Yep. Fucking bleak is right.

Between SCOTUS gutting the voting rights act and several Southern states proving that they were just fucking waiting in the wings to disenfranchise Black voters and our addle-pated, demented world leader falling asleep on camera hours before he ranted well into the night on his pet social media site, it’s ugly out there.

The Iran debacle sending gas prices soaring, inflation on the rise, the cost of living becoming nearly impossible for whole swaths of the population, the rapists and pedophiles still getting swept under the rug while ICE continues to detain and abuse human beings they’re storing in cages, it’s really hard to not give up any hope that we can salvage any of this.

But what’s most important to remember is that is exactly how the fuck they want you to feel.

Project 2025 wasn’t just about policy and kicking our society back to the fucking Reconstruction era, it was about what the walking sack of leprosy Steve Bannon would call flooding the zone. Do so much, so fast, with so much chaos that people just give up trying to stay on top of it all.

And friends, that’s the last fucking thing we’re going to do. Ever.

You can’t go hard all day every day. I know. You need to have grief and anger days. You need to have “fuck it I’m going outside and not looking at the headlines for a while” days. You need to spend time away from the maelstrom in order to survive it. Please do those things, because we need clear fucking heads on our shoulders.

To the crowd who keeps shrieking “Why doesn’t anyone DO anything?”, I feel you. It can be easy to lose the plot inside the assault, but there are a LOT of things happening. Lawsuits at the state level, walkbacks of policy decisions, failure of attempts to buy warehouses to imprison immigrants (and citizens) in, seats getting flipped in state and special elections all over the country. You just aren’t seeing them because your brain is now seeking out the doom. Because it’s reinforcing the narrative they want you to have in your head that everything is lost and we have nowhere to go from here.

But I’d like to remind you that Black, indigenous and other people of color across the country have been in this fucking fight for generations. We’ve only really been a democracy since 1965 when the civil rights movement and the Voting Rights Act were passed after countless Black people put their bodies and lives on the line to fight for it. I mean fuck, the 19th Amendment took a fucking CENTURY to pass.

This is a long, arduous fight. And the people who fought before you did so knowing they might not live to see the outcome.

We are not letting them fucking break us, okay? We are going to honor those who fought before us, we’re not abandoning our Southern neighbors, and we are going to make peace with the fact that our desire for instant gratification here is not the fucking move in a country whose history has been profoundly whitewashed. Now that the pain and suffering has hit comfortable, affluent and sheltered white people, there’s a lot of pearl clutching but that’s a fucking insult to so many people—Black people in particular—who have been telling us all along what was actually happening. We should have listened then, but we really need to fucking get a grip NOW.

Here are some things I need you to do if you aren’t already:

• Get fucking involved. Somewhere. Anywhere. I volunteer as an election judge. I do text banking for local candidates. I use Mobilize.us to find opportunities near me to donate or volunteer.

• If you have means, get on Oath.vote and send your dollars to the most consequential races where your dollars can have the greatest impact.

• SHOW UP LOCALLY. Especially if you are in the South, the 2030 census is going to be absolutely critical and we have to work the long game of state legislatures and courts because that’s where maps will be drawn in the future based on that census. Your local school board races all the way through township and state elections are fundamental and you cannot neglect them. For example, there are consequential court races in Georgia in the GA Supreme Court and Court of Appeals that can unseat right wing justices Warren and Bethel. Head to yourgeorgiaballot.com to learn about the candidates, their positions, and how you can help support the races no matter where you are.

• If you’re doing all of the above, then I need you to find ways to get the word out. If you have a platform, use it. If you can volunteer locally to send out postcards or texts to get voters registered or remind them of upcoming elections, do that. Voter turnout is essential and the only way to really counteract the racist gerrymandering happening across states. We have to flood the zone our own way with turnout that is “too big to rig”. Hungary showed us that you can indeed topple fascism at the voting booth.

We outnumber them. They know that, which is why they have to cheat, lie, manipulate and rig the system in their favor. If they can only win by corruption, they know we can take them out and they’re trying desperately to prevent that through the most nefarious means. Don’t you dare surrender to that.

The midterms have them scared shitless. They’re losing support from their own base on nearly every single issue, from the economy to the war in Iran to immigration on up. They’re caged animals, desperate to survive, and this is their extinction burst replete with violence and purposeful cruelty as progress comes for them.

Stay with us. Gird your fucking loins and put steel in your spine and lean on me or others when your knees buckle. But fucking stay in the fight.

It’s not okay right now, I know. But WE will be okay, and we are far too fucking big to be broken. Democracy doesn’t die in darkness, it dies in apathy and surrender. And that is not what we’re going to do.

I’ll see you out there, friends. Let’s get to work.

Do you know how fucking many women know that exact tone of contempt behind the face of a man who has violently assaulted us? Do you know how many times so many of us have heard that when we refuse to hand over our phone number or laugh at their jokes or surrender our bodies for their use whenever they feel like it or otherwise supposedly defy them? How many women have died with “fucking bitch” still hanging in the air as she took her last breaths?

That needle-dicked weakling didn’t shoot her because she was a threat. He shot her because she had the audacity to not fear him. She had the audacity to be queer. Her wife had the audacity to express anger toward him. So he was enraged. And he killed her.

A content creator, TheBeardedLeftist, on TikTok this week who is a former law enforcement officer shared a video with several clips of other LEOs who had to use deadly force in the line of duty. Afterward, they are shaking. Crying. Begging forgiveness. In shock. In despair, reeling from the heavy weight of stopping a threat with lethal force.

[They apparently pulled his video down, but I downloaded it expecting that, so it’s linked here (trigger warning, it’s a hard watch even though it doesn’t show any of the shootings, just the aftermath).]

The man we saw put three fucking bullets in Renee Nicole Good’s head called her a fucking bitch, calmly walked up to the car to assess the damage, strolled away signaling to his other goon buddies in the street, and then like the feckless fucking coward he is, got in a car driven by his accomplices and was whisked away.

“But Amber, she was trying to run him over” whine the cult members in my comments, parroting the lies that their cult dominatrix filler addict threw into the fray literal moments after the murder.

If you watch those videos, every angle, and that is what you see, you are stupid, brainwashed, or both.

But even if you were correct, and let’s say for the sake of stupid fucking arguments that you were for the first moment in your miserable demented life, there is ample fucking case law and regulations for law enforcement that uphold that qualified immunity DOES NOT FUCKING APPLY and that DEADLY FORCE IS NOT FUCKING AUTHORIZED, INCLUDING IN ICE’S OWN GUIDELINES ON USE OF FORCE in this precise situation where it is indisputable based on THE EVIDENCE OF YOUR OWN FUCKING EYEBALLS that she was turning away to leave the scene at about 3.5mph. Don’t believe me? Go watch this video from a fucking attorney with the receipts (Thanks, Reb).

Then we could have entire fucking conversations about how likely it is that this is exactly what this fucking subhuman neanderthal planned from the jump with his itchy, emotionally disregulated cowardly fucking trigger finger. But I just don’t have the spoons for that today.

All of this, by the way, is after ICE killed Silverio Villegas González here in Chicago on September 12th, and an off-duty ICE officer shot Keith Porter Jr. in LA on New Year’s Eve. That doesn’t even count people like Marimar Martinez who was shot in Chicago 5 times, again with a claim (that bodycam footage allegedly disproves) that she was weaponizing her vehicle. The list goes on of unchecked uses of force by our modern-day Gestapo.

And as a reminder: being in the US illegally or overstaying a visa as a first offense is a CIVIL MATTER, not a criminal one. And in no way, shape or form should the “crime” of an unarmed person’s failure to immediately comply with law enforcement carry the sentence of immediate extrajudicial execution. Ever.

Every person who has stood across from an abuser knows the tone that Jonathan Ross used when he called her a fucking bitch. We know the loathing that sits right underneath those words, the violence just waiting to erupt and put someone back in line. And make no mistake; this is just a warning shot. If you thought your white skin would protect you from state-sanctioned execution in broad daylight on the street, this is a message that it absolutely will not.

When they come to your neighborhood and your doorstep, what will you do? And when your friends and neighbors warp reality so much in their own minds that they somehow find justification for this and keep blurring the line between the crime and the punishment meted out by an unhinged cosplay law enforcement troglodyte, how will you respond?

I’m so, so fucking angry, friends. So angry. Dear Fuckers has always had a bit of lightheartedness to it, but today, I can’t fucking find it. All I’ve got is white-hot, incandescent rage.

Keep filming. The reckoning will come for these murderers. In the meantime, I’m not looking away.

Rest peacefully, Renee.

It’s fucking bleak out there, huh?

Watching innocent people get shot in the face by out of control federal law enforcement? Escalating global conflict and threats? Having people, included decorated military officers, labeled terrorists, agitators and insurrectionists because they—(checks notes)—state truthful things in the UCMJ or dare to dissent?

Yep. It makes my fucking head hurt. And the addle-pated, dementia-ridden, rotting, festering-syphillis-lesion-in-chief that is running around South America like an internet incel on a rampage gathering up oil for his billionaire buddies to help distract from being a leader of a pedophilia ring is just icing on the cake, innit?

When I met with my exec coach at the end of last year, I had this audacious goal to rekindle my own content platform, get focused on making more videos and writing again and committing to my own professional advancement outside my day job.

But how in the everloving fuck am I supposed to find the attention span for some article about being brave in your career or some vapid marketing axiom when every day feels like an act of courage just to fucking show up, stand up, and breathe?

It’s also rage-inducing to me that our Black and brown neighbors have been subject to this facism for centuries and we haven’t bothered to believe them about the threat until it looked like those of us with white skin. No matter how fucking progressive I wish to profess myself to be, even I have had to reckon with how easy it was at times to ignore what was happening because it wasn’t in my neighborhood. I will have to fucking live with that for the rest of my life, and so I’m committed to keeping my eyes wide the fuck open and never again underestimate just how systemic the rot in the system really is.

(If you too would like to deconstruct some of your own roots, whether in evangelical Christianity or systemic racism, please go follow Monte Mader on TikTok, YouTube and IG and in particular pick up the books she recommends in this video).

This is unfortunately more normal for the US than many of us would like to admit. But we do NOT have to continue accepting that.

And if you too are strugs to funk because you’re wondering how the fuck you’re supposed to find the attention span for a Teams call about the TPS reports when the world is on fire outside our fucking doors…you’re not alone.

You’re going to have to do what I am doing:

• Take fucking breaks. Go the fuck outside. Drink water. Get sleep. Get the fuck offline and the assault on your sensibilities. You have to take breaks.

