“We didn’t speak, and a beautiful, sweet evil grew between us.” ~ Julia Elliot

Silence is usually treated as a failure. A pause where language should have stepped in, a gap to be repaired. But sometimes silence does something far more active. It accumulates. It leans. It takes on a temperature. In Julia Elliott’s line from The Wilds, silence is not emptiness but a living space, one where something intimate and troubling is allowed to take root.

The unsettling power of the moment comes from how ordinary it sounds at first. Two people do not speak. Anyone who has shared a room thick with unaddressed feeling knows this terrain. What makes Elliott’s phrasing linger is the way that absence becomes fertile. What grows is described as beautiful and sweet, words we usually reserve for tenderness or care. Only afterward does the moral weight arrive. Evil, not in the theatrical sense, but in the quieter form that feels earned, even deserved. The danger is not imposed from outside. It blooms because both people let it.

That combination of attraction and harm runs through The Wilds, Elliott’s debut story collection, which was published in 2014 and quickly earned a reputation for its unsettling blend of Southern landscapes, bodily unease, and female interiority. Elliott, who grew up in South Carolina and later studied at the Iowa Writers Workshop, has spoken about her interest in desire that doesn’t behave itself. Her stories often take place in environments that feel lush and threatening at the same time. Forests, swamps, animals, weather. The human relationships inside them follow similar rules.

What feels especially sharp about this moment is how it captures a kind of collusion that doesn’t require speech. Silence becomes a shared language. It protects what should perhaps be questioned. It allows intimacy to form without accountability. There is pleasure in that. A sweetness. Anyone who has sat across from someone, aware of what should be said and choosing not to say it, knows the small rush of power that comes with restraint. The room seems to hum. The air feels denser. We once noticed the hum of a refrigerator growing louder in such a moment, as if the house itself had opinions.

Psychologically, this kind of silence can feel safer than honesty. Speaking would force definition. It would collapse ambiguity. It might demand action. By staying quiet, both parties get to linger in possibility. Elliott understands how seductive that can be, especially for women who are often trained to manage harmony rather than rupture it. Her work has been read alongside writers like Flannery O’Connor and Angela Carter, not because she imitates them, but because she shares their interest in moral discomfort and the strange beauty of transgression.

Culturally, this line resonates because it cuts against our insistence that communication solves everything. We are told to talk it out, name it, process it. And often that is right. But Elliott is attentive to the darker truth that silence can also be a bond. It can create an us against the world feeling. Think of relationships defined less by what is said than by what is mutually avoided. Families, workplaces, love affairs. The unspoken becomes a private myth.

There is also something distinctly Southern in this dynamic, though it is not limited to that region. Elliott has acknowledged the influence of Southern codes of politeness and repression, where not saying the thing is sometimes the thing itself. Silence becomes a form of etiquette. Or of control. Or of desire disguised as good manners.

What keeps the line from feeling melodramatic is its tenderness. The evil is not sharp or loud. It is sweet. That sweetness is what makes it dangerous. It suggests care without responsibility, closeness without clarity. It is the emotional equivalent of overripe fruit, fragrant and already tipping toward rot.

In a time when so much emphasis is placed on confession and exposure, Julia Elliott’s sentence offers a quieter warning. Not all harm announces itself. Some of it grows slowly in the dark, fed by mutual consent and the comfort of not having to explain ourselves. Silence, in her telling, is not neutral. It is a choice with consequences, even when it feels like refuge.

That may be why the line stays with readers. It recognizes something we would rather not name. That intimacy can deepen not only through honesty, but through shared avoidance. That what feels beautiful in the moment can later reveal its cost. And that sometimes the most consequential conversations are the ones we never have.

 Fiona F. ~ 2026. 

All rights reserved

Pasture

 

Medicaid for All Isn’t the Same as What Congress Gets

When politicians talk about “Medicaid for all,” it sounds like everyone is getting the same healthcare as elected officials. But the truth is, the benefits that most Americans receive are nothing like what members of Congress enjoy.

