I am taking a writing course with Dr. about religious trauma. I am a big fan of Dr. Moslener and her work (she has written two books that I highly recommend, After Purity: Race, Sex and Relgion in White Christian America and Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence), and have taken one of her courses before on purity culture, I found through Dr. ’s Axis Mundi podcast Straight White American Jesus.

This week in our course, we were asked to read chapter three of Rezmaa Menakem's book, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, and answer the question, “How has racial violence impacted your sense of self?”

The opening of the chapter begins with this beautiful quote by Maya Angelou:

Below is my response to the question after reading the passage.

Racial violence has shaped my sense of self in ways I am still learning to name. As a white woman, I move through the world with real privilege, and I do not want to confuse that privilege with innocence. I have been able to move more freely and to remain shielded from many of the dangers that black and brown people live with every day. That truth matters, and so does the quieter truth that my body has always known something was wrong, even when the people around me insisted otherwise. I have also found that as a white woman, the best way for me to learn about the impacts of racial violence is by listening to others who are more oppressed than I am. And then ultimately to my own body, that holds the truth of pain and trauma from generations past.

I am a highly sensitive human, and as a child, I remember feeling the atmosphere shift around race before I had language for it. I could sense the tension, the dismissal, the ways harm was minimized with common phrases, especially here in the South, like “everything is fine” or “this is just how we do things.” Those words did not comfort me; they only made me doubt my own perception.

Over time, that gaslighting became part of my own inner weather: a habit of doubting what I could see, what I could feel, what I knew to be true in my bones.

I also carry the inheritance of my ancestry. I am German and Southern, and I have no doubt that people in my line contributed to atrocity, whether through chattel slavery, silence, compliance, or the moral collapse that made Nazi Germany possible. That history lives in me not as guilt alone, but as responsibility.

Menakem writes about the difference between dirty pain and clean pain. Clean pain avoids, blames, and denies. Dirty pain stays present long enough to tell the truth and do something different. That language gives me a way to understand what I am trying to do now, which is to stop passing pain forward in unconscious ways. It’s about acknowledging it and doing what is in my capacity to repair.

Maybe that is what I mean when I talk about turning dirty pain into clean pain. I want to stay with what is uncomfortable without fleeing into denial or defensiveness. I want to let the truth sit in me and allow myself to be changed by it, time and time again. Because if racial violence has impacted my sense of self, it has done so by showing me that selfhood cannot be built on innocence or ignorance, only on truth. And truth, however painful, is the only way I can metabolize what has happened in a way that allows for forward motion.

So, my dear canaries, I offer this not as an ending, but as an invitation to witness more honestly, to notice more carefully, and to take responsibility for what we have been taught to ignore. May we be willing to stay with the discomfort long enough to see what it is asking us to change.

I have loved rainy days for as long as I can remember, and I think my dad is part of the reason why. He loved the rain, too, and when storms rolled in, he would invite me into the garage so we could sit and watch it together. I can still picture us there: the smell of wet concrete, the low drum of water on the roof, the way the whole world seemed to slow down and turn inward. My dad was good at that kind of pausing, and although I didn’t always appreciate this as a child, I certainly do now.

Maybe that is why rainy days still feel like a small mercy to me.

There is a tenderness to rain that I don’t find in every kind of weather. Sunshine can sometimes feel, as Glennon Doyle has suggested, a little aggressive in its insistence that we get out and make the most of the day. Rain is gentler than that, and it seems to understand that rest is its own kind of living.

On rainy days, the world feels less demanding. The light softens, the edges blur, and the noise quiets. I can settle into my own company without guilt, urgency, or the feeling that I am wasting something by staying still. Rain does not ask me to perform; it simply offers shelter, like a cozy blanket.

That is probably why I love it so much. Rain feels like a permission slip to be the version of myself that most naturally comes home to books, blankets, slow mornings, and the quiet work of being alive. It reminds me of my dad. Of the lesson that pausing is not the same as falling behind, but an essential part of the process.

And today, on this rainy day, I have committed to taking my teenage daughters and their friends to the mall, a commitment I cannot back down on. But I had a slow morning, and very much enjoyed reflecting on why I love the rain so much here with you.

So my dear canaries, what kind of weather feels most like home to you, and why?

A bat mitzvah is a Jewish coming-of-age ceremony for a girl who turns 13, marking the transition into religious responsibility and adulthood. But that simple definition barely touches what it felt like to be there. The whole weekend was full of meaning, labor, tenderness, pride, and the kind of invisible work that mothers do so often that no one notices until you stop long enough to see it.

How we got here

Nikki, and I met a few years ago in the rooms of recovery, through a local subgroup of Laura McKowen’s sobriety support community, The Luckiest Club (or TLC). We started a Marco Polo video chat and have been talking every day since, about nothing and everything. About the small things that make up a day and the bigger things that make up a life.

That daily check-in has become one of the most essential parts of my day, and her friendship has become one of the most important in my life.

There is something about a friend who is not just a friend, but a witness to your becoming. There is something even more precious about that friend also being on a sober path, because if you have tried to stay sober, you know this: you do not do it alone. As they say in those recovery rooms of TLC where we met, “you can’t do it alone, but only you can do it.”

The work behind the celebration

A bat mitzvah is a huge undertaking, not just for the child, but for the whole family. There is planning, logistics, emotional energy, and all the ordinary chaos that comes with making something holy and beautiful happen well. My family and I made the trip from Austin to Fort Worth to celebrate Nikki’s daughter, and I tried to come up early to help, but Nikki said, “No, I got it, just come up with your family.”

The day of the bat mitzvah, I did what I think women often do for one another when we are at our best: I did not keep asking whether she needed help. I just stayed. I told her I was hanging out with her in the space between the service and the party, and what I really meant was this.

It was my absolute pleasure to step in, and there was, of course, PLENTY for me to do.

Why do we not ask

Debriefing after this weekend, as we do, Nikki and I were talking about how hard it is for women to ask for help.

Why is that?

Why do so many of us act like needing support is a weakness, when in reality, so much of life is simply too much for one person to hold alone? We wait until we are exhausted, overwhelmed, or emotionally maxed out before we let someone in? Why do we keep pretending we can carry everything ourselves?

And I actually do not think I learned this kind of showing up from my own mother or from the women in my family. I learned it through the example of other women who showed up later in my adult life.

The women who taught me

One of the first women who showed me what this looked like was the social worker in the pediatric ICU where I worked for fifteen years. Her name is Kelly, and she and I were fast friends, share the same birthday, and people often mistake us for sisters.

She is still one of my best friends today, and happens to be in recovery as well, although neither of us got sober until years after we met. She has stepped up for me in ways both big and small, and one time in particular I will never forget.

I was at a public pool with my twin five-year-old girls and was VERY pregnant with my son. It was the second birthday party of the day, and I was that kind of bone-tired you only know in pregnancy. There was no shade, and I did not have a swimsuit. It was August in Texas, so I was already drenched in sweat the second I arrived. Kelly happened to be there with one of her kids.

One of my twin daughters completely lost her shit because she had not passed the swim test to be able to swim in the deep end, and I had no energy left to comfort her. I wanted so desperately to at least get in the pool to play with her and help diffuse the situation, but remember, no swimsuit. Kelly stepped in and made it all better. Simple as that.

I sat on the concrete in the only triangle of shade I could find and cried with gratitude.

What was no big deal to her, meant everything to me. When your child’s heart is breaking, and you feel helpless and exhausted, there is no sweeter relief than another mother lending a hand.

The gift of stepping in

And since then, there have been other women who have this particular gift of showing up and taking care of all the things, without even being asked. My mother-in-law came and stayed with us for two months after my twins were born, and I couldn’t have made it through that time without her. She would get up in the middle of the night, so my husband could get sleep, as there was no paternity leave and he had to work, change the diapers, and get them ready for me to breastfeed. When your babies are born, just over 5 pounds each, and you are breastfeeding every two hours for upwards of two months until they make their weight, this is sanity, my friends.

And my friend Meredith, who is also in recovery, has an exquisite gift for showing up big, too. She not only insists on throwing elaborate celebrations for all the occasions, complete with incredible homemade swag, but she will also fly in from across the country to have dinner with you if she thinks you need a pick-me-up. A full-time working mama of two, who is also the sole caregiver for her aging mother. The woman’s heart knows no bounds.

I’ve also seen this practice of showing up unfold in group form as well. Every other Wednesday night, I join a Zoom call with women I met in the rooms of recovery. We call it “Wise Woman Wednesdays.” Our gathering was started after someone close to us died by suicide. That kind of loss carves something open in you, makes life feel more fragile and more precious, and it teaches you how urgently we need each other. We have to show up for each other to check in, stay close, and keep reminding one another that we do not have to carry this alone, even in our darkest hours.

And because this was modeled for me, I was able to show up for Nikki in this way this weekend. Not with fanfare or a big announcement. Just with presence. Just by being there in the gap between the service and the celebration, helping in the ways that mattered: taking pictures, holding details, staying close, making room for her to be fully there with her daughter instead of worrying about everything else.

Sometimes what a woman needs most is not someone asking, “Do you need help?” Sometimes she needs someone who can see the answer before she says it and step in anyway.

What friendship can be

This is what I love about friendship with women when it is healthy, mutual, and rooted in real care: it can become a place where we borrow strength from each other. And we do not have to wait for a crisis or an event to be useful to one another. We can bring the meal, hold the baby, take the photo, walk beside the person while she finishes the impossible list of things. We can show up without requiring a whole explanation with a love that is not only practical but profound.

I think women need to stop asking each other if we need help and just…..start showing up.

Most women raised in our culture need help but do not know how to ask. And if recovery has taught me anything, it is that we heal in relationships. We stay sober in a relationship. We become more honest, more grounded, and more ourselves in a relationship.

That, to me, is one of the loveliest things women can do for each other. Not fix everything or make everything easy.

Just show up.

Is there anyone who has shown up for you in your life in a way that you will never forget? Tell me in the comments, or even tag them here!

I did not think I had ADHD.

For most of my life, I thought ADHD belonged to someone else, maybe my brother, but certainly not me. My little brother Andrew was the obvious one, with the traditional signs and symptoms of ADHD, and the kind that the teacher calls home about to demand testing because they are so disruptive. I was the quiet one, the high-achieving one, the gifted-and-talented one. I was the girl who won awards like “most likely to be successful” and, in high school, Ms. CHS because I was involved in so many activities and seemed to excel at them. From the outside, I looked like the opposite of someone struggling.

But that’s the tricky part about this. So many girls and women with ADHD are missed because we don’t look like the stereotype. The stereotype that was developed based on the male presentation of ADHD. We are often bright, capable, compliant, and deeply good at hiding how much effort it takes to stay afloat.

What Masking Meant

Masking looked like achievement in my life. It looked like being the girl who could do a thousand things and still seem composed, and staying busy enough that no one noticed how hard it was to keep up. It looked like perfectionism, control, and an almost embarrassing commitment to appearing “fine.” What no one saw was the amount of internal effort required to keep all of that going.

The reason late diagnosis in women has become such a “thing” is because many of us were never disruptive enough to draw attention. We were the “lost girls” — as defined and described in a 2020 Guardian article that named something many of us had felt but not yet understood: girls whose ADHD went unseen because their symptoms were internal, invisible, or mistaken for personality. We were not the ones who got called out, but the ones who quietly disappeared into competence, and that invisibility can last for decades.

Researching My Kids

I first started researching ADHD for my children. Two out of my three kids ended up getting neuropsychological testing, and in learning about them I kept running into myself.

The more I read, the more familiar it all felt. Not just a little familiar, alarmingly familiar. Still, even after all that research, I wasn’t convinced it was me. I could explain it away and tell myself I was just anxious, overwhelmed, a little disorganized, or a tired mom with too much on her plate.

That’s part of the problem with late diagnosis. If you have spent your whole life coping by overfunctioning, you may not recognize dysfunction because it has been disguised as success. You don’t know what it feels like to stop compensating, so you mistake exhaustion for normal.

The Breaking Point

I hit my breaking point about three years into sobriety. I became deeply depressed. This was the kind of depression where even showering felt hard, where getting through the day felt impossible, where suicidal ideations showed up and scared the shit out of my husband. I had just finished my graduate school semester, and I was entering the usual December swirl of motherhood: the cooking, the gifts, the logistics, the magic-making, the invisible labor of trying to make everything feel special for three children. And I simply could not do it.

After that, I couldn’t mask anymore. The house got messier. Still sanitary but no longer perfectly picked up. The routines and structure I had carefully built for my kids fell back to the bare minimum. My husband began to help out a lot more, which was much appreciated, but I had to face something I had spent years avoiding: I was not okay, and I could no longer outwork, out-organize, or out-perform my way around that fact.

That was the moment I had to ask a more honest question than “What is wrong with me?” Then the question became: What if this has been here all along, and I just learned how to hide it?

