The Tire, The Load, and What I Finally Named

I bought new tires in 2019 to make my major move from the Pacific Northwest to the frozen northeast. In January. Good snow tread. Ready for whatever weather came at me. I carried my most valuable goods and loved ones with me as we set off into the great unknown. A single woman, a pet for travel companion, and peace of mind. I felt like I could drive through a nor’easter without blinking. And I did for a few years.

Thirty-five years of doing this work, carrying hope into rooms that needed it, internal fortitude nobody could take from me. I felt like I could drive through a nor'easter without blinking. And I did, for a few years.

Until I noticed my tires were losing traction. But it was election cycle 2024 by then and it was a short cycle so I figured we could power through. I was energized and ready. Post-election, though, I lost my grip a little. You can find the details of that on my YouTube channel.

By this year as we approach mid-terms, I noticed my tires had developed a slow leak. Not dangerous really, but had me calculating how many more miles I could get before I found myself stranded somewhere or could afford a reset.

By now, you know I’m not just talking about tires. This is my life.

Here’s the thing about a slow leak - you don't feel it right away. You just notice the car pulls a little different one day. Then a little more the next. You keep driving because it still gets you where you're going, mostly. It's only later, looking back, that you can point to the exact day the air started going out.

So let me walk you through my leak, one small hiss at a time.

Last year I brought on a team. I poured everything I had into getting the message further: money, hours, my own tired body. We ran a holiday webinar, and afterward I found out an AI bot had scraped the whole thing out of a closed group people had pre-registered to join. I only learned of it because said bot sent me MY podcast before my team had even edited it THE NEXT DAY and tried to sell my own words back to me. That was puncture number one. Not a blowout. Just a little hiss of air I thought AAA could fix and keep me going.

I built a paywall. Then I built something bigger, a place just for us, off the algorithm, somewhere I actually controlled. It didn't work the way they promise it will. I built it and almost nobody came for a long while.

My body kept sending me little dashboard lights that whole time. I kept driving anyway. That's just what you do when the thing you're carrying still feels true, even while the car under you starts riding a little rough.

Then an historian I had on the show got censored for telling the plain, documented truth about extermination camps. Two weeks later, a platform yanked the word "Canada" out of an episode because a tariff fight made the word inconvenient that week. More air hissing out.

Next I tried building a Council inside our membership site to get help creating a truly safe space for multicultural dialog out of the prying eyes of social media algorithms. I found other strong folks willing to step in to explore the possibility. I learned my ADHD pace gives people whiplash, and that what’s clear to me is clear to mud as folks trying to follow.

The most honest sentence came from the Black women who said "don't ask us for one more thing.” Not because they didn't believe in the work. Because they were, in their own words, fucking tired. And then 2026 was upon us.

Two things happened this September that turned the leak into a full blown reckoning:

First one: our local polling place, September 8th, around ten in the morning. I voted the way I have for years. At the check-in table, somebody was sitting a few feet back wasn't doing any ballot clerk job. Wasn't checking the paper list. Wasn't doing anything I recognized. Just listening to me talk to the poll worker, and writing it down.

I called afterward to ask who that was. In one phone call, I got two different answers. First, Attorney General agents were at the polling places. Then, no, that person was just a ballot clerk. Two answers, same office, same call, and neither one matched what I actually watched with my own eyes.

So I prepared a formal public records request under my state's Right to Know Law. Names. Roles. Paperwork. Every message between the city, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, and the Department of Justice about who got sent to my polling place and why. In writing, because a voice on the phone doesn't fix a contradiction like that. Paper does.

I think in images, and today’s image nailed my feelings exactly. A woman standing next to her own broken-down car, flat tire right there at her feet, and behind her, a border detention center. Watchtower. Razor wire. Floodlights. The flag flying over the whole thing. I looked at it and said, out loud, "That's how I feel. We're driving through enemy territory in what used to be my homeland."

And then I had to sit with the sentence that came right after that feeling. I'm a white woman, raised in all the privilege that comes with being a boomer, and this is the second time in one month I've had to do the math on what it costs me to just say plainly what I saw.

I'm not going to pretend that math is new to this country. It isn't. It's new to me. Plenty of people have been running that exact math their whole lives, every time they spoke up, every time they showed up in public in a body the system already decided to watch. What happened to me at that check-in table, and in front of that photo, is the same machine, just reaching a little further than it used to, far enough now to graze someone standing where I stand. That doesn't make my worry fake. It just makes it late, and worth saying honestly instead of acting shocked like I have no idea how any of this works.

Here's what I know for sure: now that I've laid it all out in order for the first time, the message I've carried for 35 years is still true. None of this - the slow leak, the ground that turned out to be hostile, the load I never called a load until now, changes that one bit. What's failing isn't the mission. It's the vehicle I built to haul it, sized for a different season, running on a spare tire's worth of air for way longer than I let myself admit.

I used to call all this "circling the wagons." I don't anymore. Circling the wagons makes it sound like I rode into somebody else's territory and now I'm surrounded. That's not what happened. What happened is every place I tried to make a home in closed in around me instead, one after another. That's not a wagon train defending itself. That's displacement. It gets its own name.

I also used to call it "carrying the message." Carrying means the weight sits right against your spine, no space between you and it, no clean way to set it down. You just keep hauling, mile after mile, tire losing air the whole way, across ground you didn't know was hostile until you were already halfway through it.

I'm not taking that word back, though, because carrying wasn't the wrong word. It's just not the word for what comes next. Carrying got me here. It's not going to get me through what's coming. Because today, I made the correction that matters most. Not carrying. Casting.

Casting the message into enemy territory is a whole different move.

It's something you do from a safe distance, on purpose, by design, with your feet planted and your hands free to throw and step back clean. It's strategy. It's the guerrilla move, not the front-line one. And I never had to think that way before. Until now.

So this is me pulling over. Not giving up, and not failing. I am counting the cost. I did the right thing because to do nothing is unthinkable. I still don't trust the process to protect me for having done it. I'm telling you both things that made me run the math this month, because the only alternative is pretending I didn't see what I saw, and I'm done doing that.

New tires don't fix a road that was always going to wear them down. Sometimes the honest move isn't a better tire. It's finally reading the map right, out loud, in front of everybody, and deciding which roads are still worth driving.