This used to irritate me. Not in some grand tragic way. More like a mosquito at bedtime. Small, relentless, impossible to ignore. One of my earliest memories on this planet is being told, in one way or another, that I was too much. And I understood very early that this was not being offered as a compliment.

Like so many of us who are different and otherly, I was trained out of my nature by the world around me. Do not wear so much color. Do not walk into a room like that. Do not hold your books like that. Do not cry at everything. Do not get sick all the time. Do not take every little thing to heart. Do not be so sensitive. Do not ask so many questions. Do not get up from that table until you eat what felt like an absurd amount of food. “Just don’t be too much,” like it was the easiest thing in the world not to be myself. It is a strange thing to teach a child, that their most natural response to life needs editing.

Meanwhile, sensitivity ran in the family. My mother cried at everything. Birthdays. Weddings. Cards. Songs. Flowers. Hugs. National holidays. A kind word. A goodbye. A goodnight. Her eyes filled easily and almost always to the discomfort of the room. It was treated like a glitch in the system. Here she goes again. Too emotional. Too sensitive. Too much.

She wrote the kind of cards that could break your heart open. She gave speeches that should have made rooms rise to their feet. Instead, time after time, they looked right past her. Including me. How lonely that must have felt. I’m sorry, Mom.

I could never understand why no one reached for her hand. Why did they treat her like a ghost when she was very much alive? Why was her crying mistaken for fragility when it was perhaps her deepest strength? Maybe because tears are inconvenient. They interrupt dinner. They slow down the room. They ask people to sit inside a feeling a little longer than they want to. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Years later, I heard someone say something I could not stop thinking about. The idea was simple: when children are raised without violence, humiliation, or the feeling that mistakes make them unlovable, something changes in the nervous system. Maybe not the whole world at once, but certainly the home. And home is where most of us first learn whether love remains when we are difficult. Whether mistakes are survivable. Whether feelings are welcome or immediately treated as too much.

That education does not stay politely in childhood. It follows us everywhere. Into friendships. Into marriages. Into offices. Into traffic. Into the small, casual ways we wound each other without even noticing.

Maybe that is why so many people can tolerate facts, opinions, even conflict, but panic the second a real feeling enters the room.

Which brings me to empathy. Not the performance of it. Not the identity. Not the people who announce they are empaths the way others announce they are gluten free. I mean the plain, unglamorous thing itself. The willingness to make room for a feeling that is not yours.

Empathy, as far as I can tell, does not require you to agree with some else’s feelings. Half the time it barely requires understanding. Understanding is lovely when available, like finding decent organic food at the airport, but empathy can survive without it. It only asks that we let another person’s feeling exist for a moment without immediately rushing to correct, tidy, or translate it into something easier for yourself.

And because life enjoys a practical demonstration, I got one.

At a holiday party in Tahoe City, I was talking to one half of a couple everyone seems to adore. We talked winter routines, local life, food. Small mountain town things. At some point he mentioned they rarely go to Truckee because after a long day it feels far. This came moments after he casually mentioned their au pair takes their child to gym class there. He said he is usually too tired. Truckee was, and is, 30 minutes away.

And then my mouth, unsupervised and apparently fresh off its shift as a supreme court judge, said: “What do you do all day that you’re so tired?”

Not in the tone my inner narrator promised. It came out like a little slap in a velvet glove. The moment it left me, I felt it.

And I did not repair it. That was the miss. Not the imperfect moment. The silence after. Because I know repair. I believe in repair. But in real time, I froze. My nervous system decided silence was safer than owning it out loud. So I did what many of us do when we realize we have stepped on someone’s heart’s foot. I heard the crunch and I kept talking, hoping the moment would dissolve on its own. Except moments like those do not dissolve. They move in. They bring a toothbrush.

For a couple weeks I carried it around like a pebble in my shoe. Not enough to stop me, but enough to make each step slightly off.