Late Diagnosis

Getting officially diagnosed through neuropsychological testing for two of my three children helped me see the pattern more clearly, but I still needed time to believe it about myself, which makes sense to me now that I understand a little more about it.

I also am well aware of the perceived “trend” of people getting diagnosed with ADHD, and I didn’t want to be dismissed as this or as someone who was just seeking attention or excuses for my behavior.

After finally seeking the help of a psychiatrist, the diagnosis gave language to what I had been calling character flaws for years:

• chronic overwhelm

• time blindness

• emotional flooding

• difficulty starting tasks

• difficulty finishing tasks

• clutter that feels like moral failure

• perfectionism that hides panic

• a mind that never fully shuts off

And underneath it all, the exhausting effort of trying to seem regulated when I was actually working very hard just to stay regulated enough to function.

What I’m Learning

Late diagnosis did not change who I am, but it did give me a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion for the parts of me that used to be incredibly self-critical.

With the diagnosis, there has been grief for the years I spent misunderstanding myself. I am sad for the younger me who was praised for being “so together” while quietly carrying so much. And I grieve the other women who are still being missed because they are too smart, too quiet, too successful, too masked to look like they need help.

In addition to grief, I also felt relief in knowing that the little girl who looked fine was actually working incredibly hard to survive. And now that I know what I am working with, I can use the many resources available to me to help me function well in life.

If You Think You Might Have ADHD

If this essay stirred something in you, I want to gently say: you are not alone, and you are not imagining it. Sometimes the first clue that ADHD may be part of your story is not a dramatic crisis, but a long, quiet pattern of overwhelm, masking, perfectionism, forgetfulness, or feeling like everyday life takes more effort than it seems to take for everyone else.

A few things may help as you begin to explore that possibility:

• Start noticing patterns across your life, not just what is happening right now.

• Write down examples of things you struggle with, especially if they show up consistently.

• Pay attention to coping strategies like over-preparing, people-pleasing, and chronic self-monitoring, which can sometimes be signs of masking.

• If possible, talk with someone who understands adult ADHD, especially ADHD in women.

• Consider asking for a formal evaluation if you want a clearer answer and more support.

• Use external supports like reminders, checklists, calendars, alarms, and routines that reduce the burden of remembering everything yourself.

Some helpful resources include CHADD, the Cleveland Clinic, and ADDitude Magazine, which all offer information about ADHD in adults and women. If you want to learn from lived experience as well, How to ADHD and other adult ADHD communities can be a helpful place to start.

Also, please remember, if you are feeling deeply depressed, hopeless, or unsafe, please reach out for urgent support from a licensed professional, a crisis line (988), or emergency services (911) right away. You deserve care, clarity, and support.

So my dear canaries, have you ever discovered something about yourself only after seeing it clearly in someone you love? I’d love to hear your story in the comments. Especially if you were the “good girl,” the high achiever, or the one who looked fine from the outside.

Yesteryear is the debut best-selling novel by Caro Claire Burke. It follows Natalie, a tradwife influencer whose carefully curated world begins to unravel, and in doing so, it opens up questions about domesticity, femininity, faith, and the stories women are taught to live inside. It is sharp, unsettling, and I will admit that I had a hard time putting it down. It also felt uneven in ways I couldn’t quite ignore.

What I Recognized

The book didn’t name Natalie’s religion directly, and I actually appreciated that ambiguity. It seemed to place her in the broader world of Christian Nationalism, which I do not think is a religion at all, but rather a political ideology dressed up as faith.

Constitutional and civil rights attorney Andrew Seidel defines Christian Nationalism as an alliance of conservative Christianity and conservative politics that seeks to merge American identity with Christian identity, distorting both faith and democracy. That framing fits what I think the book was reaching toward, even if it never said it outright.

And I understand why that matters.

Because Christian Nationalism absolutely does use the language of morality, family, order, and protection to smuggle in power and control. It knows how to sound benign and offer the false promise of stability to people who are exhausted, lonely and afraid. It offers promises to “take our country back,” as our country continues to diversify.

White Christians have enjoyed privilege in this country for a long time. Not because it is their divine right from God, but because of the way our demographic systems of power have been created. This is power and privilege is being threatened as diversity increases, and makes the allure of Christian Nationalism being inculcated into our churches less obvious and more appealing to many.

That is the part I wish Yesteryear had been captured more fully.

The Allure it Missed

I grew up with parents who themselves were raised Southern Baptist in small-town Oklahoma. Because of their own issues with this upbringing, my dad became an atheist, and my mom joined the Presbyterian church, which is where my brother and I were baptized.

My extended family remained deeply in the Southern Baptist church, and we would return there for services on many holidays. Most of my friends and my first serious boyfriend were also evangelical Christians. I went to evangelical Christian camps every summer and often attended my friends’ churches on Sundays. Later, I went to Baylor University, one of the largest Southern Baptist colleges in the country.

Growing up, I wanted desperately to be loved and good, and evangelical Christianity gave me a recipe for both.

The Hard Part

That’s why I struggled with Natalie. She felt unlikable to me in a way that made it harder to believe in her as a full human being. And honestly, I felt that way about most of the characters. They seemed so hard, polished, and emotionally sealed off that I had trouble feeling the vulnerable undercurrent that makes people real.

And that matters to me. Because the people inside high-control systems are not, in my experience, cold and callous. They are, in fact, some of the best humans I know, even though I hold many very different political and ethical beliefs than they do. They are tender and earnest and trying and want the same things all of us do in this life: safety, strong communities, and their children to thrive. And above of all, as most of us do, they believe to their core that what they are participating in is the right and moral thing to do.

That’s what makes it so complicated. Yesteryear, at times, seemed to flatten that complexity. And when it does that, it risks dehumanizing the very people it’s trying to critique.

The Seduction

What I think gets missed sometimes in stories about high-control religion is the allure. Because that is the part that is hardest to explain if you haven’t lived it.

I drank the proverbial Kool-Aid of evangelical Christianity because I wanted to be loved and good, and those systems are very good at rewarding that desire. They tell you exactly how to perform worthiness and offer praise when you comply. They make the path feel clear and make belonging feel conditional but possible.

And when you are young, and your brain wants simple myopic answers to even the most complex questions, that can feel like grace.

That is why I think the people drawn to tradwife culture or Christian Nationalism are not usually cynical or cruel. More often, they are hungry for safety, order, and community. They want something solid to stand on and have a strong desire for a scary and uncertain world to make sense. And this is exactly what makes the whole thing so dangerous.

What is Behind The Veil

I also can’t help but think about who benefits from all of this. I believe there are people at the very top of these power structures who understand exactly how vulnerable these longings are. They know that if they can attach control to morality, fear to faith, and domination to protection through the institutions of the church, people will follow.

The more we focus on our differences, the more invisible the people in positions of power who are really feeding us the lies. I think if we could focus more on our common humanity, the whole thing would have a better chance of being exposed for what it is.

What Stayed With Me

So yes, I had mixed feelings about Yesteryear.

I thought it was compelling, and it was certainly difficult to put down. But I also wanted more tenderness, more psychological realism, more of the soft, complicated humanity that makes people inside these systems legible instead of simply legendarily awful.

Because the truth is more painful than that. The people who remain in high-control religion are not usually monsters. They are people trying to make sense of the world they inherited and are often shaped by love, fear, hope, and loyalty. I find them to be both deeply kind and deeply mistaken all at once.

And that is what makes this all so heartbreaking. Not because they are cold and callous. But because they are deeply human.

And the systems that are influencing them are often far more sinister than they can see.

So my dear canaries, did you read Yesteryear and, if so, what did it stir up for you? I’d love to know whether you read it as a critique, a warning, a mirror, or something else entirely. Tell me your thoughts in the comments.

But over time, that silence started to feel less like kindness and more like disconnection from my own integrity.

Becoming a Therapist, Finding My Voice

I am a new therapist. I recently graduated this May with my LMSW and am currently working toward my LCSW, slowly building toward opening my own practice. I also recently began re-establishing an online presence after stepping away from social media for five years to care for my mental health.

I started with Substack, which felt like a quieter, more honest place to write. A space where I could practice using my voice without the immediacy and pressure of constant feedback. More recently, I stepped back into Instagram (@thesoutherncanary), and that experience has been… experimental. My content is inconsistent, I fumble my words, and I’m learning both the technology and how to express myself in real time.

What I keep coming back to is this: writing has been essential to my healing. These platforms are not just about sharing; they are where I practice becoming.

From Peacemaker to Listener

Before I started “doing the work” required in recovery and emotional sobriety over five years ago, I used to think of myself as a peacemaker. I was open to hearing all sides, hesitant to say anything that might upset anyone, and deeply committed to staying neutral.

What I’ve come to understand, slowly and with some discomfort, is that I was also uneducated in ways that mattered. I did not fully understand the history of this country, the lived realities of marginalized communities, or the systems that shape access, safety, and opportunity.

My growth didn’t come from debate, but rather from listening. Listening to BIPOC voices, to queer and trans individuals, to Jewish and Muslim communities, to people in larger and disabled bodies, and to those whose identities and experiences differ from my own. My social work education gave me a framework, but it was sustained listening that created real change in me.

These shifts in my perspective didn’t happen all at once. They came about through exposure, reflection, time, and a deep commitment on my part to understand the cognitive dissonances percolating in my soul.

Naming Privilege, Choosing Responsibility

I now understand that I move through the world with layers of privilege: white, thin, cisgender, conventionally attractive, and economic. I don’t name these with shame, but with responsibility. Because once you see the systems that shape inequity, it becomes difficult to justify disengagement.

This shift is what began to change not only how I see the world, but how I understand my role within it.

The Ethics of Not Staying Silent

As a social worker, this is not just personal; it is professional. The NASW Code of Ethics explicitly calls us beyond individual-level care and into awareness of the broader systems impacting our clients’ lives.

The core ethical principle of Social Justice states that social workers challenge social injustice and pursue change on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed groups.

• Section 6.04, Social and Political Action, further emphasizes that social workers should engage in efforts to ensure equitable access to resources, services, and opportunities.

• Section 1.05 calls us to develop cultural competence and actively understand the impact of oppression, discrimination, and privilege.

In other words, this awareness is not separate from my work, but rather, it is embedded within it.

What This Does Not Mean

Speaking publicly about social and political issues does not mean I bring those views into the therapy room uninvited. It does not mean I attempt to persuade my clients or position myself as an authority on their beliefs. It also does not mean I only work with individuals who agree with me.

I see my role as a therapist as creating a space rooted in safety, curiosity, and respect. I aim to help clients reconnect with their own inner wisdom or higher Self, the part of them that is whole and intact, even beneath the protective adaptations they’ve developed to survive.

That work requires my utmost humility, and I take that responsibility seriously.

Why I Still Choose to Speak

Outside of the therapy room, I am still a person living in a complex and unequal society. Policies shape mental health, and systems influence who has access to care. Identity impacts safety, belonging, and opportunity.

I am not speaking because I believe I will change minds. I won’t. What I do believe is that change often begins quietly, through exposure, resonance, and witnessing someone familiar express something unfamiliar. That is how my own perspective began to shift.

Planting Seeds

So this is me, planting seeds. Imperfectly, publicly, and sometimes clumsily. I am still learning, and I will often make mistakes. But I can’t let the fear of those mistakes keep me out of the ring. Instead, I will continue to listen, reflect, and grow.

But I no longer equate silence with goodness, or neutrality with integrity.

So if you are here, whether you agree with me or not, I’m grateful for your presence. Not because I want to convince you of anything, but because I believe there is something meaningful about witnessing one another in the process of becoming.

And this, this evolving, sometimes uncomfortable expression, is part of mine.

If any of this resonates, I hope it leaves you wondering where silence has been asking you to stay small. I would love to hear anything you would be willing to share in the comments below.

And yet, there is nothing our society looks down upon more than a drunk mother.

Not a tired mother, or an overwhelmed mother. Not a mother who is stretched thin, under-supported, underpaid, under-seen, and somehow still expected to hold everyone’s life together with one hand while answering a text, making dinner, and remembering the dentist appointment with the other.

No, the mother who drinks is the one we love to judge.

The Mother’s Day Double Bind

On Mother’s Day, we are handed a strange and deeply American double bind. Have a mimosa, celebrate yourself, relax. But not too much. Never too much. Because the moment the celebration tips past socially acceptable into visibly imperfect, the warmth disappears, and the shame begins.

Mommy wine culture didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was built for a reason. It is marketed to women who are exhausted, lonely, overloaded, and desperate for some relief that feels adult, private, and earned. The memes tell the story plainly: parenting is hard, motherhood is impossible, and alcohol is the thing that helps you survive.

When I Was One of Those Mothers

I used to live inside that story.

