She is ten. And I have never once looked at my child and said, sweetheart, physical pain is a love language, lean in. But I had to get very honest with myself to admit that I didn’t have to teach her this. Before she ever set foot in fifth grade, before any boy ever laid a hand on her at recess, she had already been living a situation where the man she loved most in the world would tease her, flick her, pinch her, squeeze her neck, and when she asked him why, he looked at her and said, “because I love you.” Said by a grown man to his little girl, teaching her without a single lesson plan, which direction everything falls. Teaching her that love and discomfort belong in that home together. Teaching her that the people who hurt you are often the people who mean it most sincerely. And this is how children learn everything that will shape the rest of their lives, by being shown, over and over, until it starts feeling like gravity.

So when a boy in her class started punching her in the back, pushing her, and hitting her at recess, she shrugged. That’s the part I can’t get over. Not the hitting, though the hitting made me want to commit several felonies. The shrug. The already tired shrug of a girl who had figured out this is how love goes.

Now, before you decide this story is about someone else’s family, I need you to stay with me because I watch parents do this all the time and I did it too. We hear something like this and we think, well, my husband is not like that. He’s just playful. He’s just rough housing, or just teasing…it’s affectionate. Boys are physical, that’s just how he shows love. And maybe that’s true. But I want you to ask your daughter, not your husband, your daughter, whether it feels like love when it happens.

In healthy, innocent play, the child is relaxed, and the laughter is real, not strained or nervous. She knows she can say “stop” or pull away and that boundary will be respected immediately, because the adult is paying close attention to her cues. When it’s over, she doesn’t walk away confused or unsettled. She feels connected, safe, and still fully herself. But there is a version of this in too many houses where a dad is a little rough, a little grabby, a little careless with the small body that trusts him completely. Sometimes it looks like nothing. Until your daughter shrugs at you one day and you realize she’s been building her understanding of love out of it. That’s gravity. And it does not stay in the house. It walks right into marriages, or into fifth grade with her, and it shrugs when a boy puts his hands on her and she thinks, this is probably just how it goes.

So after two weeks of coaching my daughter through every reasonable option; tell him to stop, walk away, ask a teacher, tell a teacher, tell the principal, let’s call the principal—and watching none of it work, I did something unreasonable. The boy showed up at my house one afternoon, wanting my daughter to come play sports, because she can absolutely school anyone in sports. I invited him inside. His dad was in the military. You could see how proud he was of that with his chest out, chin up, the pride of a kid. And I said, “your dad is trained to protect and defend?” “Yes,” he said. “That’s the thing about honorable men,” I told him. “They don’t hurt girls. They protect them. They stop other men who try to cause harm, too.” I watched something shift in him. So I continued speaking with my kids as the audience. “Girls only like boys who are kind to them,” I said. “Boys who hit girls — that’s not a crush. That’s called abuse. And we don’t allow that. Right?”

The next day my daughter came home luminous. He had been kind to her all day. For the last month he has treated her like a queen. When another boy called her a dictator on the playground, this same kid, this recent puncher, stepped in and defended her. She came home looked at me and said, “thank you for telling him, Mom. And teaching him.” She is already doing maintenance on a world she didn’t break.

That boy wasn’t a monster. He was just falling in the only direction of gravity. Because boys are in this too. They get teased for liking girls, and the men in their lives don’t sit them down and tell them what’s what…they mostly worry about the boy’s wins on the field, or grades, or whether they’ve mowed the lawn. And so a fifth grade boy does what fifth grade boys have always done, which is act out the only emotional vocabulary available to him, which is physical. And every adult around him lets it pass with a smirk and a “boys will be boys,” which is a sentence that has done more damage to this country than most natural disasters and should be banned immediately. Nobody rewrites the law of gravity for boys either. And so they just keep falling.

But what enrages me most is the men who most loudly defend badly behaved boys are the exact same men who would go completely feral if anyone treated their daughters that way. The same guy who says “that’s just how boys show they like someone” would also, about his own daughter, say he’d destroy any man who touched her. He holds both of these positions simultaneously and sees no contradiction. He is out here claiming to be a protector of women while raising, and sometimes being, the very thing women need protecting from. And he cannot see it. Because gravity doesn’t feel like a force when you’re the one it’s working for.

I know this type of man, because I was married to him. And where I have a hard time catching my breath—is that I stayed for twelve years. Me. The woman writing this. I stayed, and I want to be honest about why, because I think it matters, especially for the women reading this who are nodding slowly and looking at the floor right now.

The gravity that holds women in place is not just cultural. Sometimes it has scripture behind it. Sometimes it has been given to you by people you love and trust completely, described in the language of covenants and eternal families and divine order. It makes him head of your household. And sounds like, your suffering is sacred, and your willingness to endure, to forgive, to keep the peace is righteousness. And when the God you have prayed to your whole life and the community you were raised in and the eternal promises you made at an altar are all pulling in the same direction, that is not gravity anymore. It’s the ground beneath your feet, and you don’t argue with the ground. You just stand on it and call it solid, because for you, it is. Your God did not put you on this earth to be a soft place for a man to land his worst impulses, and then thank him for it. I believe that. I believe it the way I now believe in choosing which direction I fall.

I had a man say, “I can see why you’re divorced.” Yes, you can. Because I looked at my life and chose differently. And to a certain kind of man, and to certain institutions built by certain kinds of men, a woman who does that is the most unsettling thing in the world. Because I decided my own life was worth choosing. And I was right.

My daughter shrugged because she was already, at ten, subject to a pull she couldn’t see or question. She had learned, from someone who genuinely loved her, that this is just what love feels like sometimes. That it pushes and squeezes and flicks and says because I love you and you just absorb it, you just let it be the law, because what else would you do—argue with gravity?

I tell her now that she can argue with gravity. That she can look at any force that is pulling her somewhere she doesn’t want to go and say, who decided this was okay? Who made this the rule? And, most importantly, why am I the one who has to keep falling?

A boy who is mean is not mysterious or romantic. He is not your assignment. He’s not a boy with big feelings who doesn’t know how to manage them. He’s not someone you should be patient with while he figures it out using your body. And his trajectory is not your responsibility.

And I’ve taught my son that the strongest thing he can do is make a woman feel genuinely safe. Not owned, not protected from other men while you’re the threat. Actually safe. That is the whole job. Practice it until it’s just who you are. Until kindness is just the direction you fall, automatically, without thinking. Because hopefully someone rewrote the law for you early enough that you don’t even remember learning it.

The good men, who are raising sons and daughters on purpose won’t be losing their minds in my comments. They already know. They know that hurting their daughter, even playfully, teaches her something permanent. They know their son’s relationship with women matters more than any stat or grade.

Gravity isn’t a law. It’s a theory. But it’s just what happens when nobody tells you otherwise. So tell them otherwise. Before she shrugs.

With love,

Sarah Steed xx

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Women are starting to examine inherited systems that humanity mostly accepted without inspection for thousands of years, and that’s what makes this interesting. We’re doing the math now. When I gave everything away gracefully, people called me loving. If I asked for rest, I felt guilty. If I wanted ownership, autonomy, solitude, ambition, creative expression, financial independence or fifteen uninterrupted minutes, I was selfish. Which is fascinating because men have been disappearing into garages and nobody ever accuses Gary of abandoning the family because he needed six uninterrupted hours for golf.

Men disappear and we say it’s fishing. Women disappear for everyone else. And that is the deeper story underneath all of this.

Historically, men were allowed to remain intact people. But women were environments that became the social glue, the regulators, and the memory keepers while giving everyone a soft place to land. Our identities have become all about maintaining life around us that we’ve lost permission to experience ourselves AS life. What’s being spoken about right now is women’s unpaid labor, which isn’t the most haunting part. I think the harder to stomach part is how thoroughly women disappear into functionality, and the self-interuption of it all. A woman could be halfway through a meal, a sentence, a shower, a graduate degree, a nervous breakdown, or an orgasm and someone is yelling for her, and expecting her to override what she is doing and this has been happening for generations. Women monitor everyone else all the time that we have developed an almost supernatural inability to recognize our own depletion until the body finally stages a hostage negotiation. Which explains at least forty percent of female wellness culture.

Women are out here taking magnesium glycinate, sea moss, adrenal cocktails, hormone powders, peptides, and tinctures, because we don’t realize the fatigue, the weight gain, the hormone chaos might actually be existential. And I think this is why women are changing so rapidly right now. And it’s not because we hate men, okay Chad. Or because feminism is to blame. Or selfishness. I think women are having the psychological experience of realizing they are separate people, which sounds absurd to say because of course women are people. But historically, women were often treated like a highly intelligent roomba, rather than an individual.

And now the roomba is becoming conscious. That’s what feels important.

Women are not merely asking men to help more around the house, nor are they simply blaming patriarchy. They are basically beginning to question why their humanity is organized around perpetual accessibility in the first place. And oddly enough, I don’t think anger is driving most of this. I think it’s fatigue. Fatigue mixed with pattern recognition.

Doesn’t it feel sometimes like the exhaustion did not begin with us personally? It feels like it was injected into our bloodstream from our great great grandmother’s time period. And now women are asking the questions that make those old systems spasm through their dockers. My great grandmother birthed nine children and by the time the youngest was eight, she was sent to an asylum, because back then, when a woman’s suffering became too visible, families often believed institutionalizing her was the most loving or responsible thing they could do. Mom is not okay? Mom is overwhelmed? Mom cannot keep carrying everyone all the time? The culture had very few places to put female pain except somewhere private, and out of sight.

