Allison Raskin's Blog, page 3

ARE HUMANS INHERENTLY GOOD?

One of the main hallmarks of Trump’s second term has been a devotion to cruelty. I’ve watched in horror as prominent Republicans sing the virtues of Alligator Alcatraz and countless MAGA celebrate kicking millions of people off their health insurance. It seems like every one of their policies and ideals is designed to hurt someone they don’t like or find unworthy of basic support. The near daily updates aren’t just heartbreaking but confounding. I find myself trying to understand how we got here. Is this dramatic swing toward barbarism fear-based? Is it the media’s fault? Did the massive death toll of the pandemic and the appalling actions of the genocide in Gaza prime people to stop caring about each other? Or is something else at play here. Is humanity simply showing its true colors?

The age-old debate of whether humans are inherently good or bad has always made me uncomfortable. I know what someone with my politics and general outlook is supposed to think. But for some reason, I’ve always had a hard time fully believing that our goodness is inherent. I feel more comfortable believing that we are born neutral and our environment and experience shape which way we sway. The question then becomes do some people sway so far in the negative direction they become lost causes if there isn’t some intrinsic sense of goodness to tap into? Can you ever get through to your Trump-loving, hate-fueled grandpa or has his current nature become his true nature by default?

Thinking about people’s character in such black and white terms is at odds with how I try to navigate the rest of the world. Outside of politics, I am constantly considering people’s greater context and why they might think the way they think. How did their parents shape them? What did they internalize from societal messaging? Are their pain points clouding their judgments? My ability to do this, however, shuts down when I see someone imply that all Palestinians deserve to die or immigrants should be sent to modern day concentration camps because they didn’t happen to be born in the US. A part of me still fights to see how they got here without assuming the worst (pure evil). Zionism is a hell of a drug and not everyone has the critical thinking skills to challenge their presidents claims that immigrants are to blame for all their problems. And yet…these are human beings who are being torn from their lives and getting shot while in line for food. How can you condone this blatant cruelty and not have a piece of your heart missing?

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I suppose the main difference between a totally unfeeling serial killer and anyone who supports Kristi Noem’s crusade is that the hypothetical serial killer probably doesn’t care about anyone’s life, while those cheering on Alligator Alcatraz do care about some people just not all people. They do not view all human life as equal and that is the part I have a really hard time getting over.

Does it matter if you are kind to your neighbors and a wonderful member of your local community if you want to strip transpeople of their rights and vehemently hate Muslims? When weighing someone’s humanity, do their actions matter more or less than their belief system? These people who claim to be good people but want bad things to happen terrify me. I would rather someone say, “I’m a selfish piece of shit and that’s why I love racist policies and police brutality” rather than hear people claim their good Christian values are why they want women to die in childbirth.

HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT I want to scream but I know their answer won’t satisfy me. Because there is no satisfying answer. At least not one that will make sense to me and my understanding of compassion and goodness.

The growing number of these types of people, whether there are genuinely more than before or it’s just become acceptable to come out of the shadows, has altered my relationship toward humanity. I am finding it harder to envision a future where we pull ourselves out of this mess. Where total destruction—either through climate change, nuclear weapons or artificial intelligence—isn’t the inevitable end to our species. I believe there will always be good people in the world, but my fear is that it is becoming easier and more appealing to become the bad kind. And if our true core is neutral, or even worse, self-protective, what hope do we have of evening the scales and getting people to care about one another?

I don’t have an answer, but I take solace in knowing it is not my job to solve alone. For all the people whose cruelty horrifies me, there are those who endless compassion motivates me. People who have managed to hold on to their goodness despite personal attacks, systemic opposition and unfair hardships. Whether or not that goodness was inherent in them from birth doesn’t matter because it is at the core of their being now.

