I’ve never considered myself fearful.
Even as a child, I was borderline reckless with my bravery. There was no tree I was afraid to climb or height I was afraid to go to. If someone told me I couldn’t do something, I was definitely going to try to do it. No dare was too terrifying for the likes of me, and if Hogwarts had invited me to attend, I would have certainly been sorted into Gryffindor.
I had bravado, but I’ve come to learn just how fearful I was beneath it. Even now, I hate to admit how much…
When relationships end, we often give a reason. The reasons can be encapsulated in a single word. Infidelity. Abuse. Incompatibility. It requires no further explanation, as the listener nods their heads in agreement. It’s understandable, after all. They may not know our particular story, but they don’t have to. They know of one like it, having been there themselves or having heard tell of it before. While the experience is never easy, the explanation might be.
But sometimes the reasons aren’t so clear-cut. They require a story, the telling of it requiring a cup of coffee held tightly in our…
I have a temper. It’s something I work on, but it’s not something I try to hide. I talk openly about having one and how I try to control it or, at the very least, express it appropriately. I used to know rage well — and not just the road variety either. My anger comes out less these days, but not because I don’t feel it. Every day, there’s a fresh news story reminding me that people, women in particular, have plenty of reasons for rage.
But what I’ve found interesting over the years is that my anger when unleashed…
Accessibility should be industry-standard, not pandemic protocol.
The pandemic has been one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life. It’s not just showed me the problems underlying many of the systems we once took for granted. It’s also shown me the values of the people around me. While some of what I’ve seen over the last year has left me filled with hope, much of it has reminded me that there’s so much we’ve been taught that could make the world better if only we would learn it.
Public health needs to be prioritized.
As I see more and more people throw out their masks, I’m filled with disappointment. The pandemic is…
It may be speaking volumes
When I was younger, I used to tease a friend about her Wall of Shame. That’s what I called her history of failed, and sometimes embarrassing, relationships — long before I had a history of my own. It was easy to laugh at the hodgepodge of men she’d attached herself to who turned out to be anything but what she wanted. We could laugh it off, but years later, the memory came back to me while I was evaluating my own long history of broken relationships.
While I no longer use the term, I do think that our past history…
Finding a cure is tough without awareness
If you’ve never heard of neurofibromatosis (NF), you’re not alone. It affects more than 2.5 million people globally (1 in every 3,000 people). It impacts more people than Cystic Fibrosis, Tay Sachs, Huntington’s Disease, and Muscular Dystrophy combined, and yet you’ve likely heard of one or more of these diseases. Neurofibromatosis, however, is the unheard of disease that desperately needs our attention. Without awareness, it’s challenging to raise funding for NF to help find a cure.
I, too, had never heard of NF until I found myself sitting in the pediatrician’s office having my daughter’s skin checked. I assumed her…
Play that song again
Light a candle for the lover
Who came before
Pour wine into my glass
And tell me more
Tell me all the ways
You tried to make her stay
I will hold it against you
When you let me get away
Play the same old song
Dance to the same old tune
When you think of dancing under stars
You don’t think of me and you
Did the kisses shared
Mean nothing more than this
A substitute for the one you love
And hate and yet still miss
You play your tune I’ll be here playing mine Love unreturned then…
There’s a reason they’re failing to thrive
For a long time, everything I planted died. Succulents, reportedly easy to grow, shriveled up and died in my presence. Every seed I planted failed to thrive. I decided that I didn’t have my grandmother’s green thumb.
My relationships worked the same way. Every attempt at love would end the same. In heartbreak. In disappointment. Every love I tried to grow would fail to thrive.
But the year of the pandemic changed something in me. Perhaps it was a natural consequence of the world outside my doors closing. …
Don’t worry: one of them is not “love yourself”
You won’t find “Love yourself” anywhere on my list. While I have said before that you should love yourself and chase no one, that’s a general rule for life, not just for dating. But when we come out of relationships and start to think about dating again, there are three things we might want to consider doing before we dip a toe back into the shark-infested waters of the dating pool.
Get Therapy
While I don’t believe that you have to be perfect or have your shit entirely together in order to date, I do believe that every single person would benefit…
You are your strength, not your struggle
Twenty years from the last time I sat in a therapist’s office as a client, I found myself there again. A different office, a different therapist, but the feeling was the same. If this is me at the end of my rope, showing up to therapy is proof that I’m still holding onto it.
Recent changes in my life echo previous trauma, and sometimes I am afraid that I’m in danger of centering my life story around this narrative. Sometimes, I am afraid that I already have.
Is this who I am, or is this what happened to me? …