Medicaid for all is a baseline public safety net. It’s designed to provide essential care—doctor visits, hospital stays, basic prescriptions—for everyone, regardless of income. It’s adequate, but it comes with limitations:

• Restricted networks of doctors and hospitals

• Longer wait times for specialists

• Basic coverage for families, often with fewer perks

Meanwhile, the healthcare available to our representatives is a different world. Funded by taxpayers, it includes:

• Access to any doctor or hospital they choose, often elite institutions

• Fast-track specialist care with minimal delays

• Comprehensive family coverage

• Wellness programs, concierge services, and retirement healthcare

In short, while “Medicaid for all” is meant to ensure Americans don’t go without care, it’s a baseline safety net—not a premium package. Our elected officials, by contrast, enjoy coverage that far exceeds what most Americans could ever access.

When discussions about healthcare become political theater, it’s important to remember: the phrase “for all” doesn’t mean equal. The system is still tiered, with ordinary citizens at one level and those making the rules enjoying a vastly richer set of benefits.

The takeaway: Advocating for universal healthcare is about fairness and access—but it’s not the same as the benefits lawmakers themselves receive. If we truly want equality, we need to recognize and address that gap.

Representation, Not Privilege: Why Citizens Deserve the Same Protections as Elected Officials

I don’t need a leader. I need someone who will advocate for me.

I’ve spent years noticing a quiet truth in American politics: the people who write the rules rarely have to live under them. They are insulated. Their families are insulated. The healthcare they rely on is stable, comprehensive, and guaranteed. Their children have access to educational opportunities the rest of us can only dream of. And yet, when the same protections are suggested for citizens, they are called aspirational, idealistic, or impossible.

At first, I couldn’t understand it. Why would the very people entrusted with making decisions for the public create rules that treat themselves and their families as essential while leaving everyone else to navigate uncertainty, debt, and insecurity?

The answer is simple, though uncomfortable: they understand the value of stability and protection because they live it, and they do not extend it universally.

Consider healthcare. Members of Congress receive coverage through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. It is comprehensive. It is national. It covers spouses and children. Continuity of care is guaranteed. Financial risk is limited. In other words, the system works for them and for their families.

Now consider most Americans. Healthcare is conditional: tied to employment, income, geography, and luck. Family coverage is expensive. Deductibles are high. Networks are narrow. Losing a job often means losing access to care when it is needed most. Medical debt is common. Families shoulder enormous costs. For millions, the difference between stability and catastrophe is one illness, one accident, one unforeseen event.

I began to see a pattern. The very protections considered essential for effective governance are treated as luxuries for the public. When citizens raise the same concerns—family coverage, continuity of care, financial security—they are told these expectations are unrealistic. For them, scarcity is inevitable. For those in office, it is carefully managed.

Education shows a similar divide. Elected officials do not have tuition programs for their children—but they have access to publicly funded training, conferences, and elite networks that indirectly benefit their families. Professional and cultural advantages are built into the system. Meanwhile, citizens are expected to pay for education themselves, often through decades of debt. Opportunity is rationed, disguised as personal responsibility.

It isn’t that politicians are immoral. It’s that the structure of power itself reproduces privilege. The gap between what they live under and what the public is asked to endure is built into the system. It is quiet, invisible, and rarely questioned.

That’s when it became clear to me: if representation is real, it cannot include exemption. If stability, healthcare, and access are necessary for governing, they are necessary for living. What is considered a prerequisite for officeholders should be a baseline for everyone.

Citizens should demand the same protections. Not more. Not symbolic gestures. The same. The systems exist; the government already administers them effectively for elected officials and their families. The challenge is not technical—it is political. Extending them is a choice, one that has been deferred for decades.

This is why the question of standard matters. If Congress believes certain protections are essential for decision-making, then they are essential for citizenship. If family stability matters to the functioning of governance, it matters to the functioning of civic life. Anything less erodes trust, deepens cynicism, and creates disengagement. People do not withdraw from politics because they are apathetic—they withdraw because they are being asked to accept a system that does not accept them.

