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Parenting between compassion and fear. We moved somewhere safer, and still… There are unhoused people sleeping near the places my children walk. Desperation shows up in public spaces. Violence leaks into ordinary afternoons. People still grasping for life in a world that doesn’t support us all. I don’t blame people for acting out in a…
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Sign me up! If you haven’t been following this particular corner of the AI wars, here’s the short version: the Pentagon is threatening to pull its $200 million contract with Anthropic, the company behind the AI tool Claude, and potentially label them a “supply chain risk,” which would pressure anyone doing business with the military…
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About the ease of naming evil and the work of looking deeper They say small towns are families. I grew up in one. The kind where people knew who your parents were and the corner store grocery store cashier knew your name. The kind where doors were rarely locked and casseroles appeared on porches before…
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Thoughts on marriage and leaving… A friend is getting divorced after nineteen years with her partner. It’s tender and hard. I ache for her, not because I think she’s making the wrong choice, but because I know how deep those roots go. What it means to disentangle not just a life, but an identity. Thinking…
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I don’t need graphic footage to understand… I am enraged, heartbroken, and shaken. I don’t need graphic footage to understand what happened. The reporting is already clear. As News, Not News wrote this week, what we are witnessing is not a single tragic mistake, but the predictable outcome of a system that has been expanding…
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Healthcare, rights, and the question of belonging… If the first crack in our decision to leave came from safety concerns, the next came from the realization that we were asking our children to tolerate systems that didn’t see them, or worse, actively worked against them. There were the day-to-day things. After my second child, I…
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It wasn’t just fear… It didn’t happen all at once. The decision to leave unfolded slowly, like a shadow creeping in just before dusk. Long before we packed up our lives, before our final goodbyes, there was a quiet shift beginning. A sense that the ground was changing beneath us. Thanks for reading Melissa’s Substack!…
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Home is never just a place… It’s a strange thing to grieve a place while feeling relief to be gone. I lived in Texas for most of my life, long enough to feel tethered to its heat, its rhythm, its stubborn pride. I was born along the Texas coast. I’ve traveled before, even lived abroad…