I do not know who will ultimately prevail in the battle of good and evil. In many ways, I have to admit that it is easier to understand why people are drawn to tribalism and self-protection than it is to understand those who sacrifice their own lives for others. The first approach is animal nature—to protect yourself and your offspring no matter what. The second can’t fairly be called human nature, given how rare it is becoming—but it is something wonderful, nonetheless. I can only hope it finds a way to spread.

xoxo,

Allison

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WILL MY OCD MAKE ME A BAD MOTHER?

I once had a boyfriend who told me he didn’t think I would be a good mom. I can’t recall the exact details of the conversation, but I remember feeling fundamentally misunderstood. What did he mean? I loved and doted on my nieces and little kids always seemed to like me. Once I got a dog, I cared for her like she had come out of my own body. And yet, he seemed to be focused on a part of my personality that outweighed any of these factors in his mind. It’s the part of myself that causes me to worry about the same thing—my contamination OCD.

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LIFE LESSONS I KEEP FORGETTING

One of the more frustrating parts of evolving as a human being is that a lot of stuff doesn’t stick the first time around. Sure, there are some singular aha moments that totally change your mindset and behavior. Like the time my mom’s hospice nurse explained that palliative care requires a totally different approach than curative care and that shift can be hard for people to come to terms with. Or when I realized I shouldn’t put aluminum foil in the microwave because it can burst into flames. I am now different than I was before I had that conversation and kitchen fire.

Unfortunately, most of my growth hasn’t been as linear. Instead, I find myself having to revisit lessons I thought I had already absorbed. While this can be frustrating, I don’t think it’s helpful for me to beat myself up for not getting it right the first (or eighth) time. Lasting change is difficult, especially when we are fighting against our internal biases, societal messaging and emotional vulnerabilities. So in an effort to normalize the messy, inconsistent work of getting closer to who we want to be, here are some of the life lessons I seem to always need refreshers on:

MY FRIENDS ACTUALLY LIKE ME

This is an embarrassing one to admit I still struggle with considering how much I’ve already written and seemingly processed it. But, alas, my friendship insecurity remains an Achilles' heel. I continue to find myself shocked when my friends show up for me, like they did this past weekend when celebrating my birthday. As I sat at a table surrounded by eight of my closest friends, I took a moment to remind myself that I have strong, mutual friendships and it’s time to release myself from the narrative that no one cares about me as much as I care about them. Will this be the last reminder I need in times of doubt? Probably not! But mindfully collecting this kind of evidence helps me build a stronger case for when I start to doubt myself in the future.

THEY CAN’T ALL BE HITS

This is a useful distillation of a larger life lesson that was first introduced to me by Caroline Cala Donofrio’s essay of the same name. The basic idea is that everything you put out as a creator isn’t going to have the same level of success. In fact, it is impossible and unfair to have that expectation for yourself and your work. As someone who can get into unhealthy loops obsessively checking my social media metrics, Goodreads reviews and podcast ratings, it’s been valuable for me to have such a tangible way to relieve some of the pressure to always outdo myself. I find myself returning to the phrase they can’t all be hits multiple times per week. Does this practice completely relieve me of my irrational fear that one poorly received essay or post proves my career and creativity are on the decline? Nope! But it does lessen the intensity of that fear, which seems like I’m heading in the right direction.

MY WORTH ISN’T DIRECTLY TIED TO MY APPEARANCE

Now this is a particularly painful one because I really thought I had moved past an unhealthy relationship with my looks (and more specifically, my weight). Back in 2023, I proudly defied the pressure to lose weight for my wedding, and found a lot of peace around accepting my new body. And then…the old thoughts came roaring back. I’ve recently found myself fixating on what I used to look like in my twenties and believing that if I could just be thin again so much of my life, from my wardrobe to my popularity, would improve. I didn’t want to be back here, but here we are. I’m clearly in need of a new approach to balance my (understandable given the nature of our society) desire to look a certain way without letting it take over my life or self-esteem. I haven’t figured out exactly what that looks like yet. But knowing that my end goal remains a clear separation of worth and appearance is useful as I find my way.

