​We are having a crisis in this country. I’m amazed that no one is actually talking about it. Oh sure you hear bits and pieces of it pop up in conversations. Usually as complaints about something personally related to them. But no one is talking about the bigger issue. The thing that has become so toxic, I’m constantly flabbergasted that we haven’t had an actually protest about it yet.

Do you know which issue I mean? No? Here’s a hint:

It’s a contamination of epic proportions and it’s affecting every decision we make and how we show up in the world to each other.

Still not getting it? 

I’m not surprised considering it’s been insidiously worming it’s way into our physical systems and social structures for some time now. To the point where most people don’t even know it’s a problem anymore. Practically everyone over the age of 18 is literally infected. And our youth are conditioned to think this is “normal health”.

It’s a dis-ease of adulthood. Or rather the lack of adulthood.

Put simply, we grownups are no longer allowed to be grownups and it’s poisoning us from the inside out.

​There is nothing sexy about unbuttered toast. 

It sat in front of me, a single piece, sliced diagonally on the plate. A very small cobalt blue plate. With a glass of water in a lovely wine glass. It was as though serving this poor substitute for a decadent drip of a buttered biscuit on attractive tableware, would make up for it’s complete lack of luster.

The toast looked like I felt. Flaky, dry, as though I would disintegrate when touched. I was practically parched for anything that might have some taste. But this cardboard looking imitation appeared to have been sitting out too long in a desert sun. 

​I was an essential worker. At least, for several weeks, at the beginning of the pandemic. Just before the mask mandate came down, after losing everything I had built up for my own business, I found a job at the local CVS up the street. Stores like CVS remained open, supposedly complying with strict levels of cleanliness (which translated to a dirty store and occasionally spraying fumes of lysol at the register). And my job was deemed “necessary” - by me because I had just lost everything. By society because no matter what, people need toilet paper.

If we could get it, that is. The world was having a run on toilet paper even though COVID was not a stomach virus.

It was not an ideal position. Within a day of being hired, multiple “supervisors” were texting my personal number offering to “walk me” to work since they all knew where I lived up the street. Apparently, it was “okay” for them to take down the personal details of a “hot girl” (their words not mine) since they were in positions of authority. It felt sketch to say the least. But I was desperate for work, and tried to shrug it off. I also refused their offers of walking me anywhere. Several tried to be insistent, so I generally ran out the door as fast as I could after my shift.

​I woke excited that day. It was one of the rare moments that I was allowed to be at a community pool “alone” with friends. I felt grownup - after all, I was a preteen, a double digit member of the community. At 11, I was having the coolest hangout ever - an “unsupervised” girls’ day.

Now there were plenty of adults nearby, lounging on crappy plastic chairs. My friend’s mom, who drove us, was herself sitting under the shade with a few parents. All sipping from plastic bottles and keeping an eye on the kids in the wading pool. Admonished to put on our tanning lotion, and keep out of trouble, we “big kids” were set free to chill in the deeper waters.

​I was standing in the woods admiring the light filtering through the leaves, when it hit me. I hadn’t seen a trail marker in quite some time. I turned slowly around in a circle, and suddenly EVERY direction looked like a possibility. Where was a sign when you needed it?

Signs are funny things. We talk about them a lot in society. We ask for a sign that we are doing the right thing. We ask for a sign on which direction to take in life. We ask for a sign as to whether or not we should trust someone. We ask and ask and ask.

Oddly enough for all this asking, it turns we often don’t listen when we receive the requested sign. Especially not when the signs come from our own bodies. Instead we wait and wait and wait for an outside force to give us the information we innately already know.