I guess I’m just gonna put this out there and see what happens, probably nothing, but my gut is tied up in knots and I keep waking up at 3 am and staring at the ceiling and honestly it's getting old, you know, this feeling like a bad person when I’m not usually, or I try not to be, but then you get older and things get kinda muddy and the lines blur. Like this week. My boss, he’s a decent guy mostly, but he told me to charge this rich lady, like REALLY rich, for a part we didn’t even replace, and I did it. I just did it. And I know why, because little Timmy, his kid is sick and the medical bills are like a mountain and Timmy’s insurance isn’t great and my boss, he wants to cover his coworker, his friend, and so he figures, hey, rich lady won't even notice a few hundred extra bucks on a multi-thousand dollar bill, and it’ll pay for Timmy’s meds. And I went along with it. And it feels… WEIRD. Like a really bad joke but nobody’s laughing but me, and it’s a dry, hollow kind of laugh. And I keep thinking, would anyone else have done it? Or am I just a total pushover, or worse, am I just as bad as the rich people who probably do worse stuff all the time and never think twice? I mean, I’m a mechanic, not a brain surgeon, and I’m just trying to keep my head above water, and my parents are getting older and my kids are adults but still, you know, they need help sometimes too, and all of us humans we’re just scrambling, always scrambling for something, even when we try to do good, we end up doing something kinda bad to make it happen. And I was always the one who taught my kids to be honest, and here I am, being a part of this… this… well, it’s a lie, isn’t it? And it just kinda sits there, in my stomach, like a brick. And now I’m wondering if this is just what happens when you get to my age, mid-fifties, everything feels less black and white and more like a messy grey painting that you can’t quite make out, and you wonder if you’ve lost your way or if this IS the way, and maybe I’m just too tired to fight it, to fight the boss, to fight the system, to fight the fact that a little kid’s life depends on a made-up car part. It’s almost funny how messed up that is, the sheer absurdity of it all, and it makes me want to just scream or maybe just curl up in a ball and sleep for a week and hope it all goes away. But it won’t. It’ll just be another thing that makes me feel a little bit off, a little bit less myself, and honestly, who even IS myself anymore anyway after all these years of being a mom and a wife and a whatever… you just kinda lose track, you know? And then you do something like this. And you’re just… there. In the grey.