Memory is tricky. Porous. It shifts and rearranges, until you’re left holding something delicate and fragile, that you hope or believe is true. Or is a version of the truth, at the very least. Back to us: I am 27; she is 41. I never stop to wonder if I am in love. I still... Continue Reading →
I Did Not Give Her a Mixtape of Breakup Songs
I broke up with my therapist a little while back. Nice woman. Jaunty British accent. Gay. (She got good marks on all these fronts.) But, we ran up against a topic that she just wasn’t able to hear me on. I like to tell people that I broke up with her because she told me... Continue Reading →
After Years of Trying for Normal, I’m Embracing My Weird
I went clambering up an embankment this morning, using roots as footholds, basically feeling like a badass. A very tired badass. Who cusses a lot. When normal people find out that I run miles in the woods for fun, they think I’m weird. Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall? they inquire, clearly concerned about my physical... Continue Reading →
Why I Didn’t Drink: A Study in Common Threads
I gravitate toward believing that at the core of our experience as humans in this beautiful and chaotic world there’s something universal. It’s less lonely that way, believing that there’s something that binds us together, a landmark that we all would recognize if we were ever privy to someone else’s interior landscape. That flash of... Continue Reading →
Surviving Shitty Election Results
I woke up at 4:25 this morning and immediately opened the AJC to look at the election results. Some of my friends spent the past week vacillating between fretting over a potential loss for Stacey Abrams and trying to be doggedly hopeful so that would be the energy that got released out into the universe.... Continue Reading →
When the Truth Gets Real Truth-y
Pick people who will reflect your true self back to you. They are guides. They are a pain in the ass, but they are guides.
Tequila Never Made Me Feel Like This
Every morning of my late twenties dawned with sickening dread. Every morning. I’d wake up and immediately begin the slow slide into the murky depths of shame. And fear. And regret. Anxiety gripped me like a vise, making it hard to breathe. I hated myself, pitied myself, held dear a storied mythology of myself. What... Continue Reading →
Girl, Take a Breath. There’s More Than the Hustle.
I struggle with the concept of rest. Not like I don’t believe in it. And I’m not one of those all-the-glory-is-found-in-the-hustle folks.. But I can’t get comfortable with the idea of just being. And it’s to my detriment. If I am not creating, thinking, planning, or actively doing something that qualifies as “productive,” I get... Continue Reading →
Hesitation
I spent most of my life waiting for the other shoe to drop. That’s a pretty shitty way to live. It means that every time you feel real joy, there’s a pin-prick of fear… because what if it all goes away? And that tiny prick of fear builds into a swell…because how would you ever... Continue Reading →
Secrets Are Small Soul-Deaths
A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.Women Who Run with the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés I gave up being exhausted in late 2008. For 33 years, I'd been collecting secrets (big and utterly minuscule) and stacking them precariously in various corners of my soul. Which meant I couldn't round a corner without... Continue Reading →