I Can't Find the Runway

On political homelessness and the cost of complexity

Four years ago, I paid $26,000 to install a grease trap in my cat café.

A 100-gallon grease trap — which I named Grease Witherspoon, because if you can't laugh you'll cry — required by the city of Palm Springs to prevent fats, oils, and greases from entering the city sewer. From a business whose most significant culinary operation was a single espresso machine. The cats, for the record, were not consulted on the environmental impact assessment.

I appealed. I documented. I pointed out that neighbouring businesses serving actual hot food — the kind that generates actual grease — had been granted waivers because they'd opened before stricter rules came into effect. I was told, essentially, that large chains and their architects know how to navigate the system, and that smaller businesses without professional support tend to struggle with compliance. Which is a polite way of saying: the rules exist, we haven't codified the exceptions, and that's your problem.

She cost $26,000 — twenty of it just to dig the trench to bury her. She never fills. She sits dry in my floor, connected to the city sanitary sewer line, emitting gases from the sewer itself — the very system she was installed to protect — that I have to neutralise every single day with water, vinegar and baking soda poured down the floor drains. A $26,000 hole in the ground that requires daily maintenance to stop smelling like the problem it was supposed to solve.

And somewhere in the months of fighting that battle — the paperwork, the appeals, the cheerful bureaucratic indifference — something shifted in me politically that I'm only now finding the words for.

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What I couldn't quite shake was something I'd read about Gavin Newsom. The origin story of his political career begins with a mop sink. A city inspector told him his new wine shop needed one — despite the fact that the entire store was carpeted. He pushed back, he fought city hall, and the rest is California history. The mop sink, the story goes, launched a governor.

I think about that sometimes. Not with bitterness exactly — more with a kind of wry, exhausted bewilderment. Because somewhere between Newsom's mop sink and my grease trap, decades passed, a progressive political dynasty was built, and somehow the machinery that radicalised a young entrepreneur into public service is still producing the same paperwork. Just with better branding.

That's not a partisan observation. It's a governance one. And it's the kind of thought that — once it occurs to you — starts opening doors to other thoughts you weren't expecting to think.

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It started with the true-up bill.

The condo I was renting had solar panels. The responsible thing. The California thing. And yet every year, a bill arrived for several thousand dollars — the gap between what the panels generated and what we actually consumed, widened by rates that seem to climb regardless of how much sun you catch. We catch a lot of sun. This is Palm Springs. We have three hundred and fifty days of sunshine a year. It wasn't enough.

I moved out two years ago. I am still making monthly payments to Southern California Edison for electricity I no longer use, in a condo I no longer live in. I mentioned it once at dinner and watched three people around the table nod with the particular weariness of people who have stopped being surprised and who are on their own payment plans.

That nod is everywhere once you start looking for it. Car insurance that costs significantly more than it did two years ago and shows no sign of returning to what it was. Groceries that require a moment of quiet recalibration at the checkout. Utilities, rent, staffing costs, supply costs — the whole stack of ordinary expenses that used to be manageable and now require a kind of constant low-level financial triage. Until one day you realise you are no longer watching other people struggle to exhale financially. You are one of them.

I want to be precise here, because I know the counterarguments and I find some of them genuinely compelling. California is one of the largest economies in the world — a fact Newsom will cheerfully remind you of, while somehow leaving unaddressed the question of who, exactly, can afford to live inside it. The state leads in innovation, environmental policy, technology, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ protections in ways I deeply value. The cost of living crisis is not unique to California. Inflation has risen globally. Housing pressures exist across most of the Western world. Pandemic aftershocks, corporate consolidation, stagnant wages, and decades of structural economic shifts all share the blame.

I understand all of that. I hold all of that.

And yet.

I should tell you who I am, because it matters for what comes next.

I am a British-Canadian green card holder who moved to California five years ago and has poured her savings, her labour, and the better part of her late forties and early fifties into building something here. When I arrived, I felt politically and culturally aligned with almost everyone around me. I was socially liberal — still am. Instinctively suspicious of ideological extremism in any direction. Supportive of LGBTQ rights. Broadly progressive on social issues. And genuinely uncomfortable with the direction American politics seemed to be heading.

None of that has changed.

What has changed — and what the grease trap cracked open, if I'm honest — is my relationship to political certainty. And more specifically, the social expectation of political certainty.

A few years ago, if you'd asked where I stood politically, I could have answered almost reflexively. The categories felt clean. The moral lines seemed obvious. Certain beliefs appeared to belong naturally together, as though political identity were less a collection of independent thoughts than a fully assembled package you either accepted wholesale or rejected entirely.

Then life interrupted the packaging.

Lived experience has a way of complicating ideological loyalty that no intellectual framework quite prepares you for. Somewhere over the last couple of years, I found myself thinking something that felt genuinely dangerous to say out loud in the environment around me:

What if Democratic governance in California simply isn't working as well as people want to believe?

Even typing that sentence, I feel the pull to pad it immediately with reassurances. I can feel myself reaching for the disclaimers — and that reflex, I think, is exactly worth examining. Because it tells you something about the climate we're operating in.

I'm also aware of the obvious counterargument: that this is precisely what a person whose financial interests had shifted would say. That economic pressure reshapes perception, and that calling it intellectual honesty doesn't put it above suspicion. I can't fully step outside that possibility. Nobody can. What I can say is that I've tried to hold it honestly, and that the discomfort of writing this feels less like self-interest and more like the specific fear of social consequence. Which is a different thing, and the thing I actually want to talk about.

