I used to think it was cruel to have life forced upon you—at eleven years old, hiding in the darkness of the guest room closet, crying, swearing, I will never have children. The world is too cruel. I tended to operate only in dichotomies. I felt forced into existence, and I didn’t wish that upon anyone. I didn’t belong to myself.

Fifteen years later, standing on the sidewalk of a coastal town in California, I’m crying again. The breeze moves my hair. It sticks to my lip gloss. My mouth is dry. It’s a perfect 72 degrees, even though it’s January. The sun is a welcome warmth on my bare arms and cheeks. My baby sister is calling me, and now I have to break the news to her. As I unlock my phone, I think, He will never see the ocean.

When I tell her you are gone, I face the Pacific Ocean. She cries. I cry too. Your uncle and I spent six weeks here last year. I felt that my life was too good to be true; I wondered if I was living someone else’s. I didn’t know I could be at home in my own skin. Fifteen years is only 5,475 days. That doesn’t seem like long enough, but somehow it was enough. I wish you could have even just a day to play on earth.

On Monday morning, I walk into the guest room in your parents’ house. Your big brother took his nap there since he sleeps in a toddler bed now. When I open the door, he is holding a little stuffed dog, swaddled in a blanket. He pats it and rocks back and forth, just as he did when he held you for those brief minutes. With you, he was gentle. Your presence miraculously stilled him. I kneel before the bed and whisper, You’re a sweet big brother.

It’s strange. Though he’s a big brother, he has no little brother to play with, to wake from a deep newborn sleep, to hold. Your mother’s arms look as empty as they feel. Your hands were barely the size of your father’s fingernail.

No longer confined to a tiny body, you take up infinite space. I’ll see you each time I stand before the ocean or hug your older brother. I hear you in the sound of the trumpet in the sanctuary, the morning after you are born. I wonder if that’s how it sounded when you entered eternal rest. Later, I call your big brother. When he points to the few pictures we have of you, he says, That Sammy Rowe? and we respond, Yes, my love, that is your little brother. In a few weeks, we’ll lay you to rest in Alabama clay, but I know that changes nothing for you now. You are singing, you are playing, you are patiently waiting to hold your mother as she faithfully held you.

I’ve changed my mind a hundred times over since those days I used to hide between the coats in the guest room closet. You reinforced what I already knew: the world is often cruel to children. But you also helped me to see it through new eyes—like I am seeing it all for the first time. I wanted you to see it for the first time, but you never will. So I will see it for you. I will wonder at the ocean, and I will play hide-and-seek with your big brother. We will speak of you often, not just in sadness, but also in joy. I love you.

God, please show Samuel the ocean.

People

• My niece and nephew, who are unknowingly teaching me what it feels like to have a love that lives outside my body every day. To live apart from them is to be in a constant state of missing. It hurts that each day their little brains and bodies learn new things, and that there are roughly 100 of these days between each time I get to hold them. I’ve never loved two people in the way that I love the two of them.

• Jason Isbell. A couple of days each year, I only listen to Jason Isbell. These days creep up on me after months of my usual listening habits. I’ll be driving back to Alabama, and suddenly it’s mandatory that I listen to Alabama Pines. These kinds days have been inevitable since 2018 when I moved away from home. Since then, Jason Isbell has been the soundtrack to many long drives. 24 Frames, the drive home from the funeral. Speed Trap Town, the drive from Auburn to Birmingham. Children of Children, the drive when I wonder who my parents were before I existed. Death Wish, the drive to California.

• Simeon, an often overlooked character in the Christmas story, but my favorite since childhood—the representation of so many years of longings fulfilled at last, which is the best of the story. His song of response is called the Nunc Dimittis, which translates to “Now you let depart.” He’s the first person we watch be fulfilled after a lifetime of longing. He is finally at peace. He is who each of us will be.

Places

• My living room, because I love to stare at our Christmas tree. The blessing of living in a moment I once wished for cannot be overstated.

• Washington, DC, because for the first time since I graduated, I’m not spending a few days of my December there. I didn’t expect to think anything of it, but after just three years, it had become routine to return to the nation’s capital a couple of times each year. DC always meant conflicting feelings—disappointment, inspiration, confusion, sadness, hope, and a side of work stress. While there, I would always sneak away for a few hours to visit the monuments. I love to stand in front of anything that makes me feel small. In a city of people scraping for significance and playing pretend, it’s glaringly evident that we are but a dot on the timeline of history. Even our most impressive infrastructure intentionally resembles that which came before us and also crumbled in its own time. We are a few generations among thousands. There were millions of years before us. There will be millions after us.

• Anywhere but inside my own mind. In his speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace said: “…Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of.” Staying conscious proves to be more difficult than I anticipated because my experience is lying to me.

Things

• Currently reading: East of Eden, John Steinbeck. Currently listening to: Everybody Scream, Florence + the Machine. (Honorable mention: Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party, Hayley Williams.)

• Documentation. A pen and paper feel more permanent than a digital footprint these days. My enthusiasm for journaling comes and goes, but recently, the magic and whimsy are a paper airplane carrying me, keeping me from being too heavy. Writing it down is a way I make things with my hands, things that exist in opposition to the mirror world.

• My space heater, which follows me around the house, as I choose a different spot to work each day. Its consistent hum is a comfort in the long, dark winter months.

• The Serenity Prayer, which I first heard in a greige treatment room in Summer 2018. We said the Serenity Prayer together whenever someone “graduated” from treatment. Graduating usually just meant someone’s insurance was no longer willing to cover the cost of inpatient or intensive outpatient care. But we said the Serenity Prayer, since that was something we could not change; we would accept it eventually. And one day in June, my insurance provider decided I was better, too, and the Serenity Prayer was for me. These days, I go months without thinking of the Serenity Prayer, and then it comes back to me the way summer comes around each year.

When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?
I didn't think it was much;
It always seemed simple to me,
I had never seen less. 
Now I've seen less. 

However,
The more I see, the less I've seen. 
And somehow it's easier to part with money 
than time.
When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?