I’ve always felt like motherhood was treated as sacred right up until the moment compensation was mentioned. Then it became “just what women do,” which is interesting considering it is some of the hardest, most relentless labor on earth. Women are still called “provided for” while remaining statistically more financially vulnerable after divorce, caregiving, childbirth, and aging. Again…speaking from personal experience here. The math is not mathing.

Once women fully understand the economic, emotional, sexual, psychological, and reproductive value of what they have been giving away for free, I don’t know if civilization survives in its current form. I mean that sincerely. Birth rates are dropping, and marriage rates are dropping , and I don’t think it’s because women suddenly became selfish monsters who hate love. Women are opting out of arrangements that require them to become exhausted household apparitions haunting everyone else’s well-being and feeling fulfilled about it all.

And men are confused. Not all men. Relax, Todd. Have a cracker. Because for generations, men were told to be providers. Which to be fair, many of them tried to do. They carried so much pressure. Yes, men provided something. But they are not prepared for the women who are asking to define what they are providing. Provides what exactly, Brad? Access? Access to what? A home or ownership of one? Security or dependence? Partnership, or permanent gratitude? And I think the next twenty years are going to produce one of the strangest social rewrites humanity has ever witnessed. Because women are beginning to realize they are not dependent in the way everyone assumed. Civilization is actually deeply dependent on them. And…that is a very different conversation. Because the women who fully understand the economic and psychological value she brings into the world becomes extraordinarily difficult to manipulate with guilt, crumbs, exhaustion, or fear. Hallefreakinglluaha.

Which is why the system in place is suddenly sounding louder lately. Flailing in an almost frantic desperate way to convince women that indeed depletion is beautiful, and has a sort of nostalgia. But women are recovering from a very long hypnosis. And the first stage of waking up usually does make you look a little insane. You wander around blinking at everything like a Salem witch emerging from fumes. You start saying deeply inconvenient things at book club, or at church. You become physically incapable of hearing the phrase “he helps with the kids” without astral projecting.

And, no John. We aren’t asking to be worshipped. We just want the arrangement to make sense. So, to the Mom’s now answering to “Bruh,” or “MOMMMMMM,” I need you to hear me for a second. You remembered every birthday, and signed every permission slip, bought teacher gifts and scheduled dentist appointments while absorbing everyone’s feelings. But exhaustion is not your personality, and being spread thin is not proof of love.

And I think women are beginning to feel that deep inside themselves. That internal voice finally saying, actually…no. No I will not martyr myself, no I do not exist solely to evaporate into nerves while I make everyone’s life run smoothly.

So we just might find ourselves saying the inconvenient things, “Figure it out yourself, you can make your own appointment. I’m resting.” Tiny sentences.

And listen, I know mothers love their families. I love mine deeply. This is not about abandoning our children while we start affairs with beekeepers… although some of us deserve a European scandal. I just want women to begin suspecting that they may also be alive. Not merely useful. Alive. With desires, thoughts, bodies, ambitions, creativity, and whole inner worlds. So frankly, this Mother’s day I hope you stop apologizing for needing rest, or space. I hope somebody else makes dinner and you eat it while it’s still hot. I hope you disappear occasionally for yourself instead of everyone else. And I hope you remember that your humanity is the point. Happy Mother’s Day, ladies. Now go stare at a wall in silence, like the fully sentient woman you were always meant to be.

With love,

Sarah Steed xx

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Certain kinds of questions are always welcome, especially when they carry the approved answer. They are the ones we hear in conference talks that end with swelling music and somone staring thoughtfully at a mountain. Or the ones that end with, “…and then I realized the leaders were right all along.” Those truths get turned into refrigerator magnets.

The truth that really matters usually tracks mud through the living room and asks inappropriate questions. It keeps digging because it notices contradictions, and asks why certain stories keep disappearing into closets. And the moment those questions become uncomforatble, they become “negative” or “divisive” or just a faith crisis. Inquiry itself is treated like contamination.

And this is why I keep thinking about Socrates, who frankly would not last six minutes in modern church culture before someone gently escorted him into a disciplinary council. I think people misread why. They assume he was a professional argument winner who wandered around Athens like a cynical little goblin making everyone feel stupid. But what he did was worse. He’d sit down with someone who was absolutely certain they understood justice, courage, or piety, and he would ask one small, polite question. Then another to find out whether the thing they were so certain about was something they actually understood, or just something they had absorbed from being in a culture long enough that it felt like their own thought. That’s what got him killed. Not the questions themselves.

Most people cannot tell the difference between a conviction they arrived at and a conviction that arrived in them, usually sometime in childhood, wearing the face of someone they loved and trusted. Which is exactly what makes religious belief so difficult to examine. And exactly what makes it so necessary. Because when those beliefs become attached to our identity, questioning them feels like trying to remove your own rib cage with craft scissors. Believe me, I know. And religions know this. Especially religions that began with questions. Which is why questioning ourselves is much more threatening than questioning someone else’s worldview, especially when that worldview gave us family, a heaven, a map, and that part of ourselves that loves approval.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has often presented itself as a truth seeking faith. Dieter F. Uchtdorf once said, “We are a question asking people,” adding that inquiry leads to truth and that the church itself began with a young man who had questions. He also said, “Asking questions isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a precursor of growth.” That is a beautiful idea. It is also a devastating standard. Because if asking questions is a precursor of growth, then the people asking painful questions are not automatically enemies of faith. They may be the ones taking the faith’s own claims seriously enough to test them.

There is also the well known J. Reuben Clark statement, often quoted in LDS circles, “If we have truth, [it] cannot be harmed by investigation. If we have not truth, it ought to be harmed.” Now that sentence has chest hair because it suggests that truth should survive contact with reality. Truth does not need a legal team standing between itself and uncomfortable stories. Hearing the full range of human experience should not destroy truth. In fact, it should clarify it. And if it cannot, then maybe what is being protected isn’t truth as much as it’s authority, reputation, or institutional control.

This is where the lawsuit involving The LDS Church and John Dehlin’s Mormon Stories becomes such an interesting example. Just recently, April 2026, the Church filed a lawsuit against Dehlin and the Open Stories Foundation, alleging trademark and copyright infringement related to the Mormon Stories name, their branding, and use of church related imagery. The church has argued that the podcast’s presentation could confuse people into thinking it is affiliated with or endorsed by the church. That is the legal frame. And maybe there are legal questions there worth sorting through. Trademark law exists for reasons, branding matters, and institutions have legal rights. Fine. Let the lawyers put on their serious shoes and handle that part. But culturally and spiritually, there is another question eating crackers and making everyone uncomfortable.

Why does a massive global religion with temples, billions in assets, apostles, missionaries, media departments, lawyers, scriptures, universities, family history centers, and an entire curriculum appear so threatened by a podcast? And the answer cannot simply be, “because branding confusion.” Mormon stories is a long running platform known largely for interviewing current and former members about their experiences, including faith crises, church history, institutional harm, spiritual disillusionment, and the emotional cost of leaving. Mormon Stories has aired about 2,100 episodes since launching in 2005 and “frequently criticizes the church.” That matters because negative experience is information, not anti-truth.

Which is why it is so fascinating to me. Because here is a church founded on the story of a boy asking dangerous questions. Joseph Smith looked around at the religious certainty of his day and basically said, “What if all of you are wrong?” But now our religious institution has begun developing a sort of allergy to the very process that created them. They now act like questions are wonderful when they lead toward the institution, and less wonderful when they begin wandering around inside it with a flashlight.

What fascinates me is that positive stories are often treated as evidence of the truth, while painful stories are treated as betrayal. A woman says the church saved her marriage, and that becomes a beautiful testimony. Another says church culture kept her in an abusive marriage because she was taught that righteousness meant enduring, submitting and keeping her eternal family together at all costs, and suddenly everyone wants to discuss her tone, motives, bitterness, faithfulness, her misunderstanding of doctrine, and whether she is being influenced by satan or feminism, or modern culture, or the four horseman of the something-or-other, she can’t remember, she stopped listening around ”bitterness.” But both stories are information. If an institution only accepts the stories that flatter it, it’s curating an image, and image curation is not testimony or truth.

And look, I get why people get defensive because religious belief is rarely just theology. It’s family, and memory and funerals and eternity. Questioning it can feel like threatening the design of your entire life. But still, if God is real, surely He can survive an honest conversation.

Questions come from everywhere. Children ask them. Drunk uncles ask them. Even comment sections ask them with the grace of raccoons in a pantry. But the most dangerous and important questions are the X-rays that expose the difference between truth and social agreement. Those are the ones that make institutions sweat.

A healthy faith should be able to hear the negative experience and say, “Tell us more. Where did the system fail you? What doctrine was used against you? What leader mishandled this? What language made harm easier to hide? What assumptions did we teach that made your suffering harder to point to?” That kind of listening would STRENGTHEN faith, not destroy it. In fact, it might be the only thing that can strengthen faith. Because when a testimony never encounters contradiction it’s not necessarily strong, right? It’s mostly just sheltered. A testimony that can look directly at harm, historical messiness, and human pain without needing to immediately silence the witness is more mature than certainty.

Difficult experiences are not anti-truth, they are part of truth. You shouldn’t have to erase the speaker in order to preserve the system. I would argue that allowing those stories actually creates the possibility of stronger faith. Real adult faith that wrestles with contradiciton instead of hiding from it.

Fragile faith says, “Please do not tell me anything that makes belief more complicated.” It needs every painful story to become an exception, and every criticism softened into something easier to dismiss. Examined faith says something different, “If this is true, then I do not need to fear the full record.” It is willing to place the hard stories beside the beautiful ones and ask what patterns what might be there.

