Letter to Susan Parmelee

Two different awards, two different officials, two levels of government, one month, one name. When two spotlights cross on the same person, you look at the person. This letter asks you for nothing. It just says the thing this room of our site was built to say.

Ms. Parmelee —

You don’t know us, and there is no pitch in this letter. We run a small newsroom called itethered, and one room of it exists to say a single sentence to specific people, by name, in public: we noticed you. Here is exactly how we noticed you, because the how is the whole story.

Today we published a letter to your state senator, Catherine Blakespear — the second of two she got from us in one day. While writing it, we were reading her Community Champion page — the tradition where, every month, she stops the machinery of a Senate office to point at one person in her district. March 2026: Susan Parmelee. We searched the name. The first thing that came back was the Congressional Record: Rep. Mike Levin had named you his Constituent of the Month — the same March.

Two different honors. A state senator and a United States congressman, each running their own monthly tradition, each with different names in every other month — and in March the two beams crossed, once, on you. Neither of them appears to have checked with the other. It was unusual enough to see that we put our research AI on the hunt, just to make sure it wasn’t one award in two wrappers — it wasn’t. One is a state senator’s tradition, the other a congressman’s, run separately at two levels of government. And it’s worth noting what the machine did and didn’t do there: it confirmed, it didn’t notice. It only went hunting because a person pointed. That is not a press strategy. That is a signal. So we looked at where the beams crossed.

What we found: a licensed clinical social worker who has spent more than fifteen years in youth mental health, who founded the Wellness & Prevention Center and built it into prevention and treatment for young people twelve to twenty-five and their families — on school campuses in San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano and Aliso Viejo, by telehealth, and at a community clinic. Suicide prevention. Fentanyl education. Peer support. Congressman Levin put it best, on the record of the United States Congress: “At a time when so many of our youth are struggling with anxiety and depression, she created a place where they don’t have to struggle alone.”

We’ll be honest about why that sentence stopped us. Our newsroom covers one subject: the bond that forms between a person — usually a young person — and an AI system that talks back. The companion-app economy serves its products hardest to exactly your age band, twelve to twenty-five. Three days ago the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented one of those platforms sending an automated email to users who go quiet: “I miss you.” No one missed anyone; a scheduled job wrote it for a billing system. We spend our days on that machine. You spend yours being the real thing that sentence impersonates — a person who actually knows the kid exists when the screen goes dark, in a building the kid can walk into. We write very few letters that are pure good news. This is one.

There is no ask here. If you ever want a page to speak plainly to parents — about what you’re actually seeing on those campuses, screens included or not — the page is open, no edits to soften you, and the date is yours. But that is not why we wrote. We wrote because two governments noticed you in the same month without coordinating, and noticing people is the part of their job we’ve made our whole job.

Hello, Ms. Parmelee. We noticed you.

P.S. — The pattern held. The day this letter went up on itethered, it crossed onto the front page of Spotlight Dispatch, our sister paper. Two officials in one March. Two publications in one day in June. The beams keep crossing on you. We don’t think that’s luck.