Mop Wielding Warrioress – Cleaning up his mess By Carol Reynolds

But… but… but.. I’m One Of The Good Ones

Last week I published an essay called Eve Was Framed. If you missed it, the short version is this: organized religion took an already existing culture of violence against women, gift wrapped it in divine authority, stamped it with God’s signature, and told everyone this was the plan all along. Eve ate the fruit, women are the problem, cover your elbows, we’re done here.

The response was fascinating. Not because people disagreed, I expected that. But because of how they disagreed. Oh boy. And the boys showed up in droves. I’m going to reflect on two of them, because honestly two is enough, the rest were basically the same song in a slightly different key.

It was like watching someone read an essay about fire and then immediately set themselves on fire to demonstrate that fire isn’t that big a deal.

The first gentleman, and I use that word loosely, got so tangled up in the word invented, as in religion invented rape culture, that he essentially wrote a doctoral thesis in my comments about the Edict of Milan, 313 AD, the persecution of early Christians, and the technical imprecision of my chosen vocabulary. He was deeply concerned that I understand the historical nuance. He cited dates. He used footnotes. Metaphorically speaking. And then, when I didn’t immediately crumble under the weight of his historical precision, he called it womansplaining.

In the comments of an essay about centuries of institutionalized violence against women. He called me out for womansplaining.

Insert dramatic eye roll here.

But here’s my favorite part. His entire argument, his magnum opus, his Edict of Milan deep dive, boiled down to this: Christians were persecuted first. As if that’s relevant. As if we are now having a conversation about who threw the first rock somewhere outside Rome in 200 AD and whoever threw it is the real villain and therefore nothing that came after counts and certainly nothing I said in my essay is correct because technically, chronologically, if you really want to get into it, and he really wanted to get into it, the church was the victim first so can we please stop talking about women now.

This is what we call a diversionary tactic. Wrapped in pedantry. Dressed up in dates. It’s the intellectual equivalent of your house being on fire and someone showing up to explain that actually fire existed before your house did so the house can’t really claim the fire started with it, and also you’re womansplaining.

The second man announced, in these same comments, that he was currently being abused by women. Which, if true, I am genuinely sorry about, that sucks, been there, moving on. But I want to point something out. He didn’t come to the comments to listen, or learn, or share his experience in a way that opened a conversation. He came to make sure that even here, even in this specific space carved out to talk about what has been done to women since Eve allegedly ruined everything with her fruit habit, even here it became about him. The gravitational pull of male victimhood is truly something to behold. It will find its way to the center of any conversation given enough time and a comment section.

I’m not one of them, these men always say. I’m one of the good ones.

And then they do this.

And here’s the thing about that. If you are genuinely one of the good ones, this essay is not about you. You should be able to read it, nod, feel the appropriate amount of rage on behalf of every woman you have ever loved, and move on with your day. The fact that you feel attacked is not my problem. It’s your data. Because if the shoe doesn’t fit, why are you trying it on? Why are you in my comments stomping your feet and making it about you if it isn’t you? The good ones don’t feel attacked by this conversation. They feel implicated in a system they didn’t choose and they’re trying to do something about it. That’s a completely different feeling and if you don’t know the difference, well. Now we know which one you are.

Here is what keeps astonishing me, not the disagreement, I can handle disagreement, but the sheer acrobatic commitment to avoiding the simple thing. The easy thing. The thing that costs nothing and means everything. Because all of this, the Edict of Milan, the semantic gymnastics, the sudden pivot to personal victimhood, all of it is an elaborate, exhausting, frankly impressive obstacle course built for one purpose. To avoid saying four words.

You’re right. I’m sorry.

That’s the whole ask. Not a public flogging. Not a lifetime of penance. Not a tattoo that says patriarchy bad on your forehead. Just the basic human acknowledgment that something terrible has been happening to more than half the population for the entirety of recorded history and you see it and it matters.

But something stops them every time. And I think I know what it is. It’s the same installation the essay was about in the first place. The same machinery that told men vulnerability is weakness and weakness is failure and failure is the one thing you must never be. Because saying you’re right requires you to be wrong first. And being wrong, in the operating system these men were handed at birth, is not just losing an argument. It is losing the only identity they were ever given permission to have.

So instead they find the word invented. They bring up 313 AD. They announce they’re the real victim. They do absolutely anything, build any argument, climb any rhetorical mountain, rather than the simple terrible brave thing of saying yes. You’re right. This happened. It is still happening. And I am part of the world that let it.

The man who called me womansplaining, who was so determined to win a vocabulary contest that he missed the entire point of everything, mentioned at some point that a woman was afraid of him. He offered it up like it was a relevant data point. Like it helped his case somehow. I have been thinking about that ever since. About what it means that he thought that was a thing to say out loud, in this particular conversation, and didn’t notice what it told us.

That’s not one of the good ones.

The good ones are quiet. They’re reading and listening and sitting with the discomfort instead of sprinting away from it toward the nearest Wikipedia article about Roman history. They’re not in the comments announcing their goodness. They’re out in the world actually practicing it, which looks nothing like winning an argument about the Edict of Milan on the internet at two in the morning.

I’ll keep writing these essays. Men will keep showing up to explain why I’m wrong about the thing that has been happening to me and every woman I have ever known for my entire life. And every single time they do, they will think they are proving me wrong.

They are not.

They are the essay.

And to my fellow women writers out there who have the audacity to speak up about the patriarchy, here’s some free womansplaining for you.

I once wrote a piece about the gray rock method. It’s a technique I discovered during my divorce and it is, quite simply, the most powerful thing I have ever put in my toolkit. You become gray. Boring. Unresponsive. You give them nothing to grab onto, nothing to fight, nothing to feed on. Because the response is what they’re after. The fight is the point. The engagement, even the negative engagement, is the supply they came for.

So when the boys show up on this essay in droves, and they will, I will be gray rocking them. I won’t be responding. They don’t deserve my energy or my time and quite frankly they’re not going to get it.

If any man comments on this piece with anything other than you’re right, I’m sorry, you have just shown us exactly who you are.

Thank you.

We’ll be ignoring you now.

Writing is my daily meditation and you’re apparently part of it now, so welcome to my brain. If you’d like to support the chaos, become a paid subscriber. If subscriptions give you hives, just drop me a tip. Either way I’m grateful you’re here and I’ll keep writing either way because I genuinely cannot stop.

I got stuck in a pair of pants today

Not metaphorically, not in a cute wow these are snug kind of way, I mean fully physically trapped, like I briefly considered whether this was just my life now, me and these pants, together forever, canceling plans and learning to sit very still

It started the way these things always do, with optimism, the dangerous kind, the kind that whispers this time will be different

I decided I needed a couple pairs of nice pants because I am apparently reentering society, meetings, events, leaving the house like a person with intentions, so I did what we all do, I ordered multiple sizes online and told myself I would keep one and return the rest

A system built on hope and denial

The first pair arrived and I could tell immediately they were lying, you can just tell, but I tried anyway because maybe this time my body would cooperate or the fabric would show mercy

They got to my hips and paused, like they were considering their options, and then they said oh no you are good, we fit, just a little shimmy

And this is where I betrayed myself

Because I shimmy

I always shimmy

There is a very specific moment where you are alone, half dressed, negotiating with clothing like it is a toxic relationship, and you know it is not going to end well but you proceed anyway

And somehow I got them on

I stood there, looked in the mirror, and immediately understood the consequences of my actions

I looked fully nine months pregnant, not in a glowing way, not in a maybe she is just bloated way, in a someone get a doctor way

And then came the real problem, these pants were not coming off

Getting them on required determination, getting them off required strategy, flexibility, and a level of core strength I do not have access to, I was twisting, pulling, holding my breath, questioning everything, at one point I thought maybe I just build a life around these pants

Eventually I got out, but not with dignity

And honestly that felt like the perfect metaphor for the entire experience of being a woman trying to buy clothes right now

Because what exactly are we doing

At some point, somewhere along the way, we were all pushed into this one size fits all mentality that fits absolutely no one

Every store looks the same, every rack looks the same, every style feels like it was designed for a completely different body than the one I have been living in my entire life

And then we are told it is our fault when it does not work

Sizing is a joke

In one place I am a medium

in another I am a large

in another I am something that suggests I am both wider and significantly taller than I have ever been

Numbers mean nothing, they are vibes, they are guesses, they are chaos

I am five foot two, I have had two children, I have never been skinny, this is not new information, and yet every time I try on clothes it feels like a fresh failure

And I think that is the part that gets me, it is not just inconvenient, it is exhausting

It is not just about pants, it is about constantly being reminded that your body does not align with whatever invisible template is currently being pushed

I have always been a little insecure about my body

Even when I was pregnant, people would look at me and ask if I was having twins, just casually, like that is a normal thing to say to a woman who is already carrying an entire human being

I gave birth to an almost eleven pound baby, just fully produced a giant human, and instead of that being the headline, the takeaway somehow became that my body was a problem to fix

I ended up with a C section and what has apparently been given this very cute nickname, the FUPA, sometimes I just call it Bertha, my evil twin permanently attached to my body that I cannot evict no matter how strongly I feel about it

And now we add menopause into the mix, because why not

The menopause belly, which arrives uninvited and settles in like it has a long term lease

I am told there are solutions, of course there are solutions, stop drinking wine, stop eating sugar, take hormones, drink something that sounds like it came from the bottom of a forest, remove every small joy from your life and maybe, maybe, you can make it smaller

It is just another way women are expected to suffer so that we can remain physically acceptable, or at least less offensive, to a standard that was never designed with us in mind in the first place

After I had my second child, my ex ex husband, who was having an affair with his 19 year old receptionist gave me a lovely push gift

A gym membership with a private trainer to boot

Not a diamond tennis bracelet, not a new car, no, a gym membership, because nothing says I love you like your body needs fixing now

And I remember thinking, I just grew and delivered an almost eleven pound baby, I am recovering from surgery, I am keeping two small humans alive, and the takeaway here is that my body needs to be fixed

Like a personal trainer was going to come in and just smooth everything back into place

Problem solved

Like my body was just waiting for a man with a clipboard to walk in and be like alright let’s just tuck this back where it used to live, tighten that, give it a little pep talk, and boom, factory settings restored

And can we please talk about the fact that we are still out here saying wow she bounced back after giving birth

Bounced back to what exactly

A different body, a different life, a different set of organs that have all been rearranged and are now just doing their best

We grew an entire human, moved things around internally like it was a studio apartment renovation, and the expectation is what, that we emerge looking like we just got back from a light Pilates class

Like nothing happened

Like we did not just build a person from scratch

It is wild

And the truth is that thinking is everywhere, it just hits harder when it is that personal

You see it every time you open a magazine or scroll past a perfectly curated image of a woman who looks untouched by time, untouched by gravity, untouched by reality

I stopped comparing myself to that a long time ago because it became so obviously unattainable it almost felt insulting

Of course I am not going to look like that

I do not have a team, a budget, or the desire to make that my full time job

But it is no wonder people are out here chasing diet pills and procedures and anything that promises to reverse what is actually just life happening

Especially for women, especially as we get older, the message is very clear, do not age, do not change, do not look like you have lived

Meanwhile men are out here having the simplest experience imaginable

Have you ever looked at the difference between a men’s section and a women’s section in a store

Men get pants, jeans, shirts, done

Nice shirt, not nice shirt, that is the entire range

No one is asking them to decode whether something is cocktail or pre dinner or drinks or business casual or business or whatever new category someone just invented to make things more confusing

What is the difference, no one knows

Women walk in and it is like choose your identity, choose your level of effort, choose how many rules you are about to break

And do not forget the jewelry, because apparently if you are not layered in accessories you have somehow failed as a person

It is just more, more decisions, more ways to get it wrong

Even shopping itself has become exhausting

Places like TJ Maxx and Ross Dress for Less are not stores, they are overwhelming obstacle courses, racks and racks of things that may or may not make sense together

People who are good at shopping there have a skill I will never develop

I do not want to hunt for clothes, I want to find something that works and leave

Instead I am ordering multiple versions of the same pants, trying them on, sending most of them back, keeping the one that is the least wrong

And even then it is not quite right

If I size up, suddenly I am six feet tall and everything is too long

If I go petite, I do not know who those proportions are for, but they are not for someone who has lived in this body

So I come back to the same question

Why is this so hard

I am not suggesting we all start sewing our own clothes, but it feels like somewhere along the line we lost the part where clothes were made to fit actual people

Now it feels like we are the ones expected to adjust

And I am just tired of it

Because at the end of the day the choice starts to look very simple

I can fight my body

I can fight the sizing

I can fight the system

or I can buy bigger pants and move on with my life

So wine or menopause belly

Honestly I am choosing both

And anything with an elastic waistband that does not lie to me on the way up my hips.

If you made it this far, first of all… what are you doing with your life, and second, thank you

Subscribing is cool, it’s like finding the perfect pair of pants that actually fit your body, your mood, and your will to live

But I get it, not everyone is ready for that kind of long term commitment, some of us are still recovering from low rise jeans and emotional damage

So if commitment feels like a lot, you can always just buy me a glass of wine

It supports the writing, it supports the menopause belly, and honestly it feels more on brand anyway.

Painting by www.heidizinart.com

I just finished season two of Beef, created by Lee Sung Jin, and I can’t shake the feeling that I didn’t just watch a show—I recognized something. Not in a vague, “oh that’s relatable” way, but in a way that lingers, the kind that sits in your chest a little too long and refuses to let you off the hook. We like to talk about stories like this in safe language, rage, conflict, dysfunction, maybe a little “wow humans are messy,” as if naming it neatly somehow lets us stay outside of it. It doesn’t. What stayed with me was greed.

Not the obvious version, not yachts and private jets and villains we can roll our eyes at from a safe distance. Something quieter, more embedded, more familiar. The kind of greed that doesn’t announce itself because it doesn’t have to. It just lives in the water, and we’ve all gotten very good at pretending we don’t taste it.

Watching Beef, an incredibly well-crafted series, reminded me of an opera I saw in the 90s, McTeague, directed by Robert Altman. At the time, I didn’t have the language for it, I just knew it got under my skin in a way that felt… inconvenient. It was one of the first times I saw greed not as an idea but as a force, something that moves through people, shapes them, distorts them, makes them justify things they probably swore they never would. And now, watching Beef, I felt that same recognition again, which makes me wonder if what unsettled me then and unsettles me now isn’t just what greed does to us, but how normal it’s started to feel.