• Learn to operate from the moment, not the distant horizon. Garth would say ‘Live in the now, man”. In horses we would say you have to ride the horse you have today. Every day you’re going to have to work from the resources you have, not the ones you wish you had.

• Find joy. Yes, I’m fucking serious. Joy is resistance and a defeated, hopeless population is one that is easily subjugated. Don’t you dare let them do that to you. Whatever it is you love doing, I want you to double down on finding time and space to do that thing.

• Be in community. Whether it’s one dear friend or your local interest group or even local politics (essential in the recovery we will have to orchestrate), be with other people. In real life. In your town, city, neighborhood, school. We heal AND resist in community, not isolation. And community is galvanizing when you feel alone.

• Get involved. I have worked elections on and off for many decades. I’m going to an event with an aspiring US Senator from IL this weekend to ask questions and listen to his stance on issues facing our country. But you can volunteer, phone bank, fundraise, canvas, register to work the polls, even run for something in your own community. Remember, US policy roots alllll the way down to local communities and the policymakers we bring up through the system.

But you don’t have to just fucking grind out more TPS reports every day without acknowledging that it’s really fucking hard right now to switch between watching state-sanctioned violence on your social media feeds and then just showing up to talk about the quarterly sales conference. It’s hard. Some days, it might even feel impossible. But your self-preservation is also important, and your livelihood is what allows you to take care of yourself or your animals or your families to weather this horrific storm.

I don’t have anything bright and fucking shiny to say today. I really don’t. I’m tired. I’m really fucking angry.

But I am not alone, and neither are you. They are fucking afraid of us, and they should be. We outnumber them, and they’re going to make it painful, but they’re not going to win in the end.

You hang in there, you hear? I see you. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s doing it scared. And we’re not fucking giving up, okay?

Okay.

xoxo

If you’ve been on the other end of an abuser, you know exactly the derision and vitriol that “Quiet, Piggy” triggered in all of us as that festering pile of incompetence poked his fat vienna sausage finger at a journalist last week. The fucking audacity.

What’s worse, every single media outlet seemed to just…glide on past that. It’s days later and I’m still mad as hell.

Why? Because it’s the perfect example of the slow frog boil that has gradually empowered an entire generation of red-pill-swallowing, entitled, arrogant misogynistic assholes to continue to treat women like receptacles instead of human beings and speak to and about us as inanimate objects, animals, or worse.

And don’t even get me started on the fucking tradwife bullshit; some woman on Threads the other day posted a picture of her in a cute little kerchief, holding a baby next to a rustic butcher block with the caption “The feminists would say this is oppression” or some shit. I replied with the fact that feminism is about her ability to make that choice instead of having it foisted upon her, but cult members who are enthralled by their own oppressors because they’re scared to death of their own power don’t really hear you when you try to point out nuance.

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Look, I’m not saying anything a thousand other people haven’t already said, but every time the limp-spined and eviscerated fourth estate glosses right the fuck over this kind of inexcusable and utterly impotent vitriol from the sitting fucking president of the united states which I will not capitalize in this context, they are NORMALIZING this as the expected behavior and intimidation of everyone from that smug dickhead at work who speaks to women as if they’re his personal servants to “husbands” who condescend, abuse and berate their own wives behind closed doors. And the more it gets normalized, the more fucking women are UNSAFE.

And let’s be very fucking clear: this has been the way Black and brown people have been treated in this country since its inception, and the result is the state-sanctioned violence we see against them every day, much of it completely unchecked and available all over the internet right now in the form of videos of ICE raids across the country alongside our standard-issue police brutality. Now that the venom is also loudly and spilling over into caucasian communities at the hands of a microwannabedictator with dementia, it’s emboldening every basement-dwelling schoolyard bully with mommy issues, including the ones in Congress and in the cabinet, and everyone seems to be sitting around in shock but somehow trying to excuse this as the ranting of a man not to be taken seriously instead of the leading indicator of exactly how much this administration and the cult that props it up absolutely hates women.

The result is that I’m fucking angry. AngrIER, maybe. And on a call this week, a man on a video call about a book project made an incredibly condescending remark with a sneer, and so I simply looked calmly in the camera and said “Did you intend to be incredibly condescending or would you like to try saying that differently?” Had the context been different, I might have actually pulled out “Exactly who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?” (Needless to say we will not be working together on my book, so if you know a good nonfiction agent, hit me up).

So I guess this is my shout into the void:

Whether you’re in the press pool unfortunately having to stand within arm’s length of the narcissist-in-chief or in the boardroom or in a classroom or literally just sitting at a bar somewhere when the equivalent of “Quiet, Piggy” shows up in your midst, stop letting that go unchecked.

I’m tired of these fucking small, weak, impotent men being the barometer for what is acceptable behavior toward women. Whether it’s the workplace or the streets of the city or the community spaces we inhabit, I don’t know about you, but I’m about to make Quiet, Piggy a whole entire problem in reverse.

We outnumber them. We do. But that only matters when we’re unwilling to continue to move the goal posts of what we will tolerate, excuse, rationalize and let go of.

Let the rage be your fuel, friends. Keep fighting.

PS - I will say it was a little bit satisfying watching Geriatric Joffrey fawn over Mamdani so hard this week, and the gentle parenting way that Mamdani charmed while somehow also deftly pitying this addle-pated cave troll in front of the cameras.

Art.

A few months ago, I listened to some advice I shouldn’t have.

It was well meaning, I think, but it was basically advice to move on from the Dear Fuckers era and brand in favor of something softer and more introspective. At the time, the advice made sense. Sort of. But after a few months, I quickly realized…fuck that.

I am who I am, and I’m tired of softening my sharp edges because they make some people uncomfortable. I’ve done it so fucking many times in my life and career. If I had a dollar for every time I was told to be less something—less fat, less loud, less sweary, less opinionated—I could fucking retire.

Most recently, I’ve been going through some pretty hefty life transitions. I took on a new, bigger role at work with a new team, new boss, and new remit. I sold a house. I bought a house. I moved. I sent my kid off to college.

And somehow in there convinced myself that I needed to be less again so I could…I’m not even sure. Play the part? Embody some new idea of “life era”? I dunno. All of the rationale for toning it down started to feel shitty and disingenuous and once again like I was trying to be someone I’m not.

One of the moments of enlightenment came recently because I’m watching the absolute dumpster fire of our current administration where we’ve spent years protecting pedophiles while somehow also making it fine to starve people for sport and political clout while they kidnap and disappear American citizens in my city and it tripped my feral switch all over again.

I’m so tired of pretending that I have to fucking shrink myself down when absolutely incompetent, small, corrupt men with bad suit tailoring and tiny hands can get away with rape and murder and somehow even get elected President and try to diminish and continue to disenfranchise women (ALL women) in the process. So here the fuck I am.

If you want to get more sweary missives, click the button like a good gi— er, just do it.

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I’m not a political writer. I’m not qualified for that and I don’t fucking want that job, anyway. I’m content to doomscroll just like you do and eventually throw my phone across the fucking room like the maladjusted, middle-aged perimenopausal angry crone that I am becoming.

But I do like to write. I’m okay at it. Some days. But it’s not going to be about politics so much as because of politics. Because fuck all of this nonsense, right in the ear, alongside the ever-crazymaking and warped expectations we have of women and the audacity of entitlement that makes these clownpunchers think they can dictate how we show up.

I spoke at an event this week. It’s a speech I’ve given many times now on a topic I’m very passionate about and that is going to be my next career investment. And I was enraged once again watching an entire room of women grapple with the bullshit that is labeled “imposter syndrome” because they have been convinced that the problem is THEM instead of the fucking SYSTEM and double standards they have to be subjected to at every turn, and once again…there was the anger.

The anger that we are supposed to appease, fit in, smooth over, tame and soften while an entire fucking clown car of deplorables is about to drive a few hundred years of democracy off a cliff. So I’m honestly just tired of pretending I should be sorry for being angry when there is plenty to fucking be angry about.

Do I want anger to define me? Of course not.

Do I want to use anger to fuel me? Absolutely the fuck I do.

Then within the span of several weeks, I had multiple, unrelated people reach out to me and ask what happened to this newsletter and why it stopped and begging me to bring it back. Honestly, I’m surprised AF that anyone reads this shit, but hey…

Who am I to deny the people what they want?

There’s a lot more going on right now and we’ll talk about that later (yes, I’m going to write the fucking book), but for now…welcome back to Thunderdome, motherfuckers.

The sweary newsletter is back, and I’m back with it, and the next man to tell me that I should be less angry is going to get an envelope full of rancid tuna salad with raisins mailed to his house along with the mail-order masculinity pills he has on backorder from that Facebook ad he swears he didn’t click on.

Missed you. Mean it. Hope you’ll stick the fuck around because we have some shit to talk about.

With love and angst,

Amber

My mom would have been 78 today.

She died two years ago March after a long and devastating battle with COPD (don’t smoke, kids, I fucking mean it). I miss her every day.

One of my favorite things about her—about my weird, dysfunctional little family really—is that she had a great sense of humor. We laughed a lot, and her laugh in particular was truly contagious. It was unapologetic and fucking LOUD and she often guffawed until tears filled her eyes when something struck her as particularly absurd.

One such memory was when I was a teenager.

My brother was rooting around in the fridge and freezer for something to eat. And as many families do, we had a freezer stuffed full of random things we forgot about. My mom was a great cook, so there were always Tupperware containers stacked in the freezer with various leftovers, and on a late afternoon, one of those containers violently attacked my brother.

He opened the freezer door, and without warning or preamble, out jumped a rock-solid container that landed with a dull THUD right on top of his bare foot.

Yowling in pain, my brother exclaimed “OH GOD, FROZEN BEANS!!”

My mom and I were of course startled and utterly confused at first, alarmed at the shouting and wondering what had happened. But as we ran to the kitchen and observed my brother hopping around, yelling at the beans, holding his foot, realizing he wasn’t mortally wounded…

We absolutely collapsed into tummy-grasping peals of laughter.

For years and years, we would encounter life crises or random difficulties where in a quest to cope and find lightness, we would should OH GOD, FROZEN BEANS! as some kind of battle cry or universe-rattling lament that inevitably made us laugh or reminded us that we’re all just meat-covered skeletons hurtling through space on a round rock and that it probably isn’t that serious.

So on this birth anniversary of Pammy Jo, one of the funniest most big-hearted and wonderful people I ever knew, I’m sharing our misfit family battle cry with you for those days when you want to fucking punch a wall (or maybe a person, who am I to judge) and shout into the void.

Instead of just some generic hollering into said void, you now know the power of shouting OH GOD, FROZEN BEANS! (Void not included, pick your poison). It’s impossible to take too much overly seriously when you’re invoking frozen legumes in rage, I promise.

