Authors note: This was written on June 2 for my email newsletter list.

Last night I went to bed and said my prayers. Thank you for June 1st 2026. I said this genuinely. I do not say this every day.

June 1st 2026 felt like rounding the last corner on a slow race out of hell. After this one final bend, fire and brimstone in my rearview, the bleak whatever-the-hell-that-was from the past flies off my back like a cloak that’s just been ripped open at the neck. Rid of me, it flits off with the last moments of feral gale, flying backward dramatically, emphatically. Erratically—like a bat.

Decloaked, ghostless, free, I pressed the gas all the way down at the apex in the bend. Sayonara to all that came before—good fuckin’ riddance. I won’t look back. I will never look back. I’ve always been more pepper than salt.

As I come to circle ‘round the track, the smoke clears and there it is: a distant, but closer than ever, sunrise. The kind you only see in deserts. Deep indigos, dusty pinks, outlaw reds; the colors of beginning again. The colors of Phoenix. The colors of home.

This is the moment I’ve been counting on since she died. The hope of again—of warmth again, beauty again, dreams again, desire again, love again... one of these days.

One of these days is now.

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I pull my dusty sunnies down from the sun visor, drop the top, and cruise off into the hard-won golden season I was promised. No more cloaks, only scarfs in the wind.

That is how yesterday felt. Not because of some big gigantic moment—true shifts are never so cinematic. No big Hollywood climax here; turns out, I am not a blockbuster. No, I just… felt it. I stepped into the flow, or, more likely, the flow stepped into me. Whatever the case, here I am, floating down the river on a throne, ice-cold beer in hand, chilled. Aware. Going swimmingly in the right direction. Finally.

Speaking of direction, last time I wrote to you I told you I had gotten clear on mine. I told you there were two pillars holding up my new-found path. I told you one was teaching and I told you the other one I can’t reveal just yet. And I still can’t reveal that second one (sorries) but I can tell you that I’ve dedicated the entire month of June to building it.

And I just know it’s going to be a breeze—scarfs in the wind, my friend, scarfs in the wind.

The gentle, gentle wind.

This is my little story for you today. It’s small and vague and imperfect—written in a flash—and everything in and around me wants to convince myself not to share it with you. Because, “who cares?”

But I am ignoring that devilish voice, at least for today, because I know it isn’t the voice of God. The Creator—who I deeply believe wants us to, more than anything, CREATE—would surely insist our stories, even the small and vague and imperfect ones, matter. Now more than ever. Now, as our old world burns to the ground.

We live in “the time of monsters,” waking up to increasingly insane headlines being normalized every single day: war, genocide, pedogate, AI apocalypse, environmental apocalypse, critical-thinking apocalypse, alien apocalypse. You name it, we’re on our way.

“And there’s nothing we can do about it.” - signed, Reese Witherspoon, Mel Robbins, Demi Moore & Satan

The fuck there’s not.

Toni Morrison, when asked about the act of writing (and I’d expand that to say more generally creating) in troubled times, said this:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

The antidote to every single thing we face ahead lies in both refusing to lose our own humanity and refusing to lose connection with other humans. And it is storytelling, folks, that is the cornerstone of human connection. Always has been, always will be.

If you have long held a desire to tell your story, I invite you to claim that path now. Step into your flow; let is step into you. Activate your voice. Take your seat on your God-given thrown. My upcoming ONLINE workshop, Your Path to Publishing, is for all level of writers who are ready to (or thinking about being ready to) birth their story into this world.

A world that is outrageous, no doubt, yet it is ours in which to outrage.

And you may feel helpless in that, most of us do.

That’s why today I write to remind you of the truth: your story is a bomb.

Cheers,
Arizona

Like my vibe? Cool. Here are some other ways to connect with me:

• Follow me on instagram

• Join my email list, which is different than my Substack list

• Work with me (consulting, editing, ghostwriting, workshops, all the things)

It was Joan Didion who said it. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

In. Order. To. Live.

This is no small claim: to tell stories is to be alive.

In one seemingly simple sentence, Didion drilled down to the very core of what it means to be human. Of what makes us different. Of what we are made of.

Complex storytelling is what distinguishes us from every other living being on the planet. It’s the very building block of who we are. As natural as breathing. A survival instinct.

And make no doubt about it, we are now in an era that is threatening our survival. For the first time in history, we have entered an age where the very faculties that allow us to tell stories—our attention, our imagination, our capacity for deep reflection—are under siege. There is a war on the actual state of being human and our inner life is the battlefield.

With the rise and exponential growth of AI, a landslide of people have begun outsourcing their creative impulses, their capacity to tell the very stories that make us human. What is meant to be forged internally through struggle, reflection, and synthesis, is now being generated externally, frictionless and fast.

Day by day we become more mechanical. People are happily handing over the most human acts—sense-making, meaning-making, critical thinking—to machines who do not love, cannot suffer, and do not understand the concept of survival.

Machines do not need stories in order to live—we do. As our inner life is outsourced, our stories begin to thin. And when the stories thin, so do we.

Writing matters now more than ever because telling stories matters now more than ever.

Writing, storytelling, art—it all coaxes us away from the mechanical that encases us and toward the miraculous. Toward what truly matters. Toward the soul. Writing is wrestling—with our beliefs, with the world at large, with the nature of reality, with our concept of God. And that exact wrestle is extremely fucking important right now.

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As Toni Morrison put it, when asked about the act of writing in troubled times:

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

This isn’t really anything new, of course. From banned books to underground presses and samizdat, writing has always been a part of the resistance. Writing has always been how we push back. It interrupts the world’s trance. It activates spiritual awareness. It declares: under no circumstances, will I surrender my story, my life.

You may have noticed the world as we’ve long known it is crumbling. We are living in a troubling—and so revolutionary—time, and sharing our stories is the rebellion. It’s the front line. It’s Katniss giving a three-finger salute while looking directly into the eye of the camera.

Doubling down on writing, storytelling, and creativity in general is what will keep us human in a world pushing us toward the opposite. To sit down with a pen and pad of paper and an intention to create something true, something real, something human, is a direct revolt to the idiocracy technocracy that looms. To sit down and spell out your ideas, your stories, your love, your worries, your confusion, your rage—it’s all resistance to the robo-dystopian nightmare that is pounding eagerly at our doorstep.

Every era of upheaval has been midwifed, defended, and preserved by writers. Writing is the last place where human meaning is still made by hand, through struggle and faith, in a world racing to automate the soul. It’s how we insist on staying human in a system intending to strip us of what we are made of. It’s how we survive. It’s how we live.

Cheers,
Arizona Bell

Like my vibe? Cool. Here are some other ways to connect with me:

• Follow me on instagram

• Join my email list, which is different than my Substack list

• Work with me (consulting, editing, ghostwriting, workshops, all the things)