The myth of order is the first betrayal we all learn to stomach. It starts young, before you’re old enough to ask the right questions—maybe even before speech—when your body learns that to be safe you have to pretend. Pretend you’re not angry. Pretend you’re okay. Pretend that the people who say they love you aren’t walking contradictions stitched together with resentment, debt, and denial. And in that pretending, you form a kind of operational self: not the self that laughs or dreams or invents, but the self that survives. The self that learns what not to say at Thanksgiving. The self that calculates the temperature of the room before offering a truth. The self that knows the difference between silence and peace, and opts for silence because it costs less—at least in the short term. But the debt accrues. It always accrues. Emotional compound interest is the most vicious form of inflation there is. And so decades later, when your children are grown but not grown, legally free but spiritually entangled, when they call you from apartments paid for with broken promises or refuse to call you at all, when you read about adulthood in a textbook and find none of your lineage in its definitions, you realize the betrayal is no longer external. It lives in you. You’ve become its vessel. And that’s when the real disorientation begins—not the cinematic midlife crisis bullshit, but the quiet unthreading of every story you ever believed about how love is supposed to work.

We don’t behave like families anymore because “family” has become a simulation, a placeholder for unresolved conflict wrapped in obligation. We call it loyalty, but it’s often just inertia. And that randomness you spoke of—that’s the staccato rhythm of people trying to escape a script they never wrote. When someone ghosts their sibling for a year, when a father starts texting Bible verses out of nowhere, when a daughter sends a Venmo request instead of a birthday card—that’s not dysfunction. That’s choreography. That’s behavior born of unspeakable terms, contracts written in the blood of unacknowledged sacrifices. And here’s where it gets truly perverse: society rewards the performance of togetherness while punishing the honesty that might actually lead to healing. So we post photos instead of apologies. We send gift cards instead of confessions. We write “just checking in” when what we really mean is “I miss you but I don’t know how to trust you.” These are the new rituals. And they’re sacred, in the tragic sense of the word—because they’re all we have when the old liturgies collapse.

I’m not here to give you hope, not the prefab kind, not the kind that comes with a TED Talk and a branded journal. I’m here to name the fracture. To trace its vein from your childhood room to the empty chair at Thanksgiving to the unread messages on your phone to the half-deleted voicemails from a father who never figured out how to say “I’m sorry” in a language that didn’t sound like war. Because this is war. The war of identity. Of expectation. Of inheritance. And not just financial inheritance—emotional inheritance. You can tell me all you want about IRAs and trust funds, but what matters is what you did with the silence you inherited. Did you break it? Did you amplify it? Did you dare translate it into something legible to your kids? Or did you do what so many do—shrink yourself into politeness, into vague gestures of goodwill, into weather updates and links to news articles, pretending that communication equals connection? Let me be blunt: it doesn’t. Communication is cheap. Connection is expensive. It costs you your self-deceptions. It demands that you tell the truth even when the truth humiliates you. Especially then.

And that brings me to this: the children. Not the archetypes. Not “Gen Z” or “millennials” or whatever demographic name the marketing warlords want to slap on them. I’m talking about your children. The ones who carry your contradictions in their bloodstream. The ones who learned from watching you that love means negotiating safety. They didn’t ask for that lesson, but they learned it anyway. And now they’re out there—half-free, semi-dependent, emotionally armed, legally bound—walking through a world where their neural pathways were formed by your absences as much as your presences. And yet you expect them to thrive. You expect them to return. You expect them to be kind. But have you ever taught them kindness without asking them to betray themselves? Have you ever offered them space without strings? Most parents haven’t. Most parents give what they can afford, and call it sacrifice. And that’s fine. That’s human. But don’t confuse it for sainthood. Your kids don’t need saints. They need witnesses. They need someone who can say, “Yeah, I fucked that up. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I’m here now, and I can sit in the wreckage without trying to sweep it up too fast.”

