Author: Sarah King

The Mess Comes First: Why Creative Work Almost Never Arrives in the Right Order

Posted on 10 August 2026by Sarah King

Can we just agree on something before I start? The idea that creativity flows in a clean, logical, beginning-to-end sequence is one of the most persistent and honestly kind of cruel myths that gets handed to people who make things. It sets up so many of us — writers, musicians, artists, people building weird little corners of the internet at midnight — to feel broken when our process looks like a crime scene instead of a flowchart.

Because here is what actually happens. You wake up at 2 a.m. with a line. Just a line. You don’t know what it belongs to, you don’t know if it’s a lyric or a sentence or a caption for something that doesn’t exist yet, but it is alive and it is yours and if you don’t write it down it will evaporate like it was never there. So you grab your phone or a receipt from your pocket or you scrawl it on the back of your hand, and then you go back to sleep, and in the morning you look at it and think okay but where does this go.

The answer, by the way, is almost never immediately obvious. Sometimes not for months.

And that’s fine. I am here to tell you that is actually, genuinely, completely fine.

The Fragment is Not a Failure

I have folders. So many folders. Documents that are two sentences long. Voice memos where I’m clearly half asleep murmuring something into my phone because my brain decided 3 a.m. was the ideal hour for creative transmission. Sticky notes in various states of illegibility. Screenshots of colour palettes I was never going to use right away but needed to save. A folder on my desktop called “STUFF” which is exactly as chaotic as it sounds and somehow still one of the most useful creative tools I own.

We treat fragments like they’re evidence that we didn’t finish something. Like a two-paragraph draft is a confession of laziness or inability. But what if the fragment is just the creative work arriving in the only form it could arrive in at that moment? What if the incomplete thing is actually doing its job?

Fragments are holding space. They are the bookmark your brain dropped before it had enough context to write the whole chapter. They are the first note of a song that isn’t ready to be a song yet. They are the sketch that comes before the painting, and the painting that comes before you understand why you made it.

The creative process is not a factory line. It’s more like… you know that mechanic in an RPG who’s always got seventeen side quests running simultaneously and she’s wandering the map collecting ingredients for one quest while accidentally triggering cutscenes for three others? That’s it. That is the whole thing. You are managing multiple open loops and occasionally one of them pings you at an inconvenient time and goes hey, I’m ready now, pay attention to me.

You gotta be ready to drop what you’re doing and pay attention.

Inspiration Has No Respect for Your Schedule

I want to talk about the specific cruelty of inspiration arriving at the wrong time. And I say cruelty with affection because I think it’s also kind of hilarious, in that way where the universe has a sense of humour that is equal parts annoying and magnificent.

You’re in the shower. You’re driving. You’re mid-conversation at a family dinner. You’re trying to fall asleep. You’re in the middle of a completely unrelated task that requires your full concentration. And then, like a cat knocking something off a shelf just to see what happens, your brain hands you the thing. The idea that fits perfectly. The bridge for the song. The turn in the essay. The website layout that finally makes sense. The solution to the structural problem you’ve been circling for weeks.

Right then. Right in that moment when you cannot act on it.

This is why I have learned to be relentlessly, almost embarrassingly committed to capturing things immediately. Not when I get home. Not later. Now. Because my brain, bless it, is not a reliable storage system. It’s more like a whiteboard in a coffee shop — things get written there, and then someone else’s idea gets written over it, and then the whole board gets erased, and you’re left trying to remember what was there before.

The capture system matters so much more than people talk about. Not because you’re going to use every fragment you collect. Most of them will sit there and never become anything, and that’s okay too. But you need the practice of catching things. You need to train yourself to reach for the notepad, reach for the voice memo, pull over if you have to. Because the ones that do become something later? You’ll be so glad you caught them.

Returning Is Not Starting Over

Here’s a thing that used to mess with me badly: opening an old draft and feeling like I’d gone backwards.

Like there was something shameful about picking up something I hadn’t touched in six months. Like I should have finished it the first time. Like the gap was proof of something failing instead of proof that I was a human person with finite energy and a life with approximately nine hundred moving parts.

But here is what I’ve actually learned from returning to things after time away: I am almost always better positioned to finish them later than I was when I started them. The distance is not a setback. It’s the whole process working exactly the way it’s supposed to.

You write the beginning of something when you’re feeling the feeling. You put it down. You live your life. You think about it sideways while doing dishes, while walking, while reading something completely unrelated. And then you come back and you see it with fresh eyes and you understand what it needs in a way you absolutely could not have seen the first time through.

This is not just true for writing. I think about this with website work too, which some people don’t think of as creative work but is absolutely creative work. I have gone back to design decisions I made months ago and completely understood why they weren’t working, when at the time I thought they were fine. The distance taught me something the closeness couldn’t.

Music does this too. You lay down a track and you’re not sure about it and you leave it. You come back. And now you hear the gap where something belongs, or you hear the part that’s overloaded and needs to breathe, and you could not have heard that when you were still inside the making of it.

The return is a skill. Treat it like one.

Structure is a Thing You Find, Not a Thing You Start With

Okay this is the part where I will probably step on some toes and I am at peace with that.

We are taught — in school, in a lot of creative writing advice, in productivity culture — that you should outline first. Plan first. Know where you’re going before you go. And look, I understand why that advice exists. It works for some people. Genuinely. If you are a plotter and an outliner and you like your map before you start walking, I am not here to tell you you’re wrong. You’re not wrong.

But there is a whole enormous category of creative people for whom that sequence is backwards, and those people have spent years feeling like they’re doing it wrong, and I want them to know they are not doing it wrong.

Sometimes you make the thing first and you find the structure inside it after. Sometimes you write three thousand words before you understand what the piece is actually about. Sometimes you record a bunch of sound and the song reveals itself in the edit. Sometimes you start a painting with a colour and the composition shows up later. Sometimes you build half a website page and only in doing it do you understand how the navigation should work.

Structure-after-inspiration is a completely legitimate way to make things. It is not lazy. It is not undisciplined. It is a different sequence that honours the reality of how creative material arrives — which is often raw, often formless, often burning hot in a way that doesn’t wait for you to make a chart first.

The discipline isn’t in the outline. The discipline is in doing the work of shaping the raw material once you have it. And that shaping? Sometimes that’s the hardest part of the whole process. Nobody gets to skip the hard part. We just find it in different places in the sequence.

Nonlinear Doesn’t Mean Chaotic (But It Might Look Chaotic)

I want to distinguish between nonlinear and chaotic because people use them interchangeably and they’re not the same thing.

Chaotic means no system. No capture. No returning. Just spinning and generating and abandoning and never actually landing on anything, which is genuinely exhausting and also not what I’m advocating for.

Nonlinear means the sequence isn’t fixed. It means the middle can arrive before the beginning. It means chapter seven might be the thing that tells you what chapter one is supposed to say. It means the chorus might appear before you have a verse. It means the website footer might be what you design first because it’s what you can see most clearly, and the header will come later when you understand the whole page better.

Nonlinear still has a system. It just doesn’t front-load all its decisions. It’s responsive rather than prescriptive. It follows the energy of what’s alive and ready rather than forcing every piece into a predetermined slot before it’s ready to go there.

And yeah, from the outside, it can look chaotic. The open tabs. The disconnected documents. The multiple half-finished things living alongside each other. The way you might bounce between three different projects in one afternoon because each of them wanted something from you in that window and you followed where the work was calling.

It looks like a mess. It frequently is a mess. But there is a logic underneath it, and that logic is the logic of what’s ready, what’s alive, what’s asking to be worked on right now.

I trust that logic more than I trust any chart I could make before I know what I’m making.

The Part Nobody Talks About: When Nothing Comes

We need to talk about the gaps. The dry stretches. The times when you sit down to create something and the lights are off and nobody’s home and you are sitting there with a blank document or a blank canvas or a blank track and feeling like you have been quietly unplugged.

Controller unplugged mid-cutscene. That’s the vibe. The game was going fine and then silence.

I have a complicated relationship with those gaps. I used to panic in them. I used to interpret them as evidence that the creative part of me was gone, broken, done, had packed its bags and moved to somewhere warmer without telling me. I would push and force and come out the other side with stuff that wasn’t good, stuff I made out of anxiety instead of out of anything real, and that stuff never helped anything.

What I know now, and what took me an embarrassingly long time to learn: the gaps are part of the process too. They are the fallow season. The compost stage. The loading screen between levels. Something is happening underneath even when nothing is appearing on the surface.

This doesn’t mean you just sit on your couch waiting for lightning. It means you do other things. You read. You live. You take walks. You let yourself be bored occasionally, which is incredibly countercultural right now but also incredibly necessary for creative work. You look at art you didn’t make. You listen to music you didn’t write. You go outside. You talk to people. You fill the well.

And then, often when you are least expecting it, the transmission comes back. Something fires. The folder labelled STUFF contains exactly what you needed. The fragment from three months ago is suddenly ready to become something larger.

I actually believe that about creativity the same way I believe it about faith: Proverbs 3:5-6 has never steered me wrong. Trust the process that’s larger than your immediate understanding. The path gets clearer as you walk it, not necessarily before. You don’t always get to see the whole map before you start moving.

Practical Things That Have Actually Helped Me

I don’t want to end this without saying something useful. Not a universal system, because I promised I wouldn’t do that and I meant it. But some things that help me navigate nonlinear creative work without losing my mind entirely:

Capture everything, curate later. Don’t try to evaluate fragments at the moment they arrive. That’s not their time to be evaluated. Catch them, store them, let them sit. The curation happens when you’re ready to work on something, not in the middle of the night when the thing first showed up.

Date your fragments. When you go back to an old note or a half-finished draft, knowing when you made it gives you context. Where were you? What were you going through? Sometimes that context tells you everything about what the thing is and what it needs.

Respect what’s calling you. If one project is alive and asking for attention, give it attention. Even if it’s the fourth thing on your list or the one you’ve been avoiding or the one that feels too big to touch. The energy that a piece of creative work carries when it’s ready is real. Don’t ignore it because it’s inconvenient.

Give yourself permission to start in the middle. You don’t have to write the introduction first. You don’t have to design the homepage first. You don’t have to record the first verse first. Start where the work is alive and work outward from there. The connective tissue can come later.

Return without apology. Old drafts are not failures. They are creative work in progress. Returning to something doesn’t mean you didn’t do it right the first time. It means you’re doing it right now.

Stop performing linearity. This one is the big one, honestly. So much creative paralysis comes from trying to do the thing in the right order so it looks correct to some imaginary observer. There is no imaginary observer. There is just you and the work. The order doesn’t matter. The work does.

The Thing I Keep Coming Back To

Creative work is trust. It’s trusting that the fragment matters even when you can’t see what it belongs to. Trusting that the gap will end. Trusting that the project you put down six months ago and picked up again this morning is worth the return. Trusting that the mess you’re making right now has a shape inside it that you’ll be able to find.

It doesn’t arrive in the right order because it doesn’t know what the right order is. And neither do you, not at the beginning. You figure it out together as you go.

The beginning matters. The fragments matter. The gaps matter. The returns matter. The chaotic 2 a.m. voice memo that makes almost no sense in the morning and is somehow exactly what you needed matters.

All of it is the process. The whole beautiful sprawling mess of it.

Start wherever you can reach.

Put the Advice Down and Back Away Slowly

Posted on 3 August 2026by Sarah King

I have a problem. A deeply ingrained, knee-jerk, borderline compulsive problem. Someone starts telling me something hard, something they’re carrying, something that’s been weighing on them for weeks, and before they even get to the part where they take a breath, my brain is already three steps ahead, filing through a mental drawer labeled Solutions I Have Prepared For This Occasion.

It’s not malicious. It comes from a genuine place of caring. It comes from wanting to help, from wanting the person in front of me to feel better as fast as possible. But here’s the thing I’ve had to learn the hard way, through years of mentoring and being mentored and getting it embarrassingly wrong:

The fastest way to help is almost never the first thing that comes out of your mouth.

And if you’re someone who works with young people in any capacity, whether that’s mentoring, coaching, youth work, volunteering, or just being the adult in the room that kids actually talk to, this is probably the most important skill you will ever develop. Not program planning. Not knowing the right resources. Not even being consistent or dependable, though those matter too.

Listening. Real, full-bodied, not-already-preparing-your-response listening.

Let me tell you why I believe this so hard it’s practically a tattoo on my brain.

—

The Fix-It Instinct Is Lying To You

There is something deeply satisfying about having an answer. Like, neurologically satisfying. The moment you identify a problem and produce a solution, your brain does a little happy jig. You feel competent. Useful. Like you’ve earned your place in the conversation.

The problem is that the young person across from you did not necessarily come to you for answers. They might not even know yet what they came to you for. They might still be figuring out what the question is. And the second you start offering solutions, you’ve essentially told them: I already understand your situation well enough to prescribe something for it.

Spoiler: you don’t. Not yet. Maybe not ever, if they don’t feel safe enough to tell you the whole thing.

When we rush to fix, we skip the part where we actually understand. We grab the presenting problem, the surface detail, the thing they led with, and we run straight to the toolkit. And sometimes we’re so close that it looks helpful. They nod politely. They say thanks. And then they leave and go talk to someone else about the real thing, the thing underneath the thing, because they could tell you were already on your way to the answer before they finished the sentence.

The fix-it instinct is not your greatest asset. It’s your greatest liability when it fires too early.

—

What Listening Actually Looks Like (Because It Is Not What We Think)

I used to think I was a good listener because I didn’t interrupt. Which is like saying you’re a good chef because you own a pan. Necessary. Not sufficient.

Real listening has texture. It has presence. It’s not just the absence of talking.

It’s sitting in the discomfort without reaching for the eject button.

When someone tells you something heavy, the instinct is to lighten it. To say but look on the bright side or at least you have or have you tried just. That impulse to lighten the room is not about them. It’s about your own discomfort with sitting in the weight of what they’re carrying. And they feel that. Young people especially feel that, because they’re already hyperaware of whether the adults around them can actually handle what they’re about to say.

If you reach for the silver lining too fast, you teach them that their hard thing is too hard for you. And they will calibrate accordingly. They will give you the smaller, easier version of their life going forward.

So. What does real listening actually involve?

Your body being present. Not half-present. Not one eye on your phone. Not mentally meal planning. Eye contact that says I am here, you have my full attention, the rest of the world can wait five minutes. For kids who are used to adults being distracted or dismissive, the experience of someone being genuinely, physically present with them is sometimes the most powerful thing that happens in a mentoring relationship.