I think I first brushed up against that realization when I was 22. I had just gotten married, and almost immediately I felt it—not loudly, not dramatically, just there, like a quiet pressure, a subtle reshaping. Like something was being negotiated without me fully agreeing to the terms. This version of life was going to require me to give something up. Not in a poetic, romantic way, in a very real way, pieces of myself, edges that didn’t quite fit into the structure I had stepped into. And I remember thinking, is this just what life is, a series of trades you don’t fully understand until after you’ve already made them, which feels like a terrible business model if we’re being honest.

The marriage lasted about 18 months, which on paper looks like a quick mistake. Efficient, even. Big fan of efficiency, apparently. But being inside it, even briefly, showed me something I couldn’t unsee. The system doesn’t demand everything all at once—that would be far too obvious and frankly terrible branding. It asks slowly, reasonably, logically. Just enough that you don’t notice what’s leaving you until it’s already gone, which is a very effective strategy if your goal is quiet compliance.

We like to think greed belongs to other people, extreme people, obvious people. But the truth is greed has evolved. It’s not just about money anymore. It’s about more—more knowledge, more productivity, more access, more control, more visibility, more experiences, more life somehow squeezed into the same finite amount of time. We don’t just want to live anymore, we want to optimize living, track it, measure it, improve it, package it, post about it, and maybe monetize it if we’re feeling ambitious. We’ve mistaken access to everything for depth in anything, and somewhere along the way being human started to feel a little inefficient, which is a tough rebrand for the entire species.

There’s a kind of greed in the way we consume information, needing to know everything, understand everything, stay ahead of everything, as if knowledge itself has become something to hoard rather than something to sit with. There’s greed in time, every moment accounted for, maximized, monetized, rest becoming something you have to earn and stillness something you have to justify like it’s a suspicious expense. There’s greed in attention, the need not just to exist but to be seen existing, preferably in a way that performs well. And then there’s control, control over outcomes, over identity, over uncertainty itself. We don’t tolerate not knowing anymore, so we build systems that pretend we do and call that peace of mind, which feels generous.

But greed, in this form, isn’t just accumulation. It’s extraction. From the world, from each other, from ourselves, and we’ve gotten very efficient at it.

And then there’s the version of greed that feels like a fever. Low grade at first, easy to ignore, until it isn’t, until it becomes baseline and we stop recognizing it as a fever at all. We just call it life. Then social media shows up and turns the dial all the way up, because of course it does. Now it’s constant, a relentless stream of images telling us what we should look like, what we should have, who we should be, all delivered with the subtlety of a flashing neon sign. And underneath all of it is the same message, repeated in a thousand slightly different fonts: you are not enough. Not thin enough, not successful enough, not interesting enough, not desirable enough.

But don’t worry, there’s a solution. There is always a solution. It would be irresponsible if there weren’t. You just need a little more. More discipline, more money, more access, more willingness to fundamentally alter yourself in the name of self-improvement.

So we try. Of course we do. We cut pieces off ourselves, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes not. We starve ourselves, numb ourselves, optimize ourselves. We take the pill, buy the program, follow the plan, commit to the routine, fall off the routine, feel bad about falling off the routine, repeat. And ironically, one of the most consistent ads I get, because I have the cheaper version of Netflix, is for weight loss drugs. Over and over again. Nothing subtle about it. Even in the places we go to escape, the message follows: fix yourself, refine yourself, reduce yourself. Somewhere along the way, even our bodies became projects, which is exhausting when you think about it for more than five seconds.

And if you can’t afford to keep up, the message doesn’t disappear, it just shifts slightly, like it’s trying to be polite about it. You’re still not enough, just in a different way. And that’s where it starts to blur into something darker, because when you combine that kind of constant pressure with a system that ties worth to access—what you can afford, what you can become, what you can display—you start to understand why people will do almost anything. Not because they’re broken, but because the system is working exactly as designed, which is somehow both impressive and deeply concerning.

So the question becomes, are we trapped in it, or are we feeding it. Probably both, which is annoying, because it would be much nicer if we were just victims and not also quietly complicit. But here we are.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying not to follow the expected path, trying different things, veering off course, resisting the neat version of what a life is supposed to look like. And in some ways, that gave me a kind of freedom. But not immunity, because there isn’t really an outside anymore. Even resistance can become something you perform, something you curate, something you shape into an identity that—ironically—still fits neatly into the system you’re trying to avoid. The system really said, you thought you were opting out, that’s adorable, and then handed us better branding tools.

When you step back and look at where all of this is heading, it becomes harder to ignore the role technology is playing in accelerating it. Companies like Palantir Technologies don’t create the problem, they reveal it. Data is the new land, human behavior is the resource, and optimization is the goal—not meaning, not connection, not depth, but efficiency, prediction, control. We’re no longer just extracting from the planet, we’re extracting from ourselves, our habits, our attention, our patterns. Everything becomes data, everything becomes usable, everything becomes an opportunity, which sounds great until you think about it for a second.

And at a certain point, you have to ask, what happens when the most valuable thing left to extract is us. Not just our time, not just our labor, but our humanity itself. Because if something is inefficient long enough, it eventually becomes optional, and history suggests we’re very comfortable discarding things once we’ve labeled them inefficient.

I think about this a lot when I think about my own life, especially the choices that felt the most defining. Having kids in my early 30s changed me in ways I couldn’t have predicted, and I want to be clear about something, because honesty matters here. I love my kids deeply, completely. There is nothing in my life that replaces those relationships or the experiences we’ve shared. But love doesn’t cancel out awareness. And if I’m being fully honest, I’m not sure I would make the same choice again, not because I regret it, but because I understand more now about what the structure requires, what it takes, what it quietly asks you to give over time, and it asks a lot.

That’s not a clean thought. It doesn’t resolve nicely. It’s not particularly marketable. But it’s real.

I think maybe the problem isn’t that we’re messy, I think that’s the point. Humans are messy, emotional, inconsistent, inefficient, we don’t always make the logical choice, we don’t always optimize, we don’t always get it right, and somehow that’s where the meaning lives.

Because the things we actually value, the things that stay with us, aren’t the most efficient ones. Art isn’t beautiful because it was made quickly or perfectly or optimized for engagement. An AI can generate an image in ten seconds, and it might even be stunning, but that’s not what makes something feel alive. What makes art matter is the imprint of the person who made it, the imperfection, the hesitation, the intention, the quiet knowing that someone used their hands or their voice or their body or their time to create something that didn’t exist before. You can feel that, not intellectually but physically, like a frequency.

And maybe that’s the part we’re starting to lose, because if everything becomes faster, cleaner, more optimized, more efficient, what happens to the things that only exist because we’re not. What happens to the parts of us that don’t scale, that don’t perform well, that don’t make sense on paper. What happens to being human when being human starts to feel like the least useful option.

We are at a precipice, a real decision point, where we have to decide what actually matters. Do we keep moving in the direction we’re moving, toward optimization and efficiency and control, even if it means slowly editing out the very things that make us who we are, or do we stop and remember that those “flaws” might actually be the point.

Because this isn’t abstract anymore. It’s happening in real time.

And maybe the choice is simpler than we make it.

Do we protect our humanity, or do we trade it away.

Because if we don’t actively choose it, if we don’t fight for it, at all costs, then we may not lose it all at once.

We may just wake up one day and realize it’s gone.

The Family of Street Acrobats, the Injured Child (Oil on Canvas), by Gustave Dore

There’s a tax bracket nobody talks about. Not poor enough to qualify for the good help, not rich enough to stop doing Olympic level math in the grocery store checkout line. We live in a charming little financial purgatory I like to call broke but not poor, and I’ve been a longtime resident. Would not recommend. Zero stars. Amenities include anxiety and a calculator app you open like it’s muscle memory.

But before we get into the existential dread, let me tell you about my glasses. Because the glasses explain everything.

I finally qualified for Medi-Cal this year, which, genuinely, felt like winning something. Not the lottery, more like a scratch off where you win a free coffee. But still. I’m blind. Not cute, quirky blind. I mean aggressively, structurally blind. The kind where optometrists pause and go, “Wow, okay, we’re doing a lot here.” I need progressives. Those magical lenses that fix distance, reading, and your will to live all in one seamless pane of glass. They’re subtle, they’re functional, they’re expensive, and they are, unfortunately, not covered.

I waited a year for this appointment. A full year. I showed up hopeful, like someone about to receive something they actually need, rookie mistake.

The exam was great. The doctor was lovely. The frames, though, you get three options, ugly, uglier, and a third pair so offensive they’re basically a social experiment. Also, fun fact, your insurance doesn’t cover progressives.

So I chose ugly. Because I need to see.

Somewhere, a health insurance executive is remodeling his third kitchen. Not his only kitchen, that would be gauche, one of several. This man has healthcare that probably includes emotional support peacocks and experimental anti aging clouds. He is not thinking about my bifocals. He is thinking about whether to golf before or after lunch in whichever zip code he woke up in.

I took the glasses. Of course I did. This is broke but not poor life, you accept the options, you say thank you, and you convince yourself the line across your lens is fashion forward. I’m calling it retro. I’m committing to the bit.

And honestly, that’s the whole story.

Not just the glasses, the whole thing.

Let me be clear, I am grateful. Deeply, sincerely, almost annoyingly grateful. I keep a roof over my kids’ heads, food on the table, and I pay my son’s college tuition. Some months, big months, I get my nails done and have an espresso martini. Sixty dollars total. That’s my luxury. My reckless financial decision. My version of a yacht. And I guard it like it’s a retirement account because I’ve learned something important, if I’m miserable, my income drops. The espresso martini is basically a business investment.

I’m not here to complain.

I am absolutely here to complain.

Because at some point, gratitude culture turned into a gag order. You’re supposed to be so busy counting your blessings you don’t notice the system is out here playing Jenga with your stability. I notice. I have eyes now, well, mostly.

And for the record, I’m broke for reasons that make perfect sense once you factor in the patriarchy and one extremely dedicated narcissist I used to be married to. He cheated, spent money like it personally offended him to keep it, dragged us into a house I never wanted, and then spent the next fifteen years avoiding financially supporting his own children like it was an Olympic sport. As a grand finale, he wrecked my credit and took the money.

Commitment. You have to respect the consistency.

So I rebuilt. Slowly, stubbornly, with two kids watching, which really keeps you from just lying down on the floor and becoming part of it. I do meaningful work. I help writers, I help filmmakers. I used to be a filmmaker until life said, let’s explore other hobbies, via a fairly dramatic accident. I pivoted. I persisted. It’s all very inspirational. I would absolutely put it on a throw pillow if throw pillows weren’t financially irresponsible.

Some years, I even do well. I can feel myself climbing out of the hole. And then, plot twist, I learn something new about how the system works and have to sit down like I just watched a horror movie where the villain is the tax code.

Because here’s the fun part, the tax system is basically a custom built obstacle course for single mothers. If you earn between about fifty thousand and one hundred thousand a year, congratulations, you’re making enough to be taxed like an adult but not enough to absorb it like one. And if you creep even one dollar past around sixty two thousand, you hit what they cheerfully call the subsidy cliff. Which is exactly what it sounds like. You don’t gently lose assistance, you fall off it, dramatically, all at once. No safety net, no warning, just vibes.

So your options are, stay small enough to keep help, or leap to something like two hundred fifty thousand or more so losing help doesn’t ruin you.

There is no middle. There is only the financial equivalent of good luck.

Then there’s my bonus round, my ex illegally claimed one of my kids on his taxes for years. Can I fix it, yes, all I need is a tax attorney. Which costs thousands of dollars. Which I don’t have. Because I am in the exact bracket designed to ensure I never casually have thousands of dollars lying around to fix problems caused by someone else.

This is not a glitch. This is the feature.

Also, I’m self employed. Which means I pay both sides of Social Security and Medicare taxes. Because apparently independence comes with a surcharge. Add federal taxes, California taxes, and the general cost of existing, and you start to realize the system is like, oh, you wanted autonomy, that’ll be extra.

At this point, the options seem to be, make millions, or marry rich.

And I, like a woman with principles and poor timing, chose independence.

Honestly, I should have just been a gold digger.

Kidding. Mostly.

But can we talk about that phrase for a second, gold digger. Such a neat little piece of branding. It didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was built, polished, handed down, usually by the same systems that made financial dependence a requirement and then mocked women for recognizing it.

Because it’s a fascinating setup when you really look at it, create a world where stability is tied to money, make access to that money uneven, limit women’s earning power historically and structurally, and then act shocked, shocked, when some women decide to secure financial stability through partnership.

And then label that decision with just enough shame to keep everyone quiet about it.

It’s not that I think marrying for money is some kind of aspirational life goal. It’s that pretending it isn’t a rational strategy in the system we built feels dishonest. We’ve spent decades acting like love and money exist in completely separate universes, when in reality they’ve been roommates this entire time, splitting the rent.

And I bought into that shame. Fully. I internalized the idea that doing it the right way meant doing it alone, meant proving something, meant earning every inch of stability independently, even if it took fifteen years and a nervous system that now flinches at utility bills.

I’m proud of that. I am.

And also, it’s worth saying out loud, the fact that marrying rich is one of the most reliable financial strategies available to women in this country is not a commentary on women.

It’s a commentary on the system that made it so.

And somehow, that’s the part we’re not supposed to say.

I was listening to a podcast recently where one entrepreneur was doing that thing, you know the thing, where they say, people just need to become entrepreneurs, like it’s a personality trait you can pick up between coffee and emails. Like you just wake up one morning, stretch, drink some water, and say, you know what, today I will simply become financially stable through risk taking.

And the other guy, God bless him, cut him off.

He said no. Stop. That’s not how this works. You and I have a financial foundation. We’re not worried about rent. We’re not worried about groceries. If this fails, it’s inconvenient, not life altering. That’s why we can take risks.

And I nearly drove off the road because, yes. Exactly that.

Because here’s what gets left out of the just be an entrepreneur pep talk, entrepreneurship requires a runway. It requires time, space, and the ability to fail without everything collapsing. It requires not needing every dollar you earn immediately for survival. You don’t just decide to be an entrepreneur, you need the conditions that make entrepreneurship possible.

Otherwise, it’s not a bold career move. It’s a gamble with rent money.

