I'm glad you think so. I'm increasingly a pessimist who retreats further and further into the safety of my own bubble. There is currently a HUGE backlash against women gaining more rights, against LGBTQ folks, etc. I would have thought that things would be so much further along by now and not be worse than when I was a young adult, but they demonstrably are and it's probably going to get even worse after the election.

At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, young people today don't have even the most fundamental social skills, and 30 years of hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn have turned most young men into clueless zombies who hate women for not making themselves available to their sorry asses for no good reason simply because they feel entitled to them. They resent women for not putting up with their shit, and eroding their unearned privilege. As far as I can tell, men are demonstrably changing for the worse and not the better. Half of young men in Britain think that "feminism has gone too far" even though the UK ranks pretty far down on the gender equality scale of Western democracies. In the US, we're on the cusp of The Handmaid's Tale and it's tipping more and more in that direction every day.

I used to be sad that I would never be a grandmother. Now, I'm fucking relieved. I feel like my autistic son will be adequately taken care of during his lifetime, and after that the world can burn. Gaia deserves better than us and I kind of hope she kicks us off because we don't deserve to survive as a species. I hold close the ones I love and take good care of them, and try to encourage positive change in the world, but I'm extremely pessimistic at this juncture.

But, I do appreciate you trying to be uplifting and encouraging. I really, honestly do. Such moments are water in the desert, so thanks for that.