That is what makes the existence of Mormon Stories Podcast so interesting to me. Whether intentional or not, the podcast invites people to examine their faith rather than focus on their inherited certainty. It asks listeners to look directly at the full picture and decide what kind of faith can survive this type of honesty.

And this is why questioning matters so much. Questions don’t automatically lead people out of religion. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they move a person from a belief that was borrowed to a conviction they choose themselves. But questions always reveal what the system is made of.

If a church really has nothing to hide, then it should not fear stories from those who suffered inside it. It should not need every former member to be caricatured as offended, deceived, lazy, sinful, bitter, or hungry for attention. It should not need to treat public scrutiny as persecution while treating its own missionary scrutiny of other religions as sacred courage.

The church itself teaches members to speak up for truth. A 2023 church article says members are “expected to speak up,” to be a “warning voice,” and to defend truth in a world that may not want to hear it. If speaking up is noble when it protects the institution, then speaking up cannot automatically become dangerous when it exposes the institution. That is the moral inconsistency.

The question is not whether believers should abandon their faith because someone had a painful experience. That is too simplistic, and frankly, too lazy. The better question is whether believers are allowed to let painful experiences expand their understanding of the faith they claim to love. Love that cannot receive criticism is not love. That feels more like possession. A person can love a church and still ask what it has done to people. A person can value a tradition and still look at who paid the price for its stability. A person can believe in God and still question the men who speak for Him! Actually, if God matters, these questions become more important. Because if a religious leader claims divine authority, then the moral stakes are higher. We should question them more carefully. We should ask what happens to humans when obedience is praised more than their conscience. We should ask what kinds of people benefit from silence. We should ask whose pain gets termed a “faith crisis,” and whose comfort gets protected as “sacred order.”

Cynicism assumes corruption before listening. Honesty listens long enough to notice when the explanation does not match the evidence. And when it comes to religion, honesty requires us to ask not only, “Is this true?” but also asking uncomforrable questions, like. What has this belief required me to ignore? Who benefits when I stop asking? What kind of person am I becoming by defending this? What evidence am I willing to count and what evidence have I already decided cannot count? Do I want truth, or do I want the comfort of never being wrong?

Those are not anti-religious questions, they are adult questions. And if a religion is true, it should be able to survive adults. And this may be the central issue here. Not John Dehlin, or his one podcast, or the one lawsuit, or the confusing overlapping brands. The deeper issue is whether a church built on the story of a boy asking forbidden questions can tolerate adults doing the same.

Joseph Smith’s question was not polite. It challenged every church around him. It suggested that established authorities could be wrong. It began with the premise that religious certainty deserved investigation, which is a dangerous origin story to inherit if you later become the authority. Why is the restoration tempted to protect itself from the very questioning that created it?

Truth does not become less true when someone wounded describes the wound, just as faith does not become stronger by refusing to know what happened. And a persons testimony certainly does not deepen by editing out the what makes the institution look human. If God is a God of truth, then truth can’t be honored when brushing reality under the rug is seen as loyalty.

So yes, question everything. Question your doubts, your certainty, your leaders, your anger, what triggers you. Question the stories that makes you feel righteous too quickly. Question the institution you defend, or the one you left. Question the version of yourself that needed the old answers to be enough.

If truth is actually true, it doesn’t need protection from people brave enough to look directly at it.

With love, and lots of questions,

Sarah Steed xx

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SOURCES & RESOURCES:

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

Additional LDS references citing quote:

• Church of Jesus Christ Article on Questions & Growth

• BYU Religious Studies Center Reference

• https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/church-historians-press/at-the-pulpit/bonus-chapters/bonus-7?lang=eng&utm

J. Reuben Clark

Referenced in:

• D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years (Brigham Young University Press, 1983)

Online references:

• Wikiquote Reference for J. Reuben Clark Quote

• Discussion & Historical Context of the Quote

LDS Church Statements About Asking Questions

• Seeking Answers to Spiritual Questions (General Conference reference)

• Church Article: “Do You Have Questions About the Gospel?”

Mormon Stories Podcast & Lawsuit References

• Salt Lake Tribune Coverage of the Lawsuit

• Axios Coverage of the Lawsuit & Mormon Stories Background

• https://www.sltrib.com/news/2026/04/19/lds-church-sues-mormon-stories/?utm

• https://www.deseret.com/faith/2026/04/19/church-of-jesus-christ-files-trademark-complaint-against-podcaster-for-alleged-imitation-of-brands/?ut

Socrates and the Socratic Method

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/socrates

• https://iep.utm.edu/socrates

So apparently some of you are new here. Welcome.

If you just found this place and you’re trying to figure out what this is, the short version is that I’m Sarah Steed, in my mid-forties and I write about the patterns that society has decided not to notice, and then I drag them into plain view until people either look at them or get annoyed with me for pointing. And frankly, both responses are data, and I love them.

What I’m interested in, and what I can’t seem to stop being interested in, is power, perception, and the cost of certain systems that protect themselves by sounding moral. Mostly religion, fitness culture, marriage….the usual suspects. I’ve been inside the things I write about, played by the rules, paid for it, and then got very, very interested in how it all worked. So the tone here isn’t detached critique from a safe distance. I’m an informed disruptor.

I notice things I shouldn’t. This has always been a burden of mine. Followed me around like a disease most of my life and have caused some relationships to be difficult. I have been known to wander, but it’s usually on purpose, and I’ll go wherever it’s telling the truth. I’ve lived some things which will show up when they matter in my writing.

For those of you who’ve been here a while, hi. I still like you best. Don’t tell the new people. (They don’t have our history yet so we’re fine.) For the new ones, thank you. I’m genuinely glad you’re here. Poke around. The first post is a good place to start if you want to understand what we’re doing.

And if you have questions, thoughts, or a story that sounds uncomfortably similar to something I wrote, my inbox is open. That’s not a polite thing I’m saying. I mean it.

Since it’s been a year on Substack, some posts will be free, because information that helps people should not require a subscription. Paid subscribers get my strategies. They receive little excerpts from a memoir I’m working on. But also, they’ll receive worksheets and practical tools for life and body transformation that I usually save for paid clients.

And yes, there will occasionally be stories that make you raise an eyebrow. Given the life I’ve lived, that’s unavoidable. But I want to say that I’m not here to perform my damage. I’m not interested in trauma as content. What I am interested in is what comes after the raised eyebrow, like the “what do you actually do with this,” because that’s what matters.

So, welcome. I’m glad you’re here. And I want you to know, before we go any further, that I love you. That you are not your divorce, your religion, your before photo, your worst decision, your most impressive credential, your follower count, your credit score, or whatever story the loudest person in your life has been telling about you.

It’s not a ko-winky-dink that you’re here. I mean, you could have wandered off by now. Some people don’t stay for this part. They like the version that wraps itself up, smiles, and lets them get on with their day feeling unchanged and vaguely virtuous. No shade. It’s efficient. But you’re here, which tells me you’re the kind of person who suspects there’s more going on, and is willing to hang around long enough to find it. Even when it asks you to loosen your grip on what you’ve been certain about. That’s who I’m writing for.

Okay. That’s it.

Just wanted to say hi.

Hi.

— Sarah xx

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First, I want to say that this question is important. It is not the same question as “not all men,” which tends to end a conversation while pretending to participate in one. But this question comes from people who read far enough in to feel the pull of it, who have looked at the undertow and said alright, I see it now, I believe it’s there, and then, understandably, asked the thing that fear always asks, which is, “okay, so how do I spot it?” How do I protect myself, my daughter, my friend, the woman in the pew next to me… give me a checklist, something I can use. I understand that impulse. I wanted it too, for longer than I like to admit. I have absolutely sat there thinking, if I had just been a little smarter, a little more perceptive, maybe I could have seen it coming and saved myself the whole experience.

But what I’ve come to understand about that question is that it’s asking for something we can’t fully deliver because it is only half the answer. It is asking for a spotlight when what I am describing feels more like a climate. And no matter how bright a spotlight, it cannot illuminate a climate. It can only make you feel safer while the weather continues to change around you.

I am not describing men with a particular set of identifiable characteristics that you can screen for on a first date or spot across a church foyer. It looks like a meeting where a woman explains what happened, and the conversation shifts, almost imperceptibly, to whether she might have misunderstood it. It looks like a room full of reasonable people deciding to “wait for more information” while she goes home with the full weight of it. I am describing a structure, and structures don’t have faces. They have incentives, patterns and habits that repeat so often they pass for common sense. Those habits become structures that build an unspoken sorting system for tolerance. Some pain is met loud, with urgency. The rest is handled off to the side, and kept from spilling into anything especially when it is asking for more than the system is willing to give.

The harm I’m describing would not be found in a man’s eyes or a man’s handshake. It looks like a conversation where his character is defended while her account gets rerouted into a side conversation. You see it in who is taken at their word, who gets believed without breaking a sweat, who is kept safe and buffered, who gets to write the official version and somehow that’s the one that sticks, and who is left carrying the cost of a story she never got to tell.

When people ask, “how do we know which ones,” they’re usually reaching for a simple answer to something that isn’t simple, trying to fix a whole system by sorting out one person at a time, which would be great if that were how any of this worked. They want to sort men into two columns, safe and dangerous, trustworthy or not, so they can navigate accordingly and keep the existing structure largely intact. As if we are dealing with a series of isolated incidents instead of a repeating pattern embedded in how decisions get made. Which is a very human thing to want, because sorting feels like agency.

