Author: Marlena Sauceda

5 Lessons from Five Years of Therapy

Marlena Sauceda

This month marks five years since I had my first conversation and began meeting with a therapist on a regular basis. I have written about my experience somewhat in reflecting on my anxiety, and I have publicly advocated for therapy and mental healthcare online for years, but I have not yet shared in very great detail about my journey. Therapy has become more normalized recently; I could not believe my ears last summer when I heard the so-called POTUS on the radio, saying that mental health is just as important as physical health. But awareness and access are two different things, and for many people a lack of knowledge about the process may be the biggest thing standing in their way of seeking therapy.

To mark this anniversary, I thought I’d share five lessons that I’ve learned over the past five years of accessing therapy and working on my mental health. I hope this helps you feel validated in your own therapy experience, or provides the insights you’re seeking if you’re just starting to wonder if therapy might be for you.

1. There’s nothing “wrong” with you

I hope you know this, but in case you don’t, let’s start here. Therapy is not just for when people experience very serious mental health episodes, and it’s not just for people actively going through a difficult or traumatic time. While many people may find their way to therapy after a devastating loss, or a hard break-up, or some other traumatic incident, you don’t have to actively be going through something in order to seek therapy, and accessing therapy does not mean there’s anything “wrong” with you.

When I started therapy I was recently engaged, had just purchased a home, and was on my way to a promotion at work. It was one of the best times of my life. It had been several months since I first recognized that I may have anxiety, and my upcoming marriage made me feel a sudden sense of urgency to access the mental health care I needed to live my best life. I had considered therapy once before, as a teenager, but was deterred by the stigma around it and believed I was fine. Five years ago I was relieved, even excited, when I made my first therapy appointment and proudly shared about it on social media. I was met with some reactions that made me feel like I was sharing that I had some kind of terminal disease, and it made me realize that some people still believe therapy is only for when you are in dire straits.

2. Be selective

After getting over the stigma and finally accepting that I could benefit from therapy, came the enormous task of finding a therapist. My first thought was my then-employer’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP), which many companies and organizations offer. These programs provide employees with (usually) free access to sessions with licensed counselors or therapists, and may be a great option. There are also affordable options for virtual therapists offered through many services, some of which allow you to set certain criteria or specialties. I knew that I wanted to find a therapist who shared some aspects of my cultural identity, so that I would not have to spend time during sessions explaining things, and who specialized in some of the specific issues that I was dealing with.

I found my first therapist using PsychologyToday.com, which has a directory that allows you to be very specific with the criteria you set, including certain identities, specialties, ages, therapy types, and languages. It also shows you pricing options, so you can find something within your budget if therapy is not included in your healthcare plan. You can get even more specific with directories like LatinxTherapy.com, or TherapyforBlackGirls.com. Therapy is an investment, and being selective in finding a therapist will help ensure that you’re getting the most out of it.

3. Set clear goals

Okay, so you’ve found a therapist you can afford, specializing in what you need, who is accepting new clients; congratulations! Now what? Most likely you’ll start with a consultation, your therapist may send you some forms to complete an assessment, or you may have a brief meeting to discuss your concerns. In your first “official” meeting, whether it’s in-person or virtual, your therapist should discuss your goals with you. What are you hoping to get out of therapy? How do you want your life to be different 6 months to a year from now?

Having clear goals allows you and your therapist to have clarity in your treatment plan, and provides a benchmark for you to measure progress against. I remember being so surprised after my first year of therapy, when my therapist asked me to review the goals I had set in our first session together. It felt as if I had manifested all of these things that were now true or almost true, but in fact I had spent hours upon hours in therapy sessions and in every day life steadily progressing toward those goals. It’s important to continuously review and reset your goals to ensure that you continue to get what you need out of your investment in therapy, and to enable your therapist to adjust your treatment and incorporate new or different techniques.

4. Check your expectations

It’s important to be realistic with your expectations. In my experience, a therapy session often leaves me feeling less anxious – it can also leave me feeling emotionally exhausted, or angry, and on one occasion even more anxious. Attending therapy is not a one-stop shop solution to your mental wellness; it requires practice, after care, and lifestyle changes. You wouldn’t expect that a single visit to the doctor is enough to heal your physical ailments. You might also have to go pick up a prescription or OTC meds and take them, or need a cast or brace, or additional testing, or physical therapy, etc. So you shouldn’t expect that simply meeting with a therapist is going to solve all of your mental health issues. You will also need to implement healthy coping mechanisms, adopt habits that support your mental wellness and shed habits that don’t, and possibly even take medication or supplements.

It’s also important to recognize that a therapist is not a life coach…or a friend. A therapist is not meant to tell you what to do or not do when you face a difficult decision or situation, and they’re not meant to always agree with you. This is why the previous tip is so important – if you have clear goals then your therapist can continuously hold you accountable to them, then your sessions will focus on how you can better manage your mental health and move toward your goals no matter the situation. It’s also important to spend time on your mental health outside of therapy. I have found that exercising, eating a healthy diet, spending quality time with loved ones, and limiting screen time are all also essential for me to feel mentally healthy, and I continue my learning outside of therapy by reading books relevant to my experience.

5. Don’t be afraid to start over

One of the best pieces of advice I received after starting therapy, was to not be afraid to change therapists. The thought was, at first, inconceivable, that I would enter into such a vulnerable relationship with someone and then, one day, end it. I felt happy enough with my first therapist, until I didn’t. My first therapist specialized in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which focuses on mindsets, beliefs, and attitude, otherwise known as “talk therapy.” This was incredibly helpful at first, and provided plenty of space for me to talk through my experiences and gain greater insight into my anxiety. After a while, however, I felt like I wasn’t making much progress. Therapy began feeling like a chore, and I even found myself dreading my appointments. I took that as a definite sign it was time to move on and search for a new therapist.

