God I Am Tender Now

Gloriousness + wretchedness go together

God I am tender right now.

My skin is as thin as a wing, a mayfly’s wing, barely any barrier at all. Barely there. Which is not easy. When your skin is translucent, everything stings.

So far, 2025 has me in its teeth and is giving me a hard shake. Obvious examples being losing my University job to DOGE, my boss’s house blowing up, and the overall weight of existential dread that settles over me when things go this far off the rails. My shoulders ache. My jaw aches. My heart aches.

But also … I am becoming so tender. Utterly softened by wretchedness.

There’s this Pema Chödrön quote I love—one I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s from Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living:

“Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sens…