Does it disgust you,
a glass of wine on my table,
trash overflowing with overripe fruit?
When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?

When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?
A lifetime of learning and it won't be enough.
Devouring words, on paper and screens,
Observing how 340 million people coexist
—Not very well.

Now I've seen less,
I vowed to myself to fight back against More
The voice in my head feeds existential dread
I can't take it with me. 
When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?

Just beyond the hills of Enough
There's a mountain of More
When god said gluttony was a sin
is this what he meant?
Nothing could ever be Enough,
I couldn't possibly stay conscious enough—
in a word where unsconsciousness is currency—
To be satisfied with myself.

In high school, numbers guided me. Numbers made things simple: my grades, my ACT score, my weight, the paycheck from my after-school job. The number of awards I received. The number of concerts I went to. The combination to my locker. The salary I might make one day and the number of boys I kissed. The number of therapists I had, passed from one to the next since I was 14. The number of almonds I could eat before having a panic attack. The number of people who might listen to the TED Talk I was determined to give one day. The number of times I went to church in a single week. My four years of high school. Four years of college. My life was meticulously mapped by numbers that could guarantee my significance.

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But when I sat in that cold auditorium listening to Professor Stone drone on about integrals, I felt sincerely disappointed. All my hard work, and we all ended up in the same place? This is what it was all for? I felt like a Rory Gilmore cliché: The promising student doesn’t live up to her full potential and instead finds herself aimlessly wading through life after realizing she may be just like everyone else. I’m actually embarrassed to write this—because I hear my own inflated sense of self—but this is how it felt to me at eighteen. Just a few months in college was all it took for me to resign from my lifelong dream of being someone special.

For many years, I was rudderless because my significance was determined by my (narrow idea of) success. It was subconscious, and I would have certainly denied it if questioned. A high school teacher once prompted me: Should you redefine success for yourself? Where does your definition even come from? Why does it hold so much power?

At the time of our conversation, I was wallowing in embarrassment and self-hatred after being deferred from my dream school. It had come as a shock to high school me, who had thus far achieved everything she’d set out to do. Suddenly, after opening that email, I was questioning the cycle I had operated in for seventeen years: To be successful, I must be significant. In order to prove my significance, I must be successful. It took me years and years to unlearn this. In some ways, I still am; I know this because I still prefer not to tell people I didn’t get into that dream school. Eight years later, I can feel traces of the confusion it caused deep within me.

In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath touches on a similar intimate coming-of-age revelation in the character of Esther Greenwood. Esther observes:

Over time, personal significance matters less and less to me. Maybe everyone else already knew how little value it held, or maybe they are also learning it as they age, but aren’t speaking about it. Holding to my values is more important than my success. (Disclaimer: Much of my attention to values as guideposts comes from Paul Kalanithi’s reflections in When Breath Becomes Air, my favorite memoir.) I am released from the intense pressure of choosing the fig that will bring me the most success, no matter how I find myself defining success in any given decade of my life. Instead, I can try each fig at will, spit out the bad, savor the good, and still be entirely worthy.

Now, I cherish my insignificance. It’s a gift and a privilege to create a small life of moments that may often only be meaningful to me. Because actually, it is very, very significant. I interact daily with eternal souls. I have the opportunity to imprint on the eternal souls of those around me, as they do to me. It isn’t the significance I once imagined or hoped for, and some days it feels dreary, lonely, or mundane. Yet, it’s life. And why did that seem like such a bad thing for so long? After all, in some ways, it’s a tiny reflection of eternity. All these various routes, but we cannot change our fates. Death waits at the end of each path, no matter how winding, crooked, narrow, or straight. Letting external factors, even ones I believed I had control over, determine my significance was only ever leading me towards the same disappointment. I rest in my own perceived insignificance, my own corner of the world where I now focus on creating beauty, showing empathy, and hopefully easing the burdens of the eternal souls around me.

A little video I made from our summer out west <3

I ain't the kind you take home to mama*
I ain't the kind to wear no ring
Somehow I always get stronger
When I'm on my second drink

Something uncovered from childhood—a small treasure, turned over in my hand. I am Aladdin searching for a genie—A memory from the grocery store parking lot, asking my dad to turn the volume up—“I like this song.” My one wish would be a memory.

One day, my parents might cry over my tattoos, but they have the mercy not to show me. She doesn’t know this song yet or what it means to eat guilt for dinner on a silver spoon. She’s too little, too young, but she already feels too much. Young does not mean the absence of hurt. Youth is not a shield against pain, even when the grown-ups say so.

Even though I hate to admit it
Sometimes I smoke cigarettes
The Christian folks say I should quit it
I just smile and say "God bless"

The smoke will escape her lips at eighteen when she chokes in the parking lot after coffee. Your friends might be friends with Death—she is never far away. (Do you think you’re safe? This house can’t save you.) “The house might be on fire, but you’re standing outside,” she tells me. I feel better, if only for a night, an hour, a minute.

My Wednesday mornings are spent like a knight at the round table—we’ll debate the ethics of owning a nice car, but in the end, there are no winners. There are merely those who agree and those who don’t. Those who bear the burden of a world on fire—and those who don’t.

Burning.

Meanwhile, she’s screaming at me to REWIRE MY MIND. I scream back. Nothing comes out. Instead, I start bleeding. The louder I try to scream, the more I bleed.

'Cause I heard Jesus he drank wine
And I bet we'd get along just fine
He could calm a storm and heal the blind
And I bet he'd understand a heart like mine

Did you hear that? Jesus himself can’t resist a sip of red wine. I sigh in relief. (Wouldn’t you?) Jesus didn’t calm this storm, but he brought a cabernet and a bottle opener. (My fingers are crossed behind my back, hoping you won’t notice what I set on fire while you slept. I stole your pocket knife. I cut slits in every curtain, but it still didn’t let the light in.)

