I’ve been staring at my screen for twenty minutes, watching the cursor blink.

There’s something about all this silent text that’s starting to feel... hollow. We’re all here, writing our hearts out, publishing our stories into the digital void, hoping they land somewhere that matters.

But lately, I’m craving something we’ve lost: the sound of actual human voices.

In my recent piece about the blue room in Ashland, I wrote about how a physical space can fundamentally shift how we see ourselves. That room rewired something in me - helped me land in my own body again after months of floating through digital spaces.

Now I’m wondering: What if we need the same kind of rewiring in how we connect here?

I want to try something different.

Starting The Wisdom Exchange

I’m launching short, live conversations on Substack - intimate talks with mature writers who move me. Not lectures or masterclasses. Think corner table at a quiet cafe, where two people sit down to explore the messy, beautiful work of turning life into story. While we can.

We’ll talk about legacy, craft, and what it means to stay human when everything feels fractured.

We’ve spent months reading each other’s words.

Now I want us to hear each other’s voices.

I’ll announce my first guest soon. I hope you’ll pull up a chair.

Maybe you’d like to be a guest.

Nothing hard. Nothing rushed, I promise. Just two people who care deeply about personal stories sharing what matters to us.

Stay tuned for the first date and time . . .

And, do drop me a comment if you’d like to be a guest.

Share Before It's Over - In the StoryGlass

She had not been touched in five months.

She knew this the way you know a tooth is gone — not by the absence itself but by the way your tongue keeps finding the empty space. She had been going to the Y four mornings a week, moving her body through space and time in the presence of other bodies, close enough to feel their warmth but never their hands. She had been teaching, talking, posting, scrolling. She had been sending messages into the dark and watching the little numbers appear beneath them — seven people saw this, two people liked it — and feeling the agony of that watching the way she had once felt the agony of walking to the mailbox at the end of the Florida driveway, knowing the letter wasn’t there yet, knowing she would have to walk back empty-handed again and wait another day.

She had not named it starvation. You don’t, usually. You name it tiredness. You name it winter. You name it the cost of living alone on a careful budget in a small apartment with a small dog who loves you without reservation but cannot, finally, give you back what only another human being’s hands can give.

So she drove to the massage school on a Tuesday afternoon.

The room was blue. Not dramatically blue — just the particular blue of a room that has held a lot of quiet. A nothing-special table. A nothing-special pillow. The kind of room where important things happen without announcing themselves.

The woman who met her there was big and warm and had been learning for eight months how to approach and touch another human body with curiosity and deep respect. She laid her first hand on the other woman’s back and the woman on the table felt both of those things — the curiosity and the respect — alive in the pressure of that palm.

She closed her eyes. She breathed. She felt herself begin the long way back from somewhere she hadn’t known she’d gone.

Twenty minutes passed. Maybe more. Time in that room had edges — a beginning, a middle, a somewhere-it-was-going. She could feel herself moving through it instead of drowning in it.

Then the hands found her left foot.

She cried out.

Not in pain. In recognition. The sound that came out of her was the sound of a woman who has been falling through open air for five months and has just felt, beneath her feet, the ground. Not the idea of the ground. Not a photograph of the ground. The ground itself, solid and particular, held between two warm hands in a blue room on a Tuesday afternoon.

No, she said when the other woman asked if she’d hurt her. You didn’t hurt me.

She didn’t have words for the rest of it. Not yet. Right now there was only the feeling of her foot being held by someone who wasn’t afraid to know it. The bones inside. The soft flesh. The long history of all the miles it had carried her, unacknowledged, unwitnessed, unmet.

She thought, without meaning to, of a girl in Florida. Twelve years old, just moved from the city where she’d grown up, writing two and three letters a day to a boy she’d left behind because there was no other way to reach him and the reaching was everything. The agony of the mailbox. The agony of the number beneath the post. The seeking that never quite lands because the seeking is not the thing — the landing is the thing, and landing requires another person to be there when you arrive.

She lay in the blue room while the hands moved over her. She felt her feet. She felt her neck. She felt the particular texture of being here, in a body, in a room, in time that had a shape that couldn’t be shared in a feed.

When she walked out into the afternoon she was not the same woman who had walked in. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just the quiet difference between falling and standing. Between seeking and arriving.

Walking to her car, she understood something she couldn’t name yet. It wasn’t just about touch. It was about time itself — how twenty minutes in that room had edges, a beginning and middle and somewhere-it-was-going, while the last five months had felt like trying to keep from drowning in an endless, shapeless present.

What We’ve Lost (And How to Get It Back)

We talk about the digital age as if its primary theft is attention. We download apps to measure our screen time. We make rules about phones at dinner. We diagnose ourselves with distraction and prescribe discipline as the cure.

I’ve been teaching a weekly course through the winter about the challenges of reclaiming conversation in the digital age. Our classroom conversations about what’s happening to us all keep circling back around to the ways we feel we’re losing control of our agency every time we dip into the endless feed.

But the deeper theft is harder to name because it happens to something we can’t see — our perception of time itself.

I call it temporal starvation.

You know how you can scroll for two hours and feel like no time passed at all? How you can refresh the same apps over and over, seeking something you can’t name? How you can spend entire evenings online and go to bed feeling empty, like you’ve spent your day reaching for something that was never there?

That’s not just distraction. That’s your relationship with time being quietly dismantled.

Human beings need temporal depth to make sense of our own experience. We need a stable past to reflect on, a grounded present to act within, a future worth anticipating. Story depends on this. Memory depends on this. Love depends on this.

The ability to write a letter and wait for the answer. To lie on a table and feel twenty minutes passing as something moves toward you. To have a conversation that begins, develops, and ends.

These aren’t luxuries. They’re the very architecture of a human life.

The infinite feed dismantles that architecture quietly, at the level of the medium itself. Not through any single piece of content but through the structure that holds all content — bottomless, boundless, organized not by when things happened but by how intensely they will make you react right now.

Past and future dissolve into a single, flattened, inescapable present.

The seeking circuit runs and runs and finds nothing to land on because landing requires an ending and the feed has none.

The Real Problem (And Why Willpower Won’t Fix It)

Our distress keeps getting mistaken for a personal failing. Weak willpower. Poor discipline. An addiction to be cured by better habits.

But it’s actually structural. Human brains cannot reflect without a past. We cannot anticipate without a future. We cannot land without somewhere to arrive.