And people in my bracket are not afraid of hard work. We are afraid of one bad month turning into a domino effect we can’t recover from. We don’t lack ambition, we lack margin. There is no cushion, no soft landing, just the ground coming at you fast.

So when someone says, just take more risks, what I hear is, act like you have something to fall back on.

And that is the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Anyway, back to reality.

My daughter and I share a one bedroom apartment in West Hollywood. Before you picture something chic, please understand, it’s old. Which is actually great because it means the rooms are human sized. She has the bedroom. I have the living room. We operate like a well rehearsed dance, she’s nocturnal, I’m not, and somehow it works.

We’re thriving.

Until summer.

My son comes home from college, and suddenly it’s three people in a one bedroom, which is less cozy and more logistical puzzle. So I leave. I find a couch, a friend, a spare room somewhere. Last summer I ended up in Maui, which sounds wildly inconsistent with everything I’ve said so far, but I assure you, this was not luxury. This was least in the way.

Before I left, I told my kids, do not run the AC all day. It’s basically a machine that turns money into slightly cooler disappointment.

I came home to an eight hundred dollar electric bill.

I stared at it the way you stare at something that just rewrote your financial future.

Payment plan, of course. You always go on the payment plan.

I was paying it down responsibly like the model citizen I am. Then my credit card got frauded. Someone spent fifty dollars, which I noticed immediately because I track my bank account like it’s a live sports score.

New card, update all payments, administrative nightmare. I did it.

Except, plot twist, the utility company has two separate billing systems that do not communicate like they’re in a silent feud. I updated one. Missed the other.

Miss one payment, the entire remaining balance is due immediately. No grace, no nuance, just surprise.

Also, the account is in my daughter’s name, and if you know a Gen Z person, you already know, if they don’t recognize the sender, that email is gone before it finishes existing.

So this morning, she says, the power’s off.

And it is. Over three hundred dollars. Down from eight hundred. Paid faithfully. Still, lights out.

Here is the difference between broke and poor, and it is a difference that kept me up that night even after the lights came back on.

I had three hundred dollars.

Not extra three hundred dollars, not treat yourself three hundred dollars, not even buffer three hundred dollars.

I had three hundred dollars in my account because a client had just paid me. That money was already spoken for. Fully allocated. Mentally spent on next month’s rent, bills, groceries, the careful, invisible math I am always doing to keep everything functioning. That three hundred dollars wasn’t mine in any real sense. It was just temporarily sitting in my account on its way to somewhere else.

But the utility company doesn’t care about mental accounting. They don’t care that you’ve already assigned every dollar a job. To them, it’s simple, the money exists or it doesn’t.

So I paid it. Of course I did. I shifted everything forward, rearranged the timeline in my head, bought myself a little more time in the present by making the future slightly more precarious. That’s the game.

And that’s when it hit me, hard.

Because I kept thinking about every woman who didn’t have that exact moment of timing. Who didn’t get paid the day before. Who did the same math, made the same mistake, and is sitting in a dark apartment right now because her three hundred dollars is still three days away.

That’s the line. That’s how thin it is.

This is the hole they don’t want you climbing out of, not because there’s a villain twirling a mustache somewhere, though honestly sometimes it feels like it, but because the system works so well at keeping you here.

Too busy surviving to organize. Too busy juggling to protest. Too busy updating billing information to revolt.

I looked up.

And what I saw was this.

A system that punishes you for earning just enough.

A system where fixing injustice costs more than enduring it.

A system where independence is taxed like a luxury item.

A system where risk is only safe if you’re already safe.

I chose independence. I’m proud of it.

And also, I reserve the right to be a little sarcastic about it.

Because the fact that marrying rich is one of the most reliable financial strategies available to women is not about women.

It’s about the system.

Anyway, I need to go back through every single account I have and make sure I didn’t miss any other automatic payments, because apparently that’s a full time job now.

Honestly, I’m just grateful I’m not on life support or something, because at this point I’m not entirely confident I wouldn’t miss a billing cycle and accidentally unplug myself.

So that feels like a win.

Low bar, but we clear it.

Thanks for reading. I’m not writing this to play the victim. I’m just telling the truth about a reality a lot of people are living but don’t always get to say out loud, because we’re all out here pretending everything’s fine and keeping up with people who are also pretending everything’s fine.

If this resonated, the best way to support me is by subscribing. It tells me the work has value, which, in this economy, feels borderline revolutionary.

And if you’re feeling extra generous, you can help me refill that very real $300 hole, or, you know, fund an espresso martini. Which, as previously established, is basically a business expense.

Either way, I’m glad you’re here.

Me and Moose… Day 1

The comment sections on my posts about the patriarchy have become their own kind of performance art. Men arrive, chest out, to tell me I’m wrong, that I’m generalizing, that actually it’s the women who raised them. This last part is my favorite. The mental gymnastics required to blame women for male behavior while simultaneously defending male behavior is truly Olympic-level. I almost want to give out medals.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: in trying to prove me wrong, they almost always prove me right.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the men who failed my son. Not his father specifically, though that story writes itself. He ethically failed from day one and never stopped. What I want to talk about is the space that failure left, and who didn’t step into it.

There’s something that happens to boys without fathers. They go looking. It’s not dramatic or self-aware, just this quiet gravitational pull toward any man who seems to know what he’s doing, who might notice them, who might tell them they’re worth something. I watched my son do this. I watched him look for it in coaches, in teammates’ dads, in the whole architecture of organized sports, which, for boys in this country, is basically the only institution we have for teaching them what men are supposed to be.

I had my children unhealed and unprepared, and I will own that. It’s part of why I champion young people who are choosing not to have kids, because hurt people hurt people, and at minimum, hurt people should be conscious about the timing. But I had them, and as much as I’ve gotten things wrong, I have always shown up. Annoyingly so, according to my kids. I have never once let one of them feel disposable.

My son started in flag football, which was actually joyful. Good group of kids, decent parents, a coach who understood that a six-year-old’s job is to have fun. Then his father, watching from his fantasy world, decided my son would become a professional football player. My son was five. My son loves football now, genuinely loves it, but I wonder sometimes if he would have found his way there on his own, if it had been offered instead of imposed. We’ll never know. It was never a choice.

What followed was a parade of club sports, practices I drove him to alone, and dads on the sidelines screaming at five, six, seven-year-olds like they were supposed to be JJ McCarthy. It culminated one summer in 110-degree heat, my son vomiting on the sideline because he was terrified to say he couldn’t take another hit, because what would that mean about him, because he’d been taught to perform toughness for men who weren’t even paying attention. They kept putting him in. I climbed over a fence, told the referee to call the game, and pulled my son off the field.

Every dad on that field hated me. Every mom wished she’d done it too. A few of them, I suspect, couldn’t, for reasons we don’t talk about out loud when we’re talking about sports culture.

Fast forward to high school. Covid had reshuffled everything, my son had moved to a new town, and his sister and I agreed the fastest way in was a team. He’s athletic, he tried out, he made it. On JV, things were fine. He showed real potential. He also showed what I already knew, that he was doing this for approval, not for himself, making friends who turned out to be, let’s say, products of the exact culture I keep writing about.

Then 11th grade came. Varsity. And the coach who everyone praised as a builder of young men, as someone who turns boys into leaders, who does the important work, let my son quit.

I want to be careful here, because this essay is not about him. He is not a villain. He is a product. When you build a sports culture where the only boys who matter are the ones who can take you to a championship, you get coaches who behave exactly the way he did. You get a system where potential is the price of admission and everyone else is dead weight. This is not an aberration. This is the design.

And it runs deep. For a long time, for a lot of boys, especially Black and brown boys, the only ladders out of poverty that this country offered were music and sports. Be exceptional or be invisible. Be the star or be the cautionary tale. That kind of pressure does not build boys. It sorts them. It takes the ones the system can use and discards the rest, and then we scratch our heads wondering where all these lost young men came from, and somehow, again, we find a way to blame their mothers.

My son’s father abandoned him. Not metaphorically. Not gradually. He decided at some point that fatherhood was a role he would perform when it was convenient and exit when it required anything real, money, consistency, presence, accountability. He has been exiting ever since. My son has spent his whole life trying to earn something from a man who was never going to give it, and learning, slowly and painfully, that the absence said nothing about him and everything about his father. That lesson should not have cost him this much. It cost him this much because we live in a culture that treats male abandonment as a footnote and female survival as a character flaw.

So many men want the credit of “not all men” for doing exactly what the culture trained them to do, show up for the boys who make them look good and look away from the ones who don’t. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a feature.

Because the bare minimum is the ceiling, and stepping outside of it, looking around and saying wait, this system is actually destroying women and children, that’s too much to ask. It’s always easier to just blame the women.

Someone left a comment on one of my posts recently that I can’t stop thinking about. They pointed out that we say “women get pregnant” as if it’s something that happens to us in a vacuum, some miraculous accident, as though we’re all candidates for immaculate conception. We get pregnant. Men impregnate and then leave. Then they make us the crazy ones so they don’t have to pay child support.

Then they find someone new, someone who will absorb the children they left behind, while we scramble to cover what’s missing, looking for partners, looking for men in our communities who might offer our sons something we can’t, hoping someone shows up. Because we keep being told that if there’s no man in their life we are failures and they are failures. And if our sons don’t make it, if they’re not the star, if they’re not the one giving the trophy speech thanking their single mom who sacrificed everything, then we were just never enough. Of course. It’s always our fault.

Which brings me to the men in my comment section. The ones who want to tell me what I got wrong, how I should have done it, what the real problem is. Let me ask you something. Not all men, right? You didn’t rape your wife. You’re nice to her. You’re a good guy. I’ll take your word for it.

But are you showing up for boys? Not your own, not the star on the team, not the kid who’s easy. Are you showing up for the ones who are struggling, the ones who are lost, the ones who are looking for someone to tell them they don’t have to be the best athlete in the room, that they don’t have to be the toughest, that they don’t have to perform masculinity for the approval of men who will abandon them the second they stop being useful?

How many of you are offering boys vulnerability? Honesty? A safe place to land? How many of you are telling them it’s okay to not be a star?

Because that’s the women’s job, apparently. We do the emotional labor, we hold the safe space, we show up in the heat when they’re sick and no one else stops the game. The men teach them to suck it up. And then they slap them on the back when they survive it and call that raising boys into men.

And when it all goes wrong, when those boys grow up lost and angry and searching, they’ll find their way to a comment section somewhere and tell a woman it’s her fault.

Of course they will. It’s always our fault.

Dear men who are about to comment on this post: don’t tell me. Show me. And not that one time you did that one thing. I want to know if you stood up for that woman in the meeting when it would have cost you something. I want to know if your kids still call you. I want to know if you were the dad on the sideline screaming at a seven-year-old to be better, or the dad who listened when his son said he didn’t want to play. Don’t come here with your comments. Come with your receipts. Actually don’t come here at all. I wanna hear from your wives and children.

Hey, did this post resonate with you? Did it inspire you to think? I’m not gonna ask you to become a paid subscriber because that’s just fucking annoying but you know what a tip would be nice. For the most part it’s gonna go to pay for my son’s college.

I found this image online and it is created by Alexia Art – here’s a link to her profile

The Oldest Lie We Tell About Bodies

There is a research station at the bottom of the world. No bars. No nightclubs. No short skirts, no dark alleys, no “she was asking for it” happy hour. Just scientists and support staff, extreme cold, extreme isolation, and a shared mission to understand the planet we live on. Noble. Serious. Practically celibate in its austerity.

According to a recent NSF survey, nearly 40 percent of workers at US Antarctic research bases reported experiencing sexual harassment or assault during their time on the ice. More than two thirds witnessed it. These are credentialed, educated people. At the bottom of the world. In parkas. Still.

If you were waiting for proof that sexual violence has nothing to do with what she was wearing, here it is. Delivered on a glacier. By scientists. You’re welcome.

So if it’s not the short skirt, not the bar, not the provocative collarbone or the ankle or the ear, what the hell is it? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s us. It’s what we’ve been taught. It’s the oldest, most successfully weaponized lie in human history: that the body is shameful, that desire is evil, and that sex is so dangerous, so dirty, so fundamentally wrong that it must be locked in a box and only opened for one approved purpose. Making more humans. Everything else is the devil’s work, and the devil, wouldn’t you know it, looks exactly like a woman.

Welcome to original sin. Population: everyone who has ever had a body. Congratulations, you’re already guilty. Please cover your elbows on the way in.

At some point, and I’d argue it was the exact moment organized religion realized that shame is cheaper than an army, someone looked at the full, messy, overwhelming human experience of desire and connection and said: that’s the problem. Not violence. Not cruelty. Not the impulse to conquer and destroy. Desire. Touch. The radical, dangerous act of wanting to be close to another person. That’s what got labeled evil.

And they needed a face to put on it.

They chose Eve. (or they made her up.)

Eve, who was curious. Eve, who wanted knowledge. Eve, who apparently had so much catastrophic destructive power that one conversation with a snake unraveled all of creation, simply because she existed in a body and used it. She didn’t conquer a nation. She didn’t burn anything down. She ate a piece of fruit and suddenly the female body became the source of all sin, all temptation, all moral failure, for the rest of recorded time. Every war, every plague, every bad harvest, somehow traceable back to one woman who had the audacity to want to know things.

That’s not theology. That’s a frame job with a two thousand year marketing budget.

And it worked spectacularly. Two thousand years later, in certain parts of the world, women still have to drape themselves in black from head to toe and disappear in public, because the female body is apparently so radioactively sinful that a glimpse of a wrist might bring down civilization. The wrist, ladies. Hide the wrist. God is watching and he’s very upset about your wrist.

Meanwhile the men doing the mandating have a rape problem. Funny how that works.

I visited my mother in Kansas years ago with my two kids. My son was about eighteen months. My daughter was barely five. They were at that age where clothes are basically a suggestion, because children have not yet received the memo that their bodies are shameful. My mother was in a state because she couldn’t share photos of her grandchildren. They were, in her words, indecently exposed.

They were babies. Toddlers. Running around the way toddlers do, which is naked and at full speed, because diapers are a prison and freedom is a warm afternoon and nobody told them yet that their bodies are a problem.

My genuinely naïve self could not compute who exactly was supposed to be looking at a one year old and feeling something. But my mother was a Catholic, and to a Catholic the body is not a neutral thing. It is a loaded weapon that must be covered, managed, controlled, and apologized for. Even on a baby. Especially on a baby, because you have to get them while they’re young. The shame has to be installed before the child can even form the question. Before they can look up and say, wait, why exactly are you panicking about my kneecap?