But what I’m describing cannot be sorted. Because the men who cause the most insidious harm are often not the ones you can pick out of a lineup. They are frequently the ones everyone would put in the “safe” column. They are charming and well-regarded and probably present at every meeting, the ones everyone is relived to see walk in the room because things feel more stable when they are there. They are the ones people defend, loudly, the moment a woman opens her mouth. Sometimes those defenders are right. Sometimes the people rallying around a man know something true about him. What distinguishes that from the pattern I’m describing is whether his defenders are defending what actually happened, or just defending his image. The danger, in many of the cases I’ve written about and lived through, was not announced, but administered structurally, through a series of small decisions made by men who genuinely believed they were doing right by everyone, because the system doesn’t require them to check.

This is what our cultural conversation about harm has been reluctant to fully confront. We are still, collectively, looking for monsters. We want the harm to have a face we can reject, or a profile we can identify, and a set of behaviors that are dramatic and obvious enough that we would all clearly have seen it coming. Because if the story comes with a character that obvious, then the rest of us get to sit back like morally superior bystanders who definitely would have noticed, definitely would have intervened, definitely would have done something heroic and then we can be comfortably off the hook.

And while this desire is deeply understandable, it is also exactly what allows the harm to continue. Because if you’re out there looking for monsters, you tend to overlook the system doing steady, unglamorous damage in plain sight. Where they turn some people’s pain into background noise, while other voices come already stamped as credible (no questions asked, love that for them), and entire groups end up covering the cost of outcomes they had no say in shaping. So, for me, the question is not “which men.” I’m more interested in “which structures,” and who benefits every time we ask about the men instead.

Rather than giving you a neat little checklist you can tape to your fridge and feel accomplished about, I want to offer something a little more useful. And I should say upfront, it’s still a partial answer to a partial question, because individual character, inconveniently, is part of the story whether we like it or not.

Because the issue is that if the harm is structural, does individual character even matter? I think it does. The structure sets the conditions. But people still make choices within those conditions every day. The structure tells a man he doesn’t have to check. Character is what makes him check anyway.

The men I trust aren’t the ones who check the right boxes or learned the right language. I recognize them by how they handle discomfort. When they encounter a woman’s pain that implicates the system they’re part of, they do not minimize it or redirect the conversation back to their own intentions. They don’t reach for a quick defense. They sit in it. They ask questions that cost them something. They say “tell me more” when everything in them probably wants to say “but that’s not how we do things here.” They are willing to look like they are on the wrong side of their institution, because they have decided that being on the right side of the truth matters more.

So if you’re still asking “which men,” and you’re not wrong to be, watch what happens when a woman’s account makes things uncomfortable for him. Watch whether he reaches for her credibility or protects his own comfort. And yes, I hear myself. I spent three paragraphs dismantling the checklist and then handed you one. It isn’t the answer, it’s just a way in. Because character signals are real, and they matter, they’re just not sufficient on their own. What I’m pointing you toward is when something is actually at stake, does he use his position to carry truth, or to avoid it?

What might actually take this conversation somewhere useful is noticing what happens when you remove half the information and then act surprised that things don’t add up. The harm being done to women inside these structures has been filed away like a special category, something to be handled separately. Meanwhile, the system keeps trying to function with a massive blind spot.

Imagine a medical study where half the data gets tossed out for being inconvenient. The symptoms that don’t fit are labeled “outliers,” the reports that sound too emotional or generally uncooperative are set aside, and everyone publishes the findings like the picture is complete. No one would call that science. And yet, here we are.

We are making decisions, setting policies, interpreting doctrines, raising children, and running institutions based on a version of reality that is edited. Whole sections of lived experience are missing. The women who were dismissed, managed, and sent home with their pain renamed are not noise. They are data. Specific, relevant data about what is actually happening inside the system.

But that data never stood a chance, because the people running the analysis had already decided what counted, and everything else was ruled out before it could even be heard. Which does explain a lot, unfortunately. And this is the part of the conversation that is still unfinished.

A few people in the comments suggested this is really a kindness issue, as if the fix is to just be a little more compassionate, maybe nod more enthusiastically while someone is talking. Kindness matters, of course it does. No one is advocating for being a jerk as a growth strategy. The real issue is how we decide whose testimony counts as credible data and whose gets set aside. A system that cannot accurately receive the experiences of half its members cannot accurately understand itself. And if we can’t admit that, then we will keep having this conversation in comment sections instead of in the rooms where things actually change.

Meanwhile we’ll keep producing policies, doctrines, norms, and decisions based on a reality that is missing entire sections of lived experience, and it will do so with confidence, which is…revealing. Which brings me back to the original question. How do we know which men?

Twenty three hundred comments. And in that number there are people not asking which men, and instead wanting to know which rooms, which structures, and which centuries long habits of arrangement we are finally willing to dismantle.

The structures that have actually shifted did so because more than one perspective was in the room when decisions were made. We need both, how to recognize who we’re dealing with and how to see the pattern we’re inside. I’m not leaving either one out.

With love,

Sarah Steed xx

This essay is part of a series that started innocently enough and has since taken on a life of its own, because it clearly wasn’t finished. If you want the origin story, start with The Brethren’s Bro-code and then Not All Men (links below).

“The Brethren’s Bro-code”: https://open.substack.com/pub/thesarahsteed/p/the-brethrens-bro-code?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

“Not all Men.”: https://open.substack.com/pub/thesarahsteed/p/ive-never-seen-this-and-other-things?r=5h0qr4&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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Standing there, watching our little flock arrange itself around a painting at a museum with eerie precision, I caught myself thinking, when did we learn this? These are not passive people. These are people with opinions about politics, physics, philosophy and conspiracy theories. And yet, give us an airport, strip away our roles of our ordinary lives, and something just takes over. We didn’t need a leader. We became one thing. Which is beautiful and also terrifying, and I’m not convinced those are different things.

There is a game children play called Red Light, Green Light. One child stands at the end of a field and shouts commands. Everyone else freezes or runs on cue. The whole point is that you cannot move under your own authority. You must wait and listen and be told. I’m going to say this gently, and then not gently at all, that we play this game our entire lives. That the commands never really stop shouting, we just stop noticing it. The person giving commands stopped being a child, and is now harder to see.

I love watching people. Not in a call the police way, but in a mildly unhinged anthropological way. And the pattern I keep finding, everywhere I look, is that someone has to say “go ahead, I’m done” before anyone touches the last slice of cake at a party. Some influencer has to wear the bold lip online before the rest of us decide we’re allowed to. Someone has to leave the marriage or quit the religion before the rest of us stop pretending we don’t want out. I realize permission is the system. We’ve just made it pretty enough that we call it freedom.

Consider the influencer, because they are the most naked, clear-cut version of this phenomenon and their existence is on some level, hilarious. An influencer is, at base, a person who became famous for doing something, like being pretty, being funny, doing their makeup, going to the gym, eating whole foods, and then the rest of us watches long enough to decide we are allowed to also do the thing. A woman watches another woman on TikTok say no, leave early, stop explaining—and not get punished for it. Something in her goes, oh. That’s allowed? She needed to see someone do the thing before she attempted it herself. This is ancient primate risk-assessment behavior, updated for the smartphone era.

Our ancestors watched the bravest member of the group approach the unfamiliar fruit first. If he died, no fruit. If he was fine, everyone ate. We’ve simply replaced unfamiliar fruit with “loud opinion” and “leaving a marriage that wasn’t working.” The influencer is the brave one who ate the fruit first. And we are still, in 2026, watching to see if they die.

What makes this stranger is that religion understood this same thing thousands of years earlier and, frankly, executed it better. Religion understood something about human psychology so deeply and completely, that it essentially invented the permission economy before the algorithm did.

Every major religious tradition is built, in significant part, on outsourcing the question of is this okay? Is this food okay? Consult the text. Is this marriage okay? Consult the priest. Is this thought okay? Consult your conscience, which has been so thoroughly shaped by doctrine that it will give you the approved answer anyway. And the genius /terrifying, awe-inspiring genius of this system is the eternal consequence mechanic. If you get it wrong, you might be damned. Damned is the worst possible outcome that exists in the entire structure of reality, forever. The paralysis this creates is profound, especially when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for a long time and can’t remember when you started. Because if the stakes of getting it wrong are infinite, actual forever consequences, then of course you hand your thinking over to someone who sounds more certain than you feel. Of course you do, that is brilliant.

That is a person trying to stay safe in a system that made safety feel conditional. It’s impressive, if we’re being honest. The way we learn to outsource our own knowing, or the way we find the person with the clearest voice, the most confidence, and think, yes, you decide. You seem like someone who understands the rules of this place better than I do. Then we call that wisdom, which is a generous word for what is mostly relief.

Now instead of the fear of damnation, and hellfire we fear social exclusion. Which sounds milder until you’ve posted one honest thing at 11pm when you thought you were just talking and watch people pick you apart who don’t know you and don’t plan to and suddenly you’re very aware of how exposed a human voice actually is. And you think, maybe let’s not do that again. What is actually happening is that we’ve created a world where your ability to speak is contingent on reading the room correctly, where the room is six billion people that change rules every week, and where they will absolutely tell you about it if you get it wrong. This is Red Light, Green Light at a global scale, and the child at the end of the field is all of us and none of us simultaneously.

Now let me implicate myself, because that is how I write. I tell on myself, and intellectual honesty demands it. I have waited for permission most of my life. I have looked at someone else doing something I wanted to do and watched to see if the world punished them before I tried. I have swallowed opinions at dinner tables because I wasn’t sure if it was the kind of table where those opinions were allowed. I have started sentences and aborted them mid-air, redirected them into safer territory, watched the safer version of my thought land with polite approval and felt relief, but also shame. This is the product of extraordinarily efficient conditioning. We think we need a teacher before we can learn, or an institution before we can be credentialed, or a partner before we can be whole, or a boss before our work has value, or a baptism before we can be saved, or an audience before our voice matters. In all of that, we lose our way back to whatever we were before the conditioning started.