Democrats, in particular, have long claimed to champion equity, access, and fairness. Yet when it comes to their own benefits, they continue to operate in a separate system, insulated from the pressures their policies are supposed to alleviate. The question is not whether they can argue for democracy—it is whether they are willing to live under the same democracy they ask the rest of us to trust.

The solution is simple in principle, though difficult in practice. No elected representative should receive a benefit they are unwilling to guarantee to the public. Healthcare, education, family security—these are not luxuries for governance. They are baseline conditions for a functioning society.

Representation should not mean privilege. It should mean obligation. It should mean alignment between those who make policy and those who live under it. Until that alignment exists, trust will remain fragile, participation uneven, and democracy incomplete.

I do not want leaders. I want representation. And representation begins with equality of condition—not exemption.

When Pain Is Disqualified

Anger is not evaluated on truth.

It is evaluated on permission.

Some rage is called righteous. Necessary. Brave. Other rage—equally intense, equally justified—is called abusive, unstable, unsafe.

The difference is not the intensity of emotion.

It is who is speaking and what their pain threatens.

In some relationships, certain expressions of hurt are absorbed easily. They fit the story the listener wants to believe. They are acknowledged without asking anyone to change. Other expressions—personal, raw, insistent—are treated as transgressive. They make the listener uncomfortable, and that discomfort is often read as the problem.

Pain that reinforces the narrative someone else prefers is granted authority. Pain that demands recognition, accountability, or reflection is disqualified.

Authoritative pain is useful. It can be softened, abstracted, reframed into a story that reassures the listener. Pain that refuses to be reshaped—pain that insists on being seen—is inconvenient. It arrives with a demand: see what has happened, acknowledge what is real, reckon with it. That demand can feel threatening, even intolerable.

Composure becomes the measure of legitimacy. Pain is trusted only once it has been contained—calm, articulate, edited. Raw grief, rage, or desperation is read as instability. The more clearly pain has affected someone, the less permission they are given to speak it.

The paradox is clear:

Those most affected by harm are often the least permitted to name it.

When anger is labeled abusive, the focus shifts immediately. Expression becomes the problem. The original harm disappears. Control is restored. The conversation ends. Nothing changes.

And the cost is not peace. It is corrosion. Pain that is dismissed does not vanish. It calcifies or erupts sideways. Trust erodes. Reality fractures. People self-censor, not because they are healed, but because they are afraid. Systems—friendships, families, partnerships—grow quieter and more brittle, mistaking silence for stability.

Over time, only performative pain remains—pain that flatters, reassures, and asks nothing real to change. Everything else is driven underground, where it returns distorted, harder, and more dangerous than before.

This is how relationships lose the ability to self-correct. Not through too much anger, but through the systematic delegitimization of voices most affected by harm. When truth is allowed to speak only after it has been softened, edited, and made harmless, it ceases to be truth at all.

What survives is order without integrity—

and compliance mistaken for moral health.

Silencing pain that demands acknowledgment does not protect anyone from chaos.

It guarantees it—later, louder, and with fewer words left to stop it.

And to anyone who reads this and feels discomfort, consider this: the measure of another’s anger is not the measure of harm. Dismissing it as “abusive” is not protection—it is an invitation for the consequences to return, larger and more insistent than before.

Beyond the Ballot Box: Why Voting in 2026 and 2028 Won’t Save Democracy — or the Planet

Elections alone cannot dismantle entrenched power — and centralized democracy is under ecological as well as political strain. As energy declines and ecosystems unravel, real change requires more than ballots: citizens must pressure parties, build local power, and practice democracy in ways that respond to both human and ecological realities.

