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Have you ever felt an intense sense of indignation? You want to grab a bullhorn to rail against the outrage you feel and then there is nothing you can do about it. So, bullhorn in hand, you rush to join the stage with the same clowns who have been trampling your trust and sadly realize you are now even more vulnerable because effectively you have joined their circus.

Curses!

You allow yourself to be vulnerable to another person’s concept of fairness.
You allow yourself to be vulnerable when protecting your child.
You allow yourself to be vulnerable to hints of largess by people who offer no means of delivery.

So much vulnerability exists and so little time.

Oh, and I have a knee jerk reaction to someone asking: Rachel, why do these things happen to you? No, no, I do not like this question. There are no answers, themes, centralizing energies around what happens to me – good, bad or indifferent. [Unless it’s all lollipop goodness than, yes, of course, the trend is my friend.] But when I am vulnerable to someone’s venality or manipulation, no, I don’t have answers for why people do what they do or why or if I attract these types of people. The same questions could arise at why I attract wonderful people who are generous and kind.

Last year, in Oxford, The Oliver Hotel completely wronged me – they raised their room rate from $140 to $1800 for a reservation I made months in advance and then cancelled all my reservations for the next three months when I balked. Customer service – no ma’am. At their mercy, vulnerable, I found other places to stay – The Treehouse Gallery and Fox Fire Ranch and my friend’s brother’s brand new condo – so many good places appeared from The Oliver’s greed. So many silver linings and memories for a lifetime.

This year, a friend of a friend with a Tucson Air BnB said she’d rent to me off platform for my January and February visits. When she text me that the roofers would be there my entire stay in January, I said, ok, I understand, even though I knew roofers banging all day would disrupt my tranquility and writing time.

WHOOSH, out of the blue, a rare Southeastern snow storm blanketed the south the likes of which haven’t been seen since 1963; the storm cancelled all flights; I couldn’t fly out from any location. Oh no, trusting this friend of a friend, I had paid her in full for my stay.

Her response, “You didn’t book on Airbnb.”

Ah, the vulnerability of trust, so easily eroded.
The vulnerability of outrage, so easily exposed.

I’m leaning into my propensity for silver linings with new rules:

– never pay all of your money up front
– friends of a friend are not your friend
– don’t accommodate other people’s problems (roofers), because
they will not accommodate yours (extreme weather event)
– there are always silver linings

A friend gave me a gift, a book she came across that reminded her of me. It’s possible because it was written by a Jewish author, and has a lot of Jewish references, but the subject of the book is remorse. I read a page a day and it always leaves a wry smile on my face. So I’d like to lean into remorse for a moment.

I want to lean into the lack of remorse in other people. One day, I was putting up tables in the Hall and I said to my friend who was helping me, do you ever have a day where you remember all the slights against you and you just feel grudgy?

“Oh my God, Rachel, never. Why would you think that,” she said.

I was quiet the rest of the morning. If you know, you know, is what I thought. I think about people who have hurt me and not shown any remorse. I’ve told each person they hurt me, so it isn’t as if they don’t know, and yet no show of remorse. Sometimes I collect my box of other people’s non-remorse and open it and peer inside and wonder why?

I do not wonder why they have no remorse – they are dead to me – I wonder why their insult or slight or intentional harm was able to prick me. I know now that I have not had appropriate boundaries in my life, and for the love of God, being a parent has helped me to confront this genuine flaw of mine. And to correct it.

Would you tell your secrets to someone who doesn’t protect you? Would you bring someone into your house who would harm your family? Would you spend time with someone who has no facility with the truth? The people who drain you don’t always come with warning signs, and if you don’t have boundaries, these people push your boundaries without a second thought – they get so used to your generosity, they don’t realize they are overstepping (Brene Brown has covered this idea many times over).

How much time do you spend replaying conflict in your head, sure, it is time wasted. I do think every now and then you might allow yourself to take out the box of remorse – other people’s – remind yourself that those people suck and to hold your boundaries against future invasions.

I do this so that it keeps me focused on people who uplift and support me. Yay them.