Happy birthday, Mom. You were a real one. Thanks for the laughs. And the beans.

This is Martini.

On a road trip back from my daughter’s college orientation in Martin, TN to our home in the Chicago burbs, we stopped at a rest stop in the middle of nowhere Illinois to let our dog, Charlie, have a walk and a drink of water and to stretch our legs a bit.

As my daughter was walking Charlie, she points behind me and says “Is that a cat?”

It was indeed a cat, a very young female, underweight and getting a drink from a small creek that ran through the rest stop. I fully expected her to dart away when I approached her, but instead she came right up to me. I scooped her up and asked around the few people at the rest stop, but she didn’t belong to any of them and was way too close to a very busy interstate highway…so in the car she went. This photo is of our rapid setup of the dog crate crammed in the back of my SUV with kid, dog and luggage stuffed in the back seat to make everything fit.

Was I planning on having a third cat? No. Did I think my senior 16yo sister cats would appreciate this invasion? Also no. But was I going to leave this tiny girl to take her chances by the road and in the wild? 100% no.

Now that we’ve had her home for a few weeks (she’s healthy and vetted) a somewhat expected wrinkle has arisen: we think Tini might be pregnant.

I’m an experienced rescuer and while I don’t have tons of experience with kittens, I have ample resources to help me if we are indeed expecting babies. But my brain swirled because I just took on a big new job at work, and I’m trying to sell my house and buy a new one, and I’m about to move my daughter to college…so the timing of this is far from ideal.

We need a nesting box. I need to figure out where to put it. I need to figure out what I’m going to do if she has kittens and I have to move Abi to school. I need to figure out how to keep the rest of the animal brigade away from Tini and the Tinies (my emerging band name for the litter if it exists) while they are newborns. I need to figure out how I will handle house showings if I actually try to list my house while all this is going on. I need to figure out a lot of things.

Is that overwhelming? Fuck yes. Does it feel like more than handle? Fuck yes. Am I equipped to solve it though? Probably.

Because one thing I’ve learned about the ridiculous curveballs life tends to throw at me: the toolkit I’ve built over many years coping with challenging situations is still there for me to access. We don’t lose those skills once we develop them.

I forget that sometimes. Faced with new challenges, I often feel like I’m starting from scratch, daunted by the unknowns and uncertain about the path forward. But when I slow down long enough to ask myself where I need to begin, what I know to be true, what the very first step is before anything else (in this case, getting Tini to the vet to confirm my suspicions), things start to seem more manageable.

I have friends. I have contacts at rescue organizations. I have a vet I love, pet sitters I can rely on, and all of those people can help connect me to other people to help if I need them.

When I break down the problem and really look at it…I have everything I need.

And I guess if life wants to throw me kittens, well, there are certainly worse problems to have in the world than that.

Is this relatable to anyone else? Do you get overfaced with problems in your life or work and have to take a step back to find the path forward? I’d love to know how you face the daunting challenges with a level head.

Sometimes healing means throwing yourself headlong into new things.

For the better part of three years (more if you count the caretaking years), I have been dealing with sick and dying parents, a dead dog, romantic heartbreak, and a job that can only be described as galactic fucking levels of stressful. Needless to say, I lost a bit of myself in the process.

One promise I made to myself in the wake of the Year of Death and Destruction (nb: if I don’t rely on gallows humor I’m not gonna make it so…sorry not sorry) was that I was going to rediscover a bit of Amber and what even makes my head and heart happy.

It’s really fucking disorienting when you ask yourself what that is, and you don’t even know where to start.

I mean, I’m going to be 49 this year. 40 didn’t freak me out, but the lurking of 50 somehow makes me all kinds of twitchy. Maybe it’s facing down death and mortality so hard core the last couple of years. Maybe it’s the fact that 50 coincides with my daughter heading off to college as a Division I equestrian (holy fuck), which means I’ll be an empty nester (holy extra fuck). Maybe it’s just that half a century feels like a giant Red Rover step forward toward being dead myself.

But it bothered me enough that I grabbed my trusty journal, and sat down and tried to inventory what things actually made my heart full and my soul feel like it’s being cared for. When you spend a lot of time caring for other people and then you sit down to ask your own damn self what makes you happy, what you need, what fulfills you, it’s actually quite an emotional experience.

It’s almost as if my heart was like “oh hey, someone actually cares to know what we need and want?” Sometimes you have to be your own fucking white knight, I guess.

What I came up with was:

• Writing. I love writing, but man it’s been fucking hard to find voice again, to give myself the permission to write as an act of creativity instead of aversion or time-wasting, to believe that my writing is something that even matters. I’m working on it.

• Creating. I’m a creative nerd and used to let myself get fucking bullied about wanting to do crafts or make projects or pick up and put down any number of wild hobbies like paper quilling or making hair bows for horse show kids or learning to draw mandalas or doing collage and junk journals. But I’m really tired of apologizing for how much I love to make shit. So I’ve learned to crochet and I’m dusting off some of the craft supplies because fuck people who make fun of others who do artistic or crafty things.

• Music. I was a music major in college and I was never happier than when I was in rehearsal or performing on stage. I also loved theater and acting, but music had its hooks in me. So I picked up my flute, got brave enough to reach out to my high school band director about joining the wind ensemble he directs, and I performed my first concert in nearly 25 fucking years a couple weekends ago. Even sent my beloved flute out for a complete overhaul, because I’m fucking investing in me.

The one that I didn’t see coming was fish tanks.

My BFF started an aquarium several months ago, and once she started explaining all of the intricate biology of building a self-contained ecosystem in a glass box—cycling the tank, selecting and introducing live plants, evaluating compatible fish, understanding water parameters, encouraging biodiversity with snails and other critters—I immediately had to be a copycat and bought a tank.

Now I have fucking three. Because I have zero chill and hyperfixation is a thing. (And thank you, Steph, for enduring my incessant fucking questions and nerdery for a hobby I totally stole from you.)

My betta fish Dante lives in his own house, my African Dwarf Frog Virgil in his own pad too because he was a dick and kept trying to eat Dante’s fins when they were roommates, then my big tank (pictured here) has a community of nano fish (ember tetras and celestial pearl danios), panda cories, blue neocardinia shrimp and a handful of snails who were all “fuck you, you didn’t ask for me but here I am to clean up the shit in your tank, you’re welcome”.

Nature is my cathedral, really. I’m not a Jesus girlie and I don’t particularly subscribe to a sky daddy running the show out there but I have always been unable to look up at the stars or through the forest and not feel the awe that comes from being a speck on the pale blue dot hurtling through spacetime for a mere breath of a moment compared to the vastness of the universe. My cleansing tears come with my back against a tree, or my feet in a surf. So it would seem that having a slice of that in my house makes me REALLY FUCKING HAPPY.

And fish tanks are fucking fidgety. When you’re new to it, there is an overwhelming amount of information, some of it conflicting, and everyone of course has a fucking opinion about the best way to do this or that. Mark, my local fish store guy, has more years of fish keeping experience than I’ve had on the planet, so he’s been super helpful as I navigated feeling like a murderer when some of my first fish died and when I freaked out about the pH being too high and when I was trying to make sense of which things did what.

But there’s ritual in sitting with my little ecosystems, tending to their maintenance by changing out water or pruning plants, watching them grow and balance on their own, watching nature give me the “quit fucking fussing with things and just let me handle this, you rookie” that shows me she has always and will always know better than I do.

Just yesterday, I sat on my bed and watched my little fish and shrimp swimming around, my snails wandering across the glass, listening to the gentle bubble of the filters, and I realized something.

Part of the peace I’m finding in the aquaria is the peaceful but purposeful reminder that life, in its own way and always whether we want it to or not, keeps going.

The world sort of screeches to a halt when you’re in the midst of crisis and loss and it can feel afterward like your time is standing still while everyone else’s keeps hurtling forward. At first, it makes you angry, and you want to scream “How can you just keep fucking living when my mother and father are dead?!” Then it makes you sad, because you note the moments and milestones your loved ones are missing because they’re no longer here.

Yesterday, it brought me comfort.

Neither of my parents—my stubborn-as-an-ox German-Welsh mother or my stoic Swede of a father—would want me stuck. In fact, they’d be pissed. I can practically hear my mother in my ear “Oh for fuck’s sake Amber, don’t you dare sit there moping, I’m dead, go live your life and take care of Abi and wave to me when the stars are out because I’m zipping around out there with Grampa.”

So as my little fish tanks make new plants and grow more fucking snails and sustain the lives of my beautiful little fish and frogs, the prayer that I whisper to myself is that life keeps going.

And so, somehow, must I.

Dante and Virgil and The Gang are dragging me forward, inch by inch. I’m trudging along, less begrudgingly by the day. Happier to see sunrises, more contented to see sunsets, and comforted to see a sky blanketed with stars knowing my parents are out there somewhere, floating around as stardust.

So long, Mom and Dad. And thanks for all the fish. xo

A broken heart is a messy fucking thing.

Whatever the loss that caused it, it’s spiky. Splintery. The little shards of broken seem to embed themselves, with barbs, in all the most tender places. And they shift and move around as you get up and try to trudge through the fog, digging in when you’re trying to do something—anything—productive and proving themselves to be right inconvenient and cruel assholes when you are at your most vulnerable.

This past year has given me so much fucking heartbreak that I’d really like to write a strongly-worded letter to management, but then I’m reminded that I am fucking management, at least as it relates to how I respond to the situations put in front of me. No one is fucking coming to save me, so once again, I will fucking save myself.

On a whim, I was walking through Basic Bitch Disneyland the other day (aka Target) and wandered through the book aisle with my basic bitch Starbucks drink in hand. I committed the deadly sin of walking into that fucking store with an empty cart, no list, and those annoying fucking heartbreak barbs being particularly sharp and shifty that day so I tried to outrun them via retail therapy and farmhouse home decor. Then something caught my eye.

In the area with all the mindfulness and poetry books—nothing like my usual fare, mind you—a book stared at me with the title the way forward in lowercase letters like some annoyingly zen master reaching out to me and saying “hey, you, quit fucking ignoring how much you really need someone else’s pretty words right now”. Actually, I’m pretty sure a mindfulness teacher wouldn’t be as sweary as I am, but in my head they are. So.

I flipped open the book in the store, and because the universe is not without a fucking sense of humor, I landed on this page right in the middle, and the audacity of these words to assault my eyes:

yung pueblo, you fucking asshole.

So after I flung away the tear that escaped down my face standing in that stupid and unfair book aisle, I bought the damn thing and took it home with me so that I could lean on someone else’s wisdom when my own was feeling like it had abandoned ship.

