I should warn you in advance that the universe appears fully committed to casting me as some wandering patron saint of misplaced dogs, because somehow, honestly, I don’t know how this keeps happening to me.
I found another puppy, this tiny German Shepherd mix with ears still too heavy for her head and an umbilical cord scab that tells me she hasn’t been alive long enough to understand that humans sometimes do the cruellest things without hesitation.
She was down by the creek behind the house, wedged between the brush and water as if she was debating which direction to run in that would hurt less. And of course, in the way my life has always unfolded, she looked at me with that little face, half hope, half apology, and my entire body responded before my brain could even negotiate options.
She glued herself to me instantly, tucked behind my ankles like she’d known me her whole life, and every time a car passed or the wind moved wrong, she pressed her entire weight against my calves as if she believed I was the final safe place on earth. Shadow, predictably, is already competing for custody of my lap, performing his dramatic wedge maneuver by planting his thirty-something pounds directly between us, shoulder first, sighing with that theatrical exasperation that only dogs, and insecure men, seem to master. Dino, my other pup (Golden Retriever/Chihuahua), is thrilled, though “thrilled” for him is somewhere between confusion and blind enthusiasm; he was grown in a lab, not a womb, so everything in his life feels like an experiment he’s participating in without informed consent.
But the baby, she’s soft in the way only frightened animals are soft, the kind of softness that presses itself into the crease of your knee and refuses to look up, afraid that if she lifts her face the world will rearrange itself back into the moment it abandoned her. I took her to the front yard, let her watch children on bikes and strollers rolling past, and other dogs being walked by parents who don’t yet realize their children will soon be adults who ask complex questions at inopportune hours, and still she would not take more than six inches of distance from my feet. And the moment a car approached, even one she couldn’t see or hear, she ran for me so quickly her paws scraped the concrete. That’s how I know she wasn’t homeless. She wasn’t wandering. She was dropped, left, and removed from the center of someone’s life without explanation. Some fears settle into the muscles before they ever reach the tongue, and she moved with that quiet, trembling knowledge.
This isn’t the first time I’ve stepped into the middle of someone else’s irresponsibility, nor the last. Houston gave me two Great Pyrenees puppies trapped on a second-story balcony in heat so thick it felt like being waterboarded. Those dogs were panting themselves into exhaustion, no shade, no water, and a nineteen-year-old owner who didn’t understand that double-coated dogs can’t cool themselves by sweating, that they were built for snow banks and northern air, not concrete that bakes to 140 degrees by noon. Their umbilical cords were infected, riddled with worms and fleas, and I remember thinking how strange it was that a species built for mountains and snow was suffocating in a city that didn’t care enough to learn the basics of their biology. I carried them out myself, told the kid plainly that I was taking his dogs, marched them straight into a vet clinic, and later drove them across the country to Minnesota, where snow breeds actually belong, to homes that would love them, to a place where the seasons still mean something.
Sometimes I think rescuing is just what my hands know how to do. Not because I’m good, but because I am physically incapable of walking past suffering without feeling like the air has been stolen out of my lungs. I rescue until my arms are tired, until my mind is tired, until I’ve redistributed whatever tenderness I have left so something else, someone else, can go on breathing a little easier.
And in the midst of all of this, the job interviews came and went like little tests of intention, each one its own small theater of confusion and opportunity. I won’t share details the way I normally might because I don’t trust spoken plans; they evaporate too easily. But I can tell you this much: I felt steady in myself, the way I do when I know I am speaking from the place where logic and instinct braid into certainty. I care about systems, about structure, about analytics that actually measure impact and not vanity; I care about whether a company knows what it needs or if it’s simply hiring because someone told them it was time to grow. Most companies don’t know. They think they do, but the gap between intention and comprehension is wider than anyone wants to admit.
So I interviewed them back. I asked them questions they weren’t expecting because I’ve sat at enough executive tables to know when something is missing, when a company is reaching for the wrong solution, when a startup is trying to hire an operations person, when what they really need is someone who can reengineer the entire internal skeleton they didn’t realize was crooked. And I felt proud of myself, not because I performed perfectly, but because I didn’t shrink. I didn’t pretend to know less than I do. I didn’t withhold the clarity that has taken me years and entire lifetimes of mistakes to earn.