I was one of those mothers trying to find the ever-elusive balance of drinking just enough to soften the edges, to take the pressure off, to feel like I could keep the job done without ever appearing like an irresponsible mother. The performance was exhausting, and the math was constant. How many should I have at lunch? I really want another, but if I do, I will need a nap, or I will have to keep drinking. But if I keep drinking, I can’t get too drunk. And who will drive?

And then came the hangover.

If you know, you know. Parenting a toddler, or any young child for that matter, with a hangover is a particular kind of fresh hell. It is not glamorous, not rebellious, not funny after the fact. It is a body that feels punished for seeking relief and a child who still needs breakfast, patience, sunscreen, and someone to remain emotionally available. There is no hiding from it. There is just the long, aching morning after.

What I Believe Now

I have not had a drink in over five years, and I have zero judgment for women who still choose to drink. None. Women do what they need to do to get through their days, and motherhood in this country is not built with tenderness in mind. It is built with pressure, scarcity, and a bizarre expectation that mothers should be endlessly available while also remaining composed, thin, grateful, and unbothered.

That is what I want to talk about: not the woman with the glass in her hand, but the culture that put it there and then turned around and mocked her for it.

What the Culture Misses

We do not support mothers well in the United States. We do not adequately support stay-at-home mothers, working mothers, single mothers, adoptive mothers, mothers of disabled children, mothers in poverty, mothers carrying invisible labor, mothers carrying trauma, mothers carrying the whole damn household. And then we act surprised when women reach for something that blunts the ache.

Of course they do.

Of course, some mothers drink. Of course, some do more than they intended. Moms are trying to take the edge off a life that has offered them very little edge protection. And then, once they are tipsy, sloppy, actually visible in their need, we ridicule them and turn them into cautionary tales. Their coping and trying to do the most human thing of soothing their pain turns into a moral failure.

Shame Is Not Care

That shame is not okay.

Shame does not make mothers safer or healthier. It does not create rest, support, childcare, mental health care, paid leave, community, or relief. It simply tightens the trap and teaches women to hide their pain better, not to heal it. It often keeps women stuck in a cycle of addiction. I know it did for me.

If we want to be honest, we have to admit that “mommy wine culture” is not the disease. It is a symptom.

It is a symptom of:

• overwork, loneliness, and a country that romanticizes motherhood while refusing to materially support it.

• the demand that mothers be both endlessly self-sacrificing and effortlessly cheerful.

• a culture that sells women relief in a bottle and then condemns them for reaching for it.

What We Owe Mothers

I do not miss drinking, but I do miss having something to change the way I feel when I am uncomfortable or in pain. I remember the promise that one glass could become a small private exhale and how quickly relief can become ritual, and ritual can become reliance, and reliance can become something you are suddenly expected to defend.

What I wish we would offer mothers instead is not more judgment, but more care, honesty, and room for imperfection. Systems that keep women from having to medicate their exhaustion in the first place.

Because the answer was never to make mothers feel worse about being overwhelmed. What we need to be doing, is asking why motherhood is so punishing that a meme and a mimosa have become the language of survival.

So my dear canaries, on this Mother’s Day, I’d love to hear what this brings up for you, especially if you’ve felt the pressure to hold it all together while quietly reaching for something to help you survive.

I also love my children deeply. This part was never in question. But alongside that love, there is something quieter, harder to admit. Something that doesn’t feel very “maternal” or “grateful” or “good.”

Until about four years ago, I would have never admitted this out loud. I am not even sure I recognized the sharp, exhausting pangs of resentment that made me feel like I was disappearing in the life I had so desperately wanted.

Once I recognized what this feeling was, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it.

The Life I Thought Would Work

I didn’t even start trying to become a mother until my late twenties.

My husband and I got married in our mid-twenties and were a typical young couple living in Dallas who worked hard and played hard. We bought a house, both went to grad school, and built lives that looked, from the outside, like they were working very well.

By the time we started trying to get pregnant, I was in a high-pressure clinical management role with thirty direct reports. Everyone told me I was good at it, and I was. But I was also deeply, quietly miserable.

I was working all the time, drinking wine every evening, answering emails on my Blackberry on vacations, trying to outrun a feeling I couldn’t quite name.

And then my younger brother Andrew, who was just fifteen months younger than me, was found dead at his job. He died because of his own addictions to cocaine and crystal meth.

When something like this happens, you can’t help but crack open and examine every crevice of your life. I knew I couldn’t waste another second doing something that was making me miserable, no matter how good I was at it or how much money I was making.

So I left that job, but the drinking and the stress didn’t stop. And when it came time to get pregnant, I believe this with my whole heart now: my body knew what I wouldn’t admit.

My body wouldn’t allow me to get pregnant, as my body wasn’t safe for babies. It was overworked, swimming in wine, and not a safe place to land. We ended up at a fertility clinic, and I had three miscarriages. And then, finally, we got pregnant with twins through IUI.

I thought to myself, now I can relax because these babies, becoming a mother, will finally save me from myself.

The Illusion of Being “Better”

When I found out I was having two girls, my heart sank. I sobbed alone in the bathroom while everyone was fawning over how lucky I was to be having not one, but TWO, precious twin girls.

I was distraught, not because I didn’t want them, but because I knew how hard it is to be a girl in this world. And I knew, deep down, that I didn’t have steady ground beneath me, and I had no idea how to be a woman myself. So how in the world could I raise two of my own?

But I still believed, somehow, that motherhood would fix me.

That it would make me drink less like a “normal person,” make me more confident, grounded, more whole.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

My drinking didn’t disappear—it adapted. It got quieter, more hidden, and in many ways, darker. I drank more at home, and I parented massively hungover. I felt trapped inside a life I didn’t know how to cope with, without the one thing I believed made it manageable.

At the same time, I built a version of motherhood that looked flawless from the outside.

We had a schedule, and my girls were always perfectly dressed. I went back to work when they were three months old and made it look easy. I ran three half marathons, and I lost all the baby weight—and more. By every visible metric, I was thriving, but internally, I was unraveling.

The Breaking Point

I broke when my girls were around two.

My husband was in London for work, and both the girls got a stomach bug. Then I got sick, and as you know, when you are a mother, getting sick isn’t an option. Especially when you don’t have any family that lives nearby that you can call. I was alone in the house, completely depleted, trying to hold everything together.

And something in me just…gave up. I couldn’t pretend anymore, and I knew I needed help. I tried desperately to do anything but quit drinking, even completing the 9-month RCIA process to convert to Catholicism, searching for something to anchor me. But what I eventually realized was this.

What I needed wasn’t to become someone else; I needed to surrender to the truth.

The Part I Tried to Silence

This is when I finally began the process of trying to get sober. It was a long process, and I had a bazillion day ones. But in those periods of sobriety, I began to allow many truths to sink in, to find myself again.

The truth was that I loved my children with my whole heart. And I was also overwhelmed, resentful, and completely disconnected from myself. That was the part I had been trying to silence.

Because what kind of mother feels that way?

But when I finally got still enough. Really still, the way you do when you’ve run out of ways to escape yourself, I could feel something deeper underneath the resentment. It wasn’t failure or brokenness, but truth.

Resentment as a Messenger

This was when I began to understand my resentment differently, not as something to fix, but as something sacred enough to listen to.

It was showing me where I was overextended and all the places I had abandoned myself. Where I was trying to live inside expectations that were never sustainable to begin with.

It was also showing me something bigger, because when I looked around at all the mamas around me I realized that it wasn’t just me.

My resentment wasn’t just personal; it was systemic. And once I saw that, I could stop turning it inward as shame.

Coming Back to Myself

Getting sober from alcohol allowed me I start listening to my own voice again. The quiet, steady one underneath the noise. The one I believe is connected to something deeper—to God, to the Divine, to whatever name we give the truth that lives inside us.

I began honoring my whole self. Not just the part that loves my children, which I do fiercely, but also the part that needs space, support, rest, and autonomy to stay connected to that love.

I said things out loud that I had spent years swallowing.

• I need help.

• This is too much.

• This doesn’t feel sustainable.

And slowly, I started to feel something return.

Resentment Is One of My Greatest Teachers

Now, when my resentment shows up, I recognize it for what it is: an invitation. To come back to myself, realign and stay honest. I ask for help, I take breaks, I go to yoga, I stop “doing” and start “being.”

Staying connected to the truest part of myself, the part I can hear when I get quiet enough. The part that reminds me, again and again, that I don’t have to disappear to be a good mother. That love and resentment can coexist without canceling each other out.

For those of you who celebrate, Happy Mother’s Day, dear canaries!

What is one truth about your life or motherhood that you’ve felt afraid to say out loud, and what might change if you did? I would love to hear about it here.

There was a time when I thought my daily wine habit was some kind of secret weapon. I distinctly remember the time when my relationship with alcohol shifted in my early 20s. I was having drinks after an intolerably painful breakup with the man I knew I was going to marry, the first man I had ever slept with, and feeling the enormous sigh of relief knowing I could get through this. I thought to myself, I can get through anything as long as I have my wine at the end of the day. It was the magic elixir that softened the edges of the pain, and the unbearable noise that was always in my head, and made it so much more tolerable.

But the truth is, I didn’t avoid the mess and the noise by turning away from it. I just stopped seeing it clearly and momentarily stopped feeling it so acutely. Over the next fifteen years, when I would continue to drink, the boxes where the messes are kept keep piling up. The old feelings keep getting shoved toward the back. This pain doesn’t magically vanish; it just continues to accumulate.

And then, when I got sober in November of 2020, the lights came on.

At first, it felt absolutely intolerable, excruciating. And I went back to drinking because I didn’t think I could handle it. All at once, I could see everything: the dust, the clutter, the things you meant to sort through years ago, the emotional debris I kept trying not to touch. But the gift of sobriety is not that the closet is instantly clean; it’s that I could finally see what’s in there. That was my life I was avoiding, not just the hard parts, but the good parts too. And once I saw it, I could begin to sort it out.

Some days I clean up a lot. Some days I clean up a little. Some days I just sit on the floor in the middle of the mess and breathe. All of that is okay. The only thing that matters is that I do not turn the lights off again.

I Got Sober in a Closet

This metaphor rings even more true for me, because I actually got sober in a closet.

During the fall of 2020, I was a stay-at-home mother to a one-year-old and twin six-year-olds. My life was full, loud, and beautifully chaotic. I was also trying to find my way out of drinking, and I needed a place that felt steady enough to help me do that.

So I created what I called my cozy corner: pillows, a soft blanket, a place for my books and journal, and warm light. It became the place where I went to pray, reflect, read, write, and take sobriety meetings.

The best part of that cozy corner was that it was behind not one, not two, but three doors. My young children and my husband had to pass through all of them before they could reach me. I was, in a way, like a little squirrel tucked safely inside a tree, doing the work of coming back to myself.

It felt sacred, private, and a sanctuary of relief

The Cozy Corner

People on meetings would sometimes ask, “Molly, are you in your closet?”

And I would laugh and say, “Why yes, I am.”

Sometimes one of my children would wander in during the day and curl up among the pillows and the blanket, finding refuge there with a book. That made me so happy. I had created a space that not only helped me regulate, but also gave them a place to settle, too. In some quiet way, I had built a little sanctuary for the whole family.

That is what sobriety gave me at first: a place to downregulate. A place to remember myself. A place where I could hear my own thoughts long enough to begin trusting them.

Where Will You Go?

When we were getting ready to sell that house in Dallas and make the move to Austin, I asked the realtor if I should put the clothing rod back up in the closet and take down the cozy corner. I could tell she didn’t really know what to think of me and strange little retreat space. She said, “Probably.” My husband, without missing a beat, said, “No. Where will you go?”

He knew exactly what that space meant to me. I think he thought I was a little crazy when I made it, but over time, he came to love it too. He understood that it wasn’t really about the closet. It was about survival. And creating a space of my own for the first time in a long time, so that I could finally save the only life we can save.

Rebuilding the Corner

We lived in a rental in Austin for a couple of years while our new home was being built. By then, I was three years into sobriety, not going to as many meetings, and feeling more stable. I didn’t create a cozy corner in that house. I thought maybe I didn’t need one anymore.

And then, as they say, “life got lifey.”

That’s when I found myself needing to return to the practices that had first held me. I needed the quiet structure of my morning ritual. So I rebuilt the corner in the rental. I didn’t make it fancy, I just used what we had and it was just what I needed to inspire me to get myself out of bed and relish in that sacred, luminal space of the early morning.

When we designed our new home, my husband did something generous and deeply loving: he suggested I have a whole room.

Not just a corner. Not just a nook. An ENTIRE ROOM!

Eighty square feet of sanctuary that we called the reading room on the plans. It was hilarious to watch the architect try to understand what this room was for. He kept wanting to place a desk and printer in it. But I kept saying, “No, no, let me help you understand.”

I have a built-in daybed filled with pillows and a cozy blanket, and bookshelves where all my emotional support books are within reach. I told my husband, and I meant it, that he could do whatever he wanted with the rest of the house as long as I had this room.