I took a short break before starting again, and my experience with my second therapist has been that much better due to being informed by my experience with my first therapist. I realized that I need more than CBT, and sought someone who incorporated somatic therapy practices that focus on the mind-body connection and releasing pent-up emotions. I feel like I’ve made more progress in the last two years with my current therapist than I made in my first three years, even while meeting less frequently. As scary as it was to start the whole process over again, it was one of the most essential things I’ve done for my mental health.

I hope this helps you on your own mental health journey. I truly believe that everyone can benefit from some amount of therapy, and that the world would be a much better place if more people had access to mental healthcare.

Lost/Free

Marlena Sauceda

I’m stuck in this
side hustle
make content
meal prep
romanticize your life
hamster wheel,
and I wonder
why I keep getting
tension headaches.

I try to drown it out
with NPR and
podcasts and
nonfiction audiobooks,
but sometimes
the truth
is too heavy.

What is it like?
To not be
in fight or flight?
To be able to rest
in the quiet of your mind?
To feel safe,
safe enough to digest.
I wonder,
have I ever
really slept?

I was so close
to finding myself,
to meeting the version
of me
who would exist
in an alternate universe 
where capitalism did not,
where humanity
was truly free.
The glimpse alone
is enough to make me know,
I can’t let that version of me
go.

I’m trying to interpret
the angel numbers,
trying to read
the universe’s signs,
but I’ve forgotten how
to look for them
without too much
screen time.

So what do I do?
Do I say
fuck it all,
leave the city,
quit my job?
Live like a monk
so I can be
what I want?

Or do I girl boss,
get a raise,
buy some stock,
start a business,
and hope that
by the end of it all
I still have it in me
to be
what I want?

//

I hope one day
these years
are remembered
as a dark time
where we lost ourselves.
I hope one day
we relearn to live
in the light,
to cherish the earth.
I hope one day
our children
might be free –
free enough
to be.

On doing everything “right”

Marlena Sauceda

Several years ago I read an article titled “Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong” by Gillian White. This article was the inspiration for my blog post on “escaping” poverty, a feat which I have now been dedicating myself to for twenty years.

This summer, twenty years ago, was the moment when I decided that I had to dedicate myself to my education in order to get a well-paying job, and provide a comfortable, stable life for myself and my potential future children. Since then I can’t say that nearly nothing has gone wrong, but I had an incredible amount of support from my extended family and community, and I know that I have done my best effort to do things the “right” way on my climb up the steep cliff face of socioeconomic status in the land currently known as the United States.

It’s ironic that I find myself here, experiencing unemployment for the first time since 2015, this time not entirely at my will. A couple of months ago my former employer decided to eliminate my position and offered me severance. And instead of panicking and rushing to find any other option for a job, as I might have a few years ago, I have decided to just pause.

At this point, I would say that I’ve achieved a status to be proud of. I am a college graduate, a homeowner, I have no debt aside from that pesky student loan the government hasn’t forgiven yet, higher-than-average savings, a diversified stock portfolio, a retirement account. I live in a two-income household, have access to reliable transportation and fresh food & water, and can afford to buy new clothes and shoes and home decor when I want to. I can even go on vacation to cities where I don’t know anyone and stay in hotels, occasionally. And yet here I am, with no job and few prospects.

After twenty years of tireless effort, at school, then at school and work, then at work, after so much support and so much “going right,” so much doing “right,” I’ve realized that I sacrificed so much of what I want for the sake of what society has told me is “right.” I wanted a good job, so in 3rd grade I dedicated my life to doing well in school so I could go to college. In 8th grade some project came up in English class that asked me to pick a career. I liked to write, so I figured I should be a journalist and I dedicated my life to that. At 20 I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in journalism, convinced by then that I did not want to be a journalist. Soon after I recognized the issue of educational inequity and I dedicated my life to that. At 25 I bought a condo, qualifying with the comfortable-living-wage salary I had obtained in my comfortable nonprofit job. I found myself farther along on my journey, higher up on the cliff face than I had imagined myself getting to at such a young age. And I learned that, the farther up you get, the easier the journey seems to become. Still, I found myself feeling like something was missing, like I had forgotten part of myself somehow. I struggled to find a way to continue my journey, reach even greater heights, while still dedicating myself to saving the world.

It wasn’t until a few months ago that I realized it is not my responsibility to save the world. That realization opened my mind up to a truth that I have long been ignoring: my only responsibility is to be true to myself. To find my light and live in it. Twenty years of doing everything “right” led me to achieve upward socioeconomic mobility, but it also had me miserable in a dead-end job, consistently underpaid and, eventually, laid off.

I can’t help but wonder what might have happened had, instead of doing what was “right,” I had been brave enough to pursue my dreams. What if I had gone to my 8th grade English teacher and said I wanted to write novels and poetry and movies and TV shows? What if I had dedicated myself to learning how to do that? Instead I have toiled away in the nonprofit industrial complex, convincing myself that I was doing the “right” thing, while I hide my poetry in my notebooks and only jokingly refer to writing books and movies and TV shows. I never allowed myself to believe that I could have both. That I could do what I want, not just what others tell me is “right,” and still achieve upward socioeconomic mobility.

Have I outrun the shadow of poverty enough to pause and take a breath? Am I in a comfortable enough position to allow myself to dream? I can’t be sure, and I would be lying if I said that the thought of not working, not having a consistent direct deposit hitting my bank account, doesn’t scare the crap out of me. I am grateful to have a partner to lean on, to have all of the comforts and conveniences that I worked so hard to access. And I am grateful for the ways in which I have been coming back to myself. Grateful for the hours of therapy that have enabled me to shed the layer of fear that pushed me to bury my dreams. Grateful for the birth chart reading that confirmed the truth in the dream that I had buried. Grateful for the community college course that enabled me to see the reality of creative writing as a profession.

I picture myself now on a ledge upon this cliff face that is wide enough so that it has plenty of room to rest, and even sustains some edible plants. There is shade and a spring. Instead of moving along with my climb, I am choosing now to pause. I recognize that after 20 years of working tirelessly to achieve this stability and security, I need rest. I need time and mental and emotional space to ponder what I want to work toward next.

