This is the newsletter version of Sara by the Season, where I explore what is piquing my curiosity as I try to lean into nature’s wisdom and rhythms. You can listen to me read you the newsletter by hitting play above - or you can click the little link above and to the right to play in your favorite podcast player.
If you know someone who would like this sort of thing, I’d be so grateful if you would share it.
My sister has worked in adolescent sexual and reproductive health care for the last fifteen-ish years. She literally wrote the book on ASHR in humanitarian settings. You know where this story is going. She found out last night that her job is officially terminated. Everyone at her organization assumed that would be the case since DOGE’s dismantling of USAID, but last night made it official. How many people do you know that are passionate about their careers? Like they are doing what they love and getting paid for it - not paid well, but still? I know two - my sister and a friend from college that is a park ranger in the Pisgah National Forest. She had recently gotten promoted, so she was a “probationary employee.” Both have been laid off in the last month.
Do you ever have those nightmares that you can’t get out of? Like you wake up, sigh in relief that it was just a dream, and then fall back asleep to only get right back into the nightmare again? It never seems to happen to me with good dreams, only ones I want to escape. I spent all Sunday night in a nightmare that the developer was cutting down more trees surrounding and on our property. I was holding on to one of the trees as the men with chainsaws were gleefully taunting my efforts. I would wake up, and then it would all just start over again.
I left for the gym Monday and when I returned home, either the developer or the city - they are one in the same to me at this point after a years’ long fight against both, which accomplished nothing except to prove to me that the city is in bed with the developers and it mattered little what citizens did or said - had cut down hundreds more trees. Trees that we had been promised wouldn’t be cut down. Trees that the developer bragged to me about in one of the many hearings we spoke at, condescending to me that “this development leaves way more trees than most developments!” All of them gone in an afternoon. I was so irate that I had to pull the car over and take some deep breaths. I thought of my terrible night sleep the night before and wondered if the trees were trying to tell me to get out there and protect them.
I could spend the time and energy to pull up the original plans in which none of those lines of trees were supposed to be cut down and then research how they had probably at some point sneaked that addendum into some planning committee agenda item that everyone that would protest it likely missed. Or best case scenario I guess, I would find that they never got permission to take down those trees, and my research would get them in trouble. Maybe they would get fined? Or have to replace those trees with tiny saplings that won’t get as big as the ones they just took down until long after I’m dead, plus they’ll be far less hardy and diverse anyway? I’m tired, and the damage has already been done. Even if I were to somehow get the developer or city in trouble, what good would it do?
I’m an optimist by nature. One of things that annoys my family and that I continually have to work on is offering a positive spin on every situation and instead just letting myself and others feel our feelings. So I am having a very difficult time with the pace at which bad things are coming at us right now. I haven’t written here because everytime I sit down and write, it comes out as the equivalent of one long scream of rage at all that is being dismantled so quickly and that we’re all just expected to go to work and school and the grocery store. I don’t think anyone wants to read that.
And yet. There is this lesson that I’ve heard repeatedly from writers, especially memoir writers, that we should write from our scars instead of our open wounds. I’ve heard this so often that I can’t even find a source to quote - it is accepted wisdom it seems. I’ve always had trouble with it because I think there is value in hearing from someone who is in the middle of it - that hasn’t yet figured out how to tidy it all up, who hasn’t yet come out on the other side with some shiny lesson, who is in the mess.
I keep hearing or seeing stories of people, particularly women, that are full of rage right now. The reaction of women to Dr. Teresa Borrenpohl being dragged out of a supposed town hall in Coeur d’Alene last weekend. The people getting fired up at town halls around the country. The park rangers taking to social media to plead their case. Constituents jamming congressional phone lines and voicemail boxes. My sister, who I can count on two hands how many times I’ve heard use the F bomb in my life, told Senator Tillis on her daily call to him this morning that she was going to make it “my fucking mission to get you primaried.”
We are angry. We are overwhelmed. We don’t know what to do. We are thirsty for good leadership. We are not speaking or acting from the tidy, cleaned up scars. We are in the messy middle, and we’re all doing the best we can.