Reflecting back without editorializing. This is a skill. A learnable one, but still a skill. It sounds like: So what I’m hearing is you’re feeling like no one in that situation took you seriously, is that right? Not Oh well your friend probably didn’t mean it that way. Not That’s actually pretty normal. Just: here is what I heard you say, am I getting it right? That kind of reflection tells them you’re tracking, that you care enough to get it right, and it gives them permission to correct you if you’re off.

Asking questions that open doors instead of closing them. There is a massive difference between Did that make you angry? and How did that feel? One has two possible answers. One has infinite possible answers. Always go for the infinite door. Questions like What was that like for you? or What do you think made that so hard? or even just Tell me more about that are worth their weight in gold. They say: I want to understand your experience from the inside, not just the outside.

—

About the Silence, Though

This one is a beast. I will not pretend otherwise.

Silence in a conversation feels wrong to most people. It feels like failure. Like something broke. Like you should say something, anything, to get the wheels turning again. For those of us who are neurodivergent or who have social anxiety or who were raised in families where silence meant tension, sitting in a quiet pause can feel like waiting for the jump scare in a horror movie. You know something is coming. Your whole nervous system is braced.

But in mentoring? Silence is often where the real stuff lives.

When a young person goes quiet after you ask them something, they are almost always processing. They are turning something over, looking at it from a new angle, deciding whether it’s safe to say the next thing out loud. And if you fill that silence with a follow-up question or a reassurance or an it’s okay, you don’t have to answer that, you’ve just closed the door they were about to walk through.

Let the silence breathe. Count to ten in your head if you have to. Become comfortable, or at least functional, in the presence of quiet. Because a young person who learns that silences are safe with you? That you won’t panic, rush, or override them? That person will eventually tell you the thing they haven’t told anyone else.

Not because you extracted it. Because you made the space safe enough for it to surface on its own.

That’s different. That matters enormously.

—

Patience Is a Practice, Not a Personality Trait

I have to be honest with you here: I am not naturally patient. I am a woman who has been known to give her microwave instructions to hurry up. The idea that I would sit calmly and wait for understanding to develop organically sounds like a premise from a comedy sketch about me specifically.

And yet. Mentoring has taught me patience in a way that almost nothing else has. Not because I figured out some secret, but because I kept seeing what happened when I wasn’t patient, and it was always worse than the slower road.

Patience in mentoring is not passive. It is not just waiting. It is actively choosing to prioritize understanding over efficiency. It is reminding yourself, sometimes in real-time, that this person’s timeline for processing and sharing is not going to match your timeline for helping, and that’s okay. The mismatch is not a problem to be solved. It’s just the nature of real human relationships.

Practically speaking, patience looks like not circling back to your point after they’ve changed the subject. It looks like being willing to have the same conversation across multiple sessions instead of wrapping it up in one tidy visit. It looks like not showing visible relief when the hard part of the conversation ends. Young people notice when adults are relieved that a difficult topic is over. They clock it. And they file it under things to avoid bringing up again.

Show up again next week. And the week after. That is where trust actually gets built. Not in the moments of insight, but in the accumulation of ordinary moments where you kept showing up and nothing dramatic happened and you showed up anyway.

—

Checking Understanding Before You Offer Anything

Here is a practical checkpoint I’ve built into my own approach: before I offer any perspective, suggestion, or reflection of my own experience, I ask myself two questions.

One: Do I understand what’s actually being asked here?

Two: Have I been asked?

Because sometimes someone is not asking for advice. Sometimes they are not even asking for reflection. Sometimes they are just asking to be heard, and if I respond to that with a five-point plan, I have completely missed the assignment. The map and the territory are not the same thing. My perception of what they need and what they’re telling me they need can diverge wildly, and it is always worth taking five seconds to check.

So I will literally say, sometimes: Are you looking for input on this, or did you mostly need to get it out?

You know what’s wild? People love being asked that. Especially young people, who are so used to adults deciding what they need and dispensing it without checking. Being asked what kind of support you want is, for a lot of people, a genuinely novel experience. It says: I see you as someone with agency in this conversation. You get to tell me how to be useful to you.

That is not a small thing. That is the difference between help that lands and help that bounces off.

And if they say they do want your input, great, now you can offer it and know it’s actually wanted. But even then, the way you offer it matters. There is a difference between here is what I think you should do and here is something that’s helped me in a similar situation, take it or leave it. One is a prescription. One is a gift with no strings. Young people, especially teenagers, are exquisitely attuned to the difference. They will resist the prescription even if it’s correct. They will consider the gift on their own terms.

—

The Urge to Fix Is Not Neutral

I want to name something that doesn’t get said enough in mentoring conversations: the urge to fix everything is sometimes more about us than them.

When someone we care about is struggling and we can’t solve it, there is a particular kind of helplessness that kicks in. It’s uncomfortable. It brushes up against our own fears, our own unresolved things, our own experiences of feeling helpless or unseen or stuck. And fixing, or at least the motion of trying to fix, gives us something to do with that discomfort. It creates the feeling of forward movement even when nothing is actually moving forward.

This is worth sitting with. Especially if you find yourself working very hard to resolve something for a young person who hasn’t asked you to resolve it. Ask yourself: whose discomfort am I trying to manage right now?

I am not saying this as judgment. I am saying this because I have caught myself doing it, more times than I’d like to admit. The work of mentoring, especially over the long haul, requires some ongoing self-awareness about your own emotional state and what it’s doing in the room. That’s not therapy language, it’s just honest. Your stuff comes with you. Knowing what your stuff is keeps you from accidentally centering it in someone else’s story.

Not everything can be fixed. Not every hard situation has a solution you can hand someone. Some things just have to be lived through, and the most important thing you can do is make sure they don’t have to live through it alone. That is not nothing. That is, in many cases, everything.

—

When Listening Opens the Door to Real Help

Here’s the thing I want you to hold onto: listening well is not the opposite of helping. It is the foundation that makes actual help possible.

When you listen long enough and well enough to genuinely understand what someone is dealing with, the help you eventually offer, if help is asked for and appropriate, is so much more precise. So much more useful. Because it’s based on their reality, not your assumption of their reality. The difference between a guess and an informed response is the entire distance between unhelpful and genuinely supportive.

And sometimes the listening itself is the help. Sometimes someone needs to hear themselves say something out loud to a person who will not freak out, will not judge them, will not immediately try to solve it. The act of speaking something into a safe space can shift things internally in ways that no advice can touch. You cannot shortcut that process by skipping ahead to the advice. You have to go through the listening to get there.

This is also, it should be said, not counselling. It is not therapy. There are things that come up in mentoring relationships that are beyond the scope of a mentor to carry, and part of listening well is recognizing when something needs to be connected to professional support. Being a good listener does not mean being an on-call therapist. It means being a trustworthy person who helps someone feel heard and helps them find the right path forward, including the path that leads to someone more qualified when that’s what’s needed. Knowing where your lane ends is part of the skill.

—

Okay But Practically Speaking

In case you want a few concrete things to try, because I know some of you are like me and need the list:

Before your next mentoring conversation, set an intention to ask three questions before you offer anything. Three full, open-ended questions. Not rhetorical questions. Real ones. Listen to all three answers before your advice-brain gets a turn.

Practice the reflection technique. Literally just try: So what I’m hearing is [summary]. Did I get that right? and see what happens. You will be surprised how often you were slightly off, and how much it means to them that you wanted to get it right.

Let one silence go uninterrupted. Just one, this week. Let it sit. Don’t count it as failure. Count it as space.

Ask what kind of support they want. Make it a habit. It takes ten seconds and it changes everything about the dynamic.

After the conversation, notice how much you talked versus how much they talked. There’s no perfect ratio, but if you talked more than they did in a conversation that was supposed to be about what they’re going through, that’s information worth having.

None of this is complicated. All of it is hard. Hard because it requires setting aside the ego satisfaction of being the person with the answer, and settling into the quieter, less flashy work of being the person who makes space. That work doesn’t get applause. It doesn’t always get acknowledged. But it is the work that actually changes things.

—

I think about Proverbs 18:13 sometimes in this context: To answer before listening, that is folly and shame. That’s not complicated theology. That’s just wisdom that has been true for thousands of years and will be true tomorrow. Listen first. The rest follows.

The young people in your life are telling you things, maybe not always in words, maybe not always directly. The ones who feel heard will keep telling you. The ones who don’t, won’t. And you cannot retroactively become the safe person someone learned you weren’t years ago. You can only be it, consistently, starting now.

Listening matters. Patience matters. The silence matters. The questions matter. The decision to put down the answer and actually hear the person matters.

Pick it up from there.

The Language Before Words: This Is Your Brain On Art (With a Twist)

Posted on 27 July 2026by Sarah King

This is your brain.

[Picture an egg. A perfectly reasonable, unremarkable egg. It has never hurt anyone. It has never been asked to feel something about a cello, a piano and a crazy woman drinking hot cocoa at 3:00am on a friday night in a Snorlax onesie wondering where the gnomes took her sanity.]

As such…This, is your brain on art.

[Picture that same egg, cracked into a hot pan, and instead of frying into something sensible, it starts playing a piano line so quietly devastating that you’re suddenly back in a kitchen from fifteen years ago, smelling coffee that no longer exists. Also there’s a wedge of lime on the plate for some reason. Nobody asked for the lime. The lime showed up anyway. This is important. Hold onto the lime.]

Any questions? Good, because I have a whole post.

PSA #1: This Is What Music Does To An Undecoded Brain

Here’s the deal nobody put on the label: when you’re autistic and the world hands you subtext without a manual, music is the one substance — sorry, language — that doesn’t lie to you straight to your face. A minor key is grief, no footnotes required. A cello parked in that low chest-register isn’t being metaphorical at you. It is mainlining directly into your nervous system, no cutting agent, no dilution, a hundred percent pure truth, and mine came with a twist because apparently everything does now.

That’s not performance. That’s the drug talking. Except it’s not a drug. It’s a Tuesday and a cello.

PSA #2: Your Brain On Melody Is Just Your Brain On Memory With Better Marketing

Some of my memories are crystal clear. Others got redacted somewhere between the trauma and the chronic illness, and I genuinely could not tell you what happened in there — see a doctor, not me, I only have opinions about cellos.

But play me one specific piano line and boom: I am standing in a kitchen, autumn light doing its thing, coffee smell included at no extra charge, and I did not consent to any of this. The melody just reached into the filing cabinet of my skull and yanked the folder marked DO NOT OPEN UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY STRINGS.

Scientists call this the reminiscence bump. I call it getting emotionally roofied by a piano. Either way: the note and the moment fuse, and years later you can’t walk past the doorway without the door swinging open, twist of lime, whether invited or not.

I’m a novelist. I want that exact mechanism working on you. I want one sentence in my book to be the piano line that ambushes you in a grocery store checkout line in 2031 for no reason you can explain to your spouse.

PSA #3: Meet Your Dealers (The Instruments)

The cello is the reliable one. Shows up, sits in your chest register like it lives there, and delivers grief you’ve already made peace with, straight, no chaser.

The violin is the unpredictable one. Higher, brighter, will make you cry from joy and then immediately from something with no English name — possibly Portuguese, we’re looking into it — and it has never once stopped moving long enough to let you catch your breath. Do not trust the violin. Also, do trust the violin completely. Both are correct.

The piano is running two conspiracies at once. Left hand says one thing, right hand says the opposite, and together they cut it with a third substance nobody saw coming, which is somehow the truth. This is also, coincidentally, how good dialogue works: two characters saying the same words and meaning entirely different things.

When I write a character, I ask what instrument they are. Cello, violin, or the improvising right hand that keeps wandering off the plan. Pretentious? Sure. Also it’s the only thing keeping my characters from flattening into people who mean one thing at a time, so.

PSA #4: Your Brain On Rhythm Doesn’t Know It’s High Until Something Interrupts It

You never notice rhythm while it’s working. You just feel your foot start moving without your permission. You only clock it when it breaks — a missed beat, an unexpected rest, a meter change that makes your whole body go wait, what.

Prose does the exact same thing to a reader, and it took me embarrassing years to admit it. Short sentence. Then a long one that stretches out, takes the scenic route, makes you trust it’s going somewhere. Then it lands. Short again. Rest.

If a scene feels dead and the content’s fine and the emotion’s fine and I can’t figure out why — it’s rhythm, every single time. All the sentences are the same length, nobody’s breathing, there’s no twist anywhere in the glass. I fix the rhythm, the scene wakes back up. Every time. No exceptions, no rehab required.

PSA #5: Some Music Is a Location and You Cannot Convince Me Otherwise

Certain pieces don’t remind me of a place. They are a place. Wide open and rolling. Or claustrophobic. Or cold in that specific clean way, or warm in the specific way of a summer afternoon about to turn gold.

This is the same trick novelists pull with setting. The moor isn’t a moor, it’s dread wearing heather as a costume. The mountain isn’t geology, it’s ambition with a body count. Composers do it with instrumentation — sustained high strings for vast and exposed, woodwinds for lush and secretive, soft irregular percussion for “something is watching you and it has good taste in music.”

So now when I write a scene, I ask what it sounds like. Not cute. Actual diagnostic. If I can’t hear it, I haven’t earned the right to write it yet.

PSA #6: The Lie of Simple (Or: Three Chords Will End You)

We’ve collectively decided complexity means seriousness. Long is smart. Dense is impressive. Simple is for people who didn’t try hard enough. And then a song shows up — three chords, six lines — and flattens you completely, and you have to sit with the humiliating truth that precision is harder than volume.

A three-minute song has to build a world, a character, a rising tension, and a gut-punch in roughly ten lines, with zero room for a paragraph that’s secretly just stalling. So when I catch myself wandering through a chapter, enjoying my own sentences more than my reader will, I run the songwriting test: would this line survive the cut? Usually not. Usually I cut it. The chapter always thanks me later, in the sense that chapters cannot thank you, but if they could, this one would.

PSA #7: The Twist Nobody Warned You About

Here’s the actual confession under all the bits: I am not reliably good at knowing what I’m feeling while I’m feeling it. Not repression, not performance — the label just doesn’t load. Alexithymia, if you want the clinical garnish on top.

Music doesn’t ask me to identify the emotion before I’m allowed to have it. It just runs the substance through my system, and then I know things I didn’t know I knew, the way you don’t taste the lime until it’s already changed the whole drink. The melody locates the thing sitting unlabeled in my chest and names it in sound before I have the words. Then I have the words. Then I can write it down and hand it to you.

That’s the whole operation, honestly. Emotional GPS. Plug in, find your coordinates, proceed. When I’m stuck in a draft — not blocked, just fogged, unable to access what a scene should feel like — I go find the piece of music living in that same territory and let it drive until the fog burns off.

