Holy Week
will I ever stop talking about life and death and resurrection?
I hate the clickbaity hellscape of April Fool’s Day on the internet, so I refrained from posting yesterday. I didn’t want my readers to have to wonder if I was being sincere or tricking them, no more than I wanted to navigate the minefield of bullshit announcements myself. So I’m here, now. Being honest.
Those of you who have been following along with me for awhile likely remember my father died on Good Friday of last year. I still remember everything about it. The way my mother said “he’s gone” with a long, rattling breath in it. The misty grey drive up to Cascadel Woods, the ache of relief in my chest. The way his cold, clammy dead flesh felt under my hands. The smell in the room, not rot, but something else. How the women from the funeral home held us and let us cry in their arms. The way I bizarrely, nonsensically, felt that I still should get myself together go to work, so insistent life carried on in the wake of loss.
I sobbed that day, I had an Aperol spritz by the lake, I thought fondly of my father and posted a photo of him to my instagram with a charitable caption. I was exhausted more than I was sad, but I wasn’t angry. The anger would come later.
It feels insane that Holy Week is upon me again, that an entire twelve months of grief and change and strife has transpired and it’s actually time to reflect. Somehow, I am coming up on a whole year of non-stop cleaning up the literal and figurative mess my father left me. It’s been a year since I was forced to move. I year since I had to step into the role of my mother’s financial caretaker, executor of the state she fundamentally does not understand. A year of money stress and unpaid labor and constant sacrifice and no thanks and still, always, people asking more and more and fucking more for me. And in spite of all this change, as you can probable tell, I’m annoyingly still really angry.
It’s super embarrassing to admit. I really wish I was more evolved, that I spent the year arriving somewhere resigned and mature. But Holy Week 2026 finds me still in an incredible bitter, resentful place.
Maybe it’s because it took awhile for the weight of the aftermath to really hit me. Maybe it’s because I’m still processing the fact I didn’t get to indulge in the rewards I’d dream about to get me through my darkest moments (like my thwarted plans to move to Europe). Maybe it’s because we’re in the last stretch of Lent, and I’m denying myself my vices and cravings which makes me grumpy. Maybe it’s because my mom has learned nothing, taken on nothing, and changed nothing, and I caring for her is still a full time job I don’t get paid for.
Or maybe it’s just because I’m human and it will inevitably take me more than a year to stop feeling hurt and betrayed by the ways in which I was utterly fucked over and thrown under the bus by my father.
I use this space, substack, to write little liturgies for myself and my friends. It’s a chance to look back on the month and find a story or a parable. Holy Week, days before Easter Sunday, feels like the best possible time to have something profound to say, but here I am. In virtually the same place I was a year ago: writing about my dad dying. This morning I did not feel profound. I didn’t feel worthy of liturgy. I barely felt worthy of hammering out a little newsletter for you all, —and in realizing that, it occurred to me: that’s where the liturgy lies: In the myth of unworthiness. That is, and always has been, the message of Holy Week. That redemption is for everyone, that there is no human too unworthy to be touched by the divine.
They’re such ugly, Sunday School cliches to say plainly, because they’ve been hijacked by hateful evangelicals and toted by un-christlike Christians so many times in so many formats they’ve lost meaning. I know I certainly bristle in knee-jerk resistance when I hear Christ died for your sins or Jesus loves you. But when I think about what Holy Week means to me, the springtime celebration of the ways in which life comes from death and death births life and resurrection always follows destruction because that is the oldest, most indelible way of the world, I find comfort in even those adages. That these gifts— the wheel of the seasons and the incarnation of unity and abiding love—are for everyone, even us sinners (especially us sinners!) because they are deeply ancient and deeply human.
I always want to believe I am doing life “right,” and that’s a maddening goal when the world is as fucked by corrupt billionaires and oligarchs as it is. I can live as “right” as possible and still feel like it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Which is just as likely to make me give up and order something off of Amazon again for the, which then makes me spiral into a pit of obsessive self-loathing. And I know, on some level, that this is ridiculous. That mentally torturing myself for using Amazon twice a year or for not being perfectly monk-like in purging the righteous anger following my dad’s death an arbitrary year later is not only useless, but a manifestation of indoctrinated Western Individualism that’s part of the problem. Like I am aware. And yet— I ruminate over my sins every day.
