Is Striving Always a Virtue? Here’s the Line I’m Walking.

I keep asking God for a clean heart. But what I really want is for everyone else to try as hard as I do.

I quietly shared this with paid subscribers last week, but it’s official now: If I Die is now Slouching Toward Sunday. Same voice, sharper vision.

Two large print books arrived in an Amazon package yesterday: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. I’m collecting the classics for my daughters, and I’m collecting them in large print—because even if, despite their visual impairments, they can read standard size print, it will be more comfortable this way. The standard print editions of the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Austen, Orwell, Fitzgerald come wrapped in debossed hardcovers with foiled lettering, designed for people like me who believe books should be read and displayed.

Accessibility, on the other hand, comes with no frills.

The large print copies of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have glossy black softcovers, lifeless illustrations, and typefaces that feel like an afterthought. I knew that when I ordered them. I ordered them with a plan to rebind them myself—to turn them into collector-worthy hardcovers, debossed and foiled. Because my children deserve beauty just as much as any human. Visual impairment will not deter me. But what’s available for the visually impaired—that enrages me.

The rage sometimes rises with me, before the sun, a righteous fury that cycles through the injustices my children will face because of race, glasses, size, and maybe even family of origin. The injustices I face as someone who strives to produce excellent work—custom-bound books, specialized meals, a tailored-for-the-child education—in a world where self-care sometimes feels like throwing a Lunchable at a kid so we can unwind with Mormon Housewives. (No shade to the Housewives—only admiration for their ability to keep their kitchens that white.)

Rage is valid. Anger, even, is useful if you can see it from the right angle (which, when it comes from a woman, people rarely do).

Because these emotions—the frustration, the fury—are the heat signature of hope. They are evidence that I still believe things could be better.

Even still, I’ve started a new morning ritual. In the wake of welcoming a newborn and the absence of a regular spiritual practice, I wanted something simple. Something repetitive. A liturgy I could fold into my survival routine to subdue my big feelings. Which is how I ended up with two copies of the Book of Common Prayer. (One in English. One in Spanish.)

I was raised Southern Baptist, where faith was loud and supposed to be deeply personal—less about rhythm or ritual, more about rightness. We didn’t do liturgy. We did altar calls, unplanned testimonies, and sermons that made you question if eternity might start in the pew. There was no script for lament. Or, if there was, I couldn’t hear it above the boom of the preacher’s voice.

I got the impression I was expected to wrestle my anger into submission and call it surrender.

But in my morning prayer from The Book of Common Prayer, in the prescribed Scripture from Psalm 51, I found something that doesn’t erase my rage—but gives me somewhere to take it:

Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.

I am jealous of people who don’t rise to the occasion. I am jealous of people who do not restructure their monthly budget to afford a smart cutting machine and leather-embossing tools just to rebind classic literature in a way that makes visually impaired children feel worthy of beautiful things. Because nothing says accessibility like an artisanal edition of Jane Eyre.

I am jealous that they can live unbothered by injustice.

It’s not that I want what they have. It’s that I don’t understand how they live without this compulsion. And that confusion feels like jealousy—but underneath it, there’s something closer to grief.

Create in me a clean heart, O Lord. And renew a right spirit.

A right spirit acknowledges that maybe unbothered is a form of protection—a boundary for people who don’t have the emotional or financial capacity to do more. A right spirit acknowledges that doing more is not always morally superior. Even Jesus gave Martha permission to do less.

In the Gospel of Luke Jesus visits two sisters: Mary and Martha. Martha does what most women I know would do—she starts preparing, serving, making everything happen. Mary sits down and listens. When Martha finally asks Jesus to tell her sister to help—instead of, you know, pulling her aside and letting her have it—he tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better part. Which is beautiful, I guess.

But I’ve always wondered—if Martha doesn’t do it, who does?

In Rage Becomes Her, Soraya Chemaly writes: “We expect women to absorb inequality, discomfort, and emotional labor without complaint.” It’s not just that we absorb it—it is that we learn to turn rage into competence. Into vigilance.

Last week, I made two different birthday cakes for my mom. I really wanted to try a chocolate genoise, even though I knew it was too ambitious for my intermediate baking skills—so I made it anyway. But I also had the ingredients for my foolproof chocolate olive oil cake on standby. We had chocolate olive oil cake for dessert that night, and I was grateful for the compulsion that told me to prepare Plan B—and for the part of me that listened.

Perfectionists avoid failure; I assume it. I know that doing truly excellent work means walking straight into the possibility of it not working—and I do. But I plan meticulously so that when failure arrives, it lands quietly. I build in cushions, safety nets, backup cakes. I fail, but I fail in a way that ensures no one else has to clean it up. (Unless we’re talking about dishes. If I bake the cake, someone else always has to do the dishes.)

When someone else opts out completely—when they live their lives without the constant pressure of anticipating everything—I don’t think, must be nice.

I think, How dare you?

(Spoiler alert for Liz Moore's Long Bright River. You definitely should read it.)

There’s a moment in Liz Moore's Long Bright River that wrecked me. We discover that Mickey, the protagonist, is not her son’s biological mother. She took custody of him because her sister, an addict, was unfit to.

She didn’t swoop in like a savior. She stepped in quietly, because someone had to. And when the truth surfaces, her family turns on her. They accuse her of taking him. They imply she thinks she’s better than them.

I read that scene far past bedtime, and my eyes snapped open. Because I know what it means to step in. To carry a child through grief that isn’t biologically yours and still becomes yours all the same. I know what it is to be misunderstood. I know what it is to have deep care mistaken for control—and to fear that someday my willingness to show up might be rewritten as arrogance.

Create in me a clean heart. Because even when I’m right, I don’t want to be hard.

I’ve been reading Julie Bogart’s Raising Critical Thinkers as I try to raise good people who can sit with tension—who can consider others’ perspectives without abandoning their own. But that requires a self-awareness I don’t always practice.

It requires me to admit this: I want to be surrounded by people who have multiple hills they’re willing to die on—motherhood, career, faith, feminism. I want a partner who notices problems and moves toward them, preferably within 48 hours and with a receipt from the hardware store. I want the world to anticipate like I do—to match the urgency I live with. And when they don’t, I don’t just feel unsupported. I feel abandoned.

I don’t think it’s about superiority.But I do wonder if my care becomes control the moment I expect others to match it. Maybe the clean heart I’m asking for isn’t one that stops caring. Maybe it’s one that can care without condemning.

Create in me a clean heart, O God. Renew a right spirit within me.

I knew this verse well when I was growing up, but it wasn’t a daily prayer like it has been lately.

Even on the days when the cake turns out fine—even on the days I plan for failure and smile when the backup works—I still feel it. The ache of being the one who cares first. The one who prepares. The one who tries so hard to make everything beautiful, even if no one notices.

Create in me a clean heart. Because I don’t want to need applause to keep showing up.

Renew a right spirit. Because I don’t want to confuse being overwhelmed with being good.

If you’ve been meaning to upgrade to paid, now’s a great time—we’re saving up for a smart cutting machine to rebind the classics in large print for little eyes. Support the essays and the mildly unhinged DIY projects that keep this household running on caffeine and curiosity.