There is a species of primate that shares nearly 99% of our DNA. They live just south of the Congo River and resolve conflicts without war. The species is led by females, and they are called bonobos.

But here’s what many people don’t realize. Bonobos may be the closest living example we have of what cooperative power actually looks like in action.

Bonobo societies are matriarchal. Female bonobos form strong alliances with one another, sharing food, grooming, and supporting one another’s young. When conflict arises, they diffuse tension (not just with each other, but with their raucous male partners) through connection rather than domination.

I heard something on a reel this week that stopped my scrolling index finger mid-air. “There’s no waste in nature.”

It was spoken by Jenni Britton Bauer of Jenni’s Ice Cream in a venture announcement with Misfits Market, and the words landed like one of those quiet truths that feel obvious once you hear them, yet slightly life-altering all the same.

No waste in nature.

Not the fallen leaves that rot into soil, nor the lifeless, hollowed-out crooked tree that becomes a home for birds. Even the forest fires, which appear to be destruction and devastation, are busy making way for new life.

Nature doesn’t discard itself. It transforms.

Jenni’s comment made me wonder when we decided humans were the exception.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how many of our beliefs were absorbed without our consent. Beliefs about worth, and love, and what’s possible, and how much space we’re allowed to take up in the world (and a host of other things). 

Somewhere along the way, most of us were gently, and sometimes not so gently, taught who to be. Be quieter, tougher, easier to love, smaller, and stop asking so many damn questions. The world has a funny way of handing us a script and calling it “maturity,” or “fitting in.” And for a long time, many of us follow it without question, assuming this is simply what becoming an adult looks like. 

But what if so much of what we’ve accepted isn’t who we are at all?

What if it’s just who we were conditioned to be?

Growing up Catholic meant I was raised on parables long before I ever learned what a “parable” actually was. To me, they were the stories priests told during homilies, as I envisioned a dusty village where people walked around in leather sandals, carrying woven baskets of bread and fruit. These stories always ended with a moral that made me feel vaguely guilty, even if I’d done nothing wrong that week.

My earliest memory of a parable is sitting in a pew, swinging my legs, trying to pretend I understood why the shepherd would abandon ninety-nine perfectly good sheep just to find the one rogue lamb. Even at nine years old, this felt fiscally irresponsible.

I’ve always found it strange that we ever agreed to this, but I find it even more perplexing that we haven’t flipped the narrative by now. 

By “this,” I mean a world in which men are routinely credited as the architects of creation while women are treated like supporting characters in a story that literally cannot exist without us.

I used to log every mile I’d run and every scrap of food I put in my mouth. But over the years, I should have also been keeping a running tally of all the times my immediate family members should’ve died but somehow didn’t.

It’s honestly a miracle any of us kids survived childhood. Looking back, I realize our family didn’t just have guardian angels, we had a whole celestial fleet pulling overtime to keep us all alive.

Birthdays make me reflective, mostly because they remind me that I’ve spent a great chunk of my life perplexed. Even as a kid, I wasn’t one to take the world at face value. While other children were content eating chalk or believing in the tooth fairy and elves, I was busy trying to untangle the contradictions of existence. 

There’s a difference between trusting your gut and knowing. The gut can be noisy with its nerves and second-guessing. Knowing is quiet. It’s the kind of peace that settles in when you’ve stopped overthinking and finally let the universe get a word in edgewise.

I first learned this as a high school sophomore, standing at a crossroads that felt way bigger to me than it probably was. My choices were to help my track team go to state in the two-mile relay, or audition for the school musical, Fiddler on the Roof. 

My mom was the first person to introduce me and my siblings to how thoughts become what we focus on.

She has always believed that the universe listens—not just to what you say, but to what you think. Which, frankly, always made me a little nervous.

After last week’s mountain vacation story, I started thinking about everyday life, specifically, what happens in the quiet kind of chaos that doesn’t make headlines, appear in photo albums, or really ever make it into my blog stories. Things like daily letdowns, or the moments that sting for a second but somehow leave us stronger and wildly more compassionate.