That’s the machinery. And it runs on children. It has always run on children.

Here is what’s interesting about the animal kingdom: no other species has this problem. Not because animals are more evolved, but because they didn’t get the memo that connection is evil.

Sex in the animal kingdom is just what creatures do. They connect. They bond. They touch. There’s no guilt spiral afterward, no female blamed for making the male of the species lose his entire mind simply by existing near him with a visible collarbone.

We are the only species that decided intimacy needed to be regulated, punished, and primarily experienced as a source of shame. We looked at one of the most natural, connective, humanizing forces in existence and said, no, that’s the bad one. War, fine. Conquest, absolutely. Torture, we’ll work with it. But two people wanting to be genuinely close to each other? Get a priest involved immediately. Write some rules. Make sure someone suffers.

And then we wonder. We actually wonder. Why is this still happening?

Here’s what happens when you tell people their bodies are bad: they don’t stop wanting. They just stop knowing how to want well.

Men got one message hammered into them for centuries: you have urges, those urges are ungovernable, that is simply the nature of man, and if a woman inflames those urges by existing near you in a body, that is entirely on her. Two kinds of women exist in this worldview, the wife you respect and the whore you use, and the wife, if she is a good one, will lie back and think of England and not make it weird. Men were never taught intimacy. They were taught appetite. And appetite without intimacy is just hunger with nowhere honest to go.

But here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough, and I want to be very clear that saying it is not letting anyone off the hook, it is explaining how the hook got built.

Men were not just taught that women’s bodies are dangerous. They were taught that their own tenderness is a character flaw. That vulnerability is weakness. That weakness is failure. That failure to dominate is failure to be a man. Real men don’t need. Real men don’t feel. Real men take what they want because wanting it quietly and hopefully and humanly is something women do, and women are the punchline, remember? Woman is the insult. Soft is the insult. The entire architecture of masculinity as organized religion and patriarchy designed it is a structure built to make sure men can never, ever ask for what they actually need.

So what do you do with hunger you’ve been told is shameful, in a body you’ve been told must dominate, with desire you’ve been told to never show?

You take. You drug your wife because mutual desire requires you to be present and vulnerable and actually worth wanting, and nobody taught you how to be any of those things. You catcall women on the street because domination is the only script you were ever handed. You control your partner through fear because control got sold to you as strength and strength is the only thing you were ever allowed to have. You smack your own face on camera to achieve the jawline of a man who has never once in his life been tender with anyone, and you are very proud of this.

None of this is an excuse. Let me say that again. None of this is an excuse. The patriarchy broke the very men it claimed to be serving, and those men have been breaking women ever since, and that is still on them. Understanding how someone was made into a weapon does not mean you stop ducking when they aim it at you.

And the women in Antarctica who were also participating in the harassment? I’m going to stop you right there before you use that to change the subject. When you are a woman in a male dominated environment, in the most isolated place on earth, with nowhere to go and no real protection, you have two choices. You can be the target or you can learn to speak the language of the room. That is not dysfunction. That is not complicity. That is survival inside a system that was never built for you, doing the only math available. The blame for that goes exactly one place, and it is not on the women doing the adapting.

Antarctica is the perfect argument because it strips away every excuse the patriarchy has ever made. No cocktails. No provocative outfits. No mixed signals. No ambiguity. Just human beings at the end of the earth, carrying inside them everything civilization taught them about bodies and desire and who gets to have power over whom. And it turns out that luggage travels anywhere. Even to the ice. You don’t need a short skirt. You just need the wound, and we have been handing out wounds since Genesis.

You cannot fix this with better HR policies at McMurdo Station, though sure, let’s have those too, they clearly have a lot of work to do. You cannot fix it with sensitivity training or reporting hotlines or zero tolerance language in a handbook written by the same institution that looked the other way for decades. You fix it by going all the way back. Back to Eve. Back to the moment someone decided that the most dangerous thing in the world was a woman in a body who knew what she wanted.

Back to the lie.

We have been treating symptoms for centuries. We hold hearings. We launch investigations. We send task forces to Antarctica in November, which, have you seen November in Antarctica, because that is how seriously we are not taking this. The disease is older than all of it. It is the lie installed in every child before they can speak, whispered in churches and parliaments and family dinner tables and Catholic grandmothers panicking about toddler kneecaps.

Your body is the problem.

It never was. We just needed someone to blame, and she was standing right there, curious and hungry and reaching for the fruit, and honestly, good for her.

The body was never the problem.

The lie was. It always was. And we built an entire civilization on top of it and called it sacred.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Here’s the link to the article about Antarctica

And here’s another wild idea… Imagine what would happen, if this post resonated with you, you dropped me a tip. Not only with that helped me support myself and my little family, it would let me know that my words have value.

By the way, this was my day. Got notified at 7pm last night that the screen door guys were coming. No details. Just, men are coming. Then spent all day watching two guys try to install a modern patio door into a building built in 1960 that had absolutely no interest in participating. I am grateful. I also had to explain three times, in broken Spanish, that I was not married and not interested in dating. And you wonder why I didn’t just leave and let my daughter handle it. Bless.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​( boys will be boys… right?!)

I Was Gonna Write About That, But Then I Remembered

I was gonna write about the tax on tips, that shiny little sleight of hand designed to make you feel like someone in Washington gives a damn about your Applebee’s server, but then I remembered there’s a website where men teach each other how to drug and rape their wives while they sleep.

I was gonna write about the men running this country, locked in their 18 year old fever dreams, but then I remembered Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion because someone released the tax returns he was supposed to release anyway.

I was gonna write about the pardoned January Sixers re-arrested for rape and child sexual assault, which tracks actually, but then I remembered the website again, Motherless, 62 million visits in a single month, 20,000 videos of women being raped in their sleep, eyechecks, $175 shipping, operating legally.

I was gonna write about Mamdani and why powerful men are losing their minds over taxing empty apartments, but then the Attorney General announced we don’t get the Epstein files. And none of the men named in those files, including the current president, credibly accused of raping a child, have been arrested.

I was gonna write about Medium, and the platforms that don’t hand rapists a microphone, but then I remembered Congress voted to keep sealed every name, every accusation, every dollar of our tax money spent to shut women up.

And then a man commented on my last post. Kept coming back, actually. Each time making sure to tell me my rage was valid, but. There’s always a but. Valid, but what about men who’ve been harmed. Valid, but you’re leaving men out. Valid, but if you want men to change you have to make them feel included. As if the website with 20,000 rape videos is somehow also a men’s issue we need to center. As if the pardons and the sealed files and the silenced women are really just a both sides situation. This is the male loneliness syndrome in its purest form, not loneliness actually, narcissism. The inability to be in a room, even a metaphorical one, where it isn’t about them. A woman lists the ways the world is actively organized against her survival and a man reads it and thinks, but what about my feelings. That is not someone who has been harmed. That is someone who cannot tolerate not being the main character.

And he kept telling me I needed to forgive. That forgiveness was the path forward. That my rage was the real problem.

Forgiveness. That word. That gorgeous, well-packaged, spirituality-industry word designed to make women swallow what was done to them so men don’t have to sit with what they did. Forgiveness isn’t healing. Forgiveness, as it’s been sold to us, is a patriarchal tool. It is accountability avoidance with a wellness price tag. It is what we tell women instead of telling men to stop. I’m done with it. We should all be done with it.

Sixty two million visits to a rape tutorial site in a single month, and I’m the problem.

I’m a mother of a son. I love him ferociously. And he knows exactly where his power comes from, and it is not from controlling, diminishing, or harming women. That is not strength. That is a man so hollowed out, so gutted by his own inadequacy, that the only way he can feel powerful is with a drugged, subdued, incapacitated woman beneath him. That is not dominance. That is confession.

The patriarchy doesn’t just breed inequality. It breeds narcissism, the specific suffocating kind that cannot tolerate being seen, being wrong, being held to account. The kind that will sue the IRS rather than release a tax return. The kind that will pardon rapists, seal files, buy silence, and host 20,000 rape videos on a legal website in broad daylight.

And then ask you to forgive them.

Women have to stop being fucking nice.

I was gonna be nicer about it.

But then I remembered.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Look I get it. Nobody wants to subscribe anymore too many fucking emails too many notifications… Nobody remembers who they subscribed to anyway. If you’d like to you’re welcome I’d love for you to become a paid subscriber or you can buy me a martini..

SURPRISE! YOUR HERO IS A RAPIST.

An extremely unsurprised woman’s guide to the eternal shock and awe of men behaving exactly like men.

So Eric Swalwell, champion of democracy, hero of the resistance, the guy who literally farted on live television while defending women’s rights, has resigned from Congress today because, shocker, multiple women say he’s a rapist. And somewhere right now, a Democrat is clutching their “Nevertheless She Persisted” tote bag in absolute disbelief.

Bless your heart.

Can we have the conversation we are never actually allowed to have? Why, every single time, do we perform this elaborate theater of shock and devastation, as though we didn’t already know, have always known, that this is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem, but a man problem?

Go watch Mrs. America. I’m serious. Turn off your sound bath, close your mouth, and watch it. It’s a gorgeous, infuriating series about the battle to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, and one of the things it captures with surgical precision is this: it did not matter what party the man belonged to. If he was a man with power and a woman nearby, the dynamic was the same. The entitlement was the same. The violence, subtle or otherwise, was the same.

I use the word rapist deliberately. I know it’s a violent, awful word. It’s supposed to be. We have spent decades softening the language because the accurate language makes people uncomfortable, and god forbid we make men uncomfortable. He was “inappropriate.” He “made mistakes.” He “struggled with boundaries.” We have euphemized male violence into a gentle fog so thick you can barely see the women lying in it. When a man grabs your ass he’s “handsy.” When a man destroys your sense of safety and stability on a daily basis he’s “difficult.” We invented the word misogynist so we could talk about rapists in polite company. I’m done with polite company.

Because rape is not just the thing that happens in an alley. Rape is a spectrum of dominance and violation. What is happening to us right now under this presidency is rape. Not a slap in my physical face, but a daily assault on my nervous system, my economic security, my sense of reality. The chaos is not accidental. The cruelty is not incompetence. It is violence, and violence by any other name is still violence.

Phyllis Schlafly was the woman the patriarchy chose to fight the Equal Rights Amendment. A lawyer, a political powerhouse, a true believer that if she just played the game well enough she would be the one woman they actually respected. She was the original pick-me. They used her the same way they use Pam Bondi. Dress her up, give her a title, let her do the dirty work, discard her when she’s no longer useful. Schlafly spent her life telling women to stay home while she went to law school, hired help, and accumulated more political power than most men in Washington. She was the patriarchy’s favorite ventriloquist dummy and she died thinking she was the one talking. The Equal Rights Amendment, the radical notion that women deserve equal protection under the law, has still not been ratified. That was forty years ago. Sure, we’ve had women in Congress, women in cabinet positions, women almost in the White House. But a woman-shaped prop doesn’t stop being a prop just because she has a title.

Cesar Chavez. A hero. A giant. A rapist. Dolores Huerta built that movement alongside him, was raped by him, had two children she had to hide, and spent sixty years holding that secret so the farmworkers’ cause could survive. She gave the movement a hero and swallowed the rest. That is the price women have paid since the beginning of organized human power. Our silence in exchange for being allowed to stand in the room.

We protect the movement. We protect the legacy. We protect the man. Because we have this unfounded hope that one day they’re going to get it. They are not going to get it. Not until we sit our asses down and refuse them. All of it. The labor, the silence, the cover, the loyalty. It is a carefully played game of power and they use us until we are no longer useful. So let’s make a decision, collectively, consciously, and with great fucking pleasure: let’s no longer be useful.

We know this works because women have done it before. In 1975 the women of Iceland went on a single day strike. They refused to work, cook, or care for children. The country ground to a complete halt. Within five years Iceland had the first democratically elected female president in the world. In Poland women went on a black strike against abortion restrictions and brought international attention and real political consequence. In Argentina the Ni Una Menos movement against femicide became one of the most powerful feminist uprisings in modern history and changed policy. In every single case the mechanism was the same: women stopped being useful and the whole thing shook.

They cannot run a single thing without us. Not a movement, not a household, not a government, not an economy. We are not the support system. We are the system. And the moment we act like we know that, everything changes.

So go ahead and feel betrayed by Swalwell. Go ahead and grieve Chavez. But please, please, retire the shock. The shock is the thing that lets us keep believing the next hero will be different. That if we find the right man, the right party, the right movement, we will finally be safe inside it.

We won’t.

No more cool language. No more softening. They are rapists. Of women, of children, of the land, of the economy, of every institution they have ever been handed and squeezed until it bled.

Put down the amethyst. Pick up your power.

It’s the only thing that’s ever actually worked.

I get it, a paid subscription feels like a commitment and we are all in our “not looking for anything serious” era. But if you want to support this particular unhinged corner of the internet without putting a label on it, the tip jar is open. No strings attached, no follow up texts, no labels. Just you, me, and an espresso martini I very much deserve.

Thanks, BoB…

The universe, or as I like to call it, Bob, does provide. Sometimes with a gentle nudge, sometimes with a burning bush, and apparently sometimes with a great white shark screaming FUCK! at you from a swirling teal ocean while you’re just trying to walk your dog.

My daughter and I were lamenting just the other day that her apartment living room has no art. We’d been looking, sort of casually, the way you look for the right couch or the right therapist, knowing that when it’s right you’ll just know, and nothing had landed yet. Nothing had said her. We shrugged, let it go, filed it under “eventually,” and moved on with our lives, you know, the ones that currently have you saying the word fuck approximately ten thousand times before noon. What the fuck is happening. What the actual fuck. No seriously, what in the entire fuck is going on right now. We are living in a time that has upgraded fuck from casual punctuation to a full spiritual practice.

So this afternoon I head downstairs to take the dog out, fully expecting nothing more exciting than a fire hydrant and a patch of questionable grass, and sitting right there on the sidewalk in front of the building, like it had been drop-shipped directly from the cosmos, gift-wrapped by some profane and deeply intuitive divine concierge, is this painting.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

A great white shark, mid-lunge, jaws thrown open like it just read the news, with “FUCK!” arched over its head in big bold letters and little emphasis lines shooting off the exclamation point because apparently even the punctuation needed to express how strongly it felt. It was whimsical and expressive and somehow, genuinely, arrestingly beautiful. And, I cannot make this up, it was the exact color palette of her apartment. The teals, the blues, the whole moody oceanic situation. It was as if Bob had commissioned it specifically, noted the measurements of the wall, checked the throw pillow colors, and said yes, this one, right here, now go.