Here’s the twist that made it sting, and also made it honest. I do not have a job in the clean, résumé-friendly sense. No meetings that count as proof of living a clock-in life. My days are full, hectic, and real, but not stamped with a title. And I do not have a child, which, mathematically speaking, gives him a strong lead in the Exhaustion Olympics. So the question was never really about him. It was projection with good lighting. It was my own fear of being misunderstood. My own tenderness around invisible labor. It was the part of me that has had to defend my own days, my own rhythm, my own value, one too many times. And instead of naming it, I disguised it as a question. One that sounded suspiciously like a verdict.

Then my partner Jeremy ran into his husband at the gym and learned he had been dealing with nerve issues, including an ER visit. Suddenly my little social misfire was no longer the headline. Someone was in pain. Real pain. The kind that makes the day feel like a steep staircase. The real reason I hadn’t reached out wasn’t that I didn’t know what to say. It was that I didn’t want to feel the embarrassment again. So I did it anyway. I texted him.

I wished him a happy new year. Said I had heard about the nerve pain and understood more than I wanted to after a recent shingles adventure of my own. Then I said the thing I should have said sooner: I felt like I landed wrong at the party and did not want it to sit weird. I was sorry. I would love a re-do.

He answered with kindness. Calm kindness. The kind that does not make you audition for forgiveness. And something in me unclenched.

That is when I understood that empathy is not only about how we hold other people in their pain, but how we return after we have landed wrong, stay available to repair, and resist collapsing into shame.

We often talk about empathy as if it were a personality trait, some lucky inheritance handed to a soft hearted few. But I’ve started to suspect it’s less like personality and more like oxygen in a room. You don’t brag about it. You just notice it when it’s missing. It can hold tears without treating them like a flood. It can hold awkwardness without rushing to bleach it. It can hold someone else’s problem without immediately comparing it to a bigger one and announcing the difference as though that were wisdom.

And yes, there are horrors in this world that bend the mind. Genocide. Hunger. War. Abuse. Devastation on every scale. But if we cannot stop these horrors by dawn, why would we deny each other the smaller mercies that are available right now and that cost nothing. Why would tenderness be the first luxury we cut.

Most people are carrying something the way a house carries winter. Some roofs hold. Some pipes burst. Some windows rattle all season and no one outside can hear it. Your house may not look like mine. Mine may not look like much from the street. But the body knows what it is to brace against weather. Maybe that alone is reason enough to handle each other more carefully. And perhaps, every once in a while, ourselves too. Most people would never speak to a loved one the way they speak to themselves while suffering.

Maybe that is all empathy really is. Not sainthood. Not perfection. Just making room. Room for what aches, what embarrasses, what arrives badly timed and difficult to name. Room for what you do not fully understand. Room to circle back after you have landed wrong. Room to let someone keep their dignity while feeling exactly what they feel. And, every once in a while, maybe extending that same grace to yourself when your own body or heart stops making sense. Maybe it is holding your mother’s hand through her tears while she’s watching a commercial and understanding that love does not always need words.

I am still a work in progress. Still catching myself. Still reaching back when I miss, and boy do I miss more than I’d like. But if I can become someone people exhale around, someone who does not treat feeling like a disruption or a flaw, then maybe that is enough.

Sure, this may look like a small act from outside.

Until you live in a world starving for it.

For my mother, who was and is never too much.

I have not lived through some towering, earth splitting loss. I can only speak to my own sharp edged griefs. Even they arrive carrying too much. Longing, acceptance, regret, fear, anger, sorrow, grace, remembrance, pain, laughter, and tebessum (a Turkish word for that soft, knowing smile that naturally rises on your face) through sadness, without touching it. How can a human hold all that. How do you make room for something that takes up the whole room.

Last month I lost a high school friend, Seda, a total firecracker, all spark, wild, sharp, unmanageable, funny and trouble in the best possible sense. Then I lost MaryJo, my dear friend’s mother, who was also one of my spirit animals and a dear friend in her own right. MaryJo and I talked about life in that rare way that is joyful without being performative. After work, between conference calls, while making tea, folding laundry, opening mail, in traffic, or stepping out for air and whenever California handed her a new story. We exchanged cards, lots of cards. I loved her, she loved me, in every sense of the word and I felt it with no effort. Even writing that now floods my eyes. My eternal friend. Thank you.