Last summer I had an idea for a novel that I’d like to write, and over the last year I have written several thousand words, fleshed out more characters, plot points, and timelines, than I ever thought I could. I am hoping to finish this novel in the next six months, and will be seeking an agent and publisher within the year. I plan to start compiling my first book of poetry in the next few months. I also have several ideas for movies and television shows that I’d like to write. Children’s movies inspired by my dog and family stories, dramatic TV shows that cover millennia of human history, maybe even a stand-up special one day. From this ledge I can see so many more possibilities, so many more pathways onward, than I ever knew existed.

I am pitching a tent, hanging a hammock, and creating space for myself to just lay back and dream. To let my shoulders ease back and away from my ears, to release some of the tension in my neck that has built up over my years spent climbing, pushing myself to achieve ever more. I know that I will have to continue eventually, and I am open to considering all of the options and possibilities out there, to finally releasing the idea that I must do everything “right.”

Sometimes, we forget

Marlena Sauceda

Sometimes we forget
what it means to be human –
that others are human.
Sometimes we forget
that our mother is a person
with hopes, dreams, fears.
Sometimes we forget
that our father is a person
with plans, feelings, insecurities.
Sometimes we forget
that our siblings, friends, peers
are people
with expectations, preferences, assumptions.
Sometimes we forget
that our partners are people
with needs, desires, secrets.
Sometimes we forget
that we are people
with all of those things and more.

These systems have us so occupied
with survival
that we forget what it means to live.
So occupied with doing
that we forget what it means to be.
We pass the time day after day
completing routines,
doing what we have been told
we have to.
And sometimes, we forget
what we have.

Me and my anxiety

Marlena Sauceda

It’s difficult to explain to those who do not have anxiety what it’s truly like for those of us who do. Most folks know what it’s like to feel anxious. Butterflies in your stomach, your heart racing, maybe your palms get sweaty – a general feeling of anticipation that makes you feel unsettled in the moment.

Generalized anxiety disorder is different. For me, it is an undercurrent of that anxious feeling paired with an incessant narrative in a voice that is my own and isn’t – one which is quick to think of the worst case scenario for any occurrence, which tells me that the things I know and feel in my heart are to be questioned. My anxiety is very pronounced when I am in the car and someone else is driving; I feel a sense of impending doom with every merge, every uncontrolled left turn. The narrative in my mind tells me that at any second, another vehicle or a slip of the driver’s attention will bring an end to everything I know and love. When I travel to the land currently known as California, the place of my birth and where I spent most of my life, I am constantly on edge waiting for “the big one” to hit – the giant earthquake that I spent my childhood hearing about and preparing for with earthquake drills. I will be standing on a hilltop looking down & around at a beautiful vista, and in my mind’s eye I see the earth around me undulating, the trees swaying, buildings crumbling. All while at the same time, feeling gratitude and love for the beauty of the world around me.

Anxiety is not an invited feeling. It arrives even when you feel peace, happiness, safety. Yes, anxiety can be triggered by certain unwelcome events, but it also shows up when nothing has specifically triggered it. Those of us with anxiety can feel it when we’re on vacation, when we’re enjoying a birthday celebration, when we’re at a family gathering. It is often unrelated to our physical environment. The thing that those with anxiety have to learn to navigate, and those without anxiety have to learn to accept, is that anxiety is not a reflection of reality. The inner dialogue doesn’t care if you are physically safe, if you are surrounded by loved ones, if you are in a beautiful place. It can be kept at bay by self affirmations and supportive words from your loved ones, but when it’s really bad it can make it difficult to believe yourself and others about what is reality. It often doesn’t make any sense, and that’s what makes it difficult for those who don’t have anxiety to understand and empathize with those of us who do.

One of the best and only examples that I have seen of anxiety in media is on Issa Rae’s Insecure. I’m not sure if it’s intentional, but it feels as though it must be. There are multiple ways that the show depicts characters’ anxiety and anxious thoughts & feelings. One way is with flash forwards – scenes that seem real to start, then become very exaggerated versions of reality before flashing back to Issa’s character in the present, who was imagining the worst case scenario in a conversation she is anticipating or an action she is considering. This is a great example of what it’s like, to imagine a reality completely different from the one we know, where all of our worst fears come to fruition.

A frame from the TV show Insecure, showing the main character, Issa, from the shoulders up, off-center against a plain background.
A frame of Issa Rae’s character in Insecure

Another way is through cinematography – they frame a shot of a character so that the center of the frame is not their face, but instead a blank space that is meant to represent all of their unstated thoughts. This technique depicts why those of us with anxiety can seem to lack presence when we are around others, because so much of our mental capacity is spent on the inner dialogue of things we are too afraid to say out loud.

My anxiety is very different from my otherwise very logical and process-oriented brain. I will hear an odd sound in the night and my anxiety will convince me that it’s an intruder come to destroy everything I know and love, before I realize that it’s just the deep snores of my dog, or the ceiling fan, or the wind. What is often said and written about anxiety is that your brain and your body don’t know the difference between a real and a perceived threat. I have found that to be very much true. In those moments where I am convinced that a strange sound is death knocking at my door, my heart is racing, my jaw is clenched, my entire body is stiff waiting for the next sound that will confirm that the threat is real. Even after realizing that there is no threat, it can take several more minutes for my heart to stop racing, and for my mind and muscles to relax enough to let sleep take over.

I’ve seen recent posts on social media that claim that anxiety is beneficial, a survival instinct that we have refined over millennia, which can keep the anxious one safe or sound the alarm when something feels “off.” My anxiety has certainly helped me in some ways. It made me a great student and test taker, as I would cope with my anxiety by reading incessantly and consuming every piece of learning material accessible to me, so that by the time I sat down for a test I felt confident in my knowledge. My anxiety makes me a great employee – I am constantly thinking that I’ve missed something or forgotten something, so my organizational systems are robust and effective. I am good at thinking ahead to all of the possibilities for a given project, pilot, or organizational change, and trying to understand how other people might be affected. My anxiety makes me detail-oriented, thorough, and direct – traits which are for the most part rewarded in U.S. workplaces.