I’m so mad at my mom for being fucking gone right now because I desperately need her to tell me that I’m beautiful and amazing and that I’m going to be okay. But because she had the temerity to fucking die on me and the wooden box on the mantle doesn’t dole out quite the same hugs that she did, I decided that the person who needed to love me right now is…me.

I’ve long looked around me at people who have had a lifetime of love, managed to find their partner in a sea of absolute and unadulterated chaos, and been envious. Truthfully, I didn’t have a lot of great examples growing up. My parents divorced when I was 18 after several years of turmoil, affairs, and discord. Afterward, my dad remarried (unceremoniously deciding that his own fucking children didn’t need to be told or invited to the wedding) to someone I never grew close to, mostly because she was fucking mean to me a lot. My mom never did, and I think she was forever in love with my dad even while she repeatedly instilled in me that I didn’t need some fucking man in my life. I think in part that her bitterness combined with my parents’ dysfunctional love stories and my own battered and bruised self-esteem meant two things: 1) I didn’t feel like I was allowed to want a partner because that somehow made me weak or pathetic and so 2) If there was an olympic sport for picking relationships doomed to fail, I was a regular fucking gold medalist. Daddy issues? You fucking betcha.

Anyway, after I read through this inconveniently on-the-nose book and dogeared pretty much every other page to come back and read when the proverbial rug slips from beneath my weary feet, I glommed onto a singular important concept: I am the one who has to love me through this. Aside from my family, no one has loved me fiercely for years upon decades, including me. In fact, I’ve been a downright dick to myself for most of my life. But the best gift I can give myself when love leaves me is to give myself the love, care and acceptance I need. So, this morning when I was doing my Morning Pages, I wrote myself a love letter. Here’s what it said:

Dear Amber,

I know you’re hurting right now. The ache is real, the loss is felt, and the gloom feels really hard to walk through. But I need you to know something.

You are doing this. And you will fucking be okay.

You can go slowly if you need to. But you will learn to tend to your own heart now. You will honor the journey you’ve been on to get to this place. You will embrace putting your feet on a new path that feels different and even though you can’t see around the corners, you will trust that the softness in your heart that has brought you this far will continue to serve you and you will absolutely not harden it out of fear. Your softness is part of your beauty, and you will not let the storm limit what you can see ahead.

Storms are temporary. Unpicking old knots and healing over new wounds is a long-term project and you are really good at staying the course. This is all a gateway to brighter things and an opportunity to remember that you are, as yung told you yesterday, more than a match for what scares you.

I will always look after you. You are amazing, tender, beautiful of mind and heart and full of so much to give. Your time is not just coming, it’s now. Walk forward, breathe past that squeeze in your chest, and know that you are embarking on an era where you love yourself best of all.

We feel so we can live. Go live. It will be worth the hurt, I promise. I love you.

Love,

Amber

Go live, motherfuckers. Write yourself that letter and love yourself best of all. Time isn’t stopping for any of us.

And you will fucking be okay, too.

I fucking hate cliches.

I’m the curmudgeon that scrolls through my Instagram feed and sees the saccharine quotes about love and hope and whatever else and I reflexively roll my eyes and think “fuck this toxic, sunshine-y bullshit”.

But deep down, I think it’s because I’m pissed that I can’t relate to a person who finds the silver fucking lining in every hardship. I’ve struggled with pessimism all my life and I blame my late fucking Swedish, stoic, pain-in-my-ass emotionally unavailable father whom I loved with all of my fucking heart for that…gift? Curse? Whatever.

I know it’s been a minute since you’ve heard from me. But I’m going to ask you for a fucking hall pass because my parents are dead. Both of them. That probably wouldn’t have convinced my high school composition teacher that I deserved to miss class. But I’m a fucking adult now and it seems like a reasonable excuse.

2023 was, by all accounts, a really fucking awful year. My mom died in March after a long battle with COPD and heart failure, and I was her primary caregiver through hospice which was both an honor and a torture. I won’t lie; her death was fucking awful. Like the kind of death no one should have to witness let alone endure. I’m grateful she’s at peace now but that experience will fucking haunt me for the rest of my days.

Then just as I was getting a handle on shit, I got the news in July that my dad had esophageal cancer. He was dead by December and once again, I stepped in to help navigate the hospice care and last months of his life because they too were fucking awful for myriad reasons and I flew home on December 6th, two days after his death, a shell of myself. Hollow, empty, and mostly in deep fucking disbelief that I was an orphan.

This was all on the fucking heels of a dramatically fucktangular year at work with dickhead problem children that made my life hell (being a people manager is AWESOME, she said through gritted teeth) and a really difficult economy and advertising industry (which, as it turns out, is shitty for people who sell ads for a living).

Then I wandered smack into a hefty dose of midlife complicated situationship romantic heartbreak to round it all out and well, dear reader, I keep coming back to a fucking inspo quote that seems to sum it all up and I hate myself for liking it.

Goddamn it if this stupid thing hasn’t been somewhat of an emotional anchor through all of this bullshit. Because I need to believe something through the oily weight of anger and regret and sadness in my gut.

The better part of my last half decade has really been defined by either caretaking of others or trying hard to give and give and give to the people I love. But the problem with that—even with noble intent—is that there’s only so much to go around. So that dazed, empty, “how the fuck did I get here” fog that you end up in makes you feel like the time slipped by without your knowledge or consent, you’re drained completely of all the things, and all you got was this lousy fucking emotional t-shirt that reads “48 and Lost”.

So I’ve been slowly trying to pick up pieces.

As you can see by Exhibit A, I’m making a feeble attempt at writing again. I haven’t just had writer’s block for the past year, I’ve had a fully fucking stone prison in my mind where the words were committed with no possibility of parole. (And seriously fuck those artists who can create through the worst times in their lives, you’re all fucking prodigies or aliens or both and I lovehate you with all my soul. Looking at you Taylor.)

I also picked up my long-forsaken flute and joined a local wind ensemble because I have missed playing for many, many years and finally told myself that I deserved to experience that even if I had a lot of rust to knock off, emotionally and on my fancy-ass professional flute that Gramma Ruthie bought me in music school.

I put Mom and Gramma on the mantle and I decorate their urns for seasonal holidays and I don’t care if you think that’s fucking morbid or disrespectful. They would have cackled with joy and laughter to be donning the light-up bunny ears for easter. And it’s almost time for Memorial Day stars and stripes.

I haven’t managed to find the gumption to get back to my healthy gym habit so I’m basically paying those fuckers $250 a month to keep a spot warm in the locker room next to that zero-fucks lady who blowdries her hair stark naked every morning, singing to herself with no music or headphones. I’ll get back there eventually. Maybe. Throwing weights around is cathartic, but first you have to lift the weight of a heavy heart that somehow won’t let your feet move, either.

I want to believe that stupid fucking instagram quote. I want to believe that this sweeping, raging, monumental storm that has washed through my life for the last couple of years had purpose and meaning. I want to believe that the purpose was to clear the path in front of me, to shake me by the shoulders and say “Amber, look, there is possibility ahead.” I want to believe that maybe this time is for me, that there is oxygen coming back into my lungs that doesn’t belong to anyone else but can fuel me to put a foot on the ground, and then another, and then another toward something. I don’t know what.

But I do know that what I need is to remember who I am. Me. What I love, what ignites my mind, what gives my soul that “fuck yes” energy where you practically vibrate with potential, how I want to show up in the world that isn’t just as someone else’s something. I’m not even sure I know who I am anymore. Maybe that’s the point.

I stood on a beach not long ago on vacation with my daughter, and the brine of the ocean air always feels and smells like salvation somehow. Like you can wash your insides clean and breathe out darkness and it just gets carried away on the tide like foam.

Being a blank slate feels scary as fuck. I feel raw, spent, and there are parts of my heart where the ache is persistent and impossible. But I think it might be the bruised little pulse that is trying to remind me that I am alive and that easing the ache, like so many little midlife pains, requires getting up and moving around and through and onward.

So I guess I’ll keep the fucking cliche. I’ll thank the stupid storm and the stupid instagram girlies for making their Canva template so I can save it on my fucking phone. I’ll try to tuck Paul’s pessimism on the shelf next to the little buddha statue of his that I stole from his cabinet and try on that hopefulness and optimism the kids keep talking about.

I’ve always loved a storm. The rage and power during, the peace and calm after.

Hurricane Amber has come and gone. The worst of it, anyway. And dawn is breaking.

So I’m going to go stand out there, empty and afraid, and let it light my way forward.

It’s good to be with you again.

Hey, fuckers. Bet you thought you were rid of me.

Truth is I’ve been mired in a swamp of fucktangular life shit that has had me mostly mentally upside down for many, many months, white-knuckling the lap bar on whatever this broke-ass roller coaster we call life is.

I’m kind of a country western song lately; my dog died on fucking CHRISTMAS (simultaneously shattering the heart of my child who had loved him most of her life), my mom died in March after 6 months in hospice care following many years of illness, this week my company laid people off and while I wasn’t affected, many I love were, and that’s all on the tail of a year at work where I dealt with assholes galore trying, in various ways, to fuck me over.

In the midst of that freight train of fuckery cars, I’ve mostly been doing…not great?

I wish I could paint you a rosy fucking picture of resilience and silver linings and all the lessons I’m surely supposed to learn in the midst of this. I’m confident that I’m supposed to make some inspirational content on LinkedIn or whatever about death and life and something about the journey, but to be honest, I don’t have the fucks to give. About any of it.

The parts that people don’t tell you about grief are that it doesn’t always come in wracking sobs. I think that was the most fucked up, disorienting part. I’ve mostly felt numb. Like I can’t be bothered to care. I’m going through the motions, doing all the adult responsibility shit like keeping my kid and animals alive, showing up to work, paying my bills.

But there’s just no fucking sparkle. In any of it. I wake up, I do the things, and I just want to crawl back into bed and sleep until it stops hurting.

Truth is, Pammie Jo (that’s my mom, otherwise known as Pam) would be pissed at me for moping. She’d be hollering about the fact that’s she’s cosmos dust now (and also literal dust in the box on my mantle) and I should suck it the fuck up and go do things with my kid and not be sad because she lived her life and I should live mine. Sentiment wasn’t a big thing in my family, can you tell? I'm the black sheep in that regard.

Gallows humor has helped; I mean, how the fuck do you traverse the nightmares of having to live an Adult Life without making fun of the bleak and dark? For example, I was oddly bothered by having a Box o’ Mom on the mantle because it’s just fucking morbid. And I have a Box o’ Ruthie (my gramma who died in 2016), too, that we found in a fucking closet in my mom’s house (see earlier note about family sentiment).

