Greetings my lovely feral, dark, and bright ones,

I woke up this morning pissed off at myself for falling into depression.

I looked around my world and realized I had allowed myself to get old, heavy, and compressed into a sterile little box that doesn’t belong to me. My house felt like a dated, beige corridor of inherited choices—basically a living testament to an “old people living here” aesthetic. My workspace had been stripped down into a clinical corporate cubicle because some robotic checklist told me to clear things out and look more “professional”. Because heaven forbid a remote worker has a single shred of human personality showing while answering tech support queues. I was logging in every single morning to pour my whole heart into a technical support queue, leaving absolutely zero fuel for my actual life.

Let’s go beneath the surface of that realization, because the unvarnished truth is a hell of a lot heavier than a bad mood.

We have been promised rain by the meteorologists here in Tucson for God knows how long, but we haven’t seen an absolute drop of water where we live. Maybe other parts of this dust bowl are seeing it, but we are definitely not. I just read that Mt. Lemmon is on water restrictions. Nice, huh? A literal mountain forest in the middle of a desert is running out of water. Yeah, I am completely, utterly over living here in the desert. I am over all of it.

I want to live where it’s actually lush. Give me trees, real water, green grass, and actual dirt where flowers can grow and bloom without turning into a crisp five minutes after sunrise. This desert is just barren, brown, and completely blah. I need beauty around me, and to be perfectly honest, the longer we live here, the angrier I get.

There has to be more to existence than this. And please, don’t try to tell me that at age 55-years old it shouldn’t matter that there is nothing to do here and life is boring. That is complete, unadulterated horse shit, to be honest. If you actually believe that your life is supposed to shrink and dry up just because you crossed a specific number on the calendar, then you are choosing a wasted life that isn’t worth much. To be honest, I have spent too much time living a life not fully lived—wasted in the gray—and I want more!! For FUCKS sake, I want fucking more out of life!!

We don’t even go to the mall here—either of them—anymore. Why, you ask? Because it’s not fucking safe. We had a literal shooting, and not even a month later, a bomb scare. What the actual fuck is wrong with people nowadays???? We tried to escape for a minute and went to Tombstone recently, and even that place is turning completely commercialized and modernized. They are ripping away the historic part of it to sell cheap plastic trinkets. The last time we walked down those streets, it just felt dead and heavy. There was no magic left in the dust, and it’s just sad.

And let’s talk about magic, shall we? We supposedly have all kinds of metaphysical stores here in Tucson. I have yet to find a single one that feels like the shop we used to have back in Middletown, NY—Sunshine Studios. You walked into that place, the music was playing, the incense was burning, and it would immediately take your soul to a whole other level. The ones out here in the desert? MEH. Not so much. It feels like buying rocks from a clinical pharmacy.

Even walking into Barnes & Noble has become an exercise in frustration because the entire store is mostly geared towards young adults now. I was trying to find something substantial to read, a real book to sink my teeth into, and absolutely nothing was impressive. There are just way too many young adult books and not nearly enough grown-ass adult books to read. I want Nora Roberts, Mary Higgins Clark (yes, I know she passed away, but her books still have teeth), Fern Michaels, and Yasmine Galenorn. I don’t want little politically correct authors who spend more time crafting trigger warnings for their books than actual plots! Heaven forbid an adult book actually triggers a thought!

I want real coffee shops where you can actually sit, relax, and talk to another human being—not these clinical corporate drive-thrus. Give me the little mom and pop joints, and the exact same goes for the eateries. I am not a big food chain person; give me a locally owned, gritty mom and pop joint where the food has soul and I am happy. I want orchards, real farmers markets, massive flea markets, roadside farm stands, and actual neighborhoods where neighbors are truly neighbors, not just strangers hiding behind stucco walls.

I am so over this city, can you all tell? I am completely sure there are better cities out there where real people actually gather and care, because I miss small towns. I miss true holiday markets and country holiday fairs, not the pathetic excuses for events we have seen here because they absolutely suck. I miss real street fairs and authentic country fairs. The shit they host out here are not fairs. Not to mention, they aren’t even safe to walk around anymore, not with the crazies wandering the streets with machetes, guns, and whatever else they cleared out of their system that morning.

I need more!!! I need waterparks, amusement parks, and NO, I am absolutely not too old for them. Again, if you think you are too old for a roller coaster or a water slide, you need to seriously reevaluate your entire life, cause you are only aging yourself and taking valuable years off your life.

When you don’t know how to half-ass a single thing, giving your entire soul away to a corporation becomes your default setting when the rest of your city feels barren and boring. And honestly? It’s a toxic cycle. I’ve been metrics-tracking, ticket-smashing, and over-performing at jobs while running on absolute fumes ever since Ronnie’s accident, and I am entirely over it. I logged into this role back in March with genuine, clean energy, ready to actually excel and take pride in my work. But before the corporate onboarding ink was even dry on the digital page, the universe decided to drop a literal bomb on my life. On May 4th, my mom passed away.

Did I get a pause button from the corporate machine? A moment to breathe? Please. There was no grace period. I was thrust straight into software infrastructure queues while my heart was a bleeding, jagged mess. I had to sit in a chair, swallow down the scream in my throat, and troubleshoot technical support issues for people who think an enterprise software cache is a life-or-death crisis, all while my actual world lay in literal ashes.