Beneficial, though? I would give up my anxiety in a second if I could. My anxiety disturbs my peace and impacts my relationships. It makes it difficult for me to build new relationships, to be present, to be confident. I am constantly working on being better at these things and confronting my anxiety, because it tells me that I am not worthy or deserving of others’ time and attention.

My anxiety is the main reason why I started therapy a couple of years ago. I finally recognized and labeled my anxiety, and began cognitive behavioral therapy, a common treatment for anxiety. I talk with my therapist about my anxiety, how it’s affecting my life, and I learn ways to manage and work with it. I try to maintain a meditation practice, and though I’m not very good at it, I at least have that in my toolbox to turn to in moments when I am feeling overwhelmed by my anxiety. I am getting better at recognizing my anxiety, interrupting the narrative, and letting go of the fear. I know that there are medications that I can take to treat my anxiety, but I prefer to learn how to manage it on my own, and I am grateful that my anxiety is very rarely debilitating. Writing is another way that I manage my anxiety. When I write I come back to myself, I tap into the voice in my head that is my own.

After recognizing and accepting my anxiety, then learning ways to work with and through it, I am feeling ready to move onto exploring the root causes of my anxiety. Understanding where my generalized anxiety disorder came from, and doing the work to heal my inner child, is the next great adventure on my mental health journey. I know that there isn’t a cure for my anxiety, and have accepted that this is a part of who I am. But I am determined to live my life joyfully and fearlessly, and to stop letting my anxiety control my actions, my time, and the way I see myself.

On doing your dreams

Marlena Sauceda

Today is my Mars return, an event that happens approximately once every two years, when Mars returns to the place where it was on the day you were born. It is a day when you can tap into Mars’ power and energy, and channel it into whatever endeavor that you feel most driven to. This could be work, a creative project, your sex life, etc. I am starting with this because I took today off from my “day job,” or the work that I do in exchange for a living wage, in order to have time and space to channel this energy into working on a writing project. I am starting, instead, with this blog post. It has been a while since I last shared on this platform, and the reason for this pause is that I found myself pushing myself to write about things that I didn’t really want to write about, and so I just didn’t do it. It is also because I have started a long-term writing project that I am very excited about and which is taking up a lot of my “free” time. But today, I want to start my Mars-driven writing spree with this reflection on doing your dreams.

Do you remember the first thing you ever said in response to the question, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”

If not the first thing you ever said in response to that question, then the first thing you really gravitated to, the one you stuck with and repeated to yourself, perhaps until you reached adolescence?

For me, it was a singer/songwriter. I wanted to be like Selena, the icon, the Mexican-American girl from humble Texas roots who changed the world with her powerful voice. I wanted to write songs about love – feeling love, yearning for love. Cute, catchy, poppy songs about love. The first one that I wrote was in a Barbie diary with a lock, a birthday gift from a family member, and it was titled, “Somewhere, Somehow.” I was 7 or 8 when I wrote this ballad about the boy I had had a crush on in my first grade class in San Jose, CA, where I no longer lived. I would gaze up at the moon, like movie-Selena does in the film, Selena, and picture myself on a stage. I held onto this dream until I was maybe 11 or 12, after I had seen more of the world and of humanity, and realized that life was more complex than first grade crushes.

I wonder why adults ask children that question at such a young age. Had I not been asked the question until I was a bit older, what might my initial response have been? After songwriter came journalist. I had started writing poetry but I told myself that it simply wouldn’t be possible for me to achieve the upward socioeconomic mobility that I sought through poetry, and that journalism was a great way for me to get paid to write. I also believed that it would give me the opportunity to write about the many wrongs that I saw in the world, to bring society’s attention to them, and in doing so, solve them. I stuck with this dream from the ages of 13 to 20, when I was getting ready to graduate from Journalism school, and had finally become so disillusioned with the media that I thought I should dedicate myself to critiquing and transforming it, instead.

And then I started working full-time. I told myself I would pursue stories as an independent reporter in my free time, imagining that I would have so much of it compared to my life as a full-time student and slightly-more-than part-time administrative support student-worker. I told myself I would only do the enrollment counselor gig – the first offer I received after graduating – until I got into a graduate program on media studies. I imagined I might go on to be a professor at a prestigious university, where I would spend my days convincing young, privileged minds that the media was a tool of white supremacy and that it must be reconstructed.

Then, in the spring of 2015, less than a year after I graduated from college, a couple months after being rejected by multiple doctorate programs (I honestly thought I could skip a master’s…), came a realization. An understanding that had been several months in the making, but came to fruition in a moment. I was listening to the This American Life episode, Three Miles, sitting at my desk in the enrollment marketing office, processing data on the thousands of students applying to ASU’s online programs, when I was struck by the understanding that the education inequity that is described in that episode, exists everywhere, and sometimes even within closer distances. I realized that in my high school, as I was being challenged and intrigued by my excellent education in Honors & AP classes, three doors down my classmates were receiving a sub-standard education, with classrooms led by teachers who were not invested in their success.

I realized this because I had spent my junior year of high school in a “college prep” English class due to a clerical error, as I had enrolled in my school’s AP English Language & Composition class, but was told there wasn’t enough room. For a year I rolled my eyes in English, in a classroom that was more poor and more diverse than my AP/Honors classrooms, who were treated as sub-human by the teacher, who was actually the school’s athletic director, and who was either not there or would leave in the middle of class 3 – 4 days out of the week. I was so frustrated by the curriculum, which was closer to my 7th grade GATE English class than what my friends were learning a few classrooms away in AP English. I thought, 5 years later, as I listened to that This American Life episode, that this was the wrong that I must right. A year after that episode aired I had quit my enrollment counseling job, moved to California for a brief, failed attempt to enter the EdTech industry, and was getting ready to move back to Arizona to start working at one of the largest education-focused nonprofits in this stolen land.

