let me throw the white light of Alma around you & everyone you pass

What if I throw the white light of Alma around anyone who might need protection from the reckless speed of driving or the reckless swerve & skid of the world? & the psychic opened his hands & shrugged up his shoulders. So despite your doubt or mine as to why I’d gone there, to a psychic, in—I kid you not—a town of psychics—in the first place, right now, as you read this, let me throw the white light of Alma around you & everyone you pass close to today, beloved or stranger, the grocer, the bus driver, the boy on his longboard, the lady you stand silent beside in the elevator, & also I am throwing it around anyone they care about anywhere in the spin of the world, because, we can agree that these days, everywhere, particular caution is in order &, even if unverifiable, the light of my dear sister Alma, couldn’t hurt.

-​The Psychic | Victoria Redell

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Sara and I recorded an episode of The Parent Rap this afternoon, one that was scheduled to be about expectations and reality and which things seem a lot less chosen than we'd like. We did talk about that, but not exactly in the way we'd intended, because what parts of the last few weeks have had anything look the way we planned? 
While we mostly kept things on track, the conversation was also a little bit therapeutic, in that we talked about the way things have been feeling and reminded each other about the ways our group of online friends (some of us have been close for fifteen years now) have come up to handle a lot of the things the world throws at us. That the situation is unfathomable now doesn't mean the tools are useless, and just talking to her for a while really brought me some peace I'd been needing.
I am really, really bad about retreating into myself when I'm struggling. In a crisis, I tend to make sure the people I can help are stabilized, and then I curl up and hide. It's not my instinct to reach out, and my long-time habit has been to hold things in until they're too much and I shatter. In the worst example of this, I tore the walls of my life down around myself and had to rebuild completely from scratch, a process I very much do not recommend. That's not where I'm at, and I have a lot more self-awareness and a lot more tools at my disposal now than I had then, but I can never let myself ignore it, never let myself give in entirely to the hiding out instinct. But it's hard. 
One of the things Sara and I talked about was how people's habits all become extra obvious when we're under a lot of stress, and how some of those habits are great and others really difficult to live with. We bring ourselves, in abundance, to the table. But we have to show up, hurting and bitchy and scared and sad and annoying. We just have to show up in the ways we're able, as all our best and worst selves all at once.
So I bring you my love, and my wish to put you in a bubble of safety and warmth and care. I bring you my habit of hiding, and of getting angry when I don't get to hide. I bring you my mistakes and my triumphs. I bring it all, and I wrap you up in it, and in turn hold you in your abundance.
We're going to do everything we can. Most of us are going to get through this, but some of us won't. We will hold them, too. We will carry each other.