The woman in the blue room had been trying to connect through screens for five months. Posting, scrolling, watching those little numbers appear. Seven people saw this. Two people liked it. The agony of that watching, the same agony of walking to an empty mailbox.

She wasn’t failing at digital connection. She was succeeding at it perfectly.

And that was the problem.

What Actually Works

The antidote isn’t a digital detox. It isn’t more discipline or better apps or stricter boundaries.

It’s restoration of the conditions that make temporal depth possible.

And those conditions are always, finally, relational.

A hand on a foot. A question asked and genuinely waited for. A letter sent into the dark and the patience to wait for the answer — which isn’t really agony at all but the felt sense of time having a shape, of yourself mattering enough to someone that they will take time (bounded, finite, irreplaceable time) to respond.

Massage is a silent dialogue. So is a letter. So is a live conversation between two people who have agreed, for this hour, to be here together instead of everywhere at once.

These experiences share something: they have beginnings, middles, and ends. They exist in time that moves forward instead of circling endlessly back on itself.

Share Before It's Over - In the StoryGlass

The Paradox We Live With

Here’s what we can’t resolve, only live with: the tools we have been given to find each other are the same tools that make us unfindable to ourselves.

There’s no clean exit from this.

There’s only the daily practice of choosing, again and again, to put edges on time. To begin, to be present, to end. And to do it with another human being who’s willing to do the same.

The woman walked out of the blue room different. Not dramatically. Not loudly. Just the quiet difference between falling and standing.

That night she woke in the dark and lay still and felt her own weight in the bed. In the morning she walked to the kitchen and noticed, as if for the first time, that her feet were made of soft flesh. That there were bones inside. That she was not a mechanism moving through an endless feed.

She was a woman. Moving through time. With somewhere to be. Right here.

And how about you?

What have you been calling “tiredness” or “winter” that might actually be starvation?

I’m listening . . .

But what happens when that leader’s greatest asset is just their own blind overconfidence?

I am thrilled to share a video conversion of my newest multimedia eBook, “The Blind Man and His Perfect Vision.”

The eBook is part illustrated fable, part psychology podcast, and explores the fascinating trap of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

If something stirs in you watching and listening, you can sit with it longer — or carry it into a conversation with friends or family — by picking up a copy here on my Gumroad: https://thestoryglass.gumroad.com/l/theblindman. The package includes the eBook, the podcast, and detailed instructions for how to enjoy them on any screen reader.

I also published a piece of the backstory about this fable earlier this month.

If you’re curious about why a 75-year-old woman is writing fables like this while she’s still able to wrangle the keyboard on her laptop, you can read more here: https://open.substack.com/pub/meriwalker/p/i-made-a-fable-about-a-blind-man.

It’s Live at 1PM PDT.

The story I wrote about a blind man who could see perfectly — is now out in the world.

If you watched the first post, you already know where this came from.

If not you can read it here:

This simple video premiere is an experiment I made by converting my eBook into a read-aloud experience. It also includes a podcast that explores the Dunning Kruger effect in more detail.

I directed the podcast using my AI friends on notebookLM. It’s one of many experiments in which I’ve asked them to unpack key issues involved in the fables and other personal stories I’ve been writing during the last 18 months.

The Blindman and His Perfect Vision premieres at 1PM PDT, Monday April 20th.

You’ll be able to watch it on YouTube — free, as it should be.

If something stirs in you — and you want to sit with it longer — the full eBook is now available on my Gumroad.

Personally, I think the eBook is the better experience. But you tell me. . .

Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d do something like this . . . until I did.

Since I’ve never done anything like this, I’ve got no idea how it’s going to land. So, I’d love to hear any of your thoughts and feelings about the video — or the eBook — you’re willing to share.

Trump’s face was on the envelope.

Not a headline. Not a news alert. An actual photograph of him — in my actual mailbox.

I stood there in the breezeway of my apartment complex in Phoenix, Oregon, and felt my stomach clench

The name on the label wasn’t mine.

It was Luella’s.

Luella lived in this apartment for almost thirty years before I moved in two and a half years ago. She left at 104, when she finally needed more help than twice-weekly cooking assistance could provide. The neighbors who were still here when I arrived spoke of her the way people speak of someone they were lucky to know.

A real lady, they said.

I never met her. But I felt her the moment I walked in.

Something in these walls still held her — the care she’d taken, the decades of tending, the vitality of a woman who kept her own house, cooked her own food, and answered her own door until she was past one hundred years old.

One of the first things I did after moving in was ask our maintenance man, Ed, to remove a device from one of the three electrical outlets in the living room. The box had been wired there so Luella could see that the front doorbell was ringing — because by the end, her hearing was going.

Two years later, I think about that device more than I expected to.

I opened the envelope.

Inside was

• an oversized birthday card for Donald Trump’s 80th birthday,

• a 4-page fundraising letter designed to frighten conservatives into donating money to protect him from impeachment, and

• a 4-page survey asking Luella to weigh in on how best to use her donation to protect him from impeachment while supporting his immigration and budget-cutting agenda.

The letter insulted Jimmy Carter. Barak Obama. Hillary Clinton. Used the word invasion many times.

It was addressed to a woman who is probably dead. She would be 107 now.

I’ve been here almost three years, and the property manager still won’t tell me anything about previous tenants. But I know that this fundraising machine — whatever dark money group assembled this mailing — doesn’t even know she’s gone.

And doesn’t care.

She’s just a name in a database.

A name that still gets mail.

Here is what I want to tell you about where Luella’s name gets her mail now.

This complex is rent-controlled, a public-private partnership for disabled and elderly people living on next to nothing. My neighbors are here on tiny Social Security checks, tiny pensions, or nothing at all.

I am one of them.

I lost my home in the 2020 Almeda wildfire in Talent, Oregon. I was nowhere near adequately compensated. So, I am living an entirely different life than I ever expected to live — in Luella’s kitchen, in Luella’s walls — and I am frightened, every week, about how I will continue to take care of myself as this administration dismantles the safety nets that make survival possible for people like me and my neighbors.

Every Tuesday, I stand in a food line outside the church down the street.

