly, consistently, and generously carried the edges I was dropping. He called me “Boss Lady” with a smile while I was actively forgetting how to be one. He filled in gaps before they became problems. He never once made me feel slow or behind. Or like I should already have it together.

There’s a version of this trip where I come home depleted, embarrassed and second-guessing myself. There’s a version where I spiral a little. Where I think, Maybe I’ve lost it. Maybe I can’t do this the way I used to. But that’s not the version I got. Because someone chose kindness. And maybe just as importantly, I let him. I didn’t deflect it, overcompensate to prove I was fine or shut it down with, “No no, I’ve got it.” I let someone support me. Which, if I’m honest, might sometimes be harder than offering kindness in the first place.

We learn how to be kind very young.

“Use kind hands.”

“Say kind words.”

“Be nice.”

But we don’t spend nearly as much time learning how to receive kindness.

How to not feel weak when someone helps.

How to not rush to repay it.

How to not minimize it.

Kindness is something we teach obsessively to five-year-olds, and then quietly stop prioritizing as adults. We start valuing sharpness, efficiency and impressiveness.

In my late twenties, after ending a long-term relationship, I made a list. A very serious, very considered list of non-negotiables for a future partner.

It had everything I wanted/needed:

Intellectually intelligent.

Emotionally intelligent.

Creative.

Curious.

Ambitious.

Loves to laugh.

Desires travel.

Values family.

Seeks truth.

Cares about health.

Encourages growth.

It was, in my opinion, a strong list.

I shared it with a close friend. He looked at it and said, “It’s great… but you’re missing the most important thing.”

Kindness.

So the list grew. It was no longer a clean, satisfying dozen. But it was finally complete with now 13 attributes.

When I was pregnant with Vivian, I went to a 10-day Vipassana retreat. Ten days of silence. No tech. No distractions. Just me, my breath, and this tiny, forming person inside me.

And during one of those long, still stretches, I remember thinking: Who do I want her to be? Not what she achieves, how she performs or how she’s perceived.

But who she is.

I came up with five things:

Kind.

Curious.

Empathetic.

Creative.

Gritty.

Kindness was first.

Not because it’s easy but because it might be the hardest. Kindness is restraint when you could criticize. It’s patience when you’re inconvenienced. It’s choosing softness in a world that rewards sharp edges. It’s seeing someone struggle and deciding, not consciously but instinctively, not to add weight.

Last summer, I watched Vivian become the very thing I had hoped for her when I was pregnant. She participated in Kindland’s Summer of Kindness challenge, and she took it seriously in the way only children can. She delighted in checking the boxes, but more than that, she started looking for her own ways to be kind. It wasn’t about completing the list. It was about noticing.

A few weeks ago, she asked me if there was going to be another kindness challenge this summer. I told her that even if there isn’t, she can make her own. Kindness isn’t something we wait to be told to do. It’s something we choose, over and over again.

Milfort didn’t have to show up that way. He could have corrected me. He could have been efficient instead of generous. He could have let me feel every inch of my rust. Instead, he made it lighter.

Kindness doesn’t just make you better, it changes the entire environment around you. It turns what could have been a hard week into a gentle one. A stressful return into a supported one. A shaky start into something steady.

We don’t talk about that enough. We don’t celebrate it enough. We don’t choose it enough. But we should. Sometimes, the most bravest thing we can do is let someone be kind to us. And then, when it’s our turn, notice and choose to carry what someone else can’t.

Anyway. We move on.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend texted me asking if I would come over and help her clean out her garage. Not “come over and have wine while we gesture vaguely at the garage.” She meant clean it. Like gloves, piles, decisions and the whole emotional support slash manual labor experience.

I showed up and she met me with fuel: a matcha and a donut. I am a real slut for a “there will be cake” invitation.

And then we got to work!

Helping someone else with their chaos, is wildly satisfying. There is no emotional attachment to the seventh box of cords or the baby swing that may or may not be needed again someday. You become a woman of action. A general. A calm, rational voice saying things like, “We are not keeping this, right?!” Meanwhile, your friend is having a full internal experience about each bin. It’s a perfect system.

We pulled everything out. We made piles. We donated. We trashed. We reorganized. We listened to music. We talked about life in that easy, meandering way that only happens when your hands are busy.

Hours passed. The garage became… a garage again. A space with air and intention instead of quiet resentment and avoidance. When I left, I had that deeply specific satisfaction that only comes from doing something tangible. Not thinking about doing it or just talking about doing it. Doing it.

So I texted her a few days later to check in and propose something radical.

I said, what if we did this once a month. We alternate houses. One month we tackle your life admin nightmare, the next month we tackle mine. Four hours. A project we have both been avoiding. She responded, “this is some sister wife shit and I LOVE it”! YESSSSSSSSS

The thing about adulthood that no one prepares you for. It is not the big, cinematic responsibilities that wear you down, it is the endless, low-grade accumulation of tasks that require energy you do not have at 9:30 on a Tuesday night.

The bin of baby clothes you need to sort through but cannot emotionally access. The medical bills that feel written in a language designed to break your spirit. The cabinet that has quietly become a graveyard for things you once intended to organize. These are not hard because they are complex. They are hard because you are alone with them. But add one other person. Add music. Add a shared understanding that today we are simply going to begin.

Suddenly it becomes… almost fun? At the very least, it becomes possible.

We now have two dates on the calendar. In a few weeks, she’s coming to my house. She will stand in my garage, or my closet, or wherever I point her, and she will say things like, “Okay, what are we doing first?” while I spiral briefly and then get it together.

And then the next month, I will return the favor.

Six times a year, we will take something that has been quietly looming and we will deal with it. This feels like a kind of wealth. The kind where your life is actually easier to live.

I’ve also been doing a monthly beach walk with another friend. At the end of each walk, before we even leave the parking lot, we put the next one on the calendar. It means that at least once a month, I will stand near the ocean, move my body, breathe briny air, and talk to someone I adore. It is both simple and wildly effective.

And I think what I’m realizing is this. Friendship, at this stage of life, cannot rely solely on “we should get dinner soon.” That sentence is a graveyard.

What works is structure. Gentle, intentional and mutually agreed upon structure.

A standing walk. A standing garage clean-out. A recurring moment where you show up for each other in a way that makes both of your lives better. Not just more connected, more functional and more livable, too! Also, significantly more likely to result in a very clean and organized garage.

If you take nothing else from this essay, take this. Find one person. Pick one annoying and avoidable, adult task. Put it on the calendar. Show up with snacks. See what happens. Worst case, you clean a closet. Best case, you accidentally build a life that feels a little less overwhelming and a lot more shared.

Writing that sentence still makes me a little self conscious. It sounds indulgent and slightly unserious. The sort of thing that feels easier to justify if it comes attached to a measurable benefit like increased creativity, better mental health, or improved focus.

Adults are very good at having to justify things. If we read, we should learn something. When we exercise, we should improve something. Should we rest, it should help us become more productive later. Even our leisure often comes with a purpose.

Play, by definition, does not.

That is part of what makes it difficult to choose. It asks us to step outside the system most of us have been trained to live inside. Play is joyful without being useful, nourishing without being efficient and meaningful without needing to inherently prove its value. Choosing something that cannot be defended with a spreadsheet or a list takes more courage than it should.

When we talk about play, we often imagine children. They understand it instinctively. Play is building a world out of couch cushions and a table cloth. It is inventing elaborate backstories and soap operas for stuffed animals. Play is laughter that erupts out of nowhere and dissipates just as quickly.

Children do not worry about whether play is productive. They simply do it. Adults slowly forget how.