I wonder for the hundred and nineteenth time if my thoughts are being broadcast on a TV screen behind my head (like a Teletubby, with a little TV stitched into my skin). A million TVs, maybe—and I can’t stop them from showing you my inner world. You said to let thoughts float by like clouds in the sky, but then you didn’t tell me how to do that!

I’ll share a bottle of wine with Jesus. Then you can tell me how to feel.

Daddy cried when he saw my tattoo
But said he loved me anyway
My brother got the brains of the family
So I thought I'd learn to sing

I might not sing most days, but I use my journals to communicate with my past and future selves. My imagination tries to devour the truth; she’s a carnivore stalking her prey. Like a vulture, I circle my dinner.

It’s me, I am the bird of prey.
It’s me. I am the prey.

The hardest summer of my life rolled out the red carpet for the greyest January I have ever known. Let’s put 2018 to shame! she roared, as my wet cheeks became acquainted with the rug in the living room. The advancement of power does not mean the advancement of freedom. The advancement of liberty might be the only power I ever know. The power I wanted simply became the power to destroy, so I didn’t want it anymore. I hate her for jumping off that cliff with a running start, so now I’m going through a breakup with my own intuition. We tried to make it work—yes, for years we tried to make it work. We’re just different people (that’s what they usually say, right?). Irreconcilable differences.

These are the days that I will remember
When my names called on a roll
He'll meet me with two long stem glasses
Make a toast to me coming home

Eventually, I’ll learn the perfect dosage of pondering. If I think too much, I am crazy. If I don’t think enough, I am careless. The medicine bottle doesn't have instructions on the package. It reminds me of that ride at the carnival—swinging like a pendulum, showing me the inside of my mind. Oh! Do I finally understand what this means? Do you remember all the men in line? They were lining up just as you were promised, no? Things weren’t quite what I had been told, though. The Hard Times devoured me; there was nothing left for you to feast on when you finally arrived. So I tuck her into bed and kiss her goodnight. She’s just another heart like mine.

*Paragraphs in italics are lyrics from Miranda Lambert’s Heart Like Mine

I was sweating in all black
Black boots black skirt 
Black long sleeves
It was April
And April has never been the same again

To you, spring means new life
To us, it means death.

When it's over
She falls,
Holds out her phone

I read her mother's text
The news you think will never come,
Because you're seventeen
And the world isn't on fire yet
But the world burns in April

I put my forehead to hers
Our tears mix on the ground
With our sweat and our prayers.

As they all gather around her,
I think, these prayers don't go to heaven
They're stuck in the rafters of this church—
The way balloons bump against the ceiling of the grocery store
In their quest for the sky

I have never asked for anything
As much as I asked god for that April to end.

And now
Death as the final act
At the end of our annual Shakespeare festival,
Come eat with us, they'll say in thirty minutes
But I'll go home to my words and my room

In a long line of Aprils
That was her final April
Because the world burns in April.

There's no longer me or you or us
There's just life and death,
The bits of time in between,
And one slippery moment when you hold both.
It was April
And April has never been the same again
So let the world burn in April

“All of them bending themselves to listen thought, ‘Pray heaven that the inside of my mind may not be exposed,’ for each thought, ‘The others are feeling this. They are outraged and indignant with the government about the fishermen. Whereas, I feel nothing at all.’”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

In an interview with TIME magazine this past February, Grimes claimed that killing god was a mistake. She backed her assertion by saying that the death of religion has come at a great detriment to our culture because we’ve lost our subsequent morality. Even the interviewer seemed surprised in the moment, unsure how to respond.

Grimes endured some backlash after the video circulated on social media, and I saw some strong responses to her claims. People seemed outraged that she insinuated needing a divine power for a code of ethics. How deranged and lost do you have to be to need a divine being steering you to good? People reasoned. We all have that gut instinct for right and wrong, right? Aren’t ethics obvious?

Actually, I don’t believe ethics are so straightforward—and I’m surprised by how many people seem to think they are. Not to mean that there is no objective morality, but that objective morals aren’t so obvious. The way I see it, we are constantly experiencing the fallout from this lack of agreed-upon ethics. It’s in the news, online, in our daily lives. If ethics are truly intuitive, why do we disagree so widely? Why don’t we all care about the same injustices and share the same convictions?

We see examples of this everywhere. In Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, each character endures a different life inside their own heads, trying to make sense of the world—and each other. They all come to vastly different conclusions, depending on their age, gender, upbringing, disposition, etc.

In the dining scene at the crux of the novel, the characters discuss a political issue, and each fears their own true apathy toward this injustice might be exposed—they know it’s wrong, but they cannot even bring themselves to feel something about it. They rely on the apparent performative morality of the other characters to motivate their conviction. Later on, Lily Briscoe attempts to feel something at the deaths of Mrs. Ramsey, Prue, and Andrew. These characters show us that relying on their own feelings to guide moral certainty proves to be a fickle ethical philosophy. Something could be unethical, but we may not consciously feel something toward or about it, try as we might. Can these feelings be the determinants of right and wrong?

So then, are we to determine morality by considering the good of the whole, some kind of John Stuart Mill utilitarianism? Is morality related to freedoms, duty, and obligations, as Christine Korsgaard argues? (A notion that takes me back to philosophy of law classes in undergrad.) Is there some kind of collective morality that differs from personal morality? (Spoiler: I think yes.) Is morality derived from end results and outcomes? Does the end justify the means?

Using our cultural gut-check on morals isn’t working out so well. It’s strange that in a society where we vastly disagree on how to handle systemic issues like poverty, war, and social injustices, people still seem to think our moral instincts are a safe compass. But even in a singular religion, people disagree on where lines should be drawn—meaning we sometimes can’t agree on morality even when a divine figure is involved.

So, far be it from me to agree with Grimes...but she makes a great point in the interview. The idea that morality just innately exists inside of all of us is a weak conclusion based on the evidence all around us—and it doesn’t explain the often intense disagreements in ethics even among people with similar backgrounds or values. It’s not a reliable way to choose our morals.

