I wrote something back in 2018 that I keep coming back to.

I was trying to articulate the terror and the grace of watching my child grow up, of having to learn a whole new language I didn’t have words for yet, and I landed on this: I have a village of people I lean on. While I’m stumbling around in the dark, they’ll find a candle.

I meant it at the time as a parenting thing. A motherhood thing. The kind of thing you say when you’re talking about raising a child and the ways the people around you make that survivable.

I don’t think it was only a parenting thing.

I think I was circling something much bigger and just didn’t have the full picture yet.

Here’s where I am in 2026: every single person I know is stumbling around in the dark. Not just the parents. Not just the people in hard seasons. Everyone. My friend who is trying to figure out how to pay for fuel. My colleague who is watching their industry dissolve in real time. The people I see online who are clearly holding on by the thinnest thread and still showing up every day, which is its own kind of extraordinary. The people who have no idea what the world is going to look like in six months, or whether the decisions they made five years ago are going to hold up under the weight of what’s coming.

ALL of us are in the dark. The candles are in short supply.

The village was never just a parenting strategy. It was THE strategy. The one that humans have known about for as long as humans have existed, that we have consistently dismantled in the name of progress and productivity and independence, and that we are now desperately, urgently paying the price for.

Here’s the thing that gets me. We talk about the village like it’s a nostalgic concept. Like it’s a thing people had in simpler times, in smaller towns, before the world got complicated. We treat it like something you can only access if you’ve lived in the same place for thirty years or if you were lucky enough to be born into the right family or the right community. We treat it like a nice idea that doesn’t quite translate to the life we actually live.

That is such a catastrophically wrong read of what a village is.

A village is not geography. It’s not proximity. It’s not even history, although history helps. A village is the agreement between people that they will show up for each other. It is the decision, made over and over again, to be the person who finds the candle when someone else is in the dark.

My village doesn’t all live near me. Some of them I met online, years ago, and they are as real and as vital to my survival as anyone who has ever sat at my kitchen table. Some of them I have known since I was a different version of myself, and they’ve tracked every version since with the same steady love. Some of them I found recently, in unexpected places, and they slotted in like they were always supposed to be there.

What they all have in common is this: they see me. Not the version of me that I present when I’m trying to hold it together. Not the version I post online. The actual me, sitting underneath the table, trying to figure out how to cope with the world.

I wrote in 2018 that the hardest paragraph of the parenting language I was learning was the one that said: it is no longer about what you can teach them. It’s about what they do with what you taught them. I think that applies to all of us now, in the bigger world. All the structures we were taught to rely on, all the systems that were supposed to hold, all the institutions that were supposed to be the scaffolding of society, they’re doing what they’re doing. We can observe that. We can be furious about it, and we should be. We’re allowed our fury.

What happens now is what WE do. What we build for each other. Whether we choose the village or whether we keep choosing the isolation that the system has spent decades engineering for us.

That’s the thing I keep coming back to. The isolation wasn’t an accident. I said it in my last post and I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in: we have been divided and isolated on purpose. An isolated person is a more manageable person. An isolated person is a more profitable person. An isolated person scrolls and doom-reads and buys things they don’t need to fill the gap where community used to be. An isolated person is very, very easy to market to.

A person with a village is harder to reach. A person with a village has somewhere to put their fears that isn’t a consumer platform. A person with a village can say: “I don’t know how I’m going to pay for this” to an actual human being who will help them think it through, instead of quietly Googling at midnight and getting served an ad for a financial product they don’t understand.

The village is, in some ways, the most radical thing you can build right now.

I know that sounds dramatic. I know there are people who will read that and think I’m being overwrought.

I genuinely believe it. The decision to invest in your relationships, to prioritise the people in your life over the performance of productivity, to be someone who finds the candle rather than someone who just notes that it’s dark, that decision is political and it is structural and it matters enormously.

It also isn’t easy. I want to be clear about that, because I think the “just find your village” advice can land in a really tone-deaf way if you haven’t acknowledged how hard that actually is right now. When you’re working three jobs to cover rent, finding time to build community feels like a luxury. When your mental health is barely above water, showing up for other people feels impossible. When you’ve been burned by people who didn’t show up when you needed them, trusting a new set of humans feels genuinely terrifying.

I get it. I really do.

The answer I keep landing on isn’t a neat one. It’s just: start small. Start with one person. Start with being the one who sends the message that says “I’m thinking of you” with no agenda attached. Start with being honest about your own struggle, because honesty is the thing that creates the conditions for a village to form. Nobody can show up for you if you’re performing fine when you’re not.

I have spent a lot of my life trying to protect the people I love from the weight of my own hard things, and what I’ve learned is that this is actually a kind of arrogance.

It assumes that they can’t carry it. It assumes they’d rather not know. It assumes I have to manage my mess before I bring it anywhere near the people I love.

My people have shown me, over and over, that they want to be in the mess with me. That they would rather be the candle-finder than stand outside in the light wondering why I won’t let them in.

This is me saying: let people in.

Not everyone. You don’t owe everyone access to your underneath-the-table moments. Some people haven’t earned that, and that’s okay. Your village is not the general public. Your village is the specific, chosen, tended collection of people who have demonstrated, through action, that they’ll find the candle.

Find those people. Tend those people. Be that person for someone else. I am very glad I have mine.

The world in 2026 is genuinely terrifying in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I was writing about letting go in 2018. The stakes are so much higher. The cost of isolation is so much more visible. The thing that is going to get any of us through this is not a better system or a different leader or the right financial product served to us at the exact moment we’re frightened enough to click.

It is each other.

It was always each other.

It will only ever be each other.

Build your village. Hold it close. Find the candle.

That’s the whole plan.

p.s. When people show you they are not worthy of your circle, repel them aggressively. Protect your peace, too. Cheers.