There is a comforting myth in American politics: if people simply vote — clearly enough, loudly enough, in sufficient numbers — authoritarianism will yield. History, both here and abroad, tells a harsher story. Kaczyński in Poland, Pinochet in Chile, Milošević in Serbia, Marcos in the Philippines, Bolsonaro in Brazil — none were removed by elections alone. Ballots mattered only as part of a broader rupture: mass civic resistance, institutional fracture, elite defection, and moral and economic pressure. Authoritarianism is undone not by voting, but when power is destabilized and redistributed. Elections may register that shift; they rarely create it.

Modern authoritarian regimes have adapted. They no longer need to abolish elections outright; instead, they weaponize them. Electoral authoritarianism keeps ballots, parties, and campaigns while stripping elections of democratic substance. Ballots manufacture legitimacy, exhaust opposition, normalize repression, and gather intelligence. Elections reveal where opposition is strongest, which demographics are shifting, which issues mobilize citizens, and which leaders pose a threat. Far from threatening power, elections allow authoritarian regimes to fine-tune their control.

Even in countries with democratic processes, the pattern is the same. Milošević fell only after mass protests made Serbia ungovernable. Marcos fled only after millions mobilized and the military defected. Pinochet’s defeat came after persistent pressure. Bolsonaro lost because institutions and civil society created conditions that made continued governance untenable. Elections followed the weakening of authoritarian power; they did not produce it.

Americans are told, “It can’t happen here.” Yet the U.S. does not lack elections; it lacks popular sovereignty. The Democratic Party is not the antidote. While the Republican Party increasingly embodies hard authoritarian tendencies, the Democratic Party has perfected a softer, managerial form: controlling gatekeeping and donor pipelines, neutralizing insurgent movements procedurally, and deferring popular demands indefinitely. Soft authoritarianism hollowing out democracy often prepares the ground for harder forms by making citizens feel powerless.

Elections in the U.S. increasingly serve to measure and manage discontent rather than resolve it. Campaigns harvest data, refine narratives, and leave structural problems untouched. The mantra “vote blue no matter who” is not a democratic principle — it is a loyalty oath. Voting is necessary, but it is not sufficient.

So what can a citizen do, especially someone raised as a Democrat? Real change requires action beyond the ballot. Treat voting as the floor, not the ceiling. Track elected officials after they win, hold them accountable, and make leverage start after ballots are counted. Pressure parties where they are most vulnerable: primaries are critical, and support, donations, and volunteerism should be conditional, public, and organized. Parties fear unpredictability more than ideology.

Citizens must also build power outside formal structures. Major democratic advances in U.S. history — labor rights, civil rights, women’s suffrage, environmental protections — came not from party elites, but from grassroots organizing. Workplace organizing, mutual aid networks, and narrow, issue-specific coalitions create legitimacy that parties cannot ignore. Citizens must make parties compete for them rather than offer passive loyalty, shaping discourse, building coalitions, and making support conditional. Democracy is not a ritual; it is a practice, one that requires persistence, imagination, and courage.

Finally, this is not just a political crisis — it is an ecological one. As energy declines and ecosystems unravel, centralized, mass democracy becomes less viable, not more. Ironically, existing hierarchies could allow power to flow back down to states, regions, watersheds, and communities — toward simpler, local, low-energy governance. But this can only happen if we stop pretending national elections alone can save us. Democracy must be practiced locally and collectively, in ways that respond to both human and ecological realities. Voting registers consent. Everything else — organizing, coalition-building, mutual aid, local governance — is where democracy truly lives.

If Democrats — or any party — respond at all, it will not be because voters finally explained themselves clearly enough. It will be because pressure became unavoidable, legitimacy became conditional, and power became unstable. Voting records consent. Everything else is where democracy lives.

Embrace your darkness. Your roots are growing there.

 Beneath the surface, unseen by the world, life takes hold. In the quiet soil, where warmth and water meet in patient rhythm, roots stretch, twist, and deepen. They do not need applause or attention. They only need persistence, patience, and trust in the process.