You can also feel our collective anxiety about this in the stories we love. Again and again, pop culture returns to the same theme. In Hook, Peter Pan grows up and becomes a work-obsessed lawyer who has forgotten how to play until the Lost Boys remind him. In movies like Big or even the surprisingly philosophical world of children’s shows like Gabby’s Dollhouse, adults rediscover imagination after losing it somewhere along the road to responsibility. These stories resonate because they tap into something many of us silently suspect, growing up was never supposed to mean abandoning wonder, and yet, somehow most of us do.

Responsibility becomes our primary identity. We manage calendars, families, work, finances and obligations. The list rarely ends. Play begins to feel like something extra, something we might earn once everything else has been handled, every item checked on the never ending to-do list.

There is also the emotional risk. Choosing play means loosening control. It means allowing ourselves to be just plain silly. It’s being willing to look slightly ridiculous in a culture that rewards competence and composure. Yet the absence of play has a cost.

Play is where curiosity lives. It is where connection becomes easy instead of effortful. When play disappears, life becomes organized entirely around tasks and responsibilities. Things function, but something essential goes extinct.

This realization is what led to my promise. I want to remember to play. I never forgot how, I just stopped prioritizing it. Today I had the chance to practice.

I spent the day at a filming of a game show where everyone in the audience is required to come in costume. So I went as a ladybug.

Even writing that sentence makes me smile and wince at the same time. There is a part of my brain that immediately begins assembling an argument for why this was a reasonable thing for a grown adult to do. Another part of me feels proud for ignoring that voice.

Walking into the studio felt like entering a room where everyone had made the same brave decision. There were pirates, astronauts, princesses, superheroes, bananas, and a surprising number of cows. Dozens of adults had carved out a day in their schedules and committed to being joyful together.

Phones were turned in at the door. For the next seven hours the room belonged entirely to the people inside it.

We cheered for strangers!

We laughed loudly!

We went wild when someone won!

We groaned when someone got ZONKED.

The atmosphere was generous in a way that felt almost unfamiliar. No one was trying to impress anyone. It is difficult to maintain professional dignity while wearing antennae and cheering next to a man dressed as a disco ball.

For a few hours everything felt light.

The noise of the outside world quieted. The constant awareness of everything that is frightening, heavy or downright disturbing in the world stepped back just enough to allow something more kind to appear.

What replaced it was simple human connection.

People smiling at each other and strangers offering encouragement. A room full of adults remembering that joy does not need a reason, only a Tuesday and a costume.

I was lucky enough to spend the day with my dear friend Karis, who arrived as the sweetest butterfly you have ever seen. The most beautiful kind, not a stick of butter with wing. Karis is a mentor, a friend, and a partner in play. There is something deeply reassuring about laughing beside someone who understands that joy is not a frivolous choice, it is a courageous one.

Play does not solve the world’s problems. What it does is remind us that we are human inside them.

When we play, we reconnect with curiosity, imagination, and connection. We remember that life contains delight alongside responsibility.

The episodes we filmed today will air on November 12, 2026 and May 27, 2027. If you happen to tune in, you might catch a glimpse of a small red ladybug cheering in the audience.

If you do, you will be witnessing a grown adult practicing something that turns out to require more bravery than we often admit. The simple act of remembering how to play.

Daytime television has always been easy to mock. It’s shorthand for idleness, for people with nothing better to do. But that framing has always felt a little cruel to me. For many people, it’s something else entirely. It’s companionship on a quiet afternoon, the familiar rhythm of voices when you’re sick in bed, or the gentle distraction when pain or grief makes the day feel too long. For people who, for any number of reasons, can’t easily step out into the world, it’s a small thread connecting them back to it.

So the thought that my small participation in that strange little ecosystem of games and laughter might bring someone a moment of lightness, someone resting, lonely or just needing a break from the heaviness of the day, does feel meaningful to me.

Even here I notice myself reaching for justification, as if play must serve some greater purpose before it’s allowed. As if joy must prove its usefulness before we can trust it.

Which makes me wonder if the real work is simply learning to stop asking play to explain itself. If that’s true, I suppose I still have a little more playing to do.

I have been off social media for a week now. A complete break from apps on my phone and hearing myself lie out loud by casually muttering, “just checking something,” to my family. I do not want to credit every internal shift this week to that single decision, life is certainly more layered than that. But something has widened in me, a spaciousness and mental clearing.

Instead of reaching for my phone yesterday, I went outside.

What began as simple weeding turned into something more deliberate. My passionflower and star jasmine vines have a habit of climbing toward the sun and abandoning everything below. They gather at the top of the terrace and leave the lower half sparse and bare. If you do not train them, they become top-heavy. All upward reach with no grounding.

For the past few years, I have not had the bandwidth to tend them properly. For many reasons, some logistical and some emotional. The terrace has felt slightly neglected. If I am transparent, so have I.

The soil was cool when I first pressed my hands into it. Dense and slightly damp beneath the surface. It carried that dark mineral scent, alive and quietly working. When I pulled weeds, the roots resisted just enough to remind me they were anchored. Fine grains clung to my palms and dirt gathered under my fingernails, making them resemble that of a 7 year old boy. The sun warmed the top layer of earth until it felt almost silky against my skin. Ahhhh, oh my God, this is it. Actual grounding.

There is something deeply regulating about touching soil. Not metaphorically but literally. Research suggests certain soil microbes may positively influence serotonin production. Gardening may not only feel grounding. It may actually be shifting something in our brain chemistry. Don’t believe me? Check out, The Surprising Ways Soil Can Aid Our Mental Health. Perhaps that is why playing in dirt has soothed children for generations.

What I know is this. I was calm. Just sitting inside calm.

I began wrapping the vines back down toward the lower lattice, guiding green tendrils carefully where I wanted fullness. Growth, redirected with intention. I could not help noticing how similar it felt to reclaiming my attention. For years my focus has climbed upward into digital air, dispersing into headlines, tragedies and other people’s highlight reels. Important things, sure…maybe. But not always mine to carry in that moment.

Yesterday my attention stayed where my hands were.

At one point I realized the vines had crept high into the tree in our backyard, clinging to branches well above the terrace. I climbed up to untangle them, higher than I have climbed in years. Bark scrapping against my palms and knees while sunlight filtering through the verdant leaves. The faint sway of a branch reminding me that balance is something I negotiate. The crack of a branch under my feet reminding me that not everything is meant to hold me.

Vivian wandered out while I was up there. She looked at me as if I had revealed a secret superpower. Her delight was immediate and unfiltered. She wanted to climb too. Later, when I asked about her favorite part of the day, she said it was seeing me in the tree.

It wasn’t the TV time she got or the bike ride we went on. It was me. Slightly wild and a little dirty, doing something unexpected.

In all honesty, there was a flicker of reflex when I stepped back to look at the terrace after I had finished, a subtle urge to capture it and to be witnessed. To make sure the effort existed somewhere beyond my own memory. It startled me how automatic that instinct has become. As if beauty requires proof and joy must be archived to actually matter. I did not shame myself for it. I just stayed still long enough for the impulse to pass. The vines were enough. Vivian’s delight was enough. I was enough.

It felt luxurious to experience something beautiful and not export it. To let the satisfaction be internal and allow the magic to exist without audience.

There is something tender about admitting this: I did eventually take a photo. Not in the heat of the moment and certainly not to convert the Sunday afternoon into content but today, once the impulse had softened and I was thinking about the accompanying visual for today’s essay. I am still untangling what it means to live a life that is sometimes shared. I am not renouncing witness, I am just learning to decide when and why I invite it.

I worked outside for three or four hours. Time loosened its grip. I was not carrying the emotional residue of a morning scroll and no lingering outrage. No low-grade buzz from absorbing the world’s worst moments before noon, just warmth, dirt, and the quiet pleasure of incremental change.

By the time I came inside, I was truly dirty.

