Something happened yesterday that I didn’t expect to hit me this hard. And then I realized — I’ve felt this before.
I think I finally figured out what’s been underneath this feeling I’ve been circling all day.
It’s not really about retirement. It’s not really about aging. It’s not even really about my business or my writing.
It’s about belonging.
I woke up this morning, read the news, and something hit me much harder than I understood at first. Something happened out there — in the larger world — that made me feel, in a very quiet and personal way, like a door had been shut in my face.
Yesterday, the Virginia Supreme Court overturned a referendum the people had voted for.
Like I’d been told: You thought your voice mattered? You thought your participation counted? Little Monica, let me explain something to you. It really doesn’t.
And I know some people will hear that and say — well, that’s just how it goes.
But I think it’s deeper than that.
Because here’s what I’ve been sitting with all day.
Democracy isn’t just a governmental system. It’s also a psychological agreement. A quiet promise that says: you count. You belong. Your voice enters the room. Your existence matters inside the larger story.
And when that agreement starts to crack — when something happens that makes you feel invisible inside a structure you thought included you — it doesn’t stay out there.
It becomes personal.
It comes home.
And I think that’s why today felt so strange. So disconnected. So heavy. I wasn’t just reading news. I was feeling something I’ve felt before — in rooms, in marriages, in institutions that quietly decided I didn’t need to be heard.
That feeling of: oh. I see. I was never actually in the room.
Maybe a lot of us are quietly feeling this right now. Not just politically. Existentially. Like the ground underneath something we counted on just shifted without warning.
And I don’t have a tidy resolution for that. I’m not going to wrap this up with three steps and a download.
But here’s what I keep coming back to.
Even if systems go cold — even if institutions grow distant — even if the culture keeps sorting us into demographics and data points and before photos —
we are still human beings.
We are still here.
Still capable of creativity. Still capable of love. Still capable of noticing beauty. Still capable of telling the truth about what it actually feels like to be alive in this particular moment.
And maybe that’s where I begin again today.
Not with certainty. Not with performance. Not with pretending I’ve got it figured out.
But simply by telling the truth.
That I think a lot of us are grieving a world we thought we belonged to.
And we are still here.
We are still HERE, dammit.
And that is not nothing.
That is actually everything.