Is it so bad to look outside ourselves for morals? Our own unreliable narration of the world further makes an agreed-upon moral standard so impossible and fickle. Sometimes we aren’t even reliable narrators of our own stories—especially in cases of complex trauma, memory loss, biases, and the list goes on. We can all experience the same event in drastically different ways. As the saying goes, there are three sides to any story: mine, yours, and the truth.

God provides a morality that exists outside of us—and that’s a good thing. Can’t an entire culture be steered wrong (see examples such a slavery, genocide, etc.)? Who gets to decide which culture has it right if society is all that determines morality, if not god? Are we relying on instincts to determine right from wrong? Instincts can so quickly be led astray—by peer pressure, money, social influence, and a million other things. We rationalize all kinds of things for ourselves.

I don’t think that the best case for belief in god is an agreed upon a moral compass, but it can’t be ignored as a massive benefit of religion—and to act as if that’s not a benefit seems silly. A shared moral framework is a great benefit to us culturally, truth that transcends experiences, whims, emotions, and cultural ideas is reliable, steady, and trustworthy. We are fickle creatures and easily justify right and wrong in our minds due to a million external factors. We do it in the little things all the time, but we cannot assume we would never do it in the big things.

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On a work trip last summer, I had the privilege of visiting the beautiful San Miguel Chapel, the oldest standing church structure in the United States. The original walls and altar were constructed in 1610 by Tlaxcalan Indians from Mexico. The intricate sanctuary, contrasted with the simple structure, captivated me. I grew emotional sitting alone in a pew, taking it in, pondering the thousands that had prayed here over the centuries—through eras of stomach-churning colonialism, war, mining, unrest, and the land’s repeated reallocation.

And yet here was this building, so old that it seems to be part of nature itself. The church barely felt human-made, the colors and textures so breathtakingly natural (a feature of adobe architecture I love). It wasn’t a cathedral by any classical standards, and yet it felt so utterly holy. Its holiness looked different than stained glass windows or the warehouse gathering spaces that we now call church. I’ve been to St. Peter’s Basilica and to the Duomo. I’ve been to white-washed megachurches in the Bible Belt. I’ve been in a church service where they sang the national anthem during the service (disgusting) and I’ve rung the bells late at night on Holy Saturday in an Anglican church. But the architecture of this chapel felt different—and made me think about how we’ve disconnected spirituality from nature.

The kind of spiritual encounter that’s also tuned into the natural world reminds me of Anne of Green Gables. In my head, I can hear young Anne interrogating Aunt Marilla on why prayer is so stale and routine. She doesn’t want to “say her prayers” on her knees before bed. Anne, in all her whimsy and zest for the transcendental, thinks of prayer quite differently. She passionately proclaims to Marilla:

Growing up, I was an avid Anne of Green Gables connoisseur—both of the book and the 1985 movie—but I thought Anne got spirituality very wrong. Her idea of faith was too fanciful, emotive, and mystical. Spirituality isn’t a feeling, but a practice, a rote daily motion. Prayer should be thoughtful, diligent, and structured. But I actually think I was wrong to dismiss Anne’s version of spirituality and its subsequent inseparable relationship to nature. Anne didn’t see the natural world as a distraction from spirituality, but an aid to it.

In her book Out of Sorts, Sarah Bessey suggests that God is much wilder than we dare to dream—and this has fully captured my imagination. This view of God as wild frees me from mundane spirituality and practice. Sure, God exists in cathedrals, but he also exists in butterfly cocoons and fresh water from a spring. He’s at the top of the mountains we hike and in the deepest part of the ocean. His wildness has a sort of can’t-be-tamed quality that beckons me to lose myself in nature. This wildness isn’t chaos—nature is not chaotic—but rather a resistance to being contained or pinned down or even fully understood. We could spend our whole lives studying the vast wilderness of God and still only scratch the surface—and this is the only kind of God worth believing in.

In light of this revelation, life doesn’t have to be so structured, so traditional, so repetitive. Aspects of life might be that way, but they are not requirements. My urge for the wild is itself holy. I cannot be separated from nature. I am of nature. And despite my fondness of predictability and spiritual tradition—because there is value in the way tradition connects us to those who came before us—I realize now that I’m missing out if I don’t see both sides of the coin. I’m challenging myself to value the wild right alongside the tradition. The wilderness offers something to worship and spirituality that we miss if we’re unwilling to explore this aspect of God. In this wilderness, we can better understand God. From dust we are, to dust we shall return.

In college, Jacob and I excessively quoted Baby Driver: “Let’s head west on 20, in a car we can’t afford, with a plan we don’t have.” It was always our dream: when we graduated, we would move west. It didn’t seem too far-fetched, given we lived almost as east as you can get in the United States. We dreamed of Seattle. We dreamed of Salt Lake City. We dreamed of national parks. We dreamed of desert sunshine, torrential rainstorms, freshly brewed coffee, cold and starry nights.

And then COVID-19 happened and our dreams were buried by practicality. Was it smart to be so far from home? Was the economy verging on collapse? Could we afford to move so far away? What if this pandemic never ended or another one began? And so, we let our dreams evolve and deflate, backtracking our Baby Driver-inspired promises.

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Fast forward to fall of 2024: Jacob and I are married, living 300 miles farther east than we did in college. Sitting on our back porch one night—as we talked and smoked cigarettes into the wee hours of the morning—my vivid dream of driving west with no plan became all-consuming once again. I couldn’t shake it from my head or my heart. I needed to be west. I pitched up Utah, Arizona, Nevada, California. Anywhere we could land where I could lie in the sun for hours and let it heal me from the outside in. I’ve done a fair share of healing from the inside out (though it will surely be a lifelong practice), but for a few months, I wanted the outside to be healing as well. I wanted to be in an open space, just feeling prayer, like Anne said. I wanted to be open to the experience as it unfolded. And with a little convincing, Jacob agreed.