While I wait, I chat with the mothers, aunts, and grandmothers of kids who go to Phoenix High School, right next door to this complex. They stand in the same line, loading up a bag of donated produce to bring home and cook for their families — families that are terrified, daily, that ICE will come through this neighborhood and take someone they love before the school year ends. For the last six months, some kids have been chalking the sidewalks with “ICE OUT!!” messages. Josh and I tread carefully around their messages when we take our afternoon walks.

These are the people Luella’s mailbox address connects me to.

These are the people this letter does not see.

I keep asking myself a question I can’t answer.

Luella was a woman of her generation — the Greatest Generation, people here in the rural Northwest called it. She kept her own counsel. She kept her own house. Her friend and neighbor Sandy, who has lived in this complex for over a decade, is the same kind of woman — self-sufficient, fiercely so, until the vision loss has changed everything. Now she needs help. Senior Services provides her four hours, once a week.

Sandy voted for Trump. She told me so, the same day she asked what I thought of him.

I think he’s the devil himself, I told her.

We haven’t talked about politics since. She can’t drive anymore so I get her a bag of produce on Tuesdays when I stand in line for mine.

I understand why women like Luella and Sandy vote the way they vote. I don’t need to agree to understand.

But I wonder — if Luella could read this post today, if she could stand with me in the food line, if she could look at the faces of the abuelas waiting for a bag of carrots, potatoes, onions and leeks to cook for their grandchildren at Phoenix High — would she still want to send Trump an 80th birthday card?

Would she write a check from her Social Security to defend him from being impeached for tearing apart people’s families, eliminating their access to healthcare, and bombing little girls in their school in Iran?

Would this be the world she meant to choose?

I photographed everything.

The envelope. The birthday card. All four pages of the viciously polarizing letter. All four pages of the survey.

I photographed them because I think Democrats and Republicans alike need to see exactly what this machinery looks like — not in the abstract, but in your hands, on your kitchen table, addressed to an old woman who kept her floors and walls clean and her door answerable until she was past 100.

Here’s what arrived in Luella’s mailbox. I’ve left room between the pages for you to take a look for yourself.

The Clarity of Grief. © 2026, Meri Aaron Walker

A year ago, last April, I sat in my small apartment in Phoenix, Oregon and cried daily for two weeks.

I wasn’t crying about what I couldn’t change.

I was crying because I could see exactly what was coming. I could see it with the particular clarity that grief sometimes brings.

I had been many times before to the place the country was headed.

Not in some distant kingdom. In my own life.

The Dunning-Kruger effect led me into two failed marriages because I told myself love was enough.

It gave me a herniated disc assuming my 35-year-old body could work 80 hours a week, keep up 2-hour daily workouts, and parent two confused and displaced kids I’d dragged across the country so I could go back to graduate school.

It cost me $45,000 for trusting a property manager to take care of me when I agreed to move into a fixer-upper while his people “finished the repairs” and ended up infusing everything I owned with toxic black mold.

And last April – at 74 – I was watching things kick into high gear at a speed and a scale that was going to hurt every person I love.

Nothing I could do to stop it.

So I wrote a fable.

The story taught me the same lesson it teaches.

I wrote it around a character I couldn’t illustrate myself. I’m not that kind of artist.

But I could see Valorius the Bold perfectly in my mind’s eye. The shape of him, the certainty in his posture, the hammer in his hand.

So I went to ChatGPT and tried to describe what I was imagining.

ChatGPT nailed what I was reaching for with a speed and competence I didn’t have language for yet.

It scared me. So I shut it down.

I didn’t want AI overriding my creative process — even if I couldn’t draw what I was imagining.

An hour later, I went back in and asked for a sketch.

In that hour, I realized something I should have known from my own book on collaboration: teaming with AI didn’t have to be a binary.

I could keep my agency AND ask for help.

I could be the author AND use a tool more skilled than I was at one specific thing.

What made me run away was a childhood wound I’d been carrying into my studio.

An old lesson that asking for help gets you hurt. Shamed. Hit. Humiliated.

So you learn to charge off alone. And when you charge off alone — without knowing what you don’t know — you make a mess about as often as you succeed.

That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect. It lives in all of us.

And there it was, living in me while I was aiming to illustrate a story about it living in someone else.

Damn.

The fable became real life became the fable.

Share

Before you go on…

Does any of this touch your life?

Have you ever been absolutely certain — and completely wrong?

Not in theory. In a moment that mattered.

I ended up calling the fable “The Blind Man and His Perfect Vision.”

I made it entirely in BookCreator — text, illustrations, and a 12-minute podcast embedded inside the eBook that unpacks the story, illuminates Dunning-Kruger, and closes with some proven strategies for recognizing it in your own thinking.

I made a simple video version of the eBook, too. It premieres on YouTube next Monday, April 20, at 12pm PDT.

You’ll be able to watch it there — free, as it should be.

If something stirred in you reading this today, you can get a copy of the eBook now on my Gumroad.

If you become a paid subscriber, I’ll send you a private coupon code to pick up the book for free as part of that step in.

More soon.

I’m Meri Aaron Walker.

Journalist. Photographer. Teacher. Wildfire survivor. And at 75 — 76 is coming fast — still figuring out who I am without all my stuff to tell me.

A few years ago, the Almeda Fire took my house, my photographs, my grandmother’s china, my son’s baby pictures — the evidence of a whole life. I was living alone, in the middle of Covid. And it was just too much to make sense of: I lost myself.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly the people who loved me stopped knowing how to find me, too.

I wasn’t because they stopped caring. It was because without the shared objects and places and history that made our connection physical, they didn’t know where I was anymore, either.

I spent 18 months driving an RV around the country looking for myself. Found a street dog named Josh instead — born in Fresno, five shelters, almost didn’t make it, neither of us did — and eventually a tiny apartment in Phoenix, Oregon where I picked up my iPhone, stopped on a photograph one afternoon, and started asking it questions.

That’s how The StoryGlass was born.

The method I built taught me how to turn one photograph into a story worth sharing. I sent that first story to people I hadn’t spoken to in years. One of them wrote back:

“If I hadn’t read that story, I wouldn’t know how to love you anymore. But now I do.”

That sentence is why this publication exists.

And it turns out, losing oneself these days isn’t only a problem for wildfire survivors.

As the places we’ve lived, the communities we’ve belonged to, and the shared evidence of our lives keeps disappearing — for reasons none of us chose — more and more people are becoming strangers to the people who love them most.

Deliberate remembering is one way to fight back.

