I owe you an intimate answer...

TL;DR: I had to get weird

I have been MIA the past two weeks. I am so sorry for this. You pay a subscription fee and deserve consistent, cohesive content. That’s the deal.

Some of you reached out to ask if I was OK. Which really touched me.

I wasn’t OK.

But I’m out the other side now and would like to give everyone here (the paid subscribers) a month’s free subscription¹. Don’t argue with me. I was raised Catholic.

Mostly, though, I want to give an explanation. Or, rather, I’d like to take the opportunity to explain where my thinking has been at, because ultimately it has landed me back into a good better, right space. I know I am not alone in feeling we are at some new, dastardly stage in this mad human transition² and perhaps my thoughts, which I had to go down deep to refine these past few weeks, might support some of you with where you’re at.

This post is probably the start of a broader conversation to this effect. So I’d love your feedback (also see my request at the bottom of this long post).

So.

A reader who might be familiar to many of you here, Madeleine Urion, recently asked me in the comments section how I cope, as a general thing.

Sarah, I often wonder how someone as sensitive as you can hold the moral injury that social media and this growing darkness inflict upon you in tension with your call to give words to it all.

It was interesting timing because I had not been coping so well for several months. Madeleine’s question was in response to this post where I wrote about how we’re being called to not remain silent about the atrocities being committed around us. Madeleine is an Anglican minister in Canada and writes with stunning consideration. You can read her full comment and question here. It’s beautiful and she includes a prayer for the “ache” that she witnesses in me, which, I think, exists in many of you here, too. I cried when I read it.

I wrote back in the comments a few days later, after I’d felt into her question:

The intense feeling of being recognised so care-fully punctured (I think this is the word) the bubble I put around my deep ache. The ache oozed out fully all weekend.

I tried to answer her question, but, you see, the ache failed to stop oozing. For days, weeks. It took me down. Which was a really good thing in the end. The bubble was ripe for puncturing and I needed to take a good, revised look at things.

So that’s the background. And now I’ll endeavour to answer Madeleine’s question. And explain myself.