Friday Care Package
When trust is broken, how do we care in order to repair?
Dear Substack Community: I am writing from Ireland where I have been for the last 2 weeks, first in the North of Ireland with Michael McRay, and now with my literary agent, Cathleen Falsani. It’s been a nice chance to slow down and write and renew.
It’s Friday, again, and here is my Friday Care Package, continuing the same thread as before: care and conflict.
📦 Friday Care Package
Putting Care Into Our Conflicts
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
Dear Becoming Ones,
This week, my body has been the site of sorrow.
I learned of a breach of trust in a relationship I hold dear, and the ache it brought with it is sharp, cavernous, unpredictable. You know the kind—the kind that hollows out your chest and rattles your ribs. The kind that makes even familiar touch feel unfamiliar. I don’t yet have answers. I don’t yet know the shape this pain will take. All I know is that something sacred has been disturbed, and I am left with the fragments.
And still, I return to the question I’ve been living into:
How do we put care into our conflicts?
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: we cannot escape conflict. It is the natural byproduct of intimacy, of entanglement, of community. Conflict isn’t the problem. The absence of care is.
Care is not docility. It is not avoidance. Care is fierce and clear-eyed. It does not flinch when the wound is exposed. Care, as María Lugones teaches us, is a practice of world-traveling—stepping into another’s reality without erasing our own.
So today, I am choosing to stay. To listen. To not run.
To honor my own pain without demanding repayment from someone else’s.
To resist the allure of revenge and root myself in the slower, thornier, truer path of repair.
Conflict, especially the tender kind—the kind that disrupts trust—has a way of calling us back to our most ancient fears: abandonment, betrayal, not being believed, not being loved. And yet, what if this moment, with all its ache, could also become a field of becoming?
What if instead of picking up the tools of dominance, we picked up the tools of care?
Attunement. Boundaries. Listening. Rest. Grief. Truth-telling.
Care doesn’t mean reconciliation will always come. Sometimes the wound is too deep, or the work unreciprocated. But care does mean we will not become what has harmed us. We will not be consumed by the fire. We will let it purify instead of destroy.
In my own body, I’m learning to listen again.
To let the tension in my chest teach me.
To breathe in curiosity.
To exhale vengeance.
To ask for support—not as weakness, but as solidarity.
I’ve texted a few beloveds this week with the simple request:
“Can you hold space for me?”
And they have.
And that has been enough.
So I offer the same to you.
If you are carrying a quiet sorrow today, an unresolved hurt, a tender breach—
may this letter be your invitation to pause.
To feel.
To tend.
To remember that even in conflict, you are not alone.
We are practicing together.
We are fumbling toward liberation.
We are putting care where there once was only silence.
🕊 A Poem for the Practice of Care
When the wound sings louder than the wisdom,
wrap it in fabric made of breath.
Let the air carry your sorrow to the window,
where even broken light can become blessing.
Do not run from your ache.
Let it name you kin.
Let it walk with you to the edge of yourself,
and teach you the way back home.
Care is not the absence of anger—
it is the refusal to harden.
It is the hand held open,
even when the heart is still mending.
Let us become the people
who pause before speaking,
who choose the slow fire of repair
over the flash of retaliation.
Let us be the ones
who make care the center
and conflict the teacher,
so that even our hardest truths
may lead us back to one another.