Before she was also dust in a ziploc bag inside a box, Ruthie used to have one of those concrete porch goose things named Matilda. For the uninitiated, these are literal concrete goose figurines that are life size, and the thing to do was apparently buy them jaunty fucking outfits for the seasons and holidays. I always thought it was funny and weird, but Ruthie thought it was amazing, so we went with it and she had quite a wardrobe for Matilda. In that spirit, I decided that maybe Box o’ Mom needed to be festooned for holidays to make it at least a little darkly hilarious to have her sitting above my fireplace. So. Here she was for Easter in her bunny ears.

Everyone tells you that there isn’t a “right way” to grieve. They tell you to be kind to yourself, to be gentle and patient with your heart, to take whatever time you need. What I’ve learned is that while all that is true, grief is also just messy as fuck. One day I’m fine. The next day I’m brought to my knees in my mom’s living room because her chair is empty or recalling how traumatic her death was despite hospice (COPD is awful, kids, please don’t smoke). The one after that I’m cackling about some ridiculous shit she said to me, or shaking my head at the random IT consultations I was forced to do on her laptop, or remembering the time she passed out drunk in my apartment hallway in Milwaukee because she had too much chardonnay after our symphony date.

I think the best descriptor I had was from a friend who reminded me that we don’t get past the grief. It just becomes part of us. If grief is just love with no place to go, we grow around it and with it and it just becomes part of who and what we are and we are forever changed by it. And as anyone who has been there knows, change can be incredibly painful and beautiful and gut-wrenching all at the same time.

So I’m a fucking mess, mostly. I’m trying to be less messy, even a little bit, with each passing day. Yesterday I failed. Today I’m better. Tomorrow, who knows. Maybe Mom would be delighted that she’s all tangled up with me now in ways that mean I can never forget to call her again because she is just part of me. Maybe that really is her that I can feel brushing through the room when my chest hurts so much from the loss. Maybe.

She was a fan of Dear Fuckers, read every issue, and was the original source of my thorough training in cursing, swearing and artful word fuckery. She was a delight and a pain in my ass and would probably be pleased as punch to be the main character for this issue, but I’m not at all sure she’d endorse the bunny ears. But I know she would love knowing all of you are out there, sharing a bit of her with me, if nothing else to comfort the hole in my heart for a few extra moments today. So thanks for that.

In the days before she died, Mom asked me how my writing was going. We were talking about work stuff because she always was interested my career. I confessed that it really…hadn’t been because the months had been so hard and I couldn’t seem to find a lot of words.

She knew *exactly* what she was asking, by the way. She absolutely knew. She just stared at me and waited.

“MOM. You did NOT just ‘dying wish’ me about my writing!”

That grin. The innocent eye roll. The signature laugh. The head tilt and knowing look that silently asked “Well?”

What a total Mom move. She had mastered that shit over a lifetime and dropped the mic at the absolute 11th hour. Humor wrapped around the loving demand that I don’t surrender. Like a fucking queen.

I guess I’ll be over here getting back to writing then. So, messy heart and all, hopefully I’ll see you fuckers very soon.

Every once in a while, life is an asshole.

In my case, it has been the kind of persistent and sustained asshole that is riddled with pus-filled hemorrhoids sat atop a cactus in the desert heat. So in other words…not pretty.

The sum-up is that I took a new job back in December which has been awesome, but holy fucking demanding in ways that are hard to describe. I’m still really glad I did it and I absolutely adore the team I work with but I bit off a big fucking hunk of challenge with this thing.

Plus, my dog is trying to fucking die on me. He’s got lymphoma and I know we’re on borrowed time, so a hearty Fuck You to the forces of the universe that decided dogs only get a dozen or so years on this planet. That’s right up against having a mom who is really, really sick too and has spent far too much time in hospitals in recent months for my fucking liking.

So it has been, as they say, the perfectly fucktacular shitstorm of life and things like writing (and sometimes eating or sleeping or laundry or functioning) have been on the back burner.

Sorry about that. But it actually brings me to a good point for this months-overdue edition of your beloved Dear Fuckers.

You need to cut people some fucking slack. Including yourself.

I mean, for the last three (okay, arguably six) fucking years, we’ve been wandering through this hellscape of a societal cocktail that’s two parts pandemic, a few dashes of violent and extremist white supremacy just hanging out all casual-like on the steps of the fucking Capitol, a floater of rolling back of women’s rights into somewhere like the cretaceous era, and a chaser of collective mental health that’s crumbling at the slightest crosswind.

I’d say we’ve had our fucking share of Existential Dread, and that’s to say nothing of whateverthefuck we’re all going through in our own personal lives. Which, if my social media feeds are any indication these days, is quite a lot.

So we have our sanity dangling by a fucking thread but somehow we keep waking up every day just trying to do the “fine, this is fine, no problem it’s all fine” dance while also somehow being on the brink of a guttural, soul-wrenching scream that we’re not even sure is because of anything it’s just there, on the tip of our psyche daring us to open our mouths or hearts too wide lest it come tumbling out in the most inopportune moment.

We’re touch-starved, we’re intimacy and relationship starved, we’re afraid and we’re weary and we’re angry and it’s all this tangled labyrinth of emotion that one day might be okay because we can drown it in enough Productivity to keep it to a dull roar.

The next day it might be Very Much Not At All Fucking Okay.

And every time I have a VMNAAFO day, I still somehow manage to chastize myself for not doing enough to be Polly Fucking Sunshine or go burn some calories or finally patch that hole in the wall or remember to make dinner for my kid.

Seriously though, what the fuck is that?

If it were anyone else I loved, I’d be bending over backwards to demand that they have some grace for themselves and reiterate all the things that are like gale-force headwinds to well-being right now. But somehow I can’t seem to find that grace for myself. I try. But I fail a lot.

I’m sure I’m not the only one.

So I’m trying to cut myself slack for abandoning you for several months and I won’t pretend to make promises here that I have the spoons to write you weekly right now, but I’ll promise to show up a little more often even if it’s a little more messy because fuck, what isn’t messy right now? That’d be pretty on brand.

And that means we probably need to find a little more patience for each other, too, because we’re all swilling this swampy life elixir right now that kind of tastes like ass (and not the good kind). Except for the fucking misogynistic assholes I’ve encountered this week—yes, plural—including the one who tried to tell me on LinkedIn that sexism “doesn’t exist where he’s from”. Because I guess it’s a geographical thing, sort of like whether you call it a bubbler or a cah pahk. Sure, Craig. Okay. Whatever you say, champ. Have the day you deserve.

Anywhore, nothing more profound to say in this missive except: latitude, okay? We’re giving each other a wide berth for the messy and mundane and imperfect because our souls are currently stitched together with twist ties and day-old chewing gum and it’s the least we can do for one another.

Okay? Okay. Good to see you again. Most of you.

With love and angst,

Amber

PS - Andrew Scott as Moriarty is perfection, I will hear nothing else, and if you haven’t seen him do the Hamlet soliloquy or this gorgeous solo play called Sea Wall (full version here and way worth the $5), you are missing out on so, so much in life.

Today I ran across something I wrote last year.

It was a response to a guy I’d known for years through “professional” circles who systematically treated people, including me, terribly. In fact, fucker would get so hammered at events and put hands on women to the degree that his reputation became known and women in the industry would warn each other about him or steer clear of him at events.

But of course, as with most of these fucking guys, this one was lauded as a “thought leader” and got on stages to give speeches and fanbois fawned over him. Everyone seemed to turn the other way at the rest of his lecherous behavior. Natch.

I was happy over the years that the dude had faded from my view for the most part, I stopped running with any of those tangentially connected crowds, and I thought I’d probably never see his face again. Sadly, I wasn’t that lucky.

One day, my LinkedIn messages pinged and there’s his greasy face in my inbox, asking me for a favor. (This happens a lot with these dickheads; I was no one to them for a long time, then I work for a big company and I’m supposed to now call in favors for people who barely gave me a second glance all the years I needed support…but I digress).

And because I’d had enough of shit like this, and his in particular that day, this is how I responded:

You know, it's really funny to me how time and history work.

For many years, you and I ran in many of the same circles, but for much of that time, you were far too cool to pay me the time of day. Unless you were hammered, of course. 

Then you went out of your way to harass women, including me (which I doubt you'd remember). I watched you behave like such a disgusting human with a good friend of mine at a conference and she was so rattled by it, I'll never forget her tears and your *laughter* when you thought she was overreacting to your "advances".

But in polite and sober company, you and the boys club of digital were far, far too important for the likes of me, and in many a room, you practically looked PAST me.

You fucked over dear friends of mine in business, then had the audacity to ask them for favors down the road.

And surprise, surprise, here you are in my messages. I haven't heard from you for years - which honestly, was a blessing - and then suddenly when I have a high profile job at a high profile company, here you are, asking ME for favors as if we're old chums. Let me make something perfectly clear.

I am not your personal "in" here. I am not your tech support, your connection to the right people, and I am most certainly not your friend. I was polite twice before. Now you can take your arrogant, presumptuous self out of my inbox and off to wheedle somewhere else to try and call in favors over burned bridges.

They say the internet has a long memory, but truth is, my memory is longer still. How you treat people has consequences, and many of the "old guard" of men are learning that the hard way after they treated people - especially women - as expendable and beneath them for years. I'm all done with that sort of nonsense. I may not be able to hold you accountable for the way you treated people I love, but I can at least hold you accountable for how you treated ME. And you should be glad that all I'm doing is telling you to get bent in a private message.

So, no thanks. I won't be coming on your show, I won't be helping you get connected to the truly good people that I work with since they deserve better, and I certainly won't be continuing to let you ping me here to attempt to call in favors that you have never, ever earned.

I doubt you have the self-awareness to reflect on any of what got you here, but at the very least, I can make sure you don't get to keep doing it.

I’m sharing this today not because I’m going to name names. I’ll do that when I have nothing left to lose professionally and decide to fuck off to the Maldives for literal ever. Because we all know that the consequences are never for the perpetrators, but for the whistleblowers. But for now, the point is this.

We all have choices about whether we play nice with assholes or whether we hold them to account. We can’t always afford the price of doing it publicly (especially as anyone who is not a cishet white man), but we can all have backbone and integrity privately and make sure that shitty humans know that we know they’re shitty humans.

It’s cathartic. It puts people on notice. And it reminds us that we do not need to kowtow to these absolute skidmarks of human beings simply because they got themselves popular on the internet once or twice. I think I saved this in my Notes app specifically for the days when I wasn’t sure I had fight in me anymore. I’m glad Then Me took a moment to give Now Me a reminder.