Two losses, back to back. It felt like the universe was clearing its throat. Grief hovered over me like a lost train of thought I kept reaching for and could not catch. I am old enough to have buried elders. Somehow those two landed differently. I got myself ready to embark on a journey looking for answers on grief, only to realize it was already parked outside my door and had taken over the whole lot.

I had spoken to Seda a few months before she left. She told me about her health, and lack thereof. I wished her healing and all the beauty in the world. Funny and strangely spot on for a last thing to say. Something came over me after she passed and I sent her emojis anyway, like throwing a penny into a well knowing no one is on the other end to toss it back. Her husband replied. She was an angel now. The family was doing okay. Did I have any photos or memories to share for their girls.

Soon enough, I was back in the attic of myself, pulling out bins, opening albums, finding faces that still looked far too alive to have left the building. There they were, frozen in photographs, with no concern whatsoever for chronology. A friendship smiling under a blanket. A goodbye before moving to America. Kids wild enough to leave home as if headed to school, only to take a plane to another city for the day because apparently that felt reasonable in the nineties.

Then another photo I was not expecting. Another classmate, Ipek, bright as day, who left this earth by choice. With her came a different grief, one I had apparently filed under not now, does not make sense, circle back later.

So there I was, touching the faces of the dead with the fingertips of the living, trying to understand how a person can be nowhere and everywhere at once. Trying to think of what one says to children about a mother they barely got to have. Do you say she was wild. Fierce. Smoked like a chimney. Cussed back at cab drivers. Had the shell of a warrior and the touch of a feather. Do you say your mother was a complete original and the world is now slightly less interesting without her.

And then, because life refuses to let any emotional scene become a hallmark movie, I came downstairs for tissues and found the refrigerator acting up.

Most of the appliances were already on their way out, so I decided to finally use the new ones that had been sitting in the garage for four years. While I was contemplating death and memory, the kitchen was under siege. New stove, wrong gas line. Dishwasher handle in a territorial dispute with the drawer next to it. Refrigerator too large, too snug, too committed to inconvenience. Water where it should not be. Cabinets shifting. Nervous system trying to remain chic. The kitchen upside down. The living room suddenly not a living room. Days of disorder. It is one of life’s rudest and finest qualities that while your heart is busy asking cosmic questions, an appliance will cut in and say, devastating, yes, but where exactly would you like this electrical box.

I used to imagine life arriving in chapters. Grand sorrow here. Great beauty there. Small domestic nuisance in the next room. But no. It all walks in together, talking over each other like relatives at Thanksgiving. Grief sits next to style magazine. Synchronicity borrows your glitter. The universe sends you a cardigan when you need it the most by way of a dead friend and then, in the same breath, asks whether you have chosen the right music for your story post.

The sadness is real, but so is the strange dead air around it, dusty attic air, ancient photo albums, the hunt for the right plastic bin in a tight, hot space.

For me, the hardest part is not always the crying. Sometimes it is the flatness. The absolute refusal of life to pause and the absolute refusal of grief to leave.

It’s been a year since I let go of the old world. What followed wasn’t a plan. It was a becoming. By the quiet grace of synchronicity, I began to manifest not what I thought I wanted, but what my soul had been asking for all along.

For 20 years, every single morning began something like this: cell already ringing before my eyes were open, all three phone lines blinking at once before I got to the office, 50-something emails landing while I was mid-knot on my shoes, 60-plus clients pulling in 60-plus directions, contracts on one screen, a scandal on the other, a manager furious, a publicist spinning, a brand executive confused, an award show three days away, a flight I was already late for. That was Tuesday. Wednesday looked exactly the same. So did every Thursday for two decades. And then one day, mid-sentence, mid-chaos, mid-everything, I decided to get off the ride. And discovered that what I had been chasing between all the noise had actually been waiting for me the whole time.

I landed in Tahoe City and found an altogether new rhythm.