And I do. And it is perfect.

Returning to My Highest Self

Now, in my updated cozy corner, I still do the same things that got me sober in the first place. I still go there to be quiet. I still sit with my journal. I still read. I still check in with the deepest, truest part of myself—the part I believe I can hear when I get still enough, the part where God (who I call the Divine) speaks.

That, for me, is sobriety. Not perfection, performance or some polished version of having it all together.

Keep the Lights On

Sobriety is returning to my highest self again and again. Getting still and quiet so I can do my best to live in my integrity. Noticing when I’ve drifted, and gently, without shame, coming back. Unpacking the boxes in my closet as I’m emotionally ready, and allowing the mess to exist without letting it overwhelm me.

Most of all, it is sitting through the uncomfortable parts, sometimes exquisitely painful parts, of staying in the light.

Because now I know the mess in the closet is not something to fear. It’s simply what was waiting to be seen, processed, and

And I know for certain that as long as I keep the lights on, I can handle it.

So my dear canaries, what might you begin to see—and who might you become—if you chose, even gently, to keep the lights on? Let me know in the comments!

But then there are the others.

A man picks up the phone, and when I tell him we can’t get him in for 6-8 weeks, something in him fractures. “This is pathetic,” he says. The tone in his voice hardens, and any warmth evaporates. It’s at this point that I know he’s not talking about the waitlist anymore. He’s talking to me, and he’s letting me know I’ve failed him.

I know this kind of man, and I have my whole life.

I Used To Be The “Good Girl”

In my 20s and early 30s, I was the archetypal “good girl.” I had perfected this in my various roles in the hospital, where I worked as a registered nurse, with male physicians at the bedside and with the “suits” in leadership, and it honestly served me well. When a man got angry, I fawned. I apologized for things I hadn’t done. I made myself small to make him feel big again, and I truly believed it was my job as a professional and subordinate in power to soothe his rage and to keep the peace at any cost. I thought if I was just nice enough, quiet enough, accommodating enough, the anger would pass.

Sometimes the anger did pass, and I was promoted quickly at a young age to positions of power. I am not saying I wasn’t qualified or capable of these promotions, but I know they were due in large part to my willingness to play the patriarchal game laid before me and understand my female role in it.

But every time I participated in this game I lost a little piece of myself, and underneath, I was simmering with my own rage and resentment as a result of self-abandonment.

Now, I’m different. With getting sober came a tremendous amount of work, and I know now that I don’t deserve to be spoken to like that no matter who I’m talking to, no matter what energy they bring. I am now able, most of the time, to respond in a way that is clear, firm, and professional.

And I’ve noticed that something fascinating happens when I hold that boundary: these men get angrier.

It’s as if they’re expecting the old script. They’re ready for me to shrink, to soothe, to make it okay. When I don’t play the game, when I don’t fawn, their anger spikes. It’s almost as if my refusal to participate is the real provocation.

Terry Real and the Anger Men Can’t Name

This is where the work of Terry Real becomes so essential. Real, a renowned family therapist and author of The New Rules of Marriage, I Don’t Want to Talk About It, and Us: Doing the Work of a Lifetime, has spent decades studying men, masculinity, and the hidden emotional lives of men that they’re taught to suppress.

Real makes a crucial distinction: men aren’t angry because they’re bad. Men are angry because they’ve been taught that almost every other emotion is forbidden.

In his seminal work I Don’t Want to Talk About It, Real argues that male depression often looks like anger. Because men are raised to believe that vulnerability, sadness, fear, and grief are feminine and therefore unacceptable, those emotions get converted into anger. Anger is the only feeling men are given permission to express. Anger is the “manly” emotion. So when a man feels overwhelmed, powerless, or ashamed, he doesn’t cry or say “I’m scared, “or “I feel abandoned.” He gets angry.

Real calls this relational terrorism: the ways men, unconsciously, use anger and dominance to avoid feeling small, powerless, or vulnerable. It’s not that they want to hurt you. It’s that they’re terrified of feeling the things underneath the anger.

When a male client raises his voice at me over a waitlist, what’s really happening isn’t about the waitlist. It’s about a lifetime of being taught that his needs must be met now, that his comfort matters more than someone else’s time, that his frustration grants him the right to dominate the space. It’s about the unspoken belief that if he’s angry enough, loud enough, intimidating enough, the world will rearrange itself to serve him.

And when I don’t rearrange myself and fawn? If I stand steady and say, “I hear you, and I still can’t see you for six weeks”? This is when the rage spikes. Because I’ve broken the script. I’ve refused to participate in the old dance.

The Fawn Response and the Cost of Being “Good”

I used to fawn. It’s not that I don’t ever fawn, but I now immediately recognize the signals in my body. For me, this looks like tightness in my chest, the intense urge to apologize even when I have done nothing wrong, and the reflex to make it okay. Now that I can name it, I can feel it coming and often choose differently.

Real talks extensively about how women are socialized to be the emotional caretakers, the ones who hold the space, who absorb the anger, who make sure everyone else feels safe. We’re taught that being “good” means being accommodating. That being “kind” means never setting a boundary and making ourselves small so others can feel big.

I have found this is especially prevalent in southern culture, particularly among white women. I come from a long line of “good Christian women” who chose others over themselves because that is what I was told Jesus and the Bible tell us to do.

But here’s the truth I’ve learned through my own healing: fawning is not kindness. It’s survival, and quite frankly, it’s dishonest. And survival strategies that worked when we were small don’t always serve us when we’re adults.

The “Good Girl” Contract

This is where Dr. Ingrid Clayton’s work adds crucial depth. Dr. Clayton, a therapist and writer who focuses on trauma, attachment, and the feminine shadow, names the fawn response not just as a trauma reaction but as a learned feminine survival strategy rooted in patriarchal conditioning. She writes in her second book, Fawning: Why The Need to Please Makes Us Lose Ourselves and How to Find Our Way Back, that women are taught from childhood that our safety, our worth, and our lovability depend on our ability to anticipate others’ needs, neutralize their discomfort, and never make a scene.

Dr. Clayton calls this the “good girl contract”: if I’m quiet, if I’m helpful, if I never rock the boat, I will be safe and loved.

But Dr. Clayton is clear: this contract is a trap. It keeps women small and to mistake self-erasure for virtue.

When we fawn, Dr. Clayton says, we’re not being selfless. She says we’re actually afraid and acting out of a deep, often unconscious belief that our needs don’t matter, that our anger is dangerous, and that if we assert ourselves, we’ll be abandoned or punished.

Now when I don’t fawn and a male’s anger around me escalates, I don’t think it’s because I did something wrong. I think it’s because I stopped doing what they needed me to do to avoid facing their own discomfort.

Real would call this the infantile male stance: the belief that the world should revolve around me, that my needs are paramount, that if I’m unhappy, someone else must fix it. When that stance meets a boundary, especially a boundary held by someone they expected to submit, the rage comes out.

Dr. Clayton adds another layer: when women stop fawning and holding the emotional container for men’s unprocessed anger, men often feel abandoned. Not because we’ve actually abandoned them, but because we’ve stopped doing the invisible labor they assumed was ours to do. Dr. Clayton says this is when women start to be labeled “cold,” “selfish,” or “bitchy.” Because we’ve stopped performing the role we were assigned.

The fawn response, Dr. Clayton argues, is also deeply tied to internalized misogyny. We’ve been taught that femininity equals weakness, that assertiveness equals aggression, and that setting a boundary equals rejection. So we fawn not just to survive, but to prove we’re “good women.” But Clayton is clear: the good girl is a myth. And the price of pretending to be one is our own aliveness.

What Can We Do?

Real argues that men not only need to recognize this but then need to go through the process of grief. They need to mourn the loss of the masculine ideal they were raised with the belief that they should be strong, unemotional, and invulnerable. And then look at the relationships they’ve damaged, they have damaged as a result, the intimacy they’ve lost, and the parts of themselves they’ve abandoned.

Only when this happens, Real says, will the anger start to soften. Because the anger was never the problem, it was just a symptom. The real problem is the unprocessed grief, unacknowledged shame, and unspoken fear.

Dr. Clayton adds that women, too, need to grieve—not just the relationships we’ve lost, but the parts of ourselves we’ve abandoned in service of the “good girl” contract. We need to grieve the years we spent shrinking, the anger we swallowed, the boundaries we never set. And then we need to reclaim what was stolen: our voice, our rage, our right to take up space.

So what can we do?

• Hold boundaries without apology. When a man raises his voice, don’t fawn or shrink. Be kind, but be clear: “I hear you’re frustrated, and I still can’t see you for six weeks. I understand you are angry, but if you’re going to speak to me this way, I am going to have to end this call.”

• Name what’s happening. Real says we need to help men see the pattern. “It sounds like you’re really frustrated, and I’m wondering if there’s something else underneath that. This waitlist isn’t personal, but I can hear that it feels like it.”

• Invite vulnerability. Instead of meeting anger with anger, meet it with curiosity. “What’s this bringing up for you? What’s the story you’re telling yourself about this waitlist?”

• Don’t take it personally. Real is clear: when men get angry like this, it’s not about you. It’s about a lifetime of conditioning, unprocessed emotions and unmet needs. It’s not your job to fix it, but it important to hold the boundary and stay steady.

• Encourage therapy. For men who are stuck in this pattern, therapy is essential. Real says men need safe spaces where they can learn to feel, to name their emotions and to grieve without shame. Therapy isn’t about fixing them but instead slowly giving them permission to be human.

The Work Is Hard, But Its Worth It

I still get flustered when a man raises his voice at me. It sometimes stings and even lights my body on fire like it used to. But I don’t fawn anymore and I certainly don’t apologize for things I haven’t done.

I’m learning to see the anger for what it is: a signal. A signal that this man is hurting, that he’s been taught that anger is the only way to be heard, that he’s scared of feeling powerless.

I’m hopeful. Because I’ve seen it change. I’ve seen men who were strangers to their own emotions finally name what they feel. I’ve seen men who were addicted to control finally let someone else hold the weight. I’ve seen men who were afraid to cry finally let their guard down and say, “I’m scared.”

And I’ve seen women who were addicted to fawning, women just like me, finally stand tall and say, “No. I don’t do that anymore.”

If you’re a man reading this, and you recognize yourself, I want to say: you’re not broken. You were taught to hide, but you don’t have to anymore. You can grieve and feel the full range of emotions. This is what it means to be human.

If you’re a woman reading this, and you recognize the fawn response in yourself, I want to say: You’re not weak. You were taught to survive, but you don’t have to anymore. You are allowed to set boundaries, and you don’t have to play the game anymore.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below! This work doesn’t happen in isolation; we heal in relationship. Let’s keep the conversation going.

What I remember most, though, was the light in his eyes. The way awe softened his face when he talked about the cosmos. There was no separation in those moments. No distance between him and me, between Earth and stars, between the known and the unknowable. Just wonder, shared between a father and his only daughter.

Even though my father passed away years ago, I carry that feeling still. It is a foundation of my spirituality: that to be alive is to be part of something vast, tender, and deeply connected. He taught me, without ever saying it outright, that we are not separate from the universe. We are the universe.

Finding and Using My Own Voice

I recently came back to Instagram after five years away. It wasn’t just nostalgia pulling me back; it was a desire to use this voice I had found after I quit drinking alcohol in November 2020. To fumble forward, to speak, to be brave enough to stand in what feels true, even when that courage feels really scary and awkward. That intention also birthed this Substack, which has truly been a gift to me in the form of expression and healing through the art of writing.

Coming back online has been… mixed. (I’ll go deeper into that in an upcoming essay.) There’s joy in feeling woven back into community, in seeing creativity, realness, and other humans’ bravery in this wild time we find ourselves in. But then, almost without realizing it, I start scrolling and forget.

Forget that I’m whole just as I am in this very moment. Forget that I’m connected with or without Instagram on this beautiful planet Earth.

What I Learn from the Moments That Try to Pull Me Away

It’s astonishing how fast that forgetting happens. My nervous system hums with comparison or scarcity, twitching toward the illusion that I’m separate and somehow alone, behind, and not enough. When I feel that pull toward separation on Instagram or Substack, I think perhaps there’s an invitation hidden inside it. When I see someone’s highlight reel and feel smaller, I can pause and reflect on the very things that make us all human.

• What is this person longing for?

• What are they celebrating, or hiding, or hoping to be seen?

When I catch myself curating my own life for approval, I can remember: behind every screen is a human who, like me, wants to be loved, to belong just like we all do.

Finding shared humanity online doesn’t mean ignoring the pain or the performative parts of social media. It means choosing to see the person behind the post, which I sincerely believe the world could use a lot more of these days. Remembering that the mother documenting her chaotic morning, the artist sharing their vulnerable work, the activist calling for justice are all reaching for the same thing: connection.