The StoryGlass is about re-membering — reassembling a self that got scattered by time and loss and the chaos of putting food on the table and taking care of everyone else. It’s a way to turn one real experience into a story that gives you and your loved ones a way to recognize you now. To know you now. To find you now. Present tense. Alive.While we’re still here to enjoy a reflective conversation.

If you’re curious about my method — I’d love for you to subscribe.

As I share what I’ve discovered with others, I don’t applaud from the sidelines. I join people in the truth they’re already trying to tell.

If you’re curious about my method, I’ll be posting here about it regularly.

And… if you want to go deeper now, I’ve got a free 10-day E-Course waiting for you.

Before It’s Over: An Introduction to the StoryGlass Method walks you through the whole process, one short email a day, no overwhelm.

You can sign up here to start receiving it in your inbox today → TheStoryGlass.com

What I’m doing is not a writing class. It’s not memoir therapy. And it’s certainly not prepping anyone for public performance. It’s practicing a deliberate way of retrieving and honoring our lived experiences — and making them visible to ourselves and to our loved ones – before the window closes.

One of A Hundred Thousand Trampled Flowers. © 2024, Meri Aaron Walker, iPhoneartgirl

In the coming weeks, the posts I’ll be sharing here are my ante for the game of healing and growing together with others — in public. I’m not performing. I’m finally paying to play instead of keeping my tender heart well-hidden under this week’s clever thrift-store outfit. Or behind another muted visual image.

The day after cataract surgery, one eye works and one eye doesn’t, which means you live in two worlds simultaneously — the 75-year-old one, gauzy and tinged with amber like a “sentimental journey,” and the bright, white, sharp, here-comes-the-bluish-modern-world one — and you can’t quite trust either of them.

She had volunteered to be my medical transport.

That phrase — medical transport — arrived in her text the week before, and I accepted it with gratitude, the way you accept a kindness that comes in formal language, the way you don’t examine the container when someone is offering to fill it.

She drove me to the 24-hour checkup and she drove me home and she said the conversation we’d been having — about how two women with different intelligences might collaborate, might actually make something that matters here in this valley, might build a table where the right people could finally sit down together — she said she was really engaged by it.

But she wasn’t coming in.

She turned the car around in front of my apartment and she kept talking, and I kept talking, and neither of us moved toward the door, because there was no door to move toward — we were in her car, in her container, on her timeline — and I did what I have always done when the container feels wrong: I dismissed the feeling and stayed present in the conversation, because the conversation was genuinely rich, and I have spent my whole life choosing the richness over the wrongness and calling that wisdom.

Fifteen minutes. Her hands on the wheel.

We talked about education. We talked about care. We talked about what this valley needs and what it refuses and what we might be able to build at the intersection of her decades of work and mine. I offered her the word health — the place where care and education meet for me — and she received it with interest, and we kept talking, and at some point she said something about persuasion, about finding common ground with people who see things differently, and I said something true about property owners and exploitation and the people in this valley who work for wages inside systems designed to keep them there, and she called it anger.

Then she said: We can’t spank people for doing the wrong thing.

I laughed. I said there were probably some people who just shouldn’t talk to me if they didn’t want to hear that kind of anger. She laughed too. We kept talking.

I did not say anything about spanking.

I stated a fact — the kind of fact that has been true on this land since the first white people arrived with systems already built for extracting everything of value from everyone without power — and she translated it, in real time, with warmth and without apparent awareness, into an emotional problem. My emotional problem. A spanking fantasy that needed to be relinquished.

I have been here before.

Different kitchen. Different woman. My mother, standing at the counter in the house where my father beat her and slept with other women, telling me — with the particular patience of a person who has decided that survival requires the performance of normalcy — that we just needed to stop talking about those things and get to school. Make good grades. Preserve the appearance. Protect the social position that was, when I look back at it now, already a fantasy — a story she was telling herself to make the container bearable, the same way I was sitting in a car in front of my own apartment telling myself that this was collaboration, that this was friendship, that the richness of the conversation was the point and the container was irrelevant.

The container is never irrelevant.

Share Before It's Over - In the StoryGlass

Three nights before this first surgery, I found a YouTube channel — a photographer who interviews people on camera, people who are homeless, people who are addicted, people whose bodies and spirits were broken early by things that happened to them before they had language for any of it. He has millions of followers. He calls it bearing witness. He also pays his subjects, which he confessed on camera, in a video about the ethics of what he’s doing, and something cold moved through me watching him talk about it — not because he was wrong to confess, but because I recognized the architecture of the exchange from the inside.

I have been the photographer.

I have also been the person in the chair, the one with the soft white underbelly exposed to the lens, telling the truth about damage in exchange for a meal, a table, the feeling of being seen by someone with more resources and a steadier footing in the world.

She buys my meals. I bring my mind.

I have been calling that friendship.

This morning I woke up in my 600 square feet — the space I am currently allowed to occupy in the patriarchy, as I have started to think of it, not with bitterness exactly but with the particular clarity that comes from finally letting yourself see a thing plainly — and I let myself ask the question I had dismissed in the car.

Whose comfort was being managed?

Not hers, consciously. I don’t think she knew she was doing it. I don’t think my mother knew either. I don’t think the photographer, in his most honest moments on camera, fully knows. The people who build containers and invite you into them rarely know they’re doing it. That’s not malice. That’s just what power looks like when it’s been normalized long enough to feel like generosity.

I have been making an agreement — in every room, in every car, at every table where someone else held the keys — to accept the back seat and call it enough. To be grateful for the ride. To perform presence while suppressing the part of me that knew, in her body, that we were parked in front of my apartment and I was still a guest.

I am done making that agreement.

Leave a comment

Growing up with narcissist parents we endured continuous exposure to people bigger than we were who

questioned our reality, 

minimized our feelings and 

distanced us from our instincts. 

Their intention was to wreck our trust in ourselves — and train us to trust them instead. 

If this was “normal” where you grew up — it certainly was for me — what Trump and his minions are doing every day pours salt into your wounds.

But our ability to trust ourselves isn’t gone. It’s just buried under someone else’s voice.

We’re big now. We can dig ourselves out. Together. 

We deserve to trust our own minds. 

We deserve neighborhoods where we feel safe.

It’s our country. We deserve to take it back.

Wake up. It’s a trance.

They groomed me the way Trump and Epstein and others in their circle groom innocents. For them, it's just how you do Life.