For a few years I dreamed of starting my own non-profit dedicated to solving the education inequity issue, I even dreamed of one day being appointed Secretary of Education, where I would be in a position to influence broad-sweeping legislation that would once and for all make access to an excellent education a right guaranteed to all.

But I work, full-time, making money for someone else, earning a comfortable living wage. I have undertaken debt in order to secure this comfortable living – financed the portion of my college education that wasn’t covered by grants & scholarships, financed a decent car, took out a mortgage to purchase a home. And the neverending bills keep me tied to this need to keep the money coming in. I certainly never dreamed, as a child, of spending the majority of my waking hours training fundraisers on how to use Salesforce, day after day. This white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system in which we live is not very forgiving to the dreams of children.

Several months ago I had a birth chart reading with Yakari Gabriel Torres, writer, astrologer, and Director of Stari Agency. Within minutes of seeing my chart for the first time, Yakari told me that there is nothing stopping me from writing, and that for me, writing was the easiest thing in the world. She said, during that reading, that what we dream of doing as children is often aligned with what we were born to do.

I can just imagine what this world might be like without this system of global white supremacist patriarchal capitalism pushing so many of us to sacrifice our dreams for the sake of surviving, for the sake of having a place to sleep at night and food to eat. What might our collective efforts, channeled toward what we are each born to do, have brought into being? Instead, for over 500 years, humanity has been pre-occupied with this global, exploitative system. It began with European men stealing land, labor, and lives in order to secure all the resources the Earth had to offer. And it has us here, trapped in a vicious cycle of giving our time and energy in exchange for a paycheck, taking home a portion of the wealth that we build for other people.

I want to be brave enough to do my dreams. I have witnessed my husband go through so much change, take so many chances with his career, in order to move ever closer to his dream of helping his community build wealth through real estate. I have witnessed my best friend put herself out there, make connections in a new community, go after her worth, in order to move ever closer to her dream of building a more just world. I have witnessed another close friend move clear across the country, away from his family, to pursue his dream of acting and performing.

I am pushing myself now to do my dreams. I no longer dream of writing songs, but I dream of writing books. Books of poetry, non-fiction books about my life and my family, science fiction novels. I dream of writing television shows and movies, and seeing my characters come to life on the screen. I dream of a life that is safe, full of love and comfort. I dream of having time to teach my children and watch them grow.

This year I am challenging myself to do my dreams, to believe for the first time since I was a little girl that I truly can do anything I set my mind too. I am challenging myself to trust that I will attract all of the abundance that I need to live the life that I desire. I am challenging myself to break free from this mindset that I must sacrifice my joy for the sake of my survival.

A wide rainbow over clusters of trees and the roofs of buildings

My neighborhood

Marlena Sauceda

I like to imagine my neighborhood,
without all the buildings…
no humming A/C units,
no roaring engines, no concrete,
no planes passing overhead…

Just the trees,
the cacti, the soil,
hard and sandy, baking under the sun.
When I look around
I see lots of shady spots
offered by old, friendly tees,
and there’s a river, not far –
you can tell by the way,
as you look to the north,
the trees grow taller,
closer together.

The trees, the cacti,
offer a place to rest for birds,
and the bushes that surround their trunks,
provide cover for many critters.
The bees feast on cactus and
palo verde blossoms,
while lizards scitter across rocks,
and rabbits tear through the
hard earth, seeking refuge from
the birds, and the sun.

I imagine the wind blowing, warm,
shaking the leaves of the
eucalyptus tree,
starting a symphony of
whispering branches,
birds calling for their lovers,
the far off hoot of an owl…

I imagine, after it rains,
when the heavy sheets of water pass,
the scents of steaming creosote
and freshly disturbed earth
fill every inch of air,
and the sky rings with
the chirps of crickets.

I imagine the Earth
restored.
Humanity existing in harmony,
with the trees, the soil, the rivers,
the critters, the sun,
the wind and rain…

I like to imagine my neighborhood.
It is a beautiful place to call home.

A message from the sun

Marlena Sauceda

Look to me, my children.
I am your light, your source of life,
I am your truest friend.

To you it appears as though
I rise and set,
but I am always here,
always watching,
always shining my light.

For brief moments,
many of you become lost to me,
as your mother turns away on her axis.
Yet even then my companion, the moon,
reflects my light back to you.

Look to me, my children,
as your ancestors did before you.
You carry their wisdom in your veins,
and you know.
You know what I am here to tell you.

My children may call me sun,
but never forget that I am a star –
born to burn my brightest and fullest,
until I simply cannot burn anymore.

As were you.

You were never meant
to spend the day
hidden away,
laboring.
You were born to shine,
to burn and be your brightest and fullest.
You were born to love,
to grow, to feel joy,
to feel my light on your skin,
as you care for your mother,
as you build your home.

You were born to be
a light.
You each carry a piece of me inside of you,
and it comes to life when you feel
love, joy, elation.
You must listen to that feeling,
for it is me speaking to you.
It is me telling you,
‘Yes, child. This is why you are here.’
You must absorb my energy,
and pour it back out
into the world,
into your communities,
into your mother.

I am your truest friend,
I see you for all that you are,
and only that.
You, you, my child, are only here briefly,
yet your light – my light inside of you –
shines on.
So spend your time burning as
bright and full
as you possibly can.
Until you simply cannot burn anymore.

A round table decorated with dried lavender flowers, a succulent arrangement, tealights, glass champagne flutes, and lavender napkins.

Making it through one year of marriage in a pandemic

Marlena Sauceda

As March approaches, the world is marking one year of being in a pandemic, and I am marking one year of marriage. My partner and I became husband and wife on February 29, 2020; a gorgeous, sunny day on which we were able to gather under the sky with our friends and family to celebrate. While we’ve been together for 8 years now, this last year – our first married, spent almost entirely in a pandemic, has been both one of the most challenging and the most enriching.