Palm Springs is, in many ways, an extraordinarily compassionate and welcoming place. It is also a small social ecosystem. People know one another. Businesses depend on community relationships. Political identity is often assumed before it's spoken. And within many socially progressive spaces — here and elsewhere — there can exist an unspoken expectation that moral goodness and political alignment should move together, in the same direction, without much deviation or delay.

You are expected to fall in line.

Or at the very least, to stay strategically silent once your thinking starts becoming inconveniently complicated.

About a year ago, I got a call from a fellow small business owner. He wanted to give me a heads up: there was going to be a protest outside my cat café that weekend.

What are you protesting? I asked. Cats?

No, he explained. The Log Cabin Republicans had posted on social media saying they were planning to go hiking at the trail that starts at the base of the mountain, near my café. They were being met with organised opposition.

I didn't know who the Log Cabin Republicans were. He told me: LGBTQ Republicans.

I sat with that for a moment. And what I kept thinking — privately, carefully, in the way you think things you're not sure you're allowed to say — was: well, maybe they're socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Maybe they're small business owners trying to make it in California. Maybe their reasons are more complicated than the category suggests. Maybe it’s none of our business, and they just want to go hiking.

I didn't say that out loud.

But I kept thinking about those thoughts. Not because I'd reached any conclusions about Log Cabin Republicans specifically. But because of what the moment revealed: that the acceptable response to LGBTQ conservatives going hiking was not curiosity. It was opposition. And that any other response — including simply not knowing what to think yet — placed you quietly on the wrong side of something.

I've lost count of the dinners, the events, the conversations where a thought has formed in my mind — yes, but what about the other side of that — and I've chosen, consciously, to keep it behind my teeth. Not because I wasn't sure of it. Because I was sure of the room.

I've watched it happen too — in this town and others. Business owners I know, people with families and leases and staff, who found themselves named online as being on the wrong side. Accused of sympathies, I had no way to verify. Calls to boycott, to avoid, to punish. And when I've gone looking for the thing they were supposed to have said or done, I couldn't find it. The evidence was the accusation. The authority was the consensus. The only thing required for a verdict was enough people willing to repeat it.

That's not political disagreement. That's something closer to social enforcement. And it works — which is the point. It works because everyone can see it happening, and everyone draws the same quiet conclusion: don't be next.

I want to name that pressure clearly, because I think it deserves to be named. It is not the same as disagreement. Democracies require disagreement — they require scrutiny, friction, competing visions of governance. What I'm describing is something different: the growing sense that independent political thought now carries social consequences that have less to do with policy positions and more to do with moral classification. Question the party line and you're not just wrong — you're suspect. You've revealed something about your character.

I know the counter to this too. I've heard it, and I don't dismiss it: that in a political climate this volatile, nuance can function as cover. That there are moments when the stakes are too high for complexity, when ambiguity becomes a kind of abdication. I understand that argument. I've made versions of it myself.

But I think it has a cost that doesn't get tallied honestly. When the demand for ideological conformity becomes the price of belonging, people don't become more certain — they become more silent. They perform certainty they don't feel, in rooms where they don't feel safe, and save their actual thinking for parking lots and private messages and the drive home. That's not a healthy political culture. It's a brittle one.

I also recognise that I can afford this ambiguity in ways not everyone can — my rights are relatively secure, my identity doesn't put me in the crosshairs of the legislation I find most troubling. The pressure I experience as silencing may, for others, be the only mechanism available to defend something they can't afford to lose.

I don't think Palm Springs is unique in this. I just happen to live here. And I'm done staying quiet about it.

Though I'll admit: I'm scared to publish this. Scared of a sentence being lifted out of context and spreading faster than the surrounding thought. Scared of being accused of something I don't recognise in myself. That fear, I think, is the whole point.

This is what I mean by political homelessness.

Not that I have nowhere to stand. But that the place where my actual, private, honestly-arrived-at beliefs might touch down cleanly — where they would be received as coherent rather than suspicious — I can no longer locate it.

If you criticise California governance, people assume you've crossed over entirely. If you support LGBTQ rights without qualification, people assume you hold progressive positions on every economic question. The ideological packages are sold as complete sets, and returning individual items apparently isn't an option.

But real people are not that coherent. Or more precisely — reality itself isn't.

I think many people are privately holding contradictory political thoughts right now, while publicly performing ideological consistency, because the social cost of complexity has become too high. Especially in environments where belonging matters. Especially when your livelihood is woven into the same community whose approval you might lose.

I'm not exempt from this. Part of my hesitation writing this is not intellectual. It is social. Human. Primal, even. I know there are people who will read this and flatten it instantly into categories I don't recognise myself inside. Some will decide I've abandoned the communities I care about. Some will conclude that questioning one-party governance is itself a form of political betrayal.

But scrutiny isn't disloyalty. If anything, I feel it's a responsibility.

I arrived in California five years ago believing I understood myself politically with reasonable clarity. I held my positions with confidence. I knew which side I was on.

Now I'm not sure that confidence was wisdom. Now I wonder if it was just the absence of friction.

My values haven't disappeared. I still know what I believe about human dignity, about equality, about the kind of society I want to live in and contribute to. Those things haven't moved.

What's moved is my certainty that any single political party or ideological framework has a reliable handle on how to get there. What's moved is my willingness to perform conviction I don't actually feel in order to remain legible to the people around me.

I keep thinking about what it would mean to simply say: I don't know where I land anymore. Not as defeat. Not as nihilism. But as the most honest thing I can offer.

Because I can't find the runway. The place where complexity is welcome, where holding contradictions doesn't disqualify you, where the admission of uncertainty isn't immediately read as moral failure.

Maybe that place doesn't exist publicly yet. Maybe the work is to build it.

Or maybe — and this is the thought I keep returning to — I'm not the only one circling.