Even the psalms run on this. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me is not a tidy feeling — that’s a man in the fog with no coordinates, set to music because plain speech couldn’t carry the weight of it. It has never stopped mattering to me that this is what got quoted from the cross.

Any Questions? (There’s One Slide Left)

I used to think music and fiction lived in separate rooms, because keeping them apart felt like what “serious” looked like. Turns out they’re the same room. The rhythm of a sentence and the rhythm of a measure are the same problem wearing different clothes. The moment a story’s whole structure finally pays off and your breath catches — that’s a resolution chord, mechanically, in your actual brain, no metaphor required.

So: this is your brain. This is your brain on art, with a twist. Cello, violin, the left hand arguing with the right hand, the silence before the first note, the song that knows exactly when to stop and does it cleanly before it wears out its welcome.

That last part matters most. No garnish needed.

So When Exactly Does the Adult Part Kick In?

Posted on 22 July 2026by Sarah King

I have a theory. And it is not a particularly original theory, but I think it needs to be said out loud more often, in public, by people who are supposed to have their lives together. Here it is: nobody actually knows what they are doing. Not really. Not fully. Everyone is just moving through the world at varying speeds of confident improvisation, and the ones who look the most certain are usually the most terrified.

I did not come to this conclusion lightly. I came to it the way most people come to uncomfortable truths, slowly, painfully, and usually while doing something extremely mundane like staring at a bill or trying to remember if I already took my vitamins or standing in a grocery store aisle for six full minutes trying to decide between two nearly identical products while a small child stared at me like I was the strangest creature they had ever seen.

That child was not wrong.

The age keeps moving.

When I was little, adults seemed like a completely different species. They drove cars. They made decisions. They drank coffee without making a face. They signed things with actual pens in a way that implied they understood what they were signing. Adulthood looked like a destination, like someplace you arrived at and then stayed. A level you unlocked and never had to grind through again.

I think most of us spent our childhoods assuming there was some specific age where it would all click into place. Like a loading screen that finally resolves. Sixteen felt like it would do it. Then eighteen. Then twenty-one. Then twenty-five, when your prefrontal cortex supposedly finishes developing, which I only know because someone told me that once in a tone that implied it should be comforting and it very much was not. Then thirty. Then thirty-five. And so on down the road, the finish line keeps relocating itself like it is messing with us on purpose.

I am still waiting for the cutscene that plays when you officially become an adult. The one where the music swells and everything makes sense.

It has not played yet. I have serious doubts it is coming.

Let’s talk about bills for a second.

Not specific bills, because honestly I respect my own blood pressure. Just bills as a concept. As an experience. Because nobody prepared me for the emotional weight of bills. Not the actual money part, I mean the psychological part, the part where a piece of paper or an email arrives and your brain, your beautiful chaotic brain, immediately starts doing math it does not want to do in a currency of stress it did not agree to trade in.

And you handle it. Or you figure out how to handle it. Or you ask for help. Or you push it slightly to one side of your brain and deal with it on Friday. However it goes, you navigate it. But here is the thing nobody mentions: navigating something does not automatically make you feel like a competent adult. You can handle very hard things and still feel like you are just a kid in a trench coat doing an impression of someone who has it together.

The responsibilities pile up and you meet them, imperfectly and sometimes late, but you meet them. And still. Still. The feeling of being a fully realized, confident, sorted adult does not necessarily follow. The responsibilities arrived. The feeling has been stuck in customs.

And the goals. Oh, the goals.

Can we talk about how weird it is that your goals are allowed to change? Like, actually allowed. I was not given adequate warning about this. I thought goals were supposed to be chosen young and then pursued with linear dedication until achieved, like a main quest line with no detours. Nobody told me that what I want at twenty-two might be completely different from what I want at thirty-two, and that this is not failure, it is just being a human person who exists in time and changes as they go.

I have wanted completely different things at different points in my life. Things I was certain about. Things I would have argued for with real passion. And then something shifted, inside me or around me or both, and suddenly I was looking at those old certainties like they belonged to someone I used to know. Not with contempt, just with the mild surprise of realizing how much ground you have covered without noticing.

Real adults, I was told implicitly, know what they want. They have five-year plans. They have trajectory. They are pointed at something specific and they are moving toward it in a straight line.

Nobody is moving in a straight line. We are all just taking the path that is in front of us and calling it a plan after the fact. That is not a criticism. That is just how it actually works.

Mistakes are supposed to decrease. Right?

Here is another thing I genuinely believed was part of the deal: adults make fewer mistakes. The older you get, the more wisdom you accumulate, the less you trip over your own feet. Metaphorically. Sometimes literally too but mostly metaphorically.

Wrong. So wrong. You just get better at recognizing what kind of mistake you are making while you are making it, which is both more and less comforting than it sounds. You develop a running commentary. “Oh, this is the part where I overcommit and then burn out.” “This is the part where I get defensive instead of just asking for help.” “This is the part where I make the same choice I swore I would not make again, full speed, eyes open, because apparently I am still working on this one.”

The mistakes do not disappear. You just develop a more sophisticated relationship with them. You learn which ones you can afford to make and which ones cost too much. You learn the difference between a mistake that reveals something true about you and a mistake that just means you were tired and not thinking clearly. You learn to forgive yourself faster, if you are lucky and doing the work. But the mistakes themselves? They are hanging around. They are freeloading. They are showing no signs of leaving.

Which means every adult you have ever respected has also been making mistakes this whole time. Quietly. Consistently. And still showing up.

That is kind of beautiful actually. In a deeply chaotic way.

The creativity thing no one warns you about.

At some point there is this invisible cultural message that gets delivered, not in words exactly, but in atmosphere. A slow accumulation of signals that say: creativity is for when you have free time, and adults do not have free time, and so creativity is something you had when you were young and irresponsible and did not have enough Real Things to worry about.

I refuse this. I have refused it consistently and without apology. But I want to name it because I know I am not the only one who felt it pressing down. The idea that at a certain age you are supposed to trade in the parts of yourself that make things and dream things and play with ideas, and pick up something practical and sensible and grey instead.

Some of the most adult moments I have ever had were inside creative work. The discipline of finishing something when you do not feel like it. The humility of learning that the thing you made is not as good as you wanted it to be and making it again anyway. The courage of putting something you made into the world and letting people respond to it. That is not childish. That is deeply adult. It is just not the version of adult we were sold.

I think a lot of people quietly abandoned things they loved because they thought growing up required it. And I grieve that. Not in a dramatic way, just in a small, steady way that lives in the background when I watch someone say “oh, I used to paint” or “I used to write” like it is a past life they closed the door on.

You can open it back up. The door does not lock from the outside.

Everyone is improvising. I have proof.

My proof is mostly anecdotal and completely unscientific and I stand by it entirely. It is this: every adult I have ever gotten close enough to see clearly has had a moment where the mask slipped and what was underneath was just a person, improvising, hoping they were getting it roughly right, carrying old wounds they were still figuring out how to carry, and doing their best with what they had available.

Every single one.

Not in a sad way, in a fundamentally human way. The people I respect the most in my life are not the people who seem the most certain. They are the people who are willing to say “I am not sure, let me think about that” and “I got that wrong and I am sorry” and “I am still working on this, honestly.” That is not weakness. That is the most adult thing I can think of.

Proverbs talks a lot about wisdom, and it describes it as something you pursue, something you walk toward your whole life, not something you arrive at and then possess forever. That framing makes a lot more sense to me than the cultural version of adulthood where you hit a number on the calendar and suddenly transform into someone who is done becoming. Nobody is done becoming. That is the whole point. That is what being alive is.

So when does it happen?

I genuinely think the feeling of being an adult is not a destination. It is more like a frequency that comes in and out depending on circumstances. Some days I feel completely capable and grounded and like I understand my life. Some days I feel like I am playing a video game on a difficulty setting I did not select and the controls are unresponsive and no one gave me the guide.

Both of those are real. Both of those are adulthood.

I think the moment most people actually become adults is not a birthday and not a milestone. It is quieter than that. It is the moment you stop waiting for the feeling and just start doing the thing anyway. When you handle the bill not because you feel equipped but because it needs handling. When you make the hard call not because you feel wise but because someone needs you to be the person who makes it. When you sit with your own uncertainty and do not demand that it resolve before you can move.

That is it. That is the whole trick. You just keep going while you are still figuring it out. You are allowed to not have it together. You are allowed to change your mind, change your goals, change your whole understanding of what you are doing and why. You are allowed to make mistakes and correct them and make new ones and learn those too.

You are allowed to be in process. That is not a failure state. That is the state.

The loading screen does not resolve. The cutscene does not play. There is no level where you stop being someone who is figuring it out and start being someone who has figured it out.

And honestly? I think I am finally, slowly, okay with that.

Mostly.

Ask me again on a bill day.

Why Summer Camp at Birch Bay Ranch Is the One Place I Get to Just Be Me

Posted on 13 July 2026by Sarah King

There is a moment, every single year, when my beat up pontiac vibe turns off the highway and starts down that gravel road, and something in my chest just… unlocks. Like a save file loading. Like the title screen music starting up. Like the game is finally, finally beginning.

That road leads to Birch Bay Ranch. And I have been chasing that feeling, that specific chest-unlock feeling, for more years than I can count now.

I want to try to explain what that place means to me, because I think people who haven’t been there might hear “summer camp” and picture something very small. Roasting marshmallows. Friendship bracelets. Maybe a canoe – oh wait, we don’t have a lake anymore. And yes, there are marshmallows. The marshmallows are not small, for the record. But what I am actually talking about is something so much bigger than the activities, bigger than the schedule, bigger than any single memory I could pull out and hand you. What I am talking about is the experience of being allowed to just exist as exactly who I am, no apology required, no performance needed, no edges softened for anyone else’s comfort.

That is rarer than it sounds.

The World Outside Has a Lot of Rules About Who You Are Supposed to Be

I spend a lot of my regular life code-switching. Not in a dramatic, conscious way. It’s more like background processing. Always running, always eating up RAM. Is this too much? Is this too loud? Is this too weird? Am I taking up the right amount of space? Am I taking up too much space? Not enough? Do I look like I’m struggling? Do I look like I’m faking it? Should I explain myself right now or just push through and hope nobody notices?

Being autistic in a neurotypical world is a full-time second job. Nobody pays you for it. The benefits package is nonexistent. The performance reviews are brutal and come from inside the house.

And then you get to Birch Bay. And the second job just… goes on hold.

I don’t fully understand how I or others do it. I have tried to figure it out. Is it the staff? Yes, partly. Is it the other campers, the community that builds up over years and years of people returning? Yes, partly. Is it the land itself, the trees and the lake and the particular quality of that Alberta sky at dusk when everything turns soft and gold and you feel like God pressed pause on the whole universe just to let you breathe? Also yes. Definitely yes.

But it’s more than the sum of those parts. Birch Bay has a culture. A real one. One that was built intentionally, and that gets rebuilt every summer by every person who shows up and chooses to participate in it. And that culture says: you are welcome here as you are. Not as you might be someday. Not as you would be if you just tried harder or masked better or figured out how to need less. As you are. Right now. Today. Weird parts and loud parts and struggling parts and all.

I have never once felt like a problem to be managed at Birch Bay Ranch. That is not a small thing. That is enormous.

The Friends Who Are Only Camp Friends (Except They’re Not, Except They Kind of Are)

You know how in a video game there are NPCs who only exist in one region? Like, you can’t take them with you to the next area. They’re part of that world specifically. And some of them you love so much. Some of them feel more real than characters you meet anywhere else in the game. And every time you return to that region you go looking for them immediately because seeing them makes everything feel right.

Camp “friends” are like that. And I say that with my whole chest, as a compliment, not a dismissal.

There are people I have known at Birch Bay for years. Decades, in some cases. People whose camp-selves I know completely and intimately. I know how they laugh. I know what makes them light up at dinner. I know how they are at the campfire when the night gets quiet and everyone gets a little more honest than they planned to. And those relationships exist in this beautiful, protected bubble where the normal pressures of regular life do not intrude. Nobody is talking about their mortgage. Nobody is stressed about their inbox. We are just here, in this place, being people together in the way that people were maybe always meant to be people together.

And yeah, some of those people I am also in touch with the rest of the year. Some of them have crossed over into my regular life and I am so grateful for that. But there’s something sacred about the camp version of that connection that I don’t want to explain away or rationalize. It’s real on its own terms. The geography matters. The context matters. Some things bloom specifically in that soil and I think that’s okay. I think that’s actually beautiful.

The Part Where I Talk About Fun and I Mean It Completely Unironically

I am going to be real with you. I am not always good at fun. Fun, for me, often comes loaded. There’s the anticipation management piece. The sensory planning. The “okay but what is the exit strategy if this becomes too much” logistics. The energy budgeting. The recovery time math.

Fun is frequently a project.

At camp, fun just… happens. It sneaks up on me. I will be in the middle of something completely ridiculous, like a group game that has devolved into total chaos and everyone is yelling and somehow there are more people involved than there were five minutes ago and nobody is entirely sure what the rules are anymore, and I will realize that I am laughing. Actually laughing, from somewhere real. Not performing laughter to fit in. Not managing my expression so I look like I’m having the right amount of fun.

Just. Laughing.

That happens at Birch Bay Ranch in a way it does not reliably happen anywhere else in my life. And I have spent a lot of time being grateful for it and not totally knowing what to do with that gratitude except show up again the next year and let it happen again.

The lake. I have to mention the lake. I will not try to describe it too specifically because I would do it wrong. But there is something about being in that water, cold and clear and surrounding you completely, where every problem you carried in with you just becomes… less loud. Like the volume gets turned down. The water doesn’t care about any of it. The lake does not require anything of you. You just float, and the sky is above you, and the trees are at the edges, and somewhere on the shore your people are being ridiculous in the sun. – oh wait a sec…that was when I was a camper, now the lake is gone and its now a swamp of bug ridden mosquitos and wasp infested ugly on a whole new level.

Boss fights feel smaller from the middle of that thought. I am telling you this as a fact.

The Campfire Conversations That Rewire Your Brain a Little

Something happens at campfires. I think it might be the fire itself, honestly. Something about sitting in a group of screaming kids with ear piercing deafness, darkness all around the edges, and the particular intimacy of not quite being able to see each other’s faces clearly. It makes people honest. It makes people brave. It makes conversations go deeper faster than they have any right to. Thank god I have heading aids and I can unplug from the world of sound sometimes.

I have had conversations at Birch Bay campfires that I still think about years later. Things people said that landed in me like seeds and have been growing ever since. Moments where someone said something true and you could feel the whole circle shift slightly, like we all got just a little bit closer to understanding something.