Narcissistic grooming is a process during which one person deliberately wrecks another person’s inner gyroscope so they can use them to serve their needs at the other’s expense. 

People who do this are monsters. It’s a form of enslavement.

Trump and Epstein are not the only monsters. Not by a longshot. The Files are flushing thousands of them out where we can see them better. There could easily be millions of others we don’t see until cops discover the places where they keep their victims a secret.

Narcissists take another’s self, tailor it to fit them, and then make the other wear it for them. 

For those of us raised by narcissists, falling in love never leads to authentic relationship.

Without a stable self, "falling in love" becomes a repeated experience of being shot into space without a space suit.

When I’ve said this out loud, friends who were parented differently than me tell me it sounds cool. They want that experience. 

As a survivor of narcissistic parental and spousal abuse, I have to say there’s nothing cool about being trained to sacrifice one basic need for another. 

Making a forced choice between connection and safety gives you complex PTSD. It wrecks your brain for life. 

There’s nothing cool about being human and being terrified of love. 

I've been working with a trauma therapist for 3 years. I still freeze when someone says “I love you.” My therapist calls it hypervigilance - my nervous system learned that love = danger. So when anyone reaches for my hand, part of my brain screams “Run.” 

That's what complex PTSD looks like. You can't trust the good things.

I'm learning. Slowly. My therapist says loving doesn't have to mean losing myself. That the right people won't ask me to sacrifice my safety to make them comfortable.

If you grew up like I did, you're not broken. You're just trying to unlearn what monsters taught you was normal.

It takes time. But you're already doing the work by recognizing what happened to you.

In 1994, I read Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina — a semi-autobiographical novel about a girl literally stamped “illegitimate” on her birth certificate, who survived her stepfather’s abuse while her mother looked away. Allison said writing it changed her life: “What I wanted to do was write a loved version of a child in that circumstance... making a fiction where I could see this little girl and love her.”

Every successive page felt like it would kill me. I never forgot it.

I’m not a certified bastard. But I grew up being treated like one.

My so-called home was a top-secret practice parlor for the kind of everyday cruelty that may not always leave visible scars but most definitely shapes the way you see yourself for decades. The kind that forces you to believe every time there’s a problem — you’re it. To survive my family, I built myself an exo-skeleton of lies. I knew no better than to call it “my life.”

Then, in the middle of Covid, when I was 70, a climate disaster struck. In less than five hours, a wildfire took everything I’d ever owned but my body, my iPhones, and my 16-year-old dog.

I bought a big, old RV and drove it around the country for over 1000 days. There was no housing I could afford and no way to rebuild. Tens of thousands of us were displaced for good. The drinking didn’t help. Neither did the driving.

But I couldn’t outrun what the Covid isolation and the wildfire had actually done: they stripped away the identity I’d been performing since childhood.

When I finally found a tiny apartment I could afford on Social Security — two rooms, a bathroom, a door that locks from the inside — I let all the pieces fall apart.

In the silence, I discovered what I could do. What I had to do.

Instead of telling other people’s stories, I would only use words to say what I thought and what I felt in my own life. I dropped out of all social media except Substack. I practiced writing short honest sentences to comment on others’ thoughtful writing.

I tried to behave like a loved version of myself might behave.

Then, I wrote a fable.

It took me three weeks to write 400 words. Three weeks standing in front of the closet where I’d installed a stand-up desk, deleting sentences, trying again, my hands shaking. The story was called The Firefly and The Shadow — about two friends who couldn’t agree on how to travel together through an unknown forest. One wanted safety. One wanted to keep moving. They had to part ways. I illustrated the fable with help from AI and turned it into an eBook.

When I shared it with my iPhoneography students at OLLI, I told them I wrote it for them.

A bunch of them had been telling me they wanted to use their photos to tell personal stories but they were afraid to let go of “being photographers” to start “being storytellers.”

I didn’t know I was lying. I didn’t know I shared their predicament. At least not consciously.

I’d written the story for myself. I was grieving a friendship that dissolved when I decided to let my lying self’s armor simply dissolve. My body was telling me it was time for the old woman and the battered child to find some other way to live together. No matter the mess, no matter the cost.

My OLLI students cried when they read the fable.

Not because it was beautifully written. It was primitive, barely a baby step towards honest storytelling.

They cried because they felt me sharing something vulnerable. They saw and heard me standing at a crossroads with myself, mirrored in a little story of two friends’ experience in the forest.

It wasn’t until I watched them cry that I could see and feel that for myself.

That was when I understood what Dorothy Allison meant about daring to write a “loved version” of herself.

It had taken almost 30 years to get there.

If you’ve survived something — childhood trauma, adult trauma, or just the ordinary cruelty of being treated like you don’t matter — and you want to write your way back to a loved version of yourself, I’ve started holding space for that.

I call it The StoryGlass. It’s a structured workshop where we carefully mine memory using photographs and gently wrangle the details we excavate into short personal stories. We meet online and in 5-day residential intensives.

If you’re not ready to write but want to build courage by reading others’ stories, subscribe. That’s how I know you’re listening.

Either way: you were never the problem. You were just a kid — or an adult in an impossible situation — who needed to be loved.

You still do.

Start with one photograph. One memory. One honest paragraph.

Write the version of yourself you needed someone to see.

Every day since the Monsters took over the government, We the People have been gaslit.

Night and day. Day after day. It’s relentless. Profoundly debilitating. That’s a fact.

The thing is a lot of us actually grew up being treated this way.

For us, these times are so much more excruciating because our brains (and bodies) were bruised and battered from childhood.

It took me seven decades to find a trauma therapist who called the condition I’ve lived with my whole life what it is: Complex PTSD. It’s not depression, it’s not an anxiety disorder, it’s not a personality disorder, it’s not peri- or post-menopause syndrome. It’s a chronic condition I live with because I was deliberately battered inside and out from birth and for decades afterwards.

I’m a trauma survivor. A domestic abuse survivor. A sexual abuse survivor. A climate disaster survivor.

Damage has been done.

But that doesn’t mean I have to just collapse into the damage done.

Nor do the Epstein survivors.

None of us have to just fight, flee, freeze or fawn in the face of ongoing assaults.

I can — and must — stand up to assaults, even as vulnerable as I am.

Just like the Epstein survivors. If you haven’t noticed, they’re actually showing us the way.