From the moment Mom, Dad, and my brother Jason arrived to retrieve me from the Denver airport in a rented minivan so chock full it looked like Jed Clampett and his clan making their way to Beverly Hills, I knew we were in for 5 days of customary Arthur antics. Little do I suspect, however, that I would soon come to realize that Buddy Ebsen's Beverly Hillbillies patriarch had nothing on my father when it came to personifying a backwoods mountain man.

For some reason, my dad had decided to complete his already questionable outfit of camouflage cargo pants and a Kansas City Chiefs hoodie with the felt cowboy hat I wore to my high school Sadie Hawkins dance. I have no idea where he found that hat, let alone what compelled him to bring it along on our family vacation, but he wore it with questionable pride.

“Doing hard things” has become a modern-day rallying cry. Glennon Doyle turned it into a movement, and her message is right on. But sometimes hard things aren’t about self-empowerment or shining brighter. Sometimes they’re about standing in the dark with someone you love and singing your heart out.

We’ve all had our share of “hard things,” and, as you can probably guess, mine typically entail my beloved family. The ones I’m focusing on today have to do with me singing at weddings and funerals of people I love.

Rumor has it that when my parents brought Julie home from the hospital, I decided the occasion called for a performance. A stubborn toddler still refusing to “void” in the big potty (or any potty, for that matter), I decided Julie’s homecoming was the day I should storm into my parents’ bedroom brandishing a fresh bowl of my own poop like it was the Olympic torch.

I leapt onto the bed, sprinting back and forth across the pillows where Mom sat cradling her seven-pound-10-ounce newborn. There I was, waving my offering like a parade flag, unaware that the swaddled bundle in my mom’s arms was about to tilt my entire world on its axis.

In first grade, I won a trophy at St. Mark’s parish for being the fastest kid in my grade. Not the fastest girl, not the fastest boy—the fastest little human. The race was a gritty asphalt sprint around the church parking lot, because nothing screams childhood like scraped knees with embedded tar fragments.

I grew up in a house smaller than my condo in Austin, where six of us shared a full and a half bath. The full bath in the middle hallway doubled as Grand Central Station every morning. Locking the door wasn’t just inconsiderate—it was an act of war. Privacy was a luxury we couldn’t afford, but punctuality was like a religion. The unspoken rule was very clear—get in, get out, and for the love of God, leave some hot water. 

This week’s story is about a horrid yet hilarious habit I used to have when my siblings visited me. No matter what, there was always “one last thing” standing between us and whatever plans we’d made.

And these last-minute must-dos weren’t simple errands like stopping by the grocery store to fetch a carton of eggs. They were labor-intensive or involved events so bizarre we still talk about them today.

Some kids had parents who reminded them after dinner, “Don’t forget to pack your homework.” My parents, however, had a daughter who specialized in 11:47 PM homework emergencies.

These emergencies usually started with me hovering by Mom’s bedside like the ghost of bad planning, “Mom, I forgot that I need to be a clown for school tomorrow.”

During Deborah's hospital stay—between the beeping, diarrhea, and medical team huddles—I had a lot of time to think.

I realized something: my whole adult life has been an exercise in searching for home.

What kept replaying in my mind was the drive I made three decades ago that took me away from my childhood home for good.

One afternoon, Deborah’s heart rate skyrocketed to over 200 beats per minute. Seconds later, a crash cart and eight people in scrubs rolled in like a pit crew at the Indy 500—instead of tires, they were swapping in wires, leads, and syringes. One of the physicians dropped to her knees beside Deb’s bed, plunging an emergency serum into her IV with the kind of focus usually reserved for bomb diffusers in thriller movies. Meanwhile, seven others buzzed around her, clipping leads and calling out numbers as if her body had suddenly become the New York Stock Exchange. I stood in the corner, tears stinging my eyes, both terrified and awed by the choreography of it all. Poor Vinny jumped from his recliner, ran to me, and wrapped his front paws around my left knee—the way he does when loud, unruly dogs he doesn’t know enter the dog park—shifting nervously, ears back, his tiny frame trembling as if even he understood that something fragile and sacred was at stake.

It’s that time again. It’s been a few years since you were introduced to my lovely person, Deborah. And, well—a lot has happened inside that head of hers. Enjoy a sampling.