At the end of a long year, I’d like to bring some personal matters forward.

A personal state of the union

Day after the election, 2024

I spent a week at a seminar on leadership and “good society” at the Aspen Institute in October. It was the kind of chance that doesn’t come often, if ever — to sit somewhere beautiful and think with other people who don’t necessarily think like you do. The cohort discussed American history and ideas like the social contract for four hours a day. We read Leviathan and talked about how to lead through ambiguity and complexity. It stretched me.

The third morning’s discussion was on a few essays, including MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. I was in New York the summer after undergrad in 2000 and remember asking a clerk at the NYU campus bookstore, “Do you have a book called The Second Sex by Simone…?” I asked like I was looking for an obscure, independent novel. Of course, they had a primary work of feminist philosophy; mercifully, the clerk cut me off before I tried to pronounce something like dee-boo-ve-ahy. Handing me the fat paperback, she seemed half annoyed and half proud that she was passing on an important text that kicked off second-wave feminism to an awkward young woman with hair pulled into two tiny pigtails. I took the book to my dorm room, cracked the spine, and didn’t get far. It sat on my shelf, provocatively, for years. The very copy is now boxed in a basement, waiting for its home on a bookshelf we’ve yet to build.

When it came time to discuss the Second Sex excerpt the cohort had been assigned to read in Aspen this fall, I was eager to kick off the conversation with the roundtable of my peers. Truthfully, I had to google before I spoke to be sure I had my history straight. “Let’s frame this in waves of feminism,” I said, presenting a two-minute refresher for the group, which they listened to patiently and most certainly already knew. After politely nodding, other women in the group went on for the hour to share powerful stories of how they have navigated sexism professionally and personally, what they had overcome. I was moved and left wondering why I didn’t challenge myself to speak along the same lines, to respond to what I read personally instead of through my usual lens of cultural curiosity.

It’s a long way of saying I’m not used to talking or writing solely about myself in public spaces. I leave personal work to journals, and you should be glad I do.

When my kid was a toddler, a party with a toddler friend was canceled because the kid got a nasty virus. “Trust me,” the mom texted the group, “you don’t want anything to do with this.” That’s how I feel about my journals. There are things to work out on private pages for the sake of the work and the reader.

But at the end of a long year, I’d like to bring some personal matters forward. Honestly, I need to practice because Nervous Systems is deeply personal. I’m proud of that, what you can read come September is worked through, thought out, prayed over, the whole nine yards. There is nothing I share in it that I have not processed, often over a number of years. But in the spirit of being more comfortable with bringing real-life stuff here, I’m going to try to write solely personally for a change. Maybe, you will find resonance with your own life now or later.

If You Don’t Know Me By Now

If you found Bitter Scroll from a particular post or recommendation, my name is Sara Billups, I’m a mid-40s author living in Seattle. This geography and culture — specifically how it interacts with Christianity — is a big part of my story. Drew and I celebrated 20 years in Seattle this past summer, and unless something wild happens, we’re planning to live here for the rest of our lives. We’re rooted and grounded; we love this place with its complexities.

I work full-time, commute, and write in the mornings and often the weekends, first Orphaned Believers and, in 2025, Nervous Systems. Days are full here, and they’re probably full where you are.

Like a lot of us, I’m tired on a practical and deeper level.

That’s because I’m sandwiched: My parents live ten minutes away at an assisted living facility, they are both sick, and I am their unlikely part-time caregiver. Dad, with treatable but not curable cancer; Mom with Parkinson’s Disease Dementia. I’m also mothering two teens. There’s nothing special about my situation. Like many members of the Sandwich Generation, either caring for my parents or teenagers could rightly take most moments of my life.

I’m reading Maggie Smith’s memoir, which is deeply personal but also traces the larger cultural conversation about divorce and autonomy in mid-life. I have not read Miranda July’s All Fours, but I understand the frame: This is the time middle-aged ladies can take our desire and autonomy seriously, before the great sag. We are invited to understand the pain and liberation of moving fully into life as ourselves, and that may include being on our own or with our option open.

The reality of my daily life could not be living further from the idea that I am free. I am bound by caregiving, by being available, and by doing things I do not want to do on behalf of another person I am connected with by blood or choice. The desire to be wanted is slowly giving way to the hidden reciprocity of loving the people in your life in their physical illness, mental illness, and progressive decline. Instead, I am beginning to understand how to be free in a more potent sense. Free to settle into myself and my relationships, and my place — not by setting limits aside but by soaking in a sad tub of them.

None of this is natural to me. I could describe the feeling of this kind of care. It is like muscle tension but deeper. It is like a bad night’s sleep, but longer. This year, I’ve come to understand new things about illness, especially when we are asked to care for people who are sick slowly, sometimes for many years.

A friend once wisely said when my parents got sick that it is okay to be boundaried, that there will always be something more to do, another way you can help. We can’t do it all. I think about this every week, sometimes every day. How to be available to care but not collapse.

It’s What You Do

I saw the Cincinnati band Over the Rhine as they traveled for their annual Seattle holiday show a few weeks ago. The singer Karin Bergquist talked about caring for her mom when she had a stroke, because, she said to the crowd, “It’s what you do.” I was on my way to the bathroom and stopped to listen when she said that.

Because it’s not, naturally, what I do. Not that practical care is for many of us. But some caregivers are indeed wired with a certain wherewithal to tend. I am administratively competent; I can schedule your oncology appointments with the best of them. But wiping your ass? Can ass-wiping be a spiritual act? I’m not trying to be crude; it’s a serious question.

This was the year I learned to care in new ways, and I mean practical ways. I mean changing adult diapers and navigating the horrendously complex Medicaid application process. These things are good for me. They get me out of my head.

2026

When I look ahead to life a year from now, approaching 2026, I wonder if things will be worse or better. To protect myself and to prepare, I repeat the message: Life will probably be hard and get harder.

But here is what has turned in me: I no longer believe the idea of a good year, a good life, is to avoid suffering. I have learned that in the complex web of loss and love, you can survive.

Just ask Wallace Stegner, who wrote with aching beauty in Crossing to Safety about life-long friendship and how limits, perceived as chains, are the things that make us who we are. From the first pages, we learn that the narrator’s wife, Sally, had polio and lives with severe physical limitations. A friend asks if he would have chosen a different life, one that did not require caregiving.

“…what he doesn’t understand is that my chains are not chains,” the narrator says of his friend’s questions. Instead, his wife’s physical limitations have “made her more than she was.” And her limits — not conceptually but in daily living — have taught the narrator “at least the alphabet of gratitude.”

Here is my alphabet of gratitude. I have seen people I love suffer, and I have seen them love in the presence of pain. I have taken care of myself every day I care for someone else: the loop around the block, reading for ten minutes, a short stretch.

If you are alive this year, if you have the privilege of movement, if your mind is whole and you are autonomous and free, then open your hands. Speak the name of someone who is bound in their body, mind, or geography. Ask God to be near. To stay close. To make you more of who you are becoming.

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A holiday gift suggestion for those looking around the American church and wondering where Jesus is: Orphaned Believers: How A Generation of Christian Exiles Can Find the Way Home (Baker Books)

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