Years ago, I had a conversation with a friend who suggested that the purpose of open-mindedness was to eventually “close” your mind around something else—maybe the thing you believed all along, maybe something different. I’ve sat with that for years, assessing its many implications. I’ve decided it’s not entirely true—and it doesn’t account for the nuance and gray areas that consume most of life. Openness to experience is an intrinsic good, not only for the utilization of closing your mind again. Conviction is good. As is empathy, understanding, flexibility, and diversity. I think these embody the wildness of God. Spirituality is not only tradition and straightforward answers. It’s constant questions and changing your mind a hundred times over. It’s too vast and wild to be finitely understood.

And so, that is why I now feel prayer, in addition to routine spiritual practices. The wilderness is not far from the cathedral. They are equally necessary. And tomorrow we will head west on 20, with a mostly-formed plan, in a car we pray doesn’t break down—and I dream of learning something wild about God, seeing him in every roadside diner, every sweeping view, every stop for cheap coffee. We won’t be passing through Santa Fe, but if we did, I would make us stop so we could spend an hour or so in the sanctuary of San Miguel Chapel and just feel prayer. I think Anne would be proud.

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I can’t take credit for the analogy; I don’t even remember who said it. But I come back to it whenever I’m wrestling to understand the reasons we cling to habits that aim to destroy us. Of course, it doesn’t apply to every situation, but I’ve found it helpful in processing the role of my eating disorder (and other self-destructive habits) in my life.

To the best of my ability to recount, the analogy is this:

Water is rushing all around. You feel you’ll drown. In fact, you’re absolutely sure of it. There is no one around to help, and even if they were, the raging river’s current is so strong you would never reach the muddy bank. It’s dark and loud; the water swells.

As you’re dragged downstream by the relentless current, you come across a knobby piece of driftwood. It doesn’t look like much, but it could help you stay afloat, maybe even make it to safety. You fight against the powerful river to paddle your way over to it and grab on tight.

You cling to the driftwood for dear life and—for the first time—you can rest a moment as it keeps you above water. You continue to be rushed downstream, head just above the waves. Eventually, you notice the water begins to calm.

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As the river steadies, you think to yourself, “This piece of driftwood actually saved me,” and you cling on to it tighter than ever. You continue to be carried downstream.

Eventually, the water calms. It feels like a lazy river, but you cannot release your grip on that piece of driftwood. As day breaks, you see your friends and family on the distant shore. They wave to you; they call out your name. They beg you to come to shore. But you look around. Swimming to shore and climbing up the muddy bank would mean letting go of the driftwood. It’s far too heavy to carry with you.

But you are attached to the driftwood.

As your loved ones beg you to let go and swim the last bit of distance to safety, you shout to them, “I can’t let go! This wood is what saved me! Don’t you understand?! This is what saved me!”

Your loved ones can so clearly see that letting go of the driftwood is now the only way to survive. They see that you must do it, that you no longer need it. But farther upstream, holding on is what kept you alive. What helped you through one portion of this raging river is now what’s keeping you from safely reaching shore. Letting go means the unknown. Letting go means freedom. Letting go means leaving behind. Letting go means figuring out who you are all over again.

For so long, I held onto my eating disorder with clenched fists and white knuckles. Couldn’t everyone see how well this has served me? How it had anchored me on my darkest days? How it had comforted me in my loneliness and confusion? How it had given me a sense of power when I was powerless? How it had provided me a purpose when I could not find any, and a name when I felt nameless?

And yet, it could not save me. I would have died if I had kept holding on. Just like that driftwood, it may have helped me cope with things my brain wasn’t prepared to process, things my spirit could not carry—but eventually it became the thing keeping me from life itself. It promised me health, but death was lurking in its shadows. It was great as a coping mechanism, but deadly as a lifestyle.

The lyrics of What Was That capture this intense moment of revelation: waking up from the dream, wondering where it all went wrong. Missing it and moving on at the same time. Honoring it, but knowing you can live without it. You must live without it. You have to wake up, release the driftwood, swim to shore, shake off the haze of the nightmare, and push forward. The pain is comforting because it’s familiar—and we stick to comfort at a great cost.

The imagery of losing years of your life to a self-destructive habit, to suddenly wake up screaming, “What was that?!” is visceral for me. A self-destructive habit that would “never be enough,” a habit you gave everything to, but it couldn’t give back. A habit that felt like a dream—and not a good one.

“Do you know you're still with me / When I'm out with my friends?” I understand what she means. When I look back on the sandstorm of mental illnesses I weathered in high school, the memories are obscured by the sand stinging my eyes. So many memories are just echoes. I don’t actually remember many vivid moments, because I was losing my physical self, shrinking into oblivion. I was losing my very physicality as I wasted away. I was barely present within myself, and that’s what I really wanted. Then, after waking up from that long nightmare, after surrendering the driftwood, I looked around and shouted at the sky, “What was that?!” I was able to acknowledge the role of these ghosts in my life, and I could finally set them free.

When I first heard the driftwood analogy in a cramped room in the spring of 2018, I finally pieced together why I was clutching so determinedly to something that I also wanted to be free from—a life-threatening habit that had been my greatest enemy and my trusted companion. I could not separate from it. I didn’t know who I was without it, and yet I had never wanted to be rid of anything so badly.

This anecdote has helped me understand the struggles of my friends and family better, as well as more effectively express my own struggles. A major step in recovery is recognizing the role of a destructive behavior (mental illnesses, addictions, compulsions, etc.)—the ghosts it shields us from, why it feels necessary. Only once we come to terms with the role of these coping mechanisms in our lives can we truly be free.

“Then I realized something. I was keeping my old wounds fresh and open, as evidence for a trial that would never come.”

Mark Nepo

Years ago, I collaged the words “the forgiver, the forgiven—I have been both” across two pages in the center of my journal. It was raw and terrifying to allow those words to exist on a page—to own them, to stare at them, to allow them to stare back at me. I didn’t want to be the forgiven, only the forgiver. I didn’t want to own my role in hurting. I didn’t want responsibility. I didn’t want to be the victimizer, only the victim.