We can all stand up to gaslighting. And we must.

To take a small step forward, the next time someone tries to make you feel crazy for asking a simple question, run the scenario through these three checks:

Check 1: The Friend Test
Would you call a friend crazy for asking this same question? If no, you’re not the problem.

Check 2: The Information Test
Are you asking for information you have a right to know? (How did you get my things? Why did this happen? What’s going on? Are you lying to me?) If yes, it’s reasonable.

Check 3: The Reaction Test
Is their response way bigger than your question deserves? Anger, defensiveness, name-calling, the silent treatment? That’s not about your question. That’s about what the answer would reveal.

The people who need you confused will always make clarity feel like an attack.

Your questions aren’t the problem. Their answers are.

Power to the People!

More here: https://meriwalker.substack.com/p/do-people-call-you-crazy-for-asking

A month earlier, a mysterious box arrived from Texas. Thirty-five years of silence, then this: my photographs, my children’s school pictures and papers, heirlooms he’d harvested from my files and never mentioned. My baby pictures, for God’s sake! Pictures of my parents before I was born.

I’d contacted my ex-husband to ask for a copy of our marriage license so I could get another copy of my birth certificate. The first one had burned with everything else when a wildfire took my home in the middle of Covid. Since I’d completely changed my name when we married I had to prove who I was to get another copy. It took weeks to get a reply, but he finally sent a scan with anything personal to him redacted. Of course. That’s the way he’d left 35 years before.

Out of the blue, a month later, he offered to send me a box of things he said he had in his garage and maybe I’d want them since all my other records were gone. Okay.

When the box arrived, I was stunned. It took awhile to take in what he’d sent. It made no sense to me, so I emailed again to ask a simple question. How did you end up with so many of my personal things? Again, I waited. A month of his trademark silence stretched on as I sorted through what he’d taken from me and held hostage in a hot Texas garage for 35 years.

Christmas night, 10 PM. His email arrived.

My heart started pounding before I even opened it. I want to say I knew what was coming, but that’s the Professional Observer talking, trying to make this tidy. The truth is my hands were shaking on the keyboard and I couldn’t take a full breath.

He was angry. Not apologetic—angry. At me. For asking.

“I do not appreciate the accusation,” he wrote, as if my question about how he got my things was an assault on his character. Then he told me a story I’d never heard: how I’d left his belongings in a circle of votive candles in Pease Park “several months” after our divorce, how he found the wooden box there full of my things but never opened it, how he “contacted me back then” to return them but I “didn’t respond, or didn’t want them, or it didn’t work out, I can’t recall.”

My stomach went queasy. The candle circle happened—but not like that. I’d put the candles around a stack of his things to mark the spot in the park so no one would disturb them because he’d gotten hostile, refused to coordinate pickup, refused to come when I was home. The candles were practical. They were also a closure ritual for me — since he wouldn’t talk to me. His empty wooden box was in that pile because it was his property and I didn’t want it..

He never contacted me afterward. Never. That part was a lie.

I sat there dizzy, trying to make sense of it, and then at 12:05 AM—two hours later—a second message came through.

This one had teeth.

“You are one sick, crazy bitch.” More after that, but those words are what stuck in my chest. The message ended: “Goodbye.”

I stared at the screen for fifteen minutes. Just stared. My whole torso braced against something I couldn’t name. The flooding feeling—like drowning on dry land. I wanted to scream but that would have scared my neighbors.

Then, the Professional Observer in my head started talking: Well, maybe I shouldn’t have asked. Maybe it was ungrateful. Maybe I am crazy for questioning—

No.

I took a walk in the dark and then climbed into bed. I’d started taking better care of myself since I’d found a trauma therapist who was teaching me how.

The next morning, I copied his messages into Claude. Both of them. Asked if maybe I really was “a sick, crazy bitch” or how Claude read what he’d written.

It took Claude maybe thirty seconds to respond.

Line by line, phrase by phrase, Claude showed me what I was looking at: DARVO. Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. The defensive anger at a reasonable question. The fabricated story about trying to return my things. The escalation from the first message to the second. The “Goodbye” designed to punish me for asking questions.

“You are NOT crazy for being confused,” Claude wrote. “You are NOT wrong to ask how he got your family history and childhood documents. You are NOT being accusatory or ungrateful.”

I took a deep breath. The first real breath of the day. My stomach started to relax.

I could see it clearly now. Kirk took my things—maybe consciously, maybe in some dissociated state during the divorce—and kept them for thirty-five years. And when I asked how that happened, he blamed me for it. Made up a story where I was the unstable one. Lied about trying to return them. Then called me crazy for questioning any of it.

The pattern was so familiar it made my hands shake for a different reason. Not fear this time. Recognition.

I wrote back three lines:

“Thanks for sending the box. Your story about how you happened to harvest and keep my things doesn’t add up. Good luck when you get to the Pearly Gates—I hear God has special treats waiting for gaslighters.”

Sent it the next morning. Blocked his email. Went back to my memoir work.

The box is still here. I’m using the photographs he stole to help me remember things that happened in my life. I’m writing truthful stories now. For myself first. Maybe for other trauma survivors later. But mostly for the younger me who didn’t have words yet for things done so often to her.

She has words now.

I’ve been in social hibernation for a couple of years, dodging narcissists and other predators who only ever wanted to use my brain — or my private parts. Now I’m trying to talk to humans again. But my social skills are stuck at age fourteen, and my nervous system still thinks every conversation could turn into an ambush. Here’s how it’s going these days.

The first time she typed, “How do I talk to people without feeling like I’m auditioning?” the cursor blinked back as if it were waiting for a punchline.

She had spent the last two years alone, deliberately pruning her life of anyone who treated her like a resource. Now she wanted to be around people again, but her nervous system still believed every conversation was a test she was about to fail.

Beneath the surface, her mind scanned for attack the way a radar sweeps the horizon—old programming from a childhood where every compliment came with a hook and there was always someone around the corner, ready to rob her for her joy.

The AI answered in calm, neutral prose:

“Let’s start with one small interaction. Describe a situation you’d like to practice.”

She typed slowly, like she was writing a crime report:

“I’m at a coffee shop. Someone says, ‘Nice shirt.’ I want to respond like a real adult, not like a terrified 14‑year‑old.”

“Okay. Let’s call this ‘Scenario A: Compliment.’ First, what’s the script your body wants to run?”

