You're a deviant. Be proud.

Trust the process

Happy new year, Feral Ones!

I hope this quarter-of-a-century of the Gregorian calendar has treated you gently, or to some buttered rum. Or maybe it has brought you some hard lessons, in which case, «hugs».

Our 2025 began with the most epic stars under a black new moon, fireworks, friends, and this:

clearly, the future is still female

Appropriate, actually, since I was considering MAGIC as my word for 2025.

(Fun fact:

Julie Steward

said that soon as she and her bf chose the word MAGIC for 2025, “it started appearing everywhere.”)

But I was also thinking of KINDNESS: in my body, having felt disembodied this year; in my family, who can be little gremlins sometimes.

Honestly, I struggle with kindness, as my kindness has historically been mistaken for weakness and allowed others to take advantage.

For example, today. Hard as hell. I was so kind to my kids. Kindly asked them to get ready, for hours. My son twiddled his thumbs until I released the Kraken, and only then did he get dressed. My daughter is on her own time — the Maori word for autism means “in their own time and space.” We were so late that our therapist left just as we pulled up — thirty minutes later. Now kids are fighting, my daughter is bawling in the store, she loses her coat…

Then, miracle of miracles, MAGIC!

My daughter ended up having three friends sleep over, which never happens, and my son ended up at a sleepover with friends, too. Community. My heart is very full.

Now I’m thinking my word is TRUST. Trust the process. Trust that magic will occur. Trust that the universe has a plan and everything will work out (you won’t know how until later). Trust your daughter, who refuses to conform. Trust your intuition, which tells you not to float down that river just because everyone else is doing it.

Which brings us to this post.

During my literary event last fall, I suggested that true freedom is refusing to conform when it’s not in our best interest. Freedom is belonging to others while still living in our truth.

So we ask ourselves: What story do we want to live? What is the right way to be? Sometimes, we must swim to the side and find new estuaries and creeks. Sometimes, the best way is to bushwhack a trail that’s never existed.

As you know, I recently pulled my daughter from school and started homeschooling her. When the world is not designed for you, sometimes you must create your own.

My story follows a similar path. At sixteen, I spent many years in Latin America and the Caribbean — as

Sophie Strand

writes, to “create connections so feral and far-reaching” that they made me “resilient with otherness.”

I have worked hard with a fantastic writing group for the last few years to shape this story into a memoir.

My memoir is about seeking my place in the world and learning to belong in otherness. It’s about believing I was inherently flawed and then realizing it was the system around me that was flawed. It’s about living in cultures completely different from mine, summoning the sensitivities, empathy, and kindness that doomed me “weak” in white American culture to listen, learn, and shapeshift.

Soon, I will be dropping morsels from my memoir for paid subscribers. If you wish to read, you can join us beyond the paywall.

Hard times are coming when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. —Ursula LeGuin

I am so grateful to all of you for reading, those who have subscribed, and especially those who support me and my work with messages, comments, shares, hearts, loves, and paid subscriptions.

If you want to join our community beyond the paywall but can’t swing it financially, no worries. Just let me know by replying to this email, and I’ll comp you.

You can also show support by hitting that heart button, resharing, and restacking this post with a comment.

Either way, much love for being here. I hope your 2025 is full of magic, trust, balance, kindness, and love.

❤️, Summer

If you don’t fit,
if you feel at odds with the world,
if your identity is troubled and frayed,
if you feel lost and ashamed—
it could be because you have retained the human values you were supposed to have discarded.
You are a deviant.
Be proud.
--George Monbiot

Me, age 16, in Argentina