Anyway. Hope it was worth the read and maybe inspires you to say absolutely not motherfuckers the next time someone walks through your ethics, boundaries, good taste, or basic sense of human fucking decency.

Let’s look out for one another out there.

Namaste.

With love and angst,

Amber

image credit: the amazingness that is Effin’ Birds. I own like ten mugs and Aaron’s comics give me life on the daily. You should buy merch too.

I’m so fucking tired of this narrative it hurts me in my no-no places.

I ‘worked my butt off’ at the beginning. Rose to being a VP at a F500, bootstrapping a business, being an “influencer” (cough), publishing and touring a book…and watching it all come crashing down.

You know what it got me?

Toxic workplaces and bosses, rampant imposter syndrome, ignoring sexual harassment in the name of getting ‘noticed’ or promoted, shifty business partners who ruined me financially, ladder climbing, perpetual insecurity, manipulative relationships, and a total crisis of confidence in my work and professional identity that nearly killed me. Not to mention missing the first several years of my daughter’s childhood on the road, pressing palms at events with useless and shallow people, and pumping time and money into weekend work and side hustles to prove…something? I don’t know what.

And when all was said and done, and I was digging out of the rubble, somehow I felt like the failure.

This shit destroys people.

Fuck this narrative, and the people who perpetuate it. I lost probably 6-8 years of my life and career to recovering from this kind of garbage. And I’m not alone.

It’s always proffered by people—mostly men—who have benefited from this approach, probably at the expense of other people (partners, spouses, systems, children, colleagues, peers) and who have such strong blinders on that they attribute their own success to their unique “hustle” and blithely conclude that any mythical negative consequences or experience related to such an approach are only the domain of the lazy, the incompetent, or those who didn’t want it enough.

Hustle culture is a fucking disease. And with every bit of bandwidth we add to the digital landscape, we accelerate it, because someone is out there to tell us that if the web moves that fast, we aren’t moving fast enough.

Let me tell you something plainly.

No one lies on their death bed wishing they worked more.

The regrets of the dying aren’t laden with not building their platform or their wealth or their shareholder value. They don’t count retweets or subscribers or clicks. Their memories are painfully rife with missing time with kids and loved ones, missing moments and memories, losing their identity inside of a profession, regretting the things they didn’t do more than the things they did.

And here we are, mired in global illness and strife and retraction of rights and protections for anyone who isn’t a white cishet Christian dude and polarizing and terrifying extremism in our own US borders…and we care about fucking working more hours so we can what, get a Good Effort ribbon when we die of an aneurism on an insurance plan paid for by an employer that will post our open job req within the day?

Stop counting the things that don’t count. You can’t get back the ones that do.

I know. That’s fucking trite. Fine. I’m okay with that.

But I get so fucking angry when this toxic, hustle-at-all-costs shit hits my timeline, and I RAGE when it gets the likes and shares from even more sycophants who buy into this shit and then pass it along like mental venereal disease to the next generation of people who want some skeleton key to success. It’s a devastating grift and one where the survivors of it are classified as failures instead of prophets.

Stop putting these fucking walking ballsacks of narcissism and privilege on pedestals to perpetuate the fairy tale of “hustle first and profit later”. It doesn’t have a great track record of success. Or reality.

I want more for you. And you should want more for yourself.

Stay frosty out there, friends. You don’t live to work. You work to live. Stop the hustle culture narrative in its tracks, beginning with your own boundaries.

Someone is watching and learning from you. And it matters.

With love and angst,

Amber

Hey, fuckers.

I know it’s late on Friday of a holiday weekend, but, whatever. I’m still alive over here. Mostly. It’s just been…a lot in recent months.

New (holy shit) role at The Job. Mom was sick, more than once. I had some moments where the days were mostly about keeping the fucking seams of my sanity stitched together just enough to wake up the next morning and do it all over again. So, hi.

It’s also tax season, which for me every year brings up Adulting in Expert Mode and I fucking hate it. All of it.

I’ve never been married. That’s somewhat by choice and somewhat by circumstance and that story or stories is for sure for another fucking episode that will be fueled by a lot of vodka martinis because that’s when my TMI trigger trips (hi, Christina).

But one of the results of not being married is that you deal with all of the Hard Fucking Adult Things by your own fucking self. Mostly for me those Hard Things are related to money.

I had next to zero financial literacy when I entered adulthood. It’s not that my parents weren’t well intended; I earned a dollar for every one of my dad’s envelopes of canceled checks I put in numerical order after they were returned to him by the bank. I sat next to him when he did the checking account budget book even if I never looked at the pages. But that was about it.

Credit and loans? Taxes? Mortgages? Retirement savings? Insurance? Estate planning? Budgeting? Nothing. Had no clue and not much help. Bought my first house totally on my own, mortgaged to the teeth, at the peak of the 2006 housing bubble. Add on to that the absolute shit show of building, running, and then imploding a business (and all the associated financial nightmares) and we have a recipe for Financial Trauma that has pervaded long into my 40s. I’m still paying down the debt and that says nothing for the emotional scars.

And seriously, what the fuck? This is the time in the mental vision of my Midlife where I was supposed to have all my fucking financial shit together, live in a house with no fucking neighbors, have enough cash in the bank to send my kid to college, and go on vacation occasionally. Maybe retire before I’m 70. That is…not how it all went down.

And professional help is great…if you can find the good ones. Because there are so many fucking bad ones. I’m fortunate to have eventually landed on some amazing lawyers, accountants, mortgage brokers, financial planners and whatever the fuck else thanks to friends and referrals. But WHY THE FUCK are these the people I need to have around me? Why is it not pool boys and polo ponies and fucking personal chefs or at the very fucking least a competent bikini wax person and meat counter guy? I feel like adulthood sold me a complete fucking bill of goods and instead of The Unmarried Cougar Life being filled with lots of booze and emotional-consequence-free dick and beach vacations, I have one filled with pivot tables and being on a first-name basis with IRS officers.

And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I’m not grateful. I have my proper fucking Gratitude Journal like a decent suburban non-housewife has. It even has fucking flowers on the cover. I write with different colored pens I get from Japan. And I AM FUCKING GRATEFUL. I am. I don’t have to worry about putting food on the table or gas in my car. And if my house burned down tomorrow my friends and family would put a roof over my head. By all accounts, I am *ridiculously* fortunate.

But I think I never quite banked on doing this part of life by myself, responsible for an amazing teenager, wondering if I’m seriously fucking it all up at every step (and knowing at times that I absolutely have).

So today I paid my vomit-inducing tax bill thanks to Gerry the Accountant who took me from tears to at least mutually feeling and lamenting the unsatisfying ass stuffing that the IRS gave me this year. I finished the living will and the powers of attorney and the updates to my other will documents because this week reminded me how important that shit is if I get hit by a bus next week. I threw some more money at the never-ending Debt Pile in hopes that it has an end sometime in my lifetime.

And then I poured a fucking martini. Because fuck, this stuff is overwhelming and scary and hard and can someone fucking explain to me why anyone would do anything related to money or finances or spreadsheets for a living? It’s like shoving splinters under your fingernails over and over again except at least that has an upside if pain turns you on. Dunno, maybe spreadsheets do that for you too. You do you.

Anyway, I don’t have a massive point other than saying that if you’re out there thinking that everyone else Has Their Shit Together financially, that money is only intimidating to you, that you’re somehow falling short because the very idea of navigating dollar signs makes you want to barf…you aren’t alone.

And then we add to it that it isn’t cool to talk about money or finances or salaries so we all just sit uncomfortably over our salads at lunch when we really want a cheeseburger and pretend that it’s fine, thanks, and gosh it’s really been too long, Orange Theory was so hard today, how was the family reunion and did you see that fucking insane post on Nextdoor?

Then it’s doubly, triply tough if you’re doing it without a partner because who the fuck is going to pour you the martini with extra olives after you do The Hard Things?

Sigh.

I also have so much to tell you guys about from the last several months so I’ll try to put that in episodes for the next few weeks. Thank you for still being here even though I’ve not been. One thing that’s a constant if you love a writer is that you have to love them even when they’re not writing the writing.

Okay, I made that rule up but I’m hoping you fuckers are on board. You’ve been so far.

I’ve missed you. Here’s to adulting, even when it’s hard as fuck.

With love and angst,

Amber

PS - That comic is from @EffinBirds and if you haven’t discovered Aaron and his amazingness yet, well, you’re missing out entirely. Fix that pronto. I have several mugs from the merch store. And no he’s not paying me, I just like cool and funny people.

Whoever decided I should start a new fucking job near the holidays and at the start of a new fucking year in the third century year of this fucking pandemic should be shot.

Me. That person is me.

I’ve had a hell of a time digging myself out of the black fucking mood that the holidays tend to put me in alongside trying to figure out how to lead a team again and navigate all the complexity of a new job in a new discipline so my brain has been on this endless teeter-totter of holy fuck this is awesome and exciting then the holy fuck what am I doing this is terrifying, over and over again.

Never let it be said that I don’t do things on expert mode.

But thing it’s got me thinking about is actually how much of a personal responsibility our own mental health and balance is. And that’s a cold fucking truth sometimes, but it’s a thing.

While I’ve been trying to dial the screaming synapses in my head down to a dull roar, I had to set aside some shit. Writing took a back seat, the blinds I was going to put up are still in the boxes in the garage, there’s Mount Amazon by the door because I only manage to find the cognitive space for de-packing and organizing shit I ordered, and I’m making my groceries come to me again because who the fuck wants to step outside in arctic temperatures in Chicago to buy food I can pretend to want to cook before I order DoorDash and dig the wilted celery out of the bottom of the drawer?

But so often, when we’re feeling the raggedy edges of burnout or overwhelm, we have to recognize first and foremost that no one is fucking coming to save us.

I know. It’s kind of brutal to put it that way. But really.

Jane the Therapist is awesome and she has done more to help me heal than anyone I’ve ever worked with. I have a great boss and great colleagues and wonderful friends. My family loves and cares about me. My kid is the light of my life.

But when it comes down to it, the only savior I have in my life is staring me dead-ass in the mirror every morning and begging me to make the coffee.

I have to fucking save myself. Every time. Over and over again.

Yep, there are times when that truth is absolutely exhausting. I want someone to do it for me. I want to cry and have someone scoop me up in their arms and remind me it’s going to be okay and tell me I’m a fucking warrior and remind me to drink a glass of water instead of the whole box of wine. I want someone to do the thing for me that I can’t find the motivation to do, or take it away from me and tell me I don’t have to fucking do it.

