When I sat down with Sally Busby, candidate for Indiana House District 78, I expected to talk about policy. What I didn’t expect was to hear policy described the same way people describe trauma: as something you learn to survive.

Busby is a teacher and a mother of two, one of whom lives with profound special needs. She knows what it means to navigate systems that promise care but deliver conditions. She’s not a career politician; she’s a parent who looked around and realized too many of us are treading water while the people writing the rules are debating who gets a life raft. “We’re all in survival mode right now,” she told me. And she’s right.

During our conversation on Gaslit – The Power of Story, Busby broke down what survival looks like in southern Indiana. Families paying more for utilities than for rent. Renters trapped in drafty apartments with landlords who aren’t required to make them energy efficient. Elderly residents watching their oxygen machines run on borrowed time. Parents deciding between groceries and electricity. The data backs it up: in Vanderburgh County, 44% of working households are ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In plain English, that means nearly half of our working neighbors can’t afford the basics.

Busby’s clarity comes from proximity, not theory. She’s been in those living rooms, and she’s heard those stories. But she’s also done her homework on how we got here. She points to a decade-long series of small legislative changes — trackers, riders, automatic rate mechanisms — each one framed as “modernization” or “regulatory efficiency.” Together, they’ve handed monopoly utilities nearly unchecked power to pass along costs, profit included, directly to consumers. It’s not one bad law; it’s dozens of quiet ones that stacked up to become a crisis.

And that’s what makes Busby’s candidacy significant. She isn’t running on vague hope or partisan talking points. She’s naming what most elected officials won’t: that Indiana’s energy policy has been engineered to serve shareholders first and citizens last. Her campaign’s call to “vote for our communities, vote for our families, vote for our energy costs” isn’t branding, it’s triage.

What struck me most was her definition of dignity. When asked what dignity looks like in policy terms, she said it means “you don’t have to choose between electricity and groceries.” It means not living in constant anxiety about disconnection. It means seeing affordable energy as a human necessity, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy. That sounds like a platform of public service rooted in empathy.

Busby states she doesn’t have a magic wand. She’s clear-eyed about what one representative can do: it will take time and resilience to restore regulatory oversight, roll back automatic trackers, strengthen shutoff protections, and demand accountability from utilities and legislators alike. She understands the machinery of change, but she also understands the moral urgency behind it.

In an election year when many campaigns feel like noise, Busby’s message cuts through because it’s grounded in lived reality. It’s not about ideology. It’s about who gets to afford heat, light, and medicine in a state where corporations write the rules and the rest of us pay the bill.

If Gaslit exists to expose how policy translates into lived experience, then this episode did exactly that. It reminded me that the people most affected by these systems are the ones most qualified to change them, not because they’ve mastered politics, but because they’ve survived it.

Sally Busby is speaking directly to voters in a vernacular they understand; survival shouldn’t be the standard.