A child asks why constantly. Why is the sky blue, why do I have to, why is that the rule …and it’s exhausting. That child is demonstrating the factory default settings of a human mind. Curiosity without permission is the original state. We spend roughly a decade grinding it out of them and then spend the rest of our lives wondering why adults are so incurious, so compliant, so desperate to be told what to feel about things.

Thinking for yourself is hard. It’s hard like standing in a field with no landmarks in the fog, having been told your whole life that your compass is broken, and then one day you stop and look around, and realize you have no idea where you are or where you were trying to go, and realize that nobody else does either. And the group is just moving with collective confidence. Which is a different thing from actually knowing. This is why charismatic leaders feel so good, even ones who are a little off, or a lot. It is the relief of being in the fog and seeing someone walk like they know where they’re going. You don’t stop to check the map. You just feel your shoulders drop and think, oh thank goodness. Their confidence is the product. And their certainty is our drug.

We want to be told what to do because certainty is the rarest, most soothing relief in a universe that provides almost none of it. So we take it where we can get it. From influencer, from religion, from political movements, even from wellness brands with botanical ingredients and soft linen light. And they genuinely believe it. But their map is still theirs. And a map in someone else’s hand doesn’t actually tell you where you are.

I don’t have a clean solution. I am deeply suspicious of essays that end with five actionable steps, because real things don’t resolve that neatly. And giving you a tidy list of instructions for how to stop following instructions would be a joke. What I have instead is that noticing matters. The moment you catch yourself waiting for the influencer to greenlight the outfit, waiting for the pastor or the Prophet to confirm the feeling is righteous, waiting for the group chat to validate your anger…that moment of catching it is not nothing. It is, in fact, the beginning of the only thing that actually matters. Which is asking yourself, what do I think?

The question doesn’t have to be answered audibly or turned into content or approved by anybody. It just has to be asked. It is a small thing, and kind of a terrifying thing, but it might be the whole thing. Even if it’s not a green light. Move anyway.

With Love,

Sarah Steed xx

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I posted it on Substack because it sounded obscure. Like a place where writings go to sit silently and think about what they’ve done. No one I knew was on it. Perfect. I could release this piece into the wild and it would live a small, uneventful life, bothering no one, and I would get to feel brave in a very controlled, low risky way.

Then, after I hit publish, the platform asked if I wanted to link it to my Facebook. And I thought, sure, who is even on Facebook anymore. This is where things began to unravel. I didn’t really think it through because I had a more immediate and pressing responsibility, which was to go outside and feed my chicken and clean their coop, which felt like a far safer use of my energy than examining my decision making.

So I go outside, feeling very grounded and responsible, and then out of nowhere my brain starts pulling up images of people I know who absolutely follow me on Facebook, and every sphincter I own tightened simultaneously.

I dropped what I was doing and made a full sprint for the house, because of course I’m going to delete it before anyone can read it, and I’m wondering whether it would leave a trace.

When I’m halfway through the door my college roomate calls. I answered it while speed walking to my computer, already out of breath, when she said, “Sarah, I just saw your post.” I could hear the caps lock in her voice, and something in me prolapsed. Oh shoot,” I said, already breathless. “I didn’t think anyone would actually read it. I’m erasing it right now…”

“No don’t, it’s good. People are commenting. Keep it up.” She said kindly. Which is not what you want to hear when you are mid-panic. She was right, the comments were rolling in from real people, with actual thoughts and perspectives. It was like the best kind of book club, where everyone actually read the book and shows up ready to talk. I was riveted, and genuinely moved.

I read and responded to every single comment while holding my phone at an angle that made it readable in the sun, and my chickens were watching me with that specific look they get. And just like that, what was supposed to be a little post became a year long public excavation of my own mind, which is apparently a place with no supervision and very loose safety regulations.

So I just want to say, respectfully, this is your fault. And also thank you.

I try to be honest here, mostly because I’ve run out of the energy it takes to be anything else. This year I gave this a lot of my time and creative energy. Some weeks I had plenty, and other weeks I had the creative capacity of hotel carpet. But either way I figured I’d offer the more fragile parts of my story and mind. Which at times felt like getting mugged and deciding, against every instinct, not to chase the person down the street. So I just sit here and think, well, this was a bold choice, and then I eat something to cope.

And you were careful with it all. Which I did not expect, and did not take lightly. This year has been very healing form me. Even when I’m making jokes, I’m not making light of it. Humor, for me, is just grief that learned how to behave.

What I want you to know is that every time you shared something I wrote, or left a comment, it told me my thoughts landed somewhere, and sometimes they mattered to someone. And that matters to me in a way I cannot explain without getting emotional, which I am actively trying to avoid because I am eating very good chocolate and I refuse to ruin this moment.

You are not subscribers to me. You are the reason any of this exists in public at all.

I don’t know exactly what the next year looks like. But I assume it involves more honesty, more research, more rabbit holes that end with me wondering if the royal family are indeed reptilians in blazers. One thing I know for sure is that the things that feel too big, too tender, or too strange to say out loud are usually the exact things someone else has been carrying alone, waiting for someone else to say first. So say it.

Thank you for this past year. Thank you for reading. Thank you for subscribing and being the kind of readers who make me want to do this better.

With love and no ragrets,

Sarah xx

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If you encountered a man on the street today who told you he was one with the Father of the Universe, that he existed before Abraham, that he was the only path to God, the resurrection and the life, the light of the world and the way through it, you would, with all compassion, be handing him a crisis hotline number. So let’s at least admit the obvious. Jesus was not manageable.

So let’s do this properly. We’re gonna look at Him from the lens of ancient texts, which will show that he was far more strange and magnificent than the gentle shepherd on the flannel board who is permanently mid-hug.

The story goes that the Nag Hammadi texts stuffed in clay jars and buried in the Egyptian dirt around 390 CE, presumably to save them from the Church, which had developed a well documented allergy to competing narratives, was found by a farmer in 1945.

One of these texts, The Gospel of Thomas opens with Jesus basically refusing to perform for the crowd. No water into wine, no walking on water, no family tree tracing him back to King David, just a simple sentence: “Whoever discovers the interpretation of these sayings will not taste death.” Which is the most unnerving icebreaker imaginable. It’s a riddle and then, apparently, He wanders off like he knows we’re not going to like the answer but also knows we’re not going to be able to stop thinking about it. Which is true.

The people behind these texts, The Christian Gnostics, were not interested in Jesus’s blood sacrifice which already makes them suspicious in the eyes of institutions that rely heavily on it. They were interested in a direct knowing, like a transmission, with no belief required, no obedience, so signing on the dotted line. Just a knowing.

The Gnostics had this unsettling idea that the world we move through isn’t always governed by the highest truth, but by something that claims authority over it. A voice that presents itself as absolute, builds a system around that claim, and expects obedience in return. Sound familiar?

But inside this whole strange production, according to the Gnostics, was a divine spark (pneuma), a fragment of the original source that had become trapped inside human bodies like fireflies in a jar. Jesus, in Gnostic thought, was the representative of the actual supreme being (Monad). According to the Gnostics, Jesus was not meant to save humanity from sin. His job was to wake people up to the fact that they were divine sparks sleepwalking. He walked around this earth pointing at people and saying, you are not who you think you are.

The Gospel of Philip goes so far as to say the resurrection was not a physical event at all. Death was always a metaphor for unconscious living. Which means, and this is where it gets a little uncomfortable in an honest, can’t-look-away way, most of us are already dead. Cheerful thought.

We’re dead in just a sleepwalky way. Paying bills, answering emails, making casseroles, occasionally feeling a flicker of something brighter, but then we quickly distract ourselves with cookies or scrolling Because if death is unconsciousness, then waking up, even a little, even briefly, even while standing in your kitchen holding a dish towel, looks curiously like resurrection.

The Gnostics were among the earliest Christian movements to emerge after Jesus’s death, far closer in time than the Christianity most of us inherited. And they did not follow a savior. They followed a map, and Jesus was the cartographer of the self.

The alchemists, despite being remembered as slightly unhinged men hunched over bubbling liquids trying to get rich, were not actually trying to make gold so much as trying to become it. They took the conversation and hid it inside symbols so it could survive long enough. They called their process the Magnum Opus (Great Work). It’s a sequence that unfolds in four stages, and when you lay those stages over the life of Jesus, it seems like leaving a clue, because the communication is so precise it is either a remarkable coincidence or evidence that someone, somewhere, understood exactly what they were writing.

In this alchemical process, first comes the collapse, where everything falls apart (blackening). The identity you’ve been carefully maintaining begins to dissolve and you suddenly realize how much of it depended on circumstances you don’t control. This is Gethsemane where Jesus sweat blood, and asked if there’s literally any other option, while his friends, who were given one job, are asleep nearby. This is the part where life puts you in the fire.

Then comes the burning purification (whitening). Everything that isn’t real under pressure falls away. Titles, roles, identities, basically the version of you that made sense to other people. What remains is harder to define, and far less interested in approval. This is the crucifixion. The alchemists called it the washing, but it’s like being stripped down to whatever can’t be destroyed. The cross is the refinement. Which is not comforting, but it is clarifying.

