Moving TruthI Am Asking
I am walking a tightrope.
I have been walking it for a while now, and I have gotten good at it — at reading the tension underfoot, at adjusting without looking down, at keeping my eyes on the other side.
But the winds have been picking up.
Before all of this, there was a choice.
The circumstances of my life had been arranged — professionally, socially, financially — in a way that was designed to leave me without one. The path had been narrowed until it looked like a corridor. At the end of it was a door I was expected to walk through. The arrangement was deliberate. The pressure was real. The people involved knew what they were doing.
I knew what was behind that door.
I did not walk through it.
I walked away instead — into the unsteady, the unfamiliar, the genuinely frightening. Not because I had a plan. Not because I knew what was coming. But because I knew what would happen to me if I stayed, and I knew what I would have to become, and I could not become it.
The tightrope started there.
Everything that followed was the cost of that decision.
I resigned from my job. The reasons given were false — constructed to justify what had already been decided. I know what happened. I know that knowing is not the same as being able to prove it quickly or cheaply. So I am walking that out, one careful step at a time.
My children are on the other side of a separation. There are lawyers — on both sides, in the way these things go — and lawyers cost what lawyers cost. I have paid them with money I spent a long time saving, money that was supposed to be for later.
My retirement is gone.
I say this not to ask for your pity. I say it because you are reading something I built in the middle of all of that, and I think you should know where it came from. I chose this. I chose it with my eyes open, knowing the cost, because the alternative was something I was not willing to be.
That is not a tragedy.
That is the whole story of this site.
The tightrope is the work.
The work is why I stay on it.
I believe that what is written here matters — not because I wrote it, but because truth has a way of finding people who are ready for it, and I believe there are more of those people than anyone is counting. I believe some of them are you. I believe some of them haven’t arrived yet.
I want to be here when they do.
The winds are financial. They are legal. They are the particular exhaustion of fighting on multiple fronts at once while trying to stay upright, stay clear, stay useful.
I am still upright.
I am not someone who asks.
That is not pride — or not only pride. It is a recognition that others carry harder constraints than this. People limited by illness. By locked borders. By the absence of safety, or freedom, or the basic ability to speak. Those are real walls.
What is stopping me is money.
Currency. The one thing every person on this planet is required to hold simply to exist — and the one thing that has been deliberately designed to always be just slightly less than enough. Everyone needs it. Almost no one has quite enough of it. That is not an accident. It is the architecture.
I find it a little absurd to say out loud. That the only thing standing between this work continuing and it going quiet is something so ordinary. So universal. So strangely powerful over lives that have far more in them than a number.
But that is where I am.
And so — unusually, and with full awareness of how rare this is for me — I am asking.
But if you have ever read something here that moved you — if a piece landed somewhere real, if a question stayed with you — I would be grateful for your help staying on the rope a little longer.
A coffee. A monthly coffee. Whatever you can.
If you can’t, keep reading. Share one piece with one person who needs it. That is not a small thing — that is the whole point of this.
If you can:
I am not asking to be saved.
I am asking for enough to keep walking.
Thank you for being here.
— Skylaur Roe