I AM NOT A SOCIOPATH

This one might come as a surprise, but I often find myself questioning if I display sociopathic behavior. This fear mostly pops up when I see other people having emotional reactions to something that makes me feel nothing. I have gotten worrisomely good at shutting down and feeling numb, especially in the wake of my mom’s death. When other coaches or clinicians talk about the toll of having to hear their clients’ struggles, I feel guilty that I am so easily able to leave my work at work. Wouldn’t a truly empathetic person struggle more with the state of the world and the pain of those around them? What does it mean that I am as not deeply feeling as so many people I admire? I don’t know exactly, but it doesn’t automatically mean I am a sociopath. There is a wide spectrum of how people experience empathy and just between I am clearly not at one extreme doesn’t inevitably place me at the other. Logically I know this, but that isn’t enough to stop some occasional reassurance seeking from my husband.

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So that’s where things stand. Maybe some of these lessons will finally stick in my 36th year and maybe I will continue to struggle with them throughout my life. Perhaps they will stick for a while only to disappear again during a time of stress or major transition. Knowing that some lessons have to be learned over and over again has surprisingly made me more open to change in general. I now understand that just because something doesn’t land the first time doesn’t mean I won’t slowly come around to it in the future. This knowledge allows me to take more time to digest other people’s insights and new experiences without putting pressure on myself to transform right away.

Sometimes we plant seeds in each other and ourselves that take a long time to grow.

xoxo,

Allison

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MY FIRST BIRTHDAY WITHOUT MY MOM

My mom had a tradition the night before my birthday. She would stay until midnight in New York—which wasn’t difficult given her aversion to going to bed—and call me at 9 p.m. Pacific time to wish me a happy East Coast birthday. I always made sure I was available for the call and would often wait with the phone in my hand to hear her welcome me, three hours early, into my new year. This Thursday night, my mom won’t be able to keep up our lovely tradition because she is dead.

Saying my mom is dead has become a kind of mantra that grounds me to my current reality. It’s not so much pouring salt in a wound as it is smelling those salts they give to people who have passed out. It awakens me to the fact that my world has been flipped upside down and the constant unmoored feeling in the pit of my stomach has a clear cause. I won’t receive a call not because I am less loved than I was last year but because the person who wants to call me physically can’t (due to our current understanding of physics and mortality). I like to imagine that she is somewhere I can’t see repeatedly trying to punch in my number similar to how I can never seem to get a cell phone to work correctly in a dream. The intention is there but we can’t quite get the buttons to work properly.

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I DON’T KNOW YOU WELL ENOUGH TO TRUST YOU

When I was a teenager, I was walking past the local train station when a man with a briefcase asked if he could borrow money for a ticket. I don’t remember the specifics but I’m sure it had something to do with him losing his wallet. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I not only gave him money I also gave him my address so he could repay me later. When I relayed this story to my parents, they were…pissed. How could I have not seen that this man was clearly lying? Why did I think it was a good idea to tell a stranger where we lived? While I understood their concern, especially about the sharing of personal information, I also felt defiant in the face of their disapproval. I insisted that I would rather live my life assuming people weren’t out to get me than have a default setting of distrust and suspicion.

Now that I’m older—surprise, surprise—my perspective has changed. Part of that has to do with no longer caring what someone does with the money they ask for. If I choose to give it, it is not my business if it is spent on a train ticket or something else. Oh, they are just going to use my money on beer after saying it was for food? Who cares. I am not in charge of their finances or their approach to a life that is likely much harder than mine.

It's been nice to realize that living with more skepticism doesn’t deprive me of empathy. In recent years, I have stopped believing what everyone says simply because they said it and have still managed to hold onto my humanity—a feat I didn’t understand was possible when I was younger. I used to think that if I didn’t assume the best from everyone, I would assume the worst and become a cynical, angry shut-in. But what I’m learning is that there is a third option, which is to wait and see.