Those conversations happen because people feel safe enough to have them. And people feel safe enough to have them because of that culture I mentioned, the one that says you are welcome here as you are. When you know you won’t be judged for being exactly yourself, you let your exactly-yourself out. And your exactly-yourself has thoughts and questions and fears and hopes and experiences that are worth hearing. That are worth sharing.

I have shared things around the “old school” Birch Bay campfires that I hadn’t said out loud before. Not because I was working up the courage. Just because the space was safe and the time was right and the fire was going and somehow it became the most natural thing in the world to say the true thing. Now the “new” school version…lots of singing and comedy

That’s a gift. That is an enormous gift that I do not take for granted.

Faith at Camp Feels Like Faith Is Supposed to Feel

I’m going to say something and I want you to hear it in the spirit it’s meant.

Faith is complicated in a lot of spaces. Church can be complicated. Religious community can be complicated. There’s politics and performance and doctrine debates and the constant low-grade anxiety of wondering whether you’re doing it right or believing the right things in the right proportions.

At Birch Bay, faith just feels like faith. It feels like showing up and knowing God is there, in the water and the trees and the ridiculous group games and the campfire conversations and the faces of the people sitting next to you. It feels like being part of something bigger than yourself without having to earn your place in it. It feels like worship that’s real rather than rehearsed, and community that’s held together by something that actually holds.

I don’t have to perform my faith at camp. I don’t have to prove it or protect it or defend it. It just gets to exist, the same way I get to exist, without constant justification.

That is deeply restoring in a way I cannot fully articulate. I just know that I leave camp with something spiritually refilled that I didn’t entirely realize had been running on empty.

The Leaving Part (Which I Always Handle Extremely Maturely and With No Drama Whatsoever)

I am lying. The leaving part is rough every single time and I have made my peace with that.

There is a specific grief to packing up at the end of camp that hits different from regular trip-ending sadness. It’s not just that you’re going home. It’s that you’re leaving the version of yourself that camp lets you be. You’re picking back up the weight you set down when you came in. Not all of it, not immediately, some of it stays lighter for a while. But the code-switching job is waiting for you out there on the highway. The background processing is going to spin back up.

And the people. Saying goodbye to the people is a whole thing. You do it and you mean it and you make promises about staying in touch and keeping up and all of that, and some of those promises you keep beautifully and some of them dissolve in the business of regular life, and neither outcome erases what happened at camp. What happened at camp is real and permanent and belongs to you forever regardless of what comes after.

But still. The leaving is hard. Every year it’s hard. I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

What I’ve learned is that the hardness of the leaving is just the weight of how much it mattered. You don’t grieve things that didn’t mean anything. The ache is the proof. I try to receive it that way, as information rather than injury. This mattered. This matters. This will keep mattering all the way to next summer.

oh what the heck am I saying…I practically live here and even out of summer camp I am working rental seasons, banquets…that’s because I have the most epic of bosses…Darryl and Sharon.

Why I Keep Going Back

People sometimes ask me about camp in that tone that suggests they expect me to have outgrown it. Like there’s an age at which camp stops being a reasonable thing for a person to care about this much.

I disagree with that tone pretty firmly.

I keep going back to Birch Bay Ranch because the world is heavy and camp makes it lighter. I keep going back because there are people there who know my camp-self and love her and I want to keep being her around them. I keep going back because the lake and the fire and the gravel road and that specific quality of Alberta evening light are in my bones now, and returning to them feels like returning to myself.

I keep going back because I spend so much of my life adapting, adjusting, calculating, managing. And camp is one place on this entire planet where I get a break from all of that. Where I get to just be a person. Fully, loudly, weirdly, honestly, completely.

Just me.

Plus I need a job and no one else will give me one because I am a person with a disability and I am blessed to have one here,

And not a managed version of me. Not a smaller or quieter or more palatable version of me. Not the version of me that has pre-planned all her exit strategies and is running the background processing at full capacity. Just me, in the sunshine, on the dock, with my people, laughing at something ridiculous, with my chest unlocked and the game finally running.

That matters. That space matters. Those people matter. That lake matters. That gravel road matters.

Birch Bay Ranch matters.

So, see you next summer. I will be the one ugly-crying on the last day again and I will not be apologizing for it.

Because I am also only a 20 min drive back to my own home and bed too. LOL

Enough is Enough!

Posted on 26 March 2026by Sarah King

I TOOK A SIDE!...and I didn't hold back.

Alright. First, a disclaimer.

This article is biased, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But it’s based on facts, and on conversations, meetings, and discussions I’ve had with advocates, agencies, professionals, and people directly affected by this. This is my opinion, built on more than a passing glance at a headline. If you disagree, that’s your right. If you agree, I hope it moves you to look closer too.

Here’s where I sit, so you have the full picture before you read the rest: I’m a Christian who believes deeply in “love thy neighbour,” which is part of why I care about inclusion and equity, even where my views don’t map neatly onto either political side. Economically, I lean toward the free market and I believe in the value of our energy industry — but I also believe we have a responsibility to the environment, and to the people among us who need a hand up. I’m a proud Canadian who doesn’t want to see this country fractured by separatism, and I don’t always agree with how Ottawa treats Alberta either. On tough issues, I try to land on common sense over ideology.

I don’t fit neatly into either team, and I’ve made peace with that. I call myself a political orphan — and I think a lot of you might be one too, even if you haven’t said it out loud yet.

So when I tell you I’ve taken a side on this one issue, I want you to know it’s not coming from a place of blind partisanship. It’s coming from lived experience.

A Personal Note Before the Policy

I have several disabilities. I live with autism, a neurological condition that causes seizures throughout the day, mobility issues, memory lapses, chronic social anxiety, sensory processing challenges, and complex PTSD, among other things. Despite what my care team has sometimes recommended, I work — within my means, at a place I care about. That work is part of what’s now at risk under the changes I’m about to describe.

I’m not lazy, and neither are the tens of thousands of other Albertans in situations like mine. Every one of us is doing the math between working enough to survive and working so much it costs us our health. That balance is exactly what’s being stripped away, and it’s why I can’t stay quiet about this.

What Changed, Now That It’s Actually Here

The Alberta Disability Assistance Program officially launched July 1, 2026, replacing AISH for most recipients. Anyone previously on AISH was automatically transitioned, and there’s a protection window: transitioned recipients keep the full AISH-level payment of $1,940 a month until the end of 2027. After that, unless someone successfully re-qualifies for AISH through a new medical review process, their payment drops to the ADAP rate of $1,740 a month — a $200 monthly cut that simply arrives eighteen months later than it would have otherwise.

The earnings exemption is the part that’s changed the most, and the part I think matters most. Under AISH, the first $1,072 a month someone earned didn’t affect their benefit at all. Under ADAP, that exemption has been cut to $700 a month. It’s true that the government has raised the annual earnings ceiling to roughly $45,000 before benefits stop entirely, and it’s true that’s a high number by Canadian standards. But raising the ceiling while lowering the exemption means people start losing support sooner, even though they’re allowed to earn more before losing it completely. For someone piecing together part-time or inconsistent hours because that’s all their disability allows, it’s the exemption — not the ceiling — that determines whether working an extra shift is worth the risk.

There’s also, as of this year, no independent appeal process for the new Medical Review Panel’s eligibility decisions — a real departure from the previous system, where recipients could appeal to an independent Citizens’ Appeal Panel. If the panel decides you’re capable of work and moves you to ADAP, that decision is final.

The Parts That Don’t Get Talked About Enough

Two changes I don’t think have gotten enough attention:

First, starting this August, couples where both partners receive AISH or ADAP will each get only 88% of the maximum individual rate, rather than the full individual rate each partner received before. That’s a real cut to household income for couples managing disability together, on top of everything else changing.

Second, the Canada Disability Benefit — a federal support meant to be additional help — is still clawed back dollar-for-dollar by the province from AISH and ADAP payments. The federal government is indexing the CDB upward this year, from about $200 to roughly $204 a month. But because Alberta claws it back in full, that increase doesn’t reach a single recipient. It just becomes a slightly larger provincial deduction.

Why This Matters Beyond the Numbers

This isn’t an abstract policy debate. It’s rent, groceries, medication, and whether someone can afford to exist next month. It’s people doing math at their kitchen table that doesn’t work no matter how many times they run it.

I’m not the only one saying so. Physicians across the province have publicly pushed back on these changes too — the Alberta Doctors’ Digest recently published criticism from doctors describing the rollout as lacking compassion for the real, human reality of living with a disability. This isn’t a fringe reaction. It’s coming from people who see the impact of these policies on their patients directly.

I’ll say plainly: there may be a small number of people on AISH who shouldn’t be there, and who make it harder to advocate for the much larger number who genuinely need it. That’s a fair conversation to have. But redesigning the entire system around that assumption, in a way that touches close to 80,000 people, isn’t the answer.

Where I Land

I’m not neutral on this, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise. I don’t think this is “just policy,” and I don’t think it’s too complicated to have an opinion about. I think a support system that Albertans with disabilities have relied on for decades is being reshaped in a way that will make life harder for a lot of people, even where the government’s own framing sounds generous on paper. I think that’s worth saying clearly, even to people who don’t already agree with me.

If you’re in a position to do something — write to your MLA, support local disability advocacy organizations, or simply talk about this with people who haven’t heard about it yet — that’s a meaningful place to start. This isn’t about which side of the aisle you sit on. It’s about whether the people among us with the least room to absorb a cut are given the dignity and stability they need to live.

Thank you for reading this far, and for caring enough to think it through with me.

Bittersweet Goodbyes

Posted on 12 February 2026by Sarah King

It's Time to Step Back...
and Lurk Into The Shadows, of whence I came.

Dear readers,

Well. Here we are.

I suppose this is the part where I am meant to write something neat, professional, and awe inspiring. Something carefully polished. Something full of tidy phrases about “new opportunities” and “exciting transitions.” The kind of post that sounds good on paper but says almost nothing at all.

This is not going to be that kind of post.

This is going to be honest, blunt and well, somewhat different. It will be a little messy, a little… bittersweet, and probably too long. It will be reflective, uncomfortable in places, and deeply personal. Because after a great deal of thinking, praying, wrestling with myself, and sitting alone in quiet rooms at three in the morning wondering how I even got here, after many discussions with my care teams, family and professionals and others, I have made some very difficult decisions about my life, my work, and my place in my world, especially in the archery community.

And it is time to share them.

Not as a dramatic farewell. Not as a burned bridge. Not as a formal announcement. But as a human being, sitting down and saying: this is where I am now.

So, in simple terms, I have stepped down from my leadership and administrative roles in archery. I have resigned from Archery Alberta and several affiliated programs and committees. I am stepping away from most organized sport involvement. I will be closing my archery club this fall of 2026 and shifting to private instruction only. I am choosing to focus on my time at Birch Bay Ranch, my creative artistic, crafting, musical work, and most importantly my physical and mental health. I am not leaving education, mentorship, or coaching entirely. I am leaving the overload, burnout, and systems that no longer serve my life. I am choosing myself.

To understand why, you have to understand how this journey began.

When I joined the archery community publicly and professionally, I did it for the right reasons. I believed in teaching. I believed in access. I believed in youth development. I believed in fairness. I believed in creating safe spaces. I believed in helping people who had never been helped before. I believed in doing things well and doing them ethically.

I poured everything I had into that work. My time. My energy. My health. My money. My emotional labour. My advocacy. My late nights. My endless emails. My conflict mediation. My course development. My program building. My crisis management. I gave all of it, and I did so willingly, because I thought the work mattered more than I did.

For a long time, it did.

But somewhere along the way, I became the person who “handled everything.” Somewhere along the way, my boundaries dissolved. Somewhere along the way, my own needs stopped mattering. Somewhere along the way, I forgot that I was allowed to be human. Responsibility became expectation. Expectation became pressure. Pressure became identity. And I stopped knowing who I was outside of it.

People often see the titles and the certifications and the positions. They do not see the cost, the exhaustion that never quite goes away. They do not see the anxiety that lives quietly in the background, or the nights spent worrying about things no one else even notices. They do not see the emotional weight of supporting others while slowly falling apart yourself. They do not see how stress settles into your body and refuses to leave. They do not see the lack of hard work and respect one gets either.

Over the last few years, my body has been trying to get my attention. Seizures. Cardiac issues. Severe stress responses. Chronic pain. Nerve damage. A frozen shoulder. Fatigue that sleep does not fix. My body has been waving red flags for a long time, and I kept ignoring them. I told myself someone had to do the work. I told myself I could not let people down. I told myself I would rest later. Later never came.

There is also another layer to this that I rarely speak about publicly: grief.

The loss of my child reshaped my life in ways I am still learning to understand. Grief like that does not end. It does not resolve. It does not get neatly packaged. It changes how you see time. It changes what matters. It changes how you experience work and relationships and purpose. For a long time, I buried that grief under productivity. If I stayed busy enough, maybe I would not feel it. If I stayed useful enough, maybe I would feel whole. That only works for so long. Eventually, grief demands space. And when it does, you have to listen.

Living with autism, aging, and mental health challenges adds another dimension. None of these things are failures. None of them are shameful. But they do mean I have limits. Limits I ignored for years. Social overload, sensory fatigue, emotional burnout, masking, decision exhaustion. I am very good at appearing functional. I am less good at being well. This year, I finally admitted that to myself. I’ve lost myself, and making friends and companions was deemed, improbable.

Birch Bay Ranch represents something different for me. It is quieter. It is grounded. It is relational. It is spiritual. It allows me to teach without drowning. It gives me room to breathe. It offers meaning without consuming everything else. Focusing there is not doing less. It is doing what keeps me alive.

At the same time, I have felt a strong pull back toward my creative roots. Before the committees, before the politics, before the expectations, there was writing. There was art. There was music. There was storytelling. There was reflection. There was me. Somewhere along the way, I lost her. I am going back. To my books, my blogging, my art, my music. To quiet creativity. To projects that heal instead of drain. This is not a hobby. This is survival.

I also want to be honest about something difficult. Not everyone in this community treated me well. Not everyone respected my work. Not everyone valued my contributions. Some people benefited from my labour and never acknowledged it. Some people took advantage of my willingness to help. Some people watched me burn out and said nothing. Some people actively made things harder. That hurts. I would be lying if I said it does not. But I am not writing this to attack anyone. I am writing this to release myself from needing approval. I no longer need to prove my worth.

Closing my club and moving to private instruction is part of this shift. Running a club is administration, liability, logistics, fundraising, conflict resolution, and endless paperwork. It is not just teaching. It is management. I no longer have the capacity for that. Especially doing it alone. Private instruction allows me to teach deeply, support individuals, protect my health, control my schedule, and maintain quality. It is not stepping down. It is stepping into sustainability.