To be completely honest, there were times when I wondered if we would make it. Yes, I loved this man enough to want to spend my life with him, but did I love him enough to spend all day, every day, confined to our house together, for an indefinite amount of time? I wasn’t sure. Pandemic life isn’t the life that any of us signed up for. And living together, when you each have your own work schedules and routines and lives that take place away from home, is much different from living together when you both work and sleep and eat and recreate in the same 1000 or so square feet. When, if you leave the house and spend time around other people, you’re risking your life and/or the lives of the people around you.

We have made it, so far. I know this pandemic life isn’t nearly over, but I’m pretty proud of how we have grown in love and in life through this past year. I know that it’s an unpopular opinion for me, as a millennial cis-woman, to be happily married, to a millennial cis-man. So many articles and even recent Twitter threads have shown that married cis-women in heterosexual relationships are having a horrible time right now. Cis-men have been happy to sit back and allow their cis-women partners to take on the majority of the cleaning, cooking, child-rearing responsibilities, even when they don’t work as much, or at all.

While my husband isn’t perfect (nobody is, perfection is a myth rooted in white supremacy), he at least understands the importance of cleaning up after yourself and sharing the responsibilities of nourishing and maintaining a household. Pre-pandemic, my husband would wake up every weekday, get ready for work, make coffee, sometimes a smoothie, occasionally boil a few eggs, and grab the dinner leftovers that he had packed for lunch before leaving to work for the day. I would eat whatever I wanted for breakfast as I started my work day at home (I’ve worked from home for nearly 4 years now), heat up leftovers, or make a salad or a sandwich for lunch, and cook dinner throughout the week. I washed whatever dishes I used during the day, and my partner usually cleaned up after dinner. It felt easy, fair, and I love to cook, so being mainly responsible for the main meal of the day was no problem.

When the pandemic began, and my husband started working from home as well, things changed. He struggled with work-life balance before, and when the line between work and home became completely blurred, that balance was non-existent. His morning routine changed from getting up, getting ready, and helping with breakfast, to getting up, walking to his desk in our second bedroom, and starting his work day. At first he marveled at the fact that not needing to commute meant he could spend more time working. He is a mortgage loan originator, and with record low interest rates on mortgages, he has had plenty of work to do and could easily work 60+ hours per week. I, in our honeymoon phase in the first several weeks of the pandemic, was okay with making breakfast and lunch and taking it to him at his desk – for a time. Fairly quickly, though, I realized that if I didn’t have time to make coffee, or breakfast, or lunch – he wouldn’t. There were multiple days where I would just grab something quick and eat at my desk, and he wouldn’t eat anything at all until 1:00 or 2:00 pm.

What had felt like an evenly shared responsibility before, had become entirely my responsibility – to figure out what the heck to eat 3 times a day, 7 days a week. Every week. I found myself doing 100% of the cooking, but also washing about 50% of the dishes. By mid-summer we came up with a solution. My husband found an affordable, local, meal prep service, and suggested we order meals to make this task a little easier. I was reluctant at first, but the meals were decent and I relented to the fact that it is okay to accept help, especially in the middle of a pandemic. We began ordering 8 meals per week from them, taking the place of 4 lunches and/or dinners. When I say affordable, I mean affordable, like $50 – $60 per week for the meals, which cut our grocery bill in half to $45 – $50 per week. My husband makes coffee and a smoothie, boiled eggs, or toast for breakfast, we take turns making/heating up lunch throughout the week, and I cook dinner two to three days during the week. We support local restaurants on the weekends, and spend some time meal prepping together on Sundays. I take care of the breakfast and lunch dishes, and he takes care of the dinner dishes. All of this has helped this task return to being a shared responsibility. It’s also helped us eat healthier meals, makes keeping the kitchen clean relatively painless, and prevents arguments rooted in unspoken resentment about who’s not carrying their weight.

Cooking and dishes aren’t the only things that became challenging, of course. Having no alone time has been difficult for me, a super introvert who needs to spend a lot of time just doing my own thing. Not being able to hang out with friends (without risking our lives or the lives of those around us) has been difficult for my husband, a super social ambivert who has a very close group of friends, who are like family. So I manufacture alone time while he manufactures connection. Specifically, he got a PlayStation and started playing Call of Duty online with his friends on the TV in our second bedroom. He works way more hours than I do, so I get enough time to myself throughout the week, and on weekends I am perfectly happy with him playing video games for a few hours while I watch my shows or listen to podcasts or write or read or do a home organizing project.

Making intentional time to be present together has been essential as well. From taking our fur-child Bernie on walks together every afternoon during the week, without phones, to finding ways to spend time together beyond watching TV or cleaning. We’ve worked on puzzles together, played a conversation card game, or two-person board games like Scrabble and Rummikub. On the weekends, our pandemic-friendly outings consist of picking a park to drive to for a walk or a hike, occasionally picking up takeout to eat at the park. Even making the bed together in the morning, or playing with Bernie before we go to bed at night, have been opportunities for us to have quality time even when we are around each other all of the time. We still watch TV together, of course, we are millennials and I truly enjoy film and television as art forms, but making time to spend engaging with just each other has helped us continue to communicate, get to know each other, and deepen our bond.

It was also important for us to have some conversations we hadn’t had before, even in 7+ years of being in relationship with one another. Binding ourselves together legally and financially required us to have frank conversations about how we manage our income, how much debt we had, our expenses, what our financial goals are. Early in April we sat down and talked through what we wanted to accomplish in the next few years, ensuring we were clear on how we wanted to be in partnership with each other, and what it would take from both of us to get there. And we’ve continued to have those conversations, as the need to make financial decisions and choices has come up. Knowing that we’re aligned here has helped to alleviate stress when the possibility of layoffs came up at work, and as we’ve dreamed together about where we want our careers to go in the next few years.