That feels rare now. Many of us spend our days in climate-controlled rooms, performing cognitive labor under artificial light. We come home mentally tired but physically untouched. Yesterday, my forearms were smudged, my knees dusty and my hair carried the faint scent of sun, soil and a few stray spider webs.

The shower last night felt downright ceremonial.

Warm water carried thin rivers of brown down the drain. The grit softened and disappeared as I rubbed my hands over my face both scrubbing and massaging. My skin felt awake. Cleansed in a way that was more than hygienic. It felt like washing off winter, like rinsing away a layer of static I did not realize I had been carrying.

Spring does not always arrive dramatically, specially here in California. Yesterday, it slipped in through an ordinary afternoon.

A week without social media has not solved my life. The world remains complex and the headlines are still there. My responsibilities are unchanged but I can feel how reclaiming even a portion of my attention alters the texture of my days. It makes three hours in the garden possible and it makes climbing a tree feel spontaneous instead of indulgent. It allows my daughter to see me embodied rather than distracted.

The vines will need training again. They always do. Growth tends upward. Attention wanders. That is the nature of things. But yesterday, on the first day of March, something aligned. The terrace is fuller now, green at the bottom where it used to be bare.

So am I.

A small note.

I’ll be moving my publishing day to Tuesdays.

I noticed something creeping in over the last few months. Sundays began to carry a quiet pressure, a low hum of obligation. I would feel the need to use weekend time to make sure an essay was finished and polished before Monday morning. What began as a joyful writing practice started flirting with the Sunday scaries.

This space is meant to be alive and nourishing. For me. For you. And for the work itself. So I’m tending to that.

Starting next week, new essays will arrive on Tuesdays. It feels like a small shift but also feels like the right one.

This is not an anti-dad or anti-men essay. This is an anti-invisible-pattern essay. Because something is still happening beneath the surface of our very modern and more than ever egalitarian marriages. I believe men, broadly, have been socialized to feel more entitled to rest and women have been socialized to feel they must earn it.

I don’t believe anyone is being is malicious or lazy. I do, however, believe that we are all following old societal scripts that run incredibly deep.

Picture a Saturday: Mom takes the kids to a birthday party. Dad is home from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. He might watch a game, read, scroll or nap. Nothing outrageous or irresponsible. Just…leisure.

Now reverse it.

Dad takes the kids to a playdate or the park. Mom is home alone. Her first thought is rarely, I’m going to lie down. It’s, Finally. I can strip the beds. I can tackle the frontyard before the HOA sends another letter. I can go through the kids’ clothes without negotiating with them. I can meal prep so next week doesn’t feel like a sprint.

The time is technically free. But it is not experienced as free. And sometimes, if I’m honest, I don’t even leap into productivity.

I freeze.

Ladies, when you have the house to yourself, do you also freeze?

Do you stand in the kitchen negotiating with yourself like you’re both the manager and the employee?

Do I make a cup of tea and sit in the backyard with a book? Do I meal prep so my stress this week is lessened? Do I catch up on my favorite show? Do I scroll because I’m too tired to decide? Or do I strip the beds and wash the sheets that are now on an embarrassingly long stretch?

The options stack up. The clock ticks. Paralysis eats twenty, thirty, sometimes sixty minutes of the quiet I thought I was going to savor.

And then comes the flicker of resentment. Not at any one person but at the fact that rest feels complicated. At the little programmed voice that whispers, “if you are not productive are you even valuable?” Resentful at the way settling into leisure requires a small internal permission slip.

That, to me, is part of the leisure gap. It isn’t only about the number of hours. It’s about the quality of those hours.

In 2013, the Pew Research Center found that fathers of children under 18 averaged about three more hours of leisure per week than mothers; 7.5 hours compared to 24.5.(Pew Research Center, “Modern Parenthood”)

More recent analysis of American Time Use Survey data shows the gap persists, with mothers averaging roughly 17 percent less free time than fathers. (Gender Equity Policy Institute: The Gender Gap in Free Time)

And emerging research on the “mental load” suggests that even when active hours look similar, women often carry more of the invisible cognitive labor; coordinating schedules, remembering appointments, anticipating needs and managing the emotional climate of the home. (Mental Load Study, 2025 preprint)

You can technically be sitting down and still be running the house in your head. That, my friends, is not rest.

Historically, men worked outside the home and were clearly off-duty when work ended. Rest felt earned because work was externally defined and validated. Now most women work too. Or, in households with a stay-at-home parent, that parent’s day is just as full, just unpaid and largely invisible. So when both parents are “off,” the remaining domestic labor and childcare should, in theory, be shared. But the leisure gap suggests that settling into rest comes more naturally to one of us. This isn’t because one cares less but because one has been socialized to feel less responsible for what remains undone.

Yesterday Patrick took Viv to the park for a few hours. I walked past a giant load of laundry waiting to be folded on the bed. It stared at me. Loud in its silence…I kept on walking.

I ran a bath. I was proud of myself for choosing that.

And then, almost immediately, my brain offered me a compromise. Great. I can call the contractors from the bath. I can get them out to look at the damage from the water heater explosion. I can be efficient while relaxing. Even my rest wanted to multitask. Then I stopped myself again.

The contractors can wait. The laundry can wait. Leave the phone plugged in. Take the damn bath!

That felt radical in a way that surprised me. This isn’t because anyone told me I couldn’t rest but because something inside me still believes rest should produce something.

Maybe that’s the work! Not redistributing exhaustion instead redistributing permission.

When you get the house to yourself, what happens? Do you freeze? Do you negotiate with yourself? Do you feel guilty if you choose the nap instead of the baseboards? Do you feel unsettled if nothing productive came from your quiet hour?

What would it look like, practically and emotionally, to redistribute not just the chores, but also the entitlement? Not to take rest away from men. But to allow women to inhabit it fully and without apology.

Let’s imagine the radical act is to not scrub the grout.

Maybe the most radical thing you can do is to walk past that monster of a laundry pile.

And take the damn bath.

I have tried to do it “right” before. Daily time limits with app nudges, gently reminding me I had hit my quota. And every time, I was presented with the same option: Ignore limit. Which I did, repeatedly.

The fact that I could so easily override the boundary I had set for myself told me everything I needed to know. I did not need better self-control, I now needed a stronger boundary.

So I deactivated Instagram and Facebook and deleted the apps from my phone. I did not erase my accounts. I am not anti-memory or anti-connection. But I created a real barrier to access.

I am not exaggerating when I say it felt fucking amazing.

Almost immediately, something shifted. My phone started spending more time plugged in on the other side of the room because there was simply nothing to do on it. Respond to a text or an email, and then, done. The familiar pull to get lost, to scroll myself into emotional activation or dissociation, just was not there.

The absence was embarrassingly loud at first. Then it was quiet followed by ease.

That ease showed up most clearly Wednesday during “special time” with Viv. It is a technique from Hand-in-Hand Parenting where you set a timer for a set amount of time and let your child lead completely. No multitasking. No folding laundry. No bathroom breaks. No checking your phone. No making coffee or stretching on the floor or picking lint out of the carpet while half-listening. You are fully in their world.

It sounds simple. In practice, it is kind of wild how hard it is to truly adhere to. There is always something else to do.

But without the extra gravitational pull of social media, I found myself able to drop in more easily. The difference was palpable. Both she and I felt it.

It was one of those small, quiet moments that reminds you how starved we all are for real attention. For presence that is not split into ten directions. Attention is the true currency we all crave.

Another unexpected benefit has been my bedtime.

Scrolling before sleep had become one of my most entrenched and mindless habits. I would get into bed around 9:30pm, tell myself I was just checking a few things, and then suddenly it was 11:00pm. All I had gained was a cortisol spike and a side of rage. No rest, pleasure nor insight. Just a wired nervous system and the vague sense that I had wasted something I could not get back.