Like many disabled Canadians, I am also navigating complicated systems such as the AISH to ADAP transition. These systems affect housing, income, stability, and dignity. They are stressful and exhausting. They require time and energy I cannot afford to waste elsewhere. This, too, is part of my reality now.

My faith has become more central through all of this. I believe God is not finished with me. I believe this season is not an ending, but a redirection. Rest is holy. Healing is work. Obedience sometimes looks like walking away. I am trusting that this narrowing of my life is actually preparation.

I do not have many friends. I never really have. My life has always been quieter and more inward. For a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. Now I understand that it is simply who I am. I am learning how to build connection without losing myself. Slowly. Carefully. Honestly.

This is not quitting nor bitterness. This is not failure nor disappearing. I am also not known for giving up. This is me. Choosing life. This is recalibration. This is boundary-setting. This is me healing. This is reclaiming myself. This is me coming home, back to my original roots.

To those who supported me, encouraged me, stood by me, and saw me as a person first: thank you. You mattered more than you know. You still do.

Alright. I hear exactly what you want here.

You want an ending that is:

Quietly defiant

Emotionally sharp

Very “Sarah”

Autistic-coded withdrawal, not dramatic exit

Honest about betrayal

And finishes with a controlled, Babylon 5–style “I’m done explaining myself” speech

Here is a rewritten ending section you can drop in to replace everything from “So where am I now?” onward.

You can copy this directly.

Replacement Ending Section

So where am I now?

I will b returning back to my writing, crafting and creating. Back to teaching in smaller, healthier ways. I will be healing, and resting. Rebuilding, and relearning who I am again when I am not constantly performing usefulness for other people. I will become quieter. Slower. More deliberate. More honest with myself about what I can and cannot carry.

And then I am walking away.

Not loudly, or dramatically, or with speeches and announcements and slammed doors.

I am doing it the way I always do things. Quietly. Carefully. Without making a scene. Slipping out while everyone else is still arguing about who should be in charge. Letting the door close gently behind me so no one notices until I am already gone.

That is my autistic way.

I have learned, painfully and slowly, that the people closest to you are often the ones who can hurt you the most. Not always through cruelty. Sometimes through indifference. Through silence. Through taking and never giving back. Through watching you drown and calling it “strength.” Through expecting you to keep showing up no matter the cost.

I stayed too long in too many places because I believed loyalty meant endurance.

It does not.

Loyalty without care is exploitation.

And I am done offering myself up for that.

This chapter of my life is ending not because I failed, but because I finally understood that survival is not selfish. That rest is not weakness. That boundaries are not betrayal. That leaving is sometimes the bravest thing you can do.

So here is my truth, without softening it.

I am not available for burnout anymore.
I am not available for being taken for granted.
I am not available for being the emotional scaffolding that holds everything together while I quietly fall apart.
I am not available for systems that benefit from my labour and forget my humanity.

If you walk with me in this new season, in honesty and respect and mutual care, you are welcome.

If you do not, that is fine too.

But understand this:

I am no longer explaining myself.
I am no longer negotiating my health in any capacity.
I am no longer shrinking to make other people comfortable.
I am no longer carrying what is not mine to carry.

This is my life, and my healing.
This is my calling now.

And I am choosing it.

So yes. I am stepping back. I am stepping away. I am stepping into something quieter and truer and far more sacred than anything ever was.

I wish no harm to anyone.

But I also owe no one my exhaustion.

You are either with me in this new chapter, with respect and integrity, or you can take your opinions, your expectations, and your entitlement, and go piss right off.

I am done sacrificing myself for approval.

This is not goodbye.

This is me walking away with my head up, my spirit intact, and my future finally my own.

Time for a new adventure!

Between the Snowbanks

Posted on 24 January 2026by Sarah King

The Calamity. No one knew what it was, how or why it came.

It arrived already named, which meant it had been decided somewhere else before most people had time to notice it was happening. It carried authority. Uncertainty, fear, finality. It implied explanation without offering one.

At first, it was described as a disruption. Then a threat. Then a constructed condition of living.

The explanations shifted depending on who was speaking and what they needed the answer to do. Some said it was inevitable. Others said it was preventable. Some claimed it had been building for years, hiding in plain sight. Others insisted it appeared fully formed, overnight, without warning.

Nora noticed how quickly certainty filled the gaps where evidence should have been.

Numbers appeared before methods. Rules before understanding. Instructions before context.

The world responded in pieces, not as a whole.

Flights stopped. Ports closed. Borders hardened. Cities emptied while rural towns hesitated, waiting for confirmation that never felt sufficient. Streets went quiet in waves, like sound traveling through water.

People watched screens and tried to decide whether what they were seeing applied to them yet.

Some said it was exaggerated. A control mechanism. A test to see how far people would bend before breaking. They pointed to inconsistencies, reversals, contradictions. They asked why certain things were allowed and others forbidden. Why risk was defined one way in one place and differently elsewhere.

Others rejected questions entirely. They spoke about trust. About experts. About responsibility. They framed doubt as danger and debate as cruelty.

Both sides spoke with conviction.

Nora watched friendships dissolve over interpretations before the thing itself had even reached their town.

The Calamity shut down the world without ever fully explaining itself.

Churches closed their doors. Arenas went dark. Offices locked. Schools emptied. Entire industries paused mid-motion. People were told to stay where they were, to limit contact, to wait for further instruction.

Waiting became indefinite.

The effect on people was immediate and uneven.

Some grew fearful, retreating inward, clinging to routine and authority. Others grew defiant, angry at the sudden loss of autonomy. Many swung violently between the two. Conversations became volatile. Voices sharpened. Empathy thinned.

Language changed fastest of all.

Words that once described actions became labels for people. Careful. Reckless. Safe. Unsafe. The categories expanded until they swallowed nuance entirely.

Loss followed, but it was irregular and difficult to track.

Some people disappeared quietly. Some died during The Calamity, though even that phrase felt slippery, as if causation itself had become negotiable. Funerals were postponed, limited, or replaced by messages. Grief became private, then abstract.

The Calamity did not just remove people. It reordered relationships.

Friends moved away. Families fractured along belief lines. Workplaces dissolved. Trust eroded under the constant pressure to choose a position and defend it publicly.

The question was never simply what was happening, but what kind of person you were in response to it.

Nora tried to understand.

She tracked timelines. Compared statements. Noted revisions. She watched how narratives hardened even as facts shifted beneath them. How fear became justification. How moral certainty replaced patience.

She saw how quickly people accepted rules that contradicted themselves, as long as they came wrapped in urgency.

She saw how others rejected everything wholesale, not because they had better answers, but because suspicion felt safer than compliance.

Both sides claimed clarity while accusing the other of false narratives. Who was right?.

Neither offered understanding.

The Calamity did not just shut down buildings and borders. It shut down the space between people. It collapsed conversation into declaration. Reduced friendship to alignment. Replaced trust with surveillance, sketpicism and fearmongering. It created a hardened world.

By the time it reached her town fully, the question was no longer whether it was real.

The question was what it had already turned people into.

And then…

There was a breath.

Before The Calamity, Nora understood people best when they were consistent.

Consistency was a form of kindness. It meant you could predict tone, volume, expectation. It meant you didn’t have to guess whether a question was a trap or a request. Nora didn’t need people to agree with her. She needed them to remain themselves.

That had been the rule for most of her life, and until a certain point, the rule held.

And now the chill of winter was around. In the stillness of the cold things were about to change. Just like the changing of the seasons, the world too had it’s seasons. But this change was more than a change. it became something else. She changed to…and became someone else. Not out of choice. But out of circumstance.

She lived in a town that was small enough to memorize. Not the names, necessarily, but the rhythms. Which houses turned dark early. Which trucks idled too long in winter. Which doors slammed and which closed gently. She lived above the old hardware store, one long apartment with thin walls and radiators that clicked like nervous fingers when the temperature dropped.

She liked the sounds. They meant the system was working.

On weekdays, she worked at the municipal records office. Mornings only. Digitizing old land deeds, census sheets, handwritten minutes from meetings no one alive remembered attending. She liked the neutrality of it. Paper didn’t argue. It only needed to be sorted correctly.

Evenings, three nights a week, she worked at the rink.

The rink was cold in a way that soaked into your bones and stayed there. It smelled like damp rubber, old coffee, and sharp metal. She logged skate rentals, sharpened blades, and sometimes ran the Zamboni when the regular guy didn’t show.

People talked at the rink. Constantly. Complaints, jokes, opinions shouted over the echo of the space. Nora rarely joined in, but she listened. Listening was her contribution.

“Hey, Nora, you see the ice in Bay Three today?”

“Think they’ll ever fix that heater or just let us freeze to death?”

“Don’t forget, potluck Friday. You coming?”

She nodded. She smiled when expected. She came to the potlucks.

Her circle existed mostly in places like that. Shared tasks. Repeated contact. Low emotional volatility.

Leah, who worked at the local medical clinic. always short on nurses and liked to talk while Nora listened.

“You’d love this book I’m reading,” Leah said one night at the rink, leaning on the counter. “It’s all about how people need to pick a lane. None of this wishy-washy stuff.”

Nora noted the phrasing. Pick a lane. It was a curling metaphor applied to morality. Interesting, but not alarming. Not yet.

Leah kept talking.

“I just think people hide behind ‘neutral’ when they don’t want to take responsibility.”

Nora sharpened skates. The blade hissed against the stone. She liked that sound. It was precise. No ambiguity.

Another friend of hers, Martin from the records office ate lunch with her most days. Was a very strong headed person and very grounded.

“You ever notice how people argue about music like it’s religion?” he said once, unwrapping a sandwich. “Like, sorry I don’t think your band is sacred scripture.”

He laughed. Nora filed that away under shared humour. That counted. Then again she always liked listening to a little Corb Lund from time to time.

On Sundays, she rotated between kitchens with friends and family. Sometimes her sister Elaine hosted, moving constantly, talking fast.

“Wow, why so silent?,” Elaine said once, half-joking. “I never know what you’re thinking.”

Nora thought, That’s the point. Although she didn’t say it.

Thom, her stout old fashioned father, sat at the head of most tables.

He spoke when necessary. When he did, people leaned in as if his word was law.

“We’ve been through worse,” he said during one dinner, referring to some local crisis years back. “Communities survive when they remember who they are and helped each other.”

People nodded. Nora nodded too. The statement was broad enough to include many interpretations. She appreciated that.

When the first mentions of The Calamity appeared, they sounded like distant thunder.

A global disruption. An unprecedented event. Temporary measures.

At the rink, people gathered around phones between shifts.

“Oh my God?! You see this?”

“They’re shutting things down over there.”

“Overreacting, if you ask me.”

The word temporary was said often. With confidence.

At the records office, emails started arriving with subject lines that felt heavier than their contents.

Update, …Guidelines, …Precaution.

Martin leaned over the divider one morning.

“This feels different,” he said. “Like, not weather-different. Just no longer normal.”

Nora agreed internally. She marked the day mentally. First noticeable shift in tone.

When the rink closed “until further notice,” the announcement was taped crookedly to the door.

People stood outside reading it like it might change if stared at long enough.

“Well that’s just great,” someone muttered.

“This is getting out of hand.”

Leah crossed her arms.

“About time they took this seriously,” she said. “People don’t listen unless you force them.”

The word force landed harder than the rest.

Church services moved online. Thom adapted immediately. He coordinated schedules, distributed links, called parishioners personally.

“This is when leadership matters,” he said over the phone. “Confusion breeds fear.”

Nora listened. She noticed how quickly care and control were being braided together.

As days turned into weeks, the town emptied.

The coffee shop closed. Then reopened with rules posted in block letters. Then closed again. The records office reduced staff. Then hours. Then access.

Friends began to vanish from Nora’s daily orbit.

One moved far away for work. Another stopped answering messages. Someone she knew from the rink passed away quietly during The Calamity, details unclear, the funeral delayed indefinitely.

People talked about it in fragments.

“Did you hear?”

“So sad. But you know… circumstances.”

The language was evasive. Sanitized.

Fear sharpened people’s voices.

At the grocery store, strangers spoke to Nora like she was already in disagreement with them.

“Some people just don’t get it,” a man said loudly in the produce aisle.

“You either care about others or you don’t,” a woman said to no one in particular.

At first, Nora assumed this was stress. Temporary distortion.

Then came the questions.

“So where do you stand on all this?”

“You believe the guidelines are necessary, right?”

Silence became suspicious.

When Nora didn’t respond quickly enough, people filled the space for her.

“Well, I guess we’ll see who’s on the right side of this.”

That was new. Sides.

At a family call, Elaine spoke sharply.

“I just don’t understand how you can sit there and analyze while people are suffering.”

Thom spoke after her.

“This isn’t a time for fence-sitting.”

The word landed like a diagnosis.

Nora said nothing. She observed how easily complexity was being reclassified as failure.

That night, she stood in her apartment, listening to the radiators click, and realized something important had changed.

Not the rules. Not the risk.

The definition of belonging.

And she didn’t yet know what that would cost her.

The height of The Calamity did not announce itself with noise. It arrived through subtraction.

The rink closed fully first. Not just ice time suspended, but locked. The bulletin board came down. The smell of sharpened steel and wet gear disappeared overnight. Nora walked past it one afternoon and felt disoriented by how ordinary the building looked from the outside, as if it hadn’t been central to her life only days before. A notice was taped to the glass, carefully centered, its edges already curling from the cold. She read it twice, then stood there longer than necessary, waiting for something else to happen.

Nothing did.

Her hours at the records office dwindled more slowly, but the effect was worse. At first it was staggered shifts, then remote tasks, then silence punctuated by emails that grew shorter and more formal. The final message arrived on a Tuesday morning, written in the polite, weightless language of inevitability. Resources reallocated. Operations suspended. Appreciation expressed. Then “phased out”

Nora printed it, filed it, and sat at her kitchen table while the kettle boiled dry behind her.

Without work, days lost their internal markers. Time became something she had to actively manage rather than inhabit. She built schedules anyway. Wake, clean, walk, eat, read, sleep. She tracked them in a notebook, noting deviations, watching for drift.

Her phone stopped ringing.

At first she assumed people were busy. Then she noticed patterns. Names that used to appear regularly vanished. Messages went unanswered. When replies came, they were clipped, directive, or defensive.

One afternoon, Leah called unexpectedly.

“I just wanted to check in,” Leah said, her voice tight with energy. “Things are really serious now.”

Nora listened.

“You can’t just wait this out,” Leah continued. “We all have to do our part. I know you like to think things through, but this isn’t theoretical anymore.”

The call ended with a suggestion. A recommendation. A line drawn gently but firmly in the air.