Then there were the conversations about racism and white supremacy that happened in many households beginning last summer. I have been thinking and talking about dismantling white supremacy for several years, and dragging my husband along the way. But the movement for Black lives and against police brutality, and the campaign of the former president of the U.S., provided so many more opportunities for both of us to confront the ways in which we’ve benefited from white privilege, and how we were operating in ways that were “not racist”, and not antiracist. These have been some of the most tense moments, when I realized that, while we had been having conversations here and there, it was as though we had been speaking different languages.

While I had been listening to podcasts, reading, and learning through Diversity, Equity, and Inclusiveness work at my job over the last 3+ years, he was mostly living life in the oblivious way that many not-racist white men do. This movement for racial equity forced us to get on the same page about needing to be actively antiracist, about how we must dismantle the beliefs rooted in white supremacy culture within ourselves, how to support each other in doing so in productive ways, and provided the opportunity for us to get clear on how, if we have them, we intend to raise our children. It was difficult at first, heartbreaking at moments, but eventually we arrived at a place where we recognized how much there remains for each of us to learn, and concluded that we must do it together. When he started questioning why I was watching The Crown (“isn’t this white supremacy?”), I realized this is both a blessing and a curse.

And through it all, therapy. Phone appointments with my therapist help me get out of my head for a bit, and learning how to manage my anxiety in healthier ways has helped me improve immensely at communicating my needs, understanding what is at the root of my reactions, and inviting my partner in on my healing. It has even helped him understand more about the ways in which he needs to heal as well.

Of course, I must recognize how much privilege is present here. We are both employed, in jobs that pay a comfortable living wage and allow us to work from the safety of our home. We do not have children, and I firmly believe that having access to contraception and reproductive healthcare, in a country without universal healthcare, is a privilege. Having access to therapy is also a privilege. Not having any underlying conditions, and not being within a demographic that puts us at greater risk in this pandemic, are privileges. Even living near enough to relatives to have been able to see family a handful of times over the course of the year feels like a privilege right now. While several people close to us have gotten sick with COVID-19, some of them incredibly so, not one of the over 500,000 individuals who have lost their lives to this virus in the U.S. has been someone who we have had to mourn.

It certainly hasn’t been easy, but having a caring and loving partner who is ready and willing to grow with me has kept me going over this last year. As we approach our wedding anniversary, I am filled with joy and gratitude at having chosen this incredible person to spend my life with, and filled with excitement for the dreams that we’ve been dreaming together. While I look forward to the days when we can enjoy fulfilling social lives once again, I have truly cherished this opportunity to spend time learning how to love one another even more fully.

One year of COVID-19 in my community

Marlena Sauceda

It has been 366 days since the first case of COVID-19 was identified in my community. The evening of January 26, 2020, Arizona State University confirmed that the first case of the novel coronavirus detected in Arizona was within the university community – a student on the Tempe campus, and they were quick to assure the community that the student had not been in university housing, and was in isolation.

I saw this news on Twitter late that night, and as I went to bed I thought about all of the people who had been on the flight that brought that student to Phoenix, I thought of the potential Uber or Lyft driver who picked them up from the airport, I thought of the potential people at the grocery stores, restaurants, and other places where that student had been before they knew they were carrying the virus. The university announcement had indicated that they were working with the Maricopa County Department of Public Health to complete contact tracing, and that individuals who may have been exposed would be contacted. But what about all of the people anonymous to that student who could have been exposed?

The morning of January 27th, I woke up thinking about this. I turned to my then-fiance, now husband, and told him – coronavirus is here. I had that day off of work, and as I drove around town running errands, I found myself at a red light behind a sports car, with a license plate that was 5 letters: WUHAN. Having attended ASU, and having lived within a handful of miles from ASU’s Tempe campus for most of the last 8 years, I know that there is a large community of international students drawn to Tempe for and by the university, and I am used to seeing the flashy sports cars of the wealthiest among those students around town. In that moment it struck me – they identified one case, but there were surely others who had been going about their lives after returning from their holiday travels.

It was easy enough to brush aside that thought as anxiety, and move forward through my day in the carefree way we used to before the pandemic began in earnest. That evening, I gathered with my family at a restaurant to celebrate my grandma’s birthday. As we sat around the table, the fact that she would be 75 in 2021 came up. We talked briefly about where we should go on a trip to celebrate, as some of us had gone to Hawaii to celebrate her 70th birthday. A conversation that I’m sure we all forgot about within the next couple of months.

Less than two weeks later, on February 8th, I was preparing for my first flight of the year, a trip to New York City for work. That weekend I spent a few hours searching for face masks. I went to CVS, Walgreens, Target, and checked Safeway on Instacart. They were sold out everywhere. I thought I was being paranoid, but as I was preparing to get married at the end of February, I was trying to avoid catching anything and getting sick period. Arriving at JFK, I remember seeing a couple of people wearing masks. I moved about the city as I had on previous trips, sharing space and air with countless strangers, and returned to Phoenix a few days later.

Another work trip to Los Angeles, wedding prep, a whole 200+ person wedding, and a couple of Spring Training games came between that trip and COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic. My husband and I hung out with friends the weekend of March 13th. That was also the weekend that the yoga studio I had been going to for the last 6 months emailed to say they were closing at the end of the month, that, “with the current state of affairs (i.e., public health concerns, etc.),” they simply would not be able to continue operating. On Saturday my husband and I went out with friends for one last night of drinks and dancing on Mill Ave., realizing that we were maybe getting too old for this, not realizing that it would be our last time for over a year. That night I looked around at the packed sidewalks, the full bars and dance floors and thought – “we shouldn’t be here.” I figured there must be at least 50, likely more, people moving around Mill Ave. that night unknowingly spreading the virus. The following day I went grocery shopping, only to find many of the shelves and produce bins at my local Sprouts bare. I had to make a separate trip to my carniceria to find onions. Even there, the one small section of fideo, estrellitas, and conchitas was nearly empty. I watched videos of people fighting over toilet paper at Costco and joked, “that’s just Sunday at Costco.”