The last few nights, I have not grabbed my phone at all, because frankly, there is nothing to look at and in that absence, something else has become visible.

The same cousin who inspired this whole move gave me a book for Christmas. It has been sitting on my bedside table, uncracked and silently judging me. I keep looking at it now like it is saying, “Hey. I am still here.”

I am hoping that removing these time and energy drains from my phone will gently usher me back into reading, letting my brain settle instead of spike. Into ending my days with words that ask something of me instead of content engineered to keep me just alert enough to stay hooked.

This choice is not about checking out of the world. If anything, it is the opposite.

The current state of things, the politics, the wars, the atrocities, the endless stream of breaking horrors, was decimating my nervous system. I have gone directly to source material and I have read DOJ documents to verify things I desperately hoped were not true.

And while I believe in staying informed, I also believe that not all information was meant to be consumed endlessly, algorithmically, without context or consequence. That kind of exposure does not mobilize me, it paralyzes me. So I am choosing to curate how I stay engaged.

I read Ground News because I want to understand bias, and not be swallowed by it. I read Heather Cox Richardson and Chris Hedges because they offer depth, history, and framing, not just pure outrage.

This feels like a way to stay in the pulse of reality without letting it hijack my nervous system.

I understand that protecting my mental health is a privilege. I am not doing this so I can look away. I am doing it so I can stay resourced enough to do something. To think, act and have energy beyond doomscrolling and screaming into the void.

I will also be honest about something else. Part of the reason I returned to Instagram last year, after an eight-month break that felt incredible, was fear. Fear that if I was not there, my Substack would not grow. That I would lose momentum, visibility and reach.

Here’s where it gets almost comical.

After writing this, I briefly reactivated Instagram to post my annual birthday tribute to my daughter. I told myself I would deactivate again that evening. In and out.

Except when I went to turn it off, I received a notification informing me that I had reached my weekly limit for deactivations.

The limit was one.

One.

Apparently, I am allowed to leave social media once per week. After that, I am required to remain visible, scrollable, targetable and monetizable for seven more days.

I just sat there staring at my phone, half laughing and the other half stunned. It wasn’t funny, it was clarifying.

The app that encourages constant engagement, endless posting, perpetual presence AND restricts how often you can step away.

It tells you everything you need to know.

So for the next week, I will technically be “on.” But not really.

My life is happening elsewhere.

And this is my candid ask. If you are still on social media and something I write here resonates with you, I would be deeply grateful if you shared it. Help me grow this work organically, human to human, without me needing to stay plugged into platforms that no longer feel aligned.

And I would love to hear from you. How are you staying engaged without being consumed? What news sources, essays, blogs, or journalists are helping you stay informed while staying sane?

Reply. Comment. Send smoke signals or a carrier pigeon. I genuinely want to know.

For today, I am choosing a life that happens in the real world, with my kid and by the ocean. With fewer algorithms deciding what I see, feel, and fear. And more intention around how, and why, I connect.

We have been forced to face the fact that monsters are real. They are not lone aberrations hiding in the dark. They are networked, funded, protected, and embedded inside the most powerful circles on earth. Sex trafficking and the abuse of children were not fringe crimes. They were normalized within elite spaces where money functioned as camouflage and power completely erased consequence.

I look at my child and feel something old as time rise in my chest. It is not fear alone, it is a sword of fury made sharp by love. Every instinct in my body is wired to protect her, to protect children I do not know, to stand between innocence and harm with my own life if necessary. That instinct cannot be pushed aside. It does not weigh optics and it certainly does not wait for permission.

What compounds the horror is learning that the systems we were told existed to protect children were never built to do so when power was involved. Courts, governments, media, and financial institutions did not fail, they absorbed the damage and continued functioning as if children were an acceptable cost of maintaining stability. That realization absolutely changes you as a parent, or at least it fucking should; it fractures the illusion that compliance to these systems equates safety.

There is a moment that keeps repeating in my mind. It is the knowledge that the most powerful office in the world has been occupied by someone credibly implicated in profound harm, and that nothing meaningful has happened in response. Accountability has stalled not because evidence is lacking, but because consequences would disrupt too many people who benefit from the status quo. Watching a portion of the population continue to defend this reality is absolute bananas. For my own mental health, I have stopped trying to drag people out of that space. I cannot raise a child and also spend my energy begging others to acknowledge what is plainly visible.

The rage I feel is not abstract or performative, it lives in my nervous system. It pulses when I pack school lunches, when I watch my child sleep, when I imagine the children who were not protected because adults chose comfort over courage. Harm to children is not one moral issue among many, it is the clearest line a society can draw between good and evil. Crossing it should remove you permanently from positions of power, wealth, influence and society at large. And that I believe is being generous.

What feels intolerable is the mismatch between the scale of the harm and the response we have been offered. One arrest is no where close to justice, in fact its a bold insult to justice. Ghislaine Maxwell in prison is containment theater and it suggests that quiet resolution matters more than truth. Mothers can feel that lie immediately. Many of us are carrying a burn it down energy because the usual avenues ask us to be patient, polite, and trusting of the same structures that failed our most basic duty.

Being told to follow proper channels feels obscene in this context. It asks women, especially mothers, to perform restraint while children were brutalized with impunity. It reeks of good girl conditioning made to appear as civic responsibility. Some evils cannot be dismantled through decorum. These truths require disruption. Asking us to stay calm while children were violated is not maturity, its utter is complicity.

I am under no illusion that real justice would be comfortable. If everyone involved were fully exposed and held accountable, economies would tremble, political careers would collapse, and cherished narratives about who deserves power would disintegrate. That kind of reckoning scares people and if I am being honest it scares me too. But a world that functioned smoothly while children were being trafficked in the background was never a world worth preserving.

Motherhood has stripped away my tolerance for illusions and has clarified my priorities with brutal efficiency. Protecting children is not a radical act, it is foundational. Transparency is not destabilizing but secrecy is. Consequences are not vengeance when they are proportionate to immense harm. They are deterrence, and need societal deterrence from crimes like this.

I do not know who the heroes are in this moment. I know they will not be the ones asking mothers to calm down, wait longer, or accept symbolic accountability in place of real justice. They will be willing to fracture American comfort in service of truth. They will understand that the rage born from love is not dangerous, it is instructive, and will be moved to action by it.

If this moment changes us, it should harden our resolve, not numb it. I am never interested in returning to a version of normal that required children to suffer quietly so adults could feel safe. My child deserves better than that. Every child does!

That’s when the familiar panic sets in, and the quiet bargaining begins. The fantasies about how to make this version of life permanent. How to stretch it, recreate it, or at least carry pieces of it home without them evaporating on the plane ride back.

Life here feels closer to how it’s supposed to be. You sync with the natural rhythm of the day. You wake with the sun and feel ready for bed not long after the ocean swallows it again around six in the evening. Six a.m. to six p.m. feels like a schedule your body remembers, even if your regular life has long forgotten it. There are no alarm clocks, only howler monkeys, roosters, and birds announcing the morning as if its the first morning.

You eat better without trying and you breathe deeper without noticing. Somewhere along the way, your nervous system exhales. You start asking yourself why we do life any other way.

Movement doesn’t feel like effort here. It’s easy to rack up over ten thousand steps when the beach stretches on for miles and walking includes pauses to body surf or stand still and watch sea turtles make their slow, determined journey up the sand to lay their eggs. The surf comes in gently, one perfect wave after another, patient and unhurried.

Down here they say Pura Vida, and it’s not just a phrase, it’s a way of moving through the world. It’s mango until you’re certain you’ve had enough and then you have some more anyway. Ceviche so fresh you forget what food tastes like back home. Your body rewards you with a perfectly timed, deeply satisfying digestive rhythm that makes you swear to Shiva, sincerely, that you will never eat anything processed or shitty again.