Afterward, Nora sat still for a long time, replaying the conversation. She noticed how concern had shifted into assessment. How the tone carried expectation. Leah wasn’t asking how she was. She was asking where she stood.

Others followed.

A former rink parent stopped her on the sidewalk one morning, standing a careful distance away.

“People are watching,” the woman said, not unkindly. “You don’t want to be misunderstood.”

At the grocery store, a man she barely knew launched into a monologue about responsibility and consequences, his voice rising as if volume could substitute for trust. He spoke as though Nora were already in opposition, already guilty of something unnamed.

She began altering her routines to avoid these encounters. Earlier walks. Later shopping. Shorter trips. She learned which streets felt hostile and which remained neutral.

The town itself seemed to have developed a posture. Windows carried messages. Lawns displayed declarations. The absence of a sign became a sign in itself.

Her sister called less often, but when she did, the calls were heavier.

“I don’t recognize people anymore,” Elaine said once, not waiting for a response. “Everyone’s showing their true colors.”

Nora noted the phrasing. True colors. As if complexity had always been camouflage.

Thomas called more frequently.

His voice carried confidence, steady and reassuring to those who wanted certainty. He spoke about unity and sacrifice, about moral clarity in times of crisis. He spoke about obedience as an expression of care.

“You can’t protect everyone’s feelings,” he said during one call. “At some point, you have to draw lines.”

Nora listened, tracking the logic carefully. She noticed how often the word must appeared. How rarely mercy did.

When restrictions tightened further, isolation became physical as well as social.

Days passed where she did not hear another human voice. Deliveries were left at the door. Notices came through screens. Even the radio shifted, its tone increasingly urgent, increasingly binary.

Her apartment grew quieter in ways she hadn’t anticipated. The absence of incidental sound pressed in on her thoughts. She caught herself narrating tasks aloud, not because she needed to, but because silence had begun to feel unstable.

Sleep fractured. She woke at odd hours, mind already racing, replaying interactions, parsing sentences for hidden meaning. She questioned her interpretations constantly. Had she missed something obvious? Was her insistence on nuance a flaw she’d mistaken for integrity?

She began doubting her own emotional responses.

When news came that another acquaintance had died during The Calamity, the information arrived stripped of detail and ceremony. No gathering. No shared grief. Just an announcement, followed by commentary.

“Tragic, but unavoidable,” someone said online.

“People should have known better,” another added.

Nora stared at the screen, feeling something essential recoil. The language felt wrong. Efficient. Sanitized. As if loss itself had been categorized and processed.

She stopped engaging entirely.

As months passed, the world outside her window reassembled itself into something sharper and more divided. People moved with purpose again, but it was a different purpose. Conversations carried an edge. Laughter sounded performative, brittle.

Nora felt herself receding.

Not dramatically. Gradually. Like a shoreline eroded grain by grain.

She trusted no one’s intentions anymore, not because she believed everyone was malicious, but because she no longer believed understanding was mutual. Every interaction felt like a test she hadn’t studied for.

She stopped answering the phone.

She stopped responding to messages.

She began to feel as though her humanity itself was being rationed, conditional on compliance. The parts of her that valued patience, restraint, and careful thought felt increasingly out of place.

And with that realization came a quiet, unsettling question she couldn’t yet resolve:

If remaining herself meant permanent exclusion, how long could she survive without becoming someone else?

By the time the town declared itself reopened, Nora no longer recognized what that meant.

People returned to the streets with a different gait, more purposeful, less curious. Conversations resumed, but they carried assumptions instead of questions. The spaces between people had narrowed, not physically but ideologically. There was an unspoken expectation that everyone had arrived at the same conclusions during the long months apart.

Nora had not.

Her days were now largely indistinguishable from one another. She woke without urgency, completed the same rituals, and watched light move across her apartment walls as if it were a metric she could still trust. She no longer marked time by events or obligations. Only by repetition.

When she ventured out, she moved carefully, not out of fear of illness or danger, but out of fear of misinterpretation. Every interaction felt like a negotiation she hadn’t agreed to participate in.

At the grocery store, a clerk she vaguely recognized smiled too widely.

“Good to see things getting back to normal,” the woman said, scanning items quickly.

Nora felt the familiar internal hesitation. Normal according to whom? The word had become aspirational, not descriptive.

Another customer chimed in from behind her.

“About time people stopped questioning everything and just did what they were told.”

The statement wasn’t aimed at her, but it landed anyway. She paid and left without looking back.

She passed the rink on her way home. The doors were open now. Lights on. The sound of skates echoed faintly through the walls. For a moment, she stopped, her body remembering before her mind did. She imagined stepping inside, the cold air hitting her face, the familiar scrape of blades being tested.

But she didn’t move.

The rink was no longer neutral ground. It had become another place where opinions circulated louder than people.

At home, her phone lit up occasionally, but she let it sit untouched.

Elaine left a voicemail one evening, her voice brisk and rehearsed.

“I don’t know what you’re doing anymore,” her sister said. “But you can’t keep isolating like this. People are moving on. You don’t want to be left behind.”

Nora replayed the message twice. The concern sounded genuine, but it was threaded with impatience. The underlying message was clear: adapt or be obsolete.

Thomas came by a week later.

He stood in her living room, hands clasped, eyes moving over the space as if assessing structural integrity. He talked at length, his voice steady and practiced. He spoke about rebuilding community, about shared values, about the dangers of prolonged isolation.

“You’ve always been thoughtful,” he said. “But thought has to lead somewhere. The world doesn’t need more hesitation right now.”

Nora listened, cataloguing each statement. She noted how often he spoke in collective terms, how rarely he acknowledged individual limits. His version of togetherness required agreement first and belonging second.

He waited for her to respond.

She didn’t.

The silence stretched, heavy and unfamiliar. She could see discomfort flicker across his face, quickly masked by resolve.

“If you don’t choose,” he said finally, “you’ll be chosen for.”

After he left, Nora sat alone for hours, replaying the exchange. She felt something settle into place inside her, not clarity but resignation. The realization that her father no longer saw her as a daughter first, but as a problem to be solved.

She began speaking less, even to herself.

Language felt unreliable. Words had been repurposed so thoroughly that she no longer trusted them to mean what she meant. Friendship had become alignment. Care had become enforcement. Faith had become certainty without doubt.

She questioned everything now, including her own instincts.

Had she ever truly understood people, or had she simply benefited from a world that tolerated quiet observers? Was her idea of friendship naïve, built on an assumption that difference could coexist without conflict?

She reviewed her relationships like closed files.

Leah, who once talked freely and laughed easily, now communicated only through declarations and expectations.

Martin, who had shared jokes and lunches, had vanished entirely, leaving behind only the absence of conflict as evidence he’d ever been there at all.

Her sister, who had once filled silence with warmth, now filled it with urgency.

Her father, who had taught her structure, now demanded conformity.

What remained?

Nora spent long hours staring out her window, watching people pass below. She noticed how often they traveled in pairs or groups, how rarely anyone walked alone without purpose. She wondered if solitude had become a visible marker of dissent.

Her internal world grew louder as her external one narrowed.

Thoughts repeated, circling the same questions without resolution. She worried she was losing something essential, not intelligence or logic, but elasticity. The ability to bend without breaking. To trust without needing guarantees.

She caught her reflection in the window one evening and barely recognized the woman staring back. Her face looked thinner, harder, less animated. The softness she’d once taken for granted had retreated.

She understood now that isolation was not just the absence of others. It was the gradual erosion of self that occurred when no one reflected you back accurately.

The world outside continued reorganizing itself into rigid lines, and Nora felt increasingly unclassifiable. Too careful to be decisive. Too questioning to be loyal. Too quiet to be heard.

And yet, somewhere beneath the exhaustion and doubt, a stubborn belief remained.

That true friendship did not require uniformity. That community built on fear was not community at all. That the values she still held patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control were not weaknesses, even if they had been rebranded as such.

Standing at the edge of town one evening, where winter finally loosened its grip and the road split toward two futures, Nora felt the full weight of the choice before her.

She could step toward belonging, adopt the language and posture required, and regain the safety of inclusion at the cost of her inner coherence.

Or she could remain where she was, alone but intact, holding to a definition of humanity the world no longer seemed interested in preserving.

And as the wind cut across the thawing ground, she asked herself the question that would not let her go:

Was survival worth it if it required abandoning the very principles that made connection meaningful in the first place?

2025: Blessed, Stressed, Politically Mugged and Messed

Posted on 29 December 2025by Sarah King

My "Year" In "review" that's not really a full year in review!

[*DISCLAIMER*: This is a deeply personal year-end reflection written from my lived experience. It is candid, emotional, and intentionally honest. Not everyone will agree with what is shared here, and that is okay. This post is not written to persuade, debate, or soften its edges for comfort. It exists to document my year, in my voice, from my perspective.
This is not a statement on anyone else’s life, choices, or beliefs. It is simply mine. If this kind of writing is not for you, you are free to close the tab with my full blessing.
Comments are welcome if they are respectful. Personal attacks, bad-faith arguments, tone-policing, or attempts to debate my lived experience will be ignored.]

OK everyone. Listen up cause I know your not as deaf as I am.

I did not start the year of 2025 Angry, pissed off and swinging with a big stick of “pissed off”. I Started It with mighty fluffy capybara vibes, gentle hope, and the absolute audacity to think the world wouldn’t light itself on fire.

That was my first mistake and wow was I so freaking wrong.

It actually started hopeful. Cautiously hopeful. The unhinged kind. Like a raccoon stress-testing reality with one paw, three escape routes, and a fully rehearsed fake death. Hopeful anyway. For reasons that now feel legally questionable.

January arrived carrying something genuinely good, which absolutely should have tipped me off that the universe was smiling because it had already calculated the credit and interest I had borrowed from it.

Even though my newly published book “Light of Winter’s Heart” technically entered the world in late December 2024, but January is when it stuck. The launch energy landed. The story moved. People read it, talked about it, and didn’t immediately forget it, which in this economy is saying something.

I watched something that had lived inside me for years step out into the world and survive without me hovering over it like an anxious goblin parent.

That is not a small thing.
Anyone who says it is has never built something from their own nervous system.

Then it became an audiobook. And listen. Accessibility is not a bonus feature. It is not optional DLC. It is not a cute add-on for good behaviour. It matters. Stories should be reachable. Especially stories about survival. Especially when the world keeps trying to quietly erase the people who need them most.

Around the same time, I hit my lowest recorded weight at 189 lbs. That part did not last long, because politics apparently has beef with my pancreas. Losing access to diabetic medication that AISH covered is one hell of a plot twist. But for a brief, suspicious window of time, my body and I were not actively at war.

That ceasefire mattered more than the number. It felt like a ceasefire.

Not joy.
Relief.

The kind that lets you exhale without doing a background threat assessment first. The kind where your body loosens its grip just long enough to remember what neutral feels like.

I was writing steadily. Creating. Planning. Making spreadsheets in my head that assumed the universe might, for once, mind its business. I genuinely believed that if I kept doing the things I loved, things would stabilize.

That belief did not make it out alive.

This was how the year started off, then it became…

“The Year the Volume Knob Snapped Off“

As winter dragged on, the world did not just get louder. It got sharper. Meaner. Dumb and then Dumber in a very specific, weaponized way that always hits marginalized people first.

Politics stopped whispering and started yelling. Costs climbed like they were racing for sport. Support systems began that slow, ominous wobble, the one where you know something is about to collapse but everyone in charge keeps smiling, shrugging, and insisting this is all very normal and definitely sustainable.

*Spoiler*. It was not.

What had once sounded a paranoid delusional fantasy sooner then started sounding planned and scheduled.

Disabled people were not being “supported less.” We were being redesigned into deeper poverty and quietly pushed off the board like a bad line item. Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just efficiently, “systematically”.

Then the money pressure hit.

Global Tariffs from a deranged madman drove inflation exactly the way they always do. Downward. Which then affected…well everyone. Rent went up. Food went up. Utilities went up. Everything climbed except supports and the actual ability to survive without juggling knives and reality.

At the same time, I was job hunting. Not because I wanted to. Because AISH and AB Works said I had to.

From January through June, I sent out resume after resume. Over six hundred of them. Six. Hundred.

Not one real response, one conversation, or even a courtesy rejection.

Just silence. Quieter then the absence of the vacuum of space, and the lack of intelligence that exists in this world now.

The kind of silence that tells you the system heard you perfectly and then made a conscious, well-documented decision to stare straight through you.

Not “oops, we missed your email” silence.
Not “we’re reviewing applications” silence.

Strategic silence. [watches a tumbleweed of neurons vanish]

The kind that seeps under your skin and rewires your nervous system like a bad firmware update. It teaches your brain that effort no longer connects to outcome. That input does not guarantee response. That doing everything “right” still gets you nothing but an automated void.

Once that lesson lands, you do not just feel discouraged.

You feel unsafe.

Because when effort stops mattering, the world stops feeling predictable. And when the world stops feeling predictable, your body goes into permanent DEFCON WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL mode.

People with safety nets do not understand this. They cannot. Their brains have never had to run twelve contingency plans just to exist. They have never had to calculate survival like a math problem with missing variables. They get to be disappointed. We get to be terrified.

…Anyway. I need a glass of wine.
Pinot Grigio. The emotional support kind.
Do not judge me. Or do. I genuinely do not care. It was $16 a bottle. The “cheap” wine that I can afford.

Now. Important footnote before someone gets cute in the comments and tries to “well actually” their way into my mentions.

Yes. I did return to my favourite seasonal “part-time” sheltered part-time job at Birch Bay Ranch, as I normally do from May through October. I love that place. I love it with my whole heart. It is one of the few environments where my brain, mental state of health, vast neurons and body agree that we are allowed to exist.

I only wish it were permanent. Year-round. Because if it were, I would stay there until the end of time and haunt the archery range in a cardigan like some kind of benevolent woodland cryptid.

Bright Spots Still Count. Even When the Sky Is on Fire.

March brought a bright spot. An actual one. A real, tangible, “oh right, this is why I do this” moment.

I held a book signing for “Light of Winter’s Heart.”

Readers showed up. Real humans. Face to face. I signed copies. We talked. I listened to what the story meant to them. Where it landed. What it stirred. That mattered. Deeply. I keep that moment tucked away for when the rest of the year dissolves into a noise-soup of forms, stress, and bureaucratic nonsense.

By June, “Beyond Where Lanterns Rise“, the first book in the “Lightkeeper” series, launched into the world.

Watching that series begin felt like laying a foundation. Not flashy. Not trendy. Not chasing algorithms like a raccoon on Red Bull. Steady. Intentional. Built to last.

Stories about faith, resilience, and growing up without pretending the world is gentle or fair or particularly interested in your comfort.

