How We Fight

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If I'm being honest, there are weeks when I struggle with what to write here. It's not exactly writer's block. It's more than that. It's that there are so many different important subjects to choose from. I often start down one road, detour to another, then come back around to something entirely different.

I'll give you a little glimpse inside my head this week.

Am I worried about AI? Yes. I'm really worried, for so many reasons. Every day, there are new alarming headlines. Should I write about my fears about what will happen to humanity?

Then there are rising gas and food prices, the real cost of the war in Iran, and the ways all of it is affecting everyday Americans.

Then there’s the president’s imposed ban on the free press that got announced as we headed into the weekend. Gasp, and before you say, How is that possible?, I need to blow off some steam about the entire Kennedy Center debacle (honestly, I'm beside myself!). So many emotions swirl inside my head and heart about that one. It makes no sense at all. Isn’t it simply insane that this is even happening? It’s a new height of narcissism.

Then I pause. I could go down any of these roads, but they would take me into darkness. Into anger. Into rage. So instead, I collect myself and think: no. This is not the space for that. This is a space for hope and inspiration. It’s a safe and spiritual space. Yes, it can be a space to express righteous anger, but it’s not a space for me to simply spew my concerns.

Today in the Sunday Paper, two Architects of Change I love—Peggy Fitzsimmons and Emma Tynan—guide us to the most settled place within ourselves. It is from this place that I want to write and speak.

So, I come to you in peace this morning. But I still want to talk about fighting. Yes, I do.

The other day I read an excerpt from a new book by Sarah Longwell in The Atlantic about the message voters have for Democrats. The bottom line was two words: fight harder.

And I thought to myself: yes. But what does that look like today? How does one fight differently than what we see being displayed on the national and global stage? How does one make an emotional case without being overly emotional, which could cause you to lose? How do I make it clear that I am fighting, even when I am not calling anyone names, even when I am not the loudest voice in the room, even when I am not performing outrage for the cameras?

If there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m a good fighter. I always have been. I came up in journalism when very few women occupied the anchor chair. We fought for the stories routinely handed to men. We fought for equal pay. For respect. For the right to be taken seriously in rooms that had been designed to exclude us. Growing up with all brothers, I found myself fighting on the athletic field and then not wanting to fight when they took it into the house.

I watched my mother fight for people with intellectual disabilities. I watched my father fight for economic justice. And in many ways, I feel like I have been fighting for women my entire career through my journalism, my advocacy, and everything I have built.

I am always down for a good fight. I want to fight for love. For my kids. For my country. For my health. For the millions of women whose brains are at risk right now and don't yet know it. For the millions of people who are caregiving around the clock (may we honor and recognize all the families fighting tomorrow on World Alzheimer’s Day).

The question I keep coming back to is not whether to fight. It's how.

When I spoke last week at the Time Health Forum in New York City, I had to admit something to myself that was hard to say out loud: a lot of my fight hasn't seemed to pay off the way I hoped. I have been an Alzheimer's advocate for close to twenty-five years, but we still haven't figured out what causes Alzheimer's. I have built a major nonprofit focused on women and Alzheimer’s, but we still don't fully understand why women are disproportionately impacted. Women's health remains severely underfunded. And in our recent status report, less than 20% of women even knew they were at higher risk for Alzheimer's than men. Less than 20!

After decades of fighting, after everything, the fight still isn’t over.

I don't say this from a place of defeat. I say it from a place of honest reckoning. Because there are so many impressive advocates and activists and changemakers on the ground fighting for causes they believe in deeply, and I suspect many of them feel exactly how I do. Not defeated. But not victorious either.

So what are we doing wrong?

In her Atlantic piece, Sarah Longwell wrote about something that stopped me cold. She says Trump fights differently. He emotionally connects with his voters. She said they understand on a gut level what he is fighting for. They may not like his language. They may wince at the bullying. But emotionally, they felt his fight. They felt seen by it.

And I thought: That is exactly where so much advocacy has failed. Not fight harder, but connect more emotionally. Make people feel, in their bodies and in their daily lives, why this fight is their fight too. We need to make these fights personal, but I don’t mean that in the way so many in the public sphere make things personal today through jabs and attacks on others. I mean, we need to make them personal by sharing our own stories: what we have lived through, what we fear, and what we are fighting to protect. Vulnerability creates connection. Attack creates distance.

I think about the women I am trying to reach. They are busy and stretched thin—paying bills, raising children, caring for aging parents, and trying to hold their own lives together. When I say, "women's health is underfunded,” their eyes don't light up. And when I say "Alzheimer's disproportionately impacts women,” they nod politely and move on.

But what if I said this instead: Your brain runs your life. Every decision you make, every relationship you tend, every memory you keep—your brain is the command center for all of it. And right now, most of us are not taking care of it the way we take care of everything else. I didn't. And I am fighting now for myself and for you to change that (on that note, please see the campaign below, BrainHealthMatters.com).