You believe yourself, too. At least for a moment.

Leaving is always the hardest part. The final morning carries a quiet sadness, the kind you don’t rush past because it feels earned. A saunter down to the water to dip your feet in, pay your respect and and bid the sea adieu. You pack slower because would it really be problematic if you missed your flight back? You promise yourself that something will change when you get home, even if you’re not sure what yet.

Costa Rica has a way of reminding you what ease feels like, what presence feels like. Bringing you back to live inside your body instead of racing ahead of it. And once you’ve felt that, it’s impossible not to want more of it.

Even as you board the plane.

The colorful ABC square classroom carpet scratched the backs of my legs while I listened to my third grade teacher read a book about MLK. Thin books with glossy covers moved from desk to desk with pictures that celebrated his life and legacy. Construction paper doves hung from bulletin boards. Black, white, tan and yellow hands were drawn clasped together. A man with a dream appeared on the page, his voice described as calm and kind. The story moved cleanly from beginning to middle to end. Justice arrived and history closed its book. The fight felt finished and the work felt done.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day again.

Social media fills with his words. Quotations slide past in neat fonts, stripped of their weather and weight. The repetition is familiar and the ease of it is too.

The rituals remain, though they feel altered by time and proximity. Children still color worksheet with doves, peace signs and Dr. King’s face. Public figures speak about unity with practiced solemnity. The man being honored lived a life that was rarely met with gentleness or consensus while it was unfolding.

This morning, I feel hollow.

I notice how quiet I feel. Attention has grown heavier and harder to carry. What is unfolding in the world exceeds the emotional vocabulary I usually rely on. Words like outrage and grief feel undersized. Even hope feels strained, like a muscle held in place on a pilates reformer longer than it was meant to be.

The news no longer arrives in a straight line, it comes in from every direction and it dog piles. Gaza. Iran. Ukraine. Sudan. Haiti. Greenland. Venezuela. Minnesota. ICE killings that follow a grim and unfortunately familiar rhythm. Deportation systems that persist regardless of who holds office. Elections shaped by fear, misinformation, and disillusionment. Governments speaking the language of stability while devising the next plans of attack.

Alongside the violence runs another pain, quieter but constant. Knowing what is true has become difficult. I read reporting late at night (too late) and watch footage that stays in my body long after I turn it off. I listen to people who sound sincere, credible and devastated. Then the ground shifts, accounts are challenged, language bends, context fractures. Every story arrives already under dispute and reality then feels splintered.

Living inside this uncertainty fucks with the nervous system. Paying attention begins to feel risky but so does ignorance. The instinct to wait grows stronger, as though clarity might eventually arrive if enough time passes.

Writing has felt harder lately. The world feels loud and fragile at the same time, and sentences don’t come the way they used to. Plain existence takes more effort. And that’s not a suicidal ideation, it’s just truth, and not just mine, almost everyone I talk to.

The confusion does not feel incidental.

Each act of violence carries a second conflict, one over interpretation. Harm softens through language until it becomes abstract. Civilian deaths are argued into footnotes. Doubt spreads in ways that slow response rather than deepen understanding. Over time, confusion starts to function. Another grief surfaces here, one I don’t always know how to hold.

It appears when I think about how easily wealth is mistaken for wisdom in this country. How money becomes evidence of virtue and “success” itself is treated as proof that someone must have done something right.

Donald Trump lives inside that distortion.

I watch people assume intelligence because he is rich, strength because he is painfully loud and legitimacy because his name is plastered everywhere. I watch facts fail to land. The undisclosed tax returns, civil fraud verdicts, criminal convictions and multiple sexual assault victims. The sealed files. Questions never seem to get answered, only deferred.

What unsettles me is not ignorance. It’s the way power creates gravity. How once someone reaches a certain altitude, the rules thin out or just don’t exist at all. How curiosity is treated as hostility and asking obvious questions becomes impolite, according to the press secretary.

I notice the stories people tell themselves to make this survivable.

There is something frightening in how much darkness people are willing to tolerate once money and spectacle step in front of it.

I think about shame, and how it curdles. How hard it is to admit being wrong once identity has been built around belief and belonging can matter more than accuracy. A cult of personality offers shelter at the exact moment people feel most disposable. Leaving that kind of spell requires grief, humility and the courage to say, out loud, I believed something that wasn’t true. That sentence carries a cost many people aren’t ready or willing to pay.

So they stay, defend and reinterpret. They double down and go ALL in. Behavior that would end any ordinary career becomes background noise or excused away somehow. The performance continues and the questions remain.

Watching this unfold feels like watching language fail again.

It leaves me with a persistent fear about what goes unnamed when power goes unquestioned, and about how much we are taught to accept once someone has been crowned successful.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, all of this presses close. I find myself wondering what he would make of a moment like this, of this fog. I’m not an expert on Dr. King, and I’m not pretending to speak for him. This is an intellectual exercise, a way of thinking alongside his life and work, wondering how his moral clarity might meet the conditions of the present. The questions matter more to me than the certainty.

Not the Dr. King preserved in textbooks or soundbites. I think about the man who spoke against the Vietnam War and watched public support collapse. He who named the United States as a source of global violence. The guy who understood how racism, capitalism, and militarism braided together, reinforcing one another through fear, distortion, and silence.

This moment would not surprise him at all.

The mechanics would feel familiar. Civilian deaths reframed as collateral damage, ethnic cleansing described as security and collective punishment defended as some perverse strategy. Weapons approved and delivered while healthcare and schools collapse under their weight. This story is old, AF.

The weariness would also feel familiar. Prolonged confusion drains the spirit, doubt settles into the body.

Dr. King understood how power operates. He knew how legality drifts from morality. He preached devotion to calm and order can obstruct justice more efficiently than open hostility. He warned about moderation that clings to stability while quietly abandoning truth.

That warning feels close now, inside a culture where procedure often replaces conscience and authorization stands in for ethics. Resistance is framed as disruption and moral urgency is treated as impatience. Uncertainty becomes a place to rest and sometimes a place to hide, too.

Dr. King understood how empire sustains itself, not only through force, but through fatigue and doubt. Through people slowly trained to disengage, to normalize harm and to mistake restraint for wisdom.

Seen this way, numbness begins to make sense, the human nervous system has limits. When suffering stretches beyond the capacity to respond meaningfully, something has to go quiet.

So I sit with the question this day raises.

Staying present without pretending certainty feels like the work. Paying attention to patterns. Noticing who is harmed, who benefits and whose voices are consistently dismissed. Letting understanding evolve while remaining responsible for how I respond.

Reading slowly helps. Sitting with discomfort helps. Americans are unaccustomed to discomfort, and don’t know what to do with it. Staying engaged when outrage and detachment both offer easy exits takes effort.

This posture shapes how I mother.

Today, I’ll talk to my daughter Vivian about Dr. King as someone who made choices that carried consequences. She’ll hear that he believed people mattered more than power. That love, in his life, showed up as sustained action rather than sentiment. She’ll hear that confusion and overwhelm happen and neither dissolves responsibility. When people are harmed, attention still matters. I will tell her that feeling hollow does not signal failure. Sometimes it reflects a moment asking for steadiness rather than certainty. For courage that moves quietly.

I think about the girl I was on that carpet in Miss Bambic’s classroom, believing the fight had been fought and won. I don’t want to hand my daughter a polished version of that story, I want to offer a truer one.

Dr. King’s life is marked today through practice rather than quotation. Through a willingness to stay awake even when the ground feels unsteady. One step forward still counts. Dr. King’s impact on history required moral backbone as does this moment. The best way to honor his legacy isn’t to post a quotation but to live his values in these current times and to show our children that complacency or believing the fight has been fought only leads to history repeating itself.