Stories that tell the truth and trust readers to handle it.

July and August. Aka: SUMMER CAMP IS MY THANG!.

July and August were my summer camp months.
My working vacation.
My seasonal DLC.
The only two months of the year where my nervous system loosens its death grip on reality and goes, “oh right. We are allowed to exist OUTSIDE.”

This is my season.

This is where I breathe again. Where I live outside. Move my body. Shine a little. Absorb trees, dirt, sunsets, and fresh air like a solar-powered goblin. Nature. Actual nature. The good stuff.

We do not speak of mosquitoes or wasps.
They are demons.
They know what they did.
They are not invited into this narrative.

This year was eight full weeks of archery.
Eight weeks of teaching.
Eight weeks of doing the thing I am legitimately excellent at without having to justify my existence every five minutes or translate my brain into corporate English.

I ran games.
So many games.

Angry Birds archery.
Poker with arrows, which sounds illegal, unethical, and possibly banned by several international treaties, but is actually just math, probability, and an alarming amount of trash talk from children with terrifying aim.

Balloon rounds.
Team chaos.
Skill drills disguised as nonsense so no one realises they are learning.

And of course. The camp “Hunger Games” equivalent.
Archery tag.
Last camper standing.
May the odds be ever in your favour, and may you not trip over your own enthusiasm.

Also. Candy.

So much candy.

An amount of candy that would concern a dentist, a nutritionist, and possibly a small regulatory agency. The kids got to shoot candy. A frankly irresponsible amount of candy. Which, honestly, might be the purest form of joy left on this planet.

I taught every single day.

I showed up, held space, kept kids safe, watched confidence bloom in real time.

I watched focus snap into place, watched nervous kids pick up a bow and realise, “oh. I can do hard things with pointy objects.”

That part mattered. A lot.

What I did not do much of was… everything else.

I did not attend many chapels, sit at many campfires, not do cabin time.
I missed most shared meals.

Not because I did not want to be there.

But because I was… simply adjacent.

I am the oldest activity program leader by more than double, even three times the age of most of the staff. Fifth oldest overall unless you count admin. I do not orbit in the high-school social galaxy. I am not part of the late-night giggles, the inside jokes, or the group dynamics that happen when everyone else is young, caffeinated, and running on shared memes.

Socially, I was nearly alone. Autism sucks when your old stuck in the mentality of a young mind. Aging body aches win.

I clocked it, felt it, packed it away neatly like emotional camping gear and kept going.

Because that is what I do.

I also wrote more this summer than I usually do. Journal entries. Diary stuff. The kind you do not post. The kind you hide like the Coca-Cola recipe or something significantly darker. Thoughts that needed somewhere safe to live before they started chewing through the walls. But I did have a “Sharon” and an “Alma“. I swear if it weren’t for those two, I probably would have gone bonkers.

I spent a lot of time writing. Engrossed in other worlds, sometimes even in Terraria, and mostly in bed by eight o’clock pm. You know the saying “Early to bed and early to rise makes a person….” wait, I’m neither healthy, wealthy OR wise….

But I did get LOTS of sleep. Even if it was more night terrors than dreams.

And then there was “The Dare”.

Because obviously there was.

I split a human hair with an arrow. No Joke.

No, no one was standing in front of the target. Safety first. Always. I am chaotic, not stupid. It only took seven arrows, which frankly feels reasonable and also very on brand.

That moment punched something important into my brain.

Even when I am socially on the outside, even when I am tired, when the rest of the year feels like a slow bureaucratic boss fight.

This is still a place where I am competent.
Trusted.
Grounded.
Fully myself.
Playing with kids.
And being weird and chaotic in my old age while thinking I am still very young.

Summer camp did not fix my life. But it does help.

It gave me air to breathe and be “me”

And sometimes air is enough to keep going.

Then August showed up like a WWE heel with a folding chair.

When Your Body Changes the Rules Mid-Boss Fight

My shoulder injury did not arrive gently.

It showed up right at the end. The final two days of summer camp. After I had already laid down all the safety rules for our “Hunger Games” chaos. After moi, the Game Maker had done her job.

And then the “Game Maker” got taken out.

It arrived decisively. No warm-up. No warning. Just a hard “oh, we’re doing this now.”

I tripped. On my own two feet. HARD!

Suddenly, things I had done on autopilot my entire life required planning. Strategy. Workarounds. Dressing. Reaching. Carrying. Gripping. Existing inside my own body without swearing.

Rehab started in early September and ran straight through Christmas.

Feelings were replaced with assessments. Instincts replaced with measurements. Grip strength became a number on a chart. Range of motion became a percentage. Functionality got translated into data points and polite clinical language.

And then came the part they say very calmly.

The damage to my right arm left me with significantly reduced mobility, reduced grip strength, and ongoing complications that now directly impact my quality of life.

Not temporarily.
Not “with rest.”
Not “if you just try harder.”

This is the new ruleset.

That injury did not just take movement. It took confidence. It took independence. It took the illusion that if I pushed through, my body would eventually cooperate out of sheer spite.

Instead, it added another layer to my disability.

Surprise.
Bonus content.
Unlocked without consent.
Welcome to Old Age.

At the same time, my body decided it also wanted a vote.

My seizures ramped up, like my nervous system had looked around, assessed the chaos, and gone, “yeah, no, we’re participating now.” Photosensitivity tightened its grip. Driving stopped being casual. Heights stopped being negotiable. My world didn’t collapse all at once; it narrowed. Quietly. Incrementally. Without asking permission.

The physical shrinkage came first. The social one followed right behind it, because that is how it always goes. When your radius gets smaller, everyone else’s patience does too.

This was also the moment AISH stopped feeling like support and started feeling like a carefully engineered trapdoor dressed up as policy.

The news of ADAP. De-indexing. Numbers delivered with a straight face and absolutely no concern for whether a real human could survive inside them. I ran the math more than once, because surely I had missed something. Surely there was a hidden column where this didn’t end in panic.

There wasn’t.

These changes that were coming don’t create stability. They squeeze. They apply pressure until something gives, then act shocked when desperation appears exactly where it was designed to show up.

Losing medication coverage shoved my weight back up to 229 lbs, because stress does that and bodies do not give a single damn about ideology. Biology does not negotiate. It never has. Shocking, I know.

And yeah, a lot of that riled me up.

So I did what I have always done.

I adjusted, rerouted.
I stopped waiting for fairness and started working with reality as it actually exists.

I got wrecked by circumstance. Hard. No warning. No consent form. My body glitched, the system pulled the floor out, and the rules changed mid-match.

So I got back up and “Tiny Tina‘d” fracked back. Not politely. Not quietly. Strategically. With teeth.

Because while everything else was on fire, there were still losses happening in the background that nobody likes to count.

My hearing kept deteriorating.

I am grateful for my hearing aids. They buy me time, and time matters. But I am not naïve about what that clock is counting down. Music has always been how I regulate, how I grieve, how I feel joy without translating it into something tidy and acceptable. Knowing that I may lose that someday is a grief I carry quietly, without spectacle or warning labels.

So I adapted. Of course I did. That part isn’t new.

I leaned harder into sign language. ASL. BSL. I buried myself in languages the way other people doom-scroll. French. Polynesian. Hawaiian. Japanese. Language gives me structure. Structure gives me safety. When the world starts yanking tools out of my hands, I build new ones and keep moving, even if it’s sideways.

Music came back in a different form. With renewed access to AVID Producer, Cakewalk, new VSTs, and my Alesis digital grand piano, I started composing again. Oxygen restored. Digital tracks now live on my site, sometimes with vocal help from a very talented human. (you can find my music on my site with the talented vocals of a good few friends of mine…sorry I don’t sing well, just the music part)

Yes. A deaf person doing music. Wild concept. I am not completely deaf. Not yet. Remove the hearing aids and the world goes silent. Sometimes silence has it’s blessings too. Until then, I work with what I have.

There were losses too.

My violin is no longer playable. I sold my cello. I loved it. I needed the money badly.

Both truths exist at once.

Quiet losses still count.
But they are not the only things that matter.

Some things are non-negotiable.

Teachers matter.
Communities matter.
Canada matters.

Autumn rolled in and the political temperature dropped straight into “authoritarian cosplay.” Listening disappeared. Empathy got benched. Teachers were shoved back into classrooms through forced legislation instead of common sense, collaboration, or respect.

Watching that happen while knowing disabled people were clearly next on the chopping block was exhausting in a very specific way. Not shocking. Not surprising. Just heavy. Systems love force. It is clean. It is fast. Compassion takes work, and this year made it very clear who was unwilling to do it.

Then October hit, and with it came Fall Camp at Birch Bay Ranch. Summer Camp 2.0.

And suddenly I was back where things made sense.

I ran the archery program. I loved it. Truly. Kids learning focus without fear. Patience without shame. Discipline without punishment. Structure without cruelty. Also, let’s be honest, pointy death sticks aimed at round circles are objectively fun and I will die on that hill.

This is why teachers matter.
This is why educators matter.
This is why persons with disabilities matter.
This is why volunteers matter.
This is why advocates matter.
This is why kids matter.
This is why our future matters.
This is why Canada matters.
This is why people matter
This is why God and Christians matter

…This is why common sense matter. Like don’t eat yellow snow and yes Pineapple goes on Pizza.

You do not gut the people holding learning spaces together and then act shocked when everything collapses. You do not undermine the ones teaching kids how to regulate, focus, and believe in themselves, then wonder why communities start cracking at the seams.

You don’t get strong communities without strong educators, foundations of faith, supports for vulnerable people, helping others and more.

And you do not get to call it “fiscal responsibility” while lighting the foundations on fire.

Ok enough of me ranting and raving like a lunatic.

November brought another decision. Not a dramatic one. A necessary one.

I shut down an old project of mine. “Dinner by the Minute“.

Eleven years. A full decade plus one. Not a failure. An ending. I officially closed it on December 31. The recipes aren’t gone. They’ll live on, folded into my personal site where they make sense instead of being propped up as a separate identity that no longer fits.

Sakura Studios is being refocused entirely on my books. The rest of who I am is being packed back into one place. One site. One centre of gravity. Social media left behind where it belongs, like clutter you finally admit you don’t need.

This was not quitting.

This was consolidation.

Narrowing my life until it becomes sustainable again instead of constantly overextended. Fewer fronts. Fewer tabs open. Less fragmentation. The same work, just finally arranged in a way that doesn’t bleed me dry.

Sometimes survival looks like subtraction.

And then Christmas showed up with something unexpected.

Mercy.

Not the loud, performative kind. A quieter version. The kind that slips in sideways when you are too tired to argue with it.

Jasper. Mountains. Snow. Actual quiet. Jasper Park Lodge. Sensory supports that worked instead of pretending to. A piece of art that followed me home and now lives with me like a small, stubborn reminder that beauty still exists.

For three days, my nervous system remembered what calm feels like. Not happiness. Not joy. Calm. The kind where your shoulders drop without being told to. The kind where your brain stops scanning for threats long enough to breathe.

Yes, the six-hour drive home through a blizzard was hell. Life does that. You take the good, grip the steering wheel until your hands cramp, and keep going anyway.

Looking back, I can still count blessings. I have to. Not because everything worked out, but because if I don’t stop and name the moments that held me up, this whole thing turns into a feral scream only my walls hear.

And I’ve screamed enough this year.

As I said before, my biggest accomplishment this year was my books.

My books reached real humans.

Not algorithms. Not vibes. Not “engagement.”
Actual people. Thousands of them.

“Light of Winter’s Heart“, the one that ripped a piece of my soul out and left it on the page, blew past two thousand copies and became a bestseller. That still feels fake when I say it out loud, so I say it louder just to make sure it sticks.

“Beyond Where Lanterns Rise“, the first book in a brand new series, cracked eight hundred and kept climbing like it had something to prove.

“The Destiny Theory“, a short story that took over a decade to finish because apparently I enjoy suffering, refused to die and just kept crawling forward like a spite-powered goblin engine fueled entirely by stubbornness and bad timing.

And then there’s “The Shards“…ooooohhhhh, lol

A brand new series born out of equal parts respect, challenge, and people looking at me and going, “okay, but what if you went even harder?” A dystopian future where universes collide like Comic-Con went feral and someone forgot to enforce the multiverse psychopathic chaos speed limit.

Apparently, chaos is my genre now.

I kept writing when my body said absolutely not. I kept creating when my brain was mush. I learned new languages just to change the pace and mildly terrorize people who weren’t expecting it. I adapted. I pivoted. I did not disappear, despite several systems acting like that would be more convenient.

I “drank” less *hic hic* stuff. Like, actually less. [I need more wine]
I read my Bible more. Some days I’m pretty sure I’m Job reincarnated with worse Wi-Fi.
I let go of half my stuffed animal collection, which sounds ridiculous until you understand how much safety lives in softness, and how much I need my fluffy things to stay human.

I survived this year on hard mode.

No tutorial.
No safety net.
No pause button.
No reset either.

That counts, right?

Because I’m counting it.

And Now. 2026. Sit Down. Shut the fuck up. We Need to Talk.

I am not entering 2026 looking to be fixed.

I am so profoundly, deeply, cosmically sick of people trying to fix me. Unless your my psychologist or therapist.

I am well aware that my health needs care. That part is true. I am not completely delusional.

But I am not that broken, just relatively broken.

And I am done being treated like a problem to be optimized, minimized, managed, micro-managed, macro-managed or quietly nudged into something more convenient for everyone else.

2026 is not about a fresh start.

Fresh starts are for people who get to wipe the board clean. That was never on the menu.

This is about a different path.

My path.

Not the world’s, or society’s, and definitely, not yours.

But Mine.

That means I am done carrying other people’s expectations like unpaid emotional debt. Done believing every crisis is somehow my responsibility to fix. Done chasing belonging in places that made it very clear I was only tolerated, never wanted.

I am protecting me now.

My energy.
My limits.
My right to stop without explaining myself like I’m on trial.

I am moving slower on purpose. Fewer relationships. Better ones. The kind that don’t require constant translation or performance. I am finishing grief chapters that nearly swallowed me whole instead of pretending they didn’t happen. No more hiding my autism. No more sanding my voice down to make it easier to digest.

No vows or promises.
Just a hard pivot.

A recalibration.

A decision to stop sacrificing myself to prove I deserve space. I ran out of swords.

And since we’re being extremely clear.

I AM Canadian. Loudly. Intentionally. With my whole chest.

Public healthcare matters. Community matters. Mutual responsibility matters. Full stop. No footnotes.

And Alberta separation can go kick rocks directly into the sun. I am not interested. I did not consent. Take that nonsense elsewhere.

God and I are tag-teaming 2026.