When I scroll with that awareness, the feed stops feeling like a competition and starts feeling like a chorus. Different voices, little canaries in their own coal mines, singing the same song.

What the Wonder of Space Is Teaching Me Today

Right now, Artemis II crew members Victor Glover, Christina Koch, Reid Wiseman, and Jeremy Hansen are voyaging around the moon. They are the first humans to do so in over fifty years. Fifty years!

From that distance, Earth doesn’t look like a collection of borders or a world divided by political ideologies. It looks like one thing.

Victor Glover, the first black astronaut to pilot a lunar mission, put it simply from the Orion spacecraft:

Christina Koch echoed this when she spoke to Mission Control after a 40-minute communications blackout, which is the longest moment of silence any human has experienced while viewing parts of the moon no one has ever seen. She didn’t talk about technology or triumph; she talked about us. About how the view from space makes it impossible to forget that we’re all on the same spaceship called Earth.

“We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire, but ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.”

This is what astronauts call the Overview Effect—a shift in consciousness that happens when you see Earth from space.

And I have to wonder if the experience of this is less about data and more like a deep spiritual knowing. The kind of knowing I’ve had the privilege of experiencing in nature, when reading spiritual texts, or in precious moments of meditation that swell in your chest when you come up on real truth.

Reminders in Moments of Separation

So my practice, especially now that I’m back online, is remembering. Again and again. Taking a breath, touching my heart, returning to the inner pulse that whispers: you belong here. You don’t need to earn your right to exist or to speak and it’s not about likes or views, followers or algorithms.

The Artemis II crew is living proof that another way is possible. As Victor Glover said:

“We humans do moonshots for a reason. Because this brought us together and showed us what we can do. Not just when we put our differences aside, but when we bring our differences together and use all the strengths to accomplish something great.”

That’s the invitation, isn’t it? To remember that we’re already connected, divine, and bound to each other before we achieve or produce anything at all.

So while four humans circle the moon right now, remembering that truth from 250,000 miles away, maybe we can remember it here, together, on the ground. Just like my dad and I did, all those years ago, with wonder in our eyes and the whole universe between us.

A question for you, canaries -

When do you most feel the illusion of separation, and what helps you remember that you’re not alone?

I’d love to hear your stories in the comments or by reply. This is what community is for: remembering together.

I would sit inside smiling to myself, relishing in the sounds of them splashing with abandon, their cackles cascading over our back patio while “Pink Pony Club” blares from the speakers. They are wild, free, born of the stars and soil, and sing out into the night sky with reckless abandon.

My joy vanishes as quickly as it came when the worries that my girls might have the same experience I did growing up, and will soon learn that is it not okay to fully be in your body. To express your desires without censorship.

I remember at the age of 12 getting into my head during flow state of playing a piano song, or doing a double turn on the stage and all of the sudden not being able to perform. It was like the hormones made me painfully aware of all of the changes my body was experiencing and to be in my body was too scary.

Along with having fears about my own embodiment came the messages about the size of my body. My own mother was one of the first to point out my weight gain one summer before my 7th-grade year when we had moved to a new city. I had been inside more because I hadn’t met new friends and was eating more starches and sweets to soothe my aching heart. But my mom and my grandmother, who never weighed more than 120 pounds, who never ate mashed potatoes after college because they made her fat, were raised in diet culture. To be thin was to be safe and loved. So my mom taught me how to replace Dr. Pepper with diet, and innocently said that if she wanted to lose weight, she just ate less than 1000 calories a day.

I was a good Southern girl; I followed instructions, and to my delight, I began to disappear. The control over my chaotic life I felt when my body was empty, the euphoria I felt became addictive. This is when I stopped listening to my body, the body that never lies to me, and when the war with my body began.

The origins of gluttony

Originally, gluttony was not about body size or food morality. In early Christian thought, gluttony meant losing awareness, being so consumed by appetite that you forget God, others and yourself.

Gluttony was about disconnection, not indulgence.

This is another essay in the series inspired by the workbook written by Elise Loehnen and Courtney Smith, Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness: A Process for Reclaiming Your Full Self. I have examined envy, sloth, lust, and now gluttony gets a seat at the table.

Modern culture’s views on gluttony

While gluttony is less often framed as spiritual failure, it is still punished - now through diet culture and the obsession with health and wellness. We’re encouraged to consume endlessly (social media, products) while being shamed for wanting too much of the wrong things. Especially things like food and rest.

Loehnen argues that women were taught their hungers, physical, emotional, sexual, creative, were dangerous. Female appetite became something to contain, shrink, and apologize for. A “good woman” is moderate, controlled, and self-denying.

Meghan Watterson’s work with the gospel of Mary Magdalene cracks this open even further. Watterson writes about how Mary Magdalene represented embodied spirituality and the radical idea that the divine lives in our flesh, that our bodies aren’t obstacles to overcome but vessels of the sacred. Mary Magdalene wasn’t transcending her body; she was honoring it as holy ground. She understood something that got erased from centuries of religious teaching: that denying the body isn’t purity. It’s a rejection of where God actually lives.

When I chase that empty, disembodied feeling and when I feel virtuous for not eating, clean for taking up less space, I’m practicing a spirituality of abandonment. I’m trying to leave my body behind, as if the goal is to become less physical, less present, less here. But what if, as Watterson suggests through Mary Magdalene’s example, the point is the opposite? What if being in a body, with its hungers and needs and stubborn insistence on nourishment, is itself sacred work?

What I’m slowly beginning to understand is this: my resistance to feeding myself isn’t really about food. It’s about whether I believe I’m allowed to take up space, to have needs, to exist as a body with appetites and needs. Every time I skip a meal or eat standing up, I’m practicing a kind of self-erasure. I’m saying: my hunger doesn’t matter, my preferences don’t count, and I can get by on less.

But gluttony isn’t about the quantity of food. It’s more about the quality of your relationship to it. And a relationship built on deprivation, control, and self-denial is just as disordered as one built on mindless excess. Maybe even more so, because it masquerades as virtue. Because it looks like discipline when it’s actually disembodiment and promises transcendence when it’s really just disappearing.

I’m trying to learn a different way. Some days I actually sit down to eat, present in my body rather than trying to escape it. Some days I order my own meal and don’t just eat off my kids’ plates, claiming space at the table as if I belong there. Some days I think about what sounds good to me and make that, just for myself, without apology. I’m learning to see these not as indulgences but as homecomings and return to the body I’ve been trained to abandon for years.

The work is remembering that nourishment isn’t gluttony. That having appetites isn’t sin, and the divine didn’t give me a body so I could avoid the human experience of living in it.

Mary Magdalene knew: we don’t find God by leaving our bodies behind. We find God by finally, fully arriving in them.

I still enjoy being empty more than I should. I still find feeding myself annoying and a hassle most days. I still hear my mother’s voice teaching me how to take up less space. But I’m beginning to understand that nourishing myself with attention and intention and the radical belief that my body is holy ground is not gluttony at all.

Starving might be.

And as I listen to my daughter and her friend laughing in the dark, I pray that when the world comes for their bodies and their appetites and their wild, splashing joy, they will remember what I am still learning: they were made to be fully alive in their bodies, to nourish them, and not to disappear.

So dear canaries, what would it look like for you to fully arrive in your body instead of trying to escape it? Please let me know in the comments or any other thoughts you have on this essay!

To quote him directly, he said when speaking on the phone to reporter Brian Kilmeade from Fox & Friends,

Let that land in your body for a second.

On the surface, it sounds like one more outrageous line in an endless news cycle. But underneath, it’s something older and darker: the idea that some humans are, at their core, biologically less than and that whole groups can be written off as defective by birth.

As a therapist-in-training, I spend a lot of time thinking about behavior: Why do some people struggle more with addiction, aggression, risk-taking, or self-control? Do certain conditions run in people’s families?

Genes matter, but these do not make people “good” or “bad.”

So what do genes do?

Behavioral genetics indicates that your DNA does influence your risk for things we tend to moralize like impulsivity, addiction, even aggression and what some traditions would call a vice or a sin.

I have recently been reading a book entitled Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Question of Accountability, by Kathryn Paige Harden, a psychologist and behavioral geneticist, who has spent years sitting with this tension. She talks about how genes shape our temperament and our vulnerabilities, especially around what we’re tempted by and what’s hard for us to resist.

Genes don’t hand you a script; they hand you a starting point.

Genes can influence whether someone is more impulsive or cautious, make substances feel more rewarding in your brain, or increase your sensitivity to stress or rejection. As Harden puts it, no one “creates themselves from scratch.” We are all born into bodies with particular wiring, into families with particular histories, into systems with particular rules about who is allowed to fail, who is allowed to suffer, and who is allowed to be forgiven.

Genes are part of the story, but they are never the whole story.

Why “bad genetics” is so seductive

If you zoom out, “bad genetics” is a very convenient story for those who want to maintain power and keep everything in the binary.

If some people are just “genetically inferior,” then we don’t have to examine underfunded schools or generational poverty. We don’t have to talk about the hard topics like trauma, addiction, and mental illness. And we don’t have to build systems that help people who were dealt a harder biological hand.

We can dehumanize people and simply say, that’s just the way they are. Suddenly, deep inequalities become inevitable, and punishment becomes easier than compassion. And if we’re being honest, most of us feel a little pull toward this story sometimes. I know I used to take comfort in believing the world divides neatly into good people and bad people. It made my fear and anger make sense, and established an illusion of control.

Harden’s work pushes on this exactly. In her book, she shows that acknowledging genetic influence should make us more cautious about blame, not more confident about who “deserves” what.

When Biology Meets Systems Built on Blame

Here’s where it gets even more complicated.

Behavioral genetics studies show that traits one might consider a vice or sinful, like impulsivity, sensation-seeking, and poor self-regulation, actually run in families through genes. The same genetic tendencies can show up as addiction, multiple sexual partners, or even violent behavior.

But the social reality is that some kids with these vulnerabilities are born into stable, well-resourced families, and others are born into scarcity, violence, and chronic stress.

One child might get intensive support, private therapy, and second chances. Another might get suspension, juvenile detention, and a record that follows them forever.

So when someone like President Trump talks about “bad genetics,” what he’s really doing is skipping over the part where systems decide whose vulnerabilities get held with care and whose get punished into oblivion.

The danger of calling groups “genetically inferior”

When a leader stands up and suggests that whole groups are “genetically” less valuable, intelligent, disciplined, or moral, it becomes very problematic. It makes it about hierarchy, exclusion, and control, and gives someone a way to make cruelty look rational.

We’ve seen this before in things like eugenics movements, forced sterilization, “scientific” racism, IQ tests used to rationalize segregation and unequal schooling. Every time, though, the script is the same. Leaders claim moral high ground and say things like “We’re not being cruel, we’re just following the science.”

But real science, the kind people like Harden are doing, doesn’t say, “These genes make you bad.” It says something more unnerving and tender:

We are all fragile, all influenced by forces we did not choose, all capable of both harm and goodness.

There is no clean line between the “good gene people” and the “bad gene people.”

There are just humans, with different vulnerabilities, thrown into wildly unequal worlds.

So what do we do with this?

If we take the science seriously, then the question becomes: How do we hold people responsible for their behavior without pretending they built themselves alone?

That’s the uncomfortable middle space Harden invites us into asks us to set boundaries and consequences when someone harms others. We can say, “What you did is not okay. And also - you did not ask for the brain, the body, or the world you were born into.”

Instead of using genes to write people off, we use them to invest more in early support for kids who are clearly struggling. We can advocate for building treatment and rehabilitation systems that assume some people will have a harder time with self-control. And perhaps, instead of shaming, we design policies that support those around us who are more vulnerable to addiction or aggression.

This information about genes can help explain why some people are more likely to end up in situations where harm happens, and why our systems should be designed with that in mind.

Beyond blame dressed up as biology

So when I hear a politician talk about “bad genetics,” I don’t hear science. I hear a refusal and excuses. A refusal to grapple with the hard truth that some of us were handed more invisible risk in our DNA and more visible risk in our environment, and that a just society responds with support, not contempt. And excuses not to fix schools, housing, healthcare, and criminal justice when we can just label some people broken from birth?

If we are going to talk about genes at all, we owe it to ourselves to tell the fuller story. We need to acknowledge that yes, biology shapes behavior, but no one is born “bad.” Accountability matters, but blame alone will never be enough.

Maybe the real moral scandal is not that some people have “worse” genes. Maybe it’s that we built a world that makes it so much easier to condemn people who aren’t like us than to care.

What does this stir up in you—and where have you seen the “good genes / bad genes” story show up in your own life?

Tell me in the comments, I’m still learning about this right along with you.

***Most of what I’m wrestling with here comes from psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden’s work on behavioral genetics and blame. Please check out her fantastic book, Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Question of Accountability, which looks straight at how our genes shape our vulnerabilities without turning any of us into “bad stock” or lost causes. She also talks beautifully in interviews and talks about how acknowledging genetic influence should make us softer with one another, not harsher.