For years now, I’ve been deeply interested in the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, what actually moves us versus what we think should move us. When I became a mom almost five years ago, I read everything I could get my hands on about parenting and behavior. The research was clear and persuasive: intrinsic motivation matters. Sticker charts, gold stars, rewards for good behavior, they may “work,” but at a cost. They teach children to outsource their internal compass, to behave for approval and to confuse performance with worth. As someone raised in the 90s, a child of classroom charts and smiley faces, I can still feel how deeply that conditioning lives in my body as an adult. How often I wait to be praised before believing I’m doing enough.

So I committed to doing it differently with Vivian. And for the most part, I think I have. We talk about feelings, impact, listening to her body and her to intuition. I try to connect her choices to internal reasons, how it feels to be kind, how it feels to rest, how it feels when her body gets what it needs. She is, truly, an angel of a kid. But sleep has never been her strong suit. She wasn’t the baby who slept through the night. She was the toddler who quietly padded into my room every night and climbed into my bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. And for a long time, I let it be. I believed in the science and attachment theory. I understood nervous system development and trusted the growing body of research that challenges traditional sleep training and what prolonged stress does to developing brains. Co-sleeping worked for us, until, it didn’t.

She was nearing five, I could feel it in my bones: I was ready for a little space. And I suspected she might be too. But I was scared to bring it up. Scared it would become a whole thing, a violation of the values I’d so carefully built my parenting around. Then my sister suggested something that felt almost heretical. What if we offered Vivian one night a week where we all sleep together as a family, if she stayed in her bed the other six? She suggested a sticker chart. I laughed. Surely no child would trade six nights for one full one. But I tried it anyway. I made the chart cute, hyped up Friday night movie night and leaned all the way into the thing I thought I was above.

Eleven nights in, we’re batting a thousand!

What surprised me wasn’t that it worked, it was how cleanly it worked. There weren’t tears or bargaining. No small feet padding into my room at 2:13 a.m. What I realized, lying there in the quiet, wasn’t that Vivian had suddenly become more motivated. It was that she felt safer. The chart wasn’t a bribe; it was a map, a way to make time visible. Something concrete she could hold onto while her nervous system learned a new pattern. The sticker didn’t replace her internal cues, it gave them somewhere to land.

That’s when it clicked: maybe extrinsic motivation isn’t the villain we’ve made it out to be. Maybe it’s not meant to be the engine, but the on-ramp, the training wheels, if you will. The handrail you grab while your body figures out how to walk a new way. Intrinsic motivation is where we want to end up but sometimes we need help getting there. Sometimes behavior comes first, and belief follows. Safety often precedes insight.

I think we get into trouble when we confuse using external motivation with needing it forever. When gold stars become the only reason we move. But that’s not what this was. This was scaffolding, temporary, intentional and kind. A structure that didn’t ask too much of a five-year-old. Or of me. I couldn’t help but notice how familiar that pattern felt. How often, as adults, we shame ourselves for wanting exactly this kind of support.

January is full of people trying to muscle themselves into change through sheer internal resolve. Be more disciplined. Want it more. Try harder. As if motivation exists in a vacuum, untouched by exhaustion, hormones, grief, or the weight of living in a world that asks us to perform constantly while offering very little rest. We tell ourselves that if the desire were truly intrinsic, we wouldn’t need reminders, accountability, or structure, that needing those things somehow means we’re doing it wrong.

But what if that’s backwards? What if external supports, calendars, routines, accountability partners, yes, even metaphorical sticker charts, aren’t evidence of weak motivation, but of self-knowledge? What if they’re not a failure of character, but a form of care? A way of saying: I know myself well enough to build a bridge instead of a cliff.

I still believe the deepest, most lasting change comes from within. I believe in internal alignment, values-driven living and listening to the quiet voice that knows what we need. But I’m no longer convinced that change has to start there. Sometimes it starts with something visible, countable, celebrated and FUN! Friday night movie night! It can start with letting ourselves be motivated long enough to remember why we wanted the change in the first place. To everyone who is trying to make some lasting changes right now, I see you, keep going and make the damn sticker chart.

When I started writing here last spring, I made myself a promise: to post every Monday until the end of the year. My intention was not to build a brand or to prove anything. Just to return to a writing practice, one that wasn’t for anyone or anything but me. I wanted to make this a place to process whatever I was noticing without needing to resolve it or make it useful. I didn’t know then how necessary that promise would become.

I was thrust into 2025 by a New Year’s event that cracked something open in me, and the first quarter of the year left me underwater in ways I had never experienced before. I didn’t know what was up or down, only that I had to keep swimming.

Ask Me If I’m Healing: Notes from the Deep End was born there. It wasn’t just a project, it was a lifesaving device.

A year later, sitting here now, that version of me feels both close and very far away.

Lately, I’ve been wondering whether this Substack still fits the shape of what I’m writing. There’s a part of me that wants to rebrand, or rename, or loosen the edges, not because I’m “done healing” (lol), but because I don’t know that healing is the central question anymore, or at least not the only one.

What I do know is that this space has held far more than I originally imagined. It’s held grief, rage and tenderness. Motherhood, marriage, bodies and belonging. Longing. Humor. Politics. Memory. Place. Thresholds.

For now, this is how I describe it:

Ask Me If I’m Healing is a Substack for the deep feelers, late-night thinkers, recovering good girls, and anyone who’s ever whispered “is this all there is?” before making dinner and doing it all again.

I’m Natalie, writer, embodied creative, mother, lover, birth worker, yogi and curious observer of this wild and weird ride. I write from the tender edge of motherhood, marriage, art-making, and personal reckoning.

This space is for stories that move between the personal and the political, the poetic and the practical. Sometimes I write about soup. Or New York. Or why I keep choosing love even when it’s hard.

There are no life vests, but you don’t need one, I promise.

This is a home for nuance, for telling the truth and for remembering the parts of ourselves we almost forgot. For asking better questions. For healing out loud.

Thanks for swimming with me.

I don’t know if the name will change. I’m letting the question stay open. Feedback welcome.

I also want to say thank you. Really, thank you.

To everyone who has opened this email every Monday. To those of you who have sent emails, DMs, or texts saying some version of “uh, huh, me too.” To people I hadn’t spoken to in decades who reached out because something here named a feeling they didn’t yet have language for.

That has been my lifeblood.

And to my paid subscribers: it still feels surreal to say this, but being a paid writer is truly a dream come true. Every time someone chooses to support this work financially, it makes me want to grow it with integrity and care. Thank you for trusting me with your time, your money, and your attention.

I’d be lying if I didn’t name the larger backdrop of this year, too. Donald Trump became president again in 2025, and the last twelve months have felt less like a year and more like a decade. The fuckery is unrelenting. The volume never lowers. Every day feels like another demand on an already maxed-out collective nervous system.

Holding that reality alongside the daily weights of elder millennial life, parenting a young daughter, running a household, trying to stay solvent in an economy where even “doing well” somehow still feels like living paycheck to paycheck to paycheck, has been nearly impossible.

It’s not just political fatigue, it’s existential. It’s the exhaustion of being asked to metabolize constant chaos while still making dinner, answering emails, showing up, staying kind, and pretending this is sustainable.

I’m not usually a metrics person, but something about closing out the year makes me want to mark it anyway, not as proof of success, but as evidence of showing up.

Since April 14, I published thirty-eight essays. One hundred sixty-nine people subscribed. Eleven people decided to pay for this work, which still feels surreal to type. Most essays were read by a few hundred people; a handful traveled further, reaching over a few thousand readers.

Some weeks the words came easily and some weeks they arrived five minutes before hitting publish.