For many of us (most?), we didn’t learn how to properly feel and metabolise our emotions as children. We didn’t learn the importance of regulating our nervous systems. If we’ve been lucky and/or traumatized1, we’ve learned those things as adults, and those of us that are parents now are trying to raise the next generation differently. But the fact remains that we don’t know how to “properly”2 handle our anger, especially we women. We weren’t allowed to feel angry as children, and now that some of us are awake to how much there is to be angry about, we are like little toddlers again - and who could blame us?!
Observing all of this rage out there and within me made me think of When Women Were Dragons, one of the best books I read last year that seems especially prescient right now. The book centers around a young girl who lives through the Mass Dragoning of 1955 when hundreds of thousands of ordinary mothers and wives turned into dragons, destroying everything in their way during the transformation. In the story, the young girl’s aunt tells her:
Anger is a funny thing. And it does funny things to us if we keep it inside. I encourage you to consider a question: “Who benefits, my dear, when you force yourself to not feel angry?” She tilted her head and looked at me so hard I thought she could see right into my bones. She raised her eyebrows. “Clearly not you.”
I would very much like to be on the other side of whatever this is, but I’m in the messy middle. The older I get, the more I think that perhaps it is all the messy middle. We might feel like we’ve arrived in some areas of our lives or moved on from some struggles, but there are always new layers of self-awareness or grief or interconnectedness to work through.
Yes, we are thirsty for good leadership, for someone to tell us what to do. I think there will be a time and place for that, and I hope it is sooner rather than later. But I’m wondering if what we really need right now is to trust ourselves. To let ourselves feel whatever it is that we’re feeling. To not know what to do or to do the next right thing in front of us. To not police ourselves or others. To seek out our people where we can be our whole selves. I was reminded this week of Diane di Prima:
NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.
In the author’s note at the end of When Women Were Dragons, Kelly Barnhill writes, “This book is not based on Christine Blasey Ford or her testimony, but it would not have existed without that woman’s bravery, her calm adherence to the facts, and her willingness to relive one of the worst moments of her life to help America save itself from itself. Her actions didn’t work, but they still mattered. And maybe that’s enough, in our fervent hope that the next generation gets it right.”
Her actions didn’t work, but they still mattered. May that be a lesson for the rest of us3.
Scattering Seeds
I usually have stuff that I want to share that doesn’t fit in the main post + I’m always finding stuff that supports the thesis of the book I’m writing on the benefits of leaning into nature’s rhythms and wisdom, so I thought I could start sharing those links and things here with all of you in hopes of some of the seeds I share germinating into something beautiful at your place.
Anger season is around the corner. Good news if you’re wanting to get in touch with your rage - anger season comes with the spring.
Tired of raging. I reread this post I wrote in 2023, in which I concluded with this and it seems like good advice for these times: “I’m about to turn 42, and I want to spend the next several decades knowing how (and when) to be soft and when to get ragey. In order to figure that out for myself, I have to listen less to what the attention merchants are telling me and listen more to myself, my family and close friends, and my community, especially those human and more-than-human parts of my community that few others are paying attention to.”
Three things from AHP. Read AHP’s newsletter from last week if you haven’t already; it was depressing as hell, but the truth matters. In it, she links to this piece on 30 small things to do from
- I did a few, and they made me feel marginally better,. She also links to this piece that made my stomach drop to the floor and that I haven’t stopped thinking about since.Here’s to the messy middle - I guess,
Sara
I realize that is a weird way to put it, but unfortunately, trauma is often the catalyst to the work of growing up.
What does “properly” mean anyway and who gets to decide?
I realize after writing all of this that it will likely read like a pity party, especially to women of color. Oh poor little white lady can’t handle her rage for ten years when we’ve been living with it for generations. I think that would be what I was thinking if I read it in their shoes, and I think one thing the Trump years must teach progressives, especially, is that we’ve got to stop policing one another’s feelings and find allies where we can.
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