Alignment/Too Everything
She was a child who ran and colored and noticed everything.
Too everything.
She ran alongside a fence line with a tiger named Maggie. Jacket tied around her waist. Both of them in motion. Neither of them performing anything.
For the first time in twenty years, she was not holding her breath.
For a decade, I tried to align systems that could not be aligned.
I believed in the mission the way some people believe in God. Completely. Without evidence. I sat in conference rooms and ran wealth screenings and made the case to people with money on behalf of a mission I was no longer sure I believed in.
In the professional world, alignment looks like this: your marketing colleague launches a campaign. You see it. You make a call. You have a donor in that market who can host an event. You find the person who will push it over the top. You are moving relationships and resources in the same direction, deepening what already exists, amplifying what is already in motion. It is skilled work. It is satisfying work. And it has nothing to do with you.
Dissonance feels like being trapped inside a tornado. Shards of glass. Trees. Roofs. Everything flying at me at once. I didn’t navigate it. I held on. I dodged. I waited for it to settle.
So I did what I knew how to do. I crafted the exterior more carefully. I made it polished. I made it professional. I held my breath and kept holding it until holding it felt like the same thing as breathing.
I found myself in Arkansas.
A Boston girl in Arkansas. I will leave that there.
I was in a cabin with two colleagues. We were building something that felt like it was actually reaching the thing it was supposed to reach. Animals healing. People show up the way people show up when the work is real.
Salvador survived confinement and neglect. He did what he had to do to get through it — masked, endured, existed within conditions that were pitiful and horrific. And then someone gave him a different situation. Not perfect. Not the wild. Not what had been taken from him. But enough space to be more himself.
One night, I sat at a bar and described the sanctuary to my family. Showed them images. Talked about it the way you talk about something that has gotten all the way inside you. They leaned in. They said it was different. Unusual. My sister commissioned a piece of it.
I looked up and realized I had brought my family into my work without even trying.
Twenty years. I had kept those two worlds separate with the kind of discipline that looks like professionalism and feels like fear. My work was my work. My family was my family. The line between them was a rule I didn’t know I had made until I broke it; not deliberately, not strategically, but at a bar, over drinks, unable to stop talking about something I loved.
She looked at me across the cabin and said:
Keira. Maybe — just maybe — your personal and your professional are finally aligned.
That is not a strategy. That is not leverage.
But it is also not the whole truth.
Running with Maggie was like finding my unscared self. Damage and all.
She was just me.
Trust the reader. Cut until it hurts. Earn the silence.