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Your spark can become a flame and change everything.

-E.D. Nixon

The quote of the day pulled out of a stack of cards. A prompt: Your spark. My spark. Friction and gasoline and the fire in the eyes.

Sometimes I feel like the furnace with a hundred rooms to heat, my spark is not enough. Other nights, breathing in the dark in bed, I am a wildfire in the crowded room, filling the air with smoke, watching bodies drop one by one.

It’s a stretch in the metaphor — but there is a fine line between setting the world on fire and burning yourself and everything you love down with it. This is where we get the calculating professional that we criticize . . . we want the martyrs, but they are buried alive.

I listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast this week about Women at Work and feel the pang of being in an HR role . . . this is impossible, I think, and then again: there needs to be another option.

We are the flames and the extinguishers — the fire starters and the boots the squash the sparks. It’s exhausting.

I am too tipsy for metaphors. Sometimes the fire just needs to burn itself out and start again.

With love,

Natalie