Then there is a pause, where nothing looks like it’s happening but everything is rearranging under the surface. This is the third stage (yellowing), the tomb. The alchemists saw this as the in-between, where you are no longer who you were, but not yet anything recognizable. It’s uncomfortable and undefined. It’s also necessary. The tomb is just a sealed container where change can finish what it started, like a chrysalis.

Then something emerges in the fourth stage (reddening) Recognizable enough to feel familiar, but different enough that the old life can’t quite contain it. This is the resurrection. And the Alchemists call it completion. The Gospels describe it as a body that moves differently, moves through locked doors and appears without announcement, as if the rules have shifted slightly. And then you read the Bible stories of Jesus showing up unannounced, or not immediately recognized. He asked Thomas to touch the wounds, as if to say, go ahead, test it, see if this holds. So, if you think the resurrection account reads strangely, it may be because the gospels are, among other things, an alchemical laboratory report.

The Philosopher’s Stone, which is a legendary alchemical substance, was the key to creating an elixir for immortality and eternal life, it was said to transmute whatever it touched. Jesus, post-resurrection.

The pious response is that these similarities are predictions of Jesus’s coming. The skeptic’s response is to roll their eyes and say that Jesus was simply invented from pre-existing myths. Everyone feels certain. Everyone is a little tired.

But here’s what I actually think, after sitting with all of it. What if the pattern of death and resurrection is something the universe keeps trying to say, like a frequency that keeps broadcasting over and over in different languages, to different peoples, across all of time? Which is either a massive coincidence, or the universe gently tapping us on the shoulder saying, “Pay attention. This part matters.”

If you stand at the intersection of all these traditions it starts to come into focus. The Gnostics say He came to awaken the divine spark buried inside of all of us. The alchemists say he demonstrated transformation publically using his own body as the raw material.

And these older traditions that didn’t make it into the neat Sunday summaries do not cooperate with the polite life-coach Jesus of the ancient world whose quotes are emroidered on doilies. They won’t let him stay small like that. The Jesus of these hidden traditions is a master alchemist who looked at the world, saw how asleep it was, saw the cost of waking it up, and didn’t flinch, and said, with the calm of someone who has already read the end of the book, fine. Watch this.

I’ve stood in the tomb in Jerusalem where they say they laid him, and I’m telling you, as gently as possible, it’s the wrong place to look. The stone they rolled away did not let him out, it let us in, to see there was nothing left to contain. The crucible is empty. The story keeps trying to relocate itself, and we keep dragging it back to a single moment, a single body, a single story we can visit, and then go home unchanged.

What went in was human with fear, the whole Gethsemane moment of “Is there any other way,” which is a prayer most of us have whispered, usually at 2 a.m. And what came out doesn’t fit in categories. He was not a spirit and not exactly a body. He was recognizable, and then not. He was here, and then gone, and then walked through locked doors. He has become this living contradiction, this proof that something has happened that doesn’t fit into our usual containers.

What we know is that He passed through fire and came out altered, lighter, and not bound the same way. We call it a miracle. We keep telling the story like the important part is that he got out. Meanwhile, the door stands open. And the suggestion waits exactly where we left it.

With Love,

Sarah Steed xx

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Humans seem to look for God in the dramatic interruption, the burning bush, the parted sea, the voice from the sky, and we keep missing Him because He’s appearing in something much quirkier, much more consistent, and much harder to argue with. In Patterns. This is God’s way of winking at us in the simplest, most elegant way imaginable. The universe is over there like a golden retriever with a tennis ball, just doing spirals. Look at my spirals, it’s saying. I made them for you. But instead of noticing, we are here squinting at cryptic riddles in scripture, and shadowy cabals, and ancient prophecies everyone interprets differently translated from a foreign language no one really understood. We keep missing it. Which is very on-brand for us.

The pattern I’m referring to is math, the Fibonacci Sequence that runs everything, including us, and it just goes about its business not caring if we believe in it. That’s actually the most charming thing about it. You can be a committed atheist or a devout mystic and it will still show up in your sunflower and your DNA.

Run the numbers ( 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89…)and watch the universe basically do a magic trick. Each number is the sum of the two before it. That’s it. That’s the whole recipe. And somehow, from that absurdly humble instruction, a golden ratio emerges: φ ≈ 1.618, a number so aesthetically perfect that mathematicians and mystics have been losing their minds over it since ancient Greece.

Count the seeds spiraling in a sunflower, clockwise and counterclockwise, and you’ll land on consecutive Fibonacci numbers almost every time. 34 and 55. 55 and 89. The plant is just growing in the most efficient way possible, and efficiency turns out to be gorgeous. That’s honestly one of my favorite things God ever pulled off.

If you zoom out the same golden spiral curls through the arms of spiral galaxies millions of light-years across. Peer into a nautilus shell, you’ll see those chambers expanding in logarithmic perfection in the same ratio. Hurricanes swirl on satellite radar. And one full twist of your DNA double helix is roughly 34 angstroms long by 21 angstroms wide, which are Fibonacci numbers. Their ratio hugs φ so closely that calling it coincidence is like calling the Sistine Chapel ceiling a natural phenomena.

What’s interesting is that nature loves wobbly approximations. Even though the pattern is undeniable, nature doesn’t do math like us by solving equations. It optimizes growth under messy conditions that include light, gravity, wind, genetics, randomness, and damage. So what we see in nature isn’t actually repeated perfection, it’s a repeated tendency toward efficiency. Meaning that Fibonacci is a good solution, not a strict rule. This dismantles the idea that truth has to be exact to be real. It’s something in between chaos and precision. That’s how I see God. God doesn’t chase perfect math, He circles around what works again and again until it looks like a design.

This is what I call God’s thumbprint. Not a fingerprint in the sense of evidence left behind that you bag and tag and hold up to the light while everybody nods, but more like a signature. I’ve never seen a perfect signature. They are usually quirky and unique to the signer, which reflects the frequency of who that person is. It’s mathematical poetry that proves energy doesn’t just happen from some lucky explosion, but it spirals and dances in the same golden rhythm from your backyard sunflower to the arms of the Milky Way.

Now if you crack open the sacred texts, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, even parts of the Quran, and read them as encrypted frequency maps rather than as history or an instruction manual of verses you must memorize, or defend, then you might notice a pattern running through them. Like the writers were trying hard to describe a rhythm they couldn’t quite pin down. But they were tracking the same cycles physicists are chasing today, only they didn’t have machines or data sets, just language and metaphor, which, if we’re being honest, might have gotten them closer than we think.

Let’s sit with what these scriptures actually say. In Ether 4, it talks about how the sealed records stay hidden until we exercise faith, until we become “clean before Him,” until we are actually ready for the greater things. Most of us have pictured a literal hidden golden book somewhere waiting to be revealed. Which is fine. But I want to propose something more radical, more scientifically interesting, and frankly more exciting. I wonder if that sealed portion we assume is buried somewhere is actually buried in you. Stay with me here, because this is where science and scripture accidentally agree.

Your body contains approximately 37 trillion cells. Each one carrying a complete copy of your DNA coiled into spirals that lean toward Fibonacci ratios. If you unraveled all the DNA in a single human body and laid it end to end, it would stretch from Earth to Pluto and back, twice. That information is inside you right now, wound into spirals too small to see, in a language that took scientists until 1953 just to begin reading, and they’ve barely started translating it.

What neurologists have discovered in the last two decades should, by all rights, have caused a worldwide spiritual crisis of the very best kind. The human gut contains over 100 million neurons, more than the entire spinal cord, and so complex and autonomous that scientists now call it “the second brain.” Your heart generates an electromagnetic field detectable several feet outside your body, and HeartMath Institute research has shown that this field changes measurably with your emotional state, either coherent with love, or chaotic with fear. Mystics have been saying this for millennia, and science just finally got the instruments.

Your brain operates on electrical frequencies, delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma. And the Schumann Resonance (the electromagnetic frequency of Earth’s atmosphere) pulses at approximately 7.83 Hz. Your brain in deep meditation hits the same frequency. You are literally tuning in to the planet, and the antenna is your nervous system. Jeremiah 31:33 doesn’t say God will write the law on tablets and deliver it by burning bush. He says: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts.” Inward parts, literally, and biologically. The instruction is internal.

The sealed portion isn’t waiting for an angel to unlock it from the outside. It’s waiting for you to unlock it from the inside. “Ask and it shall be given you, seek and ye shall find, knock and it shall be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7-8). This is what Ether 4 is actually saying. “When ye shall rend that veil of unbelief,”then the hidden things will be shown. When I was little, I pictured the veil as a curtain in the sky, but I now believe it is what we’ve hung between our conscious minds and the 98% of ourselves we’ve been calling noise.

Muhammad describes the end times as a period when time itself collapses, a year feels like a month, a month like a week, a week like a day, a day like an hour, an hour like the flicker of a flame. Raise your hand if time used to amble along like it had nowhere to be, and now it’s blowing past you. Human knowledge now doubles every 12 hours in some fields.

We found the Higgs boson, which means there’s an unseen field out there giving everything its weight and substance while the rest of us go on acting like only the visible stuff counts. Quantum entanglement is now so well documented that Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” is just… normal science. And then there’s Matthew 24:21-22, saying that unless those days are shortened, “no flesh would survive,” which reads a little differently when you hold it up next to all of this, like time itself is tightening, compressing, picking up speed in a way that is almost merciful. The acceleration is adaptive, like it’s calibrating us for the unveiling to happen at a rate we can survive. The seals are lifting just enough for us to begin to see.

The Fibonacci sequence is in your body. The sealed portion is in your body. You have been carrying the the signal and the receiver at the same time, which is either unsettling or clarifying depending on how honest you’re feeling.

