Trust on Fire

Sometimes, it just feels like everything is one big sucker punch.

I’m watching these fires—hellfire sweeping across the country in real time. It’s surreal, watching disaster unfold through my device, historical moments livestream from their homes, by people I don’t know I’ve only known through reality TV shows. The shock of lives altered, material things gone (an essay on Birkin bags may or may not ever surface here) , and the relentless churn of devastation has me reeling. And then, the stark reminder that a genocide has raged on for over 460 days.

Meanwhile, I’m at home. In my beautiful home tucked in the woods, trying to sustain myself—balancing physical practice, creative work, and staying a somewhat if not minimally, a social human with a flare for performance. I love these things. I love this life. And against the backdrop of a world on fire, it feels… complex. Dysphoric.

This is the dissonance I keep coming back to. How do I reconcile the quiet, fulfilling routines of my daily life with the constant apocalyptic changes looming closer to my doorstep? How do I trust myself to keep moving forward when everything feels so uncertain? These questions don’t have easy answers, but I keep circling back to a few truths: art, love, practice, and survival.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about interruptions—what counts as one, how to stay on purpose when life throws roadblocks my way, and how to redirect when my own brain takes a sharp left turn. These aren’t rhetorical questions, although I grew up in a rhetorical question house hold. They’re real, messy, and ongoing. It’s a practice—learning how move with change and how to be decisive when it matters. And the for me, every moment offers this attunement or surrender. That’s both terrifying and empowering.

I am afraid. I am grieving. I am growing. I am changing. I am failing. I am adapting. Reaching. And trying… well, that’s a word I’m working to get out of my vocabulary. I want to live in self-trust—to act decisively, to show up fully and with trust, to know that whatever choice I make, it’s the right one for that moment.

This all comes back to self-trust—a theme that has tapped me many times before. In a world teetering on the edge of collapse, learning to trust myself feels both urgent, revolutionary, and neurological event.

The world is on fire, and I am a part of it.

Thank you for reading this,

a.