Sometimes it looks like the loudest man in the room.

Sometimes it looks like the guy who never stops working, never admits fault, never cries.

Sometimes it looks like addiction, rage, cheating, or a need to dominate every space he walks into.

This is what internationally recognized family therapist, speaker, and best-selling author Terry Real calls covert or masked depression in men: the pain is real, but instead of collapsing inward, it explodes outward.

As someone who is nearly finished with my masters for my degree in therapy, I can’t and won’t diagnose men I’m not treating. But I can say that the patterns we see individually, in our families, and in our culture line up eerily well with what the literature and Terry Real’s work have been naming for years: a gendered way that depression gets expressed, denied, and protected.

Overt vs. Covert Depression

We’re more familiar with what Terry defines as overt depression:

• Sadness

• Tearfulness

• Withdrawal

• Loss of interest

• Low energy, hopelessness, collapse

This is the classic picture that shows up in most depression screening tools and even in our cultural imagination. We tend to associate this presentation more with women, in part because women are given slightly more permission to express sadness and vulnerability.

But Terry Real and others have pointed out that in men, depression often goes underground. Instead of showing up as tears and retreat, it masks itself as behaviors that are easier to socially tolerate, or even reward, especially in men.

Covert depression in men might look like:

• Addiction (alcohol, drugs, porn, work, screens)

• Chronic anger or irritability

• Cheating or compulsive sexual acting out

• Risk-taking and thrill seeking

• Emotional numbness instead of visible sadness

• Grandiosity (“I’m above the rules”)

• Domination and control in relationships

• A relentless focus on performance and winning

On the surface, these don’t “look” like symptoms of depression. But underneath, there is often a familiar emotional landscape: shame, emptiness, fear of inadequacy, and an inability to tolerate vulnerability.

The man doesn’t say, “I’m in pain.”

He acts the pain out, and everyone around him pays.

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

From the time they are boys, many men are taught a narrow story about what it means to be “a real man”:

• Don’t cry.

• Don’t need.

• Don’t be weak.

• Don’t lose.

Tenderness gets shamed. Vulnerability gets punished. Fear and sadness get translated into something more “acceptable” for boys and men: anger, bravado, or silence.

So when a man becomes depressed, his psyche often doesn’t reach for tears, it reaches for anything that will preserve the appearance of strength:

• Numb out (through work, substances, or distractions).

• Fight (through rage, blame, and control).

• Escape (through affairs, fantasy, or risky behavior).

From a distance, he may look “high functioning”: productive, powerful, charismatic, impressive. Internally, he may feel deeply empty, terrified of being exposed as not enough.

In women, depression is more likely to be coded as “suffering.”

In men, the same core pain is more likely to be coded as “a problem person.”

And in a patriarchal, performance-based culture, one of those gets compassion.

The other gets power.

When Covertly Depressed Men Hold Power

When a man with covert depression has significant social, economic, or political power, his symptoms don’t just hurt him or his immediate family, they can cause large-scale harm.

Think about how this can play out:

• Risk-taking becomes reckless policy decisions.

• Grandiosity becomes authoritarian leadership.

• Emotional numbness becomes lack of empathy for those who are vulnerable.

• A need for domination becomes abuse of power, harassment, or exploitation.

Because our systems reward performance, dominance, and “results,” these men are often protected from consequences. Their unwellness is not only overlooked, it’s incentivized.

They are emotionally unwell, but culturally shielded.

This doesn’t mean they don’t need to be held accountable. They absolutely do.

Accountability is non-negotiable.

But if we stop there—if we only focus on individual “bad men” and never examine the systems that reward dominance over care and encourage numbness over vulnerability.

When we excuse harm when it comes wrapped in power, then we will keep recreating the same dynamics with new faces.

Seeing the Signs Closer to Home

It’s one thing to talk about powerful men “out there.” It’s another to look at the men and boys in our actual lives: partners, friends, fathers, brothers, sons, coworkers.

Covert or masked depression in men close to us might look like:

• He never talks about feelings, but drinks every night to “take the edge off.”

• He’s quick to rage, slow to repair.

• He works constantly and cannot tolerate stillness or rest.

• He cheats, uses porn compulsively, or constantly seeks sexual validation.

• He seems detached, emotionally numb, or unreachable.

• He needs to be right, to win, to control—all the time.

It’s easy, and understandable, to feel angry at these behaviors, especially if we’ve been directly harmed by them. I’ve felt that anger too. As someone who has been shaped and hurt by the same systems that allow men to externalize their pain while women are often expected to absorb it, my first reaction is not always compassion.

And yet: if we never recognize that these behaviors may be fueled by untreated depression, we miss an opportunity. I actually wrote about my husband, who realized he was going through his own depression after he was laid off recently.

This is not an opportunity to excuse.

Its an opportunity to understand, and intervene more effectively.

Accountability and Empathy

Here’s the tension I keep coming back to:

• Harmful behavior must be named and stopped.

• The human being behind that behavior may also be profoundly unwell.

• Both can be true.

We can:

• Set boundaries.

• Say no.

• Walk away.

• Demand consequences.

And still hold the frame that what we are seeing may be a man who was never given a safe way to feel, grieve, or be vulnerable, and who now causes harm trying to outrun his own pain.

For those of us in helping professions or even just in roles of influence in our families and communities this might look like:

• Gently naming patterns (“I notice you’re drinking more and seem more irritable lately”) rather than only reacting to explosions.

• Asking about hopelessness, not just anger.

• Encouraging therapy, support groups, or medical evaluation without shaming.

• Modeling vulnerability ourselves, especially if we are in relationships with men and boys.

And for those of us who carry anger toward men shaped by this system, it might mean practicing a hard, nuanced stance:

“I will not minimize the harm you’ve caused.

“I will also not forget that you are a human being in pain.”

So What Now?

If covert depression in men is partly a product of individual history and partly a product of culture, then the response has to be both individual and collective.

Individually, we can:

• Learn to recognize the signs of masked depression.

• Challenge the idea that “strong men” don’t feel.

• Encourage the men in our lives to seek real help, not just better distractions.

Collectively, we can:

• Question systems that reward dominance over empathy.

• Create spaces where boys and men can express vulnerability without humiliation.

• Stop valorizing emotional numbness as “professionalism” or “leadership.”

Terry Real’s work invites us to see that relational health and emotional health are inseparable. When men are not allowed to feel, everyone around them pays the price. When men begin to face their pain instead of exporting it, they become more capable of love, repair, and accountability.

For me, as a nearly-graduated therapist-in-training, that’s the deeper invitation:

To see addiction, rage, grandiosity, and domination not only as moral failings, but also as distress signals from a system that has taught men to be anything but human.

The men who cause harm must be stopped.

The systems that shape them must be questioned.

And the boys and men we love deserve more than a choice between collapse and control.

They deserve a path to being fully, vulnerably alive—without having to destroy themselves or others to get there.

I’m finishing my MSW in May. Right now, I’m in my internship at a therapy practice, and one of my main jobs is answering the phone when people call to request an appointment. When I started last fall, I assumed I would be hearing mostly women’s voices on the other end—because that’s the story we’ve all been told, right? Women go to therapy. Women talk about feelings. Women buy the self-help books and listen to the mental health podcasts and cry in the car.

But that’s not what happened.

On the other end of the line were men. Husbands. Fathers. College kids. Retired guys. Partners calling about men. My caseload is now almost entirely men. I have one woman on my roster. One. The rest? Men.

Let me tell you: the men are not okay.

Let me start by saying this: it may not be men’s fault that they were born into a system that trained them out of their own humanity, but it is their responsibility to get honest, get help, and refuse to keep playing by its rules. At the very same time that I am sitting in a therapy office watching men quietly fall apart under the weight of patriarchy, we are also living in a world where the Epstein files are exposing, in black and white, the egregious, predatory, and violent actions of powerful men, actions that have devastated women and children for decades.

I think we have to be able to hold both truths at once: that patriarchy is a sickness harming men internally, and that many men, especially those with power, have chosen to weaponize that system in ways that are unforgivable.

This essay is not a defense of those men. It is an invitation to the men who are willing to face themselves, to reckon with the harm this system has caused others and themselves, and to take radical responsibility for their healing, accountability, and change.

What I Mean When I Say Patriarchy

When I say “patriarchy,” I don’t just mean “men being mean to women.” I mean an entire operating system. A social order where men, as a group, have more power—political power, economic power, social power, and where women and gender-diverse people are pushed underneath that power.

Patriarchy is the air we breathe. It’s the way families are structured, who gets heard at work, whose anger is “strong leadership” and whose anger is “hysterical.” It’s laws, paychecks, movie scripts, sermons, locker-room jokes, and the stories we tell our kids about who they’re allowed to be.

In this system, men are assigned roles: be the protector, the provider, the one in charge. Be decisive. Be tough. Be rational. Win. Don’t cry. Don’t need. Don’t ask.

Women are assigned roles, too: be the caretaker, the feeler, the supporter. Be pretty. Be nice. Be accommodating. Smile. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t be too angry. Don’t be too loud.

We talk a lot about what patriarchy does to women, and rightly so. But I need to tell you what I am seeing up close: patriarchy is also destroying men from the inside out.

The View From the Therapy Room

When men walk into my office, they usually come in at the end of their rope. They don’t show up when things first start to hurt. They show up when something critical is already on fire: a marriage, a job, a body, a relationship with their kids.

I meet men who say things like:

• “I don’t know how to feel anything except anger.”

• “I’ve never told anyone this before.”

• “I’m terrified, but I don’t know how to say that without feeling weak.”

• “My wife says if I don’t get help, she’s done.”

And I look at them and I think: Of course you’re here now. Of course you waited this long. The world has been telling you for decades that to be “a real man” is to handle it alone.

We’ve trained men to ignore their bodies, numb their hearts, swallow their tears, and keep grinding until they break. Then, when they finally collapse, we call them “cowards” or “selfish” or “emotionally unavailable,” instead of what they really are: human beings who were never given permission to be human in the first place.

How Patriarchy Lies to Men

Here is what patriarchy whispers to men from the moment they are born:

• Your worth is in what you do, not who you are.

• You must always be strong.

• You must always be in control.

• You must never need help.

• You must not feel too much.

• You must not talk too much about what hurts.

It hands them a tiny, rigid box labeled “MAN” and says: Squeeze your entire soul into this. If anything doesn’t fit, your tenderness, your fear, your confusion, your softness; you'd better cut that part off or hide it where no one will ever see.

Do you know what happens to a person whose internal world has to be hacked off to fit a role?

He gets sick.

He gets anxious, depressed, addicted, explosive, shut down. He becomes emotionally unreachable, not because he doesn’t have emotions, but because he has been punished every time he tried to show them.

So he pushes it all down. He pours work on top of it. Porn on top of it. Alcohol on top of it. Scrolling, gambling, over-exercising, affairs, anything to not feel the thing he was told would make him unlovable: his own vulnerability.

By the time he walks into my office, he is drowning. Not just in depression or anxiety or trauma, but in shame, the belief that needing help makes him a failure as a man.

Who Gets to Name Their Pain?

Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night:

Women, at least, have language now. We have words like “misogyny” and “patriarchy” and “rape culture” and “emotional labor.” We have books and podcasts and support groups where we can say, “This system is hurting me,” and other women nod and say, “Me too.”

It is not enough, and it is not fair, and the violence against women is still monstrous and constant—but at least we are starting to name it.

Men? Men are often told: You are the system. You are the problem.

Where do you go with your pain if you’ve been assigned the role of villain?

If patriarchy is a play, men are cast as the lead, but no one ever asks the lead how the costume feels, or whether he even wanted the part.

So the suffering of men goes underground. It shows up as:

• The dad who can’t say “I love you” to his kids

• The teenager who would rather die than be called “soft.”

• The husband who loves his wife deeply but has no idea how to talk about his fear, so it comes out sideways as withdrawal, irritability, or anger.

• The man who drinks every night because he has never been taught any other way to self-soothe.

We look at these men and see “emotionally distant,” “checked out,” “aggressive,” “selfish.” What I see from my chair is different. Men who were never emotionally held long enough to learn how to hold themselves. Men who have been spiritually starved by a system that gave them power and stole their permission to be human.

“Hurting Men More” Doesn’t Mean Women Aren’t Getting Hurt

I need to be very clear: patriarchy is absolutely brutal to women. It polices our bodies, underpays our labor, dismisses our pain, and endangers our lives. I am not interested in a story that says, “Actually, men are the real victims.”

What I am interested in is telling the truth: systems of domination don’t just crush the people on the bottom. They deform the souls of the people on the top, too.

When I say patriarchy is hurting men “more,” what I mean is: their pain is more secret. Less visible. Less nameable. Less grievable. Men are more likely to die from their pain through suicide, addiction, violence before anyone ever says, “Hey, maybe the problem isn’t that you’re weak. Maybe the problem is that the rules you were given for being a man are impossible and inhuman.”