It has been here the entire time, layered into you, moving beneath the noise you’ve learned to live over. The seal isn’t locked, it’s just ignored. And what opens next begins where you’ve avoided looking.

Much Love,

Sarah Steed xx

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We’re hearing about networks of billionaires and powerful men trafficking girls across continents, which makes this topic feel like something beyond our reach. Like a strange species of unhinged elites living in a rarefied air where the rules don’t quite apply, and far out of sight of the common man.

But then you hear about the Mazan case, where dozens of ordinary men in a small French town lined up to rape an unconscious woman. And then I watched a clip of a religious husband saying, very confidently, “My wife is not in charge in my house. I am.”

And I start to put the pieces together, and I realize these may look like three different worlds, but they have the same seed.

Let me explain.

We keep trying to explain sexual violence by pointing to monsters, elites, pornography, or moral collapse, as if the problem only lives in extreme men or extreme places. But I think the pattern is wider than that and older. The common thread is a social training so ordinary it barely raises an eyebrow. It is a thousand ordinary messages about what men are owed, what women are for, and what a community will excuse. The common thread is permission. This permission has a warm smile, a platform, a theology, a joke, a “boys will be boys” shrug. Permission shows up in who we protect first.

In the Pelicot case in Mazan, Dominique Pelicot drugged his wife for years and invited other men to rape her while she was unconscious. The men who showed up were not billionaires, or cinematic villains with curled mustaches. They were teachers, nurses, counselors, firefighters, fathers, and grandfathers. Just ordinary men, which is exactly the point.

At a conference discussing the Mazan trial, a man in his seventies reportedly asked the Le Monde journalist Lorraine de Foucher a question that froze the room. If Dominique Pelicot could find dozens of ordinary men willing to rape his drugged wife, and hundreds more saw the invitation and did nothing, did that mean there are men like this in every town? According to people who were present, de Foucher simply answered: “Yes.”

If ninety men existed in one small town, what would that mean across a nation? Thousands. Tens of thousands. Maybe hundreds of thousands. This is why Mazan matters. It obliterates the comforting myth that this is only an elite network problem, or a rare man problem, or a broken man problem. Mazan does not let us outsource the horror to “those elite people.”

It was our people. Human men.

Jeffrey Epstein operated on a different scale, insulated by wealth and power. The names, the flights, the social circles, the networks, the access… he was not a lone predator. He was an ecosystem, and ecosystems require many people to look away. We want a cultural sedative where we can say, “they’re not like us, they’re the 0.1%, they’re a different species…a reptilian, maybe.” But power is not what creates desire. Power expands the options and reduces the consequences.

The second layer to the story, and probably the most important is what happens to the people who speak. For decades, survivors of elite sexual abuse were treated like the threat. They were labeled unstable, and dramatic, or accused of false memories. The culture did not ask them to tell their story so we can stop it. It said, “You are ruining things,” which is an astonishing sentence when you sit with it long enough. A child says, “This happened.” A society replies, “this is inconvenient.” Discrediting survivors keeps abusers free and unaccountable while victims are pushed into secrecy and shame. This is the machinery.

Let’s look at where this machinery shows up in everyday life. We’ll start with some homegrown versions so we know where this behavior actually lives, because it is not always hiding on private islands or billion dollar planes… sometimes it’s in places we consider normal.

Take pornography. A massive industry built on the premise that women’s bodies exist primarily for male consumption. The viewer is the center of gravity. The woman’s experience, consent, interior life, and dignity are secondary to the performance of availability. It trains the brain that access to women’s bodies is something a man is entitled to, and that her resistance, discomfort, or absence of desire can be edited out of the story. Pornography alone does not create violence, but it does normalize a script where women’s bodies exist primarily for male consumption.

And then there’s the versions we laugh off in locker rooms and fraternity basements or in fantasy football leagues. Entire subcultures where the casual currency of conversation is rating women’s bodies, swapping conquest stories, and turning sexual access into a scoreboard. You hear it in the jokes, in the way a group of men talk about a woman once she leaves the room. None of it feels like a crime scene or villain speech because it’s seen as camaraderie that involves repetition, and laughter. And this is how permission spreads, through the small social rewards men receive for treating women’s bodies like public terrain rather than sovereign ground.

Then we arrive at the most socially acceptable version of the same structure. A religious man says he adores his wife. He sacrifices for her, opens doors for her, and spends more money on her than on himself. He says he wants her life to be easy. Then he says, with complete sincerity, “I am in authority over my wife. It’s not fifty-fifty. The buck stops with me.” These words sound like kindness, don’t they? Many men within this structure are kind. The issue here is how personhood is distributed.

Listen carefully:

When men are taught that authority belongs to them, and women are helpers, dependents, or recipients of benevolence, women’s autonomy becomes conditional. Conditional autonomy means her consent, her dissent, and even her interior life can be overridden. Sometimes violently, and sometimes gently, but overridden all the same. This is hierarchy, and hierarchy is the quiet architecture beneath so much harm.

The softer version of this system sounds loving. It sounds biblical, and protective. But did you hear what was actually being distributed? It was not equality, or authority. In many religious frameworks, men are taught that they hold spiritual headship in the home and that their leadership stands between the family and God. Care flows downward, and authority flows upward. And when authority is based on gender, then freedom is never fully shared. A woman may be cherished, and protected, even adored and taken on date nights, or praised in sacrament meetings, but if one person holds final say simply by virtue of gender, the other person’s freedom exists on a leash. A velvet leash, maybe. A leash lined with compliments and flowers and “I cherish you.” But still a leash.

And systems built on leashes have a very hard time recognizing harm. Because harm, in those systems, is not defined by the person being hurt, it is defined by the person holding authority. And that is how cultures grow Epsteins. It happens slowly, one permission at a time.

It grows anywhere a culture teaches one group of people that they hold the authority of God, and the other group that their safety depends on being agreeable. It grows wherever someone’s voice matters more than someone else’s body. It grows wherever the first instinct is to protect the man instead of the truth. And the most dangerous part is that the men inside these systems are not monsters, they are ordinary men who love their daughters, coach soccer, lead prayers, and think of themselves as good.

So, if they’re not cruel, then what is causing the problem? The problem is a permission that settles subtly into a culture and distributes authority unevenly while calling the arrangement harmony. Once you notice it, it becomes hard to pretend you didn’t. Which is inconvenient. But it’s also where moral clarity begins.

You may feel outrage, which may feel like action, but accountability is what actually changes things. And accountability, inconvenient as it may feel, is the only ground where real freedom grows. The world will stop growing Epsteins when women reclaim their sovereignty and men remember that another person’s freedom isn’t theirs to govern.

With love, and for sovereignty,

Sarah Steed xx

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My first area was Solnechny, which lite…

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But it’s funny. We invented a word for that woman and then somehow never bothered to invent a word for the far more common situation where a man goes looking for a woman to quietly run his life. Not like a supervillain twirling a mustache, but a pleasant fellow who simply assumes someone will manage the emotional plumbing of his existence.

He needs her for caretaking. For emotional project management. For the grocery lists and holiday magic. For all the invisible work and mental bandwidth required to remember dentist appointments, prescription refills, birthdays, and which child suddenly hates blueberries this week. She notices the empty fridge and fills it before anyone is hungry. She senses tension in a room and quietly turns it into solutions before anyone else has to feel the discomfort. Over time, she becomes the structure holding his life together quietly, competently, and without complaint.

Some men are not looking for a partner as much as they are looking for a labor digger—someone who will carry the weight so their own life feels lighter. Someone whose time and attention can be quietly converted into infrastructure. A kind of currency that buys him relief. She becomes the unpaid executive director of the household franchise known as him. And if she looks good while doing it, well, that certainly doesn’t hurt the optics. The labor may be shared, but the credit still collects under his name. We have normalized the idea that women naturally fold themselves into caretakers. We call it being a good woman with love and devotion.

Now before anyone begins writing me a strongly worded email, let me say clearly that this is not an indictment of stay at home mothers or single income households. Many women choose domestic leadership with agency, respect, and shared power, and many men carry emotional and household labor right alongside them. Mutual care and partnership exist. I’m not arguing against caretaking. I’m arguing against caretaking that is assumed, unpaid, and invisible.

In the economics of marriage, someone is profiting, and someone is paying. And for centuries, women have been the quiet accountants of everyone’s needs, while many men benefit from this system they did not personally design but often do not question. Meals appear, schedules run smoothly, feelings are managed, egos are soothed, children grow up, holidays happen like magic, socks are located, and because it happens quietly, we begin to treat it as natural.

Men are so thoroughly trained in the expectation of domestic service that most of them do not realize they are expecting it. It would probably become obvious very quickly if women started sending invoices. Imagine a statement taped to the refrigerator:

• Sorting your laundry while smiling politely at your mother’s opinions: $48

• Managing the emotional fallout of your bad day: $127

• Knowing everyone’s shoe sizes, allergies, passwords, and favorite snacks: $52

• Noticing the milk is gone before anyone else does, and restocking: $22

• Absorbing the tension in the room so nobody else has to: $143

• Opening the refrigerator and mentally calculating three possible dinners in twelve seconds: $23

• Making sure the house runs smoothly enough that no one notices it running: $63

• Existing without complaint while being called dramatic for asking for help: Priceless, in the most depressing way

• The promotion he earned while you were quietly running the life that made it possible: Credit applied elsewhere

The labor-digger himself is often a perfectly pleasant man. Warm and charming the sort of fellow that occasionally empties the dishwasher and posts something heartfelt on Mother’s Day. He simply doesn’t notice that the system he benefits from was around long before he arrived.