I bring the grit.
He brings the timing.

Table flipped.
Glitter bomb deployed.
Controller unplugged mid-cutscene.

I lived.

You do not get to delete me.

SO what was 2025 like?

It was The Year I Stopped Playing Nice With Reality

Somewhere between July heat, arrow dust, and dragging myself back to my room after 6-hour camp days, it clicked.

Not gently.
Not in a “breakthrough” way.

More like the moment you realize the floor has been tilting for a long time and everyone else just kept walking like that was normal.

I have been living permanently braced for impact.

That is not resilience.
That is a long-term emergency posture.

It looks impressive from the outside. It is hell on the inside.

And I am done pretending that white-knuckling existence is a moral virtue.

Let’s Stop Pretending This Was Random

This year did not “happen to me.”

It was built.

This did not happen all at once.

It came policy by policy. Cut by cut. Decision by decision. Quiet enough that you were supposed to miss it. Polite enough that you were supposed to thank them for it.

Persons with disabilities did not suddenly become less capable in 2025. Nothing about our bodies or brains changed overnight. What changed was our convenience. We became harder to ignore, harder to fund, harder to justify in a spreadsheet. That is a very different thing, and it matters.

ADAP will not feel like reform. It fells like a warning label slapped directly onto my life.
De-indexing AISH did not feel like budgeting. It felt like a slow eviction notice written in friendly government fonts so no one had to feel bad about it.

When medication coverage turns into a political football, your body pays the price. When employment systems only function for full-time bodies, everyone else gets treated like a rounding error. Not wrong enough to fix. Not valuable enough to protect.

And I am not interested in pretending any of this was neutral.

Neutral is a myth people use when they do not want to name who is getting crushed and who is doing the crushing.

Socially Speaking: This Was a Ghost Town

Let’s talk about the part people love to skip.

Disability is isolating even when you are technically “around people.” Especially then. Especially when you are present, visible, and still somehow not accounted for.

This year made it painfully clear who was there when things were smooth and who vanished the moment things became inconvenient, complicated, or not fun anymore.

I am not bad at friendships.

I am exhausted by asymmetrical ones.

I am done explaining my limits to people who hear them as suggestions. Done translating myself into smaller, softer, easier shapes. Done carrying relationships that collapse the second I stop compensating and overfunctioning.

That is not bitterness.

That is accounting.

Something Has to Be Cut Loose

There is a version of me that does not get to come forward into 2026.

The one who stayed too long, one who bled quietly to avoid conflict, who confused being useful with being valued.

That version kept me alive when survival was the only objective. I am not ungrateful for her.

But she is no longer in charge.

This is not a glow-up.

Glow-ups are cosmetic. Temporary. Designed to look good under fluorescent lighting and collapse under pressure.

This is a controlled burn.

The kind you set on purpose so the whole damn forest doesn’t go up later.

What 2026 Actually Needs to Look Like

I am not interested in “thriving.”

Thriving is what people say when they’ve never had to recover from their own life on a weekly basis.

What I want is simpler than that. Harder, too.

I want a life that doesn’t require constant recovery.

2026 needs to be quieter. Narrower. Sharper around the edges. Less impressive to outsiders. More functional for the person actually living it.

That means fewer projects that drain me dry just to prove I can still do them. More work that actually fits my capacity instead of fighting it. Fewer people in my orbit, but better ones. The kind that don’t require performance, translation, or emotional overcompensation to stay.

The books that matter will get finished. Not all of them. Not at once. The real ones. The ones with weight. The rest can wait, be shelved, or die quietly on the cutting room floor without ceremony.

My body doesn’t need to be punished into compliance. It needs to work with me, not against me. My home doesn’t need more things piled into it. It needs space to breathe. And my joy doesn’t need a reason, a price tag, or an explanation. It just needs room to exist.

No Promises. Just a Direction Change.

I don’t make promises to myself. Promises assume stable ground, and I’ve lived long enough to know the ground moves.

What I am doing instead is changing the rules.

I am done measuring my worth by output, endurance, or how much I can absorb before I finally collapse. I am done volunteering my nervous system as public infrastructure for broken systems and other people’s convenience.

I am choosing a version of myself that survives without disappearing.

Not softer, or quieter. And I’m not sanding myself down to fit into someone else’s comfort zone.

Just mine.

And One More Thing. Because This Matters.

And I love broken records…

Being a Canadian and an Albertan. I stand in both without shrinking myself.

Not as a slogan. Not as a vibe. As a set of values I actually live by.

I stand with Public healthcare, because care should not depend on wealth or luck.
Disability and social supports need and should exist, because disabled lives are not optional or expendable.
Teachers need to be acknowledged and treated with fairness, because communities do not survive without people holding learning spaces together.
Community with faith on both sides need to be accepting regardless of opinions and ideologies, because none of us were built to do this alone.

This country works when we take care of each other. Not perfectly. Not effortlessly. But deliberately.

I believe in responsibility that flows both ways. In helping when it’s needed. In building systems that catch people before they fall through the cracks. In neighbours looking out for neighbours, not drawing tighter circles and shutting others out and calling it strength.

This is God’s country in the sense that faith calls us toward care, not cruelty. Toward service, not barriers. Toward compassion that actually shows up in practice, not just words.

And for the record, fracturing ourselves, pulling inward, or pretending separation solves anything has never been the answer. This country is stronger together, even when it’s messy, even when it’s hard, even when we disagree.

Especially then.

This is a keep-calm-and-Canada-on moment.

No theatrics, rage spiralling, just a firm refusal to abandon each other. 

That’s the line I’m holding.

Where This Leaves Me

I’m not optimistic. I’m not calm. I’m not pretending.
I’m still standing, and that seems to be the problem.

And that seems to bother some people more than if I had quietly vanished into the background like a convenient footnote.

Which tells me everything I need to know.

So let’s be very clear about how this ends.

I am rage-quitting 2025 with confetti, a glitter bomb, and a capybara wearing a party hat. This year tried to chew me up, spit me out, and then ask if I had considered being more “resilient” about it.

Hard pass.

I am ringing in 2026 fully aware that it will probably try to mess with me too. I’m not that naïve. I know how this game works. I know the “bosses” respawn. I know the terrain is unstable and the loot is inconsistent.

So to 2026 I say, cheerfully, loudly with my whole autistic, unmasked voice unfiltered and with my whole chest;
Bring it on, bitches!.

Because here’s the thing. I already know I’ll get knocked around, politically and socially curb-stomped, ghosted by people and those I connect with, work with, game with, talk with, breathe with, exist with. I already know things will break. Plans will wobble. Systems will disappoint. Life will absolutely attempt a cheap shot from behind a shrub with backstabbing words and stares and financial instabilities.

And God still has my back.

Always has. I just need to recognize it more.

So my goals are not cute and wrapped up in frilly bows. They are practical, feral, and deeply mine.

I’m writing more books. The real ones. The weird ones. The ones that matter.
I’m changing my relationships. Fewer masks. Fewer performances. More truth.
I’m fixing my home. New energy. New flow. Better feng shui. Less clutter. More breathing room.
I’m praying my car doesn’t break down like a dragon with diabetes, because honestly that’s one boss fight I do not need.
I’m stepping away from the archery community peacefully and without getting metaphorically shot, which feels like a reasonable ask.
I’m painting new worlds like Clair Obscur at a Kegger, messy and luminous and unapologetically strange and demented.
I’m going to enjoy life more by fighting for what’s right instead of shrinking to keep the peace.
I’m learning how to swear in other languages purely to confuse people and bring myself joy.
And I’m working very deliberately on being more me.

No masks. No apologies. No dam given. I’ve hired every beaver in Canada, they’re unionized, paid in maple syrup, and working in shifts. One’s got a toque. One’s running logistics. One’s judging me silently, which feels accurate.

This isn’t a glow-up or a redemption arc. This is a woman who survived hard mode, accidentally flipped the map upside down somewhere near Moose Jaw, and is loading into the next level with snacks from Canadian Tire, Christian faith, and a deeply suspicious amount of unearned confidence. There’s a Tim Hortons cup in the console, a Clair Obscure playlist that makes no sense, and a polite but firm refusal to apologize for taking up space.

If 2026 wants a fight, it can take a number and wait its turn. The beavers are busy, the kettle’s on, and I’m still here.

Controller in hand.
Glitter bomb primed.
Capybara calm engaged.

See you in 2026.

God and I are not finished yet.

Peace Out!

PS: Happy New Year!

The Quiet between the Bells

Posted on 19 December 2025by Sarah King

A candle, a quiet road, and the courage to step inside.

Some people grow up inside Christmas.

They are born into it the way others are born into language or music. They know the rules without being taught. They understand when to laugh, when to sing, when to expect miracles, and when to stop asking questions. Christmas, for them, is a room they have always belonged in.

And then there are people who grow up just outside it.

They know Christmas exists. They can feel it in the air when December arrives, the way cold sharpens the senses and lights seem brighter against early darkness. They hear the songs drifting out of shops and churches and passing cars. They see families gather, watch hands link, watch traditions repeat themselves with the confidence of something never interrupted.

But they stand on the edge of it, always a step back, always watching.

This story is about one of those people.

She was not unloved. That is important to say. People cared for her in the ways they knew how. But care does not always translate into understanding, and understanding does not always grow into acceptance. There were silences in her life that no one meant to create, but once formed, they stayed.

From the time she was young, she sensed she lived between things.

Between answers that did not quite fit and questions no one wanted to hear. Between expectations placed on her and a deeper knowing she could never quite name. Between the world as it insisted on being ordered and the quieter truth that refused to be sorted.

She learned early that some things were easier left unsaid.

Christmas arrived every year whether she was ready or not.

It came wrapped in sound and colour and insistence. Bells rang. Schedules filled. People spoke louder, as though joy needed volume to survive the winter. Questions appeared with the same regularity as ornaments. What are you doing for Christmas. Who are you spending it with. Are you excited.

She learned to answer carefully.

She liked Christmas more than she admitted. Not the noise, not the expectations, but the mystery underneath it. The idea that something holy had once slipped into the world quietly, almost unnoticed. The belief that light had entered history not through power or certainty, but through vulnerability.

That part spoke to her.

She wondered often if God preferred the edges of things. If holiness was drawn to places where definitions softened and certainty gave way to trust. If maybe the spaces she lived in were not mistakes, but invitations.

But believing something privately does not make it easy to live publicly.

As she grew older, December stirred something restless in her. The world seemed to lean inward. Snow simplified things. It softened corners. It covered what could not be fixed and made it briefly beautiful anyway.

Winter never asked her to explain herself.

She noticed small things. The way breath fogged in the cold. The way lights reflected off ice. The way some houses glowed while others stayed dark, their curtains drawn tight as though guarding grief or weariness or both.

She passed those houses every year and wondered about the people inside. What they were carrying. What they were hiding. What they hoped Christmas might fix, even though it never quite does.

Her own life had taught her that some things are not repaired by a single night, no matter how sacred the story.

She lived carefully. Thoughtfully. She learned how to read rooms the way others read weather. She learned when to step forward and when to stay still. She learned that standing in the middle meant being misunderstood from both sides.

But she also learned how to listen.

And Christmas, beneath all its noise, is a season that whispers.

Advent came quietly that year.

The days shortened quickly, as though time itself was eager to get to something important. The sky took on that pale winter quality, neither blue nor grey, just waiting. She walked more than usual, letting the cold steady her thoughts.

On one of those walks, she passed a small church tucked between a bakery and a closed storefront. It was the kind of place people missed if they were not paying attention. Brick worn smooth by decades of weather. A simple wooden door. No sign announcing relevance.

The door was open.

Warm light spilled out onto the snow, and with it the low sound of voices. Not singing yet. Just murmuring. The quiet before something begins.

She stopped.

She had passed this church many times before without noticing it. Or perhaps she had noticed and chosen not to see. Either way, something held her there now. Not obligation. Not guilt. Just curiosity, gentle and persistent.

She did not go in.

Not yet.

She stood for a long moment, letting the warmth reach her face, then turned away and continued walking. Hope, she had learned, needed space. Rushed hope had disappointed her too often.

The days continued.

She baked one evening, not because she was hosting anyone, but because the smell reminded her of something she could not quite place. She wrapped a few small gifts for people who had surprised her by staying. A neighbour who checked in during storms. A coworker who remembered details others forgot. A friend who never asked her to be simpler.

She decorated sparingly. A string of lights. A small tree. Nothing that demanded explanation.

Christmas Eve arrived heavy with snow.

The kind that falls straight down, thick and quiet, as if the world has decided to pause. Streets emptied. Sound softened. The city felt smaller, held.

She found herself walking without quite deciding to. The cold pressed gently against her coat. Her breath rose and vanished. Footsteps crunched, then faded.

She stood again in front of the church.

The door was open.

Inside, candles glowed. A few dozen people sat scattered in the pews, no one arranged, no one trying to impress anyone else. A guitar was being tuned quietly. Someone laughed softly, then stopped, as though remembering where they were.

She stepped inside.

No one turned to stare. No one asked questions. A woman with silver hair smiled and handed her a candle. A man shifted slightly to make room. Two children swung their legs, whispering, then grew still.

She sat.

The air smelled of wax and pine. The kind of scent that lingers in memory long after the night ends. She felt her shoulders drop without realising they had been tense.

The story was told simply.

A journey. A child. No room at the inn. Light arriving without announcement.

She had heard it before, of course. Everyone had. But tonight it landed differently. Less like a lesson. More like a confession. As though the story itself understood what it meant to be overlooked.

Candles were lit one by one.

Light passed carefully from hand to hand, each flame borrowed, never owned. She watched faces soften in the glow. Lines eased. Expressions quieted. People became less certain and more present.

It occurred to her then that Christmas was not about belonging to a category. It was about being welcomed into a moment.

She looked around and noticed how different everyone was. People who would never agree on everything. People carrying grief, joy, exhaustion, hope. People who had made mistakes and people still pretending they had not.

And yet here they were, sharing light.

Family forming without permission or pedigree.

When the final song ended, no one rushed out. Someone pressed a warm mug into her hands. Someone else asked her name and listened carefully to the answer she offered. No one asked her to clarify herself. No one tried to place her.

It was enough.

Outside, the bells rang softly. Snow continued to fall. She stood for a moment, candle still burning, breath steady in the cold.

For the first time in a long while, she did not feel caught between worlds.

She felt held in the space between them.

And in that quiet, she understood something Christmas had been teaching her all along.

That love does not arrive with conditions.
That holiness often looks ordinary.
That God delights in the full, complicated truth of who we are.
That family forms wherever people choose to see one another clearly and stay.

She walked home slowly.

The candle burned low, but the light did not go out.

It never does.