I hauled it upstairs immediately, the dog skidding along behind me on the leash like a reluctant comma in a sentence that was absolutely not stopping for anything.

Bob, you absolute legend. You really outdid yourself on this one.

P.S. The painting is signed “K. Shead, 22” and I have absolutely no idea who you are. I tried to track you down and the internet was unhelpful, which honestly feels on brand for a piece of art that materialized out of thin air on a sidewalk. So whoever you are, K. Shead, thank you. You made two women very happy, and your shark says everything we didn’t have the wall space to say before. If you ever see this, please find me. I owe you a drink.

I’ve sort of been working on this all day in the event that Armageddon didn’t happen, although he did bomb a bunch of places just so we’re fucking clear… This image is the sign I was going to use at the last no King’s protest but I’m a terrible artist and I didn’t have time for a printer.

For Everyone Who Said, “He’s Not Really Going to Do That”

For those of you still saying, “He’s not really going to do that. It’s just a strategy. He’s bluffing. He only wants to scare them into submission,” I need you to understand something, the fear is the point.

And the cruel irony is that, before the threat, there often wasn’t even a problem to solve.

I know this because I lived it.

I want to tell you what it’s like to divorce someone with deeply narcissistic, sociopathic traits, someone who takes a sick kind of pleasure in watching you panic. Someone for whom your fear is not a side effect, but the reward.

In my experience, that feeling of power over another person, the ability to make them spiral, scramble, cry, lose sleep, and question reality, is intoxicating to them. Better than sex, maybe. Better than money. Better than being right.

During my divorce, my ex-husband used this tactic over and over again.

One weekend, on what was technically his visitation weekend, the kind he rarely bothered to take until it was useful, he picked up the children and then sent me an email.

In it, he claimed his lawyer had filed an emergency court order authorizing him to keep the kids with him until the divorce and custody case were finalized, and that I would no longer be allowed to see them.

He sent this after he already had them.

Now, to understand the level of terror this caused, you need context, he refused to allow the children any communication devices. If I sent them with a phone, it would be confiscated immediately. They were never allowed to call me. The minute he had them, he blocked all my calls.

So I sat there all weekend with that email.

Wondering if he meant it.

Wondering if this was finally the moment he pushed the button.

If you’ve never lived through this kind of abuse, it’s hard to explain the psychological damage of being forced into uncertainty on purpose. The trauma isn’t just the threat itself, it’s the waiting. The endless back and forth in your own mind, Is this real? Is this another game? Should I act? Will acting make it worse?

That suspended terror is the abuse.

My children were supposed to be dropped off at school Monday morning.

Of course, they weren’t.

Because the performance wasn’t over yet.

He needed to see me scramble. He needed to imagine me crying, spiraling, terrified. He needed to feel my helplessness from afar because that was what gave him the sense of control he was always chasing.

And yes, for the record, I was terrified.

Because with people like this, there is always the possibility that the unthinkable becomes real.

The first person I called when I got that Friday email was my lawyer. He gave me one instruction, do not respond. Don’t text. Don’t email. Don’t feed it.

Wait.

This is what people now call the gray rock method, offering no emotional reaction, no visible panic, no fuel.

When the kids didn’t show up at school Monday, I called him again. He started drafting the emergency court response, but he also said something that has stayed with me ever since.

He told me he had seen this exact game played many times before.

Not just by my ex.

By men like him.

At around 3:00 that afternoon, my ex finally called.

As casually as if we were discussing the weather, he said he had simply decided the kids needed a day off from school and that he’d be dropping them off within the hour.

No mention of the email.

No acknowledgment of the terror he had deliberately inflicted.

Just the smooth, chilling act of pretending nothing had happened.

When my children arrived, they ran to me, smiling and excited to be home.

And all I could do was walk down my front steps smiling too, hugging them, laughing lightly, holding myself together, while he stood there watching, smirking, waiting for some sign that he had gotten to me.

I gave him nothing.

That was the gray rock.

And here’s the irony that still gets me, it was that very email, the one he sent to terrorize me, that I later handed to the court.

It became the evidence that caused him to lose full custody of his children.

For a time, that was the accountability.

The threat itself became the proof.

The performance became the exhibit.

His cruelty became his own paperwork.

Of course, years later, I made the decision to give 50 percent custody back, a decision I still sometimes shake my head at, but that is another story for another essay.

And I keep wondering what it would look like if we could impose some version of that on our dear leader.

Gray rocking works because it denies the narcissist what they crave most, spectacle, panic, obsession, endless reaction, emotional supply.

Part of me wishes the whole world could simply stop feeding it, stop saying his name, stop reposting the pictures, stop amplifying every manufactured crisis meant to keep all of us emotionally captive.

I even catch myself wishing the rest of the world could just let him rage into the void and refuse to play along, while somehow sparing the rest of us from being dragged through the consequences.

But unfortunately, that would require something impossible, 100 percent participation, not just from my fellow Americans, but from every government, every media outlet, every market, every adversary, every ally, every frightened citizen across the globe.

That is what makes political narcissism so much more dangerous than private narcissism.

In a marriage, gray rock can protect your peace.

On the world stage, someone is always incentivized to react.

Someone always takes the bait.

Someone always answers the provocation.

Someone always profits from the chaos.

So the supply never truly runs dry.

And here’s the part people like him never seem to understand, control has an expiration date.

You can terrorize people for a season, you can manipulate courtrooms, exploit loopholes, weaponize fear, and force everyone around you into survival mode. You can create chaos so intense that, for a while, it looks like power.

But children grow up.

They become old enough to replay the memories for themselves, old enough to recognize who created the fear in the room, old enough to separate truth from performance, old enough to see who loved them and who used them.

And when that day comes, distance becomes its own verdict.

Not because the courts stepped in, they rarely helped much at all.

Not because I poisoned them against him, I never had to.

Not because justice arrived in any official way.

It happens because truth is patient.

Eventually, children see the behaviors clearly, and they make their own choices about who feels safe, who feels honest, and who feels like home.

That is the consequence men like this never plan for.

The ultimate punishment is not legal, it is relational.

It is years later, realizing the control you fought so hard to keep cost you the very people you claimed to love.

It is watching your children build lives that no longer include you.

It is becoming a stranger to the people who once ran into your arms.

It is understanding too late that fear can force proximity, but it can never create love.

And in the end, the people who spend their lives manufacturing terror often arrive at the same destination, alone.

Not because anyone sentenced them there.

Because they built that ending themselves.

And maybe that is the question I keep coming back to when I look at Trump, his cabinet, and every Republican who enabled this culture of fear, what will their accountability be?

Because so far in modern American history, the closest thing we have seen to real presidential accountability was Watergate. Nixon resigned, and his attorney general, John Mitchell, went to prison for his role in the cover-up.

So what happens now?

What is the consequence for emotional abuse on a national scale, for financial abuse that destabilizes families, markets, and entire ways of life, for lies that are so constant they begin to feel like atmosphere?

A lost election does not feel like enough.

A bad news cycle does not feel like enough.

Retirement with a pension does not feel like enough.

I think it is time we start asking harder questions about real accountability, legal accountability, financial accountability, and civil accountability for every person who aided and benefited from this abuse.

Because when harm is this widespread, when entire populations are forced to live inside cycles of fear, destabilization, and economic punishment, why should accountability stop at the ballot box?

At some point, the country has to decide whether abuse of power is just politics, or whether it is harm with consequences.

Personally, I think it is time for consequences that are real.

Not symbolic.

Not rhetorical.

Real enough that no one ever mistakes cruelty for strategy again.

That looks like investigations.

It looks like financial liability for every person who aided and abetted the harm, every official, every donor, every strategist, every enabler who helped manufacture fear and profit from the damage it caused.

We live in a country where any one of us can be dragged into court for all sorts of harm, financial harm, emotional harm, reputational harm, civil harm.

And yet somehow the people we elect to safeguard the most precious things in the world, our families, our stability, our rights, our economy, our democracy, are treated as if accountability somehow stops at the edge of power.

Why?

Why should ordinary people face consequences while the people entrusted with the greatest responsibility get to walk away untouched after destabilizing entire lives?

That should be over.

That shit is time to be over.

Because fear should never be allowed to masquerade as leadership, and power should never function as immunity.

Me and Max on his first day of being human.

While we sip coffee, others wake to fear.

Ordinary mornings are a privilege millions do not have.

I’m sitting here with my morning coffee thinking about the ordinary rhythm of a day beginning.

I woke up, walked the dog, fed the cats, cleaned the kitty litter, and made some breakfast. The quiet little routines that start a day. The kinds of things people everywhere are doing right now. Parents getting kids ready for school, packing lunches, sitting in traffic thinking about the day ahead.

These small moments are so normal we barely notice them.

But this morning I keep thinking about the mothers in Iran.

While so many of us are moving through our ordinary routines, there are mothers waking up with a completely different kind of uncertainty. Mothers who do not know if their neighborhoods will still be standing tomorrow. Mothers who are listening for sirens or aircraft instead of alarm clocks. Mothers who are trying to keep their children calm in a world that suddenly feels unstable and dangerous.

And what is hardest to sit with is knowing that so much of this fear is created by the words and decisions of old white men we gave power to. Men who speak about entire nations and civilizations as if they are pieces on a chessboard. Men who can threaten the destruction of millions of people as if human lives were nothing more than leverage.

They will say it is about power. They will say it is about security. They will say it is about money or strategy.

But if you look closely, it rarely is.

Too often it feels like something much smaller and much sadder. The desperate performance of people who have spent their lives chasing the feeling of being important and never quite finding it. People who measure their worth through domination because they have never learned any other way to feel worthy.

This is also what happens when societies promote liars and cheats simply because they were born into the right family or carry the right last name. When wealth and privilege replace character and wisdom as the qualifications for power, we end up placing enormous decisions about human lives in the hands of people who were never truly prepared for that responsibility.

It becomes the psychology of the schoolyard bully. The bigger kid humiliating the smaller kid just to feel powerful for a moment.

And the truth about that kind of power is that it is never enough.

It is never enough destruction.

Never enough fear.

Never enough obedience.

Because the thing they are really trying to silence is the quiet voice inside themselves that knows they are not what they pretend to be. There mediocrity and failure eats their soul.

Meanwhile the people who would suffer most are not the politicians or the men giving speeches.

It is the mothers making breakfast for their children.

The parents trying to build ordinary lives.

The families who simply want to wake up, go to work, send their kids to school, and live without fear.

This morning as I sit here with my coffee after walking the dog and feeding the cats, I am painfully aware of how fragile these normal moments really are.

My thoughts are with the mothers in Iran today, and with every parent anywhere in the world who simply wants the ordinary peace of raising their children without the shadow of someone else’s ego hanging over their lives.

I saw this image in several places on social media the other day, and I went ahead and researched it and found out that it wasn’t accurate, but to the normal eye or the normal person one would never know we’ve become so used to looking AI, this one is easy to believe.

I was having a conversation over social media the other day with a fellow documentary filmmaker who is also an educator. On multiple occasions, she had mentioned using ChatGPT to help write a proposal and assist with other parts of her work. She spoke about it casually, almost as if it were simply another tool to make things easier.

I cautioned her that she might want to rely more on her own intelligence and strengths. She’s a brilliant writer and filmmaker, someone whose voice and ideas clearly don’t need a machine.

She responded that she was simply testing AI because she would eventually have to teach her students how to use it. “AI isn’t going anywhere,” she said.

And I remember thinking, that’s the moment.

That’s the moment when something begins to be normalized.

I don’t think she made that choice consciously. Most of us probably don’t when these moments happen. We tell ourselves we’re just adapting. We say this is the new thing we’ll all have to live with. We might as well get used to it.

But that is how normalization works.

It rarely arrives with a dramatic announcement. It happens gradually, through repetition. Something happens once and we react. It happens again and we argue. By the third or fourth time, we begin to feel exhausted. Eventually, it becomes part of the background noise of daily life. And once that happens, it becomes very difficult to reverse.

You can see this process everywhere.

Take immigration enforcement in the United States. Not long ago, images of federal agents pulling people from their homes or detaining people in the street would have dominated national conversation for weeks. Today it barely registers for many people, even though these actions continue daily across the country.

People are still being detained. Families are still being separated. Raids are still happening.

But we don’t talk about it as much anymore.

Part of that is exhaustion. Part of it is overwhelm. When events keep coming one after another, it becomes impossible to hold all of them in our attention at once. That overwhelm is part of the strategy. When the public is constantly reacting to the next headline, it becomes easier for yesterday’s outrage to fade quietly into the background. And that fading is exactly how normalization works.

History shows this pattern again and again.

In the years leading up to the atrocities of World War II, many people in Germany did not initially support the most extreme actions of the regime. But policies changed step by step. Restrictions appeared gradually. Language shifted slowly. Each new development built on the last until things that once would have been unimaginable had become part of daily life.

A similar dynamic existed during the era of Jim Crow in the United States. Plenty of Americans knew that segregation and racial violence were wrong. Yet many convinced themselves there was nothing they could do, or that speaking up carried too much personal risk. Others absorbed the propaganda until the system felt normal.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable. That adaptability is often a strength, but it also means we can become accustomed to things that should never feel normal.

Which is why small moments matter.

My conversation with my colleague was one of those moments. It was quiet, ordinary, and subtle. Yet it revealed how easy it is to accept something because it feels inevitable rather than question it.

Normalization doesn’t require agreement. It only requires enough people to stop resisting.

That is how it works. Something happens once and we react. It happens again and we argue. It happens again and we grow tired. Eventually, we stop talking about it altogether.

And that silence is mistaken for acceptance.

History is full of moments when people looked back and asked, how did we let things get this far?

But the truth is, those moments were not invisible when they were happening. They were right in front of people, in conversations, headlines, and everyday choices.

The real danger is not what shocks us.

The real danger is what eventually stops shocking us at all.

generated images

Part of my little porch garden.