On March 17th, my husband received confirmation from his employer that he would be working from home beginning the following week. That was also the day that the first person in Arizona confirmed to have died from COVID-19 passed. That week I watched for packages containing his new work from home equipment, while the number of people in Arizona feeling symptoms, somehow finding a COVID-19 test and testing positive jumped from 16 to 53 overnight. I saw social media posts about cancelled weddings and other large gatherings, about sports events and conferences being cancelled. I thought of the tens of thousands of people from all over the country who had just been traveling through Phoenix, who were still at that moment in Phoenix, for a Spring Training season that had just gotten started and was already over. I thought of my family members who had recently returned home to California, after attending some of the Spring Training games that had managed to not be rained out. I think it was around this time that the reality of the likelihood of exposure hit me, that it began to feel like even just going to the grocery store was risky, and seeing loved ones without quarantining or being tested felt like a gamble. The reality of living in a pandemic had set in.

I stopped leaving the house except for a daily walk with my husband and our dog, grocery shopping, and picking up food. During this period I decided to prepare myself for what was to come, by watching the American Experience episode on the 1918 flu pandemic, and reading an article by a former professor about how it impacted Phoenix. I was rocked by the knowledge I took away from this afternoon, when I learned that this would not be a simple couple of months being unable to safely gather with loved ones, or be around strangers, but potentially a couple of years.

On March 30th I felt overwhelmed with all sorts of emotions as I listed to Governor Doug Ducey announce the “Stay Home. Stay Healthy. Stay Connected.” order, asking Arizonans to limit their time away from home. In the same conference where he announced this order, he encouraged Arizonans to go outside, to go golfing, to take advantage of the beautiful weather. At this point, nearly 200 cases were being identified per day, and 20 Arizonans were confirmed to have passed away from COVID-19.

March turned into April. I began checking the Arizona Department of Health Services COVID-19 Data Dashboard frequently, watching the case numbers continue to go up despite the order. When I was leaving the house at this point, I was still maskless like most others. I didn’t have a mask, and if the stores were sold out in early February, they were certainly sold out then. Then the CDC recommended that everybody wear masks, and posted instructions for how to make one yourself at home. I fashioned a couple out of an old tank top, one of my dog’s bandanas, some rubber bands and tea filters. Still, when I went to the store or to pick up food, most people weren’t wearing masks. I didn’t think the makeshifts masks looked that bad, but I was getting strange looks from people at the breakfast burrito spot and in the grocery store. I was incredibly happy when my husband’s aunt sent us some cloth masks in the mail.

The stay home order was nearly over and cases continued to rise. I began searching for testing, and saw that it was mostly limited to people who were essential workers, or who had underlying conditions. Even though cases were still rising, and there wasn’t nearly enough access to testing, Gov. Ducey decided to end the order on May 15th. By this time the Navajo Nation had emerged as a hotspot, with rates higher than New York and New Jersey. 651 Arizonans were confirmed to have died from COVID-19, and 578 people tested positive that day. The mask “debate” provided an easy way to determine someone’s political beliefs, or at the very least their commitment to community. I was incredibly saddened to go by one of our favorite bagel shops for breakfast one weekend, only to find that they were not requiring customers nor employees to wear masks. I haven’t been back since.

One month later, on June 15th, 2,999 people tested positive, and 1,194 Arizonans had passed. Arizona had emerged, for the first but not the last time, as the COVID-19 hotspot of the country. The sound of sirens became a near constant as the case count curved exponentially upward. Two days later Governor Ducey issued another order, allowing city governments to implement face covering ordinances if they wanted to, an action he had explicitly blocked with a previous executive order. The city ordinances came swiftly, and pretty soon mask mandates were in place all over the Phoenix metro area. It still took some time for the case numbers to level out and begin to decline.

In late June, a close friend tested positive, just a couple of days after going golfing with my husband. Our friend became incredibly sick and ended up being admitted to the hospital, and I tried desperately to find tests for me and my husband. Just over a week after he had been exposed, I got appointments for tests at an urgent care. Mine was first, and after waiting nearly an hour to be called back into the exam room, I was administered a test, and then told by a Physician’s Assistant that, because I was not yet showing symptoms, they weren’t going to send the test into the lab. She said that there weren’t enough resources to test everybody who wanted to be tested, even though they had just wasted the resources they used on me. In the midst of this first peak in infections and deaths, testing was still so inaccessible. It wasn’t until the first week of July, after free 24-hour COVID testing sites had opened up around the valley, that I was able to get us tested. We had passed the 14-day window of exposure at that point, but I just wanted to be sure. We went for tests on July 7th, and were told it would be a 3 – 5 day turnaround time. We didn’t get our results until 13 days later, on July 20th. I went almost immediately to spend an afternoon with my grandma.

Finally new case numbers were on the decline by early August. While still higher than they were during the stay home order, they were much lower than the summer spike of 3,000+, 4,000+ cases confirmed every day. I relaxed my personally imposed restrictions a bit, went on a road trip Airbnb vacation with my husband, went camping with my extended family members. Still, the numbers were higher than they were during the stay home order. Still, at least 10 – 20 Arizonans were dying from COVID-19 every day.

By late October cases and deaths were on the rise again. After the holidays, Arizona quickly became a hot spot once again, and we have remained at or near the top of charts tracking new infections per capita. The number of daily new cases eclipsed the summer peaks before Thanksgiving, and records were broken over and over leading up to and then following Christmas.

And now it’s been a year. A week ago, 7,262 Arizonans tested positive for COVID-19. 12,448 Arizonans have died from COVID-19, and nearly 15,000 more Arizonans died of all causes in 2020 than in 2019, a 23% increase in mortality in the state. There are no more appointments for vaccines, and individuals who got one dose might not even be able to get the second. But you can get a haircut, you can go eat inside of a restaurant, you can go to the gym. And the bars and sidewalks on Mill Ave. are busy every weekend.