Nothing Is Ever That Cut and Dried

Thoughts on injustice, retirement, independence, grief, and the impossibility of finding balance.

I think the thing I liked most about not being on Substack for a week was letting my mind wander instead of constantly feeding it new material. That being said, I listened to a couple of true crime podcasts, so really, I was just feeding it different material.

I knew this already, but injustice infuriates me. It motivates me to act more than almost anything else. I actually wrote an email to a prosecutor who refused to take a second look at evidence in a case because he insisted they “had the right guy.”

They didn’t have the right guy.

An innocent man spent more than twenty years in prison because the people who convicted him simply refused to consider that they could have been wrong. The facts were right there in front of them, and their response was basically, Nope. We are not looking at this case again.

There have been times when I was sure, 100 percent sure, that I was right, only to find out I wasn’t. I don’t enjoy admitting it, but I’ve learned there is no such thing as knowing something with absolute certainty. Sometimes it’s something stupid, like thinking my dog walker took my contractor bags when I had moved them and forgotten. Or being sure my husband ate my leftovers and then finding them in the car.

But when someone is locked in prison for a crime they insist they did not commit, how can you refuse to even consider that you might be wrong? How can you be unwilling to look at new evidence? Nothing is ever that cut and dried.

In this particular case, the accused could have served fewer than five years if he had admitted what he did and said he was sorry. He refused because he did not kill his wife. He was convicted largely on circumstantial evidence and served more than twenty years before an innocence project finally managed to get him released. On parole, not pardoned or exonerated.

Even after retiring, the prosecutor went back to fight his parole. Apparently, preserving the original conviction was more important than considering whether an innocent man had lost decades of his life. That kind of thing stays with me.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about retirement. It really isn’t easy these days. If you were fortunate enough to have a job you could tolerate for forty years, without losing it because of downsizing, budget cuts, nepotism, mergers, acquisitions, or any of the other things completely outside your control, maybe you were able to save enough money to retire.

Or maybe you were fortunate enough to have one of the increasingly rare jobs that provides a pension, and you managed to hold on until 62, 65, or 67, when you could finally reach the dangling carrot of Social Security and Medicare.

If, like my husband and me, you changed jobs often, sometimes by choice and sometimes by theirs, collected unemployment here and there, and had to borrow from your 401(k) or your home equity, retirement is not so simple. We have a financial guy helping us, but short of selling our house and moving somewhere much less expensive, we are not retiring anytime soon. And who can afford to pay for health insurance until Medicare kicks in, especially if you take any kind of medication?

The whole thing frustrates me. I would love to say, Whatever. Let’s see whether the universe has a net to catch me. I’ll quit my job, write full time, find a literary agent, and sell my book.

But that would make retiring anytime soon even less likely. Social Security considers your highest thirty-five years of earnings, so earning less now may mean losing the opportunity to replace one of your lower-earning years. At this point, taking a large pay cut is not exactly a strategic move. I don’t know where that leaves me. It’s just one more thing swirling around in my head.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is independence. I am a very independent person. Once, someone I barely knew called me needy. It offended me so much that I still dislike him for it. When I told my friends what he said, their reaction was immediate: “You? You are so NOT needy.”

I don’t want to count on anyone for anything. I would rather go without something than risk making someone feel put out or resentful. And I don’t need to be entertained. I am perfectly happy writing, reading, playing with the dogs, taking a walk, riding a bike, napping, cooking, watching baseball, or watching girly movies and shows no one else wants to see.

I’m sure I would get lonely eventually if I had no company at all, but I can entertain myself for extended periods of time. I don’t sit around worrying about when someone is coming home, coming over, or going somewhere with me. I like being alone. I like contemplating things.

If your partner is not that way, it can become frustrating. They may look to you for something to do or feel hurt when you want to do something without them. Because I have codependent tendencies, it is difficult for me to recognize that their feelings are not always mine to fix.

I don’t have to change my behavior simply because someone else doesn’t like it. I can make an effort to spend quality time with my partner without feeling guilty every time I want to do something that doesn’t include him. That is hard for me because I hate disappointing people. The last thing I want to do is make anyone feel bad.

But this is my life to live. How I spend my time is my decision and my responsibility. That is easy to write and much more difficult to live, especially when you are hypersensitive to other people’s feelings. Another life goal.

As for Substack itself, I realized there is some compulsivity involved for me. I’m not here because I expect to make a lot of money. I can’t fathom earning enough from Substack for it to change my life in any meaningful way. I suppose I keep hoping it might help me get my book out into the world somehow.

Maybe someone who connects with my writing here will eventually want to read it. Maybe building relationships with readers will matter if I ever manage to get it published. I honestly don’t know. I love having people read what I write, but once I start thinking about subscribers, engagement, paid subscriptions, and whether any of it is “leading somewhere,” something I enjoy begins to feel like another job.

When I post something, I become so anxious to see how it is received that I start checking my notifications far too frequently. I love my haikus and write them more for myself than anyone else, but I sometimes feel bad tagging people. Even when someone participates regularly, I wonder whether they are secretly thinking, Not this again. I’ve started adding “no pressure,” but then I wonder whether saying “no pressure” somehow creates pressure.

There are also things I read here that truly move me, but I honestly don’t know how to respond. Sometimes I have to walk away and let them simmer. The things people have survived, and are still going through, can be extremely heavy. I absorb what I read more than I probably should. It can change my mood in an instant, especially when injustice is involved because that is such a hot button for me.

I’m grateful for my ability to feel things deeply and see things through other people’s eyes, but it can also be exhausting. Maybe especially now, after losing June, Zee, and my Uncle Paul, while also feeling a renewed need to understand what happened to my cousin Paul.

Losing my Uncle Paul was particularly painful because he was my last direct tie to my mother’s original family. My cousins, whom I recently visited in Chicago, are a once-removed version of that family, and it was wonderful to reconnect with them. Now Uncle Paul’s partner is alone, and I worry about him in the same way I worry about my dad being alone in Florida.

They lost the witnesses to their lives.

You cannot fill that void for them. All you can do is stay in touch, let them know you are thinking about them, remind them that they are loved, and make sure they know you are there if they need you. They are not always transparent about how they are feeling because they don’t want everyone to feel sorry for them. You have to be gentle about it.

Lately, though, my own life feels out of balance. There is too much worrying. Too much absorbing everyone else’s pain. Too much work that I don’t love. Too much anxiety over whether everyone else is okay with the way I choose to live my own life.

I am still trying to figure out how to fix all of it. Or any of it. This was a huge data dump, and cheating or not, I asked AI to help me sort it into some kind of order because anyone would lose their mind trying to follow this crap.

Including me.

I keep my writing free because I want people to be able to read it.

But if anything here has meant something to you, made you laugh, made you feel less alone, or made you think, paid subscriptions are open as a way to support the work.

No pressure, truly. I’m grateful you’re here either way.