But they came.

I won’t list every essay here. That would turn this into an accounting exercise instead of what it actually was: a practice. But if you’re new, or if you want a way back in, here are a few places we went together:

On motherhood and identity:

Do I Want Another Baby or Do I Just Miss the Smell of One?,

Can You Please Just Wait a Second, I’m Ordering Groceries and Also Failing You,

On men:

The State of Men,

Millennial Dads Are Rewriting Fatherhood,

On bodies, worth, and the long middle:

Perimenopause Made Me Do It,

Do It Because You’re Worthy, Not to Prove You Are,

Rest Is a Birthright.

On place, memory, and thresholds:

Resurrection for the Rest of Us,

The House That Jack (and Whiskey) Built,

Calling in the Season.

The full archive is here, if you want it:

https://notesfromthedeepend.substack.com/archive

Looking at all of this now, I’m less interested in the categories than in the fact that I stayed. I allowed survival to slowly turn into a practice and that practice turned into something that could hold more than just me.

I don’t know exactly what this space will be called a year from now. I’m not sure what shape my writing will take, or how this year will unfold.

What I do know is that I’m still here. Still writing. Still swimming.

Thanks for being with me. Excited for what’s ahead. Happy New Year! Cha cha now, y’all, cha cha again!

If I forget it, which I often do, she corrects me immediately. The checkout guy at Trader Joe’s asked her age last week. She shrank behind my leg, so I answered for her: “She’s four.” Before my sentence even landed, she stepped forward, lifted her chin, and practically shouted: “AND A HALF!” It both a correction and a declaration. I’m learning that at this age, precision is a point of pride. She is six weeks away from five, and she would like the world to know it.

I didn’t expect four-and-a-half to be the peak of Christmas magic, but it might be. Maybe next year will top it, who knows, but there is something about this specific window between four and five where belief is still strong, imagination comes easily, and magic requires little effort. She trusts what she can’t see because she hasn’t had enough years to doubt the possibility yet. Watching her experience Christmas this year felt like being allowed back into a version of myself I thought I’d misplaced.

We had an objectively great Christmas. Not perfect, just memorable in all the right ways. The standout moment for me was watching her play with her cousins on Christmas Eve. If you grew up in an Italian American family, you might understand why Christmas Eve sits in its own emotional category. It’s always been the night: the anticipation more than the arrival and the countdown more than the day itself. The cousins staying up too late, running around in pajamas while the adults discuss food, family, and whatever’s on their minds that year.

I saw that familiar electricity take hold of her this time, our version of it, and I recognized something I didn’t know I’d been waiting to pass down.

I’m not sure how it started, but in my family we do a “cousin stack” photo every Christmas Eve, oldest on the bottom, youngest on top, like a living family tree made of limbs and laughter. We did it when I was a kid, and now our kids do it without needing an explanation. It’s one of those traditions that doesn’t need meaning assigned to it; the meaning is already embedded in the repetition. Seeing that pile of children again this year, my daughter at the top, legs dangling, hair static from the carpet, reminded me what Christmas has always been about in my family: cousins, closeness and everyone held up by someone else. The faces change, the layers shift, but the structure stays the same. It’s always been about this, and I think it always will be.

At four and a half, she’s not just observing Christmas; she’s participating. She helped set out the cookies for Santa. She insisted we count eight carrots for the reindeer, because there are eight reindeer and she didn’t want any of them to feel left out. She was serious about it, like she thought the fate of Christmas depended on her accuracy. I found myself paying attention because she was paying attention. I didn’t want to miss something she cared about.

People always say “these are the good old days,” but usually you realize that only in hindsight. This year, I knew it while I was still inside it. I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to slow time down. Not to freeze it, exactly, but to pay enough attention that I could remember it later. Her small frame in Christmas pajamas, curled under the tree lights; the way she leaned her whole body against mine during her first viewing of Home Alone; how carefully she held a carrot for each invisible reindeer. My mind kept saying: remember this version. Not because future versions will be worse, just because this one won’t come again.

The holidays are never the same twice. Family configurations shift. Someone is there, until one year they aren’t. People show up carrying the year with them, what it gave, what it took and where it left them. Next Christmas will be different. Someone will be missing, someone might be new, and all of us will arrive a little changed. Knowing that made me pay closer attention to this year instead of assuming I could catch it later.

Christmas Day was at my sister’s house, and it was lovely in a way we didn’t have to manufacture. She polished the silver and set out the china. She even made a sweetheart table for the kids with sparkling grape juice in tiny glasses, which sounds like a small gesture but made them feel like honored guests. Kevin, my brother-in-law, is a hobbyist chef who doesn’t know how to cook in reasonable portions. He made chicken marsala and mushroom risotto “for thirty-four people,” even though there were only nine of us. I’m still eating leftover cutlet sandwiches and have zero complaints.

When I think back on this Christmas, what stands out isn’t the gifts or the food. It’s the stage we’re in, four and a half, where magic is believed in and actively participated in, where cousins are automatic best friends and where bedtime is honored on Christmas Eve because Santa only comes when everyone is asleep.

I know I won’t always get to experience Christmas at this depth of wonder. Maybe one day I’ll be lucky enough to see it again through the eyes of a grandchild. But this version, this exact configuration, this precise age, only happens once.

My grandparents lived in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, one of those towns that feels permanently dressed for Christmas, all footbridges, Christmas lights and a gazebo in the square. A true Hallmark holiday movie town; I’m fairly certain one has actually been filmed there. Their house sat directly across from the assisted living facility, which meant that every December, family and friends would gather and cross the street together. We sang for the residents who came down to the atrium, and then we roamed the halls singing for those who were too tired or too sick to come listen. Afterward, we walked down to the town square and sang in the gazebo, our voices echoing back at us, layered and collective, random strangers always joining our little flash mob before flash mobs were even a thing.

Only then, only after the singing, did the season feel like it had officially started.

We’d return to my grandparents’ house for sheet pizza, cookies, and hot cocoa. It was simple, warm and unremarkable at the time. And it was one of my favorite traditions.

Like many traditions, it ended without us knowing it was the last. My grandparents passed away, the house was sold and the gathering quietly stopped happening. Years went by…

Last year, I felt the absence of it in my body. Not nostalgia exactly, something more like a hunger pang. I realized I didn’t just miss the tradition; I missed the way it called the season in. The way voices gathered together and made something happen.

So I asked. I texted cousins and friends. Someone suggested we sing at a different nursing home, the one where her grandmother lived. The tradition came back smaller, comically unorganized, and waaaay less cinematic.

Year one taught us some things. Like how, without background music or even a little percussion, Feliz Navidad is astonishingly awkward!

But despite the imperfections, watching the next generation of children sing to the elderly, watching faces soften, smiles spread, it warmed something in me that had gone cold without my noticing.

I trust it will grow! I trust it will change! I trust it will live!

Around the same time, I looked up the lyric from Here We Come A-wassailing, a song I’ve been singing my entire life without ever knowing what it meant, which totally feels on brand.

Wassailing, it turns out, is the tradition of singing to the orchard. In the dead of winter, people would gather, drink cider, raise their voices, and sing to the apple trees, to wake them up, to bless the coming harvest and insist on life while everything looked dormant.

Suddenly it clicked: we weren’t just caroling. We were wassailing people.

This year, we did it on the solstice, which felt accidental at first and then unmistakably right. The longest night, the bottom of the year. The moment humans have marked for thousands of years not because the light has returned but because it’s finally allowed to.

We sang on the night the darkness stops winning, which this year feels especially appropriate.

2025 has been a personally wild year for me, as it has been for many. There’s a collective sense of living inside an episode of Black Mirror, where the rules keep shifting and the future feels vaguely menacing.