And sometimes they do.

But mostly, I have to decide each day how to put one foot in front of the other. I have to say no, I will not add that shit to my plate today. I will not return that text in the group chat that’s making me insane or worry about the opinion of that random fucknob on the internet. I have to tune in and know that my mind cannot fucking deal with that one task or problem or whatever that can surely fucking wait another 72 hours until I’m in a better place to deal with it. I have to cancel the meeting, move the phone call, block off time on my calendar, go to therapy, make the time for a walk in the middle of my workday, take the nap, prioritize the time with my daughter.

I have to do that shit. Myself. Me.

It’s not to say I have to do it alone, in that if I need moral support while I do it I should reach out and ask for it. But when it comes down to it, I have to do the work. Set the boundaries. Protect my own well-being and mental headspace and be really fucking clear about my capacity. So. Thats why it’s been like four fucking weeks since you had me swearing at you in your inbox. It’s me over here owning my shit, being my brain’s mama bear protector, being my own fucking white knight of fortitude because last I checked the calvary isn’t coming and I owe it to myself to not sit around and wait for them anyway.

Resilience is fucking exhausting, but it’s also an individual sport, even with the biggest cheering sections in the world.

(That also means the only person continually procrastinating on finishing the fucking book proposal is…yours truly. So I’m going to go work on that this weekend. Maybe. If the blinds in the garage don’t call to me first).

Wishing you the strength to bring your own armada to the party this week, to dust yourself off and be your own bestie, and to wield a mental strap-on of self-assurance and badassery under those pants of yours and walk with the swagger of someone befitting your station.

Or at the very least, don’t forget to drink a glass of water today, okay?

I’ll see you again soon.

With love and angst,

Amber

Ah, the holidays.

Time for joy and merriment and, while in the middle of the endless grind of a pandemic, a healthy fucking dose of exhaustion with a side of despair, ennui and malaise.

I don’t hate the holidays, exactly. As a kid I fucking loved them. The lights and the smells and the twinkle of starlight on snow and sledding and hot beverages (cider always because hot chocolate is fucking terrible). I love wrapping presents and feeling the joy and wonder of kids and the fact that most of the time, the holidays help us all act a little less like dickheads to one another if only for a short while.

But I confess that as an adult, the holiday wonderment is always tinged with a little bit of sadness and lament. Distance from family and loved ones combined with the faded pictures of what holidays used to be alongside the unfilled promise of what I once hoped they might be and…well…they’re hard.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m eminently grateful for the abundance of blessings I have. And I mean that. I’m fucking lucky and fortunate in all the senses of the word. I have an amazing kid, my health (except for this layer of roundness I can never, ever seem to fucking get rid of), a wonderful career, friends, people who love me.

And it’s a weird flavor mashup to have gratitude and hope all jumbled up with lonely and wistful and not always be able to separate them without berating yourself for feeling one or the other in any given moment.

I’ve been a little absent here for a few weeks since Philip and The Airport Gun Incident (which is like the world’s most dystopian children’s book title) because I’ve been starting a new role at work (and my brain is fucking exploding) and I’ve had some other personal shit going on with home and family and well…life doesn’t always make room for sweary newsletters no one will really miss. BUT.

In the midst of my confusing fucking tangle of holiday feelings, I wanted to say…thanks.

I know this time of year isn’t easy for all of you either. I also know many of you are exhausted from being resilient, tired of being isolated, wondering how to feel joy amid dread or sad because family isn’t nearby, by choice or by circumstance. I get it.

But it’s funny. I started this stupid little missive as a way to yell into the void about the copious amounts of human fuckery that abound in my life and the universe on the daily, and while it’s done its job as profanity-laden catharsis, I’ve also been delighted to find that many of you needed this as much as I did. Because here you are. And you keep reading. And you keep sending me the nicest, warmest, most inspiring and vulnerable and agonizing and hilarious notes in response to these…yell-o-grams.

As it turns out, we’re all a little bit messy, fumbling our way through the fucktacular disasters that we find ourselves navigating in daily life. And somehow, that cacophony of ridiculousness is made more tolerable when we soak in it together, stringing together blue language like garland for our Life Trees of Fuckery and sharing a few tears or a few laughs or simply that look of “hold on bitches, this is about to get real” along the way.

The days get longer starting this week. Which tells me the light persists, dawns still happen, stars still show up to spark our imaginations, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get a few more turns on this big blue marble together even if we have to shout into the void once in a while because someone made it necessary. I hope your days are merry and bright or at least dripping in bourbon or coffee or whatever your coping substances are of choice. No judgment here. Whatever it fucking takes.

Thank you for being here. You’ve been a bright spot for me and I’m grateful. Bring on the calendar flip, a renewed optimism, and new adventures for us all. If the assholes don’t cock it up for us, that is. One can hope.

With love and even a little merry amid the angst,

Amber

I heard the screams first.

And just as I looked up to see where they were coming from, BLAM. I got knocked fucking flat on my ass in the middle of the floor of the Atlanta airport. I was ready to get up and cut a bitch when I realized that the guy who had mowed me down was the first of a fucking stampede of people.

After I yanked out my earbud, I could hear the “Oh my God he’s got a GUN” and out of instinct mixed with sheer fucking confusion, I scuttled behind the ticket counter nearby realizing that more than likely, there was another fucking psychopath mowing people down with an assault weapon in a public place…and he was 20 yards from me.

The airline employee scrambled up and over the counter while shouting “HERE HE COMES HERE HE COMES”, his lanyard getting twisted around his face while he landed in a heap behind the huddled herd of us already on the floor.

That was the moment that I started to shake violently and start to believe that I might actually fucking die. Right there. And I wondered if the metal of the ticket counter was thick enough to stop bullets and who would tell my daughter as I held the young woman next to me close while she sobbed and prayed.

Seconds passed. Then minutes. More shots never came. What did come was a hulking TSA officer booming at us to MOVE MOVE MOVE OUT OUT OUT, trying to get us all to evacuate the building amid still more screaming and running. I had no idea if there was still someone with a gun on the loose, nor did the panicked human who used my fucking head and shoulder as a stepstool as he scrambled himself over the luggage scale to break for the door.

We ran.

Someone collided with a father sprinting with a stroller and I watched his fucking infant child go skittering across the floor and someone else mercifully block the stampede so that poor, terrified man could collect his now-screaming baby and run with the rest of us. There were people face down all across the floor amongst the abandoned luggage and I had no idea if they were alive or dead.

Out the door, through the parking garage, down the ramp. Out out out. Far. All I wanted was out and fucking far. As far as I could get.

At the end of the road leading from the terminal, bedraggled humans slowed down. Runs turned to heaving, breathless walking and shaking and we came together in small packs, borrowing phones from the people that had them since many left all their belongings behind. By some fucking miracle, I had my shoulder bag and phone still with me, so I loaned my phone to several trembling people to call parents, friends, loved ones to tell them that they were safe.

Safe.

I called my daughter to tell her I was safe. My mom and brother. Texted friends. Managed to hitch a ride with a different kind stranger to a gas station at the outskirts of the airport property so I could finally fucking think.

What we learned later was that the shots we heard (was it one, was it three, who the fuck knows, none of us can agree) was a man (a felon, as it happened) who had put his loaded fucking gun through security at the airport. And when TSA pulled his luggage aside to inspect it and unearthed the weapon, the man dove for it, the gun “went off”, and he ran. The HERE HE COMES was in reference to this fucker running out the door of the airport, feet from where I was cowered behind that Godforsaken fucking ticket counter. The airport insists it was an “accidental” discharge and there was “no danger” but last I checked, even accidental bullets fucking kill people and I don’t know how you fucking accidentally bring a loaded fucking gun to an airport and through security and we surely didn’t know any of that at the time, anyway. In fact, I’m pretty fucking sure we all believed we were going to die.

I was fine physically and totally not fine mentally, and somehow with the help of My People, I managed to get myself a few miles on foot to the car rental and get in a car and get myself to a hotel. I don’t remember much about this part. It’s really fucking blurry, if I’m honest. A lot of crying and a lot of shaking. I puked once in the parking garage behind some fucking Kia something or other and I only know that because I remember the nameplate by the side of my head as I retched.

At the hotel, after surely unsettling the poor woman who checked me in amidst my confusion and trembling hands fumbling with the credit card machine, I sat down on the edge of my bed on the 29th floor and sobbed until I couldn’t fucking breathe through my snotty nose. But when the tears couldn’t come anymore, I knew I also couldn’t fucking handle being alone. So, I went to the bar.

And behind the bar there was Philip.

Philip was jovial and loud, with a round and warm island-ish accent through his mask, and his eyes glittered with mischief. His bombastic laugher rang while he cut up with patrons at the end of the bar. I melted wearily onto a bar stool and when he made his way to me with the traditional coaster greeting, I tilted my head to look up at him. His eyes immediately changed.

Softly, gently: “Are you okay, young miss?”

No, I told him. I was decidedly not in any way fucking okay but that I would please like a glass of wine and Sauvignon Blanc was my usual but anything cold and not Chardonnay would be fine because Chardonnay is fucking terrible, ha ha pretend laughter.

In that moment, he did the most extraordinary thing.

My hands were on the bar, trembling again, and I fidgeted with the corner of the laminated menu I stared at just to have something to fucking do. I tried a feeble smile of thanks across what were surely swollen and red cheeks and attempted to be as normal and glued together as a broken human can appear to be. And all Philip did was stop what he was doing, reach across the bar, and put his hand on mine.

He didn’t say a word in that moment. Not a single thing. He simply looked in my eyes, gave my hand a gentle squeeze, and nodded. Then he waited until I nodded back, squeezed my hand once more, and let go.

Philip came back with an empty glass and a full, cold bottle. He poured. I drank.

When the tears came—and they just. kept. fucking. coming—he first slid me napkins. Then tissues. A nearby waitress came over then and put a little travel-sized package of tissues on the bar next to me with a reassuring hand on my shoulder. At some point in a calm moment, I told Philip I’d been at the airport and some vague, messy account of what had happened.

Philip listened gravely and attentively. Then, in his beachy baritone, said simply “You are here with me now, and you are safe.”

I cried some more. When the wine was gone, Philip brought me a Manhattan. Extra Luxardos. He brought me food I didn’t order and bade me simply, eat.

While I halfheartedly picked at chicken tenders and watched football on the televisions and listened to the gaggle of sorority sisters at their reunion and let the sounds of the bar wrap me in familiar while desperately trying to numb the fucking screams echoing in my head with Maker’s Mark, Philip was never more than a few feet away. Even when he left to go to the other side of the bar and serve a customer, he came back to perch nearby. Never crowding me, but never so far that I couldn’t look up and find him there.