And just when you think you’ve reached your quota for cosmic cruelty, the universe decides to twist the knife. Because apparently, my boundary-defying love for my animals makes them the perfect targets for a psychological asset-strip.

On June 24th, I was sitting at my desk, watching the heat shimmering off the dirt, and poured my absolute terror onto the paper: “First my mom, now Blue and Jasmine are sick. Fuck You Universe! You cannot have them! I want them to be restored playful & happy!” I was frantically trying to hold back the tide while noting that “Peppermint is needy today!” just to keep a single, furry anchor in the room while the world spun out of control.

But the universe doesn’t take notes, and it sure as hell doesn’t show mercy to a tired soul.

The very next afternoon, June 25th, at exactly 2:00 PM, my sweet ferret Blue passed away. I sat there and drew a broken heart in my book with jagged, angry lines bleeding right out the bottom. I wrote through the tears: “Rest peacefully my angel. My heart is broken.”

Four days later, desperate to drag some semblance of life back into a townhouse that felt like a beige tomb, we adopted two little girl ferrets. I sat in the quiet of my office on June 29th, completely running on empty, and scrawled, “I hope we did the right thing. I am exhausted.” I actually took my pen and aggressively crossed out the word exhausted on the paper. Because let’s face it—admitting you are exhausted feels like giving the universe explicit permission to throw another punch.

Then July 6th rolled around, because why stop at one tragedy when you can have a matching set? Alfie passed away between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM. No warning, no fairness, just another empty spot in the house. I took a thick black pen, wrote his name, and slammed down three aggressive, heavy underlines under two words: Done with Death.

By July 7th, the isolation of this absolute circus completely locked me down. I wrote, “I cannot tell anyone how I am feeling right now. I am exhausted, yet I cannot sleep. I am sad about losing Blue & Alfie.” Because honestly, who wants to hear it? What are you supposed to say to people? “Oh, my mom died and then my pets dropped like flies, how’s your Tuesday?” No thanks. It’s easier to just lock the door and stare at the wall.

That isn’t just a string of bad luck. That is a targeted, relentless psychological assault on the exact parts of my life where I love the deepest. It is decades of stacked-up survival mode, the relentless anxiety of caregiving, and deep-rooted family trauma hitting a boiling point in a two-month pressure cooker.

So yes, I crashed. My nervous system did exactly what a biological engine does when it runs completely out of fuel—it locked down to keep me from physically shattering into pieces. The depression wasn’t a failure, and it wasn’t a choice. It was my body forcing me into a dark room because I was bleeding out my life force for a corporate paycheck while trying to process an impossible amount of grief.

But living in that survival armor for years does something terrifying to your spirit. You get so used to ducking the blows that you start letting external forces erase who you are. You start listening to digital noise, corporate checklists, and clinical spreadsheets that tell you your creative spaces are just “clutter.” You clear off your tables. You silence your voice. You slowly stop fighting the beige, dated walls of a rental townhouse and accept the heavy, clinical gray box because fighting back takes energy you just don’t have. You slowly allow yourself to get old because the alternative requires too much damn fire.

Then came this morning, July 9th.

The sadness finally turned into something sharp, protective, and completely pissed off. I grabbed a bright pink pen and wrote it down: “I woke up this morning pissed off at myself for falling into depression. I allowed myself to get old too. I don’t want to be old!! FUCK THAT.”

That right there? That is a resurrection.

I flipped back to the front of my journal, staring at the pages where I drew that massive orange and pink heart floating in the center, surrounded by a little multicolored bird and the reminder that there are “No lines to stay in.” I had written “Anything Goes,” “Freeform Writing,” and highlighted “Let myself Breathe” and “Need to Laugh” in bright yellow ink. At the bottom, I had asked a question: “Need to live my life Now?”

Today, the answer is a definitive, roaring yes.

That “FUCK THAT” scrawled across the paper is a boundary written in fire. It is the sound of me realizing that pacing myself at a day job isn’t “half-assing” it—it is a mandatory act of preservation to keep myself alive. Applied Systems gets my technical skills in exchange for a paycheck, but they do not get my soul. They do not get to consume the emotional energy I need to heal my marriage, protect my home, and breathe life back into my own skin.

The vivid, fierce woman who loves deep roots, bold color, and absolute sovereignty didn’t die under the weight of this spring’s heartbreak. She just went underground to find matches.

The coup has officially started, and it’s happening right in the middle of the mess. Over the weekend, I used my own two hands to drag my diamond art table out of the shadows and claimed a new corner of the room by the closet. The light sage paint is coming for these office and bedroom walls, and that red brick wall is getting a total visual eviction notice.

If you are white-knuckling your way through a season of profound loss and long-term misery, stop apologizing for falling apart. Your body was keeping you from breaking. But the exact second you feel that spark of pure, unadulterated frustration—grab onto it with everything you have. Turn that rage outward at the sterile, heavy boxes keeping you small. Throw out the lines, scribble all over the clinical margins of the life you were handed, and take your power back.

We are clawing our way back to the light, one stubborn, defiant, beautiful day at a time.