Threadbare Isn’t Broken

A Christmas reflection on the long way through, and the people who carried us there

I don’t think I’ve ever ached for Christmas the way I do this year. It feels as though so many of us have been moving through the world with our hearts unshielded, tender, bruised, exposed, carrying a quiet cargo of fear, sorrow, and anger that has slipped past our defenses and made a home in our bodies, settling deep into muscle and marrow and breath. And still, we’ve kept moving. We’ve asked ourselves to keep showing up, to keep living ordinary days inside an extraordinary weight, even as our spirits felt stretched thin, threadbare at the edges, held together more by will than ease.

This year didn’t arrive gently. It came all at once and then it kept coming, escalating, accelerating, refusing to slow long enough for us to find our footing. Each day seemed to demand a new reckoning before the last one had even registered, leaving us to carry grief and outrage and fear simultaneously, without the mercy of sequence. There was no time to metabolize one loss before the next appeared, no space to recover before being asked to bear witness again. It felt like living inside impact, the nervous system perpetually lit, the heart constantly listening for the next fracture.

What has been especially difficult to hold is the knowledge that so much of this wasn’t inevitable, that even a plurality of people could look directly at the harm, the cruelty, the degradation of basic human dignity and choose it again. That reckoning has been disorienting in ways I am still trying to name. It has changed how I move through the world, how I look at strangers, how I understand trust. It has been painful to reconcile the ordinary intimacy of shared spaces with the awareness that not everyone standing beside us is committed to one another’s safety or humanity.

And yet this is the truth I keep returning to, the one that steadies me when everything else feels too heavy. I still believe most people are decent.

I believe that beneath the noise and manipulation and fear, most people do not want to see others harmed or humiliated or erased. I believe most people recoil at cruelty when they are allowed to see it clearly. I believe most people want to live in a world where children are protected, where families are not torn apart for sport, where dignity is not conditional. There is undeniably a deeply rooted xenophobic, racist, bigoted, sexist streak in humanity. History has proven that again and again. But it is not the whole story. It has never been the whole story.

I know this because I have seen the other side of it, quietly, consistently, without spectacle. I have seen it in the messages that arrive exactly when someone is about to give up. In conversations that stretch late into the night, holding space for fear and anger without rushing toward resolution. In people showing up for one another without cameras or credit. In the courage of survivors who tell their stories anyway, trusting that truth still matters. In the way community forms not through perfection, but through presence.

I know this because community saved me.

There was a time not long ago when my own life felt impossibly fragile, when survival wasn’t an abstraction but a daily calculation. I was a new single mother, barely earning enough to get by, grieving the loss of my brother, navigating the devastation of a marriage ending, trying to shield my children from a world that felt suddenly unsafe and unrecognizable. There were nights I cried until there was nothing left in me. Moments when the pain became so loud and so constant that even driving alone felt dangerous, when every telephone pole I passed seemed to offer itself as a place where the suffering could finally stop. That is how dark it got. That is how small my world became.

And yet even then, what I knew wasn’t clarity so much as persistence. Something steady and unyielding lived deep in my body, lodged somewhere below language, insisting I stay. I didn’t always know how I would keep going, but I knew with an unshakeable certainty that quitting was not an option. Not for me. Not ever. The pain was real and it was terrifying, but giving up was never on the table. I understood, in the marrow-deep way you come to know only the most essential truths, that I had to keep going, that my children needed me here, that whatever came next had to be faced rather than fled.

And so I stayed.

I stayed because my children needed me. I stayed because people I had never met reached out and refused to let me disappear. Support arrived in forms I had not known how to imagine, from strangers who became anchors, from voices that said you are not alone, keep going. That love, that collective care, that quiet insistence on my worth carried me forward when my own strength ran out.

That experience has shaped how I see this moment now. It is why I believe so fiercely in what we are capable of together. It is why I believe this brutal year, as harrowing as it has been, is also an inflection point. Because the same understanding that carried me through my darkest hours, that quitting was never an option, is the same understanding I feel now when I look at this country, at this moment, at all that has been asked of us. We do not get to opt out of one another. We do not get to disappear when things become unbearable. We stay. We face it. We carry each other through.

And that is why Christmas matters so deeply to me right now.

Not because it erases what we have endured or fixes what is broken, but because it gives us a place to set the weight down for a moment. Because it reminds us of who we are when we slow long enough to remember. Because it offers light without denying the dark. Because it allows us to gather, not in denial, but in recognition, holding one another in the full knowledge of what this year has asked of us.

As this year closes and the holidays arrive, I feel an overwhelming gratitude, not just for survival, but for connection. For the people who held me when I could not hold myself. For the proof that none of us has to do this alone. For the quiet, stubborn humanity that refuses to disappear even when it is tested relentlessly.

And I need to say this plainly and without hesitation. I am deeply grateful for this community. For the way you found me here and stayed. For the way you showed up when my world was small and dark and survival felt like work. This space has been more than a platform. It has been sustenance. It is how I provide. It is how I dug my way out of the darkest darkness and learned slowly to trust light again. Everything my little family has now is braided in ways I will never forget with the generosity, care, and belief you extended to us. I do not have language large enough to hold that gratitude. I only know that it lives in me, steady and permanent, and that I carry it forward with me into whatever comes next.

This is my Christmas message, offered without armor. You are not alone in this. You never were. We are here with one another, tender, imperfect, still standing.

The only way out is through.

And the only way through is together.

And with that, today’s song:

I love you guys!

Merry Christmas and Happy Everything from me and my little family.

You matter more than you’ll ever know.

💙 Jo

* Oh — and I also wanted to share this beautiful Christmas song from my dear friend, Peter. Like all of you, he’s kept me sane-adjacent through all of this and I’m eternally grateful for him too.

I hope you’ll give it a listen.