When the Fuck Did Everyone Get So Mad?

When the fuck did we get this mad? Every intersection has become a toddler tantrum wrapped in two tons of steel. People aren’t driving anymore, they’re piloting their feelings. And the cars, packed with sensors and safety nets, have quietly replaced responsibility with entitlement. The result? Rage, near-misses, and a society that’s forgotten how to fucking behave.

Read More

Going Back

We’re taught to see work as a necessary evil, something to survive until retirement finally sets us free. But when your life is violently interrupted, you learn something different: meaningful work isn’t a trap. It’s a tether. And when you’re finally cleared to return, it doesn’t feel like obligation. It feels like coming home.

Read More

The Case of the Swollen Not-Knee

I didn’t need a mystery solved. I needed fluid drained. Instead, I got bureaucratic gymnastics, a five-figure invoice, and a surgical plan I never agreed to. This is the story of how American healthcare almost turned a simple fix into an expensive, invasive mistake, and how I walked out and fixed it myself.

Read More

Reclaiming MY Normal

After months of hospitals, recovery, and forced stillness, I finally felt like myself again, not because I was healed, but because I was seen. This isn’t a story about rushing back or pretending nothing happened. It’s about reclaiming the version of “normal” that keeps my mind alive, my sanity intact, and my life moving forward.

Read More

Between Sleeps

I fall asleep early, wake up in the middle of the night, write until dawn, ride through cold Santa Fe mornings, then do it all over again. It wasn’t the routine I planned, but it’s the one that’s healing me. Writing has become the thread that stitches my body, mind, and spirit back together, and right now, I wouldn’t trade this strange, quiet rhythm for anything.

Read More
The System is Broken, Rants & Raves Kate Sjostrand The System is Broken, Rants & Raves Kate Sjostrand

3:00 A.M. and the Right to Repair Bullshit

Waking up at 3:00 a.m. has a way of stripping things down to their bones. No filters. No patience. Just clarity. Somewhere between insomnia and Instagram, I watched a politician pitch the so-called Right to Repair Act like it was liberation. It isn’t. It’s a dangerous sleight of hand that trades responsibility for regulation and calls it freedom.

Read More

The Silent Moments

People have opinions about my recovery. Strong ones. They form them from moments, snapshots, not from the hours spent in silence at two in the morning, staring at medical records, trying to understand what my body remembers even when my mind does not. This isn’t recklessness. It’s reckoning. And what you’re seeing is only a fraction of a much deeper transformation.

Read More

The Gift I Didn’t Ask For

Everyone tells me it must be a blessing that I don’t remember the accident. That it’s a gift not to carry those images, those moments, that trauma. But they’re wrong. What they don’t understand is that my brain didn’t just erase the crash, it erased an entire day, the ER, the ICU, the moments that defined the months that followed. And I’m left carrying rage, grief, and pain without context. That kind of absence isn’t mercy. It feels like theft.

Read More

When The Universe Says “Hold My Beer”

Sometimes the universe doesn’t wait for you to ask. It looks you in the eye, cracks a grin, and says, “Here, hold my beer.” Then it grabs the wheel. Today, instead of rage-writing about healthcare or bureaucracy, I wrote queer short stories. Two of them. And when the words come like that—unforced, urgent, necessary—you don’t argue. You get out of the way and let them land.

Read More