It feels increasingly important to view life through the lens of being both the forgiver and the forgiven. It’s one of the first nuances we have to reckon with—being someone who was hurt, but can also perpetrate hurt (“forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”). Being the forgiver and the forgiven is not a wrong way to engage with the world. It is reality itself.

At the end of Bethany Joy Lenz’s Dinner for Vampires, she observes that she had sacrificed truth for unity during the decade she stayed in a religious cult, afraid of losing her network of friends and family. But as she nears the end of the book, she vows that she will no longer sacrifice truth for unity, boldly walking away from the high-demand group that controlled her for so long. This reflection on the connection (or lack thereof) between truth and unity stuck with me for weeks after I finished reading Lenz’s story.

Recently, I’ve noticed that some relationships require an inverse correlation between unity and truth. I’m not recommending giving up capital “T” truths—some truths are too expensive to sacrifice. But don’t all relationships require small suspensions of truth in order for us to continue to remain connected? Don’t they require us to sit in the tension between these two ways of being? Can’t two seemingly opposing things be true at the same time?

Maybe it’s the truth of how we’ve been hurt in the past or the truth that the person we love believes differently than we do. Maybe it’s the truth of our own point of view or opinion on a situation and a lack of ability to validate the other person’s version of an experience. It’s a willingness to believe another person’s experience of the world, even if it doesn’t match our own. Why do some people view the world as uniquely cruel, while others see the beauty in every little thing? Can both of these be true?

And at the intersection of unity and truth stands forgiveness, the willingness to believe that someone else may have experienced something quite differently from the way we did. Forgiveness binds unity and truth together at the intersection of our experiences.

I have sometimes clung to truth at the expense of unity, intimacy, and relationship. I have sometimes clung to unity and relationship at the expense of the most important truths I know. I was always waiting for the “trial that would never come,” as poet Mark Nepo puts it, ready to prove my hurts, ready to prove my worth, and to prove my tight grip on reality at the expense of intimacy. In other ways, relationships require the rawest truth, requiring us to be radically honest with ourselves about our own responsibility. In order to fully exist in relationship, I must come to terms with my own liability.

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I’m not sure I’ll always see it this way, but for now, this has helped me reckon with how to love those with whom I have massive, irreconcilable differences, and to own my part in the alternate experiences of those I encounter.

I thought it was only brave to be the victim, the forgiver. And it is. Hear me say: It is brave to hurt and love anyway. But it is also vastly, outrageously brave to come to terms with being the forgiven, the victimizer, the perpetrator of hurts. To own your side of the argument, your contributions to the open wound. To look another in the eyes as you do so. To ask for forgiveness. To hold unity and truth in the same hand, sometimes loosening your grip on one in pursuit of the other. I continue to wonder at the ever-evolving relationship between truth, unity, and forgiveness—how they fight with each other and for each other. How they do not want to coexist, and yet they must. How one is useless without the others. How the trial may never come, but if it does, these three must be the judges of our experiences.

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”

Mark Fisher

Before I dive in, let me set the stage. I love my job. I love the feeling at the end of a long day, when I finally shut my laptop, sit on the couch, and take a deep breath, knowing I’ve put in a hard day of work. I work remotely in issue advocacy for a firm based in Washington, D.C., and I find it stimulating and thought-provoking. Each day is different. Being remote offers me flexibility that I love. Challenges at work invigorate me, and yet I’m also aware that enjoying my job is a gift and privilege, especially in our consumer-driven, output-oriented society.

Recently, though, I’ve started looking at my daily work in a new light. If asked directly, of course I would say that I don’t measure myself by the output of my 9 to 5 (that mentally feels more like an 8 to 7). But the more I dwell on it, the more I come to realize it might require a deliberate effort to be sure that’s true.

As I lean into collectivist ideas (solidarity economy, anyone?), I’m intentionally examining where I place my value—rather than allowing my subconscious to decide—and finding it can be a small act of resistance to an exploitative framework. Our system that’s built on capital-no-matter-the-cost wants us to measure ourselves by our output, our productivity, and our accomplishments. You cannot passively resist that temptation in corporate America—it must be intentional. I have to fight my instinct for constant production even doing things I enjoy, like writing this Substack.

Instead of valuing my production (and subsequent consumption), I consciously choose to value my relationship to God, empathy for my neighbors, commitment to justice, love, friendship, art, and kindness. I’ve decided to challenge myself: At least as much as I may strive for corporate impact, I also want to strive for local impact. By no means have I perfected this, but I believe it’s a good first step. The aim of this exercise is completely an internal shift; it doesn’t change the quality of my work, but it does impact the quality of my life.

It’s hard to make this adjustment, because I’ve always wanted to be somebody at work—and I don’t believe there’s anything wrong with that. Since I was a young girl, I dreamed of a career, sometimes as a pop star, and sometimes as a school principal, but I always had high hopes. I usually thrive in competitive, performance-driven environments because they motivate me. But maybe it would be a small step towards greater change if we could redirect some of that high-achieving, output-oriented mindset into our local communities. I recognize this might be overly simplistic, but we must start somewhere.

Resisting the urge to live and die by our output is a small way we can come together to turn the tides against exploitative systems, an obsession with production and consumption, and the zombie-like outcomes of capitalism that Mark Fisher references in his book Capitalist Realism. It doesn’t mean we cease to work diligently. It means we don’t allow the output of our hard work to determine our value to society and to each other. It means reminding myself daily that what I bring to the table is more than just my cog-in-a-machine abilities. It’s my dedication to justice, beauty, truth, and goodness. Maybe this all seems entirely obvious, but I find noticing my subconscious instincts towards capitalism, tossing them out, and replacing them with true values to be immensely gratifying.

