Month: February 2026

Having been cast off in her prime for “doing everything right” made her deeply worry that anyone would value and stay with her through her mid and later years.

She thought about how when she was a child, her mother’s Great Danes used to tower above her small form as a child,

It used to feel like she was protected by the gentle giants as they ranged and roamed around her, so she could let her guard down.

Now that her mother had ‘upgraded’ to even larger hounds, she experienced feeling safe like a child again whenever she got back for a visit.

“But I am just going to say it.

I used the upstairs public bathroom yesterday to avoid the smells of extreme circumstantial use by the homeless downstairs.

But then I was trapped upstairs in a smaller bathroom, unsure what was happening in the stall two doors over with two people engaged in longterm shuffling, groaning, and whispering.

People in desperate need find places to do things that the average people still trying to mask as ‘normal’ try to avoid if and when at all possible.

That’s me, for sure.

Don’t involve me.

Please, please, please – and definitely not directly.

If I cannot help, it is a torment to expose me.

Being wired to extreme empathy as a healer tells me too much information about smells and needs for sanitary assistance not being properly tended to.

What happened next was that the entire room suddenly became flooded to choking with one of the worst smells of long-baked unwashery that I have ever encountered.

I could not help but quickly (though quietly) scramble-fumble out of my stall and stuffing my face into my jacket just to be able to breath as I fled the bathroom for likely the first time ever not washing my hands.

I beelined, instead, to where I knew that I could find a courtesy sterile wipe and tissue by the clerk’s desk.

Reflecting back upon the maintenance care needed for that person being helped to use the bathroom – and clearly not being tended to consistently – threatened to send me into a despair cycle that I am still trying to dodge and out-distance on this second day returning for help with my paperwork.

I have since been having difficulty subduing a type of deep keening inside – for that person, for me, and for our society barely hinging on the brink of unnecessary and wasteful political disasters.”

They think it very rude in “polite company” to speak of the horrific truths that occur when a human gets stripped of the decent basics.

To get lice from a chair?

Being in the library, she encountered those left behind, and it was so very hard to find herself also in that category – although she still fought off looking the part.

She had done all and more to ensure that others were protected, and now with her injuries, the cold wind into her coat often felt sharper.

And she could often feel within her just under the surface a high keening of mourning worry.