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This more agnostic approach has been helpful in protecting my feelings and expectations. For example, if I met someone in my twenties who promised to put me in touch with a lot of people to help me with an upcoming project, I would expect them to follow through. Then if they didn’t, I would be disappointed, hurt and confused. Why say that if they didn’t mean it? Now, if I meet someone who makes the same type of promise, I think, we’ll see. I don’t assume they are blatantly lying to me, but I also recognize that I have no insight into their pattern of behavior. Perhaps they are someone who always keeps their word. Perhaps they historically make a lot of promises in the moment that they struggle to follow through on. Perhaps they are completely full of shit. Until I have more experience with them, I have no reason to trust them, which is different than not trusting them. It’s opting out of the question of trust all together until I have more information.

The conundrum then becomes, when do you know someone well enough to trust them? According to my peer-reviewed research study, it takes exactly two months, five days and 3 minutes. Don’t believe me? Good! Because there is no foolproof answer. At a certain point we have to take a leap of faith with the people we want to rely on. One way to determine if they are worthy of that leap is to look at their actions rather than their words. Actions build credibility, while words often show who we want to be rather than who we are.

A few months ago, I was walking my dogs past a neighbor’s house, and she remarked that all the dogs love to pee on her lawn because it is the only one on the street with real grass. I remember thinking, that makes so much sense and how interesting. Then I started to notice all the other lawns on my street with real grass. I felt like a fool! It was a wakeup call to not indiscriminately listen to the last thing someone told me.

Do I think my neighbor was blatantly lying to me in an effort to distort my sense of reality and chip away at my mental acuity? Probably not. More likely, she is under the false belief that her lawn is the only one with real grass on our street, which is what make the whole issue of trust even more complicated. The world isn’t divided into honest people and dishonest people. Instead, it is filled with misinformed, heavily biased, well-intentioned folks who often don’t realize they have no idea what they are talking about. Add in people’s lack of self-awareness, despite their insistence that they are completely self-aware, and it can feel impossible to know what to believe. That’s why reserving our trust for only those who have earned it isn’t pessimistic or mean-spirited, it’s reasonable.

I find it helpful to remember that people can be trustworthy in some areas of their lives while clearly lacking in others. I can trust a certain friend to responsibly take care of my dogs and not trust any of their supposed new sources. There are some people I believe wholeheartedly when they tell me a story and others I always take with a grain of salt. Just believe I love to spend time with someone does not mean I trust they would show up for me in an emergency.

Having a more nuanced relationship with how and to who I dole out my trust has helped me become more secure in the world. I no longer feel like I need to implicitly trust everyone from the get-go to feel safe so when someone inevitably proves untrustworthy, I am not shaken to my core. But I do still need the capacity to trust some people in my life, the ones who have earned it, or else that is a pretty lonely existence.

xoxo,

Allison

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button to increase chances of engagement! Also, if you are able to upgrade to paid subscriber or share my posts with a potential reader, I would be incredibly thankful! Thank you for reading!

AM I ABOUT TO LOSE MY ENTIRE SENSE OF SELF?

Everything is going to change, new parents tell you ominously. The life you knew before, where you prioritized your own well-being, will soon be a thing of the past. Sleep is off the table as is any sense of bodily autonomy for those of us who plan to breastfeed. You will have to adapt to a different version of yourself in order to survive.

Fine, I think. I am not that attached to this version of me anyway. In fact, lately, I haven’t been attached to anything at all.

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WHAT IF WE NEVER GET THE LIFE WE WANT?

Back in January, my husband and I had a difficult conversation. We were sitting in my dad’s house in New York, on the same couch where my mother had lost control of her body just a few months before. Perhaps it was this recent loss of my mom that emboldened me to be so direct. John and I were discussing the potential end of our relationship, not skirting around it but looking the possibility right in the face, and yet I felt eerily calm. My life had already turned upside down once. I was no longer attached to any form of my reality. If my husband needed to leave me, I would understand.