Last night, my friend who is a pizza master held a house party to raise funds for the people who lost their homes in the L.A. wildfires. Nearly everyone at the gathering is a seasoned survivor of natural disaster.

You don’t survive unscathed; we all have PTSD from Katrina that was not addressed then, or a decade later, and now, twenty years later, has still not been integrated into an understanding of the psyche of a people who witnessed widespread devastation, employment loss, home displacement, loss of community and even a culture. The complex effects of this loss on us took its toll by unlocking disease – on my block in Bayou St. John, it was diagnoses of cervical cancer, Parkinson’s, Hashimoto’s, breast cancer – all in rapid succession. We thought we survived, but the maladies triggered in our bodies told us differently.

Now, I am writing from my home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This was ground zero for the brutality of Katrina (aka the 2005 Federal Flood). A snowstorm is blanketing the country, and now the weather is whipping up winds in Los Angeles and they are bracing themselves for yet more wildfires. Those who have lost their homes and communities will be processing this loss for a long time.

In 2005, we were not afforded space. I was already working remotely so I had the “good fortune” of being able to continue working throughout the horror. Only I shouldn’t have. My mind and spirit had snapped. I was unable to focus, I was unable to integrate into normal life, I was unable to feel grounded in my marriage, and the demands to do so were loud and wrong.

I drank and smoked and cheated on my husband.

There were no heroes in the aftermath of Katrina – just the walking wounded. On August 29, 2025, the 20th anniversary of an event that changed the course of our lives will be noted and commemorated. Who we were was left for dead. While the 20th anniversary of Katrina plays out against the aftermath of the wildfires in Los Angeles, I know profoundly how vulnerable we all are to the whim of nature.

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy is a call for a return to the divine dimension of being human – fraternity, bound together in community, and all of the universal friendship tropes stitched together. Last night, I experienced this great joy.

Yesterday, Friday, closing out the week, was a day of being pulled in multiple directions with the always expanding to do list that begs me to complete it and yet taunts me with additions. I got through most of it and went to my friend, Ann Madden’s show that was so delightful. Ann’s art is exquisite, and so is the work of her fellow artists, Carmen Lugo and Jenny Day. Then there was the crowd – ah, I love being among these people – artists and art lovers and true supporters of beauty. These are my people. Oh Joy.

I skirted off for a quick bite with a friend and her daughter, and then drove home to my cozy house where I slipped into lovely deep purple silk pajamas, made a fresh cup of hot tea and restarted a series on Netflix – Younger – that has me enthralled. I commented to my dogs in passing – is this the best life or what?

I feel like it is.

The moments of joy come more often than they ever did before now. I am in my sixties and the strong challenges that had me in their grip for the last decade have abated or ended. Now that I am not in survival mode, I’ve entered a thrival mode of joy.

I remember the first thunderbolts of joy in Cafe Puccini and other moments when time stopped and I didn’t know how it happened. I just knew something was different. I didn’t understand the power of a moment. I hadn’t read Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now. I didn’t know my therapist, Adam, who says: “Rachel, your perfect moment is in this perfect breath.”

Joy comes when desire fades. Joy comes when you least expect it.

Know this: joy comes.

Last night was very gemütlich. Gemütlich is joy – the feeling of cozy, of being safe, of having all that you need. You could have this feeling in the company of friends and even by yourself. My gemütlich came from having been with my friends, then having a meal with a friend, and then alone in my cozy house.

I went to bed scanning my body. I survived a fall onto a handtruck. An injection into my thumb has helped the throbbing pain. My cataract in my left eye is problematic enough to finally get attention. My hip and its hitched pain has subsided to nearly gone.

I am at peace with body.

I am safe in my home.

I linger in my cozy bed.

I am free of longing, desire, and yearning at the moment.

This joy is a state of vulnerability I welcome – all is right with my world.

In this calm, joy enters like a new friend.

Over the last 24 hours, I have spoken to loved ones about connection. A friend trying to connect with her husband of decades, a mother trying to connect with her adult son, and a friend trying to connect with her sister.