So too with us. True growth—the kind that anchors us in storms, nourishes our purpose, and carries us toward our highest potential—happens in the unseen moments. It happens in solitude, in reflection, in the challenges we face when no one is watching. The world may see only the leaves, the flowers, the visible achievements. But the strength comes from the hidden work, the quiet cultivation of self.

Authenticity often costs performative relationships. Pay it. Proudly.

 The Quiet Cost of Performative Relationships

Most of us don’t enter performative relationships intentionally. They form gradually, often under the banner of “getting along,” “being easy,” or “not making things awkward.” They look like connection. They sound like familiarity. They even feel safe—at first.

But they are built on maintenance rather than meaning.

A performative relationship survives not because both people are fully present, but because at least one person is willing to play a role. The agreeable one. The listener. The peacemaker. The wise friend. The low-maintenance companion. The version of themselves that keeps things smooth.

As long as the performance continues, the relationship does too.

Consistency Over Honesty

What performative relationships value most is not truth or growth, but predictability. You are welcome—as long as you remain recognizable. Your tone, opinions, emotional range, and availability are expected to stay within familiar bounds.

Change is tolerated only if it’s cosmetic. Depth, grief, anger, clarity, or evolution often feel disruptive. When honesty threatens the script, the relationship subtly resists it.

This is why people often say, “You’ve changed,” as an accusation rather than an observation.

Harmony Isn’t Health

Performative relationships often appear conflict-free. But the absence of conflict isn’t proof of intimacy—it’s often proof of avoidance.

Discomfort is managed through politeness, humor, silence, or emotional editing. Hard conversations are postponed indefinitely. Tension doesn’t disappear; it just goes underground.

The relationship feels calm, but also curiously thin. Smooth, but not nourishing.

Unequal Emotional Labor

In many performative relationships, one person does most of the regulating. They read the room. They soften truths. They absorb moods. They make themselves smaller, quieter, or more flexible so others don’t have to stretch.

Over time, this creates a low-grade exhaustion. Not dramatic resentment—just a sense of being unseen while being constantly present.

No one may be intentionally unkind. The imbalance is structural.

Implied Depth, Limited Capacity

These relationships often have history. Shared memories. Shared language about closeness. From the outside, they look solid.

But when real vulnerability arrives—illness, grief, moral clarity, boundaries, transformation—the relationship struggles. It was never designed to carry weight. It was designed to function.

Depth was implied, not practiced.

The Punishment of Individuation

Authenticity is the stress test.

When you become more yourself—more honest, more boundaried, less performative—the relationship destabilizes. You may be described as “intense,” “difficult,” “no fun anymore,” or “different than you used to be.”

What’s really being mourned is not the loss of connection, but the loss of your role.

Performative relationships depend on who you were when they formed. Growth isn’t a feature; it’s a threat.

Why They’re Everywhere

Performative relationships are common because they are socially rewarded.

We are taught to value likability over truth, harmony over clarity, and belonging over being. Many bonds are formed during periods of coping rather than consciousness—when people are surviving, adapting, or numbing rather than choosing.

Roles feel safer than presence. Scripts feel safer than uncertainty.

And once a role works, it’s rarely questioned.

Why Authenticity Changes Everything

Authenticity removes the script.

It replaces performance with presence. It says, “I’m here as I am now, not as who you need me to be.” That forces a reckoning.

Some relationships deepen. They adjust. They learn to hold change.

Others dissolve—not out of malice, but because they cannot survive without the performance.

This is the quiet grief of becoming real: fewer relationships, but truer ones. Less volume, more integrity. Less managing, more breathing.

Not Fake—Just Unfinished

It’s important to say this clearly: performative relationships are not fake. They are unfinished.

They formed at an earlier developmental stage and never evolved. Outgrowing them isn’t cruelty. It’s maturation.

Letting them go doesn’t mean rejecting connection. It means rejecting false connection.

And for those willing to pay the price—proudly—the reward is not isolation, but freedom: the freedom to change without explanation, to speak without rehearsing, and to be met as a person rather than a performance.

That freedom costs something.

But it’s worth it.