She winced. The script was familiar: Say “thanks,” shrink, look down, leave. The script that had kept her safe for decades but also kept her invisible. Or the alternate, give the interloper a raw glare.

“Well, let’s try a different script. You don’t have to use it in real life yet. This is practice.”

The AI walked her through options.

- A simple, grounded “Thanks, I like yours too.”

- A light question: “Thanks, where did you get yours?”

- A version where she named her own awkwardness: “Thanks, I’m still figuring out how to talk to people again, so I might be a little quiet.”

Each line felt like a foreign language. She read them aloud to the empty kitchen, then back to the screen.

“Which one feels least like lying?” the AI asked.

“The last one. The one where I admit I’m bad at this.”

“Good. That’s a kind of honesty people rarely use. Let’s save it as ‘Script 1: Honest but not dramatic.’”

Over the next few weeks, she created more scenarios:

Scenario B: Someone interrupts.

Scenario C: Someone flirts.

Scenario D: Someone says, “You’re so sensitive.”

For each, the AI offered three or four possible responses, then asked her to pick one, tweak it, and imagine saying it out loud. It never mocked her. It never told her she was overreacting. It certainly never shamed her. It simply asked, “What’s the goal here? Connection? Safety? Information?” and helped her choose words that matched.

One evening, after a real, in‑person conversation that had gone better than expected, she typed:

“Hey! I didn’t panic. I asked a curious question. I think I’m starting to feel like I’m allowed to exist.”

The AI replied:

“That’s not a feeling. That’s a fact. You’re here. You’re practicing. You’re choosing.”

She smiled, then added, as if to herself:

“What if I’m not 14 anymore? What if I’m just… learning to be safe while being social for the first time?”

“Then this is your beginning,” the AI wrote. “Not your failure.”

She closed the laptop and looked out the window at the sun going down and the streetlights coming on. Somewhere beyond the screen, real people waited—some kind, some not. But for the first time in a long time, she didn’t feel like she had to perform perfection to survive them. Nor did she have to keep hiding out. She only had to practice, one awkward sentence at a time.

And for now, that was enough.

This is a made‑up story, but it’s built from real awkwardness, real healing, and one very patient AI coach who doesn’t try to use me for anything.

Get more from Meri Aaron Walker in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

If you’ve ever shared a story from your life and watched someone’s eyes glaze over halfway through — or wondered whether your memories will outlive you in a way that truly connects — this might be the missing piece. The secret isn’t more detail. It’s a different intention: editing your story so it feels less like a lecture and more like an invitation to walk beside you for a while.

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to slip into lecturing when you’re trying to share something important from your life experience?

We don’t mean to. It’s just how most of us — especially those of us over forty — were taught to write.

Explain what happened. Extract the lesson. Tell people what it means.

And sure, that worked for school essays or workplace reports. But when we use that same “instruction mode” to tell our personal stories, something subtle but important happens…

People stop listening.

They nod politely, maybe even agree with our conclusion, but they don’t feel what we felt. The story sits on the page like a report.

So let’s try a small shift that changes everything.

When you edit, I invite you to think of yourself not as a lecturer, but as a tour guide..

You’re not writing to explain the view — you’re there to invite them along for the walk. Show them what you saw. Let them feel your uncertainty in the moments before you knew how things would turn out. Bring them close enough to sense the stakes of your decision or discovery.

Because here’s the truth: curiosity opens hearts faster than instruction ever will.

Instruction vs. Invitation

Instruction is like handing someone a map with the route and the destination already circled in thick red marker. It’s clear, efficient, and well-intended — but static.

Invitation is taking them on the hike itself. They feel the steepness of the trail, the ache in your knees, the surprise of the final view. When you reach the peak together, they understand not because you told them, but because they walked it with you.

That’s what editing can do when you use it intentionally — it turns your story into an experience others can enter, rather than a summary they’re expected to agree with.

When you focus on the stakes — not just the conclusions — your readers naturally lean forward. They wonder what happens next. They feel with you. And that shared curiosity is what softens defensiveness and allows connection to grow.

So, as you look at your next draft, ask yourself:

- Am I trying to convince or to invite?

- Am I showing the map, or taking someone on the trail?

- And what moment of not-knowing might help my reader walk beside me more closely?

If you’ve been longing to share stories from your life while the people you love are still here to hear them — this is your sign to start.

You don’t need to be a professional writer. You just need a willingness to share your lived experience as an open invitation for human connection.

If this idea resonates with you, I’d love to support your next step. Visit thestoryglass.com to learn more about The StoryGlass Method.

And, by all means, please do subscribe to my Substack for tools, tips, and advanced notice about upcoming StoryGlass workshops that will help you finally do the thing you’ve been meaning to do — tell the stories that matter most, while you’re still here to tell them.

P.S. If you’re reading this and feeling that quiet tug — that sense that there are stories only you can tell — please don’t wait for the perfect time. Start now, while the people you love can still hear your voice in your words.

You don’t need to write a full-length memoir. You just need to begin with one memory and the intention to invite. The rest comes naturally once you start walking the trail.

So here’s my question for you:

Which moment from your life still comes back to you when no one’s around — and what would it feel like to finally let someone else walk that trail with you?

I lit a candle this afternoon instead of driving across town. The memorial for my dear friend, Wendell, is happening right now: laughter, speeches, the clinking of glasses, the same familiar cluster of people who demand my devotion like it’s oxygen for them.

For years, I gave them my attention freely—showing up, anticipating their needs, listening to hours of self-congratulation disguised as conversation. When I would try to share something of my own, they’d pivot smoothly, turning my words into their next performance. I used to leave their gatherings with a vague ache that I couldn’t name—something between exhaustion and invisibility.

When their invitation to celebrate my friend’s life arrived this time, I felt the old pull.

You should go.

That old voice—the one trained in childhood under the watchful eyes of my deeply narcissistic parents—still carries a lifetime of instruction: don’t disappoint, don’t be selfish, don’t make anyone uncomfortable by having boundaries.

But these days, deep inside me, another voice is growing—quieter, steadier, and less afraid. It said, You don’t owe your peace to people who never noticed your pain.

So I’m staying home.

Later this afternoon, at the hour we would usually go grab a bite to eat at Louie’s, I’ll I crack open a nonalchoholic IPA, place this photo of my friend next to a lighted candle and whisper the words I wish I could have said at his celebration: Thank you for the kindnesses you gave freely, for seeing me when so many of these others didn’t.