Women are allowed to say, “This hurts me.” Men are still mostly expected to say, “I’m fine,” as their lives fall apart.

It’s not a competition of suffering. It’s a family system in which everyone is being harmed in different ways, at different angles, by the same lie.

What If We Let Men Be Human?

Here is the question I keep circling back to as I sit in my little therapy office, listening to yet another man apologize for having emotions:

What would happen if we let men be fully human?

If we told boys: “Your tears are holy. Your tenderness is strength. Your fear is welcome. Your questions are wise. You don’t have to earn your worth.”

If we stopped laughing at “man up” and “don’t be a girl” and “stop being so sensitive,” and started saying, “Tell me more. I’m listening. I believe you.”

If we stopped treating therapy as a last resort for men in crisis and started treating it as a normal, brave, maintenance practice—like the emotional equivalent of going to the gym.

And what if we told the truth in our homes and group chats and churches and locker rooms: This version of masculinity is not working. It’s killing our sons, partners, fathers, and brothers.

The Work in Front of Us

Here is what I want:

I want women to keep raging against the ways patriarchy crushes our bodies, our time, our dreams. And I also want us to make room in our rage for compassion for the boys and men who were never given another script.

I want men to stop trying to prove they are “good guys” and start getting curious: What did patriarchy steal from me? What did I have to hide or kill in myself to survive as a boy, as a man? I want them to sit in rooms with therapists, with friends, with each other and tell the damn truth.

I want us all to understand that dismantling patriarchy is not a charity project for women. It is a liberation project for everyone. When we lay this system down, we are not just freeing women to be more than caretakers; we are freeing men to be more than soldiers.

When I say “the men are not okay,” I’m not excusing harmful behavior. I am refusing to stop at blame. I am saying: these men are drowning in a sea they did not fill. They are carrying a story about manhood that is too small for their souls. And I think maybe, just maybe, we can build a world where our boys grow up knowing that “real man” and “real human” are not opposites.

That’s the world I’m trying to practice for in my little office, the one I want for my 6-year-old son, and for my husband.

Tell me: what are you seeing in the men in your life? Where do you see the system breaking them, and where do you see them fighting to be more human than the script allows? I want to hear it all.

But I can’t do that anymore. Because I finally understand what I’m seeing when I look at Britney. I’m seeing us. I’m seeing what we do to girls. I’m seeing what happens when a woman tries to be everything the world tells her to be and then punishes her for becoming exactly that.

The Girl We Made

For me, Britney was at the height of her career when she was doing those Gladiator commercials for Pepsi.

All three women in the commercial were gorgeous powerhouses to be reckoned with. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me Beyoncé and Pink understood the game they were playing, while Britney did not.

Britney spinning and smiling and sparkling, that crystalline voice, those impossibly perfect abs, that wholesome-but-sexy southern sweetness. I wanted to be her. I also wanted to destroy her. Both things were true at the same time, and I didn’t question it because that’s what we were taught to do with beautiful girls who seemed to have it all.

She was perfect. The perfect combination of virgin and vixen. Innocent and provocative. Sweet and sultry. She was what every southern girl was raised to be: pleasing. Palatable. Pretty enough to look at but not threatening enough to fear. Sexy enough to sell but pure enough to take home.

She followed the rules. All of them. She smiled when she was supposed to smile. She stayed thin. She danced. She performed. She gave us exactly what we asked for, and we loved her for it.

Until we didn’t.

The Fall We Watched

Because here’s the thing about the patriarchy: it doesn’t actually want women to win.

It wants women to perform winning while staying controllable. It wants women to be beautiful but not vain. Successful but not ambitious. Sexy but not sexual. Confident but not threatening.

And when Britney started showing cracks, when she started being human instead of perfect, when she started making choices that looked like freedom instead of compliance—we turned on her.

We watched her shave her head and we called her crazy instead of asking what kind of pain drives a woman to take scissors to the one thing the world values most about her.

We watched her struggle with motherhood and mental health and we made her a punchline. A cautionary tale. A trainwreck we couldn’t stop watching.

We participated. I participated. In the magazines I bought. In the jokes I laughed at. In the quiet superiority I felt watching a beautiful woman fall apart while I pretended I had my own life together.

What I See Now

What I see now, when I look at Britney, is the inevitable conclusion of internalized misogyny.

She bought what they were selling. She believed that if she was pretty enough, perfect enough, pleasing enough, she would be safe. She would be loved. She would be free.

But that was always a lie.

Britney did everything right according to a system that was designed to break her. And when she broke, we blamed her for breaking.

We watched a woman be controlled by her father for thirteen years—thirteen years where she couldn’t make decisions about her own body, her own money, her own life—and so many of us were silent. Because some part of us believed she deserved it. Some part of us thought she needed to be controlled because she was too broken, too messy, too much.

That’s internalized misogyny. That belief that women who don’t perform sanity and perfection deserve to lose their freedom.

The Reckoning

I can’t look away now because I owe her this.

We all do. We owe her the truth: that we participated in her destruction. That we consumed her and then blamed her for being consumed. That we taught our daughters to want to be her while teaching them to judge women exactly like her.

We owe her our attention now, not as spectators to a breakdown, but as witnesses to what we do to women in this culture. What we do to girls who are too beautiful, too successful, too visible, too human.

Her struggle is not entertainment. It’s a mirror.

When I watch Britney now, still fighting for her own life, still trying to define freedom after decades of control, still being judged and dismissed and pathologized, I see every woman who was told to be perfect and then punished for the inevitable impossibility of that demand.

I see every girl who learned that her value was in her appearance and then wondered why she felt so empty.

I see every woman who internalized the message that other women are competition instead of comrades.

I see the cost of our complicity.

What We Do Now

So here’s what I know I need to do, and maybe you do too:

Stop looking away. Stop participating in the consumption of women’s pain. Stop treating women’s struggles as a spectacle or cautionary tale.

Interrogate the stories we tell about women who fall apart. Ask who benefits from those narratives. Ask what we’re really saying when we judge women for being messy or struggling or imperfect.

Recognize that every time we’ve clicked on a headline about Britney’s breakdown, every time we’ve judged another woman for gaining weight or aging or making choices we don’t understand, every time we’ve felt that quiet satisfaction watching a beautiful woman fail—we’ve been participating in the system that tried to destroy her.

We can do better. We have to do better.

For Britney. For every woman who ever believed the lie that perfection would keep her safe. For every girl who’s watching us right now, learning what happens to women who dare to be human in public.

I’m not looking away anymore.

Are you?

This is hard work. Looking at our own complicity is hard work. But we can do hard things. We can face the truth about what we’ve done and choose differently going forward. For ourselves. For each other. For Britney.

That’s the work.

I would love to hear if you have ever caught yourself judging a woman for being human instead of perfect? Or share one way you’re choosing to look differently now.

At the same time, videos scream the truth that the people in power deny. Another human soul lost, like Renee Good, the woman killed just a week ago, whom I wrote about here. And what’s even harder is that this isn’t new—it’s the same blood-soaked script black and brown people live every day in this country, since its inception. Each murder is another thread in the tapestry of oppression woven by the systems designed to profit from fear and division.

Meanwhile, here I am, pounding keys for my capstone paper—the thirty-plus-page beast that will hopefully exemplify many of the concepts I’ve learned in pursuit of my master’s in social work. It’s my final paper before I graduate this spring and begin working as a therapist. But sometimes I wonder if these words can pierce the armor of policy and power that lets ICE agents roam like vigilantes, turning neighborhoods into war zones while politicians spew lies from their thrones.

Feelings of guilt, despair, and grief lay heavy on my heart: who am I kidding and what am I actually doing, formulating academic nonsense on my laptop while real lives shatter?

When the veil was lifted for me

I got sober in 2020. I started grad school in 2022. By 2023, I was patting myself on the back for being the “good liberal,” voting blue, supporting my black, brown, and queer friends—convinced I’d cracked the code on allyship without ever cracking open the ugly truths of this land.

Then the Allen outlet mall shooting hit like a thunderclap. We were still living in East Dallas at the time, just 45 minutes from where my then 10-year-old twin girls would have been weaving through those stores on their annual birthday trip with their grandparents.

The shooter—a Mexican man covered in white supremacist tattoos—was a walking contradiction that shattered my tidy narratives. His existence forced me to see what I’d avoided: the empire’s violence runs so deep it tattoos its own children with its poison. The collision of brown skin and fascist ink became my reckoning moment. The history I’d been spoon-fed—the sanitized story of progress and democracy—crumbled under the weight of truth: stolen Indigenous lands paved with shopping malls, enslaved Black labor building the wealth in my coffee cup, the same systems deporting and devouring my neighbors.

I realized I was late—too damn late—to all of this.

The learning (and unlearning)

I shut my privileged mouth and started listening. Really listening. I drank from the firehose of truth poured by those I had never even heard of. Austin Channing Brown’s holy rage, Jemar Tisby’s tracing of the color of compromise through our bloodied pews, Anthea Butler’s unflinching look at white Christian gods—all of it became medicine for my late-awakened soul.

Austin has made such an impact on me that I became one of her Troublemakers and had the honor of helping to promote her last book, which I wrote about here - she is truly an incredible human.

This reckoning has been anything but tidy or linear—and often it is still a bit of a shit show. Rage, shame, grief, all tangled up. I still sometimes word vomit onto unsuspecting friends and relatives without warning, often making those around me wildly uncomfortable and sometimes unsure of my mental well-being.

I have said too much, centering myself instead of the issue. And I have not said nearly enough, and then been so pissed at myself YET AGAIN after.

I have lost a lifelong friend, and it has been challenging to make new friends when we moved here to Austin a couple of years ago. When you don’t participate in mommy wine culture and you call out racism, people in Texas sometimes find it to be a bit of a buzz kill.

I often hear versions of questions and comments like:

“Why do you always have to make everything political or about race?”

“The left does the same things the right does, so we just shouldn’t talk about things we can’t do anything about.”

“Why do you always let this stuff get to you so much?”

Part of me begged to slam the book shut, to retreat to the soft numbness of ignorance. But how could I, when black and brown bodies never get that luxury? They’ve carried this truth for generations while we slept.

What now

Writing, for me, is how I metabolize the world around me. My mind is wild and unruly, and that’s one of my favorite things about myself—it’s alive, sensitive, impossibly curious. Growing up, I learned to read the room before I read myself, to morph and please so others stayed comfortable. So finding my voice has been both liberating and terrifying. In my head, it’s loud now—unapologetically so—but the whispers still echo: stay small, stay silent. Writing is how I quiet those whispers. It helps me organize the chaos, to carve meaning from emotion, to heal. I don’t write here for anyone else, not really. I write to unravel my truth and give it a body, to breathe.

Back to the paper

Writing here on Substack helps me find my voice—and, in so many ways, find myself. Sometimes it feels as urgent as breathing to get the words out of my body. But my capstone is different. It asks for steadiness, for discipline, for endurance. It’s less about release and more about building something that can live in the world and do real work. I need both. Substack gives me air; the capstone gives me structure—a pathway toward right action.

Together, they mirror the tension I live with daily: expansion and grounding, learning and discomfort, reflection and responsibility. Both matter. The creative and the disciplined. The inner work and the outer action.

So, back to the paper I go—with my warm coffee beside me and a storm brewing both inside and out. But maybe that’s the point. Growth doesn’t ask for comfort. It asks for presence. For persistence. For voice.

If you’re reading this, maybe you feel that tension too—the pull between reflection and action, between what breaks your heart and what you choose to do with it. Let’s keep writing. Let’s keep showing up for both. The world doesn’t change from one side alone—it changes when we learn to hold the pen and stay in the fight.

PS - If you want to stop the violence and chaos that ICE is bringing to our country and are not sure how, one of the best things you can do is to call your senator 5 times a day! Here is a site where you can find your local numbers and a script. Here’s the dets for Texas!

In October 2019, I was doing all the things to prepare to bring my third child into the world when I realized something. My primary job as a mother is to teach my children, this new baby coming into the world and his twin six-year-old sisters, how to be alive.

And I was scrolling.

I’d just finished Cal Newport’s book, Digital Minimalism, and one line kept echoing: Is technology serving you, or are you serving it?

I knew the answer - without a doubt - I was serving it.

My scrolling no longer seemed like a conscious choice to me, I’d reach for my phone, like a possessed zombie - no thought, no permission from my actual self. Then I’d surface an hour later, as if I had been in a trance, and wonder where the time went, feeling like absolute garbage. Trading my one wild and precious life and the little amount of free time I actually had. This wasn’t relaxing; this was numbing.

And then I’d run into someone at Target, and while we were chatting about normal things, weather, kids, whatever—my brain would flash to their recent unhinged political take or their recent most obvious humblebrag. And I’d be standing there, nodding, but secretly judging. If it had been 10 or 15 years earlier, before social media, I would have never known these things.

