For the last two months, I’ve been carrying my dog up and down the stairs. We have tall stairs, and a lot of them. Maeby has arthritis and an aggressive slipped disc. So about thirty times a day, when I want to go down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, or when I need to follow Juno up the stairs, or when Hudson forgets his shoes, I heft my 30 pound dog up and down, up and down, so her separation anxiety doesn’t compel her to bound up the stairs on her own and slip that disc even more.

It’s a real nuisance honestly, but It’s purpose-driven work. Lately, it feels like some of the only purpose-driven work that I am doing.

Keep doggie out of pain (up up up). Keep doggie out of pain (down down down).

And even if I can kind of succeed, the deeply uncomfortable feeling is that it’s timebound and fleeting. I cannot control this for long. At some point, and some point soon, the pain will get the better of Maeby.

And then the only thing I can control is the moment we say goodbye.

Lately I feel like I am adding to this funeral pyre of things I can’t control, stick by stick, but I am reticent to light it on fire, reticent to actually let it all go. I’d rather hoard the things that stress me out, collect them, build them higher and higher rather than actually surrender.

But also, who can blame me? Because sometimes the only way I feel like I can surrender completely is to stop caring altogether. I’ve been reluctantly dabbling with this feeling. I’ve been blanketing myself in Love Island—a basically fictitious little island of Reality TV where the contestants don’t have political beliefs, they fall in love like it’s their job, because it is their job(!) to offer us something alternative, something vapid, something that doesn’t slip you into primordial despair. Meanwhile, you can interact with Maybeline ads while you vote from your phone about how to mess with the couples on Love Island from the comfort of your own home.

It all feels very Hunger Games, and yet it offers momentary reprieve from the deluge of dying doggies and geriatric presidents and assassination attempts and wars in Gaza and global warming and threatening autocracies and even the Japanese Beetles that keep eating my roses. It’s much easier, and infinitely more fun to worry about whether Leah and Rob are going to re-couple.

And yet, it’s unnerving to feel yourself becoming what the history books warned about. Disillusioned. If you’re a longtime reader of my writing, you can see that I’ve been tiptoeing to the brink of this feeling for a long time.

Lately it seems like there’s so much pressure to process publicly. Which compels me to draw conclusions before I am ready.

If you know me as a writer, you know that conclusions are always my sore spot—where I am always trying and failing to stick the landing. But maybe that’s just because there’s nothing to conclude yet. As my therapist pointed out, history is still happening. I AM STILL HAPPENING. My shelf is slowly breaking on all sides, but nothing has landed on the floor yet, so who cares if the landing doesn’t stick?

Somewhere along the way, my audience become my children instead of my followers and that’s shifted my need to tie things up with a bow.

I’d rather 38 year old Hudson and 36 year old Juno see that I grappled real time. That conviction is a battle hard-fought, not handed to you. That the temptation for disillusionment, dehumanization, self preservation are tempting but that, if nothing else and in spite of the barrage, I at least still want NOT to be those things.

I hope more than anything I’m in the process of finding quiet conviction. Not the kind that propels me to jam your nose into my conviction. But the kind that is apparent through a life of action and wisdom. I want 30-something Hudson and Juno to know that it’s ok if they’re still looking for it. I want them to see that in the face of a tidal wave of history that has left us barraged, and barricaded, and scared, and privileged, and anguished, that their mama fought for a little conviction when the world tried to wrestle it from us with all it had. The world prefers us tired. Complicit. Passive.

Right now, I know that at least one thing I am doing is more good than it is hard. And so, even in the middle of the night, even when I am tired, even when my hands are full, I will continue to muster muster muster. Slide my hands behind Maeby’s haunches. Heft. Keep lifting the dog up the stairs.

I can practice this micro-conviction while I search for something larger. Just because it’s little hard, and a little heavy, and a lot inconvenient, and a great deal of sad… doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.