This is a post I never thought I’d write.
Not because it’s something controversial, or horrific, or even surprising.
The reason I never thought I’d write it is because it is so emotionally raw, vulnerable, and disclosing about…me.
Since November of 2024, I haven’t been able to write anything light and airy, hopeful, or even hinting at romance. As the dark days of 2025 and 2026 kept rolling along, where I, as a woman, lost more rights than I ever thought would or could be taken away, where I saw good, decent people murdered in the streets of this country by masked Nazis masquerading as patriots, where I saw people I know struggle to put food on the table, and have to choose between needed medicine and keeping their homes, I couldn’t find anything happy to write about.
For a romance author, that is cataclysmic.
A deep, dark despair began to suffuse within my soul at the state of our country. I watched as we lost our moral compass, our compassion, our honor, and our status among the other nations in this fragile world of ours. Alliances that took decades to build were destroyed with a simple tweet from an orange colored narcissist. A war no one wanted was waged, and we were lied to about when it would end, how many had sacrificed their lives, and that the cost of gas had nothing to do with it.
I watched, in terror, as children were ripped from the arms of their immigrant parents simply because they’d been given the label “illegal.”
I heard words used, horrible, ugly words that have no place in our lexicon, by people in leadership roles in the government. They called citizens of this country dirty; terrorists; communists, and certain words I will never put pen to paper.
This was not the world I was raised in. The world in which I watched my mother and aunts and all the women in their age group fight and march and protest to make life better for their children. This was not the world I wanted my grandbabies to grow up in, a world where my daughter had fewer rights than I once had. Rights to own her body, her decisions, her financial freedom.
A despair so deep I couldn’t find words to show love, respect, or even comedy to the people who have so graciously read my books for the past twelve years engulfed me and kept those happy words from blooming.
Depression is nothing to swipe away with the idea that tomorrow will be better, especially when you wake up the next day, and things are worse. Much worse and far darker than you could have imagined.
In the days leading up to yesterday’s election, polls told us there would be a blue wave; that change was wanted and coming.
I stopped believing in polls when they predicted we’d have had two female presidents by now.
I went to bed last night after voting, hopeful, cautious, and praying that change – any change -would truly come. Any change that could help us find our way again. Any change that would signal all was not lost and we could be that shining nation on a hill again, founded in freedom, justice, and truth.
A nation where we all were considered equal under the law. A nation where journalists weren’t threatened and a free press could thrive.
And then I woke up this morning and for the first time in a very long time I felt something bloom inside me: hope. Next to it was a feeling of relief mixed with happiness and a side of caution added.
This morning, for the first time in a very long time, I wrote happy words. Romantic words. Words that dealt with love. Kindness. Empathy. Today, for the very first time in a very long time, I smiled.
And with that smile came a hope for a future filled, once again, with love, compassion, kindness, empathy and truth.