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PS. I’ve seen the quiet quitting trend, one that some claim as an act of resistance to capitalism, but I consider this a very selfish approach to the issues at hand. We can’t make a difference by only looking out for ourselves (especially since individualism itself is another consequence of capitalist ideology), but we must look out for each other, too. My biggest problem with quiet quitting is that it leaves your coworkers out to dry, as you pursue your personal path to balance, rather than attempting to bring them along—attempting wider impact than your own life. But maybe I’ll make another post dedicated entirely to my thoughts on this…

My senior year of college, one of my professors charged us to write a letter to our freshman selves. I kept the letter I wrote, and years later it still resonates with me. As for most people, college was a transformative time for me; I could have never imagined where I would be at the end of it. I’m thankful my professor had me take a moment to reflect and memorialize my feelings as I graduated, so I could revisit them three years later.

At first, this prompt overwhelmed me because so much has changed for me since August 2018. But with a little reflection, I suddenly knew exactly what I wanted to tell my freshman self who had just moved to Auburn. I would tell myself the same quote a dear friend told me a few months ago: “This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.” Then I would show her this picture:

...and she would be terrified.

When I arrived at Auburn, I had just spent three months in an intensive eating disorder treatment program at a mental health facility in Birmingham. I was the healthiest I had been in years—which is saying almost nothing, because I spent all of high school deep in an eating disorder that destroyed my health. I had lost so much of my hair, my ability to enjoy dinner with friends, my energy, my memories, relationships, and the list goes on. And yet here I was, away from my support system, away from the school I’d attended since K5, and away from the life I had known for so many years. But the wonderful thing that I had yet to learn: You cannot heal in the same environment in which you got sick. This push was exactly what I needed.

I planned to transfer to Georgia Tech after a year at Auburn. I did not plan to date anyone, to enjoy Auburn, to find a little corner that felt like home, to find a major I appreciated, to lose and find meaning over and over again. Now, it’s hard to remember why I felt like a failure as I woke up early to head to freshman move in.

Freshman year Rebekah, take a deep breath. No, everything won’t work out how you want it to. It will work out better. That kid Jacob you just met? He’s going to be your husband in 2022. Your new friend Laney? She’ll be your maid of honor. Your relationship with your parents? It gets so much better. Your body? It heals. Your mind? It heals, too.

And yet, you kept going, despite not knowing any of these things.

You woke up each day, went to class, prayed for strength and grace, met new people, traveled with old friends, raised awareness on campus for eating disorders, minored in philosophy, lived alone at 19, became editor-in-chief for Auburn’s rec blog, interned at a hotel, became close with your sisters, watched your brother find the love of his life, found your own love, found community in places you never expected, and had conversations you never dreamed possible. You persevered, and I’m so proud of you and can’t wait for you to see what’s in store. Keep waking up and “doing the next right thing,” like dad always said.

“This present moment used to be the unimaginable future.”

Love,
Reba

Quote credit: Alicia Eggert, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

This is a tribute to those of us born sometime between 1997 and 2002. I’m aware that technically we may be Gen Z, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair.

There’s something about being born in the blurry intersection of two generations—especially between two that tend to express strong distaste for one another, at least online. Most of us born on the cusp of the 21st century could easily operate a Walkman, CD player, and iPod nano—a combination of skills that might be uniquely ours—because we’d owned them all by the age of 13.

Things changed quickly as we grew up. Those of us born in the years surrounding Y2K experienced a rapid evolution in technology and culture during the most malleable time of our lives. We’re a certain group of kids who were alive when 9/11 happened, but were too young to remember it. We have memories from before smartphones, but they were the standard by the time we turned 16.

When I was in middle school, my siblings and I would watch recorded TV shows so we could fast-forward commercials, but by the time I graduated high school, we only used Netflix. I remember using a cassette tape recorder to make silly tapes with my brother, but just a few years later, we both had iPods. I remember when my mom had a cellphone but my dad didn’t yet, so they used Walkie Talkies to communicate between cars on a long road trip. I remember when the first iPhone came out. I’m old enough that I saw two Harry Potter premieres at the movie theater, but I wasn’t around when the first book was published.

I had social media in middle school, but I also remember when my uncle showed up to family Christmas with a Blackberry that wowed us all. My dad burned a CD mix for me when I was in second grade, and I listened to it so much that I memorized the number of skips between my favorite songs. I remember using a YouTube to MP3 converter to download a new song—anything to avoid buying it for $1.29 on iTunes—and syncing my iPod playlists to the family computer.

One thing about me: I love a cultural moment. It’s a connector. I look back on the 2000s and 2010s with fondness. It was the age of Call Me Maybe and capri pants. Vine. Saturdays at the mall. I was too young to be worried about bank failures in 2008, but I knew something was up. I remember when Hurricane Katrina happened, but only from my 5-year-old perspective of cutting a beach trip short. Our worlds were smaller in those days.

In many ways, technology has expanded our worlds. In other ways, it’s made them even smaller. Culture feels so micro now that sometimes it seems we’ve lost it altogether. It’s just a homogeneous goo, created by endless scrolling and constant intake of media. We all have our own methods of communication and niche interest groups. You can join a subreddit for anything, and in some ways that’s wonderful. But I think we miss a lot when we’re so engaged in our curated nano-worlds.

Gen Z doesn’t know a world without modern technology (like we do), but Millennials had the luxury of growing up with minimal online presence—maybe just a MySpace account and an email address. Technology was accessible for them, but it wasn’t constantly at their fingertips.

Those of us born in the ambiguous time between generations have experienced a bit of both. We were midway through adolescence when everything changed, and I think it uniquely positions us to relate to both ends of the technological spectrum. We stand as the middle person between two drastically different ways of growing up, and I anticipate our mini-generation’s relationship to technology will continue to evolve as we grow older—hopefully for the better.

My experience of motherhood thus far is all secondhand. I see my own mother—her steady selflessness, her nurturing disposition as she juggled the schedules of four children, a husband, and her own work as a teacher. I have seen few men work as hard as my own mother. I’ve seen many of my friends become moms, riding the highs and lows of having little ones that constantly cry and sleep (or not) and giggle and vomit.