During one of the unwitting teary overflows, I caught Philip’s eye a few feet away again at his unofficial sentinel post. I offered some awkward, waving gesture of God I’m sorry look at me I’m a fucking mess I’m so sorry I don’t know what’s wrong with me why the fuck can’t I stop crying I’m sorry to be that asshole this is so fucking embarrassing. He pulled his mask down just for a moment, looked at me kindly but squarely, and mouthed the words:

You’re safe.

I think I believed him that time. A little bit, at least.

I couldn’t be where I wanted in that moment. I couldn’t hug my daughter or be hugged by anyone who loved me and would protect me. I wasn’t home in my bed with my dogs and in familiar surroundings and I didn’t want to be in the strange bed and silence upstairs. I was alone and afraid and so very exhausted. And I didn’t even yet know how I was going to get home.

But Philip was there with me. In that noisy bar, hundreds of oblivious people somehow conducting their normal fucking lives all around us. An out-of-context guardian of a rumpled-up woman, never making a big fuss of watching over me but doing so just the same.

I’m not sure when or how those sounds and images will leave me. If they’ll leave me. I’m okay now, all things considered, and I know it could have been so much fucking worse. So much worse.

Parts of humanity sometimes feel really fucking broken. It’s hard not to look around and despair and rage and wonder what the everloving fuck we are doing to ourselves and to each other. Hope and faith feels really fucking out of reach sometimes.

But someone I love—someone with decidedly more faith and depth of grace than I, most days— told me that at other times, the people we find ourselves with turn out to be exactly who and what we need in that moment. He said universal or divine intervention isn’t always direct or first hand and that humans can be the very best of us in the simplest of ways…and the most profound. He believed Philip was there simply because I needed him to be.

So, perhaps our the hope in our tattered, upside-down world lies with the Philips.

With the people who are present in the most unlikely moments, greeting strangers with softness and care and a tender touch. Or with the people who bring the bottle when you only asked for a glass because they just fucking know. Maybe it’s with the people who add extra cherries because the little things matter. And with the people who never stand too far away when they know there is hurt happening nearby.

I am so afraid of what I saw that day. Still. Maybe always.

But that evening, I also found a tiny little shred of comfort, safety and hope in a crowded hotel bar at the bottom of a bourbon glass. Not because of what had been in it, but because of the soul of the man who had poured it.

May we all be a little bit of Philip, today and always, and in the darkest of moments continue to believe that light, gentleness, and goodness can still yet win.

With love,

Amber

My dad was a big shot executive. Or at least, to me he was.

He was the VP of Management of Information Systems (MIS) which is what we called IT back before some fucking nerds decided it needed a new name. But suffice it to say he’s a smart guy and as a kid I was always learning shit from him about why he used a certain joint to put those two boards together or how to do something in fucking algebra or how complex electrical circuits are designed or why they needed those giant mats under the mainframes (yes, I’m that old, fuck off).

And I remember once that he sat me down and told me that in big important work meetings he would sometimes sit there and the answer or the solution would be really fucking obvious to him but he’d say nothing because surely someone else would have thought of it already?

And then inevitably the clown car of stupidity would continue to empty all over the conference table until he’d get fed up and finally proffer his thinking and then everyone sitting there was *poof* MIND BLOWN. And then he’d sit and wonder how that so-obvious thing could be missed by other people.

I don’t think this sort of nerf-your-smarts thing is genetic but maybe it is? I didn’t finish college. For a bunch of really fucking messy personal reasons that I’ll maybe cover in a different DF about why we should round up all the abusive men, tie them together in a sack full of bowling balls, and throw them in the fucking sea.

But I think the imposter syndrome started immediately once I waltzed into the workforce because I didn’t have a degree. Then I ended up in marketing almost by accident and without formal education in the subject so from the get-go it was what the fuck do I know about it, anyway?

The thing about knowledge that’s sneaky is that if you work at getting more of it, and you’re actively learning and exploring and teaching yourself stuff or staying open to other smart people teaching you things…you actually get fucking better. In some cases, you get really fucking good.

And the really fucking gooder you are at things, the easier they come. (Except Rachmaninoff, I don’t think that ever fucking comes easy, the sadist). But largely, expertise comes with an ease, a comfort, a muscle memory that turns hard things into easier things.

Which, as it turns out, makes it really fucking easy for us to totally devalue them.

For one, I grew up terrified to be arrogant. I’m actually not sure where that got internalized or how, but even today as an adult, raw arrogance is one of the things that fucking sets my face on fire.

So how do I reconcile owning my knowledge and expertise without being one of the obnoxious shitlords whose oblivious-mediocre-white-man swagger makes me gag?

We are also hard wired to think that something has to be difficult in order for it to be valuable. That idea is reinforced all around us in the saccharine fucking platitudes and motivational quotes we use to fire people up from school to professional life: Work hard, struggle mightily, hustle, grind, grit, earn it, put in the wrench time, A FOR EFFORT, KIDS.

But the better we get at things, the easier they feel. So we fall into the trap of mistaking mastery for mediocrity, and not recognizing that we are, in fact, pretty fucking okay at the thing we’re doing. That weight you’re lifting in the gym doesn’t get lighter. You get fucking stronger.

So I’m going to set you straight on a few things today.

FIRST: Imposter syndrome is a regal asshole. It loves to seize the moments when that expertise feels second nature and tell you the lie that you’re phoning it in. That you’re not working as hard so the output is less valuable. And that sooner or later, someone is going to figure out that you’re not putting in that much effort and call you on it. It’s bullshit and your brain is dicking with you. Because…

SECOND: The experience and knowledge you’ve gained simply means that you don't have to fight as hard to solve problems with it. The library in your head is full of well-stocked shelves, so all you really have to do is pull down the relevant information and get to fucking work. Arrogance is when you think you’re superior to others. Confidence is simply standing square in the footprints of your know-how while recognizing that we all have shit to learn still. Which brings me to…

THIRD: The very motions that have become easier or habitual because of your experience, knowledge and abilities make room to learn new things since THEY are going to be the new hard things for a while. So in essence, the shit that’s becoming easy is making room for your brain to level the fuck up in other areas because you’re going to need the mental bandwidth. THAT IS A GOOD THING. Growth is good. We like growth.

So. My missive to you today, dear fuckers, is to stop fucking pulling your punches on the things that you know, on the good fucking work that you do, on the knowledge that is all soaked up in that brain of yours and unleash its full fucking glory for the benefit of your work or your passions or your people.

While you’re sitting there wallowing in a foamy hot tub of self-doubt, life is getting away from you out there. Time is passing. Those things you want to do are fucking waiting. The new shit you want to master isn’t going to come to you, you have to go fucking find it.

It’s Friday. I want you to go rest. Breathe. Sleep. Drink the good bottle or play with the kiddo or get outside with the dog or play the fucking video game until 3am with Mountain Dew and Cool Ranch Doritos. Whatever tickles your pickle.

And then after you’re rested, we’re going to come back at Monday armed with a different fucking attitude about our knowledge and skills, okay? No more being a fucking weenie. Own that shit.

Because we’ve got some dragons to slay out there. And I refuse to be the only asshole out on the battlefield, mmkay? Shit’s lonely. Bring snacks.

With love and angst,

Amber

How many times have you heard someone proudly puff their chest and tell you that they “tell it like it is?”

You know the type. Pretending to be really fucking edgy, proud of their bluntness, wielding their oh-so-fucking-erudite opinions from the back of the highest fucking high horse in all the land. Because they have anointed themselves the Tellers Of The Truthiest Truths, saving all of us fucking plebeians from our own misguided needs for people to not be total slagwagons to us when they say things.

I run into these fuckmuppets all the time in the professional world.

They think they’re doing us a fucking service by making sure that they come scampering to our rescue, that cocky smirk giving away the fact that they weren’t actually listening, just waiting for their turn to speak. They want us to believe they’re saving us from ourselves with their casual fucking cruelty when really it’s dead simple: they’re wildly insecure little shitlords whose entire personality is simply built upon picking on others so that they never have to come up with original thoughts of their own let alone subject it to the critique of the people they’re so fucking afraid of.

Which is…everybody.

When did we become proud to attach brutality to honesty as if it’s some kind of fucking virtue to inflict pain with our personal ideas of “truth”? And when did we get so arrogant as to assume that our version of what’s true and necessary is the one that should be staked through someone else with intellectual violence?

Over the years, I’ve learned that the “tell it like it is” people, the habitual “devil’s advocates” are so fucking afraid of being questioned or criticized themselves that they don’t just wear armor, they wear weapons as a wardrobe.

And if you don’t trip all over yourself to be grateful for their unkindness, that makes you naïve or overly fucking sensitive or unable to take criticism yourself.

Women, especially. We have been there a lot. How dare we reject the “feedback” from the men in our midst because they only have our best fucking interests at heart, darling, and why don’t we want to improve ourselves under their vast fucking swaths of wisdom that they read in the latest Tim Ferris bible of mental masturbation?

And if you’re lucky enough to spend time on the internet, you get the Reply Guys who I swear practically fucking salivate in the dark corners, lurking, just waiting for the opportunity to offer some witty repost, some oh-so-clever and biting point of view that they read on Reddit…and then who act as though you towel-snapped them in the balls when you reject their enlightened snark for the peevish, sniveling, shitty behavior that it is.

Want to impress me? Show me that you know how to have a conversation that’s dripping with emotional intelligence, with compassion, with empathy and self-awareness. Show me that you can hotly debate ideas without tearing down people as you do it. Show me that your honesty isn’t thinly-veiled meanness masquerading as wisdom. And more importantly, show me that sometimes you know it’s okay to just shut the ever-loving fuck up and realize that saying nothing is fucking free.

So many of us are walking around, backs striped with the lash marks of life hidden under our shirts and trying desperately to pretend that we’re f.i.n.e. Our resilience is held together with grade-school paste and tape that has long lost its stick. We are tired. We are wounded. We are fucking fragile.

I hope this week you care about the emotional aftertaste you leave with people after you’ve touched them.

Make someone feel seen. Make someone feel like you care to hear them. Allow moments to be not even a little bit about you. Realize that honesty can be kind. Gentle, even. Believe that softness is not weakness and that when we are granted the privilege of sharing our thoughts, we can do so in ways that aren’t hurtful or harmful or deliberately punitive and cruel.

The devil doesn’t need more fucking advocates. What he needs is more people to refuse to do that work in the name of something more beautiful, more hopeful, and more humane.

Let that be you this week. Heaven knows we need you out there.

With love and angst,

Amber