The building blocks of relationships are never clean – cuts are made, slights are stored, memories accumulate – and it seems nigh impossible to have a beginner’s mind with so much history calcified.

I’m trying to learn new ways – letting go, letting them, beginning again, and yet those old ways of being are so entrenched it’s hard to be a new me. I have the memory of an elephant and the patience of Job, which means that I could endure so much hurt from you but then when my limit has topped off, I check out – completely.

My friend, Tommy, says there is nothing deader than dead love. I’ve felt that before. In 99% of my love relationships, love has not died, it has evolved. Only one relationship ended bitterly with me wishing I had never met the person. Perhaps that is why they continue to be an outlier and one that leaped over into my list of regrets.

Regrets, I have a few.

It’s the outliers that really make you who you become next though. I’m not the same Rachel. That’s a good thing. Yet, it has been 14 years since I’ve had a relationship (read: that lasted over three months) and this means I don’t really know who Rachel in love is anymore.

My connections are forged through friendships, as a parent, as an aunt, colleague, sister, niece, cousin – these connections I work on and hopefully they have helped me evolve into a better version of myself. It’s possible – being a woman – that these connections will be what remains.

I’m in the autumn of my life – this has always been a profound season of nostalgia for me – I don’t want to lean back into nostalgia though I want to be a pioneer into leaning forward into all the connections that await.

More will be revealed.

Late into a big event we had the Hall, I started limping around. I had been up since 3:30am getting ready and by the time I hit the 12-hour mark of continuous movement, lifting, squatting, my body started resisting. The very next day after lifting, moving and squatting to pick up the chairs and wipe down the tables and set up for the next event, I thought to myself – just get me through the next few hours.

Miraculously, my body did it. It hosted over 500 people over the course of two days by moving, lifting, squatting, stressing and then on Sunday afternoon I went deep into the couch to Lounge for the Lord as I like to put it. My body needed a Sabbath.

The next two days were spent cleaning up, which involved lifting heavy bags of gumbo bowls, bottles, cans into the garbage bins, moving and stacking sacks of wood chips we had bought as a hedge against the rain, and putting chairs and tables back in place. A lot of what I do is rearrange – I move things out of the Hall into my house and vice versa. I do this with handtrucks. One handtruck holds four extra large ice chests that I stack on top of each other and then bungee chord all of them together. Yesterday, as I stacked the ice chests and was trying to top the stack off with the fourth one while standing on a stool, I tipped over, fell into the four ice chests and came down hard on the hand truck metal plate.

Then I was back on the sofa with an ice pack in my groin where, with my entire body weight free falling, I had landed on the most unforgiving industrial size handtruck. I was grateful it wasn’t worse, it could have been, but I was still in pain and rueful that once again, I had pushed my body to the breaking point.

Folks are always saying you need to ask for help. I do and could not do this without help. Two friends/neighbors always come to help me when I call, but there are some things that I don’t call for because I believe I could do it myself. Lately, the answer that comes back from body is a resounding why? Why are you putting me through this?

I had just finished a long bout last year of a right hip problem that required xrays, mri’s, physical therapy, casterol heat pads, anti-inflammatories, and now here I am in pain once again after moving into a period of being pain-free that I was hoping was here to stay for a while.

Surely, I need to re-evaluate my lifestyle.

Someone wrote they lost their home in Pacific Palisade, and I went online to see about the damage, having only thought of the area as L.A. – a whole swath of Southern California. Most of the Pacific Palisades headlines talked about the dangers of wanting to live in a beautiful place and how insurance was sure to leave the area. It reminded me of the aftermath of Katrina when my cousin’s husband in Florida said, “Well, that’s the price you pay for living there.”

Infuriated, I pulled the car over and yelled, “What??? The price we pay for living here. This is your husband’s response?”

We all live here and there. We are all vulnerable to weather. The appropriate response is not why?

The utter shock of a weather event devastating your home is a state of vulnerability unlike any other. My blog was well underway when Katrina hit, and I managed to write myself through the hell we all went through – but even looking back, I don’t feel as if I cut through to the depth of our trauma.