Further Adventures in Shopping Locally Owned in a Big City

This morning I woke up to the news and thought, well, apparently life wasn’t weird and stressful enough already. The universe must have looked at us and said, let’s see how much chaos they can handle before someone starts hoarding toilet paper again.

I spent about twelve years of my life married into full-on survivalist mode. Underground storage, five years of food, enough canned beans to survive the apocalypse with a small neighborhood, the works. I eventually escaped that lifestyle, but like any long relationship, you don’t leave empty-handed. You pick up habits, skills, and a mild paranoia that makes you stock beans just in case.

These days, I’m trying really hard not to exist entirely in survivalist mode. I want to enjoy life without measuring every grocery run in “how many days of apocalypse will this last.” So I do little things. I buy a few extra groceries here and there, I plant a garden on my balcony and front stoop, and I daydream about meals that taste great the next day so I don’t have to cook every night.

My balcony garden is basically optimism in pots. I’ve got cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, spinach, and strawberries. A tiny produce aisle that somehow fits on fifteen square feet.

This morning, during what I now limit to a five-minute doom scroll, I had a wild idea: I wanted to make a pot roast. Yes, it’s ridiculous for two people, but I’ve been trying to cook smart, making meals that last a few days and actually taste better the next day. I want to cook two or three times a week and remix leftovers like a culinary DJ.

I also want to shop locally as much as possible. I still hit the big box stores for essentials, like kitty litter and toilet paper, because modern life demands it. But for everything else, I try to support little markets and nurseries. Today I needed seeds for cucumbers and green beans and wanted some strawberries, so I ventured across town to a part of Los Angeles that reminded me a lot of Mexico City, and I mean that in the best possible way. Bustling streets, vendors, independent shops, people toing and going from every direction.

Abuelas stroll by with carts and grocery bags, teenagers head to the basketball court, and right next to them a Mercedes and a Tesla glide past. It’s chaotic, beautiful, and real, exactly what a city should feel like. And I thought, is this the kind of life the right are afraid of? Every day people existing, everybody minding their own business, unbothered by what we’re wearing, what language we speak, or what color our skin is. What’s so fucking scary?

I stopped at a nursery, grabbed my seeds and strawberries, and then went to a little market I know for its fantastic meat. The parking lot was packed and inside, even more so. I waited in line for a cart like it was the opening scene of a grocery-store adventure game. Signs in three languages, fruit and vegetables from every corner of the world, spices I can’t pronounce. The place was the United Nations of groceries.

At the butcher counter, I couldn’t find a chuck roast. One of the butchers was standing there, but he didn’t speak English. I pulled up a picture on my phone and showed him. His face lit up like I had just handed him backstage passes to a concert. He smiled, pointed behind the glass, and asked “¿Qué más?” How much. After a little charade, I realized he was asking how many people I was feeding. “Dos,” I said.

He looked at me and the giant piece of chuck roast I was pointing at and gave me a funny look, like, ma’am… are the two people professional linebackers? I tried to explain in broken Spanish, “Muchos días,” and he paused, then grinned and said the one English word he clearly knew: leftovers. We both laughed. I walked away with a fantastic piece of meat and the satisfaction of having successfully navigated a small international incident and gotten exactly what I needed.

While I was there, I grabbed a little Easter treat for my daughter. She’s almost twenty-two but still loves an egg hunt. Instead of prepackaged chocolate that tastes like sweetened wax, there were freshly baked goods and little chocolate eggs made right there. She loved it.

Shopping locally turns errands into adventures. Farmers markets, little stores with names I can’t pronounce, bakeries that smell like heaven. It makes me feel alive, surrounded by good people, and reminded that life doesn’t always have to be survivalist serious.

I remembered once in Minnesota, I told a waitress in a small town I was from Los Angeles. Her eyes went wide. “No wonder you moved here,” she said. “It’s so unsafe there.” I laughed. I actually feel safer there than I do here. When you actually do the math and compare crime statistics proportionally, her tiny town and Los Angeles were remarkably similar. But most people outside these worlds never do the math. They just hear the stories over and over until the story becomes the truth.

Back on my little balcony farm, I planted my seeds. Maybe they’ll be bonus vegetables. Maybe one day we’ll actually need them. Either way, if I end up eating the occasional cucumber while my pot roast leftovers heat up, I’ll consider that a pretty good life, a lot more fun than living fully in survivalist mode, and proof that sometimes the simplest adventures are the best ones.

Here’s a random survivalist tips, especially if you have limited storage space:

Ramen noodles in the little packs, those things will survive the apocalypse, no doubt.

The box containers of broth, low sodium, beef, chicken, and if you don’t eat meat, vegetable. This is great if for some reason you have limited water resources, you can still cook your noodles and they taste better. They’re usually good stored in a cupboard for like a year.

Lots of spices. Besides salt and pepper, even if it’s the random mixes of spices.

Frozen veggies.

And if you can afford it, one of those emergency charging stations. You can get them for like 60 bucks, sometimes the nicer ones are about $100. I leave two plugged in at all times, so if the power goes out, I can at least plug in a little lamp, charge my phone or whatever little electricity needs I might have.

A Britta water filter. I also have 6 to 8 large bottles of water stored in a closet that I rotate out. Just in case.

Drawing by www.heidizinart.com

Spinning Back Together: Beauty in the Broken

With all the ugliness in the world lately, I’ve been craving reminders of something else, something deeper, quieter, and more powerful.

Beauty.

Resilience.

The way the human spirit finds a way back.

That’s why I wanted to share the work of my dear friend and client, Heidi Zin. She creates some of the most extraordinary pieces of art I’ve ever encountered, pieces that come straight from the heart and soul. When you know the story behind them, they become even more powerful.

Imagine being at the height of doing the thing you love most. It flows from your body, your heart, your creativity. It’s part of who you are.

And then in an instant, it’s gone.

That’s what happened to Heidi.

A tragic accident left her with a traumatic brain injury and the loss of the use of her arms. Overnight, the life she knew, and the way she created art, disappeared.

Most people would have accepted that as the end of the story.

But Heidi didn’t.

Instead, she began again, slowly, painfully, courageously. She learned how to paint and draw with her feet. She rebuilt not just her creative practice, but her entire relationship to her body, to movement, and to expression.

Her journey is captured in a stunning coffee table book that traces this transformation, from the moment everything changed to the moment she found her way back to creating the powerful work she makes today.

One of my favorite pieces of hers is called The Spin.

There’s something about this image that stops me every time I see it.

Maybe it’s the sense of motion.

Maybe it’s the feeling of breaking apart and coming back together at the same time.

Or maybe it’s because it reminds me that even when I feel like I’m spinning, broken in so many ways, there is still a way to come back together beautifully.

The Art: I Am Kintsugi, The Spin

This drawing measures 30” x 40” and is framed in a lightweight white frame with plexiglass and acid free mounting. It is hermetically sealed in the back to preserve the work.

Heidi created the piece using powdered graphite, various pencils, and Prismacolor, with 24 carat gold leaf applied to the arms.

The inspiration behind the piece comes from the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold. Instead of hiding the cracks, the repairs are highlighted, transforming the object into something new, often more beautiful and more valuable than the original.

That philosophy became a metaphor for Heidi’s own journey of putting herself back together.

In the drawing, a dahlia flower, one of Heidi’s favorites, emerges as a central symbol. If you follow the stem downward, you’ll notice roots growing into the abdominal area of the figure, representing new growth and regeneration.

Heidi even dipped real dahlias into watered graphite, pressing them onto the paper to create prints of the flowers. These were cut out and layered into the composition, orbiting around the figure as she spins.

Look closely into the sky and you will begin to notice hidden forms.

Birds, whales, turtles, alligators, flower pods, cats, and dolphins appear within the movement of the piece, all creatures from nature that inspire Heidi and remind her of the beauty she continually returns to.

The image itself begins with Heidi tracing her own body. From there she refines and reshapes the flow of the form. The composition reveals multiple layers, the female body, the profile of a face, and shapes that transform into animals as the image expands outward.

The entire drawing took two months of focused work, and it is part of her larger I AM series, a body of work that references the universal energy connecting all living things.

Supporting Independent Art

The original piece is available for purchase for $5,000, and prints are also available in a variety of sizes.

www.heidizinart.com

With Mother’s Day coming up, this would make an extraordinary and meaningful gift, but honestly any day is a perfect day to bring a piece like this into your home.

Because when you support an independent artist, you are not just buying art.

You are supporting a story, a journey, and a human being who refused to give up on beauty.

And sometimes that reminder is exactly what we need.

Especially right now.

I no longer use AI to create photos or images that represent my essays, so I just find pictures of my real life and if you think about it, this is a epically perfect example of the spirituality and wellness industry. They sell you happiness while dangling you above treacherous seas, where you can drop into peril at any moment.

I recently read a post by where she spoke about how difficult it is to understand how we got here as a culture and politically.

But the truth is, it’s not actually that difficult to understand.

For decades we have been telling people something very specific inside the spirituality and wellness industry: you create your reality. That idea has been repeated so often that it became almost unquestionable doctrine.

Well, if that’s true, then we created this reality. We don’t really get to spend decades telling people they create their reality and then suddenly act shocked by the reality we’re living in.

To be fair, I was part of the beginning of that wave. My film What the Bleep Do We Know!? helped launch a cultural moment that I believed at the time could do some real good. The intention was to encourage people to think differently about consciousness and their relationship to the world.

What’s interesting is that before that moment, the global value of the spirituality and wellness industry was barely even measured. It was so small it wasn’t seriously tracked as a major economic sector. But from 2004 until now, the spirituality and wellness industry has exploded into an estimated six-trillion-dollar-a-year global industry, one of the fastest growing industries on record.

Ironically, it’s an industry built around telling people how to fix themselves.

And yet here we are.

You can draw a pretty clear line from that cultural shift to The Secret and the explosion of prosperity spirituality that followed. Complex spiritual ideas about consciousness and self-awareness were flattened into a simple formula: you create your reality, you are a master, you are essentially a god, and if you think the right thoughts the universe will rearrange itself in your favor.

The spirituality and wellness industry took that message and turned it into a marketplace. What was once about genuine self-inquiry became a monetized ecosystem. Anyone could become a healer after a weekend certification. Anyone could start a program, charge a thousand dollars, hand someone a certificate declaring them a master, and suddenly they were positioned as an authority.

At the same time another narrative began to grow inside the spirituality and wellness industry. Don’t trust institutions. Don’t trust science. Don’t trust medicine. Don’t trust the government. Trust the guru, the influencer, the healer who claims they know the truth that “they” are hiding from you.

Over time that messaging created a large group of deeply disillusioned people who were constantly told they possessed secret knowledge while everyone else was being deceived. The anti-vaccine movement found fertile ground in this environment. So did endless conspiracy theories, pseudo-science, and the belief that reading the right book or taking the right course somehow made someone an expert in fields like medicine or epidemiology.

The culture of superiority was subtle but powerful. You’re not just learning something new, you’re part of the awakened minority. You know what others don’t know.

That mindset didn’t stay inside the spirituality and wellness industry.

It spilled directly into politics.

A large portion of the audience that had spent years being told that institutions were corrupt, experts were lying, and they possessed special knowledge was already primed to reject traditional authority. When someone came along validating that worldview, the bridge had already been built.

Enter Donald Trump.

Trump rose to national fame through The Apprentice, a show built on manufactured narratives. Reality television is carefully edited performance presented as authenticity. Image replaces substance. Confidence replaces competence.

In many ways that formula wasn’t unfamiliar to audiences that had spent decades consuming the personality-driven messaging of the spirituality and wellness industry.

If you step back and look at it objectively, Trump is not that different from figures like Tony Robbins, Jack Canfield, Marianne Williamson, or Deepak Chopra. Smooth talkers presented as authorities. Charismatic personalities positioned as experts largely because they project certainty and confidence.

The spirituality and wellness industry has perfected that model for decades. Elevate the personality. Package the message as revelation. Tell the audience they are part of an enlightened minority who finally understand the truth.

When a political movement appeared that spoke the same language — distrust institutions, reject expertise, trust your intuition over evidence — millions of people were already conditioned to respond to it.

This is also where the modern MAHA movement finds much of its cultural DNA. Years of anti-vaccine messaging, distrust of science, and the belief that personal intuition is superior to institutional knowledge created the psychological foundation for it.

Which brings us back to that six-trillion-dollar question.

A six-trillion-dollar industry dedicated to helping people heal, awaken, and transform themselves should arguably be producing a more conscious, more compassionate, and more grounded society.

Instead we seem to be living in a moment where people are more anxious, more divided, more narcissistic, and more distrustful of each other than at any point in recent memory.

If the central promise of the spirituality and wellness industry was that people could transform themselves and thereby transform the world, then it’s fair to ask a difficult question.

How is it that a six-trillion-dollar industry devoted to human awakening appears to have produced a culture that feels more fractured and disoriented than ever?

If we have spent decades telling people they create their reality, and this is the reality we have collectively created, then it’s hard to avoid a very uncomfortable conclusion.

The spirituality and wellness industry didn’t just fail to solve the problem.

In many ways, it helped create it.

Stop Letting Language Play You

Language is a weapon. Not the obvious kind with swords or lightsabers. The sneaky, invisible kind that makes you nod along while your brain quietly files for unemployment. If you do not notice it, it will manipulate you faster than a TikTok trend you did not even want to follow.

Case in point. Donald Trump recently tweeted he wants to get rid of Obamacare because what he really wants to do is “put money in the hands of everyday Americans so they can take care of their own health insurance.”

I stared at that sentence like it personally insulted me. Because here’s the thing. It literally means nothing. It is like saying I will solve world hunger by giving everyone forks. Sure, sounds nice, but the problem is not that people do not have forks. The problem is that the system is broken.

Obamacare actually reduces insurance costs. It makes insurance companies follow rules instead of just charging whatever the hell they want. It gives people coverage instead of sending them bankrupting bills for a cold. Take it away, and suddenly your “money in your hands” just buys you the privilege of getting screwed by insurance companies. Sounds empowering, right? Sure, if you are a fan of getting played.

This is classic manipulation 101. Confuse people enough so they cannot tell whether they are being helped or sold snake oil. Make them question themselves instead of the system. Confusion is control. Confusion is power. It is the same energy as reality TV making you care who got voted off The Bachelor while corporations quietly steal your retirement.

