“Are you crazy?” a woman I’d just met began, perplexed. “Why bother writing if you can’t make a living at it?”

Back in 2001, when stories I had locked away in my brain found their way to paper, I felt God was giving me another talent to play with. From the time I was young, I was pulled to the arts: drawing, painting, sculpting, even sewing. Later, music entered with my first guitar, and off I was in folk land, singing the songs of John Denver, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. And while I treasured every moment of creation, even occasionally making decent money from each, I was raised to believe the arts were just a nice hobby. They couldn’t be the sole occupation for people who had bills to pay. So I understood her confusion, especially when writing can be a laborious process for little or no pay.

Fighting for control of American jurisprudence has been a blood sport in our country for a while now, so anyone might have assumed that Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court would be fraught with emotion and partisanship on both sides. But if you listened to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony at the confirmation hearings, watched Kavanaugh’s rebuttal to her claims and then saw the Senate Judiciary Committee respond to both, you would have witnessed something new: the acute pain of an entire nation infused throughout a super-charged, high-stakes, winner-take-all moment of lasting historical and cultural importance.

Acrimony, bitterness, victimhood – we’ve all seen that playbook before. This time, however, it felt different to me, as if polarization in our country had reached its zenith. I don’t mean in a “fever broke” sort of way, I mean that we arrived at the summit only to find ourselves at the base of a taller, more arduous peak. In other words, turbulent times ahead.

Maybe Donald Trump is, after all, the greatest president of all time.

For a variety of reasons, he did encourage a record number of voters to engage in the mid-term elections to make sure their voices were heard. To me, that is his biggest accomplishment so far.

Walking into my apartment, exhausted after a long day of negotiations on my recent listing in Los Altos, I stopped and looked around at the tiny space I called home. Just a year ago, I sold my beautiful five-bedroom, 3,500-square-foot home – filled with memories and pictures of my four kids on every wall – and downsized to what felt like a 780-square-foot closet. My first thought was, “I should be crying over this change.” Instead, I smiled.

My spouse and I biked up to downtown Los Altos in mid-October to watch the Los Altos High School homecoming parade.

“I’m in favor of a vibrant downtown.”