I’ve been sitting with a lot this week. Gas hit $5.39 today. It cost me $101 to fill my Bronco. I remember when it was $45. I have more financial cushion than I used to and I still felt it. I keep thinking about the people who don’t have that cushion. Who are doing the math at the pump. Who are one layoff away from something really scary. And there are a lot of those people right now.
The world feels heavy in ways that are hard to name without going somewhere political, so I’ll just say this: it’s hard to watch people in power make decisions that feel very far from the people those decisions actually affect.
And yet (!) This week I bought more teacher appreciation gifts than I have in all my years as a parent combined. Not because I had to. Because I needed them to know.
There are teachers out there who are exhausted and underpaid and asked to do more every year with less. And some of them — the ones who decided to really see my kids, to meet them exactly where they are, to build something specific and personal and real for them — changed everything. Not a little. Everything. You know who you are. Thank you will never be enough.
My kids are stepping into this heavy world right now. A first job secured. An internship in San Francisco. An interview at Chick-fil-A. I am proud and a little heartbroken simultaneously because I want the world they’re walking into to be better than this.
I think it can be. I’m just not sure it’s choosing to be right now.
I am figuring out what’s next for myself too. Career transition is a strange place to live, full of possibility and grief in equal measure.
What’s keeping me sane is this: I am planning something hard. Something solo. Something that will require everything I have physically, mentally, emotionally. Just me, a trail, and decisions that only affect me.
I don’t say that to be dramatic. I say it because sometimes knowing something difficult and beautiful is coming is the thing that makes the heavy week feel survivable.
I want to be the kind of person who says the real thing. Not gated. Not unreachable. Because if there’s anything I know how to build — it’s community. And community only works when people feel seen.
Not everything is a win right now. And pretending otherwise doesn’t serve anyone. So here we are. Holding the hard and the hopeful at the same time.