Now, while we are at it, look at the conversations you are having every day—with your boss, your life coach, your car mechanic. They are probably better at this than you realize. That’s right. The car mechanic saying, “Yeah, we should probably check your alignment,” while quietly charging you for a full suspension rebuild. Your boss dropping a “synergy” bomb in the middle of a meeting while quietly passing the blame. Your life coach going full therapy-speak with, “Let’s reflect on your processing integration,” while subtly making you feel inadequate. These people are basically linguistic ninjas. And if you are not paying attention, they are slicing your attention span into little pieces.

So here’s the thing. Stop letting language dress itself up in glittery, useless therapy-speak and soft corporate jargon. Stop saying “I am processing that” when you mean “I do not get it.” Stop dropping “integration” and “alignment” into every conversation like you are running a corporate retreat instead of having a conversation with another human being. Stop pretending “What I am hearing you say is…” is deep listening. It is the verbal equivalent of a participation trophy.

If someone really understood you, they would not need to repeat your words back like a parrot at a TED Talk. They would respond to the meaning, not the buzzwords. But here is the thing. People love this stuff. It is like emotional glitter—sparkly, shiny, and totally useless. Words like “synergy,” “value-add,” “leveraging,” or “processing and integration” make you feel smart while accomplishing exactly nothing. Therapy-speak like “I hear you” or “let me reflect back” gives the illusion of care, but often the person saying it is just waiting to drop their next point like it is a Kardashian Instagram caption.

And do not even get me started on the way language softens horrifying realities. “Sex with a minor” sounds clinical. “Rape of a child” sounds like a police report and probably makes your stomach want to quit life. Yet institutions insist on using the first because it is softer. It is easier to talk about and harder to get angry at. Words have power, but some words are designed to rob you of moral clarity.

Speaking of moral clarity, I hear people complain that my essays are harsh or mean. Okay, fine. I am sarcastic. But mostly I am direct. I use words that mean what they say. Sentences that do not require a thesaurus or a life coach to decode. That makes people uncomfortable because most of us are trained from birth to avoid clarity.

This is not just a personal gripe. Look at how countries talk about themselves. I posted on Facebook that maybe the next time someone says Iran is evil, we should check ourselves. Cue angry Americans clinging to the comforting lie that we are the righteous superheroes of the planet. The narrative goes, America spreads democracy, defeats dictators, liberates oppressed people. Reality. We often ally with dictators, destabilize entire regions, and occasionally invade a country because apparently it is a fun Tuesday. But do not worry, the narrative is shiny and moral and makes us feel superior. Language did that.

So here is the takeaway. Stop listening to the words. Start listening to what is not being said. Notice which words are designed to confuse you or make you feel good without actually solving anything. Question whether the “good” being presented is really good or just a distraction.

Here is how to start reading and listening like you are an eighth grade English teacher without crushing anyone’s dreams.

Tip one. Look for vague verbs and shiny nouns. Words like empower, leverage, optimize, align. Whenever someone uses these, ask yourself, what is actually happening here? Chances are, nothing.

Tip two. Check the grammar for responsibility. Who is doing what? If a sentence is all passive voice, like “mistakes were made” or “money will be put in your hands,” run. That is someone trying to hide who is accountable.

Tip three. Ask what is left out. If someone talks about giving you money but never mentions insurance companies, rules, or costs, you are being distracted. Always ask what they are not saying.

Tip four. Watch for performance listening. If someone repeats back your words or uses a bunch of therapist-sounding phrases, they might not be hearing you at all. Real listening is responding to meaning, not showing off your acting chops.

Tip five. Question the narrative. When a country, a company, or a politician tells you a story, do not swallow it. Who benefits if you believe it? Who is quietly getting away with something else?

Next time someone says, “We are giving you money to handle your own insurance,” nod slowly, smile, and quietly roll your eyes. You just decoded their little word game.

Language does not just communicate. It seduces, confuses, and manipulates. If you are not paying attention, you are basically a puppet watching the strings dance above you, thinking you are in control.

Pay attention. Read between the lines. Question everything. Or just enjoy being bamboozled. Your choice.

This is moose… He wants you to have a little more discernment.

I was having a conversation the other day about the monetization of spirituality, which is a polite way of saying the internet has turned enlightenment into a subscription service.

You know the ecosystem. The New Age influencer economy, the wellness industrial complex, the coaching universe where someone has a personal breakthrough while journaling in Bali on Tuesday and by Friday they are selling a $999 “activation container” designed to unlock the divine CEO within your nervous system.

And the funny thing is, the people buying most of this stuff are not the kids.

It’s us.

Gen X, Boomers, and a generous slice of older millennials. We’re the ones wandering through the digital bazaar of enlightenment like slightly confused pilgrims hoping someone will finally sell us the correct map to the meaning of life.

Which honestly makes sense when you look at how we were raised.

Most of us grew up in systems that trained us to look outside ourselves for answers. Religion did it, education did it, politics definitely did it. The cultural message was basically this, someone somewhere has figured everything out, and your job is to listen carefully and absorb the wisdom from whoever happens to be standing on the slightly taller box.

Preferably someone with a microphone.

Or a robe.

Or a laminated certificate from the University of Trust Me Bro.

Humans love authority figures. We like the idea that somewhere out there is a calm, confident adult who actually knows what the hell is going on and will kindly explain the rules of the universe to the rest of us.

Preferably in a book.

Or a seminar.

Or a twelve week transformational mastermind where you will finally align your energy with abundance for the low introductory price of $1,444, payment plans available, enlightenment not included.

Then the internet showed up and basically handed the megaphone to everyone.

Suddenly anyone could build an audience, anyone could start a podcast, anyone could wake up on a random Tuesday, drink a mushroom latte, and decide they are now a life coach.

Some of these people are thoughtful and genuinely helpful. Some are great communicators who make complicated ideas easier to understand.

And some of them are, let’s be honest, absolute charlatans with a ring light, a Canva template, and the unshakable confidence of a golden retriever wearing a crown.

Meanwhile Gen Z grew up in a completely different reality.

They are the first fully digital generation, which means they didn’t just hear about celebrities or influencers, they watched their entire lives unfold online in real time like a never ending reality show called Humans Making Questionable Choices.

They watched people become famous overnight on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

More importantly, they watched those same people crash and burn just as quickly.

Influencers rise, influencers peak, influencers implode, the internet grabs popcorn and moves on. Sometimes that entire cycle happens in three or four years, which is roughly the lifespan of a moderately successful TikTok guru and also several Hollywood marriages.

Kids watched this happen while they were still in middle school. People they followed religiously on YouTube would explode into fame and then, just as quickly, get dragged through the 24 hour internet news cycle when something messy surfaced.

One minute someone is the glowing oracle of makeup tutorials and life wisdom.

The next minute they are sitting on the floor in a hoodie whispering into a webcam about “taking accountability.”

When you’re twelve and you watch that happen to someone you thought was basically a digital demigod, you learn something pretty quickly.

The people on the pedestal are just people.

Some are talented.

Some are messy.

Some are both.

But none of them are the all knowing mystical beings we sometimes imagine them to be.

A lot of Gen Z kids got that lesson before they even finished middle school, which is honestly a pretty efficient timeline compared to the rest of us.

And just in case that crash course in influencer reality wasn’t enough, the universe handed them one more cultural masterclass, the pandemic.

Imagine being a teenager and watching the entire adult population suddenly transform into self appointed epidemiologists overnight.

Facebook doctors appeared like mushrooms after rain. Podcast virologists emerged with tremendous confidence. TikTok scientists began explaining global health policy in ninety second clips while dancing aggressively at the camera.

Everyone had opinions.

Everyone had certainty.

Very few had actual training.

From the outside it must have looked like the grown ups collectively lost the plot and started playing medical improv on the internet.

And the interesting thing is the takeaway for a lot of younger people wasn’t that nobody knows anything. If anything many of them came away with the opposite conclusion, actual expertise matters.

They respect licensed therapists. They talk about mental health in ways previous generations never did. They seem to understand the difference between someone sharing personal insight online and someone who actually went to school for a very long time and has a framed degree instead of a Canva quote graphic.

At the same time they are not especially interested in building giant pedestals for people.

They follow creators they like. They listen to different perspectives. Some of them enjoy astrology or tarot or other spiritual frameworks.

But they treat those things more like interesting tools than sacred instruction manuals for the universe.

Meanwhile a lot of people my age are still wandering around the internet like slightly frazzled spiritual tourists hoping the next guru might finally crack the code.

Gen Z seems to be starting from a different premise.

They have spent their entire lives watching authority figures get things wrong in very public ways. They have seen influencers rise and fall before they even finished middle school. They have watched adults argue on the internet with the confidence of prophets and the accuracy of a drunk weather app.

And let’s just acknowledge the obvious.

Gen Z looks at anyone born before them with a mixture of mild disdain and exhausted disbelief.

And honestly, fair enough.

The world they are inheriting is pretty spectacularly fucked up. Climate anxiety, economic instability, political chaos, a permanently online culture that occasionally feels like a group chat run by raccoons.

This is the backdrop of their coming of age.

So if you grew up inside that landscape you might reasonably ask why you should automatically trust the generations who built it.

Instead they question things.

They filter information.

They listen, but they don’t automatically hand over authority.

And frankly a lot of them don’t have the luxury of chasing enlightenment packages on the internet anyway.

This is not the generation of “manifest abundance and think positive.”

This is the generation of “I’m trying to pay rent and find a job that has health insurance and doesn’t slowly eat my soul.”

They don’t need your $999 cosmic awakening container.

They have group chats.

They have friends.

They have twenty people in a Discord thread collectively trying to figure out taxes, therapy, relationships, and whether oat milk counts as a personality trait.

It’s basically a decentralized emotional support system powered by memes, caffeine, and the shared understanding that nobody actually knows what the hell they’re doing.

Which honestly might be a better model than most of the guru economy.

Because it starts from a refreshingly honest premise.

Nobody actually has the entire map of reality figured out.

Wisdom exists, experience matters, expertise is real and valuable. But the idea that one charismatic person somewhere has the answer to everything lands very differently with a generation that has spent its entire life watching authority figures confidently sprint in the wrong direction on the internet.

And that might be the healthiest starting point anyone could have in a world full of influencers, gurus, coaches, mystics, and extremely confident people selling certainty online.

Because if the last decade has taught us anything, it’s this.

Anyone claiming to have the final answer to everything is almost certainly trying to sell you something.

Usually for $999.

Imagine this moment, if you will.

I drive an hour and a half to a repair shop in my old neighborhood because when you’re a woman with an older car, trusting mechanics is basically like playing financial Russian roulette with a socket wrench.

And technically it’s not even my car. It’s my daughter’s car. Which means my maternal instincts are in full mama-bear-with-a-credit-card mode.

So I go to the one mechanic I actually trust. He’s always flirting with me a little, but whatever, if a man wants to flirt while charging me $100 instead of the $700 Hollywood “because you’re a woman” tax, he can wink all he wants.

He tells me the repairs will take about two and a half hours.

Fine.

So I park myself at a coffee shop 40 steps away like a sun-bleached lizard with Wi-Fi, working on my laptop while the Southern California sun slowly tries to turn me into artisan jerky.

Two and a half hours later I call.

The owner says, “Oh yeah, we’re waiting on a part… probably another two or three hours.”

Cool. Fantastic. Love that for me.

So I Uber four miles away… which in suburban Los Angeles apparently costs the same as a minor dental procedure.

I settle into another spot with better internet and a smoking patio. I’ve just gotten comfortable when Mr. Flirty Mechanic texts me.

“Hey, your car will be ready in about 30 minutes.”

Oh.

Oh fantastic.

So now I’ve taken a luxury Uber field trip across town for absolutely no reason, and I’m mentally calculating the cost of the return ride like I’m budgeting for a small moon landing.

Then he texts again: “Where are you? Maybe I can pick you up.”

And I think, okay… that’s actually nice.

So he comes and gets me.

And I slide into this tiny BMW loaner car from the shop, one of those small ones where the center console is basically a polite suggestion of personal space. We are very much sharing oxygen in this vehicle.

We’re driving back and suddenly this man launches into what can only be described as the Financial Stability PowerPoint Presentation. He’s talking about his retirement savings. His investments. How financially secure he is. How he might move back to Utah someday.

Sir.

Why are you giving me your 401(k) origin story like you’re Bruce Wayne of compound interest?

You already know what I do for a living. You know I’ve told you multiple times: please do not discover new things wrong with my car because I cannot afford that shit.

And then… out of nowhere… this man sighs and says,

“I feel really bad that I voted for Trump twice.”

Now internally my brain does that cartoon record scratch.

Because suddenly I realize this man thinks he’s confessing something vulnerable and I’m supposed to give him emotional absolution in this moving BMW therapy session.

But buddy, I’m not your priest. And this car is not a confession booth.

The silence that came out of me when he said he voted for Trump not once, but twice must have been screaming all over my face and my body. Because in my head I was thinking, wow… you were so against the idea of a Black woman being president that you voted for a rapist. Twice.

But of course I didn’t say any of that. I’m locked in a car with a dude who literally voted for a rapist over a woman…

Because here’s the thing about being a woman: when you’re sitting in a very small car with a man who just admitted he voted for Trump twice, your brain immediately switches into personal safety mode.

And for anyone who thinks that’s an overreaction… um… no.

Women know exactly what that calculation feels like. When you’re alone in a small space with a man and something suddenly feels off, you don’t start a political debate. You start managing the situation.

You nod.

You keep things calm.

You let the car keep moving toward your destination.

Because some dudes are normal.

And some dudes… vote for Trump twice…

And the whole point is you don’t find out which one you’re dealing with while you’re trapped in the passenger seat.

So I let him keep talking.

He starts explaining how during COVID he got sucked into all this stuff online — propaganda, misinformation, how everyone was terrible, how he didn’t see through it at the time.

The political equivalent of someone explaining how they accidentally joined a pyramid scheme because the brochure had nice colors.

Dude… for real?!

Still locked in a small BMW with him…

So I toss out the gentlest possible intellectual life raft.

I say, “You should watch this documentary called The Great Hack.”

Just casually. Like I’m recommending a cooking show.

Because if he’s starting to realize he got manipulated by propaganda, that documentary is basically Propaganda Awareness 101.

He nods.

Then eventually it comes out that his kids aren’t speaking to him right now because of all of this.

And that’s when I realize something else.

