Under Pressure

Notes from Where We Are

Would you rather listen?

Not all pressure announces itself, but the waves and the clouds do keep rolling in.

I have been feeling a lot of pressure lately.

Not the dramatic kind people name as burnout or crisis. Something quieter than that. A steady, atmospheric pressure that shows up in multiple places at once, which makes it hard to locate.

Financial pressure, certainly. Over the past year I have moved between different kinds of work, including leadership roles and consulting, each with its own rules, expectations, and infrastructure. Each shift requires recalibrating systems that are easy to take for granted until they change; taxes, forecasting, what it means to have a financial strategy rather than a financial hope. Getting my arms around that has its own steady hum.

But the more I sit with it, the less it feels like financial pressure alone.

A friend of mine, Trina, often uses a framework from organizing spaces: I, We, World. I’ve found myself returning to it as I try to make sense of this pressure. Working with it has been clarifying.

Because the truth is that the world is under pressure right now.

The global situation alone carries its own emotional gravity. Conflicts expand in unpredictable ways. The news arrives in fragments, but the fragments accumulate into an atmosphere. Iran. Gaza. Minneapolis. Epstein. Not the same kind of pressure, but all of it lands. Even when you try not to obsess over it, the information leaks in anyway.

And world pressure rarely stays abstract.

It enters daily life through smaller adjustments. Gas prices jump because of international conflict, which suddenly matters more when you have a commute again. Family routines that once felt easy—long drives, wandering afternoons—now require calculation. The body notices these shifts even when the mind tries to brush them off.

Some of the pressure is simply emotional. A diffuse sadness. A sense of uncertainty about where things are headed.

And for those of us who pay attention beyond the headlines, there is another layer: the pressure of awareness.

When you spend time in politically conscious spaces, there is a constant expectation that you will get it right. Not just politically right, but morally right. Strategically right. Historically right. Use the correct language. Hold the correct position. Respond to the correct crisis in the correct way.

The stakes feel high because they are high. Real harm exists. Real injustice requires response.

But the vigilance required to move through those spaces carries its own weight. It is another kind of pressure, one that lives between people.

The we layer.

This is where pressure becomes relational. It shows up in communities, workplaces, families; the spaces where our decisions ripple outward into other people’s lives.

Belonging is part of that pressure. Anyone who has spent time inside professional or movement communities knows that recognition can be uneven. Sometimes you discover that the place you thought you stood is not quite where you imagined.

But relational pressure is not only about belonging.

It is also about responsibility.

When you occupy positions of leadership, the pressure shifts. Decisions that might look procedural from the outside carry real consequences for the people inside the system. Roles change. Structures evolve. Stability moves.

That is a particular kind of pressure.

Leadership pressure rarely gets talked about honestly because it sits in a strange moral territory. Decisions have to be made. Systems have to change. And yet every decision touches someone’s livelihood.

The weight of that does not disappear simply because the decision may be correct.

That same tension appears in family life, though in a different register.

I feel pressure to provide for my family financially; to build stability, grow income, create options. But I also feel pressure to be present with them, which is harder than it sounds in a system that pits those two obligations against each other.

The work that makes that stability possible is often the same work that takes me away from them.

That is not an accident.
It is a design feature.

Some people have enough wealth to step outside that tension. They can buy time back from the system. For the rest of us, the tradeoff remains.

Time or money. Presence or provision.

There are ways to soften the edges, but the tension itself rarely disappears.

Eventually all of that pressure moves inward.

The I layer.

These are the pressures that feel most familiar; the quiet standards we carry without even noticing them.

Be a good mother.
Be a good partner.
Be a competent leader.
Show up for your team.
Be a reliable friend.
Take care of the Elders.
Be beautiful presentable.
Build the business.
Write the essays.
Use your time well.

It is an impressive stack of expectations when you list them out loud.

Time becomes its own kind of pressure inside that equation. There are only so many hours in a day, and deciding how to allocate them begins to feel like a moral calculation rather than a practical one.

Some pressures I have started to loosen.

I am not keeping up with social media the way I once thought I had to. That has consequences for growing a public platform, which is inconvenient for someone building a writing and consulting practice. But at the moment it simply does not rank high enough to compete with everything else.

There are other places where pressure gets relieved through delegation or support. Small decisions that free up time or energy.

And yet every time pressure gets relieved in a practical way, another pressure appears: judgment.

Shortcuts. Privilege. Opting out of work that others still carry.

It creates a quiet contradiction. You are expected to hold a long list of responsibilities at once; family, work, relationships, presence, care. But the moment you find ways to make that list sustainable, the terms of the judgment shift.

Doing it all is unrealistic.
Not doing it all yourself is suspect.