I hope to fucking god that this Saturday, at least energetically, means the darkness stops winning.

Being in Cleveland made everything feel more Christmas-y. The Midwest doesn’t flirt with winter, it full on commits. Earlier this month, the city got dumped with snow, full feet of it. Trying to be proactive, I texted my cousin to ask if I could pay her fifteen-year-old son to shovel my driveway so I wouldn’t arrive and immediately have to dig myself out. He agreed, did an excellent job and earned his money honestly.

Which meant that, in classic Cleveland fashion, the day I arrived it was over fifty degrees and all the snow had melted anyway. Arg!

My sweet California baby, Vivian, who had been carefully hyped up for feet of snow, pulled into a muddy and patchy driveway. Winter’s sad aftermath instead of the cinematic thing she had been promised.

The next day it was whip-you-in-the-face cold, which is also extremely Ohio. I grew up hearing that if you don’t like the weather in Cleveland, just wait five minutes.

A trip to Trader Joe’s felt less like grocery shopping and more like a tundra crossing. I gripped my bags against the wind, fingers numb, when the bottom of my seltzer bag gave out and cans went skittering across the parking lot. I dropped to my hands and knees to chase them, sliding on industrial street salt, scraping my palms, apologizing to no one in particular. A grown woman in a faux fur coat crawling across an Ohio suburban parking lot, reclaiming cans of bubble water in a wind that did not care.

This, too, felt like a kind of gritty Cleveland winter ritual.

The day after the solstice and the caroling, we drove to my cousin’s wedding.

It was a Christmas-themed celebration, cookies and milk, candelabras, warmth layered on warmth. This is one of my favorite cousins, and the wedding was perfectly him and his new bride. Thoughtful, unpretentious and genuinely joyful. The seating chart was a naughty and nice list. All the children, unsurprisingly, landed on the nice side. Every adult was placed squarely on the naughty list.

A millennial couple who clearly got the memo that you can make even a church wedding short, special, and uniquely yours.

I think after many of us were punished as children by sitting through full Catholic Mass weddings or Orthodox ceremonies with enough songs, prayers, and readings to feel like a spiritual endurance test, our generation quietly corrected course. We learned that reverence doesn’t require excess and the meaning doesn’t deepen just because you’ve been standing for ninety minutes.

Their ceremony was brief and beautiful. A gorgeous piano version of the Talking Heads, This Must Be the Place performed on church organ and vocals, by their best friends. Honest, grounded vows that sounded like two people who actually know what they’re agreeing to.

The reception was held at a castle-like venue, Christmas’d to the nines. Dinner music was instrumental: Game of Thrones, Star Wars, other cinematic soundtracks that made even passing the bread feel dramatic and emotionally charged. It worked completely.

Family gathered, the little kids took over the dance floor, it was holiday wedding perfection.

Somewhere between the singing, the solstice, the windburned grocery run, and this room full of people choosing love out loud, I felt the season land.

Traditions, as I have written before, aren’t about perfection or preservation. Most of the time they aren’t inherited intact. They’re re-chosen, practiced, adapted and sometimes they shrink before they grow again.

For me, it began with two boys, one in India, one in the Philippines, whose pictures now live on our refrigerator door. My family sponsors both through Save One Life, and to remind ourselves that connection is a daily practice, not an annual email update, we turned their photos into fridge magnets. Every time the refrigerator opens, for Vivian’s applesauce pouch, for Patrick’s protein shake, or for my 3 p.m. “get me over the hump” snack, we see their faces, stories and their place in our lives.

But they are just two of the many faces I carry with me. Because I have traveled around the world visiting some of the global hemophilia community, I’ve stood barefoot in homes in India and El Salvador. I’ve sat on beds in clinics, crowded waiting rooms and living rooms where the electricity flickered on and off. I’ve witnessed local patient organizations doing heroic work with almost no resources. I have hugged mothers whose entire lives are shaped by hemophilia, women who are stigmatized, often abandoned, and who have spent their entire lives caretaking, doing quiet, tireless, invisible labor rooted in love, fear and duty.

Their stories have stayed with me, told with strength, exhaustion and yet hope. When you look into their eyes, you understand the stakes in a way no statistic on a website will ever adequately communicate. Because when you love someone with a bleeding disorder, as I love Patrick, you can’t help but see the alternate universe were he born somewhere else. Somewhere without access to factor, without hemophilia treatment centers, without insurance or infrastructure. That’s the truth that keeps echoing in me: Same diagnosis. Different country. Radically different fate. It’s why I serve on the board of directors of Save One Life. And why this work feels less like philanthropy and more like responsibility and love.

Save One Life itself began with a moment of connection. In 1999, a mother asked Laurie Kelley, whose own son has hemophilia, if she could sponsor a child with hemophilia abroad, the way one might sponsor a child through a traditional humanitarian organization. At the time, nothing like that existed. But the question stayed with Laurie. A year later, during a visit to a family with hemophilia in Pakistan, she sat on the floor of their home, listened to their story, and understood something instantly and irrevocably: one family’s support could alter the trajectory of another family’s life, through direct financial assistance.

That visit became the blueprint. In 2001, Save One Life officially launched, the first and only nonprofit dedicated to providing direct sponsorship support to individuals with bleeding disorders in the developing world. Twenty-five years later, it has supported thousands of children, adolescents, and adults; funded micro-enterprise grants; awarded scholarships; strengthened treatment centers; and built a global network of mutual care. It began with one mother’s question, and continues because of thousands of families who believe in connection.

What makes Save One Life different is that it is relational. Sponsorship is not a faceless act. You learn who your sponsored child is, their personality, interests, siblings and daily challenges. You get to watch them grow year over year. In our home, we see them on the refrigerator every day, living right next to Vivian’s artwork and the summer pool passes. They are part of the visual fabric of our family. Save One Life makes compassion personal.

The impact of even modest support is profound. Sponsorship doesn’t just change the life of one child, it shifts the reality of an entire family. When treatment is accessible, parents don’t have to choose between medical care and feeding their other children. When transportation is covered, a mother doesn’t risk losing her job. When school fees are funded, siblings benefit. When emergency factor arrives, entire households breathe differently. The ripple effect is immediate and widespread.

The support doesn’t end when childhood does. When a sponsored child turns 18, Save One Life continues to walk alongside some of them by providing the opportunity to apply for micro-enterprise grants, small but transformative investments that help young adults start sustainable businesses bringing support to themselves and their communities. Small businesses that are tiny seeds of dignity and independence that grow into generational change. It is the clearest expression of the organization’s ethos: we don’t just help people survive a bleeding disorder, we help them build a life too.

Like I said, I have seen the global hemophilia community with my own eyes. I’ve met girls who carry the emotional weight of being the “strong sibling,” and listened to mothers share stories that feel both hopeless and hopeful. And through all of it, I’ve witnessed resilience, ingenuity, community care, joy, humor, grit, and love. Save One Life honors all of that and amplifies it. It sends resources exactly where they make a tangible and lasting impact.

This organization has taught me that generosity is a relationship. It lives in kitchens and clinics, in sponsorships, in WhatsApp messages, in micro-businesses launched with just a little seed money, and yes… on the refrigerator door.

So as we enter the season of giving, if you’re looking for a place where your generosity goes far, where the impact is tangible and deeply human, and where you can truly see the difference you’re making, I hope you’ll consider Save One Life in its 25th anniversary year. If you feel moved, you can sponsor a child, make a one-time donation, or learn more about Save One Life’s work right here.

I hope you feel what I’ve learned through years of travel, community, and the simple act of opening my refrigerator door: Generosity isn’t about the amount you give, it’s about the depth of your connection to another human being. And Save One Life has taught me just how life-changing that connection can be, for everyone involved.

Subscribe now