My Sacred Hour
I didn’t avoid rewatching The West Wing because it aged poorly.
I avoided it because it felt like grief.
The show aired from 1999 to 2006. In that same stretch of time, I gave birth to two kids. I was paralyzed & spent a year relearning how to walk. I navigated custody court. I volunteered as a CASA, a court appointed special advocate for kids who needed one adult in their corner. I went to every PTA meeting, was room mom, packed snacks, made posters, showed up tired & anyway.
I divorced an abusive husband.
And somehow, in the middle of all of that, one thing never moved.
Wednesday night. One hour. The West Wing.
Not even every week, really. Twenty two episodes a year. But that hour was non‑negotiable. Sacred. If this were happening now, people would call it “self care.” Back then, it was survival.
It was the one thing no one ever took from me.
I own the entire series on DVD. I still follow Bradley Whitford & Josh Malina on social media. I once had Dulé Hill record a Get Out The Vote video. I joke that PTA is the gateway drug to politics, but jokes are usually just truths wearing a hoodie.
While The West Wing was airing, I was also doing work that sounds fake unless you lived through the early internet. I was a disabled online vigilante, helping define the laws & rules of a brand new digital world. I was thanked by name on the floor of the House & the Senate for that work. Not as a flex. As context.
Because the thing running through all of it wasn’t politics.
It was ritual.
My partner in crime was my grandmother in law. Grandma P.
She demanded that her grandson shut the hell up for that hour. She might have been the only woman he ever respected. Though, between you & me? She was ashamed of him.
She & I watched together even when we were apart. These were the days of dial up internet & cell phone plans that charged by the minute. We called each other after 9 pm when calls were free. We stayed on the phone during commercials. We watched “together” through a landline.
We gasped together.
We squealed together when Josh told Donna he wouldn’t stop for a beer if she were in an accident.
We called each other, breathless, after the episode with Mrs Landingham’s flashbacks.
When I moved to Oregon & we lived close enough, we had watch parties. Same show. Same hour. Same rule. The world can wait.
That hour wasn’t escapism.
It was a place where adults finished sentences. Where consequences existed. Where power was treated like a responsibility instead of a toy. Where people argued fiercely & still believed the work mattered.
When your real life feels lawless, that kind of order hits different.
We lost Grandma P over a decade ago.
Rewatching the show now is the closest I can get to sitting next to her again. It’s muscle memory. It’s grief with a soundtrack. It’s hearing her voice in my head during the opening credits, already annoyed at anyone who might interrupt.
I didn’t end up in public relations or politics or social media or writing Substacks because of The West Wing.
I ended up there because I recognized myself in it.
The show didn’t teach me to care. It didn’t invent my sense of responsibility. It named something that was already there & said, quietly, you are not ridiculous for believing this matters.
People talk about nostalgia like it’s weakness.
But this isn’t longing for the past. It’s honoring the version of myself who survived an unreasonable amount of shit & still carved out one hour a week to believe in something better.
It’s honoring the woman who held that line with me. Who made space. Who showed me that joy & seriousness can coexist. That politics starts in living rooms & phone calls & shared rituals long before it ever reaches marble floors.
I keep doing this work now with Grandma P in the back of my mind. Not as pressure. As a private goal.
To make her proud.
To keep one sacred hour.
To believe that care, responsibility, & stubborn hope are still worth protecting.
~AK
Beautiful.