And this is why it’s necessary for me to remember the crucifixion and all it’s implications. Not just Christ died for your sins and Jesus loves you but pay thoughtful , ritualistic homage to the man preaching love thy neighbor who was murdered by the state. Recall his truly radical message that redemption is possible and available to every single person who chooses to seek it. Even the corrupt billionaires and oligarchs. Even my dead father. Even me—a girl still stupidly, pathetically mad at her dead father even though he’s very much dead and she can’t even yell at him about it.
I think a lot of the people who choose to hate Christianity (and I get it, trust me, I get it) reduce the message of universal salvation to a mandate that we must forgive everyone who has ever hurt us. Which is just—not actually the core of what’s being taught. The Good News isn’t that we must personally forgive sinners, but that divinity, however you refer to it— the spirit, the universe, Jesus, nature, whatever— offers forgiveness, universally. To me, that is a message of hope: no matter how far down a supposedly irredeemable path we travel, we can turn back. We can make amends, We can change. No one is too far gone to seek their own forgiveness in Christ (or the universe, spirit, nature, whatever). That doesn’t mean we have to forgive our abusers. It only means even the worst people can be redeemed, if they choose.
And as someone who tends to lapse into believing I am The Worst Person Who Ever Lived in moments of self recrimination, I find comfort in this. I also find comfort in it when I look at the world, and feel it is beyond hope. Because nothing is beyond hope, if we love our neighbor. If we love ourselves. If we love our neighbors, as ourselves.
Now, shifting gears because we’re a quarter into the year and I feel like I’ve released ZERO announcements regarding writing which is why many of you are here, so I’d love to share a little bit about how 2026 is shaping up.
First off, I sold four short stories right off the bat, all of which will be released very soon! I’ll be making a post with links to read them when they’re all out, but in the meantime here are some teasers:
First off, the wonderful Carnage House, a leftist extreme horror press, picked up my rural occult horror story, Catch a Hot One. Their editors have been so wonderful to work with and all in all it’s been one of my favorite publishing experiences yet.
Then the wonderful, haunting death-centric magazine The Deadlands picked up a magical realism meditation on divorce and depression I wrote last year called The Dog.
Lesbos Literary Zine, a grassroots lesbian press, published Campfire Ritual, a cute butch/femme coming of age erotica piece that takes place as a summer camp between two counselors.
Lastly, up and coming weird-girl-lit mag Dogwater published my midwestern lesbian horror story On Roaches and Rabbits, which is out and available to read, actually, right here! Dogwater is impossibly cool, I am very honored to be featured.
In addition to these projects, my dear friend MJ Marlowe and I are in the throes of completing the first volume of our butch4butch erotica, poetry, and photography anthology, Butch Bait. It’s been an absolute blast working with MJ on a passion project and we had a fucking amazing turnout with regards to contributions. The news is bleak right now and we have to find our hope, and I truly think collaborating with fellow queer artists on things we love and want to see more of in the world, celebrating our identities and sexualities and histories and communities, arenecessary practices. So we are thrilled to be cranking this project out! Stay tuned for further updates (and hot butches).
In terms of my current writing project, most of my time has been spent on a manuscript I had to temporarily abandon when my dad died, SHOCK COLLAR. A horror (romance?) about Agnes, a dog-hating employee at a corrupt urban dog daycare facility who, in the midst of a alcohol-withdrawal induced psychosis, kidnaps Emma Sweet: the plain, unassertive younger co-worker she’s obsessed with. Convinced she’s saving Emma from their boss’s drone dog spies and sinister plans, Agnes whisks her away her on a road trip from hell in an attempt to shape her into the woman she believes she can be, slowly revealing the woman she is, along the way. It’s tight and insular and piss doused and an absolute blast, chock full of toxic yuri and dyke mommy issues and Dog Stories galore. I left it at about 12k last year, and in the last few weeks since picking it back up, have managed to reach 33k, and I’m still going strong!
I have no idea what I will do with this manuscript once it’s finished, but I think it has the potential to be trad published if I can actually be patient enough to embark on that process instead of just throwing it up on an epup so you all can read it as soon as possible. I will be looking for beta readers for what I have soon SO if this sounds fun to you and you have time on your hands for a fun juicy ride, hit me up.
In the meantime, remember: you are not the Worst Person Who Ever Lived. But even if you were, it’s never, ever too late to turn it all around.