Women participate in this too, of course. Many of us were raised to believe caretaking is how love is earned. So we dish out our time like it’s a mandatory tax, or a 100% tithe, and then we wonder why resentment settles into the corners of our heart like dust we can’t sweep away. Then we hear someone throw around the term gold digger and we shrink a little, because we fear that label more than we fear quietly losing our lives to unpaid labor.

The real question is who benefits. Why would a grown adult want a partner whose existence guarantees his comfort? Why would another grown adult agree to perform emotional janitorial work that he never bothered to learn? Why do we treat domestic work as invisible until it fails to be done? The labor-digger wants something far more valuable than money. He wants the time, energy, and life force of women who delay or downsize their own ambitions so his can remain uninterrupted. But that is not partnership, that is extraction.

If you simply ask honest questions, like, who benefits from the arrangement? Who is growing? Who is shrinking? Whose needs are centered, and whose are assumed? Then things come into focus.

Many women do not recognize the economics of this arrangement until the day the arrangement ends. When the marriage dissolves, they painfully discover that years of labor produced a life that carried someone else’s name, someone else’s paycheck, and someone else’s résumé. Which is a shocking discovery.

A healthy relationship becomes real and good when both people shoulder the invisible tasks, when care moved in both directions. We are witnessing a cultural shift where women are tasting autonomy and realizing it has a remarkable flavor. They are examining marriage and asking why so many wives seem tired, overdrawn, and nameless in their own story. Naming something is the first act of power. So here we are.

The labor-digger is simply a description of a pattern that has existed quietly for generations. If it unsettles you, sit with that. Maybe the discomfort is the truth trying to say hello. Labor is a form of currency. Providing the house is one kind of labor, and making the house run is another. Both count. She is not a dependent, she’s half the enterprise.

I’m asking you to notice how much invisible labor keeps our lives running, the way gravity does. You rarely think about it, but the moment it disappears, things can get weird fast.

Because labor is a form of currency, a woman is not wrong for wanting a partner who knows how to sweep the floor of his own life, or pay her for hers.

And if we’re being honest, the term gold digger starts to feel flimsy once you understand that the real wealth in many relationships is not money at all. It’s time, and energy, and years of someone’s life hidden in the hours women give away for free. And the world, especially men, has become richer because of them. It might be time they kept a little more of the profit.

Labor counts, even when it’s called love.

Sarah Steed xx

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The first time I collided with this brotherhood, I didn’t recognize it. I was engaged to be married, glowing with the naivety of someone who believed spiritual leaders deal in truth. My fiancé and I shared the same bishop, and he told me he was worthy to take me to the temple the way poets speak about love. What I didn’t know was that he was sprinting through repentance interviews behind closed doors, tripping over old secrets I wasn’t allowed to know existed. The bishop knew and could have warned me. He could have said one sentence. Instead, he gave me a temple date and sent me skipping toward a future I didn’t have the information to consent to. That wasn’t trust in God, despite the language they used. It was human deceit.

Would I have married him if I had known? Who knows. That isn’t the point. The choice was never given, and that, right there, was the theft. The theft was my agency, in a religion that claims agency is the foundation of life. Men decided the trajectory of my eternity while telling themselves they were protecting me. They didn’t set out to harm me; they simply followed a pattern that never once required them to consider my humanity. But nothing about that was protection; it was containment and control.

When I found out the truth, I was told by my husband and by a bishop that his repentance process was “between him and the Lord,” as though binding myself to someone forever did not entitle me to know the history he was bringing into my life. They’d been conditioned to see a woman’s need for truth as less important than a man’s need for privacy. But those omissions became the architecture of our marriage. His wounds set the tone of our home. His patterns shaped our children. His secrets slept beside me. What had been declared “none of my business” became the business that rearranged my entire life.

So I state this to the Church today: Consent without information is not consent; it is coercion.

Once my eyes adjusted, I saw it everywhere. In the Church, men write the rules, interpret the rules, and break the rules while other men sweep up after them. A man cheats? He’s human. A man lies? Don’t ruin his future. A man destroys his family? Marriage is hard. A man harms a woman? Forgiveness is divine.

Men aren’t inherently cruel. The tragedy is a structure that prizes boyish allegiance above adult accountability and creates a sort of clubhouse loyalty diguised as priesthood. Somewhere along the way, accountability got mistaken for an insult to priesthood instead of its most basic responsibility.

Faith communities learn how to endure sin, but not always how to endure being examined. When authority wavers, the instinct is often to silence women or children in order to protect the narrative.

Look at any sexual abuse case. The pattern is identical:

• Leaders protect the perpetrator

• Victims are cautioned about forgiveness

• Lawyers are called before therapists/or authorities

• Scandal is feared more than suffering

The brethren protect the brethren. Women and children become collateral damage, sanctified by policy and quieted by scripture.

The Church says it values families, and it does. But the family it protects most fiercely is the quiet fraternity of men who decide what counts as truth, what qualifies as repentance, and what women shouldn’t worry our pretty heads about. Women aren’t protected in that arrangement. We are managed.

The bro-code isn’t a rumor; it functions like an ecosystem with roots and nutrients and its own growth plan, a place where secrecy flourishes and accountability withers.

It resurfaced with brutal clarity when a doctor in my stake sexually assaulted me during an appointment. I reported it to the authorities—both legal and ecclesiastical. I shook through those interviews. Other women whispered their own stories to me, claiming he’d done the same to them. None of them reported it. They didn’t want to “hurt his family.” They had been conditioned to protect the very structures that devoured them.

The doctor wasn’t disciplined, or even benched. He was simply shuffled into my congregation, into my pews, directly into my line of sight, where I was expected to raise my hand and sustain the man who violated me. When I called it out, the leaders shrugged it off as a misunderstanding, something unfortunate, anything but what it actually was: abuse.

It might have stayed that way if not for a dear friend who recognized the quiet panic in me because she had lived it too. She took my hand and said we were going together. We met with the church leaders to name the damage of their decision to place him in my congregation and expect my silence. At first they defended themselves. By the end, they sat stunned, confronted with the cost of their protection. Their faces showed the slow, dawning realization that they had chosen his comfort over my safety. I spoke because she stood beside me. Without her, I would have swallowed the whole thing. Sometimes the only thing that dislodges power is two women deciding not to disappear. By the time we left that room, everyone understood something I had learned the hard way: a system built by men to protect men will never know what to do with a wounded woman. The only leader who helped me was the one who quietly stepped outside the formation, because he remembered he was human, and counseled me to report the doctor to the police.

Worse, even after our conversation, the priesthood leaders who knew what the doctor had done still kept it from the doctors wife. Three bishops, one stake president, the docors very own brother, even the police. A woman whose life could be upended by his behavior was left in the dark because a man’s reputation mattered more than her reality. This isn’t doctrine or priesthood, and it certainly isn’t God.

It’s collusion.

The Church sometimes behaves like God entrusted His vision to men who decide which sins matter and which women must learn to swallow pain quietly enough to keep the quorum intact.

I married the way most of us do, full of faith and a stomach crowded with hope. What I didn’t have was the truth. Secrets behave like termites and chew through your covenant from within until one day you finally understand plainly that the bill for protecting men always gets sent to women.

Some might call this culture, or priesthood order. I call it what it has shown itself to be: A private clubhouse run by men, protected by a bro-code, and funded with women’s and children’s lives.

With love,

Sarah Steed xx

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Every moment was assigned, and every feeling was assigned…

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Friend. If your enlightenment still needs a villain of the week, you did not deconstruct. You redecorated your cage. You can always tell how deep someone’s awakening goes by how specific their blame is. If the blame has a logo, we are not at consciousness yet. We are at merch.

All administrations are toxic. Yes, all. Every single one. It’s called pattern recognition,. You live longe enough and you notice there are no differences between them. None. The administration shows up like their job is to preserve structure despite their “side.” They work for the machine and stabilize it at all costs, especially at the cost of the poeple.

The two party system is the professional wrestling type that is already scripted. Red corner. Blue corner. Same things. Same donors. They expect us to hiss and throw popcorn while they make decisions in rooms with no windows and catered lunch, clinking glasses, swapping favors, and congratulating each other for saving the world again without ever having to meet it.

Real deconstruction is quiet and much more inconvenient as you turn the flashlight inward and say, oh no, I am participating, and benefiting, and repeating. It does not hand you a new enemy. It puts you in a carnival mirror maze where every reflection is you, brutally helpful, and honest.

Still, and this is the strange bright part, something honest is happening right now. The curtain is getting yanked back by accident and by whistleblower and by leaked files and by brave loud women and men. The exposure of corrupt religious power structures, government rot, and sexual exploitation networks hiding behind wealth and respectability is ugly and overdue and weirdly hopeful for women especially. For us this moment feels electric. Systems that ran on female bodies, and women’s silence and women’s unpaid emotional labor are starting to choke on what they swallowed, finally sputtering evidence. The old formulas are not working like they used to. The threats are less effective. The shame spirals are wearing off. It’s glorious.

Some of these institutions have been grazing on women like an “all you can eat buffet,” just plate after plate. Now someone flipped on the lights, and the diners are being asked to settle the tab. I call that progress. Messy loud, and slightly unhinged progress. It scares the people who prefer their authority unquestioned and their secrets hidden.

This requires no party loyalty, and no new ideology. Just the courage to admit the rot is structural, and the nerve to stop outsourcing “evil” to whichever mascot you already disliked. It’s all Evil. That’s why it’s all crumbling.

It is a strange, wild time to be alive. Someone pass the popcorn.

With Love,

Sarah Steed xx

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