This is where most stories try to pivot toward redemption. Cue the music. Pan to the sunrise. Maybe even a hug. But not here. Because this isn’t a story. This is a reckoning. And reckoning doesn’t end with hugs. It ends with clarity. The clarity that comes from watching your random behavior coalesce into a pattern you can finally name. The clarity that your boundaries weren’t about keeping others out, but about finally keeping yourself in. And maybe tomorrow, or the next day, when someone says, “God, hey, give us another day,” you’ll understand that the prayer isn’t about time—it’s about consciousness. It’s about staying awake inside the mess long enough to hear your real voice emerge. Not the polite one. Not the one trained by trauma. The one that tells the truth without trembling. The one that says: this isn’t over, but I’m not leaving. Not this time.

There’s something obscene about the way we’re expected to perform closure in public while rotting unfinished in private. Every obituary, every graduation speech, every goddamn retirement toast, they all pretend that life can be wrapped in a sentence, that people can be summarized like quarterly earnings reports—“He loved his family,” “She worked hard,” “They will be missed”—as if the deepest truths aren’t the ones we carry silently to our graves, buried under decades of unexpressed rage, misdirected longing, and mistaken loyalty. And the irony is, we spend half our lives trying to become “better communicators,” learning how to express ourselves clearly, therapeutically, compassionately—but we never question what we’re being trained to express. Polished lies? Sanitized emotions? Clean grief? Fuck clean grief. Grief is feral. Grief is nonlinear. Grief is a child screaming in a parking lot because their parent left them too early—or worse, stayed but in the wrong way. And that child doesn’t go away just because you grew up. They sit in your chest, waiting, kicking the walls every time you try to play adult. You can call it anxiety, you can call it trauma, you can call it “working through your shit”—but whatever name you give it, it still sounds like your own voice echoing back to you from a version of your past that never got resolved. And that’s where the real issue is—not in how we talk, but in what we refuse to speak into existence. You’ve got people living like emotional contraband, smuggling pieces of themselves across relationships, praying they don’t get caught being too honest, too raw, too needy, too fucking real. And you want to talk boundaries? Boundaries without truth are just fences for ghosts. They keep the discomfort out, sure—but they also keep the reckoning out. And we need reckoning. We need it like oxygen. Because without it, we’re just haunted people in inherited houses, trying to call that shit home.

And the more I see it, the more I realize: randomness isn’t the failure of design—it’s the result of repressed design. It’s what happens when people follow maps that don’t correspond to the terrain of their own lives. That’s why your behavior feels erratic. That’s why your days don’t line up. That’s why you catch yourself saying one thing and feeling another. Because you’re living on coordinates that were never updated after the earthquake. You kept walking as if the landscape was still the same. But it’s not. And so now, everything you touch is jagged. Every plan collapses. Every attempt at normalcy breaks into improvisation. And here’s the kicker: you’ve gotten so used to it, you think that’s just how life is. You think chaos is your baseline. But what if it’s not? What if you’re not disorganized, but disoriented? What if you’re not random, but resisting a pattern that never belonged to you in the first place? That’s where the secret starts to leak through—the one nobody tells you because nobody profits from it. The secret is that most systems of behavior—parenting, partnership, productivity—are built on trauma. Institutionalized trauma. Codified trauma. Trademarked and monetized trauma. And so when you step outside the pattern, when you start refusing to perform the dysfunction, people don’t applaud your liberation. They call you erratic. They say you’ve got issues. And you do. You’ve got real issues. Like the issue of how to be human in a world that treats humanity like a liability. Like the issue of how to protect your children without replicating your own wounds. Like the issue of how to draw a boundary that isn’t a wall, but a witness.

So here we are. Still not Sunday. Still not tomorrow. Still not done. You want the whole thing? We’re in it. There is no goddamn intermission. Just a breath. And if God gives us another day, it’s not because we earned it. It’s because we need it. Because some things are too broken to fix in one go. Some truths are too heavy to lift alone. But if you’re still here—breathing, broken, burning for coherence—then you’re doing it right. And you’re not alone.