Drafted May 1, 2026.
Revised May 6-8, 2026.

Quick note from the author: The mental model I’ve had for this newsletter, at least initially, is to write long-running series/themes where I deeply excavate a specific topic for as long as it feels right or until I get bored. I started this newsletter as a place to share about the intersections between my personal life and all my internet rabbit holes, but at least initially, to also process my divorce.

I feel like I’m reaching the point where I’ve said most of what I want to say publicly about my divorce at this point. There are a lot of other topics I want to write about, so expect to see a few thematic shifts in this newsletter over the coming year. Many thanks to those of you who pay for this newsletter. As a result of my unexpected divorce, my household AGI dropped more than 80% and I would be in a tough spot were it not for alimony and savings. Your $25 annual membership directly supports my ability to pay my bills (including my cat’s portion of the rent).

Something I gave a lot of credit to my ex-husband during our marriage, and still to this day, is that in some ways, his own religious identity propelled me to seek out my own spiritual home. I had grown up Episcopalian and Unitarian-adjacent, and drifted away from organized religion around the time my own parents divorced as a teenager. For years the only exposure I had to religious practice was when I attended either Christmas and Easter services with my father (a former Presbyterian minister who left the ministry long before meeting my Mom, but who remained religiously engaged until the end of his life), or High Holiday services with my ex-husband. When we moved to Cincinnati, my ex visited several shuls until he found a good fit. I never felt propelled to convert to Judaism, but over time I felt an increasing nudge towards finding my own religious home.

The final push in the direction of me seeking a religious home was witnessing the fallout related to Ferguson, especially when Darren Wilson was not indicted for the murder of Mike Brown back in late 2014. I was so engulfed in anger that I thought I should probably find a community skilled in handling anger. Around this period, I began visiting the local Quaker meeting house. Although no one among my immediate friends and family were Friends (Quakers are more formally known as the Religious Society of Friends), I knew about their reputation for social justice from my days of being a teenage anti-war activist and general exposure to liberal denominations.

After attending my Quaker meeting for several years, it wasn’t until a few years ago that I decided to take the step of becoming a member. Some Quakers become members of their local meetings very quickly, others never take the step of becoming an official member and remain attenders for the rest of their lives. For many years I wrestled with the idea of becoming a Quaker because of two significant reasons.

The first was that I had a lot of misgivings around the Quaker peace testimony and any potential expectations of pacifism. Ironically, the Quaker peace testimony is what drew me to Quakerism in the first place. But I have long felt that marginalized people in a violent repressive society reserve the right to armed self-defense. For a while I owned an old pistol inherited from my dad, and I have taken a firearms training course. But, shooting fifty rounds at a shooting range confirmed that I have zero interest in owning and maintaining a firearm. This is a lonely time for pacifist leftists. I find that a lot of American leftists have many wildly uninformed and revisionist views around the role and history of pacifism on the left, but that’s an essay for another day. I finally reconciled myself to my complicated feelings around the peace testimony with the realization that Quakerism, much like many other enduring faith traditions that have survived persecution across many generations and geographies, does not require neat and tidy answers, just a commitment to wrestling with questions that are not easily answerable.

The second thing that gave me pause around committing to membership was that at the time I began attending my Quaker meeting, it was a rapidly aging meeting with very few people my age around. To put it bluntly, I did not want to be the one who turned out the lights on what I feared was a dying meeting. I was already dealing with the traumas of eldercare for an aging parent as an only child, I did not want to also shoulder the responsibility of an aging meeting. At some point I had a conversation with a Friend who grew up in the meeting, who has also become a long-time small-f friend of mine, and her thoughts on what this trajectory could look like really helped shift my perspective in a productive direction.

By the time I started to get really comfortable with moving forward with membership, even with my concerns about an aging meeting, our meeting also suddenly began to get younger.¹ In my region (what Quakers call a Yearly Meeting), the process for membership requires you to write a letter stating your wish to apply for membership, how you see yourself fitting into Quaker worship and practice, and anything else you feel is relevant to discerning your membership in a communal way. I’ll share that letter and more about the process in Part 2.