On Hiatus!

See you in a few weeks, or a few months, or not.

The thing about not having a zillion subscribers (this is a hive of lurkers) is I get to correspond with those who read here regularly. As I prepare to log off from work for a while, I’m grateful for those of you who’ve written in to share reactions, thoughts, and words of support—and for those who trust me with their most sensitive and private stories.

Some of you know why I’m having this break and I thank you for your kind words and thoughts. You can still contact me! Really. Keep the news tips and ideas coming. Just know I might not respond for awhile.

Pictured: Summer’s end, courtesy of THE LANDING’s new Instagram account and an image of the area around the island we visit on weekends every year. And every year, we know it might be the last we’ll have the opportunity to walk its grounds and dive off its dock. We know better than to take anything for granted. Follow this IG account for smaller updates and bits of news.

sarahammelwrites

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I hope you’re all greeting the new school year, the new month, the new season, with strength and optimism and a sense of hope. I wish that for you, but I know many of us are not feeling any of this.

Most of the people who find me are living through one of the worst moments of their lives. Sometimes they’re in crisis. Sometimes they’re at the crest of a towering wave and all they can see ahead of them is a crash. Sometimes they call me from the bottom of a trench as they’re looking up, ready to start climbing again. Most of them are angry, and I don’t blame them.

This is most certainly NOT a Banksy quote, but a nice one nonetheless.

Obviously, not being a lawyer or a therapist, I only listen, support them, write their story if they ask me to, and I connect them with experts who can offer help when I can.

I’ll leave you with some wisdom from a distant relative of someone in my family, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and essayist from my home state of Massachusetts (though I haven’t lived there in decades).

If you’ve read my memoir/military history book The Strong Ones, you know Walden Pond’s woods was where I found peace and solitude as I exercised on early winter mornings when I was a young newspaper reporter covering towns outside Boston.

Emerson owned a piece of it, and allowed his friend Henry David Thoreau to stay there for his experiment in living simply that became the book Walden; or, Life in the Woods. It’s worth a read if you’re looking to shut out endless noise and immerse yourself in a different way of looking at life.

Actually, just one more thing before I go. For those who have been abused in the workplace, first by the perpetrator and then by your own employer, then by colleagues, by online trolls, by anyone who blames not your assailant for harming you but YOU for seeking justice, for the ones who ignore you, punish you, who blame you for what others have done to you, this is what you can tell them—or at least dream about telling them—when they try to come for you:

You don’t owe them any piece of you or your attention. You’ve got this.

This is what I tell myself, anyway.

See you on the other side.

xoSara