This person was just trying to buy paper towels. But I was carrying all this information I didn’t necessarily ask for in an acquaintance without any real context, building a case against them in my head, unable to enjoy being a normal, present human with another perfectly imperfect human.

That’s not who I wanted to be.

And then there was the breastfeeding. I knew I would spending hours and hours in the dark breastfeeding a newborn. And instead of being present with my son, I would be staring at other women’s bodies, wishing mine looked different. Spiraling about how I was already failing my daughters because obviously I’d have less time for them now. Consuming everyone else’s highlight reel while sitting in my actual, messy, sacred life.

So I deleted it. Instagram. Facebook. All of it.

And friends, when it comes to mental health, it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made—right up there with getting sober.

Instead of scrolling while nursing, I read. Book after book on my Kindle. I created shared iCloud albums for photos so the people who actually love us could see our lives. I had the privilege—and I know it’s a privilege—of being able to step away because my livelihood didn’t depend on it.

Did I miss things? Sure. I missed checking in on many of the fun accounts I had started following in recovery and seeing updates from some of my friends. But what I gained was so much more. Presence. Peace. My own mind back.

Fast forward to now: I’m tiptoeing back onto Instagram because of this Substack, The Southern Canary. There are things I want to share that feel more fitting for that platform. And I’m watching myself carefully. (Also, reels didn’t exist in 2019 and HOLY SHIT those things are diabolical)

So here I am. Experimenting. Trying to stay aligned with my own integrity while also not being so rigid that I can’t adapt.

Because here’s the thing: We get to keep asking ourselves the question. We get to keep choosing. Is this serving me? Or am I serving it?

I’ll let you know how it goes.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I would love to hear if you have ever quit social media? Or even just thought about quitting? What’s keeping you there - or what made you leave? I am genuinely curious and would love to hear about it in the comments.

PS - If you have Instagram, please come see me! It’s been a minute, so I am still getting acclimated. You can find me @thesoutherncanary

I’m young in it—no older than eleven - at that age where you’re trying so hard to be good, to say the right thing, to not be too much or too little or whatever impossible thing people need you to be that day.

My father asks what I want to say to myself thirty years from now. And I answer, without hesitation: “I want to be relaxing.”

My mother’s response comes fast: “That’s pathetic. I thought we taught you better than that. How embarrassing.”

I watch this now, as a forty-five-year-old woman with twin daughters of my own who are now at this same age, I want to reach through the screen and shake everyone.

I want to yell: She’s a child. She’s eating a rice cake she calls styrofoam because apparently she’s already trying to lose weight.

And you’re telling her that wanting rest is embarrassing?

But I can’t change it, she’s stuck there. She then goes on to announce that she wants to be a writer but knows she has to be a doctor first because “writers don’t make enough money.” The video ends with my father helping me install a calorie counter on my computer.

A calorie counter. For a kid.

And I wonder now: Why don’t I have self-compassion?

Oh. Right. Because of that.

I made my way back to rest and self-compassion five years ago

On November 10, 2020, I had my last day one, and I am now over five years alcohol free. In order to quit my wine habit once and for all, I had to find self-compassion. Believe me, I had tried a billion times to do it with shame and self-flagellation, and while that might work for a while, eventually I always found my way back to the glass.

When I quit drinking, I had to start showing up for myself in ways I never had before. I learned to sit still. I learned to speak kindly to the frightened animal trapped inside my own heart. I found practices through my teachers that connected me to something larger - what I came to call The Divine - and through that connection, I stumbled into self-compassion like someone finding water in the desert. I didn’t know that’s what it was at first; I just knew I could finally breathe.

I had to talk to myself like I wasn’t the enemy and start asking for the things I needed, even when it inconvenienced those around me.

And then, about two years in, when the urgency had passed, when my desire to drink had miraculously lifted, I started to ease up on my daily self-care practices. I slowly let things slide, because I genuinely thought that all of this focus on myself was really too much.

I gradually dropped most of my recovery meetings, I slept in instead of waking before dawn every morning to write and meditate, and I slowly began to dismantle the scaffolding I had built within the daily practices of being gentle with myself. It just seemed like so much work, too much focus on ME, and daunting to think about doing it for a lifetime.

Turns out, you can’t coast on self-compassion. It’s not a one-and-done thing. It’s more like brushing your teeth—you have to keep doing it, or slowly the decay will creep back in.

And believe me, it crept back in.

Not the drinking—that part stayed quiet, thank God. But every winter, depression seemed to hit me like a freight train. Disordered eating snuck back in and tried to take me out like it always does. Perfectionism began to have its way with me, paralyzing me from sustainable forward movement.

What I didn’t realize was that the practices I’d abandoned - the ones that seemed like “too much" - weren’t just about not drinking. They were my very foundation of being and the conduit to my higher power. They were how I learned, for the first time in my life, to treat myself like someone worth caring for.

I realized that if I lost this, I could still survive, but I could not thrive. And this was a reality not far off from the one I had built when I was actively drinking.

What parts work taught me

What I finally realized is that the voices in my head telling me I’m not enough, the ones saying I am “pathetic” when I dared to want rest - these voices are not my voices; they are the voices of my parts.

Parts work - or what many call Internal Family Systems - is the idea that we are not broken, we are many.

Inside each of us lives a small family of selves. Some of them are loud and bossy. Some are scared and quiet. Some keep us achieving, pleasing, numbing or holding it all together. Every part shows up to help us survive something, and none of them are wrong or bad.

Healing our system doesn’t mean silencing the messy parts or “fixing” ourselves. It means turning towards these parts, with curiosity instead of judgement and saying - I see you, I finally understand why you’re here. You don’t have to do this alone anymore.

Where did my parts get these messages?

These are the voices that told me I had to earn the right to exist. That rest was shameful. That wanting anything that didn’t produce something measurable and valuable was “embarrassing.”

My voices got this memo directly from my mother and father, who were doing the best they could with what they had to raise me. From the world around me, steeped in hustle culture, from the society that tells us we are not enough and that we need something outside of us to fix us.

And its not just me - everyone is hurting this badly. We’re all walking around with these installed voices telling us we’re not enough, and most of us are too exhausted from trying to prove them wrong to realize we could just… not listen.

The way back

I used to think self-compassion was self-indulgent. Like it was something I’d do once I’d earned it through enough suffering and self-improvement.

Watching that video taught me something: I was never going to be okay until I gave myself what I actually needed. Not perfection. Not achievement. Not a smaller body or a more impressive career.

The work looks so simple, which is why it’s so hard;

• Putting myself to bed at a reasonable hour for 7-8 hours of sleep

• Take a lunch break instead of working through or eating while standing up

• Going to my yoga class even if it means inconveniencing my husband a bit with the kids’ stuff

• Stepping away from a family gathering for an outdoor walk if I need 10-15 minutes to regroup

The craving for alcohol left after two years. But the craving for perfection, for self-punishment, for making myself small enough to be acceptable—that one’s older and deeper and harder to shake. Because it was there first. Because it’s tangled up with every message I got about being loved.

So what now?

Here I am in 2026, committing to doing the work again. The same sacred work I did to get sober in the first place.

I am learning how to be in Self more than not, to talk my parts the way I would talk to that girl in the video—with heartbreak at what she was taught and fury that no one protected her from it.

With the understanding that she deserved so much better. That I deserve better.

I offer myself the compassion I would give to any friend, any stranger, anyone who was suffering this much.

And slowly, underneath all those old voices, I’m starting to hear my own, the voice of Self.

It says: Relaxing is your birthright.
It says: That was never pathetic, in fact, that was the sanest thing anyone said on that tape.
It says: Start there. Go back to that. Let that girl finally get what she needed.

So I am. Every day, I’m trying. I’m coming home to the part of me that knew what I needed before anyone taught me to need something else.

I’m offering myself—finally, messily, imperfectly—the self-compassion that could have saved us both.

The compassion that still can.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This year, I plan to share this work with you, my fellow canaries, here on my Substack. Perhaps it will inspire you to listen for that song inside you that always knows the way home. I would love to hear what your younger self would ask for today if you finally stopped telling them it was too much?

I had been trying—really trying—to stay out of the news. Not as an act of privilege or ignorance, but as an act of survival. I started this new year with intentions around grounding practices, with plans to operate from a place of love rather than fear, with a commitment to create change within my actual circle of influence instead of doom-scrolling myself into paralysis.

And then I read about Renee Nicole Good, a woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in south Minneapolis after dropping her six-year-old son at school.

This is the kind of event that sucks you back into the vortex whether you want to go or not. The kind that makes staying away feel impossible, irresponsible even.

So I went back in. I watched the video of the brave human who captured this tragedy, who would not look away. I was sick, and I still am sick. I absorbed the outrage and the grief and the inevitable politicization and utter lack of regard for human life. And within hours, those grounding practices I had barely begun to establish were completely co-opted. I wasn’t meditating or moving my body or nourishing myself with intention. I was feeding the algorithm. I was participating in the machine—the one that runs on our fear and our rage and our constant, exhausting vigilance. The one that convinces us that awareness without action is the same as action. The one that’s trying to take us all down, one doomscroll at a time.

I felt like such a silly white woman. Thinking I could just… not participate. Thinking I could choose calm when Renee Good didn’t have a choice. Thinking my little grounding practices mattered when someone like Renee can be shot in the head in broad daylight and no one will be held accountable.

But here’s what I’m learning, slowly and imperfectly: the machine wants me to believe those things. The machine wants me to think that self-care is selfish, that tending to my own nervous system is an act of complicity, that the only moral response to atrocity is to let it consume me entirely.

But a consumed person is an ineffective person, and a dysregulated person can’t create meaningful change. A person running on fear, exhaustion, and vicarious trauma is exactly what the system needs to keep running.

I want to live and operate from a place of love, not fear.

I know this intellectually. I know I need to stay aware, to create change where I can within my actual sphere of influence—which is smaller and more local than the internet wants me to believe. I know that my real work is in my relationships, my community, the conversations I have with my kids, the choices I make about how to spend my time and energy, and attention.

But knowing this and practicing it are different things entirely.

Yesterday afternoon, after I’d exhausted myself reading about things I cannot change, I opened my Libby app and pressed play on Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. Meryl Streep’s voice filled my ears—steady, warm, human. She read me a story about a family on a cherry farm during a pandemic, about a mother telling her daughters about her past, about memory and time and the small, ordinary ways we survive difficult seasons.
It was almost like meditation. My body was transformed back to my fourth-grade classroom when I used to listen to my teacher read stories to us after lunch on the carpet. But this—listening to a story, following a narrative thread, letting someone else’s words create a world I could step into—this actually calmed something in me. My shoulders dropped, my breathing slowed, and I remembered I had a body that needed tending.

I can take care of myself today, even when the world is burning down.

This feels almost obscene to say out loud. But what if it’s not? What if it’s actually the most radical thing I can do?

Because really, if every being on this earth committed to that—to actually caring for themselves and their immediate circles with intention and presence—wouldn’t some of this stop? Not all of it. Not the systems of power and violence that require much bigger interventions. But some of it. The casual cruelty I inflict when I am running on empty. The way I snap at my kids or ignore my neighbors or walk past suffering right in front of me, I could actually address, because I’m so overwhelmed by suffering, I can’t. The despair that makes me believe nothing matters, so why try?

I’m not talking about toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing. I’m not suggesting we ignore injustice or opt out of collective responsibility. I’m talking about the difference between awareness that leads to action and awareness that leads to paralysis. I’m talking about building the internal resources we need to show up for the long haul, not just the outrage cycle.

The machine wants me afraid. It wants me consumed. It wants me to believe that staying informed means staying submerged, that being a good person means being a wrecked person.

So today I am making a different choice. I will remember Renee Good’s name. I will let her death matter without letting it destroy my capacity to act. I will have conversations with people in my actual life about what happened, about what it means, and about what we can do from here.

And I will also listen to Meryl Streep read about cherry orchards, because that is how I am nourishing myself today. The algorithm can have my attention in measured doses, but it cannot have my wholeness, my humanity. That I’m keeping. Not because the world doesn’t need my grief, but because it needs my presence more. And presence requires a person who hasn’t been hollowed out by the endless scroll of tragedy she cannot touch.

Because Renee Good deserved a world full of people who were whole enough to see her, to fight for her, to stand up for what is right, good, and true. And I can’t be one of those people if I’m broken into a thousand pieces by nightfall.

PS - Click here for the GoFundMe supporting Good’s family in the wake of this tragedy.

Canaries, I’d love to hear from you: How do you navigate this balance? How do you stay informed without being consumed? What are your grounding practices when the news breaks your heart? What helps you operate from love instead of fear?

Leave a comment below—I think we’re all trying to figure this out together, and your wisdom might be exactly what someone else needs to hear today.