I’ve never been driven by money for its own sake; I’m driven by meaning, by impact, by the kind of purpose that outlives a paycheck. Give me my expenses covered and one luxury shoe a month, and I’ll be fine, because the real value is in what you can build, what you can extend, what you can open for other people. Resources matter more than wealth. Knowledge matters more than salary. And when you understand that—truly understand it—the world rearranges itself around the quality of your intention.
Which brings me, reluctantly, to the truth that gets me in trouble the most: men are my Plan B. It’s not a joke, not some feminist stance or rejection of softness, it’s just the architecture of my life. I am a mother to two dogs, one special needs and one emotionally confused; I’ve lived most of my adult life in solitude, whether chosen or forced, and I am comfortable there in a way that frightens people who think companionship is proof of worthiness. The company I accept is exceptional because my solitude is exceptional. I don’t need a partnership to feel whole; I need alignment to consider sharing the space I built for myself.
My career, my mission, my eventual child—that’s Plan A. Adoption has always called to me extremely loudly. My dream was to be stable enough by thirty-five to take three to five years off and adopt a child who deserves a world much bigger than the one I grew up in. I don’t trust the American public school system. I don’t trust gatekept information. I don’t trust the careful curation of ignorance that was handed to me by the region, the culture, the system. I want my child to have access, not limitations. Opportunity, not containment.
And if a man cannot commit to that—to private school, to alternative education, to an ungatekept childhood—then he cannot commit to me. And therefore, he cannot commit to my children. I would rather raise a child alone with the full force of my ambition than raise one with someone who would diminish their world just because it’s cheaper, easier, or more common. I will not hand a child the smallness I had to break out of—the one shaped by geography and circumstance.
So yes, men are Plan B. But I should clarify: even the one I’m not letting myself overthink does not outrank the life I’m building, not because he is unworthy, but because I am Plan A. And the truth is, if he ever knew that, if he ever understood how rare it is for me to soften even a fraction of an inch toward someone, he might realize that being Plan B in my life is still more sacred than being Plan A in most people’s.
So here I am: rescuing dogs, interrogating startups, trying to decide where to plant myself next, writing too much, sharing more than I ever thought I would, letting you in slowly, deliberately, in the way someone like me only can, one layered truth at a time.
And maybe that’s the real thread of all of this—the rescuing, the questioning, the interviewing, the uprooting, the rebuilding. Maybe everything I’ve done this year has been one long attempt to protect whatever small part of the world still feels soft to me. Whether that softness takes the shape of a trembling puppy or a career I refuse to compromise or a future child who deserves a bigger world than the one I had, the instinct is the same: I move toward what needs shelter, and I move away from anything that tries to convince me that smallness is safety. I don’t believe in shrinking. I don’t believe in settling. And I don’t believe in pretending that I don’t want more, not more money, but more meaning, more intention, more resonance in the bones of my life.
I think that’s why I’m so careful now, why I’ve become almost deliberate to the point of secrecy when choosing the people I let orbit me. When you’ve lived most of your life in solitude, the smallest shift in someone’s energy feels seismic. You notice things others overlook—who flinches at responsibility, who rises to it, who meets you where you are, and who simply marvels from a distance because they’ve never learned how to step closer without trembling. People assume solitude makes you lonely, but I’ve found the opposite: solitude teaches you how to recognize real connection when it appears, not because it announces itself loudly, but because it arrives quietly and consistently, without forcing you to compromise any part of yourself. And in that way, the people I choose, even the one I’m trying not to think too deeply about, matter not because I need them, but because I recognize a softness in them that echoes something inside of me.
As I figure out where to go next, how to rebuild a life that has been dragged through more extremes than any one person should reasonably endure in a single year, I’m not rushing, I’m not forcing anything. I’m letting each day unfold with the same intuition that led me to every dog I’ve ever rescued and every crossroads I’ve ever walked toward with shaking hands but steady feet. I know that whatever corner of the world becomes mine next will make itself known in its own time, just like the people who are meant to be there when I get there. For now, I’m doing what I’ve always done: caring, choosing, building, observing, loving in my own strange way, and staying tethered to the kind of life that feels warm in the center of my chest.
Until next week.
xo,
Sheridan Guerrette
WhatSheridanSaid.com
Life Behind the Artist: Wed at 9/8C