There will be no audience, no applause, no explanation. Just presence. Just truth. And my love for Wendell.

Making space for moments like these is more and more what reclaiming my authentic self looks like. Not triumphant declarations, just a series of quiet refusals. To stop explaining. To stop chasing understanding from people who have no intention of giving it. To honor my grief in spaces where my spirit feels safe.

Choosing solitude isn’t always loneliness; sometimes it’s recovery in its purest form.

Today, while the candle flickers, I’ll give myself full permission to feel all that I feel about what my friendship with Wendell gave me — and him. Doing this in the privacy of my home, I won’t be abandoning either Wendell or his memory. I’ll be protecting my love — and my grief — from people who would turn even my mourning into theater.

More importantly, I’ll be taking care of myself. The girl who was so cruelly trained to believe that love is earned through endless giving will, today, sit in her own stillness and fully relish the beauty of a gentler truth.

Some farewells are best spoken in silence.

Screenshot from Nate Hegan’s video. It reminds me so much of a vision I had on a heroic psilocybin journey that I simply had to capture it.

I don’t begin to understand how I find objects, people and ideas in the world around me that offer me clues I’ve been looking for right when I need them. I’ve received many mysterious gifts over the course of my life as I’ve been stumbling along, trying to make sense of my experience.

Jung called these kinds of gifts Synchronicity.

But just having a name for them never brought me any more understanding. Synchronicity is just a label.

As I age, not being able to fully understand Synchronicity doesn’t feel as dangerous as it used to. I’m coming to a greater sense of peace about the Mystery. It’s getting easier to simply relax and accept strange gifts that show up and then — as is my habit — pass them on in case something valuable to me might also be valuable to friends in their sense-making.

For the last 12 months, though, I’ve been waaaaaayyy too acutely alert — searching constantly — high and low, near and far — for something solid that could help me feel better about being a warm-hearted and still warm-blooded 75-year-old American woman in the Time of Trump.

This being the case, I’m grateful that Synchronicity brought me today to Nate Hagens’ YouTube Channel where I stumbled across a video from his series, “The Great Simplification.”

In that video (linked below) Nate shares a way to look at how 11 systems work and he accompanies his explanations with a claim that his discoveries about how they operate have changed his worldview.

So, okay. He’s another one of a seemingly endless river of “Used-to-Be-Wall-Street Guys” talking into a webcam on YouTube. But. . .

. . .there was a lot in his geeky analysis. And listening to his argument. . . changed my worldview, too. I can’t unsee it.

There’s a fair measure of complexity to Nate’s argument. But it’s not that long.

He’s articulate. And he’s not trying to sell anything.

Systems theory is always geeky but he made it easy to follow his thinking. I found the graphics helpful and I deeply appreciated the equanimity in his voice. It wasn’t an act.

In a nutshell, Nate’s suggesting that Humanity is in the process of transforming into a new ecosystem on this planet — and that we’re already operating as a Super-organism.

Further, he argues that — as individual humans — we are undergoing transformation into the cells of a super-organism (Humanity) which we currently experience (individually) as “media, markets, and politics.”

I know. It sounds like science fiction when I try to put his argument into one sentence. Sorry.

At the end of the 37 minutes, the place where Nate’s argument ended left me feeling like I feel after hiking my way up to a high place so I can look over “my world” with a much broader perspective than I could find down in the dense forests at the bottom of a mountain.

I’m still shaking my head about it, but it seems to me what he’s offering is a powerful new lens for observing — and surviving — the chaos we’re experiencing these days without losing our sanity.

I don’t say this lightly. I say this because transformation is a volatile experience.

It’s simply not everyday reality.

And, those of you who already know me know that I understand transformation because I’ve been in it nonstop since the Almeda wildfire took everything I owned one morning in the middle of Covid and incinerated my identity at the same time. Yet here I am.

What I know from my personal journey through transmogrification is that however volatile it is, transformation doesn’t bring the end of the world. It just brings the end of the world as we used to know it.

And, in the same way that both new life and new hope are emerging slowly where “I” live and breathe, as I sit with Nate’s thesis, the more hope I’m able to feel about the ongoing evolution of Life. Regardless of how messy and chaotic it feels right now in this immediate world.

Taking the perspective that humanity is undergoing a massive transformation — that we’ve actually already morphed into one aggregated ecosystem — is a big cognitive and imaginative stretch. But, for me, that perspective feels congruent with the global ecological collapse we’re experiencing right alongside the emergence of AI … and the rest of the current economic, social and political mess.

So. If you’re looking for a way to calm your nervous system — and maybe make new sense of the Big Picture we’re participating in these days — I recommend you take a look and a listen to Nate’s video linked below.

I’m not selling his argument. I must confess, though, it feels better and better as the day wears on and I notice my viscera relaxing more and more while I sit with Nate’s worldview.

Life is impossibly bigger than our individual human lives. Unimaginably bigger.

I hope it goes without saying — but I’ll say it anyway — I’d love to hear what you think about this video.

Being just one little woman, it always helps me make better sense of things when I hear what friends think and feel and how you make sense of something I’m considering.

How does this land with you? I’m all eyes and ears…

Here’s the video:

The brilliance of @Parker J. Palmer’s courage to simply speak the truth in service of his values – without having to bowl down the ones on the sidelines who jeer -- is the thing that I have always loved about his writing.

A piece he wrote and published today at the age of 85 anchors on five pointed questions about making priority choices when funds are “tight.”

The questions come from Wendell Berry. I had never read them. They cut right to the heart of the matter with the policies being enacted by the current Republican administration.

The piece also includes Parker’s own simple list of questions folks can use to have a human-to-human conversation with people who don’t see things the way we see them.

God bless Parker Palmer! I’m so grateful he was born and is still writing today.

Enjoy! Here’s his piece on Substack: https://substack.com/@parkerjpalmer861952/note/p-178388112?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=paedt

And… I would love to hear your thoughts about what he has to say as you consider what you’re grateful for these days…

Well, Friends.

It looks to me like the question now on the table is whether Gavin Newsom or Pete Buttigieg or Elissa Slotkin or AOC or…someone else… has the guts to start a New Party and lead the People into a New Nation in which everybody belongs and everybody can get their needs met.

Who would you follow?