In the Goo

An Update From a Friend

Hello? Tap. Tap. Tap… Is this thing on? Is anyone still here? I know it’s been a while since my last post, but I finished my first year of grad school last week and wanted to get back to Substack and start writing again this summer. I’ve learned my lesson, I won’t promise a specific cadence or schedule because every time I do, it turns out to be a lie.

I want to thank all of you who are still following my journey, and welcome a bunch of new followers and subscribers who have joined while I was away. I want to thank my old friend (and birthday buddy) Emmy Award-winner Jeff Hiller (for HBO’s underrated warm hug of a show, Somebody Somewhere) for recommending my Substack and recommend his as well. Also, if you haven’t read Jeff’s book Actress of a Certain Age, do yourself the favor and get on it!

About midway through the semester, one of my fellow Gen X midlife career pivot classmates texted the group chat, struggling, now too deep into the decision to turn back, wondering what they were thinking by vanishing from an established career in order to pursue a degree in social work. We commiserated and confirmed that we were all feeling the same kind of way.

Transformation is hard. When a caterpillar enters the chrysalis state prior to becoming a butterfly, it literally melts down to a liquid goo of cells before rebuilding itself piece by piece and emerging with wings. I shared this metaphor in the chat and said “We’re all in the goo now.”

I think that metaphor holds for me personally and for America and the world at large this first part of 2026. We’re in a sticky mess and feel formless but know that a transformation is inevitably coming (unless of course someone stomps on the cocoon before we can emerge).

Being in the goo is the challenge but it needs to be experienced in order to grow and change.

It’s not that the second semester was necessarily easier than the first, but it wasn’t starting from zero again. I had gotten used to the schedule and the reading and gotten to know my classmates better, so there wasn’t the overwhelming shock of the first semester, which made it easier for me to focus on the work.

I came to realize that social work is not one thing. It is a suite of ideas and systems that is necessary wherever there are people who need help. As someone who doesn’t have one specific interest, the generalist nature of social work, which incorporates ideas from social sciences, psychology, systems theory, ethics, politics and policy, and more, tied together by a loose code of ethics, really appeals to me.

I wrote papers or worked on projects that spanned everything from ethics of human research, family systems, how climate change is a social issue, grief in young men and boys, Pennsylvania’s recreational marijuana bill, the Supreme Court’s ruling on conversion therapy (linking me back to my But I’m a Cheerleader roots). I wrote a literature review about how we traumatize our youngest generations through gun violence, school lockdowns, community violence and a history of racist policy that continues to create poor mental health outcomes throughout their lives. Spoiler Alert: the more trauma children experience, the worse their outcomes. I even wrote a short play for one of my classes.

Cataloguing this, really helps me to see how far I’ve come and how much I’ve learned. And it gives me ideas for future Substack posts I want to bring to you this Summer. Because underlying all of this is the state of the world, and from where I stand, the world has become more volatile and messy.

This is the world I’m studying social work in. A country where the Voting Rights Act gets gutted by the Supreme Court on a Tuesday like it’s nothing. Where the rules, laws and systems designed to protect the people are being actively dismantled by the government entrusted to protect them. I didn’t stumble into social work by accident — I chose it because I believe, as I wrote early in my journey here, that Human | Nature is real: that humans are animals hardwired for connection, to our communities, ourselves, and the Earth. The current administration and their billionaire puppeteers are doing everything they can to ignore these truths (and distract us from the Epstein Files).

So this summer I’m going to write. About young men and their “crisis of loneliness”. About climate change as a social justice issue. About what it costs us when we traumatize generations and call it policy. About hope, even when it’s hard to find. About the forests and the systems that show us another way is possible.

But for today, I’m just reporting in from the cocoon. Still in the goo. Still becoming. The wings are not yet visible but I have to trust the process.

Thanks for sticking around through the transformation. Let me know about the times in your life that you were in the goo, and what it looks like from the other side.