Often the people offering that judgment have no idea what the full shape of your life looks like. But judgment has a way of landing anyway.

Which brings me back to pressure itself.

There is a familiar story about pressure that people like to tell. Enough pressure turns carbon into diamonds.

I do not particularly like that story.

It usually gets used to justify suffering that never needed to happen.

But I have noticed something else.

Pressure reveals things.

When enough force gets applied to a system, the fault lines become visible. The places where the structure was already weak begin to show themselves. Pressure clarifies what matters and what does not. It exposes the hidden calculations we make about safety; financial, relational, professional.

In that sense, pressure is diagnostic.

It tells the truth about the systems we live inside.

I hesitate to say this, because it sounds suspiciously close to bootstrap mythology, but some of the pressure I am feeling right now does seem to be refining something in me. Not because pressure is noble.

But because it leaves less room for illusion.

When the pressure rises high enough, you cannot pretend everything is fine.

You have to decide what holds.

And what doesn’t.

If this resonated, what pressures are you under right now?
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Under This Moon

New Moon in Pisces — March 18
Stone: Labradorite — truth beneath illusion.
Tarot: Ace of Cups — a beginning that asks for emotional honesty.

This New Moon lands while things are still shifting.

Mercury is slowing, preparing to turn direct. Thoughts don’t quite land. Conversations blur at the edges. You may feel ready to decide, to name something, to move—but the clarity isn’t fully formed yet.

At the same time, desire is stretching past its limits. Venus presses against Jupiter, and it shows. Wanting more. Taking on too much. Reaching for something that doesn’t quite fit the container you’re in.

And underneath that, a quieter current: Mars building momentum with Jupiter. A steady urge to act. To move something forward. To stop circling and do something.

So you get both at once.

Pressure to expand. Pressure to choose. And just enough uncertainty to make both feel unstable.

Pay attention to where things feel like too much and where they feel like not enough. That tension is not something to resolve immediately. It’s information.

Clarity isn’t arriving all at once. It’s arriving in fragments. A sentence that lands. A moment that doesn’t let you look away. A desire that keeps returning, even when you try to smooth it over.

You don’t need to resolve the whole thing.

But you do need to be honest about what’s real.

Toward the end of this cycle, the energy steadies. Mercury goes direct on the Spring Equinox and moves out of the retrograde shadow in April. The pace slows. What feels good becomes easier to trust. You don’t have to force that shift. Let it come.

For now, stay close to what you know, even if it complicates things.

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Ritual/Reflection

• Write down one desire that feels a little dangerous to admit. Not the polished version. The one you’ve been editing to make it easier to hold.

• Under it, write:
  What would this actually require of me?

• Choose one action you will take in the next 48 hours that aligns with that desire.

• Drink a glass of water slowly. No phone. No distraction. Let the choice settle in your body before you move on.

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What’s Simmering — Equinox Edition

March 20th. Day and night meet without arguing.

Nothing extra. Nothing missing.
Just enough to feel where you are.

Equinox Plate

Start with something that grows in the ground.
Carrots, sweet potatoes, beets if you’re willing.
Roast it until it softens.

Add something sharp.
Greens with lemon. A quick vinegar dressing. Something that cuts through.

Then something rich.
Yogurt. A spoon of tahini or hummus. Olive oil. Something that steadies it.

Bring it together on a plate. Don’t overbuild it.

Finish with a squeeze of lemon, a pinch of salt, a scattering of fresh herbs.

Before you eat, pause.
Notice what’s heavy.
What lifts.
Where it tips too far. Where it holds.

Adjust once, for balance.

Then eat, and mark the shift.

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Worth Your Time

Pressure doesn’t always sound the same.
Sometimes it tightens. Sometimes it diffuses. Sometimes it slips into something almost playful without ever fully letting go.

“Under Pressure” — Queen & David Bowie
The baseline is immediate; tight, insistent, impossible to ignore. But it’s the layering that carries it. Two voices circling the same problem from different angles, never quite resolving it. The song doesn’t relieve the pressure so much as name it—and in naming it, make it briefly bearable.

“Inner City Pressure” — Flight of the Conchords
A parody, technically. But it lands because it tells the truth sideways. Economic pressure, creative pressure, the low-grade anxiety of trying to survive inside systems that don’t quite hold. It’s funny until it isn’t. Or maybe it’s funny because it isn’t.

“Pressure” — Ari Lennox
This one moves closer to the body. Pressure as something negotiated in real time; desire, expectation, attention, timing. The push and pull of being wanted and wanting back. It’s lighter on the surface, but no less precise about the conditions it’s naming.

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Further Reflection

What holds under pressure?
What doesn’t?
And what are you still trying to carry anyway?

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Until Next Time…