#18 Why recovery matters more than ever + my first and last beauty tip

The past few weeks I’ve been at a loss for what to say here, so I haven’t said much. There is so much pain and so much inhumanity and so much grief, so so much wrong, it’s made me question what the point of my own life is, or at least the point of my work which I sometimes confuse with the point of my life. I’ve felt out of my depth in trying to understand reproductive rights, gun laws, minority rule, gerrymandering, climate change, all of the things that are happening around us that swell and show up like a million points of dust blotting out the entirety of our existence. When so much is wrong, where does one even begin.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a thread I saw on instagram, posted by Slow Factory, which reminds us that patriarchy and its enforcers—misogyny, racism, sexism, capitalism, all the other isms—underwrote what happened in Buffalo and Uvalde and the 215* other mass shootings that have happened this year alone (*that number has gone up since I started this essay a few d…