I don’t have any children of my own, and yet my relationship to motherhood is something I ponder almost daily. It’s ever evolving. From a young age, I thought about motherhood, even subconsciously. I fed my baby dolls and played “orphans” with my sisters. (Why was pretending to not have parents so much fun as an 8 year old?!) I decided at 12 that I would never have kids, but still kept a list of names in the back of my mind *just in case.* I’ve changed my mind a hundred times since then.

I’ve absorbed a wide range of perspectives on motherhood—everything from Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work to Suzanne Venker articles (2019, you haunt me). My twitter feed is caught somewhere between Chappell Roan’s Call Her Daddy interview and the hot mom discourse from Evie magazine contributor “Daughter of Wolves.” Motherhood is an inescapable idea that looms over me, taunting me to “realize my full biological potential” (something I think my father said once).

For those of you who live under the ever-shrinking metaphorical rock (lucky you), Chappell Roan recently went on Alex Cooper’s podcast (5 million weekly listeners) and observed that all her friends with young kids are in “hell.” Naturally, the internet exploded, analyzing her comments from every angle. And while Chappell’s comments felt heartless (I honestly feel bad for her friends who confided in her, only to have their misery blasted online), I think there’s more to it than that.

Like many women today, I fear motherhood. There, I said it. In all its shame, the truth sits in those four letters: fear. I’m afraid of what kind of mom I would be, if I could ever live up to my own expectations for myself. I’m afraid of who my children might be. (Do you ever think about how your kids are people you haven’t met yet, but you already love endlessly? How you have no other choice but to helplessly love them for the rest of your days?)

Because really, I’m afraid of loving someone so much that I will fail them, in all the little ways I already fail myself and my husband and my family and my friends. I worry we’ve already failed our children by dumping exorbitant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and creating a capitalist system that squashes dissent before the age of 18. I’m afraid to be the friend that Chappell Roan is talking about, who’s probably wallowing in shame at her own discontentment with her current stage of life. I’m afraid of passing down a predisposition for OCD and ruminating thoughts. I’m afraid of who I may raise them to be and all the reasons they’ll be in therapy 25 years from now, picking apart the way I parented (or didn’t parent) them.

When I was younger, my dad liked to pose philosophical questions to us kids at the dinner table (bold, considering we were a rowdy bunch). He once asked, “Would you rather have loved and lost, or never loved at all?” The answer was so obvious to us kids as we scrambled to shout our reasoning louder than each other. “Of course it’s better to love and lose!” “Only a villain would choose to never love at all!” “What a silly question!” we clamored.

And while I stand by the answer I gave in middle school, I can’t shriek it with the same intensity. It’s better whispered, repeated slowly in the back of my mind until I’m sure I believe it. Because with love comes an utter helplessness and a terrifying power, one that I see most clearly represented in motherhood: the ability to be both so helplessly out of control and yet so afraid of your own potential power to bruise the heart of a blossoming human.

In her book, Rachel Cusk doesn’t romanticize motherhood in the least—and I caught myself wishing she would. I wanted her to tell me it would all be worth it, that it would be the most fulfilling thing I’d ever do, and I would never question my maternal instincts after I made the plunge. Instead, she observed something even more profound: the untouchable power of loving another human. She writes, “Love is more respectable, more practical, more hardworking than I had ever suspected, but it lies close to the power to destroy. I have never before remotely felt myself to possess that power, and I am as haunted by it as if it were a gun in a nearby drawer.”

At the end of the day, I appreciate the honesty it takes to reckon with the terror of sacrificing your heart, your body, your life for someone else to live. But potentially more terrifying to me than the power of motherhood is settling for Chappell Roan’s perspective, one that almost makes the claim “it would be better to have never loved at all”—the idea that because something is difficult (as love is guaranteed to be) might mean that it’s not worth the struggle.

The night was hot in a pleasant way. On the side of a mountain, we had spent the day shopping, drinking cappuccinos, and tasting baklava at every little cafe. Delphi was a small and exquisite place. Two streets of shops and shopkeepers, small restaurants that survived on tourists who braved the winding, treacherous roads to this historical destination, and just a few recent high school graduates whose laughter disturbed the still summer air.

Something about it was eerie and hard to touch. Maybe some of the magic of the Oracle still resided in the small shop windows, or the potted plants that lined the sidewalks, or the stray cats that flitted between storefronts. Or perhaps it could be found in the residents themselves, few of them as there were. Something held the elusive mist that had made that spot so famous thousands of years ago.

That night my friend broke down.

We rarely knew what to do with ourselves.

She had lost her brother in a car crash just a year before and had other life circumstances that I cannot put into words. I do not know how she falls asleep at night or how she believes in God.

We watched the boys as they smoked their cigars on the balcony—the sky was yellow, then a dusty light pink, finally settling into a deep blue as the moon appeared between mountain peaks.

I will never forget this night. The sound of crying and the feeling that hits you in the chest when you cannot carry that pain a moment longer. The pressure builds up behind my eyes, and I rush into a room where I can break down the dam that lives between my tear ducts and the rest of the world.

We sat there across from each other, cheeks stained with makeup and tears, sweat running down my back because the bed and breakfast didn’t have an AC unit, while she told me that the only reason she didn’t kill herself on a Tuesday night last fall was because of the random text she received from me—before we even knew each other’s hearts as reflections of our own souls.

Some people have an otherworldly strength about them. We have all encountered someone who makes us ask: How do you keep going? How do you rise out of bed each morning, make your coffee, put on your shoes, and go about your day?

I do not pretend to know.

Whatever supernatural element the Oracle left behind in Delphi, the bond we tied between ourselves that night was stronger.

There is no alliance like that of tears rolling down cheeks with the same ferocity, a friend pulling the other off the ground with a gripping hug, and a thank you for helping me live, spoken with the kind of reverence that one uses in an ancient cathedral. After all, life itself is sacred.

I hope that you allow yourself even just one moment like this. One time where the pride and pressure of taking the next breath is set aside to reveal the deepest reasons for life. I cannot believe we let “life” hinder us from the moments where we experience what it actually means to live.