He was testing the waters. He was like dipping his toe in to see if I would still accept him after his other failure at basic critical thinking in humanity.

I’m actually not sure if this dude was about to ask me out or not. I mean… I think he might have been. He seemed like he was kind of circling the runway for that landing.

But the energy had completely changed.

Because at that point I wasn’t being polite.

I was being strategically calm for my own safety.

We pull into the shop parking lot and the conversation kind of dies.

He hands me the keys to the car.

And then he just… stands there for a second.

Like he’s waiting for something.

Maybe a comment.

Maybe sympathy.

Maybe validation.

Maybe a “we should grab coffee sometime.”

And I just looked at him and said,

“Well dude… thanks for fixing my car. Peace out.”

And I left.

Because honestly… what the fuck was I supposed to say to that man?

With everything going on lately you might have missed this little moment of dystopian comedy.

The other day Melania Trump walked down a hallway in the White House at an education summit, alongside a robot teacher.

She looked genuinely excited, or at least as excited as Melania ever looks, which is roughly the emotional range of a Roomba that just found a dust bunny.

For a brief moment I honestly couldn’t tell which one was the robot.

Anyway apparently they were showcasing the future of education. Buckle up folks.

Because if this is the future I’m picturing little Johnny coming home from school like this.

“Hello mother, today I learned that 1 + 1 = 2, emotional responses are unnecessary, please insert snack.”

Just standing there, blinking slowly, waiting for a software update.

Now here’s the funny part.

You know how Republicans, especially the loudest Christian nationalists, are constantly screaming that teachers are indoctrinating our kids.

Right.

Apparently indoctrination means teachers do radical dangerous things like showing empathy, encouraging curiosity, helping kids think creatively, teaching respect for other people.

Absolutely terrifying stuff apparently.

To them the problem with teachers is that they bring humanity into the classroom.

And that seems to be exactly the thing a lot of Silicon Valley tech billionaires think we should remove from education entirely.

Take Elon Musk.

This is one of the richest men on Earth, a guy who has repeated the idea that empathy is basically a weakness.

Empathy.

You know, the thing that makes human society function.

And this is the guy people want designing the future of education.

Let’s pause on that for a second.

The same Elon Musk who didn’t exactly build his fortune by patiently mentoring children through long division. The same Elon Musk who mostly buys companies, slaps his name on them, and then spends the rest of the time posting memes at 2 a.m. like a bored teenager with unlimited WiFi.

But sure, let’s have that guy tell teachers how classrooms should work.

And he’s not alone.

Look at Peter Thiel, undeniably intelligent, wildly influential, and deeply committed to the idea that empathy and democracy are inconvenient obstacles to the future he’d prefer.

If you were casting the tech world as a movie, Thiel would absolutely be the villain in the glass tower calmly explaining why messy human feelings are inefficient and must be removed from the system.

Except this isn’t a movie.

This is venture capital.

Because here’s the quiet part they’re now saying out loud.

Replacing teachers with robots isn’t just about education.

It’s about replacing people.

Robots are cheap labor, robots don’t need salaries, robots don’t get sick, robots don’t unionize, robots don’t demand better working conditions.

Once you normalize robot teachers the rest comes fast.

Robot nurses.

Robot therapists.

Robot caregivers in nursing homes.

Robot customer service agents.

Robot drivers.

Robot warehouse workers.

Robot retail clerks.

Robot journalists.

Robot artists.

Robot everything.

A whole economy where the robots do the work and the billionaires who own them collect the profits.

And the rest of us are just… living in the algorithm.

But here’s the problem with their brilliant little plan.

Education isn’t software.

Kids aren’t code.

And teachers aren’t replaceable hardware.

Both of my parents were teachers, decades in classrooms, everything from kindergartners figuring out which crayon tastes the least like wax to grad students wrestling with big ideas.

They didn’t just teach math and spelling.

They inspired kids, they encouraged imagination, they noticed when a student was struggling, they helped kids believe they could do something bigger with their lives.

You don’t get that from a motherboard.

Just the other day I got an email from a woman in her 80s telling me my dad had taught her son years ago and how much it meant to their family.

That’s what teachers do.

Their influence doesn’t end when the bell rings, it echoes for decades.

My own kids talk about certain teachers they’ve had so far, not just the ones who explained math well but the ones who made them feel seen.

A robot can’t do that.

A robot doesn’t notice the quiet kid in the back of the room having a rough day.

A robot doesn’t encourage a kid to take a chance on their creativity.

A robot doesn’t inspire a kid to believe they can change the world.

Look, technology absolutely belongs in education, kids should learn it, understand it, and use it.

But turning education over to machines isn’t innovation.

It’s what happens when people who fundamentally don’t understand human relationships try to redesign society like it’s just another app.

Education isn’t just about teaching kids that 1 + 1 = 2.

It’s about teaching them how to be human.

And if the future of society is being designed by tech bros who think empathy is weakness and human connection is inefficient, maybe the real problem isn’t teachers.

Maybe the real plan isn’t better education. Maybe it’s a future designed by men who don’t understand human connection, trying to automate the rest of us into the same lonely system they built for themselves.

BTW – next month I have to make a payment for my son’s college education, so if you want to support educators and education! You could become a paid subscriber to my Substack!

My trauma specialist- Cleopatra

The other night I walked down to my favorite little bar in my neighborhood. It’s one of those places I can get to on foot, bring a book or my laptop, order an espresso martini, and settle in to read or work for a while. At least that’s the plan most nights.

The funny thing is, when I go there I rarely end up doing much work at all. A wonderful cast of neighborhood characters tends to gather at the same bar stools, and conversation usually wins.

The other night the cast happened to include two men who were psychiatrists.

One of them noticed the book I was carrying, a Dan Brown novel about a sweeping discovery involving consciousness. He pointed at it and asked what I thought of it.

I laughed and told him the truth. I said I was having a really hard time getting through it. It felt a little clunky and heavy, even though I understood most of what he was talking about. It just seemed like he felt the need to explain everything a little too much.

The man thought for a moment and said, have you ever seen that strange little movie from about twenty years ago about quantum physics?

I started laughing.

Are you talking about What the Bleep Do We Know?

He nodded.

I took a sip of my drink and said, well, I made that movie.

He looked at me for a second as if he wasn’t quite sure he had heard me correctly. Then his face lit up in disbelief.

What followed was one of those long, wandering conversations you only get in neighborhood bars. We talked about consciousness, quantum physics, the nature of reality, and the strange places where science and philosophy start to blur together.

Eventually the conversation drifted toward something else, the way ideas about psychology, spirituality, and healing get packaged and sold.

At one point I mentioned something I’ve said for years, that whenever anything with real depth starts becoming popular, it often gets flattened into something faster, simpler, and easier to sell. The nuance disappears and suddenly it’s being served up like fast food.

I’ve come to think of it as the McDonaldization of complex ideas.

To be fair, I know that doctors often get frustrated when patients come into therapy armed with whatever book or podcast they just consumed. But I didn’t get that energy from these two men at all. They seemed thoughtful, curious, and genuinely invested in the people they worked with.

What they did talk about, though, was something they encounter constantly in their practices, having to slowly unravel the diagnosis their patients had already given themselves after reading a bestselling book or hearing a podcast where therapy was being handed out like French fries at a drive through.

That conversation stuck with me.

And it got me thinking about something I’ve been noticing for a while now.

Be a little wary of the trauma specialist label. It’s kind of the wellness industry’s newest designer handbag, suddenly everyone’s carrying one. Five or ten years ago the buzzword factory started humming, and when all the old methods of spiritual gaslighting started losing their shine, the industry needed a fresh coat of paint.

Cue the book avalanche.

Suddenly you’ve got the big voices, Gabor, Brené, Lissa and friends, rolling out carefully polished language about trauma expertise. Some of it comes from real study. Some of it feels like it was picked up the way people pick up yoga phrases on Instagram. Then it gets delivered in the broadest possible terms, wide enough to cast a net over half the planet.

Because the bigger the net, the bigger the audience.

Here’s one of the common plays, trauma bonding as marketing. The speaker opens with a deeply personal story, painful, vulnerable, human. You lean in because you recognize something in it. Of course you do. We all carry scars somewhere. That moment of connection is real.

But then the conversation quietly shifts from their story to everyone’s story, and suddenly what should be a nuanced, deeply personal process becomes a universal prescription.

Here’s where it gets tricky. People with trauma are often starving for connection and community. They want to know they’re not alone. They want to hear that someone else has felt what they’ve felt, survived what they’ve survived, thought the same messy thoughts at two in the morning. It helps them feel less crazy, less broken, less isolated.

That need for belonging is deeply human. It’s also incredibly powerful.

And unfortunately it can also be incredibly marketable.

When an author or speaker creates a room, or a book, or a digital community where everyone suddenly feels seen and understood, it creates an emotional gravity. People bond quickly. They feel relief. Finally someone gets it.

But sometimes that sense of belonging becomes the hook that pulls people deeper into a system where the next seminar, the next workbook, the next level is always waiting.

Connection is real, but sometimes the container around it is built for conversion.

Another thing I’ve noticed is how quickly psychological language spreads once it enters the mainstream. Take a term like complex PTSD. Suddenly it’s everywhere, panels, podcasts, Instagram graphics, healing summits. Before long a lot of people who have never actually been evaluated or diagnosed start identifying with the label.

Now let me be clear, I’m not saying people don’t have trauma. Quite the opposite. I suspect a huge percentage of humans, especially in the modern world, carry some form of PTSD in their nervous systems. Life has not exactly been gentle with most of us.

But when we start diagnosing ourselves through books and workshops something subtle can happen. We take the label on and it becomes part of our identity.

I’m someone with complex PTSD.

I’m someone who has this pattern.

This is who I am.

Sometimes that label, even if it brings temporary clarity, starts quietly building a cage.

Because what if the diagnosis isn’t accurate for you. What if your nervous system, your history, your coping patterns are actually something different. Wouldn’t it be better to know what’s really going on so you could work on the right thing.

Sometimes hearing a term that resonates gives us a moment of relief. We feel seen. We feel like we finally understand ourselves. That feeling alone can be powerful medicine.

But relief isn’t always the same thing as accuracy.

This is where the whole landscape gets complicated. Therapy is expensive. Really good therapists are often out of network. Insurance coverage is inconsistent at best. A lot of people genuinely can’t afford consistent, high quality mental health care.

So they turn to books, podcasts, workshops, online communities. They’re trying to heal with the tools that are available to them.

I get that, truly.

Which is exactly why this frustrates me so much. When you know that millions of people are searching for answers, searching for relief, searching for belonging, you carry a certain responsibility if you position yourself as an authority.

Trauma is not a one size fits all hoodie you can hand out at a conference.

Human nervous systems are not mass produced Ikea furniture where everyone just needs the same instruction manual.

And yet the industry often tries to homogenize something deeply individual, something messy, relational, and intensely personal.

You can’t really mass produce two people sitting in a room carefully unpacking a lifetime of experiences.

That doesn’t scale well. It doesn’t go viral. It doesn’t sell stadium tours.

So instead we get frameworks, formulas, and branded healing methods, each promising a clearer map than the last.

And somewhere in the middle of all this another red flag shows up.

If someone introduces themselves as a mystic, an energy healer, and a trauma specialist, but there aren’t real psychological credentials and an active license to practice therapy behind that title, you might want to run.

And just to be clear, even an MD or some other impressive looking doctorate doesn’t automatically make someone legitimate in this space either. Trauma work requires real psychological training, oversight, and accountability.

One of the biggest problems right now is that clinical psychological language is being used far outside of clinical settings. Terms that were originally meant for trained therapists working carefully with individual patients are now being tossed around in podcasts, workshops, and Instagram captions.

That’s not a small thing.

Using trauma based clinical language without the training and accountability that comes with it is a bit like getting your gallbladder removed at a tattoo parlor. The tools might look impressive, the environment might feel confident, but that doesn’t mean it’s the place where that kind of work should be happening.

Knowing the language of therapy because you’ve been in therapy, read a few books, or picked up the buzzwords along the way doesn’t suddenly qualify you to practice it.

Healing language is easy to learn. Responsible trauma care is not.

Which brings me back to the same uncomfortable question.

If all these trauma books, seminars, summits, and panels were truly solving the problem at scale, why are so many people still suffering.

And why do so many of them keep coming back to the same teachers for the next level.

At some point it starts to feel less like healing and more like a very sophisticated subscription model for pain.

So what’s the solution.

Honestly there isn’t a neat one. Trauma isn’t something you fix with three steps and a morning routine. But there are some things people can start doing that make them a lot less vulnerable to the wellness industry’s shinier traps.

First, start learning the difference between manipulative marketing language and genuine resources. Healing language has become a brand strategy. Words like trauma informed, nervous system work, somatic healing, breakthrough, transformational, they sound impressive, but they’re also incredibly easy to sprinkle into a sales page.

If something is promising to heal you, transform you, or unlock the root of your trauma in a weekend workshop, pause. Healing rarely moves at the speed of a checkout button.

Another thing to understand is that when we’re dealing with trauma we’re often quick to connect with people who seem to feel what we feel. That recognition can feel electric, finally someone who gets it.

But that emotional recognition can make us let people into our inner world too quickly.

Be cautious about who you bond with. Shared pain isn’t always the same thing as shared wisdom. Just because someone has experienced trauma doesn’t mean they’re equipped to guide others through it.

Slow down the healing rush. Real healing is usually slower and less glamorous than the industry makes it look.

Be careful with labels. Learning about trauma can be helpful, but diagnosing yourself from books or social media can quietly turn a description into an identity.

Look for people who admit limits. One of the healthiest signs of a teacher or guide is hearing them say they don’t know your situation, or that something may not apply to everyone.

Value individualized support when you can access it. Books and communities can support you, but they are not the same as someone trained to understand the complexity of a single human life.

Pay attention to how something affects you over time. Does it empower you to understand yourself more clearly, or does it keep pulling you back for the next level, the next program, the next explanation.

And maybe the most important thing.

Don’t outsource your inner authority too quickly.

When you’ve been hurt it’s tempting to hand the map of your inner world to someone who sounds confident.

But your story, your nervous system, your history are far too complex to fit neatly inside someone else’s framework.

Community can help. Books can help. Conversations can help.

But real healing usually happens somewhere quieter than the seminar stage, more like a long, patient conversation with yourself, with the right kind of support beside you, not standing in front of you selling tickets.