What had gotten us to this moment was both complicated and frustratingly simple. My husband had given up his first career as an undercover CIA officer* a decade ago to move to Los Angeles and become a screenwriter. Since making that decision, he had thrown himself fully into the identity of being a writer. Making it in Hollywood quickly became more important to him than getting married or having a family. It was his passion, his calling. And he got painfully close to living his dream more than once. But since May of last year, when Netflix canceled the show he had been developing since we met, the opportunities had dried up. The industry was constricting, and he didn’t have a long enough track record to assume there would ever be more work in a field that is primarily based on luck, privilege and who you know.

As the sole breadwinner, I found myself caught in an uncomfortable place. I wasn’t making enough to support both of us long term, especially if we wanted to have a kid. For months, I alternated between feeling resentful that he couldn’t move on from writing and get another job and feeling ashamed that I would ever want that for someone I loved. It would be one thing to have that harsh expectation if I wasn’t also in a creative field. But how could I ask him to give up writing when I still got to do it? I ultimately decided that I couldn’t, which is what led us to that confrontation of the couch.

I told John that if he still valued being a writer above everything else in his life, including our marriage and the possibility of a baby, that was okay. I would be supportive of him and didn’t want to get in the way of the one life he craved. But we couldn’t be married anymore. Marriage, for all its idealism, is also a business partnership. And I couldn’t be in the business of life with someone who was prioritizing a creative goal above our financial wellbeing. Making a living as a writer is fraught, which is why I have diversified in every way I can think of. My income comes from multiple sources including Substack, book deals, multiple podcasts and my relationship coaching business. I always assume my most recent writing deal will be my last one and try to plan accordingly. Juggling all this, along with the disappointment of never being as successful or secure as I want to be, is exhausting. I knew I didn’t have it in me to also take on the risk that John might not never have paid work if he continued to prioritize screenwriting.

My desire for John to find another, more stable path has nothing to do with his talent. Hollywood is a fickle beast where decisions are made based on the whims of one random executive and the bizarre algorithmic findings of streaming services. Despite having sold four TV shows in my twenties, I haven’t been able to get a paid screenwriting job in years. I currently live in this in between where I haven’t had to completely abandon my creative aspirations, but I have had to make significant adjustments. My favorite ways to spend my time are acting, performing standup, directing and writing scripts. I currently do none of those things. Instead, I write prose and see clients. I prep podcasts and try to figure out if what I have now is enough or if I will always ache to do more. I understand what I am asking John to give up, at least in the short term, because I want it just as badly as him.

As you might have guessed given that we are still married and expecting a baby, John decided not to leave me to pursue being a full-time writer at all costs. I suspect that sometime in the last few years, his priorities shifted—even if he didn’t notice it happening. While moving away from screenwriting continues to be painful and something he still finds too difficult to talk about, he has thrown himself full force into a new direction where he is excelling. This June he will finish up a Master’s in National Security Policy and in the fall, he will start an MPhil program where he will simultaneously work as a researcher. It is an academically rigorous environment that operates completely differently than the entertainment industry, which means he is finally getting the recognition and success he deserves. And yet…it’s not his dream.

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As much as some people might just write to write, and whether they make a career of it is simply a bonus, John and I aren’t wired that way. Our lives would be much easier if we were. Because that’s the thing about writing—you can always do it. John can keep writing scripts while he pursues this new career. But there is more to our hunger that simply getting words on the page. There is a desire for other people to read and/or hear those words. To get to colalborate with other people to bring our stories to life. I wish the mere act of writing was enough to feel satisfied. Then the life we each want would be easily accessed with just a keyboard. All our dreams would already be achieved.

Instead, we are left to grabble with the disconnect between what we want and whether we will ever get it. There is the possibility that after my next romance novel comes out, I never sell another writing project again and I will find myself in the same place John found himself last year. Will I be able to shift peacefully into full-time coaching or will I thrash and scream, enraged that I never got my own TV show? My guess is that it will depend on the day.