Ten years later, in 2015, during the commemoration activities in New Orleans, I lay in my bed curled in the fetal position. I had PTSD. I did what I always do – I wrote about it. No one had arrived to address our mental health in 2005 – people came to help rebuild, to help restore, to help renew, but our mental health remained stuck in that one moment when we realized there had come an end to the safety we had assured ourselves was ours.

I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain
I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end

This is my missive to you, whoever you are. I’m calling in your support in an area of my life that I need guidance with – how’s this for vulnerable?

I would like to know how to do all that I want to do in life and not burn out, not exhaust myself, not end up with no time left for me.

What this would look like is I could say no to doing all I want to do because I don’t have time in my day to do all the things I would like to – and that is okay. It’s possible I will leave this earthly realm not having done all that I want to do, accomplish all that I want to accomplish, and create all that is inside of me.

We went around the room yesterday morning in our exercise class and named what our theme for the year would be. Mine, of course, is vulnerability. Others called out trust, love, appreciation, patience.

Not doing feels vulnerable to me.

Prioritizing myself feels vulnerable to me.

My schedule expands even though it is typed and printed and appears finite.

I’m asking for support to discern which sparks are for me.

I’m asking for clarity as to where to focus.

I’m open to new ways of looking at time, schedules, capacity, desire, validity, work, life balance.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, poet, social activist, and a mystic wrote in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1960):

There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom, which makes work fruitful.

I belong to so many support groups, it is mind blowing. I’m in a parent support group, a parent coaching group, an alumni parent support group, a two-hour adult children of alcoholics group, my own therapy and then there is the improv class.

The improv class is scary. Vulnerable scary. You get all your fears activated right up front – I’m not that smart, that clever, that quick, that creative – oh, the list is endless of what you are not and I am not. And yet we show up, this cohort of once ingenues and now in our nth season, we are seasoned – we show up, we take instruction from a pro, and we leave gutted from laughing so hard.

We belly laugh.

We laugh till we spit.

We laugh on the floor.

We laugh at each other, at ourselves, at all the crazy that comes out of each other’s mouths, brains, unconscious and subconscious minds – the therapeutic element of free forming stories, ideas, concepts, characters, scenes and even a simple sentence is proof that making yourself as vulnerable AF is alchemy for the soul.

Each week, I sit in a two-hour meeting where I unravel the carefully composed narrative I have created about my family. This is the story I have told myself, as well as others, for so long.

In the meeting, I’m asked to take a closer look and like any good story, there are stories hiding within the story, and none of the characters are truly who they seem at first gloss.

In the long held version of my story, my father is a hero, my mother is beautiful, and I’m the beloved baby girl in a family of eight. My family, my siblings, are all close knit. We have a shared history, culture, religion, timeline, and memories.

In this meeting, we list adaptive behaviors that helped us cope – me with a rageaholic father, an alcoholic mother, and a family unit so enmeshed and codependent that none of us knew where we began and my father ended.

Until my dad died, then the narrative pulled at our seams. My sister spun off from the family. My brothers’ children shot out in varied directions. Everyone coped in a different way. I seemed okay. I just kept adding coping mechanisms.

My laundry list of responses, reactions, and skills I now realize infected and affected every relationship I have had in my life. Who knew?

Nowhere are you more vulnerable than when you begin to unravel your origin story.

Last night, we were talking about shame and regret. I spoke about my son, how he needed to feel safe, and I did not feel safe enough to give him that space. It was only last night when I was able to say aloud, without flinching, “My son needed to feel safe (and then added) and so did I.“

I, being the young girl, who always showed up in me when my son was dysregulated. The little girl, scared and tired of chaos, who lives inside me and needs to be reparented. I try to give her as much love as I can now that I know what she needs.

Safety. It’s one of the biggest gaps in most of our recovery stories. It’s in my son’s story and mine. Lack of safety is what separates healthy families from the ones from which we need to recover.

Today is my father’s birthday. He would have been 99 years old. Thirty-seven years ago, my dad raged into an early grave at the young age of 62. He was everything to me for so long and yet, because I feared this bull of a man, I stayed clear of men like him my whole life. That was one of my coping skills.