I’m also fighting for families everywhere in hopes that they don’t have to live through what mine did as my father battled this mind-blowing disease.

I’m also fighting because I watched my mother struggle my entire life with her health—bouncing from one doctor to another, never being given a diagnosis or the right medication (and, in fact, sometimes being given the wrong medication). Watching that terrified me as a child, and I have no doubt that it made my mother feel unseen, dismissed, and afraid. That’s why I fight the way I do. I don’t want one more child to watch her mother the way I did.

I do believe I can be a part of the village that changes the landscape for Alzheimer’s and women’s health. And I do believe I can advocate for everyday people who feel unseen. That is the engine and fuel that I run on. It’s the purpose that drives my work. It makes me feel alive, and I have no doubt that the fight is worth it.

I hope that message lands differently. Because it's not about a cause. It's about a life. Yours.

I thought about that this week as I listened to Michael J. Fox on the Emmy stage. He has fought for Parkinson's research by doing the most courageous thing any advocate can do: sharing his own life. He has made his own struggle visible and refused to hide what the disease has done to him. And in doing so, he’s made millions of people feel less alone in their own struggles. He hasn’t fought with anger. He’s fought with transparency. With humor. With an unflinching willingness to let people see the truth.

And he’s changed the field. He’s brought hope to a disease that, for many years, felt hopeless. Not because he was the loudest voice in the room. Because he was the most honest one.

Not everybody has to scream. Not everybody has to call people names or burn the room down to be heard. There is another way to fight. There has always been another way.

The question is whether we are brave enough and patient enough to fight that way.

On that note, I want to admit something else: I think we have become too quick to write people off. We say they are too old. Too privileged. Too left. Too right. Too loud. Too quiet. Too establishment. Too radical. We swipe through our leaders and our advocates the way we swipe through everything else, looking for the perfect messenger with the perfect message, and dismissing everyone who doesn't meet that impossible standard in the first three seconds.

And in doing so, we are being had.

Because while we are busy disqualifying everyone who doesn't look or sound exactly right to us, the people who lead with fury are walking right through the door we left open. They don't talk about love for your neighbor. They instill fear of the person next door. And it is working. Because fear is simple. Fear is fast. Fear doesn't require you to sit with complexity or extend grace to someone you don't immediately understand.

Love is harder. Love requires patience. Love requires you to listen beyond the surface. Love requires you to lean in emotionally.

Think about this. If FDR were alive today, I bet people would write him off for his disability. If JFK appeared, they would say he's too privileged, too Catholic, too young. They would call Reagan a simple actor who wasn’t serious or qualified. We would have dismissed all of them.

How many voices are we dismissing right now? How many fighters, how many advocates, how many people with something real and true and important to say just because we have decided in an instant that they are not our kind of messenger?

Maybe the problem is not that the fighters aren't fighting hard enough. Maybe the problem is that we have stopped allowing our hearts to be touched. Maybe we have become so armored, so certain, so curated in what we allow ourselves to hear, that we have lost the capacity to be moved by anyone. Maybe we’re just too exhausted or distracted. In many ways, we’re numb.

People who cannot be moved cannot be led. And people who cannot be led cannot change.

So what does fighting harder mean for me? I have been sitting with that question all week. And here is the answer I keep coming back to: I had a front-row seat to an extraordinary man—my dad—losing his brain’s capacity every single day. I had a front-row seat to watching my mother struggle to make sense of what was happening to her husband. I now have a front-row seat to caregivers and doctors struggling to find answers, and through my advocacy, I have a front-row seat to the massive heartbreak of families crumbling under the weight of a cruel and relentless disease.

So I am not going to stop fighting. But I am going to fight differently.

Less statistics and more heart. Less policy language and more human language. Less "women are disproportionately impacted by Alzheimer's" and more "my brain runs my life, I am terrified of losing it, and I am fighting for yours because I don't want you to lose yours either."

Fighting harder means staying in the fight without becoming hardened by it. Without letting the frustration calcify into cynicism. Without letting the years of slow progress turn into bitterness. Without losing the thing that made me want to fight in the first place. Which was never anger, by the way. It was love. It has always been love.

I’m going to stay the course, keep my heart open, and let vulnerability be the weapon.

Because the fights that last are not won by the loudest voices in the room. They are won by the most consistent one. And we in this country need consistent, centered, compassionate voices that we can hear. Ones that we believe in. Ones that, deep in our hearts, we know are fighting not to put their names on buildings but instead are fighting to make us feel seen, heard, and valued.

So, what are you fighting for right now? And how are you fighting for it? I want to know. Because I think if we compare notes—all of us who are in the arena, trying to make something better—we might just figure out how to break through together.

Also in this week’s issue:

• How to Declutter Your Inner and Outer World

• The Magic Found in Paying Attention to the Silence