It is not lost on me that most of us don’t get exactly what we want in life, and we have to figure out how to not just make do but appreciate the life we are living. To accomplish this effectively requires not just a level of flexibility but often a shift in identity. Who will I be if one day I am no longer a professional writer? If I have to lay my ambitious dreams to rest to not feel like a failure every moment of every day? I might never have to confront that version of me. But sometimes I wonder if she is happier.

xoxo,

Allison

*Yes, John used to be a spy. WILD, I know. To learn more about this, him and our marriage you can check our new podcast: Starter Marriage. It’s not a scripted Netflix show, but is very exciting!

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button to increase chances of engagement! Also, if you are able to upgrade to paid subscriber or share my posts with a potential reader, I would be incredibly thankful! Thank you for reading!

CONFESSIONS OF A PREGNANT MIND

There is a popular story in Raskin family lore about my grandmother’s desperate desire to have a daughter. After two failed attempts* (*two healthy and happy boys), she made the decision to try for a third child hopeful that it would finally be a girl. It was not. My grandma was so distraught by this cruel fate that she spent my Uncle Mark’s bris crying in another room. Growing up, this was a funny story that captured my grandmother’s strong personality, but there was always a tinge of sadness to it. What is it like to live with the knowledge that you weren’t what your mother wanted? That your mere existence was a source of anguish?

As I prepare to find out the sex of my baby in the next few days, I feel myself torn between the mother I want to be and the person that I am. For as long as I’ve contemplated having a child, I’ve dreamed of a daughter. As one of two girls, my nuclear family had strong feminine energy. We always outnumbered our dad, which meant we always made time for shopping, manicures and romcoms. It’s a dynamic I feel comfortable in and (jealously) watched my sister get to emulate with my nieces. I know nothing of young boys other than their penchant for getting dirty and throwing things. And what I know of grown men under the patriarchy terrifies me. When I try to get excited about raising a son, I fail.

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I’M IN MY AVOIDANCE ERA

“What are you doing for Mother’s Day?”

I shouldn’t have been surprised so many people asked me this, with a hint of concern. It was a double whammy of a holiday for me this year. The first May without my mom and the first time I’ve ever been a mom-to-be. I imagine most of my friends thought I’d be an emotional wreck, spending the day sobbing and/or honoring my mother’s unparalleled impact on my life. I did neither. Instead, I spent my Sunday working—prepping a podcast, seeing a client and desperately trying to hit my word count for my next novel. I couldn’t ignore that it was Mother’s Day given people’s thoughtful checking in. But I didn’t have the desire to engage with my emotions around it. And not just because I had gotten my lashes done the day before and wasn’t allowed to cry. Although that was a good excuse.

This refusal to peak under the curtain of my defense mechanisms has become a habit lately. Since my mother got sick last August, I have had to battle so many negative emotions. Wave after wave of horrible moments crashed down on me, barely allowing enough time to gasp for air before being dragged back down by some other new experience of loss or anger. It was exhausting and raw and real. And at a certain point a few weeks ago, I decided to opt out of the storm and climb aboard an insulated submarine that kept me safe but didn’t have any windows.

It feels embarrassing as someone in the mental health field to admit that I have been avoiding my feelings. It’s like a heart surgeon confessing to a secret diet of bacon, steak and French fries. Or a dermatologist professing they have never applied sunscreen. The entire therapeutic model is built around dismantling avoidance and here I am indulging it. Simply because I don’t want to feel bad anymore? I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed!

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I received a message the other day from someone also struggling with the loss of a parent and they said they hoped they could be as strong as me one day. What are they talking about, I thought. I haven’t been strong at all. I’m not interested in sitting with my feelings. I’m letting memories of my mom slip away rather than taking the time to nurture them. I’m building a new life without bringing her along in the way I’d promised so I can evade discomfort. I am, in many ways, indulging my least evolved self while simultaneously posting the obligatory Instagram photos on the right days to make it seem like I’m not. If I had the energy, I would be pretty disappointed with myself right about now. But that would require engaging with the bad and we’ve already established I’m not interested in doing that.