At least one day a week, at the fun-family-run Hobo Ranch in Sierra Valley, I work the land under the steady guidance of Heather River, who also owns Bespoke/Atelier in downtown Truckee where we first met. She is a brilliant, kind, generous woman who teaches me the language of sheep, seeds, water, family, donkey, community, chickens, and soil. I’m learning how to listen before I plant, to carry more than tools, to host with intention. We line trees with wool sheared at the farm to nourish and protect the soil. I watch eggs gathered warm from the hen like treasure, whisper to sheep as they pass, build fences from old willow branches with nothing but twine and trust, and find new muscles in my body and in my spirit, I didn’t know I had. I am becoming fluent in the earth.

And all around me on the farm, there is quiet medicine: a father who meets his son on his knees at day’s end, asking what felt magical. Brothers who move like kin and co-conspirators. A mother who gives without measure to her family, to community, to strangers, to life itself. She fights for earth, justice, and people she’ll never meet. And she does it all with grit, grace, and a kind of quiet fire that humbles you just to witness. Just being near them, my heart remembers how to mend.

At least one other day, I work beside a woman who once looked at me and knew. Herbalist and mystery magic weaver Aurora Wellise of Lawless Botanics, makes tinctures, bath salts, teas, sprays, and speaks not just to plants but to the unseen. She reads Akashic Records. She listens. She remembers.

She doesn’t just grow herbs. She grows worlds.

She reminds me that healing is everywhere: in how we gather, in how we grieve, in how she meets difficulty with a sincere, “We’re not done yet.”

We drink from the spring and feel it rewrite something inside us.

She shows me how to ask permission before picking. How to move without disturbing the silence.

She doesn’t hand out answers. She makes space for the questions to rise.

There are teachers who hand you instructions, and those who hand you wild violet honey made from the flowers you gathered together, to gently show you how love preserves.

We work together in a rhythm deeper than words. Even in stillness, there is learning.

Our shared gratitude flows quietly on and off “work”. A thread of friendship and purpose.

From kitchen fires to soul fires, compost to cosmos, I’m learning not just how to make medicine, but to be it. Somehow, beside her, I don’t just move forward. I root deeper.

And once a week, as a Meals on Wheels volunteer, I deliver food to elders, some of whom are over 100 years old, and some who are barely scraping by, but whose wealth lives in stories and spirit. What they hunger for is not food, but connection. I sit. I listen. I fix their phones, their internet, their bathmats. I find other lovely humans to fix their stairs, chop their wood. I show up for their VA appointments. I help them sell what they’ve made with their hands. I meet them where they are. We hold hands and cry. We talk about the weather. They call me “Sparkles,” tell me I’m their favorite, and I feel it, we love each other.

The other day, the sky held a thousand shades. In the passenger seat sat a carton of eggs and avocados all mottled, imperfect, beautiful. A reward not for what I earned, but for what I gave.

Some nights, I return home and cry, not from sorrow, but from a fullness that feels like freedom.

And there are other moments. Wild, beautiful, unscheduled.

A long soak in the hot springs with a friend, naked and soft from the day’s work. Our bodies resting, our spirits unraveling into one another. We spoke of life with that easy kind of openness that only comes when there’s nothing to prove, just presence. That, too, felt like medicine.

One night, I watched this documentary on sound healing and whispered to the universe, show me how. By morning, a friend had texted: “Come to kirtan?”

A small bird flew into a window and left her body behind so I made her a resting place, circled with dried flowers, a wooden round at the center. That night, I offered her to an owl. A quiet gift back to the wild.

And when the lake calls, I go. No plan. Just a dear friend beside me and a tug in the chest. We slip into the cold, living water, laughing like kids who remembered joy just in time.

These are the moments that stitch the everyday into something sacred.

I don’t know where this road is taking me. But for the first time, the journey itself is enough. And that, that is everything.

Call me Farmer Spice. Spirit Spice. Sparkle Spice. Why you gotta choose when you can be all?

What’s life without a little mix of color and flavor, anyway?

All Spice