Maybe this perception of me as strong is a holdover from how I behaved earlier in this process when I more successfully rejected my worst instincts. While my mom was dying, I often wanted to run away from caring for her and go watch TV. In those dark times, my deepest desire wasn’t to show up, it was to decompress on a couch. But I managed to push through anyway because my mom needed me. And I knew I wouldn’t have been able to forgive myself if I’d given in to my craving for avoidance while she was still alive. Now that she is gone, though, the only person my avoidance hurts is some nebulous version of my future self and that is entirely less motivating. Why should I sacrifice so much for her? I don’t even know her!

The other component to all of this is that when you allow yourself to feel deeply you have a harder time picking and choosing what you care about. I suspect that if I was suffering this loss during a time of greater prosperity it might not be so hard for me to hold. But the current world is a nightmare if you allow yourself to pay attention. The images from the ongoing genocide in Gaza are too horrifying to describe and every day there is a new update regarding the Trump administration’s determination to bring targeted harm across the globe. Are we all going to die in an AI fueled, nuclear shoot out soon? Kind of unclear if I’m being objective about the way things are going. Shutting myself off from all of it, including the distress of so many in my own city of Los Angeles, is a hugely appealing—albeit cowardly—option. I don’t think I have the current capacity to hold onto both pain and hope in the way one needs to to live fully in this reality. So, I’m squeezing my metaphorical eyes shut instead, which doesn’t keep all the light out but certainly obscures the worst of it.

I think a lot about one’s capacity in my coaching work. What do you have to give today? What are you hoping to be able to give tomorrow? This framework is what allows me to not give up on myself completely because I know our capacities can change with time and circumstance. Right now, I am pregnant, overworked and on a looming book deadline. While avoidance isn’t ideal, it does exist for a reason and often serves a purpose. It’s possible I need this vacation from grief to survive these next few months. That shutting down in this moment isn’t a free pass to shut down forever but more of a “closed for maintenance” situation. Once I turn my book in and have more time for myself, I can then spend that time finding a new therapist, returning to my grief and properly processing what it will be like to become a mom without my mom. I will also try to find a way to not ignore the horror of 2025 without letting it consume and destroy me. (A balancing act so many of us are trying to navigate.)

This avoidance era is real, but I am determined that it will also be brief. I suspect that even if I didn’t have a timeline for reengaging with my grief it would reengage for me. That’s why avoidance as a long-term strategy isn’t a successful one. You can only shut off for so long before your pipes burst.

xoxo,

Allison

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if you hit the like button to increase chances of engagement! Also, if you are able to upgrade to paid subscriber or share my posts with a potential reader, I would be incredibly thankful! Thank you for reading!

IS IT TOO SOON TO TELL YOU I’M PREGNANT?

I had my first positive pregnancy test on April 6. The line was so faint, I had a hard time believing it was true. My husband, an innate optimist, immediately started celebrating while I tried to temper my expectations. After all, there are few things less guaranteed than a full-term pregnancy in your mid-30’s. Especially when you’ve recently had a string of life-changing bad things happen to you and are on defense for the next shoe to drop.

But over the course of the next few days, and a series of darker lines, I began to accept my new reality: I was pregnant. My body was able to do the thing I had zero proof it could do before. That didn’t mean I was ensured to have a baby, though. Miscarriages are extremely common and for those first few weeks I worried that anything I did “wrong” could lead to an abrupt end to this new phase of life. When I started spotting the day of my first blood test, I thought, well, there goes that. It made sense that I was primed to expect the worst. My family has always been extremely cautious when it comes to pregnancy, and I have an anxiety disorder. As I slowly began to tell my inner circle the huge news, I offset the news with a warning: It’s very early. Anything could happen.

But then I realized, anything could happen still applies after the first trimester. Pregnancy is a masterclass in uncertainty. Keeping the news to myself until I was “in the clear” no longer made sense because “the clear” doesn’t exist. Even if I am lucky enough to deliver a baby, there is no promise of what their life will look like or how long it will last.

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